Like, Ghosts or Somethin'

Just sorted through the harddrive on my family's computer at home. This is the digital closet, and I've cleared it out. That doesn't mean I threw anything away, other than a few bits of meaningless information about universities, some old games, a pdf about how to disassemble a specific Casio keyboard, and so on. The rest I shuffled into a few different folders and packed into a box, where I can actually find stuff. I never let go of anything. Try and keep that in mind if you lend me something.

It was hard work. One challenge lay deciphering the incredible titles I came up with for important stuff back in "the day." I can see I was a real secretive type. "uf.wpd?" What the hell kind of filename is that? Oh, I see. Pretty much the entire point of this blog (this is obviously not true, but disregard the fact that I'm inventing it for argument's sake) was to crack open this closed-book way of writing and put stuff up inside the interwebs, presentable and with my name onn'em. Of course, some of this stuff I never, ever would have put up -- not because it's personal, but because it's embarrassingly rough.

My music is another thing. I haven't spent much time on finding new stuff these past 2 years or so, between the constraints of time and my laptop's munchkinesque HD. But even so, I'm shocked at how much good music I'm missing. I left a ton of great stuff behind on this PC that I'm gonna have to figure out how to take home. I will drop names, in a form you can easily skip over, 'cause I'm still trying to work out what I want to say about this.

Kamaal the Abstract -- a name after my own heart. Melanie Safka. A buncha stuff by The Odds. All these songs by the Five Blind Boys of Alabama -- "I have never reached redemption, but God knows I tried" is as fine a song as you can hope you hear. Long-Legged Woman Dressed in Black, by Mungo Jerry. Planes Mistaken for Stars. I miss all this stuff, when the hell did I drift away from it and not notice?

We have two dogs -- doglets, the froofiest of undersized canines. My dad has a theory that they have no sense of time, supported by how they are just as maniacally happy when we return from a trip to the grocery store as when we come back from 4 months overseas. I thought it was a weird idea to move forward through time without noticing any lapse, only a baffling change in the present state. But it turns out I do the same thing, and I can do it backwards too. I open an old document or a song from Back Then, and the ends of then and now are stapled together, everything between a closed loop. Removed from the sequence.

It isn't what I believe those in "the business" would call a smooth cut. This exact moment becomes a jarringly life-like glimpse of the future, seen from years ago. I never call the number I wrote down there? I don't go to UBC because of what? That IM session was the last time we really talked? God damn it to hell!

And then the time warp wears off -- and of course this is how things are -- almost. I wonder how well things would carry over that time-stapling suture, into now. That's really what I try to do with this housekeeping.

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There's a Hole In Broadway

Day after day, the hole kept getting bigger. Bits of asphault crumbled into it and it grew like is was opening its mouth. People called it a city works problem, but they sent a few workers down there and they never came out, and then they sent rescue workers who took a careful look and shrugged and went in and never came out. And then some scientists went and took a real careful look, and stepped inside and they got eaten, too, which means their results were inconclusive. I mean, New York is still New York, and life ain't about to stop over some monster pothole, even if it does eat people. Still, no matter who you were, the idea of it kind of gnawed at the edge of your mind. You know, like when was it gonna stop? They slapped some kind of emergency pavement on it but it swallowed that down, too.

The ads about it have settled on saying there's nothing to worry about right now, but stay away from Broadway and East 43rd St if you know what's good for you. It was like a gremlin mob was shaking down the theater district. Personally, I was sick of hearing about it, and I know I wasn't the only one. On TV, the radio, at work, everybody was saying the same things about the hole. The same shit, over and over like every time they repeated it they got closer to knowing what they were talking about. It's like the thing was sucking away their brains while it chewed on Broadway. And there were theories.

One thing you can count on crackpots for is a bit of variety. Every lunatic gave it his own personal touch. I got in a cab and noticed too late I was sharing it with a raggedy gray bum, hadda be eighty years old, all tatters and bones. The cab'd already pulled inna traffic an' I thought, what the hell, I'm stayin', an' opened my window and leaned my head as far out as I could without looking like a dog.

The driver laughed. "Say, what you think about that hole inna street shit?" he asked me over his shoulder.

"What hole?" I answered crankily, and he laughed again.

"What hole? Man, I gotta go all the way up 34th St. and back down 57th to go up broadway and he says what. Betcha you know what it's about," he said to the bum.

"Tell you what it's about," the bum bum coughed out, and I rolled my head out the window while he mumbled his theory. Sonofabitch cabbie fucking encouraged him. The bum swung from side to side and puffed as he talked like he was blowing invisible smoke rings and reading them.

His idea was that every forty years the devil visits his old high school, which is in New York, and then the city is pretty well fucked. Last time around they blew up the twin towers. I asked what happened in '61, and he said "Vietnam, asshole," like they fought the whole thing in Times Square. I gotta look at getting a bike or something. The devil's name, in case you wondered, is Adal Goel, and he went to the ?Bread and Roses High School.

Anyway, every-goddamn-one and his brother had something to say about the hole -- the same thing, in fact. I got a feeling like I'd knock the mouth off the next asshole to ask me what I thought about that shit. Lucky for me, I got an inner circle of very self-centered people.

The thing about each of them, if you asked them what they thought about the hole, they’d give you a ticked-off face for interrupting whatever train of thought they'd been following, and say "huh?" No dignified responses or stupid questions, just 'I don't give a damn about some stupid hole, I was trying to talk about me.' They're a breath of fresh exhaust. So after another day of talking about the hole, when I'd had it up to here with the god damned thing and I thought if I pretended to be interested in one more guy’s crap opinion I’d flip out, these were the people I called.

We set up a night out, chose a spot called the Arkadiuz. It’s one of those places everyone goes ‘cause no one knows about it. A hole in the wall with neon lights and a bouncer, plus a bartender who’s long on drinks and short on conversation, which was exactly the cure for a long day of cheap talk.

The drive there took a while, ‘cause the cabbie detoured halfway around Manhattan downtown to stay away from the hole. He had a one-track mind, that guy.

“So, you goin’a the Arkadiuz, right?” he asked me.

“You got it, pal, it’s just off Br-“

”Yeah, yeah, I know where it is. I’ma take a detour, though ‘cuz of . . . you know.”

“Fine, whaddevah.”

“So, uh, d’a fuck ya think ‘bout ‘at shit, huh?”

“I think it’s a hole. I think it eats people. D’a shit else do I care, so long as I stay outta da fuckin’ thing?”

“Yeah, right, I hear ya,” said the cabbie, and that set me off for some reason.

“Everybody, I mean everybody’s got some theory a’ what they think it is. Alligators or a faultline or terrorists. I mean cut the crap already.”

“I ‘ad a guy in here today thought it was haunted, you know, like ghosts or something.”

“Ah, s’all bullshit, fr chrissake. Let’s face it, pal, we don’ know what da fuck it is, and every time someone tries’a find out, they get eaten, so we ain’t gonna find out what it is. And complaining ‘bout it an’ throwin’ around theories ain’t helping nothing, so you can either accept it’s there and deal with it, or get outta town.”

The cabbie didn’t have anything to say to that, so he just shut up. After a minute or two he switched on the radio. It was talk about the hole. For the rest of the ride I listened to a guy sayin’ how the hole was the true grave of Jesus Christ, and we’d better all get our shit together ‘cause He’s coming back, I don’t know, for a night out on Broadway I guess.

=====

I can stay awake all night, but I would make mistakes, alright.

Frozen

Some children's books clear up the misconception that "children's literature" is written exclusively for kids. Anyone over the age of 12 who can read Love You Forever or The Giving Tree without getting choked up is blocking something out.

On the plus side, being called "children's" protects them somewhat from horrible middle-school English class discussions, and things like that. The books go in the same places as stuffed animals, old games, and, until recently, comic books: if you're not using them for your enjoyment, you just don't take them out to examine for any other reason. So they stay safe in the toybox 'til someone feels like reading one. Which is good, because it lets the reader be surprised how much the stories speak to people who aren't kids.

So it's a travesty that The Sixth Borough exists only within the (magnificent but decidedly adult-oriented) novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Children should read it. It should not be talked about at Reading Time or in English class but should be available there, referred to in oblique terms without discussing what it's "about," so that people'll read it if they feel like it.

On a frozen shelf, in a closet frozen shut, is a can with a voice in it. What good is it doing there? What good is the story doing in the middle of a 300+ page novel? Sure, it does the novel well, the two stories become each other -- a dad tells the story to his son near the beginning of the novel, but you don't actually hear it until 200 pages later, because by then you know why it fits in the novel. You can see the novel in it. But a good story does fits external events to itself, largely regardless of where it is. I do believe that was even part of the point.

Thanks for the book, Hugh, been reading real slow so I'm only about 2/3 through.

Oh, and another thing. The "Emergency Disaster Gästbuch" link just above the Armadillo of Shame leads to a newly established refugee guestbook, while my main book is undergoing some form of civil unrest. It's brought to you by Ze Germans. Help me make it a sprawling, perturbed mess of a guestbook like you do so well.

How to Fall Asleep

Tell yourself, whatever you do, not to move. There's a little clock in your head, and your problem is, it's still ticking. Like one of those self-winding watches, every time you budge, to turn or rearrange your sheets, it resets. Shuffle, click. Try to keep that in mind. You will find reasons to move. You might feel hungry the minute you lie down, and decide to ignore your appetite, try to get to sleep anyway, only to hear your stomach growling louder, agitating against this tiny famine and refusing to let you sleep till you eat something. Unless this happens very regularly, it's hard to plan for, and will often force you out of bed. Afterwards, you might have left the kitchen sink dripping, and think you'll be kept awake all night by the gentle tapping. God forbid a car alarm should—
       —Go off! Disrupting your whole patterned being, it puts a huge dent in the flow of your night. Those sirens sounding outside put you in a frenzy, even though you keep still: your mind clenches into a red ball of surprise, your body tells itself to react and not to, to be angry and not to. You practically have to move, if only to swat at your pillow till you cool down. But moving will fracture the unity around you. You move, and instead of sitting stock still, everything in your room shifts in relation to everything else, exploding from a flat picture into a bristle of separate shapes and corellated vectors. That isn't what you want. That's day and movement. Ideally, everything blurs together as night mills on. So don't pay attention to any single thing. This can be very hard. Is your furnace noisy? Do your pipes hiss? Does your lover, shamelessly asleep, breathe loudly next to you? Think of these as noises without causes or names, and so not really noises: features of your ears, purely sensory, not sonic, phenomena; artifacts of perception. Extend this. Your window glowers with star light, probably, or street light, or moon light. Again, this is a scene painted on the inner surface of your corneas. Nothing is beyond it, nothing is even in it. It's one thing, in you. There are neither streetlights, nor heavenly bodies, nor anything else that creates that light—certainly not a dim market square, paved in heavy cobbles thinly lined with spiky grass, with hedges of banana crates and chipped empty tables, a bench or two on the sides, and bookstores and butchershops facing in. That doesn't exist. In a reversal of the normal relationship between human beings and the universe, the world is because you see it. You are the god of your own unravelling. And your fallen angel is an itch between your shoulderblades, agitating, threatening to pry apart the harmonious aggregate you're balling together. The traitor, needling you in the trough of your spine, insists on special recognition, on treatment as a unique circumstance, requiring specific action, not caring that your design demands that everything settle into one block with no gaps. If you can think your way around the itch, good. But make sure the cure is not worse than the disease. Kundalini yoga may overcome the physical sensation, but risks focusing your mind when you need it to diffuse and bleed blackly into watery night. Therefore, Kundalini yoga is counterindicated, as are timed breathing, visualization techniques, and any mental game or recitation. Passivity, of mind and body, is crucial. Don't even react when the mattress seem to knurl your back or prod against your joints, or when your nostrils and mouth are dry. Move like a skeleton: only in the feathery moss between your ribs, and the roots knobbing through your pelvis or displacing the occasional vertebra. Some myths say the world grew from the body of a dead giant. Others say it's somebody's dream. Combine these. Combine whatever you can. When you stop sorting everything into different corners, and tune nothing out but hear nothing either, and feel no comfort or discomfort, and neglect the senses of time and place, then, unmoved, these things settle on you, a weight of thought-matter, a hazy solid with no edges or margins, lacking internal division, having only the recognizable quality of weight, multiplying, forcing you down, contributing to your stillness, pressing your mind out of its daily shapes, holding your body in a pose of exhaustion, until the space between your being and this weight is so small that it almost disappears, until your refusal to distinguish, your absorbing the world into yourself, so that all you suffer or do takes place within you, ends finally with you smothered by the undifferentiated mass you have taken in, with you joining that unthing in your unspace, swallowing yourself down till there are no legs or arms or chest or shoulders, nothing but head or mind, or the smallest piece of you that exists, and that held between your own teeth.

---

Finally.

Other "Peeps'" Work

You go girl.

I've been wanting to post that picture for a while, but it took me until now to find anyone who'd host a 700kb animated gif. U of T won't touch it. How do I know the stick figure in this animotronic internetpicture to the right is a girl? Simple:

1. She is clearly an anime RPG hero (Japanese words, crazy blasting and martial arts powers, superimposed portraits in polygonal frames, speed lines even when she is standing still). Therefore,

2. She is a girl.

Cases in point, all from actual anime RPGs: 1 2 3 4 5 and 6

See? Girl.

Speaking of which, if you've never read Moorish Girl then I decry your Moorish Girl-reading ability. If you have, then I guess you can consider said abilities recried, or if you prefer, retroactively cried so as to negate the original decrying. She also pointed me to failbetter.com for the first time, and has a list of literary magazines as long as the hour hand of the Clock of Szeged, which is to say, 5 cubits (plus 3 centicubits). If her magazine list were the diameter of a bell, that bell would be the Bell of Heroes, and it would weigh 8537 kilos, and I'm sure that makes everything clear.

If you've never read Dawn's blog, then that condition can be easily treated by reading Dawn's blog, plus massive doses of Chloramphenicol.

Scholarly writing makes André hungry for confusion treats. I'm sick of using "this" as an adjective and always ensuring that "it" corresponds to a noun. Times like this, when I'm bogged down with Englishly correctness, I wish I could rap.

Grammar and clarity own my pages so if you were shown my pages you'd be blown away by my prosperity of expression, overcoming your professorly discretion to show you how verbal misdirection is a rarity in my pages, forcing you to atone for condoning your TA's rages doubting the sincerity of my decision to assassinate errors in every stage of revision, so spare yourself my derision by not airing your disrespect 'til you dare to inspect the lines I'm sharing.

Hey, cool, I can rhyme! It just takes me five minutes and the rhymes are all jumbled, so I s'pose I'll never be the next Bunny Rabbit. S'alright.

In Case You Wondered

This is my state of mind, recorded in the margins of my research essay notes.

Gent: Sir, you don't have any legs.

Sir: Ahh! Thank you, gent. (Falls down).

Edifying! Did you ever wonder what I scribble on the sides of my pages when I'm not fully engaged in studious, studiary, studying? Well, I don't care if you didn't, now you know.

This concludes my theatrical interlude, as my essay is headed this way, and it looks both quarrelous and ornery.

I don't hate deadlines, I like deadlines, they just have such a malicious dislike for me that I avoid them whenever possible.