Is It Empty?
My watermelon pen is, nearly. My head— that too. At 6 exactly in a high plue (purple-blue) but also (all-so) plue-gray overcast out beyond the merry green & piercing red traffic lights: in-fucking-effable beauty. And all I can/should do is put it here. Visual it is. I can't draw it in words, esp. as the plue-gray darkens to: well, I don't have enough strings to my palette. I'm sitting in Ladro on 15th where the Clash are playing & the free trade coffee tastes refreshing after many months of Starbucks.
Or are they the Sex Pistols—they have that Limey-yell style of singing.
The rain has held off. My mind drains to empty all too easily these cloned days. I get no mail. I don't matter.
My only defense/revenge is to refuse to buy. So that's what I do.
*
The Korean man at the 99¢ store who sells me lottery tickets tells me that the lady with the shiny-new running shoes is French. I gnash my teeth at him as he adds, "she is beautiful." "Of course she is," I yell back, "she's French."
*
Last night I dreamed the front page of the paper had QUAKE in half-page type—but I didn't see the date on it. The papers are full of a nightclub fire in
Where's my quake?
Caffe Ladro
Perspicacious
On a Sunday, nothing much to do except finish typing up vol. 2 of the bound books (end is in sight—but I have good long sight for Ends), so I walked out at 4 on a polished-by-the-wind afternoon. Without my wooly scarf. I walked with a light step, a miracle brought about by the matching of 3 Quinto #s for $30. Polished by the wind, the clouds shoved east & the sky smiled on me....but there weren't enough cats. 2 or 3 or 4, but only one with long fur. The mountains were dusted with snow about a third of the way down. Nice enough to bring out the photographers.
So I walked around the top of the hill, saw no vacancy signs, not where I'd want to live, and by 5 I had come to cafe & who is sitting there, irking me profoundly with her orange hair & orange sweater—you know who: Ms. C. G. Absorbed in her work today. No nose-picking. O how I wish Lee were here so we could exchange Looks of Significance, and maybe he'd put on some obnoxious music & turn it loud. I'd settle for wiggling eyebrows. But no— Here I am, all alone: The perfect end to a perfectly putrid day. Except it wasn't that bad till I came in here, and it's not over yet. Besides winning the #s, I found 2 or 3 humorous entries re Lee so I can send them & not just disappear, which I sort of feel inclined to do.
A Delusion, But
I wasn't exactly laboring under it—I just found out today is Jean Op's birthday, not tomorrow (3/3) as I had been thinking, if not actually celebrating. All these years.
*
It has rained all day. Not enough candle-power to light my way to dusty death. I woke to Sunday gloom, as ever, & I thrashed around in all the usual ways, only less freely than in former years due to atrophic muscles & frazzled tendons. Didn't eat until
I thought I looked very ugly. Well, I do look very ugly. I've hung around too long. The effect of the environment on the organism is uglification. I can't... I can't ignore these 15-year-old girls. One has green tennies & the other black toenails (polish)—she's wearing zoris. Mom comes in. Mom is younger than I am. I have to say, I'm not sorry I never did that normal breeding thing, though oddly (?), earlier I was feeling sorry for myself—lorn & lonesome me. In that shoebox apartment in the smelly-brick building.
*
On my right, man in blue reads blue book: the Plays of Shakespeare. Well, one of them: “Twelfth Night.” Looks like he's memorizing: Should I turn to him & declaim: "Sweet are the uses of adversity." Of course I shouldn't & I won't.
Through rasty old aspera. To Where?
I seem to have gotten lost (stranded!) in the rasty old asperity. Years pass... Now there's a transition. I’ve lost sight of the stars. I hold on to the mistaken idea that a separate bedroom (& a front stoop) are all I need to get my dreams back. Even though I know it's not true, I believe it. What do you call that? The mental equivalent of belly-button lint: brain dandruff.
Can't see the stars. I believe the stars are up there whether I can see them or not.
Same argument could be applied to God. —I mean stars are pretty unlikely when you think about it.
Well, no, not unlikely as much as superfluous and im-pertinent. Not personal. Of no personal significance. Purty though, when you can see em. Twinkly, magical. Un-utilitarian. So, who'd want to go?
Everybody, that's who.
No going to the stars? Looking up & saying aaah or oooh is as close as you'll ever get. As close as you need to. The whole fucking point.
So what is there besides this rough & rocky wilderness? Beyond this bit, more? A spring, if you're lucky. Marshy ground. Mosquitoes.
Holding On, Letting Go
Planting my shriveled buttocks on the worn & wrinkled seat cushion, looking at the mottled concrete (or cement—don't tell me the difference, I'll just forget), I say, looking at the green-gray floor of the 15th Avenue Starbucks wondering if that marbled pattern is from a finish nearly worn off...but mostly thinking about Lee, who used to amble over with or without an implement de cleanification (broom)—& yes, of course, he could amble even while wielding a broom. In short, thinking about Lee. Thinking too hard. I've made him real to my mind & that makes me miss him.
Let me stop here & drown my sorrows in a piece of cheap cake.
*
What the? Oh, that lad computing on his wireless (& listening to something through earphones) stopped tapping the keyboard long enough to play 3 chords & a Pete Townshend windmill on his air-guitar before going back to — data.
*
I've been off today & now (stone-gray dusk) all I remember is the cold wind as I walked back from the Montlake Library —all up the long 24th Avenue hill.
Now, I'm trying to think how I am going to write a letter to JHY in self-absorbed detail. Oh, like this book, only worse. I get a little sadistic frisson just thinking about it. (Oh, he's going to hate it. He he he he he)
Halfway to
If you can believe what you read in the papers,
The smarm, the humbug & disinformativeness of the NY Times bothers me more than the lame attempts of the local rags to grab an angle.
I, as I walk around, think about other "manufactured" wars—the Span. Am., for instance, and what it is about a man's world. Race hatred & war: there you are.
There's a new virus out—SARS—that causes flu/pneumonia/respiratory collapse. A measles mutant they think. At this point, it seems like a smoldering in the sawdust. And some of us ask, Is this it?
*
At work Wednesday, out the window horses went floating up & away—from where, made of??? We saw 3. I joked that maybe they were the horses of the apocalypse that had thrown—or left without—their riders. I don't think Alvia was amused. "Oh," I said, "I'm sure if it's the End, it'll be a good deal flashier than floating horses." She nodded, grim lipped.
—And it's spring too. Cold.
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