THOSE GOLDEN SCRUBBY YEARS

Twas in the days of the dishwasher.  When they were high and lifted up and mighty as a wigwam.  In the days of the dishwasher.  Full of cockatoos and syllables of the gloaming.  Oh, in the days when seraphim sodomized god and Isaiah wrote his euphemisms on his chariot of clouds.  Things were scrubby then, and golden, in the days.

I entered the cathedral of wishy-washy song, without entrance ticket, mapless, hov’ring on myself, not inattuned to the squeaks and wooshes of the pot and pan.  (Pan’s pot. Good stuff. Organic shit. The original.)  Awed by the organ of knives and spooning, quivered by the crypt of thighs to come, recurring dust and slaughter, suds & laughter, little jetsams of our days.

It was then i saw the onset of the words, those circly things, replete with themselves, and dirty, dirty as disease.  I saw the futility of the window-cleaner, muttering his mutters in the horny heavens, firmament of muhammad and the condos (good band name), his bud lite mane whipping in the wind, eyes free and barred from all that petty privilege, 57^th floor and nowhere, like an amulet dangling from god’s ass.  The trees are grand, i’ve been told, and been there too, once upon a time.

Words are filthy monads, scrubbing, scrubbing, all that other filth.  (Like billiard balls sortof.)  What are we to do, i asked a word (which i had spent a lot for); it bit my nose & burst.  I was once a window-washer, wiping off the tears of god from human souls which we know are made of glass.  Inside—when i could see (rarely, blindly:  god’s tears are thick, relentless, my vision’s rather faulty)—i saw (i thought i saw) undressing, stretching, dissolving, copulating, semantic orgies undoing all and us for we are a bit of the all though all we mostly see is us as all or worse this me as all and that is that but not this and once upon an aum.

The dishwasher now of course is just another utility.  Like hydro or eco dry cleaning or the worldwideinterweb.  What the fuck.  Get a dishwasher.  Get 3 or 4.  4 for 3 or 3 for 4.  Give em away, like usbkeys.  To your mama, your girlorboyfriend, your bossywossy (though heorshe already has 2 or 3).  Stick your pansies in them.  And your cat.  And your girlorboyfriend, bossywossy, yourselfwhileyoureatit, and the amazonwhynot.  The world’s a dishwasher and all its minions dishes, we are being scrubbed my friends my friends, like itunes and iching and tickytocks ticyfocks talkytics falkytucks &

twas in the days of the dishwasher that i saw the dishwasher, it defeating words and everything not dirty but scrubbyclean scrubbyclean scrubbyclean again and time made new, the songs and the cathedrals having fallen down to dust and the windowwasher gone home to his little flat and his tv and his onanisms and himself or selves and that is time and that is time and that is time and this

21.09.12 1122h

Finished memorizing the Tao Te Ching today.  After four years.  Ranging from a day in which i memorized five vignettes (of the eighty-one) to a year in which i memorized and recited none.  Now the text is in me and i have to figure out what to do with it inside me.  Rather, i listen to its whispers, its soft suggestions.  Likely some refining, some audio play/experimentation, and possibly a movement toward the Chinese (its 5,000 characters instead of the English's 10,000 words).

In the meantime, the text has begun oozing surreptitiously and explicitly into my life.

To devote a life to the ingestion and expulsion, absorption and incarnation, of a text.

That is all.

INSOMNIA

I did go to bed early.  Whatever that means.  The night was dark, like a sewer, and turds careened through the streets without purpose.  Cinema was everywhere.  And all its hideous accoutrements.  I wanted to hack like a heavy smoker and run my hands down the pants of something furry with a bottle of bourbon up my ass.  The streets.  Turdcicles. Turdcycles.  Made me think of double gyres of scats as a kind of schema of history or something.  STOP trains winding down to trainy beddy bye.  Oh god.  Love again.  Or, rather, thoughts of love.  Or, rather rather, something resembling a neon sign i saw in Bangkok once intimating practices sometimes associated with love.  (Though i’ve never been to Bangkok.  Or Spain.  [Kissed Spain’s ass once, as it stuck it into France when i was perusing through Whatever when i was Ambassador to Whatever.  That’s true.]  That’s true.)  Parenthetical desires.  Epistemological eccentrics.  Make the toilets go round.  Speaking of.  Just saying.  Whatnot.  What if toilets were like carousels—pretty coloured piggies and horsies twirling in circles, oop and down like dandelions, all for a few buckaroonis ... imagine plunking down your ass on that!  They’ve almost finished it.  The bridge.  The one down to the left and over there.  But they’ve been almost finishing it forever.  Like civilization but without the Fruit Loops.  We have enough humans doing research into reason (or what’s called reason by those doing the research into what they call reason).  That’s what the nightmare’s for.  (Though nightttime should have three teas, like The Hatter & The Hare when Halice joined them with her chalice.)  And we have enough people going mad in the traditional way, the mad way, as compensation for reason.  I propose calm detached soothing comprehensive vigorous investigative documented cited methodical research into madness—which is surely nothing other than reason in a mirror, and what are mirrors for!??!—using not reason’s methods but madness’s (madness has its methods but they’re on different books):  ([{after reducing my political commitments in the external world i find i’ve been becoming more priapic at the keyboard ... good sign, wouldn’t you say?}]) the (a!) problem with psychology is it uses reason’s methods (those fearful forms) to research madness then wonders (though it rarely wonders!) why the stats are getting worse ... and they call them insane!  (I don’t usually like emoticons, i find them demeaning.)  Isn’t that what art is?  To hang reason and psychology upside down and spank the shit out of them?  To take the cosmic dildo god and make the brain’s holes moan.  Isn’t madness just the body and though we say we love the body we just want to fuck it?  René in drag.  Whatever and whatnot.  Evernot and whatwhat.  Cinema and cinnabons and sin’a’ma.  But now i’ve been at this long enough that the STOP trains are going again, even the gloaming has gone, the stupid sun is crawling up the hypodermic needle like a giant rabid testicle and everything is normal once again.

So here it is.  Seven in the morning.  Wide awake like lemons.  The soupy soup of words having souped.  Eternal night having done a dump on its techno singing swirly throne.

13 PROBLEMS OF THE EXCESSIVELY LITERATE

God swoops and hollers in our souls, calling us to lives ... mad lives, futile lives, aimless lives, fragmented lives, Our Lives of Perpetual Doubt and Anguish ... calling us to lives of trainwrecks and sunspots in the coffee, of tomato plants as high as heaven, of hippos in the jubjub trees, of shoes.

I once, when i was General Paint, commanding (or is it [was it?] commandeering?) battalions of cans—african mudslide! faulty love! flamingo sunset!—fantasized (not without some guilt and pleasure) of being Specific Paint (or was it General Mudslide? General Specific? [it most certainly wasn’t General Motors]).  But that was then.

Shoes.  Can’t live without them.  Though i did once on the backside of a giraffe.  Giraffes.  Can live without them.  Have my whole life.  That says something.

Swoops and hollers in our souls.  God is our souls.  Swoops and hollers in itself, themselves, themself ... echoes echoing in echoes of echoes:  that’s art and god and life and nothing much has happened more than that.  Swoops and hollers, woopers, shollers.  All the excitement.  Tuxes and taxes, minis and bindis, you know the story, you’ve been in the hole.

A fuzzy word approached me on 42^nd (42^nd so’s overdone—41^st) asking for directions.  Fashionable, a little pissed, a fan of Švankmajer, never very punctual, sewer-friendly, musky, i told it, Go south 54 blocks, turn right which wasn’t true so bad on me.  Fuzzy words and oops and wollers, gotta love ‘em.  God does.

God.  What a word.  Not a fuzzy word (or not the fuzzy word on 42^nd asking for directions [maybe]).  We can only swear in response, the 7 billion of us all at once swearing like banshees, that’s why we invented god, to swear.  A little madness, a little dancing, a little god.

So here we are, looking at the trains, waiting for a wreck, calm and collected like a Jesuit, gulping coffee like a brodsky, smoking cigarillos like a train, looking out for god (as usual), the wreck’ll come first, someone said, probably right, this is that, amen.

Tomato hippos high as willows, heaven trees planting in the suns.  Lucy, Alice, ain’t Lucy, Alice, but de Sade is Poe when he wants to be; smack, smack.

I was walking in my gods (i mean shoes) (i think) when a flamingo slid down Africa and said (something like) Sunset Motors! General Faulty! Painty Painty!, left without adieu or whatnot.  Whatnot!  There’s a word.

Speaking of.  Waste management.  The future.  Not plastics any longer.  Old TS, that menstruaphobe, that Starnbergersee, hurry up please it’s twit, like a violet taxi patronizing Thebes by the Isle of Dogs in drag or rag or something.  *%#$@!^.  Data data dumdiata aum.

Rhyme bites, rhymes bite, brine rights ... no ... let’s stop it here like gentlemen when travelling all day never letting their heavily laden carts outa sight.  But like st paul or oppenheimer or humankinder (why kind or kinder?) can’t quite stop it here or even there.  Hence dr seuss, said foucault.  So there.

Anyway.  there it is.  there them.  the goddy folk.  whooping it up in whatever.  here we are.  in da hearta darkness, revelation (why revelation?) any chapter, bm epilogue (judge of our scats’n’fires), andy Warwhoop, maria marina fluxus-nexis fluxus fucks us amen amen tutankhamun lowercase u txt me make me lol me down ya benjy fretting dilsey candle lse-me yippdidƏya puddin’pi  {“ ”}

anyway².  Here’s a joke.  How is a shoe like a soul?  They both flapflap.  Laugh much?  Like angels.  Chicken Boop.  Like Betty sorta.  It’s going down.  Or rather, its.  Jughead for Antichrist!  Education is the answer.  Was.  What is it now?  The Intertits.  Praise me and quasimodo panzamancha quasipanza modomancha ... j_a!

TUESDAYS

art ain’t what it used to be

Let us think now of creation.  Think of it rolling down itself like a snowball, rolling up like a sunset.  There we are.  Here.  In the lap of the machine, our mother.  Reading ones and zeros like a baby train.  The moment is now, you may have heard.  And i say the moment is now but i say the moment is then and a belch.  I say the moment is that stock broker cracked out on himself and the wall being broken and no one knowing the difference for that is the nature of the moment and who are you to say anything else.  The moment is the machine.  Let us pray and ask for grace to continue praying until we bleed flowers.  Who are you anyway to think of tomorrow.  That maestro of indifference.  Tomorrow is the absurdum ad reductio of absurdity, the dog of gods.  Where is spirit? where is potency? where is animation? where is virility? where is the transcendence of gender and war and despair and greed?  In strategic plans and retirement plans?  In pissy plans and coital plans?  In plans?  Yo Yo.  In the noon of now and the eye of cow and a trip of pigs and an I of you, woof woof.  Think now of creation.  Purple underbelly of sodomy on a Sunday afternoon.  Slinking down your panties like a song.  Oooooh.  Like a slug in your throat and a song in your ass.  You want peace?  You want love?  You want that desecration called money?  You want an automobile?  You want the apocalypse and you want it on this date and you want it in your bank account in neon?  Let me tell you, that weasly little imposter tolle and all his whoring siblings should have kept their mouths shut not because they were wrong but because they were wrong.  And if you don’t get that just go to jail and wait there with your cheap bourbon while everyone passes GO a thousand trillion times until even your boogies take on eternal significance and that is that, so there, buy Toyota, it’s American, and fuck your hamster until it bleeds.  Be nice.  Think now of creation.  That magenta haze of branded bliss.  That drunken taxi ride down Fifth when she was sprawled like a kangaroo and the clouds were raining testaments of truth, gutters sucking greedily, tongues like the Mariana Trench.   Who said Kathmandu didn’t have something to say after midnight?  Build a blossom to the sky.  Smother the Internet with tits.  You never were what you claimed to be.  As some evangelist spoke in the urban desert as the moon went black and limbs nailed themselves to the pretty windows of Costco.  Not much, she said, as she dropped her little black dress and poured another martini in the geraniums.  Not much for a Tuesday.  Let us think now of creation, which must have happened on a Tuesday if you think about it which i hardly recommend not simply because i hardly recommend anything but because Tuesdays are for drunks and pedophiles.  Where’s the light?  Where’s the light in the anus of rhyme?  Pulse pulse pulse pulse pulse pulse.  So there’s this Tuesday, see ... this Tuesday walking down the street in his stockings with a little cash, this Tuesday on which nothing’s happening but TV, which isn’t much, and Greta Garbo’s strutting down a rainbow into Ireland and someone says, Hey Greta, what the fuck you two-faced fulda, and not much happens after that.  I saw the clouds on a Tuesday, quoting Donne or Sappho.  That turned me off Tuesdays.  Let us think now of ... dark pit of whatever, shark shit of Flight 447 ... here it comes ... that song you love, that law that protects you, that heat in your hardness, your murders in bed.  Let us think now of creation.  Creation, at 40,000 feet combusting.  In the drawers of your mother and the lap of incest.  In the god of mediocrity and the injustice of justice.  Let us think now.  Now.  Of creation.  It happened on Tuesday.

And if you doubt that, you’re a fink.

BLACKBIRDS

Time is blue like yogurt.  It doesn’t fall.  I saw it yesterday, hiking the adirondacks, slightly hungry.

Time, i thought, Not one for talking.  Yet i thought i heard it mumble as it almost fell (it almost falls but doesn’t) something about something left at the cleaners.  Must have been me, though, hearing time.

Time is blue like yogurt.  Like a sari wanting to be undone.  Really!  One would think its tastes would have evolved somewhat!  But that’s it, i guess.

I’ve always pictured it sort of like a foot-shaped solar-powered rubber calculator, with big keys, very pink, fun to press, always counting.  Time, unfortunately, has never quite returned the favor.

Time likes, i think, routinely to be stroked, like a cat quite acquainted with itself and having had a tabby as an uncle.

It likes to change in a closet, like a superhero.  It likes to brush with pepsodent.  Smokes like a chimney.  Doesn’t think twice, or even once.  Might make a good ceo if it weren’t for that annoying tic.

Whenever i’m in paris, which isn’t often these days, due to something some say is the same as time but really isn’t, never could be, but sort of is, i often see it sitting on one of those benches by the river, looking in (as in a mirror?), at the bodies that have been there.

Time, like the finest waterproof treatment (^hydrobloc) for the finest leather boots (zamberlans), isn’t cheap.  But, like lots of things, it is.

I fondled my yellow banana phone the other day, reminding me of time.  If it were green, i asked myself, Would it have done so?

Some say (some would say something else) time’s better in some things than its competitors.  But i don’t know.

You know what’s been said about time and blood and fear and more by that frenchman on a throne.  I’m inclined to believe in it with certain stools.

Time.  Bit of a pisser.  Like granny’s dingleberries when she’s dying.

A bit like yogurt?  Sure.  Green yogurt on the big keys in leather boots

Ogg Two

On the cosmic spiritual scale, cruelty and sentimentality compensate for each other.  As with all dualities, it is the responsibility of those who contain them and wish to evolve beyond the puerility of their opposition, of their typical unevolved opposition in society, to choreograph a perfect dance, an aesthetic dance, between them.  In other words, it is passionate knowledge we seek, that we must seek.  Four states:  passion with ignorance (the classic brute), knowledge without passion (the classic scholar), neither passion nor knowledge (the classic couch potato, the bourgeoisie, the mandarin), passion with knowledge (the classic poet).  But I taxonomize.

These recent days my weeks follow a path something like this:

·         - three schizoid days in the jungle

·         - a day of chaos

·         - a day of recovering from chaos

·         - a day of writing prep (aesthetic mining)

·         - a day of writing (aesthetic production)

Curious routine.  I’m reminded of Louis Aragon’s lines from his poem, Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux (There’s no happiness in love):

What it takes in regrets to repay one small thrill
What it takes in sorrow to pen the slightest song
What it takes in sad tears for one tune on a guitar

Risking when one’s older is far more interesting than risking when one’s young.  Yet the trajectory of most lives these days is oriented toward the minimization of risk as one ages (the rise of risk management as a discipline).  Increasing prosthetics and the securing of them (whether cottages, spouses, jobs and careers, friends, rrsps, social standing) are seen as signs of maturity, responsibility, adulthood.  This imbalance—this distribution of risk throughout time instead of throughout psyche or soul (which is collapsed time)—is embedded through our society and is a strategic social mistake.  Our definitions of maturity and sanity occur within a context of immaturity and imbecility.

Marijuana remains a Delphic oracle for me, pointing to murky inarticulate truths, which I must then mine myself, with tangential support and attempted sabotage from others.  Of course, weed is also a delightful accompaniment to sex and partying; but in those instances, while valuable, its function feels little different than the pleasant utilities of coffee or alcohol—a kind of boost to achieve a temporary social or physical transcendence.  When pot loses its resonance as a temporary transcendence or mining tool, it has nowhere to go, has no object to unite with but itself, and one becomes, in colloquial terms, a pothead, a stone.  The diminishment of pot as an entheogen, its rise as a lifestyle.

The cycle of productive pot mining during crises:  it first brings emotional warnings (I wander emotionally through potential problems, dangers), then brings clarity as the elements of the crisis are ready to coalesce.  I feel before I cognate.  Pot works its way from body through heart to mind to action, back to itself—at best, a guided tour of the present state of the soul.  One has to cocktail, of course:  to find a judicious mix of substances (preferably organic, non-toxic, non-addictive) over time, with the right mix of solitude/otherness, in the right moments and phases.  One has to learn to exploit the drug (not the drug exploit you):  but of course this is too techno-, too formulaic, too easy and unidirectional:  rather, one has to develop symbiosis with the drug (or substance, most unfortunate words, as both have been usurped by the desperate and fearful technocratic, legal, and political class), to find one’s place in it as it find its place in you.

Business strategy is just a specialty of philosophy … of conceptualizing world.  I experience little difference in the way I process a strategy problem in a business (pragmatic) setting and the way I process a problem of language, time, or nothingness.  Fortinbras meets Hamlet.

As a philosophical Taoist, my management style is aligned with the Tao Te Ching but my lifestyle is aligned with the Chuang Tzu.  I unite these two primary Taoist streams through the dualistic passion of Christianity.  Christ as welder.

One is frequently warned before going to India for the first time:  expect a nervous breakdown at least every two weeks.  Perhaps the same warning should be given about the Bain.

Even when I’m having a breakdown, I’m marvelous—the experience just the sector of marvelous called breakdown.  Breakdown is simply a desire, a reminder, of the necessity for adaptation, even as physical hunger is a desire for food, a reminder that we need to orient our present activities to the cupboard or fridge.  Breakdown is a hunger, reminding us we need to orient our present activities to soul.

To the West:

Your troubled mind emerges from your viewing the rational as rational.  The rational in itself is not rational, but the shadow of the irrational and so a subversion of itself.  Only in cooperation with the irrational does the rational effectively display itself and prove to be capable of any dignity, intelligence.

I must assert and defend the way I feel—the way I feel (not what I feel) is who I am.  People mistake what I think for what I am; they mistakenly identify the opinions I spout with identity.  But this is somewhat like mistaking a dandelion seed floating through the air with the dandelion in its entirety—its flower, leaves, roots.  Yet, even worse—it’s like identifying the seed with the DNA.  The way I feel—the way I process myself in relation to the world—is my spiritual DNA.  What might the discipline be called that maps the two?  It surely is not academic.  It surely doesn’t belong to psychology, philosophy, or genetics.  We might say it is the poetic discipline.  We might say it is the human one.  The difference between Taoism and Christianity:  the murky way as identity vs. the solid nails on a cross.

The curious thing about my present crisis is that it’s my first that feels as if it’s largely happening/existing outside me or a “relationship.”  Like how a fungus digests externally, I’m beginning to crisis externally.  Maybe I’m turning into a mushroom.

i will go to the end of time

and there find the source of the sun

i will destroy myself

to discover myself

i will question everything

to reveal nothing

i will deconstruct the city

to find the nature that’s hiding in me

i will resurrect god in a bathtub vigil

for no reason whatsoever

i will be celibate

because no one else is

i will confuse myself

to reveal myself

i will become bankrupt

to become rich

i will give myself over to the infinite paths of darkness

to live