Four is not Five and has never been

Winter is not here. Summer offers tomatoes. The east side of America - despite prejudice - is not what the news presents. The west side of America - despite multiple viewings of Point Break and "Cops" - is not all big waves and crystal meth extravagance. oh you - and by you i mean all of you: you rich folk, you middle-class folk, you people who do not like the "folk" label because you are single (like most of us) and are battling the notion that it time to procreate -

What are we doing? Seriously. I have too much recalcitrance to envy the idea that speaking loudly is the only way out and the self-afflicted cigarette burns are too embedded in Marilyn Manson MTV videos too matter. Hear me? Beyonce has become way too Marilyn Manson. Offering more than pop cultural synecdoche may or may not signify.


Here's something else: when I was ten I went to Rexall Drug and stole three pieces of ten cent candy. Now, ten cent candy may no longer exist, but on the day when I re-entered the store (at age 12) and threw a dollar down, I did not feel good, running out the door - but I FUCKING paid that shit back. I feel as if we - as a collective - no longer feel paying the shit back is necessary. And I'm not even talking "we are neglecting too account for our children's grandchildren" because I have no children and I know the budget (I studied this shit for a couple years and honestly there is no real "budget" insomuch as all appropriations are provisional on particular details buried in the page 415) is an illusion - I'm way too tired to care too much about all that - I'm not even awake enough to countenance the idea of voting (see footnote)

FOOTNOTE: Not voting used to be an ideological stance. Now being opaque and self-referential is the ideal that ultimatley amounts to absolutely nothing.

“Welcome to Wyoming. Frankly I don’t give a shit how you do it back home.”

1. It is night in the late stages of my vacation. I am, obviously, in a bar. A man with slightly crooked nose, smelling of gasoline and sweat, walks in and sits to my left. A drink is placed before him wordlessly, which he consumes in thirty to forty seconds. Another is placed before him. He turns to me and offers, "They call me Kookaburra."

2. Earlier, in a casino in the soulless town of Deadwood, SD, a Disneyfied clutter emancipated from decency, a businessman with ample wattles chokes on his steak or meat entree (the scene was observed through the establishment's large bay windows so I'm not sure what the main course consisted of); his younger colleague recognizes the international "I'm choking" sign and, quite understandably, continues to beat him on the back even after the offending piece makes a parabola from mouth to plate. The back striking only stops when the older man raises his hands like an umpire calling time out and I feel sick to my stomach about the whole thing.

This is not an example of your lassitude for consensual decision-making

*****

Hey kid, the corner of the computer corral at the library does not make you invisible and you cannot cop a squat there. I know you're three and have the intermediate Pampers on, but still . . .

*****

Dude to my left making audible your appreciation for Pop Lock and Drop It - Fuck the heck what? You're older than I am. Don't wear the headphones and mime the motion in public. Do it in your apartment on Dakota and Cottage, overhead the bar where I watched Barry do that thing and dropped eight ball bankshots over lots of green felt to earn myself another $1 (!! - take that cost of living) pint of Leiny's, and if you don't have MTV don't make up for at the library, which as everyone knows, is for registering a new post on your blog and getting out of the heat during your daily miles long amble through the streets, culminating in windowshopping in the Sinclair Lewis-inspired downtown region.

*****

Mosquito, hearken back to your eggsac, where, as a nubile young spreader of malaria, you dreamed of my forearm - brown and tender, leading to the extremely thin wrist - or else

bring quick, unsparing death upon yourself.

*****

Current summertime = the epitome of laissez faire. Check the eggs and bacon breakfasts, the consumption of two French Press quarts of coffee before noon while reading Denby's take on romantic comedy genre in New Yorker, the baseball-viewing and videogame slaying of big game at the bar, the short game improvement sessions at the course, etc etc. And time crawls on, beating against the endless rows of corn that stretch in perfectly linear rows and streak toward the vanishing point of whatever horizon your eyes happen to take in.

did you wake up new this morning?

The birthday party was a brunch. After the Norwegian prayer, we commenced to eat: egg-tomato-onion-spinach-asiago quiche, bacon, waffles, extravagantly ripe fruit, OJ and coffee. Hours before arrival I was pondering various collisions between people I know and people whose craft I admire or just between people whose craft I admire who come from idiosyncratic perspectives that intersect somewhere here, inside me. At some point I learned you can survive on cheese sandwiches, Camel cigarettes, the arc of the postmodern post-WWII novel (Gaddis/Pynchon/Hawkes/Brautigan/etc), and consecratory gestures, but it's not that much fun. I think about this before being called back to the actual birthday party conversation, which revolves around how my grandparents never thought they'd live this long and the degree to which CNN's representation of geopoliticial situations is or is not prescient. I like cantaloupe and go to town on it. the 90 year old opines that it's not quite as humid as the untrustworthy weather guy said it'd be. The table is really big and sort of boardroom-slash-domestic elegant, and every time I suggest that the wood might possibly be teak the groans from across the room contest the plausibility of this, but anyway it takes a certain degree of orchestrated choreography to get all the dishes going clockwise because sometimes someone abandons the group effort idea and digs into whatever edible delight catches his/her attention (cf. "cantaloupe" supra). We talk about absent family members and the unnaturally tall corn ("I suppose even the folks around here are growing that genetically modified stuff," grunts the 89 year old) and I fade out for awhile until I hear the Uncle bring up the moral quandary that surrounds the diamond trade and everyone kind of blanches at this from him, as horses bricklaying and the everyday exigencies of bachelorhood in SW MN are more typically subjects of his monologues. Plus he's all thin and sprightly today, so I think it's possible he's getting laid. Three cheers! And then the sounds of mandibular crunching and lip slurping resume and it's Sunday so I wonder about the over/under on time allotted to television before naps begin. We've all been here before and it's getting to the point where it's hard not to be conscious of the long odds on this going on ten years from now, but there's dessert and coffee in about an hour and then we'll probably talk a bit about the Blitz and life on the sea before settling into that silence that foreshadows late afternoon departures.

Extraordinary - how is it pronounced, and therefore, how is it meant?

Add one more cup of flour to an arrangement that flourishes on deception and you get a powerful leavening effect that resists Id-like repression. Deception is what deception gets, and I am generally the unnamed participant in the question-begging karma excursion.

Introspective is the new Bell’s Palsy

It's not enough now to be against the gradual assimilation of reality television into the actual argot of Midwesterners waiting in line at the grocery store, and it may not have ever been enough.

Don Delillo's Falling Man has been reviewed by many prestigious publications, and no one really initiates an opinion salvo in response. "No one" being a symbol here for aggregate empathy.

Yes Pinot Grigio. Yes to the ultimately frivilous inconsequential "submit." And yes frivolous was misspelled.

Declarative Statements (con'td): No I don't have a friendster account

BVHS is alma materish. Fireflies are out in full force. Chuck Klosterman bemoans the ubiquity of the expectation that so many want so much to be so free. Hannah Major-Monfried once asked Stanley Cavell a penetrating question, but I missed it on account of my not being in that class. I am the owner of a text entitled "Classroom Instruction That Works." It is offered on EBay - please rid me of it. Save the venison for winter stew. Bubbles rise - that's what they do (same for consequences) - and reading John Berryman won't change this fact. Nor will taxi rides to the only vendor that's still open. Red Stripe to Leinenkugel's to Pinot Grigio.

Declarative Statements

"Introspection"

"Rocking Out"

Rocking out is not passe. The analysis you read is rarely the analysis that the editor read. Plato would be perturbed about Greece's place in the 21st century. La dolce vita does not reside in an Italian meatball sub; Jarod the Subway guy has entrenched himself in a kind of retroactive infamy. Minneapolis, MN is a twin in name only. Placeless arteries organized around interstate exits are not a sufficient condition for the presence of clean, well-lit sinks. "That's the kind of question that makes me want to quit teaching," a quote from youngish DJ Shadow-referencing University of Chicago philosophy professor Jason Bridges, still makes me grin a grin large enough to make my jaw hurt. Oftentimes I kid myself into believing in compression's exactitude. There is no substitute for having a timeout against a last minute pressure defense when coaching a freshman boys' basketball team with a one point lead and twenty three seconds to kill. I do not understand Yeats, though l like the aural contrast when he's placed against Keats. When did it become ok to charge $1.50 for coffee at diners? A curve is not a slurve, and Bert Blyleven's circle's circumference rarely edges Madden's diagram of a Student Body sweep. Folllow? I will take my grandmother to church on Sunday.

Cleaved from archival resources

It's that time of the year when I reestablish connections with you before they grow too tenuous. I'd call to try to accomplish this but I'm even more awkward
on the phone than I am via written word . . . . I will not do too much sharing of personal information except to say this year = upcoming enrollment in South Dakota, University of + renewed interest in defeating dualist body/self distinction (which is essentially defeating a "take that" attitude towards bodily health) + departing from flyfishing/hiking/conversations with Montana separatists/Indian reservation life + continued resistance to televisual technologies + awestruck gaping and head-shaking at modern American life.

Books - Brothers K, Education of A Coach (or whatever the Halberstam/Bellichick joint is), Dispatches, Revolutionary Road, Main Street. Employment - teaching, Forest Service chainsawing. Music - Stravinsky, Thermals, EPMD (Greatest Hits), that SOS song by Earl Greyhound (oh-oh, oh-woh-oh-oh), Gang of Four revival. Torrid summer, muted fall winter, balanced spring, back to muted this summer.


Shots from the hip/in the dark:

It's become clear to me that nostalgia is not just a theme in the Great Gatsby. Esquire Magazine is the devil and John Kruk confounds me. It's probably going to get much worse before it gets worse, geopolitical situation-wise. Depictions of suburban angst may eventually win a split decision over grumbling about the inanity of depictions of suburban angst. I have yet to find an adequate response for attempts in casual conversation to define the Nineties or any aspect of culture, politics, intellectual paradigms, etc. therein. Costello's "Allison" just came on (cf. "nostalgia" supra). I have both too much and not enough furniture.