Malediction

You wise men and your hideous, oppressive unities, your eternal progressions, regressions, fractals, and universal laws, pure and empty as a fresh condom.  When I see your gnostic, patient smile, glassy, thousand-year fisheye stare, I shudder.  I throw myself behind Satan and say, "better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven!"  Swallow your enlightenment like the tongue of a paralytic -- you have settled, mummified in your high seat without even the quickening of maggots or the thrilling odor of bacteria.  If you, preacher of the ONE, the GOOD, all-seer, all-knower, benevolent puffy-lidded lord, are the gatekeeper, keep your nation -- of order, of fascistic columns, serendipitous coincidences, providential meetings, holy numbers, asymptotic lines.  May they rot you through and through like ingested fiberglass, like rigid diatoms do flies.

Oh sweet, wild life, keep me from wisdom.  Gift me with confusion and disaster.  Crush my kingdom.  Undo me.  May I never believe.  May I never ascend to enlightenment.  Give me no powers of persuasion.  Give me sex, accidents, paroxysms of terror, early morning light, swarms of insects, unruly fruits, flowers, thorns, poisons.  Impale me with unlooked-for ecstasies.  I adore you, life.  I scream in adoration, hatred, joy.  Take no prisoners here.

New Tat

Did this drawing last night, in one marathon sitting. I'm pretty slow (and deer legs are wicked hard to get right -- they still look pretty stiff to me). It was midnight when I finished. I'd been reading Russian Fairy Tales illustrated by the remarkable Ivan Bilibin all day, and re-reading The Master and Margarita, so maybe that's why it's so... um.... whimsical? macabre?  Whimsico-macabre. I promised my girlfriend that I'd design a tattoo for her, to finish her sleeve which already has a Japanese folk tale wound up in it. So I figured this would fit in. It will be mostly green with some red for the blood and fungi, and the deer will be fawn-colored.  If she accepts it, that is.  If not, I don't blame her.  It's weird-lookin.

Thanks for that, BP.

It's like reruns of your favorite sitcom. Day or night, if you start feeling a little dead, a little disconnected, like you need a bigger narrative to connect with, want to cry a bit maybe, or maybe all that talk of the "junk shot" in the news has got you hot and bothered in that trashy midafternoon cable-porn kinda way, just take a gander at those black billows and feel your puny sorrows and vagrant loin-heat leach out into big Mama Gulf:

Live feed of the oil spill.

Thanks, BP, for attempting to fill a hole in our collective gut with tires, string, human hair, tennis balls, and whatever other cheap shit you can lay hands on. Because sometimes we just feel so empty inside.

Heart of Darkness, or Yes, I Took a Lot of Theory.

IMPORT REPORT SUPPORT TRANSPORT
COMPORT DEPORT EXPORT
APPORTION DISPROPORTION
PORTFOLIO
PORTAL
IMPORTANT IMPORTANT
IMPORTANT OPPORTUNITY

[In training today I noticed a remarkable number of words contain "port." My cynical and corroded heart told me the following, in a pretentious monotone, to be sure.]

Corporate language and the PORT.
Hot blue receiving bays of sweet virgin lands locked across waters (accidental and irreversible like swollen waters before parturition) to scummy chilly harbors where burdened northern rivers expire with stretched mouths, entered and left by teeming thousands. PORT- -PORT- -PORT is: an inner, suprahistorical preoccupation with commerce's first rapine birth in sorrow and riches (EXEUNT: riches) by ports, ports, ports opened everywhere on every continent. Forced open with guns. Eased open with gifts. Latin gate, entrance, harbor; Latin to bear, carry, bring. We always give back. Open the port. Wider. Put a burger in it. A bigger burger. Thank you for your participation. This is a very important opportunity.

[I'm no hater. I can't wait for this paycheck. I warned you. My heart is bitter and corroded and makes the worst of a really good situation.]

Day One in Brah-son City

And I've already trashed my hotel room like a rock star. Not only that, but I am simultaneously typing this, reading the New York Times, and watching music videos on a giant flat screen TV about three feet from my face (why did they hang the TV above the desk? I have the resistance of a homeschooled freshman at a  college party.)

This new job is a big deal, I guess. Five days of training and piles of manuals and four course lunches and big hotel rooms and two-hour powerpoints on business ethics and black-and-white suits... all paid. I made a hundred bucks today sitting on my ass. Actually I only sat on my ass half the day because around 3 I became violently ill and had to be taken upstairs to lie down on a king size resort bed overlooking the spring forests, after a hot bath. I wasn't faking, jerk.

The most interesting part has been watching the subtle power plays between the local mountain folk, some of them Cherokee (though none look it, to be honest, probably due to Cherokee's famously liberal enrollment policies), and the training staff flown in from Chicago. Sweet-faced office-muffin lady gestures Vanna-like to the bullet point which reads, "PETS," and says, "Now most pets are perfectly friendly, but we just ask, for the purposes of this study [involving in-home interviews, FYI] that you request the owner of the pet to please put him or her in another room for the duration of the interview." A lot of my fellow trainees have worked on various reservations before, and a chuckle goes round the room. I'm thinking about the feral dog herds of my hometown whose sole human connection is with a bullet, and the chained furies of the Navajo res in their circles of barren earth through which one passes like a ball on a mini-golf course, with fear and trembling. One lady says, "Ma'am, hev you ay-ver been on a resurvay-tion?" (Excuse the weak attempt at dialect; you really just had to hear this woman.) "Well, um, no," says the HR muffin nervously, amidst more laughter. "Guess you got nothin to say about dogs then!" hollers one of the men. And then the lady (veteran park ranger) politely prepped us all on what to do WHEN we run into bears, and another man followed up with a tutorial on bull elk. The trainers were crestfallen.

This kind of thing went on all day. When the trainers suggested professional clothing, they were laughed out. When they suggested certain ways of speaking, someone said, "No ma'am. You jest best have a sense of humor is all." The slow-talking, in-the-know locals versus the big city professionals.

Tomorrow we do role-playing. I'm nervous in the way one used to get before those prepared speeches in high school, not for any particular reason, just trembly and fuzzy-brained.

Dear Denver,

Push out blossoms from your filthy frosty fingers.
Roll a big rowdy sun up from the plains.
Leave off stacking snow for a minute.
Come out, my mountain city loves,
come out! It's almost spring,
and I
am coming
back.

Account of the Murder of Isaac Kountz, 1876, Kimble Co., Texas

The hooves of the comanche horses strike even to the roots of the grass, crunching the water hidden there. At the western edge of the yellow fields of the air, the sun pauses in its rush for night. Isaac and Sebastian watch the men come up the ridge. Their sheep drift. They tuck their dingy tails between their legs and skulk into the junipers. No one will come for them.

Isaac and Sebastian climb a stone to see. Isaac's eyes, blue as the prussian army, flash their signals down below. The wind which has blown across the plains all the way from the ice nation dies and the brothers lose their balance in the stillness. The riders have read the signal. Sadly, Sebastian puts his new hat on. They jump down and Isaac looks back in time to see the last of the sheep vanish.

"Sheep are gone," murmurs Isaac.

The comanches are beautiful. Their arms and necks are like stones that lie under the river and their hair shines blue with oil. Their smell rises up as sweet as the skin of horses with the freshness of living organs and the bite of juniper berries. They advance in a constellation, knotted to the sun and the going of the sun, sweeping over the ridge and over the fixed elements of life.

The riders stop in front of them. Down below in the arms of the river Isaac and Sebastian see the house, resourceful and brittle like the castings of caddis fly larvae; but the shape, almost square, suggests a wound on the world, a forecast of something inevitable and painful. They are filled with sadness because they do not think they will walk through that door again. Nostalgia for this ridge, the last ridge, and this last evening of eleven years, overcomes the child Sebastian. The tears run down his face and he does not hang his head to hide them from his brother; the dry air licks them up. Fletched grass quivers in the last light, and the stones soften and turn sweet like the german marzipan Isaac only just remembers, but his eyes look to that single cloud hung like a mask over the mountain across the valley, and he wrinkles his forehead, trying to remember a name of it he never heard. Tomorrow is Christmas.

The first man aligns the rifle with his black fringed eye on one end and Isaac's grass-gold head on the other and joins them with a blast. Sebastian sighs. He kneels slowly, hands, right knee, left knee, to the magnetic earth. A shadow falls across his face. The comanche reaches down from his saddle and takes the hat from his head, and the riders follow the ancient day west, throwing their shadows back.

[Note: This was the last recorded Comanche conflict in Kimble County, Texas.]