I was at Wild Oats after a frustrating day/week/year etc. Amazing sometimes how nothing really changes,
fixed a toilet for a young performance artist crazy with ideas and schemes, playing with dolls, showed me Paul McCarthy’s book of drawings & photos, sex, sex, sex like a Mexican Payaso’s sketchpad. It’s been raining cats & dogs, making leaks in my house I need some dry weather to fix
and soaked my bedclothes one night because I left the camper shell open and soaked the book I was working on another time and I had to dry it out page by page, and gave up on the bedcovers and the foam pad, just bought new ones from a thrift store.
And I can’t talk to my neighbor about the lot next door to me, he’s too involved in his depression about his ex owning it & selling it for an incredible sum, so anything I say to him about doing anything about it is me being too self absorbed.....what about him, take care of him, nurture him, SAVE him from himself
I thought that WAS about him, and that woman didn’t do a god damned thing to him, HE"S the one killing himself by putting her face in the mommy place and eating his heart out, and going to all these woo woo mystics & shamans who just drive him farther into himself instead of objectifying it...o well, if he wants to be a baby and play in his own shit, I hate interferring with people doing something they REALLY enjoy
NOR can I convince a fellow artist to buy the lot & move in there to exploit a certain community of interest, we both being art-in-nature artists....BECAUSE the more I promote my case, the more I prejudice it, life goes OUTWARD, the starship ENTERPRISE must sail on, driven by an engine powered by social entropy, uncommitted, to boyish adventures on hostile alien worlds, so screw it, I'm outa aces,
& nothing is happening with the refrigeration jobs, & I’m at loose ends & at odds.
Suddenly I see Duncan, in the check out line & wave & he waves back. Duncan, paranoid schizophrenic Duncan who used to live in the little trailer in the front of my lot, worked on my house with me, and gradually trashed the trailer, and I had to move it away because the neighborhood was upset. He helped me a lot I thought. Yes and I paid him two or three times over for that help, how much more? OK, OK. I said.
& suddenly there he was
Mind if I sit down a minute? You know I figure I’m owed a whole buncha money (He always thought somebody stole a winning lottery ticket from him) You haven’t gotten any mail for me have you?
No. (Certainly not after fifteen years)
Good then that’s over and done with. I been to AA a lot but they keep trying to ram God and Jesus down your throat.
Then go to another meeting.
I do. I go to COPE too. I’m staying on my medication now.
(Good I’m thinking, no more pretending to be the devil and all that nasty talk)
How do you pay for it? Do you get medacaid?
No, I’m on ACCESS.
How old are you?
54.
He looks like he’s much older, toothless, dark and stiff from doing yardwork. He says,
I have a problem with talking to myself when I sit down to try to write.
So do I.
I know you do.
Best thing I’ve found is just stick to the facts, like with TS Elliott’s objective correlative and William Carlos Williams "no truths but in things".
You ever read Kenneth Patchen’s Journal of Albion Moonlight?
I did. I don’t like it too much anymore, too much of one thing.
It’s a genius work of art. And in high school I was going with this girl who tried and tried to get me to read it and I wouldn’t and I didn’t even realize lots of times she would be acting out scenes from the book on me and I didn’t even know. How do you ask a person for forgiveness for something like that?
She’s probably moved on too.
You haven’t run into any 34 to 44 year old women looking for a good time have you?
No.
I shake his hand. Sympathizing with his solitude & his hard bitter struggle, but with nothing left to say.
I sit at the juice bar and order up while the juicer talks to the pretty young thing to whom nothing will ever happen,
O what a cute outfit. You look kind of sick. What can I get you?
She doesn’t look sick, she looks like she can’t do anything except laugh about some not too profound joke going on inside her. Something like wanting to get laid, but unable to deal with it directly.
And it makes me feel alone. Alone the way electing an idiot for president twice by vote fraud, a war based on greed and lies, the destruction of the earth and a thousand other public fascist idiocies make me feel alone. People on autopilot make me feel alone.
I go to my truck and sit there eating a grapefruit watching cars go down the dark street like somehow I was in a strange town and had never been here before...ever....but where HAD I been before, where DID I ever belong? A grapefruit seed falls in my crotch. I pick it up.
And think about the four videos I checked out just the other day for my sleepless nights. I just read the dust jackets anymore and rent on a hunch. I’ve given up on the classics and the hits even with offbeat critics. I’m just looking for those rare little gems of consciousness lost in a sea of money.
Somehow these four all turned out to be about small farming towns in the 30's and 40's and people feeling trapped
locked up in the dark of history, with generalized prejudice and stupidity, and I watch them while working on other things, but also fixated, maybe even addicted, like if I watched long enough maybe I could figure out the joke of time itself
daily lives that move like glaciers, which melt and inevitably disappear while they move, walls of banality that just won’t give in
(reminds me of the last line of a Japanese death poem: "life is melting snow")
I’m so glad we’re modern now and have so much more figured out, & aren’t trapped like that, with nothing happening over and over,
in some sad old movie.
