Hierophany

A man speaking his second
language said, "Gate B? Gate C?
There is another checkpoint,
with no waiting, presently."
We shuffled 'cross the term'nal,
winners to anoint.
Whoa, where did this come from?
A spiffy little joint.
But I held back on trust,
feared a finger at me point.
The line—it's just not moving,
riders with too much shit.
"Go ahead," says the guy afore me,
"my shoes are a tight, tight fit."
"It's alright," I say as I squeeze by
I tend to wear sneakers
every time I fly.

I hand my flimsy boarding pass
to a woman snapping gum.
The man at the detector
waves at me, says, "OK, come."

No beeps, no wands, no patdowns
(I keep things pretty clean)
but the x-ray argues otherwise:
there's something on the screen.

The fed gal grabs my bag,
asks me if it's mine.
She says, "Can I look through it?"
And I say, "Take your time."

She angles through its contents,
touching this and that,
how many diff'rent pockets,
little holes for dirty rats.

She finds the cut-rate canvas,
she finds the British pound.
Forget the hydrocodone,
forget the brownie crumbs,
this man has got a lighter,
and he's gonna come with us.

This entry posted by J Rand : 18:39

Having a memory of something, before it’s a memory. Not predilection, but being able to know what it is you will remember and recognizing something about your present condition, as if it were a memory. You have the sense that it will become a memory, one day, but it hasn’t become a memory yet, because the moment is not gone from you. It is the altering of short-term memory events, and remembering them as if they were emanating instead from the recesses of your long-term memory. And what I’m wondering is whether people high in this characteristic are less likely to kill themselves because what I am talking about is really a neo-sentimentality.

Honestly, this phenomenon I am outlining is a big part of the reason why I do not think more seriously about suicide. I imagine for a moment that the thigns swirling around me are suddenly distant memories. This leads to an extremely unpleasant inner reaction and, if I think about it enough, it will make me cry. I would guess that people more disinclined to think like that would have an easier time pulling the plug.

I’ve been able to have pre-memories relatively easy of late. I think this is because I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve accumulated enough memories such that I have an adequate impression of what I am likely to take from the present and commit to memory.

I find that I invariably miss the places in which I’ve lived. I miss living at home (though, don’t get me wrong, I have not wish to live at home right now). I miss living in the dorms at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, my high school in Aurora, IL. I miss living in the dorms at Wash U. I yearn for those days. I miss my first two apartments real bad. Those were the good old days. No! Those weren’t all good days. I remember crappy days—but only if I remember harder.

These days to me now seem somewhat shitty. But there’ve been good times. There’ve been great times. And I’m sure it’s those that I’ll remember before anything else. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone? Why not know it? I’m trying to. Trying to imagine it as though it were a long-time, ancient memory. What’s it like? What’s was it like being me right now?

I have thought about what my memories will be of my current apartment: the awful, fetid smell of the hallways; Leanne’s bad eye; the holes in the shoes she wears; my terseness with them all; Fred as Catman; Fred leaving small styrofoam plates of tunafish and catfood outside the back door for the (stray) cats to get to; the flies that swarm that catfood during hot summer days when they can probably smell it from a mile away; how I close my mouth when I bound up the stairs ‘cause I’m afraid that I’ll get flies in my mouth; but then I smell the tuna fish and god I just decide to not even breathe.

This entry posted by J Rand : 11:04

John said, “I’ll get stoned and write. What better?” Jack said, “Get stoned and paint.” He then leaned over to take a rip from the GB. He was, once again, a full-timer.

What did it mean?

It meant he didn’t want to talk on the phone. Nothing new there, though. It meant his mouth felt worse, and that hard exercise was more a chore. It meant memory…slowness, not like the black gaps of alcohol, but maybe sticky synapses, caught up in the resin of it, partaking in a way themselves.

He got tired just as early but couldn’t go to sleep as soon. So more BBC World Service, more SomaFM.

It decimated his job prospects. And have them he did. Yes. Triple figures in Chicago. Corporate law. Something he knew nothing about. Yet, his grades screamed, “I can do what I’m told!” Of course, the decision wasn't that simple. He also loved his wife. So the question was: Happy Hour at the firm (free booze, right?) or a crowded Metro home? The answer was: neither.

So fuckit, he won’t work. Not in any economic sense. He’ll make art, he’ll “paint like it’s going out of style.” Reassured only in knowing that if he did die a premature death, by his hand or by someone else’s (the man in the black Blazer?), that those goddam cheap impatientist paintings would still be around. All over the country. Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, Minnesota, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and St. Louis. They’ll have those to look at, to puzzle after. It was his insurance. What is health insurance if you end up dying anyway? A bad investment.

And so, to justify his love for art — everything justified, his overarching sense of guilt, useful but cumbersome…. Where the hell was I? “I am smoking my brains out,” he thought. “They don’t know nothin,” he thought. “Saps, all of them, bees in cubicles, producing money not honey. But, yet, I would be worthless without them.”

There’s a Catch-22, and not an imperfect replica but highly analagous to Heller’s original. Heller’s Catch-22 was that airmen based in Europe during the Second World War would be allowed to return home if they were crazy. However, (1) by asking to go home you evinced that you were not crazy, but perfectly rational; and, (2) if really you were crazy, you wouldn't ask to go home. Therefore, there wasn’t anyway to get home. The Catch today is: if you want to enjoy your life, you have to have money to support yourself financially. But, (1) if you have a job to make money you can’t really enjoy your life because you spend all your time working; and, (2) those people who have a lot of money without working miss the satisfaction of supporting themselves and as a result have a hard time being truly happy. So, you’re stuck in Malta with Yossarian.

Asymmetrical love. Is it possible? Could he love those who provided for him, but yet love his art as well (the art made possible only by the sweat of the brows of people he loved)? In the war between them and his art, all will suffer. It was like drinking to let your mind loose but having the alcohol simultanesously numb you out.

When the phone rang would he answer it, or would he let it go to voice mail? When the dishes were dirty would he do them, or would he put them in the dishwasher? When the herb was out would he be able to grow more, or would he ask for it to come across the border?

He contemplated questions of sustainability. How long can I keep this up? How long before Greenland’s glaciers pass over me in the great, salt-cold wave? How long before I am forced across the perimeter of what my uncles call “The Real World”? What will I be when I grow up, if I grow up at all?

Well, he had two fucking words for the real world. The first was fuck and the second was you. Did he not have an alimentary canal that made funny noises when he did not eat? If he had a fifth sense of taste would it not be called umami?

He lit a cigarette. It was definitely time for her to call. What the purpose of the call? Various but sometimes slim. Tonight just something to do, to get done, to have in the back of the mind. Something to debate the dream he had last night, the one where he was driving down to the tip of Florida, for Spring Break, with two of his five favorite people, his brother Nick and his comrade Rafe. But then an APB went out. Something about drugs. Damn big brother. Amber-type alerts, his license plate showing up in lights along the highway. TX 2DR V84.

They duck off the highway, book a room at a hotel full of sand. John racks his brain. What was it, what did I do? What could they possibly want me for? He rifled through his bags—nothing. They were in fact dry that weekend, much to John and Rafe’s dismay (no one knew how Nick felt on the subject). They were happily resigned to getting really drunk on the beach, and smoking clove cigarettes.

But damn! This was the real fuckin thing. He could not wake himself up. It had to be a dream, had to. (In real life, it was 6 am and he was waking up half way only, rolling himself halfway over, only to succumb to the same awful dream, and it was only getting worse.) They left the hotel. Nick was gone by this point. Maybe out to hang a shingle, or maybe they just left him behind for one reason or another.

John and Rafe make it to a gas station, where lo and behold Lenore and her parents are the owners and operators. Way down along the gulf coast of Florida. Only John makes it inside the gas station. Outside is total chaos, reigning and raining. There is a massive riot in the street. Cops are everywhere, maybe the Guard, too. All persons have guns. Crazy men dangle from traffic lights, try to bring them down like goalposts.

Holy shit, Florida is in a state of marshal law. The prisoners have all been let out, the men on death row alive at least until the next big hurricane. Rafe has a pistol. His hair is long and erraticly tangled with the ocean air. He has a bandana wrapped around his forehead.

He has this look in his eye. He is getting shot at and he doesn’t shirk. He looked in the gas station, and met eyes with John, who stood safe behind thick glass, safe from the bullets at least. Watching his friend prepare to die. A resigned look, the look of a man who was running right at you but was just about to turn around, to face the bullets. No, Rafe. No.

Inside the gas station is mayhem as well. A dozen or more thirtysomething men, wearing army surplus clothes, looking unshaven, with nothing in their bellies but power bars, left over from prior wars. They’re ransacking the station. The police are as good as dead outside in the riots. These men are chugging beer, popping Slim Jims, spraying engine oil all over the quickie mart.

John keeps his eye on Lenore. It’s hard. He’s distracted by a number of things, among them Lenore’s mother, who is behind the register smoking thick, heavy tar-filled cigarettes. Chain smoking. Wearing a poker visor with a full head of gray hair. He’d never before seen her smoke.

He looks back and Lenore is gone. He thinks, “She was right there.” He looks all about him. He peers over every aisle, he looks behind the counter. He asks her mom where she went. Her mom doesn’t know. He hears a scream: the bathroom.

There are no woman’s rooms in this mart, just one long unisex cinder block row of stalls. There are more than a handful of men in the bathroom. Some doing drugs, some having sex with each other, their pants pooled around their ankles. He ignores all of that, it doesn’t matter. Where is she? Where the hell is she goddamit? This is his greatest fear. He kicks open a stall and finds a dead man. Try the next stall, a handicapped accessible one. He kicks that one open and there she is. Getting fucked, being raped? Thank god no, but scrunched up against the wall, to the right of the toilet, being made to watch one man take another in the mouth, the one man barfing, the other loosening his bowels. It’s a mess that John has never seen. Lenore is bawling, in total shock. She can’t wake up either. Other men peer into the large stall and, losing it all, they start to cover the floor with vomit and piss.

John is so utterly disgusted with all of this that he wakes up, finally. It is seven a.m. Somewhat early when his first class is at 12:30, he doesn’t need to workout, and he went to bed somewhat early the night before (after having had a rip from the GB and some blended scotch).

He’s slipping, he feels. Old habits and bad ones at that. I’ll never get a decent job, I’ll never make some people happy. Only my art will carry, only it make any money. It is all I’ve got. Can it keep them from seeing me as the leech I might have to be?

Blasphemy, hatred. Not fair to yourself.

Austin, TX
2006

This entry posted by J Rand : 14:45

where is it?

dark matter twins
good where it can

entropied as evil,
ill will, bad mood

it pushes, pushes
the universe away

This entry posted by J Rand : 17:35

Ahoy hoy, Ray
it doesn't matter, Ray
I'll just, I'll just go in the jungle awhile, Ray
It doesn't matter

He didn't, he didn't walk this way, Ray
we was at Port A, Ray
It doesn't matter
[sigh]
I danced in some waves, Ray
It doesn't matter
I'm married, Ray
But it doesn't matter, I'm married
Come walk on the sidewalk, Ray
I mean, this this calls, Ray
It doesn't matter
I see trucks, Ray
it doesn't matter
I see a sting Ray, Ray
I smoke some smokes, Ray
it doesn't matter
I just keep walkin, Ray
if you were here, Ray, you'd try the same thing
[beep beep beep]
you'd do the same thing, Ray
that's the dumptruck, Ray
heh-heh-heh!
Fuck the dumptruck, Ray!
fight the air,
fuck the dumptruck, Ray
[a compacting sound]

***

I just had forty saw-kay
[beep]
Aw, Ray, Ray, you tone it down up there, Ray
wouldn't ya?
wouldn't ya tone it down a little bit, Ray
huh? huh? you'd tone it down a little bit, Ray
you you you hear the senators, Ray
you, ya know, you hear Chuckie G
"aw, aw, aww, aw, ya know, ya know, uh, I-I-I...I ki—
I kinda like, I kinda like the surveillance
I kinda like the surveillance"
you'd hear that, Ray, wouldn't ya?
wouldn't you, Ray, you'd hear that
and then, and then you'd hear...
jeera humma hullah
oh, a jigga hoya hoya
oh, and Russ Feingold joins the committee
"oh, I don't like that
I don't like that surveillance"
oh-ho-ho-ho-ho
you'd hear that, Ray, wouldn't ya?
wouldn't ya?
wouldn't you hear that, Ray?

oh, the HBP, Ray: hit by pitch
hit by pitch, Ray
you'd hear that wouldn't ya?
wouldn't you hear that, Ray?
wouldn't you hear that?
wouldn't you hear...
oh, shit, Ray
if we had more time, Ray
if we had more time
we'd be, we'd be drawin' more branches
we'd be draawin' more branches
we'd be, we'd be drawin', Ray
all this bullshit
this is twelfth street
this is thirteenth street
this is fourteenth street
fuck this shit, man
we'd be fuckin bro—
we'd be, we'd be drawin' those branches
wouldn't we? wouldn't we?
I mean: if it's...
isn't that what what we'd be doin', Ray?
if you were here?
if you were here isn't that what we'd be doin'?
fuck that shiv-ah
you hear me, Ray?
I'm spit—I'm spittin on the sidewalk, Ray
I'm spittin on the sidewalk of...eleventh street
and fuck Lavaca while we're at it, huh?
you hear that? do you hear that?
the fuckin...lights
[a crunching, crumbling sound]
there we go, there we go
someone's revvin their engines, Ray
some—[a woman's voice]
you hear that? did you hear that?
someone's gettin crazy, Ray
somebody's getting craazy
you hear that? yeah, yeah, that's Charlie's in Austin, Ray
you hear that?

I can see the UT tower, Ray
I can see the double suites
I can see the fuckin Wells Fargo, Ray
you hear that? do ya?
I mean, do ya?
Do you see the gum on the sidewalk, Ray?
Do ya 'member when you were here, Ray?
Do ya 'member when we jump through the cross-track?
Do you see the cab?
I see the cabs, Ray
I see the cabs half my life


— Austin, TX
2006

This entry posted by J Rand : 10:38

oh cloud, you're so white & puffy
like my sucky memory
used to be so good
victim of irony, paradox
times are good only while happening
only physical evidence lasts
scrapes and receipts
indiscrete e-mails
my head a balloon
fog inside mylar
deflating when i lay it down
gotta fill it up again
the morning after

curse myself curse the night
curse inertia and all smiles
jostle me, jostle you
strobe light makes things funky
sometimes calls for use
of semi-automatic defibrillators

more myself then or now?
yes & no, two selves
jiggled across the corpus callosum

one part sheared
off from the rest
both sides resent
coming back together

someone stops me says
you danced with me the other day
no, you must be mistaken
that musta been jack

we're physically twinned,
but of different minds

This entry posted by J Rand : 08:49

pretty bumpy en route
not the only ones gone to dallas
george dub, too
short flight, 33 mins

cold in dallas, dallas love
a place to wash me hands
pop some 'cedrin
head is cabin-pressurized

my hands: scraped
spilled myself at intersection
walkin the whole way home
leaving a classic message
then writing gibberish mail

count the drinks, count em
on both hands
without all digits, i'd be short
one dogfish, two dogfish
bus comin—half a dogfish
real ale phoenix esb
cigarettes and a phone

over to a bar onn fifth
a jack, a coke, a band and waiting
hey, there is someone i know
beers for them
where's the group leader?

there he is, says, "car bombs"
consensus says, "OK"
half a pint of guinness
(you can chug it)
and bailey's goes down easy

no drink service on this flight
coulda used some water
parched, dessicated, husk of self
carcasse void even of lions
clipped from sky
like a headline never written:
i arrive on time

time for another beer
let's move on
time for some dancing
wristbands and a cigarette

forty bucks for jaegerbombs
the guy next to me gets three
i double that
but can't unload the sixth
maybe god drank it
before he kicked my ass
in the form of a friend
handing me what was it?
some anonymous shot

goodnight everybody
good night for dancing
who's gonna dance with me?
i told a guy we should
brokeback dancefloor
but it didn't come to that
i worked up a sweat
doing the faux salsa

when did I leave?
don't remember
barfed a little
turned off my phone
woke up to the sound
of the handyman
mowing the lawn

This entry posted by J Rand : 08:37

ogn Fabndy ded ay triiin ficju g sin wuld toitally bat f rifhtg banot barfff



I wiold, totllay batf right bnow oizzaa the sut



I could bart f allmove tauatin


fucin austn

This entry posted by J Rand : 01:16

I need to go
need to move
but this moment here?
this one's mine.

This entry posted by J Rand : 19:52

When the phone rang, I suddenly thought of an ex-girlfriend sitting in a smoky bar somewhere on the other side of town with hair in her eyes and a cell phone in her hand. Either that or my mother rolling over in bed to pick up her own receiver.
The receiver—still a-ring, I realized—lay at the side of my bed, far away from its base and the caller ID box. I answered it anyway.
"Hello?"
"I didn’t think you were going to pick up."
"It’s late."
I sat halfway up in bed and patted some still-damp patches of hair into place. An ambulance cried in the distance.
"They’re coming for you."
"Where were you today?"
"I won’t be around tomorrow either. I thought you should know."
"Are you sick or something? What's wrong?"
"I don’t know. Nothing. I’m just not going to be able to make it."
"But…we’re going tomorrow," I said. "Am I supposed to think of things to say by myself?"
"I’m sorry. Is it fair to say that I just don’t feel like it?"
"What do you want me to tell him, then?"
"Tell him I wasn’t feeling well. Tell him the dizzy spells are back. I haven’t forgotten. Tell him I’m sorry."
On the other end: Dial Tone. I punched PHONE and the display went from lightning-bug yellow to licorice-black. My mother. She always liked the black but I could only eat the red.
I walked to the window and looked out. They were rolling him in. The stretcher convulsed as its front wheels crossed the threshold between the black asphalt of the pavement and the white concrete of the ramp. Another jerk as the back wheels bounced up onto the ramp and then they were on their way; the uniformed man in front was hunched over and looked back over his shoulder as he guided the stretcher through a set of automatic doors.
How does the fallen man’s wife get to the hospital on a night and at a time like this? Does she dart to the coolness of the garage and fire up the starter in her nightgown? Surely she doesn’t stop to apply any makeup. She sips no coffee. She doesn’t stop to think that she has woken up alone. Concerns about the legality of driving twenty-five miles over the limit in slipper-feet fail to take root in a mind pregnant with one idea, one hope, one wish only.
That mother—the man’s wife—returns from the hospital the morning after. She wears her husband’s big winter coat over a dark-green-plaid flannel gown. Her only child, a son, meets her in the kitchen and a smirk spreads across his face. He sees that she hasn’t got the morning paper with her. "Mom. You’ve got dad’s coat on," he says.
The mother clutches her keys so tightly that they make tiny little pockmark impressions in the flesh of her palm. She drops the keys to the counter with a dank! and brings both hands to her face as she begins to weep. She backs herself up against the kitchen wall. Her head is roughly even with the top of the wooden spice rack hanging by a nail at her left. The weeping changes to sobbing. She drops her head down so that her chin rests in the depression of her collarbone. The child reaches out his hand and says, "Mom. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—" He stops when she rips her chin off of her chest and bangs the back of her head on the wall behind her, sounding a large thud! She does this again and again, each time with more fervor until she is arrantly pounding her head against the wall. The beginnings of a soft depression are now apparent in the soft-toned wallpaper she literally took weeks picking out. The mother is in no shape to realize that the spice rack at her left is ready to bounce right up off the tip of its solidly driven nail. Her son stands there agape and imagines that the words forming his most recent utterance are still afloat there in the air, ripe and ready to be plucked down and stuck into the back pocket of his jeans. He sees that the spice rack is in danger, but fails to react before it becomes free of the nail.
A dozen bottles of equivalent shape and size dive towards the stern white tile below.
Only one busts—the chili pepper—begetting a veritable mushroom cloud of fine red powder. The empty thunk! of the wooden rack hitting the floor leaves the room quickly, but the mother continues to sob and now has taken a seat on the floor; the back of her head still beats against the wall. She stops the motion for a second, to stifle a sneeze. The child reaches toward the back of his skull and feels a small bump of bone beneath his still-damp hair. He looks down at his mother. Her robe has crawled up and has quit its ascent just below her knees. Her ankles there look pasty, white, fleshy. There is slush around the edges of her slippers and already it has begun. The makings of a puddle have collected on the floor. In his mind, he imagines opening the door to the laundry room closet. Light rushes in and illuminates the handle of a mop.

The moon was full but its rays obscured as they mingled with the melting pot of light stewing up and down the boulevard.
Again the phone rang. I left my spot at the window to answer it. It had to have been her. But when I picked up the receiver: Nothing. Hello, I said. Hello? The caller ID read only: Unavailable Unavailable.

I whipped my sheets around in the sky above my bed and when all the air was gone from beneath them, I smoothed them out against the mattress with great big strokes of my hand; I swept them over back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth.
My good pillow was warm and soft and all fluffed up the way I like it—welcoming as I plopped my head down into it. The comforter closed in on me with an hermetic precision. I was like leftovers encased in a monstrous shroud of plastic wrap. Cars whizzed by every now and then and I could hear the sporadic cry of an ambulance in the distance. My soporific cocktail was complete.
I wanted to stay like that: right there on the very precipice of slumber and wakefulness, one toe dangling in dreamland and both arms whirring at my side.

I would be a King Tut to future generations. Upon entering the building, archaeologists would request a key from my landlord. "Oh, yes, here you go," he’d say, reciting room numbers and corresponding resident names in his head. He’d pet his jaguar of a dog on the head as it hunkered down and shivered. Straightening his glasses he’d say, "Ah, the third one on the right. Oh, no. Wait. Yes, ah, the third one on the right. Right, Marble?"
They would thank him and wind themselves back through moist, mazy hallways, navigating empty rooms and swatting at cobwebs until coming upon my door. Behind it, they would meet a blockade of storage cells that would take them days to work their way through. Finally, they would champion it. And then they’d see me there in the bed. Beside me would be the phone and next to the phone a small, yellowed note. Please, it would ask of them, take a message, if I'm away.

This entry posted by J Rand : 10:44

I. What Time Is It?

Holy shit! What time is it?
OMFG! What time is it?
Did you just hear the doorbell ring?
What time is it?

II. This Stain

How long has my lava lamp
been going?
How many sheets can I
fill 'fore I'm spent?
How many more Goldfish
can I even have?
And will someone please
explain this stain?

III. Sarcogophegesus

My nasal passages are
STUFFED
Right on down through my
trachea and into
my escargophasus.

IV. Didn't I know?

Yesterday I spent hours
just looking for the date.

This entry posted by J Rand : 10:34