Already of Old Time
Journal Entries and a Poem (I)
Overheard at Downie’s Cafe
Waitress “You haven’t been able to find a cook?”
Portly Customer “No. Well—we can find people who can cook, but non that can handle the pressure.”
The morning were gold,
the lane I were driving on were fenced with pines,
and the sun cut through on the tiger striped avenue.
It was a misty blue dusk. We were to embark for the capital, a half country away.
Still at the terminal, but engine idling now, a man hollered at the seat in front of him. He was apparently moving his seat far too back. I imagined the men knew each other, because they were the same age, but also because they were quick to bicker.
The communist, the man reclining, resined as he was to eating pizza rolls and taking the bus, hollered a bourgeoisie whine even more upsetting than the man behind him, taking the first initiative to report back to the driver that there was in fact, a problem. He then finished the conversation in his voluble manner, which boomed through to the back of the tunneled seats, that the man behind should “take it sweeter”, “talk (to him) like a man” “like the good man (he knew his offender to be)” and to, “keep (his) mouth shut for the rest of the ride if (he) wanted to keep up his sweetheart image everyone knew (him) for.”
The communist then complained of a drip on his head later down the highway, and called over the pavo (the bus assistant). They joked about needing an umbrella. After a quarter of an hour the communist was quite serious, and so I switched spots with him.
More about the bus driver:
He threw sand before the trip, sand and rocks, stored in a green plastic bag, into the turning engine belt to remove the squeak. It worked like a charm.
Told a baddie to get up from the floor seat and find another bus if she didn’t have a ticket
Italian wouldn’t pay (again) for a time correction on his ticket, and so he, the bus driver, told the negotiator not to explain himself, to the Italian. The Italian then talked to himself off the bus.
His face seemed at ease when he was squinting. His nose was thin for his weight, and his ears were red and tight against his head.
People gave him the ‘number one’ gesture in the several villages and towns we passed.
The other is not the pretty girl at the cafe, it is the prick from the other which puts the pretty girl at the café
Red like bow
Poem I
And I saw, and I saw, and I saw the moon’s grey surface
underneath my pointed toe.
I’d come all this way…
and it seems as if I’ve overshot the velocity.
It’s picture is now a roll of smoking film.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the window pane: my hair stretched across my eyes, squinting eyes, and I’ve always since worshipped that other happy image of myself.
Newport Port smelled like gunpowder and the surrounding businesses had ridiculous names like, Barge Inn Cafe, Sew Little Time (arts and crafts store), Cheese House and Antique books, Second-Hand Antiques, Paradise Healing Emporium, Firearms and Groceries, Inn and Café (but the whole place just looked like someone’s house).
Im so balkan that when a baby cries on a crowded plane it brings me peace (we have professional mourners who are paid to come to funerals)
Common Chicago interaction epitomized in a single farewell greeting by a bathroom attendant at O’Hare International Airport who I said two sentences to: “Make sure you come back home, bro.”
How to stultify your lust for productivity:
Self-impressed with your clean house? Did laundry and went to the gym?—watch The Shinning with a punitive immediacy. Watch Persona while a cake is baking.
No matter how many nights you spend alone, at the table, never submit to rest on your fist.
You really couldn’t just surf all day to be a surfer. You’d have to have a barrier from it, a job, or a needy family to feel as if you, in that moment, you, were, now in the water. Away.
My friend at ramen: “Im sexting a black chick don’t talk for a bit.”
Man, “anthropos”, Greek for, “the one who is able to reconsider what has seen.”1
When I was homeless, the world was thankfully very small, and so the wonders were just as conversely, inexhaustible
The railroad effigy who owned H.G. Wells bookstore in La Jolla, California refused to sign Marcovaldo because he detested marking on books, so he signed for me his business card. Which I lost.
Art is dangerous because it fills that need in us to be unsettled. And we trade our life when we think we’re close to the true new polorization of ourselves.
If god is the all seeing eye, and “the painting is the thousand-eyed Argus”2, then where else is sight heavier than in an orthodox church, where one can feel the reflective (protective) infinity of god. Where one sees as if through god by the religious iconography. One is forced to commit the shameful act of thinking himself as God, by sensing (as) Him, and so to always have something to be forgiven for. Here, a picture of christ bleeding, staring with rotting skin, helpless, as if you are his savior, and with you, he has a home. But on the dash of a Corolla speeding down a Panamanian high-way, I felt...
It was so provocative to me, that my uncle demanded I read beyond my capacity, but that writing is out of the question.
In art I am free, to work out only in the way writing can do, and all of history and style and mind are at my disposal. We are always (humbly) reappropriating and retroactively tracing what we mean. And in that way, writing self constitutes my commitments to a world that would not be present if it were not with writing
There’s nobody to thank but god, that is, if there is much here to be thankful for
Tongues and razors coming from the waves
Nail on the lip
Art is also that which abandons
When I see someone pumping up their car tires with a mobile inflator it affects me in a fraternal way. I want to dab him up.
“No adding or subtracting to the population.” Overheard someone telling a group of girls as they exited a building.
Such a readiness for self-sacrifice. Him a monk, me a marine, two secular saints of bastard traditions.
My unreachable friend the soft-living czar
Often this crosswalk is considered crowded by a tumbling Lays chip bag, and then, a confounding trajectory of magnetism by three converging, annoyed, strangers.
Don’t go to sleep with only one red eye
Over medium (eggs) should be like a frozen lake
D: “Im glad you’re here but I hate you”
I’ve listened to so much house/techno country-pop started to sound avant-garde
Ad Campaign against scrolling
Triple window format
First: me, serious, good looking
Two: me biting my nails absent minded and, gross, and a little primitive
Three: hunched over scrolling watching some slop
Text overlay: “Yeah. That’s what you look like while scrolling in public”
How many brilliant moves are worth a blunder
0
Allometry
As you grow your organs grow
I never though of characterizing change like that
Finders weepers
B’s take on Amy Winehouse:
“She’s knobby. She looks uncomfortable on stage, she looks awkward in her dancing, because while the band is playing for her, while the stage and the people envelope her, she belongs to something greater. There’s a tone of irony in her groans and laments, whether its blues or jazz, she’s satirizing the genre, while she’s pointing to something more.”
If you watch the youtube videos you’ll see she has a certain velocity to her. Here’s B.
When you are insecure, everything is generally an attack
People think that it takes a violent break in behavior to isolate yourself. Severed from a life of happiness. But in reality it takes only a intolerable annoyance with social exchanges to hide you away for eternity. People deserve patience, just like you give yourself.
Every twenty-five years we are given a microphone to talk about what we think and how we feel
Not sure if I made this up because I can’t find the correct citation for it on the web, or does google suck that badly now
Pippin on Manet in, After the Beautiful
neat neat stuff🦾
lot of gems