May

Plastic was the motif.  Tablecloth, forks, and cups.  Hot dogs and Barq’s.  Cheese puff stained fingers and short pants.  Plastic coolers filled with ice and beer.  Sparklers that spit sulfur on angel food cake until children could swipe them away.  Those old enough to know that there was no harm in the spark running the young into hysterics.   

Beloved, the plastic boats we ran with, alongside the creek bank.  Shouting, sprinting, tumbling through the vine tangled bank to that great arch bridge.  To the winner went the falcon, coveted, heavy, lifted overhead with both hands.  Flawless.

I’m told that there are places where you can watch lead falcons fall from the sky.  The gold paint is often still wet when they fall.  Paint flecks and drops a comet trail from behind.  A heavy thud resounds when they hit the ground.  A sound that signals a stoppage in time, a quick hand that can steal the will with the breath.  That, I suppose, is what the beer was for.  

Powerpoint

 It’s every morning.  I log on to the computer and there is a powerpoint presentation waiting for me. 

Assembled the night before, no doubt.  Between ten and twenty slides all neatly formatted.  The first slide says the same thing. “You Will Be Attacked Today”.  There is an alarm that goes with it, "You......are under.....Attack!"  The subsequent slides are a series of illustrations depicting a man being physically assaulted in one way or another.  Many of them are bizarre enough to be quite humorous.  A man having, what appears to be, a gallon of milk poured over his head in a supermarket.  Sitting on a park bench while a small child stands behind wielding a piece of lumber.  A group of people hovered over him in a restaurant while one attempts CPR.  Bloodthirsty pandas.  Bombs.    

I pull up my email.  There isn’t much.  The usual cast of characters.  I start to reply to what I can but the motivation is quickly sapped from my fingertips.  I often find myself stalled in midsentence, distracting myself with taking out the garbage or opening a window.  Questions layered like onions.  “How have you been?”  “What time is it?”  “Are you still in your pajamas.”  Each query, by itself, simple enough to satisfy.  “Good.”  “11:30”  “Yes.” 

Then I start with the Boolean logic.  I “and” them together and type, “Fuck you.”  I delete the “Fuck you” and reassemble them with “or’s”.  Now we’re headed to trouble town.  It’s very difficult to tell which is most important.  What carries more weight?  “How have I been?”  Like on a sliding scale?  Or like “sheep go to heaven and goats go to hell”?  And time?  I’ve always suspected the rotation of the earth to be completely unreliable.  I feel good but I know there are cells dying in me.  Falling away building piles of dust in my bed and on the floor.  I breathe them in and infect the rest.  “I wear pajamas because they are comfortable.  I never had a pair when I was a kid.  I want to wear them all day.” 

I go back to the slides.  See if there isn’t one that I can live with.  Every morning.

See Dick (Toylit News Feature)

You like sandwiches? Dick likes ‘em too. Dick likes sandwiches that give him gas and vapid thoughts that fill his happy nose. Do you like dreams? Dick likes ‘em. Big dreams about smoking grass on Dick’s boat. Surprised? Surprised to hear that Dick's brain has two sides? Well that is disconcerting. What if Dick woke up in the wrong brain? No yacht, no grass, no mood to swing from just the overwhelming temptation to huddle into a “life fire zone”.

How weird. What a weird thing to happen. What an odd Dick thought. No more Dick love for sandy beaches, two arms full of Thai hooker. Rock hard thoughts moving us toward the water’s edge. Just an idea’s kiss, lightning bug movement into blue light. Like feeling 7.62 rip through your liver? Falling face down into that swollen funnel of conscious. once massaged with toasted rye bread and a little prosciutto. “Oh this sucks,” Dick might say. A futile hand pressed to the side, staunching the flow of all those thoughts. A grimaced glance up toward the sky. “Now why would I do that?” Says Dick. “The thought of it just makes me hungry.”

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"I asked a learnèd friend about this: Dr. Jay Meltzer, the legendary physician to whom I went for medicine until he retired and to whom I still go for his culinary gifts and for education and tutoring on tough subjects."


"Hearing an intellectual shtarker like Meltzer talk about such stuff makes me want to go back to school. He’s greatly interesting about how we all have two brains: the rational brain and the irrational brain."


-Dick Cavett (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/the-windows-of-the-soul-need-cleaning/)

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"The protesters, who began their demonstration here two months ago, have demanded the resignation of the government and new elections. But the movement — made up of farmers and the urban poor, many of them supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister deposed in a 2006 military coup — has fractured and its demands are now unclear."

"One photographer reported seeing two dead or wounded victims unattended in a street for a long period because of the fear of snipers. The military was not allowing ambulances to pass a roadblock, the photographer said, which meant that rescue workers had to run in a crouch with stretchers to carry out the victims.

In one neighborhood, the military posted a banner declaring a “Live firing zone.” A Thai television station reported that the banner was taken down late in the afternoon."

-Thomas Fuller and Seth Mydans (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/world/asia/16thai.html?pagewanted=1&ref=world)

The Internets

There are so, sooo many great things that get caught in the internets these days.  Sometimes I know where I’m looking.  And I struggle for hours to try to get there but I can’t quite find it.  The thing that I was looking for.  Let’s be fancy.  It’s, this thing, off in the ether.  The ether bunny that hops and hops across the desktops.  But always just out beyond the reach.  Don’t search google images for porn.  It’s a waste of your time.  The bunny’s tail is white and fluffy.  You’d think that the whiteness would make it tough to find but it actually helps a little.  The tail swishes left and right and up and down.  You can tell the color of a bunnies nose, even if you never did get to see its nose, by the color of its anus.  If a porn site is taking an excessive amount of time to upload and you start seeing pop-up advertising just unplug the internets cable.  Chances are someone on the other end is using a virus to watch you masturbate.  When the puffy cottontail moves it crosses the brown fur of the bunny.  That’s how you know you’re on the right track.  It’s always there, hopping off in the distance.  I’ll tell you the truth.  I get bored chasing the bunny.  Sometimes in coffee shops.  That’s when I look for a place to rub one out.  The bathroom is Out of the Question!  Too obvious.  You’d be surprised how many places there are in starbucks that you can rub one out.  Thanks to standard design and architecture practices it’s easy to tell people about it over the phone.  Chasing that bunny.  They’re beautiful, the little things that get caught in internets.