beyond the push/pull of hedonism, ascetism

Find the melancholy dialectic of concrete and prairie on a campus
full of 20 somethings in sweatpants and inner-directed compasses.

OR


Find the line in the book of poems that states: [Proposition regarding
the existence of fun] / when we weren't sure our lives were worth
surviving.














OR

Find sibilance on reruns of Imus episodes from the eighties, back
when shock jock meant something more: much more, much less.
Do it on a radio with a dial that actually turns.









Beg for conjunction

AND


Get "you dipshit" cute with the typesetting.


AND

Find a story involving characters whose lives are an
obscure reggae song and spread it like syphilis in the
house of De Sade.


AND

Run 12 miles today, tomorrow, the day after that, and the next
day too. Regret smoking for so long. Regret not having that
regret sooner.

USB ports are not the end all be all of computing

"He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance."

- the Declaration



The boys of the brigades knew enough to use descriptive language in delineating their complaints, did they not? Redcoats-as-heinous-swarm, sucking out the substance of a people (indeed, a freedom-loving people) at the behest of a King.

One way to stage a revolution: Turn the King into the middleman, and then cut him out of the action.


Proposition #1, made after a long, sleepless, slightly tripped out antibiotic-fueled night perusing the Declaration and its eventual companion, the Constitution:


It's easy to grow complacent in the belief that you actually remember what's in something you've read before. Complacency, in many cases, simply prolongs misapprehension.

Sub-Proposition #1a) Every time you read something you haven't read in five years or more, it means something different, b/c you are something different.


Proposition #2: There are endless opportunities to be surprised by "classic" literature, including political treatises and so on. They are never as dull or airy or limpid as you (if you are me), in your self-regarding manner, had supposed them to be.

Title:

12:16 am

p. 475. Eric Clipperton, gaspers, Lyle licking sweat, Pat Montesian's stroke-induced physical liabilities, Gately and the Nothingness product of a Higher Power search, Gately giving off signs of "Street" and "Jail" to the residents of the homeless shelter where he works as a janitor responding to incontinence in resident showers and schizoid stench in interpersonal reactions, Calvin Thrust, Eschaton disasters (the snow is the weather, which is not actually real in Eschaton's game-theory-driven ontology), Bob Hope, Marathe and Steeply on a ridge overlooking Arizona desert like an early 21st century reincarnation of Waiting for Godot but with "deep cover" intelligence organization connections, why don't I remember how Axford lost a finer and a half, and does Schtitt listen to opera, and so on.

All this has something to do with the book, but it tells little about what occurs at the level of the sentence.

I am listening to Chet Baker, Live at Colorado, 1966, and drinking can after can of Budweiser Select. Ravioli in the stomach is quietly digesting and my face's reflection in the mirror has the late summer sheen of years gone by. Roger on the Marlboro Lights and the strange satisfaction following a shift to nocturnal patterns.

For the ten weeks I lived in London during autumn 01 I roomed with a Europhile history major named Rowan who cheated on his girlfriend in our room with a girl named Leslie and led me to issue threats of physical violence, which I would have realized, when he turned the channel from 8th inning, Game 6, Diamondbacks-Yankees, to check on a Premier League soccer score. Rowan waxed poetic about the historical character of the streets we roamed and got a strange glint in his eye when he talked about how easy it was for him to imagine the historical epochs towards which our collective academic energies were directed. From his discursive mutterings, I got the idea that he could actually picture the past in something like precise detail, which ability always eluded me. I write this because it seems easier for me to imagine the particular world incarnated in these pages than it does to imagine, say, the world that existed during peanut farmer Carter's reign. Anyway . . .

Slatternly Behavior

We are in the business of watching selves endure the places they live in. Some places are better than others, and some frailties are more fragile than others. For instance, my friend who went to Norway recently tells of tall Blonde Teutonic Godmen among the people there, and these walking deities do not have any trouble enduring their environments. They make their environments, molding – shaping – redefining them – and then they cash their checks that the government doles out after collecting oil lease money. These examples are like evolutionary privilege bootstrapping itself again and again and again, until coal’s become diamond.
Other selves stay stifled in landscapes without redemption or second-chance iconography, much less Nordic fecundity. These lesser souls don’t live in deserts or suburbia or the haunted regions of Norman Mailer’s mind. Some live in trailers with little yellow Tonka trucks strewn across the lawn and green Ninja Turtle pajamas hanging out to dry on the line, but just because you can see that doesn’t mean you have any idea what the story is. That’s what I’ve come to realize, at least.