When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.
A snippet from The Song of Childhood (More German, Von Himmel!), egregiously and inappropriately ripped from the long and lovely soliloquy written by Peter Handke which begins Wim Wenders Wings of Desire. It makes me think about adults loosing the Christmas spirit, on this, the penultimate shopping day before the big shred. I ponder the transformation that takes place in a person (my person), from the love of anything having to do with Christmas to mistrusting the sequence of events all together. How do things go from being strange and openly beautiful to foreboding and foreign, when beauty is only a fluke and even then, only a fleeting glance. Strange beds and costly beauty.
But don't get me wrong. Certain things remain delightful, inviolable and strong: the smell of burning piñon wood coming from small houses and small chimneys, the rare treat of the Sandias cast in snowy raiment (they are), even the familiar tastes of biscochitos and tamales. These things come from less oblique sources of joy, incorruptible and simple, inexhaustible and yet never the same. Perhaps it is that slippery quality that allows them to elude my blunt scalpel of rationality and pseudo-psuedo-intellectual pride.
So, in order to intervene on my own behalf to avoid this downward slide of total Scrooge-osity, I bought myself copies of Emmit Otter's Jug Band Christmas, Scrooged with Bill Murray and have just finished downloading The Grinch who Stole Christmas and The Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Tough love indeed. I may even pop down to the store for a jug of 'nog and a pint of it's cohabiting libation. But truth be told (ad neauseum) this is a time for kids and if I ever have the chance, I would love to celebrate Christmas with all guns blazing just to see the excitement that I only faintly remember, rekindled and made fresh.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Kraut Think
Today while watching commercials devoted entirely to Christmas shopping opportunnities, I was reminded of a German phrase my ex-girlfriend taught me: Esse morgens wie ein Kaiser, mittags wie ein König, abends wie ein Bettler! It's the same in English folk wisdom, that one should eat like a king in the morning, a prince in the afternoon and a pauper at night. I think this applies very much to the traditions and bizarre rituals we have set out over the past few hundred years concerning Christmas. When we're young we can't get enough, every song, ritual and decoration holds promise and heightens expectation and the resulting post-present crash is like a small death. Then we are teenagers and know everything, we jump on the notion of it being a sham and a hoax and pride ourselves in being detached and yet we participate, hiding the signs of our enjoyment. Then as adults, its the spare and simple pleasures that really bring us joy, and I think that is a healthy progression. Gluttony begets antipathy begets harmony.
What are we without our traditions? Are we cold and empty or just free to frolick according to our own myths?
No boxes no bows, no felt-footied clothes
or the 9-year old ninja
who prowls starry-eyed through the night
no shifting of boxes or cellophane lockses
just for a sliver of sight
of that thing, that circled object of lust,
now so much Hallmark, headache and dust.
What are we without our traditions? Are we cold and empty or just free to frolick according to our own myths?
No boxes no bows, no felt-footied clothes
or the 9-year old ninja
who prowls starry-eyed through the night
no shifting of boxes or cellophane lockses
just for a sliver of sight
of that thing, that circled object of lust,
now so much Hallmark, headache and dust.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Dopa-mine
I am sitting on, or rather in, my very deep and cushy couch, slowly, molecularly sinking into it's nappy warmth. My back is facing to the west and the towering mountains that cuff this city like a fathers stern and protecting hand, jagged, strong and dusted white. It's raining quite steadily and I think, that even here in this modern, sterile loft which is so far removed from sentimentality, hearth or home, that the sound is still so soothing. A syncopated rat-tat-tat drawing my thoughts away while someone else begins to write.
I am listening to Erik Satie and the evanescent rise and fall of such beautiful melody makes me wonder what it must have been like to experience the dark delirium of an Asian opium den–a cave of the primeval mind so far removed from care or even conscience, patrons reclining like the enlightened Buddha under the nightshade of a great tree. Awake, asleep and yet aware of the imperceptibly low murmur of voices and one's own biological music. An attendant enters the chamber surreptitiously and wipes fevered sweat from my brow. Outside there is thick tropical heat, but inside it is only perceived as a tingletravelling a snake path of tiny glistening rivulets.
I try to imagine a smell like burnt rose petals and nutmeg, acrid and exotic yet somehow wholesome. The smoke, a swaying, sultry tendril of vascular blue and milky white, it dances with every breath.
Pattern without depth, motion without effort, effort without action–frozen in joy.
It's dark here but even the light of a single flickering candle or the explosion of the attendants match as he re-lights my pipe, sets off fireworks and cascades of impossible color.
Normally it would be overwhelming to have this many senses so suddenly acute, everything ballet and potency, ancient archetypes of semi-permanence, profound–each second a journey into unmeasured black. And yet, there is no apprehension or fear. It's as if a group of clamoring, conspiring courtiers had been sent away so that the king might enjoy the buffoonery of a cartwheeling fool.
I am listening to Erik Satie and the evanescent rise and fall of such beautiful melody makes me wonder what it must have been like to experience the dark delirium of an Asian opium den–a cave of the primeval mind so far removed from care or even conscience, patrons reclining like the enlightened Buddha under the nightshade of a great tree. Awake, asleep and yet aware of the imperceptibly low murmur of voices and one's own biological music. An attendant enters the chamber surreptitiously and wipes fevered sweat from my brow. Outside there is thick tropical heat, but inside it is only perceived as a tingletravelling a snake path of tiny glistening rivulets.
I try to imagine a smell like burnt rose petals and nutmeg, acrid and exotic yet somehow wholesome. The smoke, a swaying, sultry tendril of vascular blue and milky white, it dances with every breath.
Pattern without depth, motion without effort, effort without action–frozen in joy.
It's dark here but even the light of a single flickering candle or the explosion of the attendants match as he re-lights my pipe, sets off fireworks and cascades of impossible color.
Normally it would be overwhelming to have this many senses so suddenly acute, everything ballet and potency, ancient archetypes of semi-permanence, profound–each second a journey into unmeasured black. And yet, there is no apprehension or fear. It's as if a group of clamoring, conspiring courtiers had been sent away so that the king might enjoy the buffoonery of a cartwheeling fool.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Existential Ick
Retail therapy, frequent naps, and a descending meniscus of Irish whiskey–whatever works, but isn't. I find myself falling into a familiar state of stupor and mild desperation.
Having just moved back to New Mexico from New York City, I find myself confronted with all the same tedious problems. I am like a pendulum reaching it's apogee, the potential energy rising as the kinetic ebbs and yet it does not give me a sense of hope.
To borrow poorly from Schopenhauer, what I seek is der Wille zum Leben, 'The will to life.' But in this case it's not the preternatural drive to have sex and reproduce, but rather a state of being inspired, curious and manifesting those traits as actions and results. But when the first two exist without the accompanying act of realization you get a seriously plugged mental drain. The Irish whiskey is a poor approximation for Drano, and it is only a temporary salve. And like so many other products whose design included its own obsolescence, the results are usually temporary and end up in more resilient stoppages.
You can take the boy out of the small town, but you can't take the small town out of the boy.
It's sad but true. As hard as I've tried, as far afield as I have traveled, as many tastes, sights and sounds I have tried to force-feed my person, I still feel stranded and perplexed–infinitely capable and yet intractably mute. I could, I would, I should: Learn French. Study meditation. Eat well. Hell, just getting out of the house would be an exodus of biblical proportions. [Again, I don't know if I am extolling my shortcomings in order to see them exposed or for the sake of engendering readers. I realize that this will be a constant dilemma and perhaps the clue to it all]
My lack of concentration is frightening, I get up and walk to the kitchen and in transit forget my original purpose. I came here to focus and simplify and yet my brain seems to be doing quite the opposite. I'm hoping it's simply a matter of unwinding tangled thread that has been entangling slowly over long periods of distraction–the proverbial eggs breaking above the omelet pan as I ready myself for some sort of Forrest Gump-like epiphany.
My best friend once touched on this subject after having read a particularly gloomy fantasy book when we were kids. The term that was used was, 'impotent rage.' That phrase has stuck with the two of us ever since. It seems to sum up how we felt growing up in such a small town and feeling like outsiders (me more than him) and not having the wherewithal to do anything about it. We endured and acquiesced, sneering from the fringes (again me sneering more than him) as we awaited our turn at bat.
We expected the college years to be much more fulfilling and in many ways they were. My friend definitely flourished and experimented with who he wanted to be, while I was still trying to be someone 'else.' So many expectations became shackles to experience and enjoyment and even college became like a prison.
Egads! This entry is all over the place (as above so below) and will, upon later reading, surely disappoint me in my attempts at out-of-the-blocks erudition. Fuck it. I do apologize to you, my imaginary reader, and if I still have your attention after this particular purge I worry about your sanity as well.
So here I am in a vast desert, frozen and beautiful, sitting around a small fire whose light is slowly fading. It's deafeningly quiet and my senses are dampened by the cold. My perception of place shrinks like booby-trapped walls set for unsuspecting looters, as I search in my bag of tricks for something to stunt the imminent existential squash.
Take it away Chuck...
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning him-self to let it eat him away.
Having just moved back to New Mexico from New York City, I find myself confronted with all the same tedious problems. I am like a pendulum reaching it's apogee, the potential energy rising as the kinetic ebbs and yet it does not give me a sense of hope.
To borrow poorly from Schopenhauer, what I seek is der Wille zum Leben, 'The will to life.' But in this case it's not the preternatural drive to have sex and reproduce, but rather a state of being inspired, curious and manifesting those traits as actions and results. But when the first two exist without the accompanying act of realization you get a seriously plugged mental drain. The Irish whiskey is a poor approximation for Drano, and it is only a temporary salve. And like so many other products whose design included its own obsolescence, the results are usually temporary and end up in more resilient stoppages.
You can take the boy out of the small town, but you can't take the small town out of the boy.
It's sad but true. As hard as I've tried, as far afield as I have traveled, as many tastes, sights and sounds I have tried to force-feed my person, I still feel stranded and perplexed–infinitely capable and yet intractably mute. I could, I would, I should: Learn French. Study meditation. Eat well. Hell, just getting out of the house would be an exodus of biblical proportions. [Again, I don't know if I am extolling my shortcomings in order to see them exposed or for the sake of engendering readers. I realize that this will be a constant dilemma and perhaps the clue to it all]
My lack of concentration is frightening, I get up and walk to the kitchen and in transit forget my original purpose. I came here to focus and simplify and yet my brain seems to be doing quite the opposite. I'm hoping it's simply a matter of unwinding tangled thread that has been entangling slowly over long periods of distraction–the proverbial eggs breaking above the omelet pan as I ready myself for some sort of Forrest Gump-like epiphany.
My best friend once touched on this subject after having read a particularly gloomy fantasy book when we were kids. The term that was used was, 'impotent rage.' That phrase has stuck with the two of us ever since. It seems to sum up how we felt growing up in such a small town and feeling like outsiders (me more than him) and not having the wherewithal to do anything about it. We endured and acquiesced, sneering from the fringes (again me sneering more than him) as we awaited our turn at bat.
We expected the college years to be much more fulfilling and in many ways they were. My friend definitely flourished and experimented with who he wanted to be, while I was still trying to be someone 'else.' So many expectations became shackles to experience and enjoyment and even college became like a prison.
Egads! This entry is all over the place (as above so below) and will, upon later reading, surely disappoint me in my attempts at out-of-the-blocks erudition. Fuck it. I do apologize to you, my imaginary reader, and if I still have your attention after this particular purge I worry about your sanity as well.
So here I am in a vast desert, frozen and beautiful, sitting around a small fire whose light is slowly fading. It's deafeningly quiet and my senses are dampened by the cold. My perception of place shrinks like booby-trapped walls set for unsuspecting looters, as I search in my bag of tricks for something to stunt the imminent existential squash.
Take it away Chuck...
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning him-self to let it eat him away.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Limericks!!!
Mr. Wonka his child née ‘Willy’
Striped pants, a queer dance, oh so silly
He lured rotten kids
into tubes, chutes and vids
and murdered the tots willy-nilly
Poor Violet, he said ‘liquor’s quicker’
then dangled gobstoppers to trick her
It’s obscene how this man
and his devious plan
filled her jumpsuit with juice just to prick her
Striped pants, a queer dance, oh so silly
He lured rotten kids
into tubes, chutes and vids
and murdered the tots willy-nilly
Poor Violet, he said ‘liquor’s quicker’
then dangled gobstoppers to trick her
It’s obscene how this man
and his devious plan
filled her jumpsuit with juice just to prick her
'Drinks for all my friends'
[I thought it might be a nice addition to my fledgling blog to post the occasional entry from one of my beloved moleskins. Most of the excerpts were written in dive bars in the lower east side of New York as I, happily drinking alone, got comfortably numb and wrote in order that people didn't notice me staring at them (read: people watching)]
...I’m wondering about the old woman in the mangy, thrift shop fur. That lady, over there, on the broken stool who’s fingering her watery bourbon drink. She’s the one closest to the john. You can barely make her out, she's crouched and camouflaged against the tattered felt of the pool table and the neon glow of beer lights. Her eyes are scanning the 60 proof crystalline palisade of the bottom-shelf, and she is lost in thought... ‘Where is the yellow label festooned with the roses of Spain?’ She’s leans heavy on the side of her head, holding the sutures of her skull tight, like the lid of a child’s jewelry box where secrets are kept. She’s holding in the dapper fellas and the courtesy of strangers, all worn slippery and thin now, a melange of deco colors and the way she used to dance to horns. All of these memories flicker on a cathode tube, a bluster of static snow, the gentle fluttering of ticker-tape that welcomes you home.
...I’m wondering about the old woman in the mangy, thrift shop fur. That lady, over there, on the broken stool who’s fingering her watery bourbon drink. She’s the one closest to the john. You can barely make her out, she's crouched and camouflaged against the tattered felt of the pool table and the neon glow of beer lights. Her eyes are scanning the 60 proof crystalline palisade of the bottom-shelf, and she is lost in thought... ‘Where is the yellow label festooned with the roses of Spain?’ She’s leans heavy on the side of her head, holding the sutures of her skull tight, like the lid of a child’s jewelry box where secrets are kept. She’s holding in the dapper fellas and the courtesy of strangers, all worn slippery and thin now, a melange of deco colors and the way she used to dance to horns. All of these memories flicker on a cathode tube, a bluster of static snow, the gentle fluttering of ticker-tape that welcomes you home.
Co-dependance
The struggle against the stranglehold of sloth and distraction has launched it's first sortie. I have caved in and finally begun a narrative with a definite goal but no foreseeable direction. Putting the phony back into cacophony!
I'm not sure I even want anyone to read any of these entries, I think I just need the catharsis of a daily brain dump to keep myself sane as I face my demons. (?) Maybe imps is more apropos? I think if I had real demons, the writing would be more fluid. Right now I am just trying to be a hack who hacks, as 'writer who writes' would be to claim for too much skill or preparation.
If anything I am trying to connect my aimless meanderings with flowery dross, by saying things like: flowery dross. But in describing my reasons for writing with no other compunction than the writing, I seem to be using a voice which is cordial and even inviting to... myself? The feedback loop is deafening. So ok, if someone reads this, it is created for them and for me, so we will create a minuscule symbiosis of sorts. A part of me wants an audience and hopefully my scatter-shot train of thought will deliver some kind of entertainment.
Be my remora fish, and I'll try to save you some of the juicy bits.
So instead of putting myself through the hell of having to stick to a random topic for this blog, I will think of it more like my personal cave wall and this my first emotive scratchings after a successful hunt, the outline of a hand marking it's creator, communing with the beasties and crying out for immortality, or maybe it will just be written over like so many painted tags under a bridge in some desert town where the cops have ceased to care.
I'm not sure I even want anyone to read any of these entries, I think I just need the catharsis of a daily brain dump to keep myself sane as I face my demons. (?) Maybe imps is more apropos? I think if I had real demons, the writing would be more fluid. Right now I am just trying to be a hack who hacks, as 'writer who writes' would be to claim for too much skill or preparation.
If anything I am trying to connect my aimless meanderings with flowery dross, by saying things like: flowery dross. But in describing my reasons for writing with no other compunction than the writing, I seem to be using a voice which is cordial and even inviting to... myself? The feedback loop is deafening. So ok, if someone reads this, it is created for them and for me, so we will create a minuscule symbiosis of sorts. A part of me wants an audience and hopefully my scatter-shot train of thought will deliver some kind of entertainment.
Be my remora fish, and I'll try to save you some of the juicy bits.
So instead of putting myself through the hell of having to stick to a random topic for this blog, I will think of it more like my personal cave wall and this my first emotive scratchings after a successful hunt, the outline of a hand marking it's creator, communing with the beasties and crying out for immortality, or maybe it will just be written over like so many painted tags under a bridge in some desert town where the cops have ceased to care.
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