1.19.2011 in Normal entries

She’s hitching up her pants, standing at the burger king, hairy and mad, pulling at her choke t get a little fuel in. He’s down to the Harmony throttling an eight ball, ten on the table long long green. In between them’s traffic with the bump and the boom and the whatcha gonna do now? It’s in between everyone, the lawyer, the doctor the brain damaged cook, the salesmen, the bus driver, the student.

And someone’s hosing down the sidewalk and he’s only in his teens — Tom Waits

Paper on a park bench soaking up the rain, tea cup in the gutter wrapped up in police tape. This cat he’s got two fingers on his right hand missing and his mouth running on and ‘did I invest in Henderson the Rain King?’ And she’s hitching up her pants and waiting for a bus. All that separates them is everything.

The stars are the greatest thing you’ve ever seen and they’re there for you, for you alone and you are everything — REM

He’s underneath the jungle gym counting all the bars, night is haunted with the sound of laughing children. She says we gotta go but she’s not moving. He says it’s not the bars that keep you in, it’s the other three walls. She says we gotta go now and still won’t move. He said ‘when I was kid I’d hang for Hours and think about this right now’. She could hear the rattling of shopping carts and the sirens in the distances.

Tire tracks all across your back I can see you had your fun — Hendrix

Another gray morning with most of January behind. I’m up too early or maybe too late, I didn’t miss anything and I’m not waiting for anything particular. I don’t know what the above has to do with anything. I was driving past the Burger King in slow wet traffic, and this lady in brown tight stretch pants to tight for her was pulling and pinching at them as they were creeping down her ass. When you see one thing you are missing something else. Everything happens all at the same time, perhaps even on a grander scale than I really mean, I just meant even with our eyes, the eyes of a predator, we choose what we’re going to see, and I suppose, in a broader sense, what we aren’t going to see. If it were all laid out for me, I would have chosen differently. But I didn’t. I watched her hitch up her pants.

I tried to capture some sense of what that means to me in snippets of awkward imaginary. Sometimes I’m abstract enough to do that, sometimes I feel too concrete, not earthy, not like a sidewalk, but stiff like a wall. My backyard is littered with things the dogs have chewed up and brought out there. They will chew at them again. I could clean it all up, and yes, I’m still under the spell of whatever creeping crud, whatever malignant malaise has its grip, but it doesn’t affect the cleaning up parts of my body. The back yard resembles my thoughts, the scattering of half chewed things that were something else once among the mud and grass patches, an overturned drift boat, the bared root of the magnolia tree like my bared nerves. I gotten to used to this feeling and I’ve always been used to this thought process; I pull some lost thing from the pile and turn it over and again over I my hand establishing whatever relationship I have to my own thoughts.

Even as a young man I could not just appreciate the ass the pants were conspiring to uncover or the vanity of the woman to go to work in pants that didn’t quite fit or the subtly of a stolen intimate moment that no one else knew we were sharing — which is not to say I was never consumed with the sensual world, no, perhaps the complete opposite, it’s that the thoughts expand and diffuse, and for several years of my life I could only appreciate the extreme of diffusion, could only appreciate the beautiful and the ugly and how they intertwined like the thorn and the rose. Clumsy way of getting there, but it’s true enough.

War was my love and my friend and companion, what did I care for the pretty and plain, but her smile was clear and my heart was so troubled, oh how will I ever be simple again? — Richard Thompson

There really is no story to this story. I drove by a window at a burger king and saw a woman hitching up her pants. I didn’t crash my rig or even come close, she didn’t turn and smile, there was no lust or longing, I wasn’t appalled. Just some woman hitching up her pants, probably part of a uniform, she was behind the counter and wore a headset in her two tone hair, tied back, not smiling, wearing a vest the same color as her pants.

When I was a kid I was in this play by Carson McCullers called Member of the Wedding. One of my cues was the speech from another character, a speech about longing and belonging some and the line was something like “ … and you see someone on the street and they’re so beautiful and your eyes meet, and just for that second you feel like you could love them forever and then they’re gone, just keep walking down the street and you never see them again …” And I tried real hard at the time to know what that meant exactly, and sometimes I still try real hard. The director had us do this exercise, improvise a scene not in the play. My character, a primary character, dies off stage in the third act. We improvised my funeral. I had to lie still while the other two primaries grieved. That, unfortunately, I understood very well and sometimes I try real hard not to. I suppose I really did want to act for a while, it had nothing to do with fame or fortune. It had to do with standing on a stage oblivious to all the strangers out there breathing and creating from the clay a person that otherwise doesn’t exist. It’s a difficult feeling to find anywhere else, even more difficult to have strangers applaud you for it anywhere else. Somewhere along the line it became less important, not the feeling but the doing.

I owe another apology. I have born false witness on this website. Several years ago, let’s call it 2002 or 3, there were these two diarist; an insufferable sermonizing self stylized fellow by the name of Pastor Jeff and a six year sophomore at some community college an arrogant pseudo-intellectual atheist named Devilseye. The band of Merry Pranksters I was caught up in would have weeklong note wars that involved a lot of scripture quoting and excessive name calling and would always deteriorate into inventive insults. I was often accused of being the author of all the insurgent diaries. Flattering as that might have been it was not true. I am me; for that I came — Gerard Manly Hopkins.

I did create a diary called Rabbi Haredawgovitz. The content was fairly simple, sweet, innocuous studies of passages from Gnostic scriptures and the Apocrypha. However, the good rabbi’s notes were acerbic. There was also this kid at the time, I can’t remember his name but it was something like Billy Joe Bob, whose diary was pretty much all anti-Semitic homophobia. Rabbi Haredawgovitz left a note on the kids diary something like “Hey let’s meet up at the ManHole I’ll buy you a drink.” The kid went off on the rabbi with epitaphs like Kike Kweer. The rabbi apologized and here’s where the bearing false witness came in, the rabbi left a note “I am so sorry for the misunderstanding, Devilseye told me you had given him a hummer.” Heh. The kid goes to Devilseye diary and just starts going off with all this vitriol. Devilseye didn’t know what him, but thinking himself a great rational thinker and a dyed in the wool liberal tried to argue with this kid. I thought it was pretty funny. Maybe you had to be there. One of the funny things is that of all the diaries accused of covertly being Haredawg, rabbi haredawgovitz was not among that number. Again I apologize for myself righteous declaration that I have never born false witness and the only excuse I have is my failing memory. I’m pretty sure I haven’t killed anyone or coveted my neighbors ass or worshipped false idols though (the golden calf is just for golden cream for my golden coffee) but I’m loathe to say I never have.

Turns out Pastor Jeff was actually a send up created by the notorious BooBop Shabazz. There was a fellow called Brother Tim, however, that wasn’t a send up. He was the kind of guy that if you called him an asshat would throw some scripture at you “And the asshats shall perish and those that speak their name shall fester and their tears shall spill on the ground and yea! Thy lord willst giggle mightily.” He was a lot of fun. Brother Tim and infamous humorless atheists like Atheist Under Ur Bed would get into Straw Man and dirty hands arguments. The rabbi would leave secular and cryptic notes for the good friar like “Batman ever protects the innocents of Gotham”.

There were also fake diaries at the time conducting ad hoc social experiments like KoolChickNikki or Miss Ann Thrope. Huh. I go from hitching up pants to an OD history lecture. See? Chewed up lost things in the yard of my mind. And I’m spent.