The Glutton and The Master Fruit

 

Last night, just as I was about to dine out
I recognized the Glutton:

covertly catty-cornered, staring with a salacious pout,

and glued to every detail

of the feast for my entrails.

 

I paused, then halted:

famished yet offended, my appetite souring.

How dare he enjoy not only the sight

and smell of my food,

but also find eroticism

in my very act of devouring?

 

My revulsion was overpowering:

I took not a bite

But merely gulped mouthfuls of sucked-up air

Then ‘vomited’ it back out—

an aerophile bulimic—there—

figuring my foodless display would get him uptight.

 

But the damn Glutton wasn’t human,

but a mischievous sprite

who laughed with pure glee at the thought

that I could create an eating disorder with nought.

 

So divine did the Glutton consider

My gastronomic pantomime

That he, too, began in empathetic entrancement

To ‘vomit’ up air with such ungodly retching and heaving

That he caused everyone to stare, raptly disbelieving.

 

The Glutton thus learned from me how to gross

Everyone out at no personal culinary cost.

And, in a instant, all entirely lost

their hunger and that loss was a prize

to the Glutton’s bulging eyes.

 

And then the Glutton stole off into the night

Dreaming of all the uneaten dinners in that diner

Ecstatic with the realization that nothing is finer

(next to pigging out)

than ruining other’s appetites.

It was an incredible summer morn.  I was work-free and laying out in the sun, drinking a glass of wine, reading the first of two selected books, two books being what I would typically read during that summer's average day. 

After an hour or so of reading, I decided to take a break from it.  And lying on the outdoor cot, facing west with the sun coming over my shoulder, I had just set the wine glass down with my left hand on a flat stone and reached to set the book down to my right on a low brick structure, when I felt no assault of pain, but only an immediate and unexpected wooziness. 

I was alarmed: something had changed.  My mindset was rapidly shifting, my metabolism seemed bothered, and my time perception was drastically expanding.  I tried to stand up, but collapsed in the act to my knees.  Wtf?  Of course, wtf!!  Then I saw it: an insect-like entity as I had never seen before (or since) docked on my right forearm with its proboscis injected into my skin, sucking? injecting?, who the hell knew.  It was about two inches long and amazingly thin, with banded alternating black and yellow stripes and mosquito-like wings.  And it was seemingly sucking my consciousness away.

"Why? What?"  were practically the only challenges I could mentally self-mount before the trip kicked in.  And I mean painless, psychedelic, visionary floating imagery type-trip. Yet I did have enough remaining sense to pick the creature off me-and it departed to my picking without protest.  In fact, it seemed lifeless as I put it into a nearby empty glass jar which I inverted on a perfectly flat piece of sidewalk sandstone.  Of course, my fading, delirious thoughts at the time were that if this bite were poisonous, perhaps having the bug would assist in treatment. So the bug sat motionless with its wings spread under the jar as I laid back down on the cot watching it until I passed out…or didn't care anymore…I can't remember which.

Dreams and hours later, still on the cot and sunning, I awoke feeling strangely refreshed. After but a moment's disorientation of the "where-am-I what-am-I-doing" sort, my recall of the scenario returned and I thought-sought: the bug!  But when I looked at the inverted glass jar, the bug was gone!  Wait, its body was gone, but the wings remained! Had the jar been moved?-no.  Was the sandstone anywhere uneven so that something could have gotten in to eat it or it could have crawled wingless out?-absolutely not, it was a perfect quarry seal.  And the translucent shimmering wings were still arrayed in the exact life position in which I left the bug, but its body had vanished!

OK…psychedlic bug…body mysteriously gone *poof*…you tell me what it was???

the lulling waken me no more for love leave me rest now unperturbed the tangles of dalliance that would once excite serve but now to disturb. touch me no more with tenderness i’m roughshod now and worn the thrill of your bliss once so endless from my heart now has been torn. soothe me no longer with your soft words my world hard and silent has grown  poetry that sprung as life from your lips are  warm breezes now yester' blown. Yet if I could somehow regain it all with just a wish in time I would hearken to and forever hold that one moment you were mine.

Today could have been a better day.  I just didn't make the most out of it.

And I've suffered three annoying injuries in the last 24 hours.

But tomorrow, tomorrow there'll be changes.  It time some better stuff starts happening.

Those of you who have the entire day to themselves to roam the world unfettered have what I have not: a look at life sans labor—uncluttered.  

 

Someday I shall destroy work.  No, not my workplace: I’m no disgruntled psycho-maniac.  But I shall rather destroy work itself: my work, your work, the whole damn psycho-social notion of ‘work’.  Outrageous?  Of course!  Why would I endeavor to do such if it were anything less? 

 

And how shall I do this, you wonder?  Simple.  I’ll break it.  I’ll work until ‘work’ can contain my exuberance no longer.  Then the container ‘work’ will burst and be bust.  Shit, I’m hard at work working to bankrupt work right now!   What a fucking kick-ass endeavor.  But I’m doing good.  You’d be proud of me.  You’d probably say, if you were standing aside as an unlikely witness to my mania: “Does he have any idea what…?”

 

And my answer would be: No. Yes.

 

“But what will take the place of work?” you may ask.  “How will we live?”

 

My answers:  Wonderment.  Better.  Embracing and nurturing a near workless future as an outlook will become our way of life.  Tourism will not be a mere industry but a spiritual vocation.  Vacations will become obsolete except for those sentimental individuals who want to spend two or three weeks a year laboring in voluntary ‘work camps’.  Maternity will never be a ‘leave’ but always a miraculous coming.  There will be no calling in ‘sick days’ but rather a clear focus without need for an alibi on healing.  Small talk will no longer consist of “What do you do for a living? but rather “How do you live for a doing?”  And there’ll be fun, fun, fun, now that daddy took the T-bird away

 

 

Of course, this vision requires just one minor adjutant precondition: a self-replicating slave army of ever self-improving robots.  Before you object on humanitarian grounds, realize that ‘slave’ and ‘machine’ have been and forever will be virtual synonyms.  So unless you’re the one about to discover a way to invest robots with the eternity of heart and soul, give a big hand and hearty Welcome to Machines.

 

Now, I just ran 7 miles.  And while I’d like to run another 7 miles and write for 4 hours, unfortunately, the sun is soon setting.  And the Dracula-laborer in me is waiting metaphorically under a shadow of a tree to take wing.  There’s more work to be done tonight, the eternal unzombie in me proclaims.  It’s my fling.  But you’d be proud of me: never once has a drop of blood (or sweat or tears) escaped me without a curse by me of my workworld fate—a curse that will cease the day the bloodsuckers relent.

There is nothing worse for mortal men than wandering.
         --The Odyssey

I haven’t fallen asleep, but I have awoken.
And find myself a stranger here.
This land of vertical time
With nothing before and nothing behind.
And nothing to do
But add the zeros
Here jettisoned about
As numerous as the carcasses
Of feathery insects drought-struck
And desiccated by the sun.
And I count them
One by one by one…
And though they’re adding up to nothing,
They’re tallying to infinity.
So I’m encasing each one
In its own special little amber block.
And building a staircase upwards mounting,
A vertical spiral to the stars.

All day it felt like Something Special was about to happen.  Something boisterous, something breaking out, something spectacular in the moment.  The sun is now about 5 degrees above the setting horizon and it hasn’t happened yet.

I just finished running and felt that I could have run a lot more.  But more of something else is needed even more than running.  I’m going to pause, look around and give that Special Something a chance to catch up with me.  To make an acquaintance.  To bask with me in the last 5 degrees of this day’s sunlight. 

*waits*

Okay, it looks like Something Special is a no show.  So typical.  So instead, I guess I’ll just get down and dirty with the commonplace:

The earth shoves me. 
It has no respect for me.
It treats me with indifference.

The clouds above spread amorphously without skywriting. 
They pass over like a death angel and will not stop to even chat.

The sun blazes and is filled with the tease of desiccation. 
But it has not given me the firewings to thereto climb.

The sweet seas lie off in the distance siren-ing silently,
They know that the moisture in me shall some day to their beckoning level descend. 

Yes, the elements are tough-love hustling us. 
Because they see us as some sort of miraculous jiffy mix.

Pixy-stix.

my commonplace

I’ve spent 21 miles running around a dam this week, skipping over graves.  The cost of that opportunity: work undone.  I’m so damned.

 

One of these nights I’m just going to get myself purposely locked in Dreamland (a.k.a. the cemetery) so that I can get some writing done.  Or just watch the stars all night.  I’ll have my cellphone so that I can order pizza through the gate.  And in the very early morning, I’ll climb the highest tree on the highest hill and wait for the sun to rise.

 

Plan for tomorrow:  Paint in the morning, some computer work at noon, more painting in the afternoon, then running in the late afternoon (perhaps) and making it a marathon distance for the week.  Yes, and trying to squeeze in a few blazing minutes of blogging.  Such short precious moments as I have for blogging anymore. 

 

Oh, hey, by the way, I extricated a girl of about 20 years of age from some imminent harm yesterday.  She was running barefoot from some angry dude.  And he was running after her.  Until I got in the way.  Details.  Yes, there are details.  But damn the details.

 

uh-oh.  The sun is about to set—time to scurry helter back to Skelterland.

Tag, you're it.

It’s finally sunny, hot, hazy AND dry here in the Midwest, and so now feels truly like the summer of summers that has strung like a string through a line of pierced beads unfathomably far back into the travails of my once eternal youth.

 

Ah, the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.  Except that I just ran 7 miles, feel like a freelance anti-terrorist operative, and am pondering what I could do to make this day more memorable than any I’ve ever so far lived.

 

Perhaps I could just sit motionless on a hill and wait for the world to cough up some excitement.  Very Taoist.  Quite possibly Zen.   Except the waiting.   Just can’t wait for nothing, for nothing comes and is called the ‘now’ .

 

Perhaps I could just sit in the cemetery and blog all night.  Would it be calm?  Or the ultimate fright?  Or perhaps that one mosquito with a load of West Nile that can kill me would bite  and days hence I’d be laid where, just a naughty night formerly, I blogged and played.

 

Could get drunk!  Have I ever done that?  No, I’ve never done that.  At least, not alone, just for the sake of drink.  But I’m dissuaded of the notion by the realization that in the Amazon there are certainly yet undiscovered herbs that can make you high, and regally hallucinate, while yet endowing you with the ability to, more than ever, clearly think.  So I ponder that.

 

I wonder: if I disappeared into the Amazon Basin upon just such a search, where and when and in what condition would I reemerge?  Would I reemerge?  ( As if I’ve ever ‘emerged’ in the first place.)  

 

Somewhere, ‘out there’ , there’s a heart playful and knowing and loving and totally ‘dreamable about’ that could redirect these boylike musings of mine into a ‘merge’ of the most incredible kind.  And even a ‘remerge’ in which I might ‘emerge’ and ‘reemerge’ in the most incredible display of the beginning of no conceivable passionate end.  But is ‘out there’ now?  Or buried in a million years of dreams long past?  Or situated a kalpa just below the sunrise  and nearly beyond the almost never of tomorrow?

To be free.

To say, to comment whatever.

It doesn't have to be apropos

    -relevantly so-

or a well-struck blow.

Just free as the air you inhale

(without fail, damn you, if the economist

in you costs the air pollution).

You know, I can't stand to brand the thought. (I mean, I think I am caught by the uselessness of inappropriate expirations.)

So onward now to wordless exhaltations.

*breathe in*

*bereave out*

*breathe in*

*grieve grout*

But when the time arrives that 'I've never before had so much fun', breathe in as deep as deep can be, linger with the breath and absorb its moisture as an expression of newly-found prosperity, then shout :

Value self-awareness and self-knowledge, even unto itself.  There's so much more to this world than you'll ever be externally taught, or than 'the others' will willfully permit you to immediately behold.

My dreams are of a world afar...

     ...grant me visions, Golden Star.

Repeat: This blog is not I (though sometimes about me)
           This blog is a reflection,
           A narcissistic upwelling
           And not my identity.

           If I am the microcosm
           And the cosmos the macrocosm,
           This blog can serve to span the chasm
           Of all that constitutes my self
           Or selflessness
           Enswirled by the reality (and un-)
           Of the infinitely intervening phantasms.

 times 10.  Then take two pills (one to make you big, the other small), and call me something else in the morning.

By the way, Narcissus as a mythic character is very much misunderstood.  Today we refer to ‘narcissism’ to describe a psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation and lack of empathy.  Basically, someone 'full' of his or herself.  And, indeed, the ‘common account’ of the myth of Narcissus describes a youth so preoccupied with the beauty of his own reflection in a pool that his worshipful female admirer (would-be girlfriend) Echo, fades, in her unremitted love, to the precipe of nothingness.  (She was, however, mercifully immortalized by the gods to live on forever in the mountains as—an echo—what else?!)  And in punishment for his own self-infatuation, Narcissus eventually falls into the pool and drowns.

But the true myth of Narcissus depicts a youth who falls in love with the face he encounters while peering into a pool—an image that he is not aware is either an image or himself.  In other words, he believes he is looking out into a strange magical world and seeing and loving ‘another’, though we, as omniscient observers, are aware that it is only his own reflection.   When, however, he realizes that the person of his fascination and fixation all along was himself, in horror he submits to the water’s seduction and slips away from life as the only honorable course available.  He was a lover, a true lover, though totally deluded, who found subsequent new enlightenment in a liquidy submersion.  And like many in myths who find demise going underground or underwater or into the underworld, he re-emerges reborn as fresh as a—flower!  Such is the power if pursuing one’s true fate.

So my advice, if you find that blogging is becoming larger than life, is: find (or write) a mantra like mine above and spin it on your prayer wheel 10 x 10 x 10 googolplex times.  Or go take a leap into your psychic pool…and to the asphyxia submit.

America has finally found the infamous and elusive WMD - the Weapon of Mass Destruction.  It's the Mass of 50 million Americans who simultaneously turned on their air-conditioning Thursday afternoon and precipated the Destruction of the Northeast power grid.  As Pogo once said,

And you know what?  I think a whole heap of Northeasterly Americans found OUT last night.  No, they didn't find 'something' out--they literally found 'OUT'.  They found it was lighter still OUT on a moonlit porch than in a darkened house.  They found and met neighbors they were barely aware of discovering the OUT of doors anew--playing ball in the yard instead of watching TV, taking a walk around the block instead of playing video games.  They found the starlit sky OUT in the backyard brighter than one they've ever seen (and may ever again see) even deep within dense areas of urban buildup.

And it's a shame that as the lights started coming back on across the Northeast today, these same peeps were losing OUT once again on that more direct connection with Nature and Neighbors they had a mere glimpse of last night. 

...Just one brief shining moment that was known as The Black-OUT.

I’m sitting on a hill

contemplating the thrills

that define a life I’d love to live.

 

Chasing timid tornadoes, catching a buzz

at an unhurried hurricane bash,
hopping trains, living in the spirit

of so many of the songs sung by Johnny Cash..

 

I’d eat sausage and eggs, sunny-side up, every morning

at a different diner—as long as there was a sociable waitress for chat.

Then I’d haul on my Harley hog out into the country

Just to be free, get lost, and not give a damn

as to where I’m going or where I’m at.

 

If I saw a good climbing tree, I’d stop and climb it. 

And if I saw a good looking girl, I’d think of climbing her, too.

I’d sing: ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your hair…

The world is ours, it’s our affair.’

 

Rapuda? Rapuda-buda?

No!  I would never repudiate the Buddha.

Foil, or epee, or saber the thought.

(Though I would stab him if I saw him walking down the street.)

 

I’d be Bojangles upon the sunset

and a Werewolf from London upon the moonrise.

And I’d let the stars stare down on me

as I’d hop, and kick and, to no soul in particular,

life’s meteor-frenzied fury rhapsodize.

 

I’d transform into a raconteur of grandiose minutia

If ever you asked me the time of day.

And I’d sing the ‘Knoll of the Mummies’

(a long lost song) the moment

a foxy chick looked at me ‘that way’.

 

I’d imprison anyone who hasn’t watched

the sun either rise or unrise

in a calendar year.

(their sentence would be to rot in a cell

until for Beauty’s sake, they’d cry a single tear).

 

I’d scream ‘Bloody Murder’ everytime

I wanted a Bloody Mary.

And I’d scream ‘Typhoid Mary’ anytime

the biliousness or organizational immensities

served me up a plate of crap.

 

And then I’d yap, no, I’d whisper ‘I love you.’

As, indeed, I wishfully should.

And tender your passion

if  thus blessed, I could.

 

And I’d wake up wondering

the world who you are now becoming

As you raced away beeping twice

In your cryptically vanishing car.

 

Still, it's strange awash thus in this waterfallfoam of life
with an undying dream of someday meeting you. 
Crossing pinkies.  Pressing lips. 

Still sitting on the same cemetery hill
watching the sunset where
it seems I've known and loved you forever. 
Still wishing you the best.

I went to the cemetery with the intention to run, but arrived exhausted and inclined instead, on this dog-summer day, to slide up to an old obelisk and just slouch, like someone life-beaten, in the drunken, mystical sun.  Yet a voice screamed to me: “A warrior’s training is never done.   Don’t damn the torpedos—flow with them, become one.  Then commit the shooter to kingdom-come".

 

So run I did, indeed.  During the first lap, my brain rattled painfully about in my head, recording every footstep I ventured with a pronounced throb.  During the second lap, I found my breath.  It was sweet, pure, and painless—just like the girl of my dreams that I hope someday to meet.  The third and final lap consisted of tapping into a pool of seemingly cool, unbounded energy. Each step was free, every movement rejoicingly hydraulic, and my demeanor beamed entirely undeadly and with a heart that was childrening.

 

Aha!  I just found my ‘Aha!”, I said, I say.

 

And now I twirl with a tint of sunset and…quietly slip away.

I've been living hard lately, but it's making me tougher.  And now I'm prepared to kick the ass of the next oak tree I see.

Actually, I'm going to try to take a break from the work grind later today and run and do some writing in the early evening.  Literary-wise, even I no longer know what to expect of me.  And that surprise may be the only fun I'll have until the moon waxes full and draws me out to howl like a beast possessed.

I am being severely overworked.   So much so that I am managing to eek out only about a half hour everyday for Xanga composing and commenting. 

*oh, the mental cruelty*

This hectic state of working 80-100 hours a week, however, should probably only last until the end of September.  Then I will revert to my typical 55 hour work week. 

*can't wait*

My only hope in the short-term of increasing my online hours is to decrease my sleeptime--which I shall try.  Just a few years ago, I only needed 4 hours of sleep a night, instead of my current 6 or 7.  If I can find a way to revive my lesser sleep dependency, I should be able to keep the essential blog and its attendant festivities going.

~Here's to sleepless nights~

                    !!!

...from a foggy, forgotten 'yesterday':

“Some things are unxangable.”

…I can’t believe what I just said.
Like saying a tired child
Should never be put to bed,
Like saying that falling raindrops
Should never touch a flower,
Relinquishing to the Unspeakable
So much hidden power!

But some things are unxangable
And never to be xanged.
Just don’t ask what the hell  they are:
I’ll only twang *shebang!*

Chorus: ( she bangs!
              she bangs!
              he only twangs, she bangs!)

Oh yeah, some things are xangaphobic
And rue the day you try
To stick them in a friggin’ blog,
‘Cause that’s the day you die!

Chorus: ( she bangs!
              she bangs!
              he only twangs, she bangs!)

So when the fateful day arrives
And I no longer blog,
Be assured the most Unspeakable’s
Got me hostage in her fog.

Chorus: ( she bangs!
              she bangs!
              he only twangs, she bangs!)

In the center of Lake View Cemetery, one will encounter an unusual sight: Lake View Dam. 

  

 

At five hundred feet across and 60 feet above grade and 30 feet below grade, and with the ability to hold back 80 million gallons of water, the dam was the largest concrete filled dam east of the Rocky Mountains when it was built back in ’78.

 

The dam actually sits down in a valley —*down there*—

                                                                own the

                                                                  wn th

                                                                    n t

                                                                     *

 

                        and thus is so unobtrusive that many passersby don’t ever take notice.

 

So, such a mighty dam must be holding back a mighty river, no?  No!  In fact, the dam regulates a largely gentle brook, Dugway Brook, that only becomes a little more feisty after a heavy downpour.

  

So, why then, was the Herculean constraint of this regulating barrier ever erected?  I think it must have been as a reaction to the threat of a 100-year or even 500-year flood, something that no living being is likely to ever see.   Instead, what one is more likely to encounter is a gurgling waterfall up-dam…

 

 

 

…and a placid lagoon or two down-dam.

 

 

The route I circle (1.4 miles, time and time again) takes me down one side of the dam, across the lagoons, and up the dam’s other side and around by the waterfall, then back.  So, in a real sense, all of this time, I haven’t been ‘running around in the cemetery’ at all, but reconnoitering the waterworks and running around the dam. But, shhh!  That’s my secret.  I’d rather mostly be known as a ‘dust-kicking grave-stomper’ since that reputation seems to give me a critical edge while out  prowling around  booting ass on the weekends.