The curtain is up on the recital. Thank you for coming!!! (like my top hat, white tie and tails?) Anyway maestro, this week I'll be writing about individuals whose presence changed the discourse of my life dramatically. I wrote about Dave McDonald this morning in the eternity blog.....I originally wanted to have nine individuals, one for each entrance for the House of Worship, but I have no clue how many there will be. Nine is actually (clear throat in a seemingly important manner here) A very Mystical number. The child is baking in the womb for nine months, Mythologically, nine is emblematic of the female goddess...the trinity cubed is nine. Actually, we've kind of started a new trend over the last forty-five minutes called "mystic blogging!!!".....long story, but can't you picture thickly bearded dervish dudes spinning around in there swivel chair for hours and then typing out a profound Blog adage?
Anyway, I'm taking a Blog bye-day tomorrow and mowing my mothers lawn. So the people I'm going to profile will begin Tuesday. Tonights recital is dedicated to Memorial Day. As many of you reading this can probably surmise, I don't think much about the current war and I can point to a certain part of my anatomy to convey what I think about our current president ("I have my hand on my heart but I don't know what for" as Brilliant folk-singer Greg Brown in his song I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK.) But I can point to the center of my chest in empathy when I think about our brothers and sisters who have died because our national presidential plutocrat sold a lie to the pesants he was suppose to protect (too many P's...).
Anyway, (this takes less time than it takes to read my crazy bloggs) take a look at this prayer and think about the continuity of the soul. Our nation has done a horrible job acknowledging confused Vietnam vets....I don't know how the Veteran's of this war will pan out, but I know that some of us are vehicles of peace. Again, thanks for looking at this.
" O my God! O Thou forgiver of sins...
my God! O Thou forgiver of sins, bestower of gifts, dispeller of afflictions!
Verily, I beseech thee to forgive the sins of such as have abandoned the physical garment and have ascended to the spiritual world.
O my Lord! Purify them from trespasses, dispel their sorrows, and change their darkness into light. Cause them to enter the garden of happiness, cleanse them with the most pure water, and grant them to behold Thy splendors on the loftiest mount. "
-Abdu'l' baha
Because the errant button of yer reality is so much more than just a simple stage curtain, it is a passionate pergola of corporeal longing, a recital for every botched blessing that somehow, like your body creatively configured in hard-right geometrical angles of grace, is still to come.....
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Saturday, May 29, 2004
Naked I came into this world...
...and naked I will blog, only I can already feel my own blogs growing stale and jaundice and gaining an insipid shelf-life though they are still so very addictive you could probably get a good street price for them...addicitive in almost a keyhole voyuristic-what-piece-of-attire-will-be-sloughed-next sort of way. Everything I've written so far looks like heaps of unwanted bargain books at Barnes and Nobles. Writing is an odd profession. As novelist Richard Powers says in Galatea 2.2 the author (more or less states that), by diving into this odd literary lifestyle writers vex their families and inspire the lifes of total strangers. Boy do we ever. Mother and I are just finally getting along even though I can't give her a copy of my last published short story becasue it uses the F-word as a clumsy invective. I've probably spent sixty hours on that short story but if mom saw it she would consider it verbiage. My friend AJ--the creature who placed water-wings around my limbs and then (surprise) tossed me into this blog puddle is someone I really admire but would probably only squint at in forlorn nostalgia if we inadvertantly brushed shoulders while passing each other in the International wing of O'Hare. I can't even tell you what her voice sounds like, yet we've been playing post-it-comment ping-pong the last day-and-a-half and I feel that what she has to say is worth a great deal.
(+there's a few books burning inisde my friend AJ that I can't wait to read someday!!! When you see her visage painted inside a Bookstore mosaic, you can say that I called my shot even way back when!)
So here's my new BLOG context. The "Eternity" Blog could be called my shit, shower, shave Blog. It'll be a mirror about what I think is going on currently in my life and more importanly, the world. Say, for instance, how I think that Kobe Bryant should be castrated b/c young boys are going to emulate him and think it's ok to screw whatever you want b/c if your living large enough, you'll be able to get away with it or how I'd like to inform President Bush that Cancer, HIV and poverty are also Weapons of Mass Destruction and pain that have been found to reek mass havoc and are already imminent in the soil of our nation, planted like a landmines waiting to be pricked-off by unsuspecting limbs.
The "Eternity" blog will also shed the romantic perils of Swissy-Missy; what happens when you ingest copious amounts of caffeine into your immune system on a daily basis, stuff like that....
The eternity Blog is essentially the a.m. Blog. It's what I massage the keyboards with before I belly-flop into microsoft Word and listen to an annoying Paperclip assistant remind me once again that I mispelled a word by scraggiling a red line beneath my sentences.
The "Recital" BLOG is the one you should pay attention to becasue it's not about me solipsistically sulking. Yesterday I had so much fun BLOGGING that I gradually transitioned into the corpulent, overly-opinionated comic-book guy off the Simspons. What freedom writing (art, blogging, ect.) grants, but like any Dedalus I flapped my wings so hard at ny new found nickelodeon that I found myself with plenty of ink and parchment, but void of quills for which to write.
The more and more I slap the scattered alphabet on the keyboard in search of a good sentence or a solid image the more and more i feel that art and living is a somewhat reciprocated activity...that art sometimes frees us and takes us to places and that we get out what we put in. Put more simply, thank god for the stories we write and thank god for the stories of other people. In the movie FIELD OF DREAMS, Kevin Costner is denied access into the field he built--the crazy, picaresque, visionary baseball field he erected in the middle of a cornfield--much to his neighbors dismay--while monopolizing all his savings in the process. The see-through baseball suited wraith grants James Earl JOnes access and when Kevin Costner throws a hissy-fit, the wraith just sort of looks at him minty-eyed austerely and modestly inquires, "You did all this for you?"
The "Recital" p.m. Blog will often have a thing and be directed toward other people. Starting tomorrow the Recital theme will be people (mystical, literary protagonist sort-of-individuals) I've met and loved who've had a profound influence on my life. I've whittled it down to 9--one for every entrance to the house of worship. This is a great writing excercise becasue it makes you thankful and you can reminisce at the same time. Tomorrow's recital will feature the the folk trobadour--a person who gives music, who's playing tonight at Sullivan's 10-2, so for all you townies....
gotta go know. Blog blog blog blog blog blog blog. I'm gonna go home, feng-shui and play a THE SOUND OF SILENCE on my Melodica........"Hello Darkness my old friend........."
(+there's a few books burning inisde my friend AJ that I can't wait to read someday!!! When you see her visage painted inside a Bookstore mosaic, you can say that I called my shot even way back when!)
So here's my new BLOG context. The "Eternity" Blog could be called my shit, shower, shave Blog. It'll be a mirror about what I think is going on currently in my life and more importanly, the world. Say, for instance, how I think that Kobe Bryant should be castrated b/c young boys are going to emulate him and think it's ok to screw whatever you want b/c if your living large enough, you'll be able to get away with it or how I'd like to inform President Bush that Cancer, HIV and poverty are also Weapons of Mass Destruction and pain that have been found to reek mass havoc and are already imminent in the soil of our nation, planted like a landmines waiting to be pricked-off by unsuspecting limbs.
The "Eternity" blog will also shed the romantic perils of Swissy-Missy; what happens when you ingest copious amounts of caffeine into your immune system on a daily basis, stuff like that....
The eternity Blog is essentially the a.m. Blog. It's what I massage the keyboards with before I belly-flop into microsoft Word and listen to an annoying Paperclip assistant remind me once again that I mispelled a word by scraggiling a red line beneath my sentences.
The "Recital" BLOG is the one you should pay attention to becasue it's not about me solipsistically sulking. Yesterday I had so much fun BLOGGING that I gradually transitioned into the corpulent, overly-opinionated comic-book guy off the Simspons. What freedom writing (art, blogging, ect.) grants, but like any Dedalus I flapped my wings so hard at ny new found nickelodeon that I found myself with plenty of ink and parchment, but void of quills for which to write.
The more and more I slap the scattered alphabet on the keyboard in search of a good sentence or a solid image the more and more i feel that art and living is a somewhat reciprocated activity...that art sometimes frees us and takes us to places and that we get out what we put in. Put more simply, thank god for the stories we write and thank god for the stories of other people. In the movie FIELD OF DREAMS, Kevin Costner is denied access into the field he built--the crazy, picaresque, visionary baseball field he erected in the middle of a cornfield--much to his neighbors dismay--while monopolizing all his savings in the process. The see-through baseball suited wraith grants James Earl JOnes access and when Kevin Costner throws a hissy-fit, the wraith just sort of looks at him minty-eyed austerely and modestly inquires, "You did all this for you?"
The "Recital" p.m. Blog will often have a thing and be directed toward other people. Starting tomorrow the Recital theme will be people (mystical, literary protagonist sort-of-individuals) I've met and loved who've had a profound influence on my life. I've whittled it down to 9--one for every entrance to the house of worship. This is a great writing excercise becasue it makes you thankful and you can reminisce at the same time. Tomorrow's recital will feature the the folk trobadour--a person who gives music, who's playing tonight at Sullivan's 10-2, so for all you townies....
gotta go know. Blog blog blog blog blog blog blog. I'm gonna go home, feng-shui and play a THE SOUND OF SILENCE on my Melodica........"Hello Darkness my old friend........."
Friday, May 28, 2004
The time of year thou mayest in me behold
Solid writing day. Not a ten pager but two and half single space isn't bad considering that the library closes early. Patiencearya should have mentioned that these blogs are addictive (they should have been called Starbucks). All day I had a vision of a derby capped slim shirted individual cornering me in an alleyway bribing me with an illicit Blog, holding a little ziplock bag in front of me, chanting "Come, you know you want it. You know you need." And all day I wrote on the novel, planted corn row sentences on the page, put up with yuppie rich kids at work....geez, now I feel like Anne Frank. Maybe I'll call my diary entry Kitty and go home and see if my apartment has an attic and scribble about how people are really good at heart, which of course, we really are, even with all the shit that's happening in the world, floods in the Carribean, bodies in Iraq, social apathy here on the home front, you gotta believe that there is a universal oneness and that we are (somehow) a part of it and each individual needs to somehow strive and find out what there role is...what they can do...who they are as a human being verses a marketable material commodity. It's our duty, our dharma, and God (which writer was it, Rick Moody?? Dave Wallace???) who talked about hating enough to love enough to try to chancge the world enough. I think it was Dave wallace in "Girl w. Curious Hair" but don't quote me....
It's the end of May which means that its been almost eight years since I exited the salmon-flavored hallways of Manual High school, located in the south side of Peoria, an academic stye, school of demons that still need to be extinguished, highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Nation (three girls in the top ten of '96 had kids...seriously, they had a Bring you Kid to School my senior year...when I was wearing berets and listening to the Cure and writing quote "deep" horrible poetry pretending to be Kerouac...I think my first great so--called deep hit was, "In a world so sad, so inane, to put it's trust in Kurt Cobain" Oh well, even Shakespeare had to go out and pluck his muse in order to get a quill....
I spent the week before graduation hospitalized. I wore the flowery hospital smock and received a sponge bath from an old Black lady named Bertha who would leave the room while I attened to my "Mens Parts" as she labeled them as if they were located in the back of a shed or inside a tackel box, at Lowes on sale.
I was pretty messed up in high school and did alotta things to glean attention (in addition to having the Highest teenage pregnancy rate in the nation, my high school also boasted the loweset I-sat scores in the state. Ironically they one the state basketball championship three-out-of-the four years I attended and a big scam was evinced after I left becasue several of the district administrators confessed that grades were in fact manipulated for athletes)...I was an anal valium plug my senior year strung out on antidepressants when all I really needed (all most people really just need) is an occasionally F&&&&ing aye. An occasion yeah, life's shit, but we're here and we're resilient. There's always been and always will be people who seemed to hurt you but there's a glory that comes just through living. From having gone through something and come out and find yourself planted in fornt of an twelve-inch pixillation jotting down your memoirs....
I was in the hospital and they never found out what spawned the pancreatic flareup. I'm almost certain that it was spawned from tossing around my 'ample' girlfriend at prom, beautiful Kristina Rock from East Peoria. (I'd always pantomine that her name was CHRIS ROCK, and her face would tinge to the color of cheap wine coolers and she'd give me the finger)...anyway, becasue I was trying to see what artery did what with a potato peeler my senior year, my GPA sunk like an anchor in the Atlantic and I found myself donning the cap and gown and being surrounded by similar donned cap and gowned individuals that I didn't know--almost like I was in a mock foliage. Kristina came from across town and had her golden hair pinned up and her fair movie screen forehead just sort of looked at my class in awe as we stomped past in mock pomp and circumstance. After the ceremony the superintendant who knocked up a student teacher in lieu of a wife gave me a hug and complement and insisted that he pose for a picture with me. I remember being shouldered in the procession and seeing Mr. Washer (God Bless his soul!) telling me to have a wonderful life. I remember my father (God bless his soul!) giving me a hug...God love him!!!!!
And after the graduation we got drunk. We went home and I uncorked a bottle of wine from the Rhine valley in Germany. White Trash Pat had already been drinking for something like forty-hours, oblivious that his brother Allan was kickin' it with Amber Steele (Like her heart)....and Jackie was there and Nicke was there and Crazy Strickler wore sunglasses and a beret and started calling everyone 'Vinny' and I had a hard time opening up the wine so we eventually toated chalices to the future with little shards of cork bobbing like little corky buoys in the middle of our libations. Saying salut-tay. Chin-chin!!! and in the neck year both Jackie and Nickie would have kids and Strickler would be doing more shrooms than a Mario brother and Kristina would leave me becasue I behaved like Ted Hughes, behaved like how I though male poets were supposed to behave, so she left me and after my last college final first semester freshman year, I felt a pause and wished I could pick her up and we could bery-berry cobbler and swig cheap-coffee at Steak and Shake and just chill.......
But now, years later after graduation, I still toeast an empty chalice that is fraught with the future. For each of us. Drink up...each of us have our own cup that is full of something sweet, of is it sweet.
Chin-chin.....
(sorry fraught with errors, library is closing
It's the end of May which means that its been almost eight years since I exited the salmon-flavored hallways of Manual High school, located in the south side of Peoria, an academic stye, school of demons that still need to be extinguished, highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Nation (three girls in the top ten of '96 had kids...seriously, they had a Bring you Kid to School my senior year...when I was wearing berets and listening to the Cure and writing quote "deep" horrible poetry pretending to be Kerouac...I think my first great so--called deep hit was, "In a world so sad, so inane, to put it's trust in Kurt Cobain" Oh well, even Shakespeare had to go out and pluck his muse in order to get a quill....
I spent the week before graduation hospitalized. I wore the flowery hospital smock and received a sponge bath from an old Black lady named Bertha who would leave the room while I attened to my "Mens Parts" as she labeled them as if they were located in the back of a shed or inside a tackel box, at Lowes on sale.
I was pretty messed up in high school and did alotta things to glean attention (in addition to having the Highest teenage pregnancy rate in the nation, my high school also boasted the loweset I-sat scores in the state. Ironically they one the state basketball championship three-out-of-the four years I attended and a big scam was evinced after I left becasue several of the district administrators confessed that grades were in fact manipulated for athletes)...I was an anal valium plug my senior year strung out on antidepressants when all I really needed (all most people really just need) is an occasionally F&&&&ing aye. An occasion yeah, life's shit, but we're here and we're resilient. There's always been and always will be people who seemed to hurt you but there's a glory that comes just through living. From having gone through something and come out and find yourself planted in fornt of an twelve-inch pixillation jotting down your memoirs....
I was in the hospital and they never found out what spawned the pancreatic flareup. I'm almost certain that it was spawned from tossing around my 'ample' girlfriend at prom, beautiful Kristina Rock from East Peoria. (I'd always pantomine that her name was CHRIS ROCK, and her face would tinge to the color of cheap wine coolers and she'd give me the finger)...anyway, becasue I was trying to see what artery did what with a potato peeler my senior year, my GPA sunk like an anchor in the Atlantic and I found myself donning the cap and gown and being surrounded by similar donned cap and gowned individuals that I didn't know--almost like I was in a mock foliage. Kristina came from across town and had her golden hair pinned up and her fair movie screen forehead just sort of looked at my class in awe as we stomped past in mock pomp and circumstance. After the ceremony the superintendant who knocked up a student teacher in lieu of a wife gave me a hug and complement and insisted that he pose for a picture with me. I remember being shouldered in the procession and seeing Mr. Washer (God Bless his soul!) telling me to have a wonderful life. I remember my father (God bless his soul!) giving me a hug...God love him!!!!!
And after the graduation we got drunk. We went home and I uncorked a bottle of wine from the Rhine valley in Germany. White Trash Pat had already been drinking for something like forty-hours, oblivious that his brother Allan was kickin' it with Amber Steele (Like her heart)....and Jackie was there and Nicke was there and Crazy Strickler wore sunglasses and a beret and started calling everyone 'Vinny' and I had a hard time opening up the wine so we eventually toated chalices to the future with little shards of cork bobbing like little corky buoys in the middle of our libations. Saying salut-tay. Chin-chin!!! and in the neck year both Jackie and Nickie would have kids and Strickler would be doing more shrooms than a Mario brother and Kristina would leave me becasue I behaved like Ted Hughes, behaved like how I though male poets were supposed to behave, so she left me and after my last college final first semester freshman year, I felt a pause and wished I could pick her up and we could bery-berry cobbler and swig cheap-coffee at Steak and Shake and just chill.......
But now, years later after graduation, I still toeast an empty chalice that is fraught with the future. For each of us. Drink up...each of us have our own cup that is full of something sweet, of is it sweet.
Chin-chin.....
(sorry fraught with errors, library is closing
Did I mention....
I'm really pissed off that the computer gulped and swallowed my ten pages tuesday!!!!!!!!!!!!! The concourse has their thumbs planted on the tip of their nose, challenging me to prove myself as a writer and I become Anne Sexton overnight....ok, focus little tree, no more blog, back to work............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................NEED COFFEE....................................................................................................................................................................................
single thing proves over and over again...
....to be unimportant, Thank you father Wittgenstein (Vick-tin-stein, Lick-tin-stein, beerstein). Growing up I was a major comic book/sci-fi swigging geek (I wore thick brown glasses that looked like old abandoned RCA television sets you'd find furbished at a retirement home somewhere, more than likely blaring Lawrence Welk reruns; you know...teal and flamingo colored suits, bad polka, ubiquitous bubbles?) and everynight during junior high I would progarm my own less dated television set to automatically snap off at 11:30 so I could sway my nocturnal thoughts against stellar intergalactic lull of the starship enterprise. Remember that lull? That static white noise that warbled in the background as beautiful spandex clad female vulcans would say "Captain" and press the silver-dash nipple orb and speak scientifically into it? "Hello Beverly Cursher--YOW!!!"
Anyway, since I vowed last week to blog before writing everyday and then, thinking about my mom's furrowed brow, looking into her shoes as she tells me at a family function involving cranberries and stuffing and superficially polite relative conversation that her son has monopolized his life obtusely bent over a smith-corona writing sentences that she herself would personally be embarrassed to have her Church friends peruse (and then pray for)....I backed off, which was a mistake. I've never journaled, or logged, blathered or blogged but I write long, tortuous novels and love writing more than I could possibly convey here. Every joy I've gleaned in the last four years has come from streaming down sentences...long, bulky, meaty fraught language that slowly dots its way across the contours of the white page; Paragraphs that look like little aerial shots of neighborhoods snapped from above...yes, writing is a joy and its a helluva life (the rejections, the amours, the occasional shot, the hubris, the academic pretense, the pedantic mien I used to wear like zippers on a 1980's Footloose jacket I now loathe....all this stuff)....
I came to one conclusion after reading my "gypsy" friends blog. Whereas Focoult (I think it was him, either him or Blanchot)said that 'He who knows not how to hide,know not how to love', I'd have to retort and say that the joy of living an aesthetic lifestyle; a life in the arts, is always one of opening yourself up--making yourself a little vulnerable. So here I am...maybe this personal-confession will carry over into my fictious renderings, but more so, the emphasis is always on the reader him/herself....As Joseph campbell would carp "have you been reborn? Have you died to the infantile creature you were and given birth to the mature?
So here goes, rather than rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, I promise to be (almost) one-hundred percent completely honest with my daily rants (the margin of error, stemming from that I write fiction and love to entertain, so if I devise some crazy story involving a unicycle and a yak and pawn it off as fact, its simply for your amusement as well as mine...
I think I inadvetantly started two simultaneous blogs at once. This should be fun.
Time to motor (I need more caffeine) and the Wittgenstein quote ends but the possibility of every single thing show us something about the nature of the world...
Anyway, since I vowed last week to blog before writing everyday and then, thinking about my mom's furrowed brow, looking into her shoes as she tells me at a family function involving cranberries and stuffing and superficially polite relative conversation that her son has monopolized his life obtusely bent over a smith-corona writing sentences that she herself would personally be embarrassed to have her Church friends peruse (and then pray for)....I backed off, which was a mistake. I've never journaled, or logged, blathered or blogged but I write long, tortuous novels and love writing more than I could possibly convey here. Every joy I've gleaned in the last four years has come from streaming down sentences...long, bulky, meaty fraught language that slowly dots its way across the contours of the white page; Paragraphs that look like little aerial shots of neighborhoods snapped from above...yes, writing is a joy and its a helluva life (the rejections, the amours, the occasional shot, the hubris, the academic pretense, the pedantic mien I used to wear like zippers on a 1980's Footloose jacket I now loathe....all this stuff)....
I came to one conclusion after reading my "gypsy" friends blog. Whereas Focoult (I think it was him, either him or Blanchot)said that 'He who knows not how to hide,know not how to love', I'd have to retort and say that the joy of living an aesthetic lifestyle; a life in the arts, is always one of opening yourself up--making yourself a little vulnerable. So here I am...maybe this personal-confession will carry over into my fictious renderings, but more so, the emphasis is always on the reader him/herself....As Joseph campbell would carp "have you been reborn? Have you died to the infantile creature you were and given birth to the mature?
So here goes, rather than rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, I promise to be (almost) one-hundred percent completely honest with my daily rants (the margin of error, stemming from that I write fiction and love to entertain, so if I devise some crazy story involving a unicycle and a yak and pawn it off as fact, its simply for your amusement as well as mine...
I think I inadvetantly started two simultaneous blogs at once. This should be fun.
Time to motor (I need more caffeine) and the Wittgenstein quote ends but the possibility of every single thing show us something about the nature of the world...
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