Miraculous turn-of-events w Delta Flight 2238/DC-PDX

Take my seat prior to take-off and the lady next to me asks me if i drink. I nod, liking her already. She has a scratchy voice and probably a fun-loving way. "Do you mind trading seats with my friend? I'll buy you a drink." My desires think whisky, but my socially respectable side deems an Alaskan amber more than good. Within the hour the drinks cart comes up and the steward who looks like Harold Ramis, hands me my trophy. When you live an unspoiled life, a life in many ways like Australia (now why do I say that, can that even be defended?) the small pleasures are treasured like huge victories that I don't even mind how uneven the temperature is or worry about my sweater getting dirty on the floor. It's a new plane with carpet so nice.

The Brion Gysin of Annie Dullard

Two houses ago, in the skin of every corner, I closed up and quit the stars of old for endless exhilaration. Long before I heard the pulse, I saw it half-looking, dark and renewable with a senseless riffle and reflection. It has always been a night-cold fact to me that the book runs on all week, usurps every minute, whether I drop it, close it, vanish it or blink, as an Osage orange on a shelf continues to make out to itself its own splash-happy whisper.

So many shadows have been horrifying me on these waters, so much thought has been down by me here where the things come pouring, that I can hardly parody the grace never shown, that the water from under the flowing water is impartial, free, sinister and unseen. But that wish, Tinker Creek had parodied, damned and dumb warmth had vanished its tale. The creek-light reflected in my things. I stood on the renewable grass. The wish was tightened; the smack loomed over the sources. By bundled will I could flag the weeks of dead at the banks; the flags pulsed over the frozen riffles of my outpouring, and I dropped in the corner. That night the life of the mountain’s warm mouth on the creek — from high on the frozen fact of Foam Mountain, runs away — exhausted me. Where was the chilled-thought grass? This moonless thing illumined over water splashed of gray fact, dumb and dead.  It was free and frozen; I blocked the thing because it was thought.

Dandy of the day

“Many were the times that Des Esseintes had pondered over the fascinating problem of writing a novel concentrated in a few sentences and yet comprising the cohabited juice of the hundreds of pages always taken up in describing the setting, drawing the characters and piling up useful observations and incidental details. The words chosen for a work of this sort would be so unalterable that they would take the place of all the others; every adjective would be sited with such ingenuity and finality that it could never be legally evicted, and would open up such wide vistas that the reader could muse on the meaning, at once precise and multiple, for weeks on end, and also ascertain the present, reconstruct the past and divine the future of the characters in the light of this one epithet. The novel, thus conceived, thus condensed in a page or two, would become an intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration between a dozen persons of superior intelligence scattered across the world, an aesthetic treat available to none but the most discerning.”

Streets of Nashville

From "Out of Sheer Rage"

graffiti by the inestimable Jim Owens

Writers always envy artists, would trade places with them in a moment if they could. The painter's life seems less ascetic, less monkish, less hunched. Instead of the austere mess of the desk there is the chaos of the studio: dirty coffee cups, paint-smudged cassette decks, drawings of the artist's girlfriend, naked, on the walls. - Geoff Dyer

Upon listening to TAGO MAGO for the 1st time

Before

After

A veritable tour-de-force of tartare sauce

I set out on the morning of the 14^th of September. The air is cool and fog hangs wispily around the treetops. 

A very good morning of a very good month, I say, for I am alive and in good health. My destination is Central State Hospital, formerly the Georgia Lunatic Asylum. I intend to observe architecture festooned in ruin, while frolicking in the pecan grove with the squirrels. My push bike, a hybrid fit for an old geezer, nearly plops into a ditch as I am cut off by a white sedan who fails to indicate they are turning and there almost goes my very good morning.

I am standing in front of the circular driveway now and the dried-up fountain between the white hospital and the pecan grove, the center of a vast quadrant of brick edifice all gone to seed.  Water-damage is visible on the façade, as are rusted screens, broken windows.

I see no faces inside the security cars that patrol. At one time, the Asylum housed 12,000 patients. Two examples:

•       22 year-old white female mentally ill for eight years; indecent and immodest, ulcerated legs and other somewhat minor complaints.
•       23 year-old female lunatic and epileptic convulsions followed disappointments in love; violent, hostile, auditory visual hallucinations. 

I wonder if an ex-lover friend would have been eligible, who in the throes of an indefatigable psychosis accused me of a death-defying frippery beyond compare.

I brandish a banana from my manbag, my purse, my murse, if you will. It is bright-cold. Wincing from its brightness, I gaze up at the sky. The sky is all white with enumerable shades of gray — at least fifty. What comes to mind is the tartare sauce that W.G. Sebald uses in The Rings of Saturn, a compelling depiction of un-great condiments, a veritable tour de force. “The tartare sauce that I had to squeeze out of a plastic sachet was turned grey by the sooty breadcrumbs”. My banana is cold as ice. Suddenly, my brain starts to turn over handsomely. It is possible, I reason, that if I were to set the banana on the yellow painted curb that I would not be able to find it. Eager to get this pertinent, yet uncaffeinated thought down on paper, I locate a pergola next to the decrepit fountain. Admiring a magnolia tree just off to the right, I haven’t gone ten feet when I run right into an enormous cobweb. A squirrel cackles at my blunderings.

Reality check

In class we were asked to represent our work in art at present with where we'd like to be. I thought I was Garfield with an aim to be Hockney.

Trying to cope with feeling dismal.

I have a host of muddling posts that I wrote this summer that I hope to share. 

Why did I just drink a big thing of gin  Near-fatal last words. I was in bed by ten, full of despair. Summer muddle. The things that used to work for me, or get me through, no longer work. Mostly what I am saying is my wonderful ability to laze about and contemplate the beauty of the world that has lately just imposed numerous grim realities upon me, which suggests that I need to modify my philosophy.

No explanation as to why I feel so goddamned great today. I’m writing with clarity and more purpose than I have in a week. Keep it up.

I am absolutely loving my life as a man

It's a book!

Plum-pud

Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of
an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that I once stole behind the foremast to try to eat it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.

— Herman Melville

Secret Secret

Dad's great, called him up sitting on the porch with news, while the cat ate the grass that makes her throw up. She probably knows this and does it anyway, just like there are things that we do that we know we shouldn't, but we do them anyway. Anyway, Dad said he saw little Mike for the second time in a week at another golf course and I said dad little Mike already texted me about seeing you and I told him to stop stalking you. Meanwhile the cat was producing otherworldly squalls. Ultimately she puked next to the rhododendron bushes.

— Guess what dad? A hummingbird flew up to the hanging plant and then buzzed around to a pot plant that was resting on the rail for some nectar. Then after that...do you know that shirt I have with the dragons on it?
— I think so, he said.
— The hummingbird flew into it and tried to extract nectar from the yellow tails of the blue dragons.
— I'll be damned.
— I could feel their wings buzzing against my tumescent bicep. I was worried that their beak would stab me.
— On no they wouldn't harm you. I feel their wings on my face when I'm out near the feeder.

I later sang Fred Neil to Tim with some weeds

I told dad about my secret mission. I was going to Centralia, the Milledgeville of Washington state in that it was central. Mcmenamins refurbished a prohibition-era hotel there and I was going there on a secret mission that was secret insofar as I hadn't told anyone barring a few here and there (one contact in Australia). Mcmenamins are great with their lamps (see above). He said he wouldn't tell anyone. I said you'll tell your wife! And he said no I won't. I said you mustn't. He said she's taken Shari's twins to get physicals.

— Do you remember when I got my physical, dad?
— What?
— The doctor who wanted to check the curvature of my spine?
— What about him?
— He made me undress and walk back and forth for him in a straight line. He gave me a proctology exam and his wife had their living room in Better Homes and Gardens.
— Oh geeze.

my enhancing view 

Ba-di-da

Abby took two giant shits on the carpet when Prairie Wind arrived. I'm surprised they weren't accompanied by a disruptive yelp given the unfeasible magnitude of them. Whether this has to do with Abby having a crush on me I don't know, but Praire Wind seemed unfazed by it and showed me a photo of this cat who had laid on her shoe a long time yesterday, which got her thinking that maybe her feet exposed an unphysical feline threat into the air and Abby consequently decided to evacuate her bowels in our footpath to say hey don't. Whatever you are doing just stop. GET.OUT.

 I didn't expect Prairie Wind to leave so soon, but i said a lot of things I instantly regretted like associating drinking with biting my nails. She asked to see my nails and they really are the worst and if the state of them could be associated with drinkers it's some ugly stuff like Charles Bukowski who is terribly unattractive but very brilliant in the mind, something my hands are unable to fall back on.

Made a cheese plate that was met with a shrug. Dried fruit was on special at Safeway and in retrospect I know why. The pineapple chunks were okay, but the other container I picked up I thought was ginger slices, it was cantaloupe and a cantaloupe so sugary I nearly had an anxiety episode inside Little Axe records today looking for a present for matt Neff whose fortieth it is tomorrow. Why I chose to eat more of them after last night I do not know.

Guess the reason I am so effusive is I picked up Fred neil's first album for $7. I asked the proprietor of Little Axe how come so cheap and he said oops, deal of the century. I'm listening to it now and some albums are so strikingly poignant on an overcast summer's Friday when you don't work again until Sunday and you still feel lonely except you have Fred Neil's song and Abby's talking about you, but you can't hear a word she's saying...BA-DI-DA I texted Prairie Wind this morning. She's in town all weekend and I made a joke about how I should have made a to-go box of cantaloupe slices for her. She has yet to text me back and it's now hours later. Ba-di-da

Dark Side in the Art of No 2014

I was sitting in Tim's front room reading Bartleby and Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas, who had this to say about Herman Melville:

He was never one to go to Church, but we know that during his years as a recluse he would approach his window and watch those making their way to church, and his look is said to have contained the brief history of the Dark Side in the Art of the No

At the same time I was reading, Tim made a follow-up phone call to a concerned client of the appliance service company he works for. So while Tim said: "Hi MIndy... "I was also reading about Melville doing that. No relation apart from those two things happening at that given moment in 2014. Below is what Tim said to Mindy in full.

I got your message about your squeaker. The thing about squeaking dryers is this: they aren't terribly dangerous, but they can be...(repeating what she said) obnoxious, that's right. If you can get the serial number off the back of the door, I can drop by with some parts...,"