From Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies

"True enough," said Mrs. Copperfield, bringing her fist down on the table and looking very mean. "I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I've wanted to do for years. I know I am as guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which if you remember correctly, I never had before."

(My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Complete Works of Jane Bowles, page 197)

so many
things
almost
never
happen
and
so many
things
are just
shy
of impossible


so numerous
are these
things,
in fact,
that they
can be
relied
upon
to happen
every
day.

The Church of 4 Dollys

Here we are, again, at sanity's last stand. Onion rings served fresh all night. Geronimo is here, and the 4 Dollys and that lady we busted out of house arrest in Burma.

Ours is the church for when no time is left

We are The Church of the 4 Dollys. Dolly of the melted clocks and the cloned sheep Dolly. Dolly the Lama, Dolly singer of the legendary breasts.

The fire eyed lady from Burma sleeps only out under the stars

Whenever we lose one Dolly, another Dolly takes over. Never are we bereft. We are gathered here to teach the sheep to sing in preparation for when the busty blonde must don the yellow hat and lead Tibet.

To the world we say: do not be afraid we love you we will make time


(Madrid, 02/24/09)

Percy, 39

I’m drinking gay coffee at Downtown when the woman at the next table announces that Percy died this morning.

She expects the waiter to be upset, but he doesn’t know who she is talking about. “But he was here all the time!”

Percy was a fashion designer, well on his way to being famous. He was only 39. He’d been found in his bathtub that afternoon. He slipped and hit his head and that was it.

The waiter, instead of being upset, tells the story of another man he knew who died in his bathtub. And he was only 32!

The waiter says that he is lucky, because he is poor and only has a shower. He says, “It’s always those big bathtubs where you have space to die.”

(Amsterdam, 10/09)

"It is enough to work on the assumption that all the details matter in the end, in some unknown but vital way."

-- E.O. Wilson, Biophilia.

Size

Often it happens I am the wrong size. Walking down a picturesque bricked alley, I discover myself to be Godzilla with luggage. Except, unlike Godzilla, I am entirely ineffectual: just a big lizard in traffic.

Or I’m talking with someone, offering a little something about myself, and I think, “Wait. Did I just refer to myself as the Shah?”

More often I am trying to do something simple and important, such as buy a bus ticket, but when the man (impatient, bored) turns to me, I find myself unable to make a sound. At this crucial juncture I have transformed into an aphid. An above-average aphid--but still.

My job is to diagram the sentence but I am flimsy as a cumulonimbus, floating somewhere in the distance. How does a mustard seed get the attention of the waitress?

It gets so I am nostalgic for human male average. Five foot nine. Nostalgic for when I thought that it would be enough to be in the right place, and at the right time.

(Amsterdam, 10/08)

Talk

My problem is I’m unable to talk like a regular human being. Every sentence sounds like something I memorized the night before.

“Excuse me.” I said. “Could I please have a big cup of coffee?” Which seemed to me a natural and straight-forward sentence. I’d practiced it several times, waiting for the waiter. He has cheeks like a slapped baby’s ass and hair that looks warm and soft.

Because I have been a teacher, I also acted the sentence out, mimed holding a big cup of coffee.

Isn’t it considered polite to speak somewhat slower when speaking English in a foreign country?

Is it possible that I sometimes try too hard?

He paused and then he smiled at me, as if to say, “And here we have another one.”

This happens to me every time I open my mouth.

(Amsterdam, 10/08)

Fresh.

I shower in the morning but never feel entirely clean until night makes the city new and the British boys have had a few beers and the whores are gearing up, tapping at the glass, and laughing at us already. Terrible fried chicken is deliciously available for another seven hours! Not so bad I'm not, not overall, considering the miles. Crazy, not in a bad way, shifting my cock to the left, and staring without apology. I don't have to spend my whole life crawling on my belly! A big man with stubble's gonna lean across the bar and kiss me. He's gonna put his big pink tongue in my mouth, for starters.

(Amsterdam 10/08)

"Everyone has his sharp-toothed sleep-destroying devil inside him, and this is neither good nor bad, but is life . . . This devil is the material (and basically what wonderful material) that you have been endowed with and with which you are supposed to make something."

-- Franz Kafka
(Note: Kafka wrote this in a letter to a very young woman he'd met at the sanitorium. He might not have been so upbeat in his own diary.)

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: The Spell of the Sensuous

David Abram
The Spell of the Sensuous
Vintage, 1997

Here's an extraordinary book about how we stopped perceiving the world as sacred and came to feel cut off. A daring leaping mix of ecology, linguistics, indigenous traditions and philosophy. It is also is a book that is remarkably different from chapter to chapter.

The first chapter, about Abram's experiences as a sleight-of-hand magician in Nepal and Indonesia, is lyrical and gorgeous. I admit that I also caught myself thinking, "Dude! I want some of what you are smoking!"

I thought chapter two might advocate wearing amethyst pendants. Not remotely. The next two chapters -- on philosophy and linguistics -- require black coffee and a clear-headed morning. It is exhilarating to watch someone think this way -- like watching a daredevil making leaps over cars -- except the leaps he is making are not sport but the leaps we need to survive on the planet.

Abram investigates the present, the past, the future, and where each can be found in the landscape. He even goes so far as to offer, on page 202, a meditation on how to dissolve time. (Of course I annotated my copy; you never know when you're going to need just this sort of thing.) The last section is about writing, how the Hebrews left out the sacred vowels but the Greeks left us marooned in the abstract. (My crude summary does violence to the text. It is exhilarating to read.)

Then comes the coda and, a few pages before the end, Abram says, basically, "This might be true and it might not and what is true anyway? Truth is what heals the planet and falsehood is what harms it." Part of me agreed and part of me felt like, well, the victim of a sleight-of-hand magician. I want my truths to be, well, true and not just gorgeous. The whole section made me uneasy.

I do not mean to condemn the book. Not at all. I have told everyone I know to read it -- because I want people discuss it with! Abram gave me raptures, lectures, arguments and questions. A beautiful book, well worth wrestling with and re-visiting.

On Being (Briefly) the Hottest Man In the Bar

As I tug my sweatshirt over my head, my t-shirt rides up and the men at the bar -- who only seconds before were quiet dull Iowans -- are hooting and hollering like fratboys gone wild with jello shots, bikini girls, and MTV cameras. By the time I've got my head through the hole they're quiet again, grinning and winking, and I don't have to pay for my beer anymore.

I'm a star!!! Hot. Desirable.

Clarification: I am in Des Moines. At the Blazing Saddle bar. And it is January. It is 4 in the afternoon on a weekday. Most of the men at the bar are over 60. The younger ones -- and I mean that only relatively -- appear somehow different, in the Iowa sense of the word, dif'rent, as in there might have been some challenge there, cognitively, even before they started drinking as a career twenty years ago.

These clarifications clarify nothing for me. I'm the hottest man at the bar. The air sizzles with my seething sexual energy -- at least for me it does. And someone must have discreetly placed an air hose in my asshole because I feel myself expanding, swelling up. Soon I will rise into the air like a blow-up doll full of helium.

Except I am not full of helium. What I am full of is boring thoughts. Does he want me? Yeah, he wants me. Does he still want me? Yeah, he totally wants me. Am I hot? Yeah, I'm hot. Am I still hot? Yeah, I'm still hot.

Vanity is like a head injury. Suddenly there are no Icelandic novelists in my mind. No leaf-cutter ants of the Amazon. No Beats, no Surrealists, no Luminism. Actually, there isn't even any Iowa, even though I'm sitting in it. Is there a local beer? What are these men's stories? How old is this carpet? None of that. Am I hot? Yeah, I'm hot. Am I still hot? Yeah, I'm still hot.

I'm not content to let my hotness just sit around. No. I've got plans for my hotness. I want to go to all those sleazy clubs in Denver. I should fly to Amsterdam. Because this hotness -- this raw sexual force -- it ain't gonna last forever. (Am I still hot? Yes -- I think so. Maybe I should check? Maybe I should yawn and rub my belly seductively and see if anyone responds?)

Swollen up with boring thoughts, I find myself suddenly vulnerable. Anxiety arrives. Because I really ought to make it to the gym more often. Maybe get a trainer? How long has it been since I took any fish oil pills? Is a cheap moisturizer really good enough? What is 'photo-facial rejuvenation' anyway? What am I going to do when I'm 40? 45? 50? 55? 60? 65?

Plastic surgery is getting better all the time. Look at Madonna. What about penis enlargement? Don't hear much about that nowadays. Maybe I should do penis enlargement -- just as, like, gay sexual insurance? If I have mega-dong someone will always want me. Won't they?

A few hoots and hollers, one free Miller beer, and I have been transformed into a gay balloon of boredom and anxiety. Even making it to the toilet is going to be quite an operation because I appear to be taking up most of the air in the room.

The door to the bar opens with a shudder: a kid ambles in and knocks the snow off his boots. He looks sleepy; he's got three days worth of stubble on his college boy chin. He's not staying, just dropping off the free papers, but can I use the restroom sir? Sure you can. He's just a straight guy but I could convert him 'cause I'm so fucking hot except --

He Did Not Even Look At Me!!!

Which is probably a good thing because one side of my face has entirely collapsed, along with my inflated chest. Oh yes, I'm the Hindenburg disaster all over again. Zipping around the room, making a prolonged farting noise, like a birthday balloon somebody let go of. Nobody even notices this disaster because I am, like, invisible.

At last I come to rest back on my bar stool, a shriveled raisin limp-dick sort of man, a wizened husk.

My next beer I pay for. My career as the hottest man in the bar (god! it was glorious!) is over. From now on I'll have to fly economy, bag my own groceries, jack off.

As recompense, as a consolation prize, here is the world: Icelandic novelists and leaf-cutter ants, a long line of drunks sitting here at the bar in Des Moines on an afternoon in January when I was, for a very short time, the hottest man in the bar.

Of Visions

Recently at the sauna I met a 6'5" blonde Dutch muscle god, who as we lay together in a cubicle after sex, told me that he had had three visions.


He'd been an opera star in America but came back to Holland to care for his mother after she got cancer. For three years he took care of her and then she died. For two years he grieved, until one night he awoke to find her sitting on the edge of his bed. Just looking at him and loving him. When she vanished (and since that time she is always with me!) the room was full of light, he thought it must be morning, but when he pulled the curtain back it was still night.


The second vision he had was in the hospital -- the lining around his heart was swollen with water and he had to gasp for breath. Dozens of tests had been made but the cause could not be found. He had been prepped for surgery -- the water had to be relieved or he would die. In the hour while he waited, a light came to him and filled his body. When the nurse came to bring him to surgery, he was breathing normally. (And the refrain is always the same: and the doctors had never seen anything like it!)


The third vision was simple: he was out on his balcony in Germany and the light came to him and he saw that God was in the world and he saw that he was God. I say it's simple. It never happened to me. If I go out on a balcony, it's to guess what the weather might be -- and most of the time I'm wrong.


Synchronicity and psychic phenomena were sprinkled liberally throughout his story. For example, when he was suffering in the hospital, his best friend consulted a psychic who without knowing anything! declared "your friend has tears on his heart."


All this was told to me, as we lay together, rather sticky, after sex in a dark plywood cubicle at the day sauna in Amsterdam. I'd told him that I didn't ordinarily get guys like him. The tall Dutch gods generally only want each other, the very pretty or the very young.


"I'm deeper than that," he said. "I'm not religious but I'm very spiritual."


Gosh. Thanks. Let me make sure I understand. You're Saint Francis. I'm the leper.


I'm not religious I'm spiritual. Of all the infinite varieties of bullshit, that is the sentence I personally find most nauseating.


Then again, he was 6'5" and he did love his mother and he had spent the last hour, uh, ardently reciprocating, so I said, "Of course you are" and he went on to tell me his three visions.


"But I'm no better than you," he said, as a CEO or rock star might, knowing full well that he IS better, unutterably, self-evidently better. He's a 6'5" opera star who has seen God. I'm a jug-eared punk with a crippled leg and an unfortunate personality. It's my job to say that he was "gracious and down-to-earth" and consider myself lucky.


I do consider myself lucky, incidentally.


Sometimes I think it would be the easiest job in the world to be a writer of newspaper editorials. Most of the time, two opposite statements are both true. Especially in regard to human beings.


He was a profoundly and authentically spiritual person. C'mon. For three years he gave up his opera career, where death takes only eight minutes and arrives with an aria, to care for his mother. He didn't ask for those visions, they came to him. As for final proof, you'll have to take my word for it. I held him in my arms. There is some radiance that can't be faked.


He was also a shallow puffed-up egotistical ass. He was there to impart his vision -- since he'd already shot his spunk. I had no more right to claim mystic experience of my own than a cornflake.


I mentioned that I was the author of a well-received essay about the practice of Buddhist loving-kindness meditation in sleazy gay bars. But he was not interested, not in spiritual me. The termite.


I am forever amazed by how things can be so true and so false, all at the same time.


For example, how life manages to seem, on one hand, perfectly random and meaningless, and, on the other, as intricately and thoughtfully plotted as a door-stop Victorian novel, an old-fashioned one, unapologetically heavy-handed with impossible coincidences and deus ex machina.


Does life seem this way to you? Sometimes it's a monkey at the typewriter. Other times I want to clutch my hair and howl mad scientist style: Everything iz connected!


The 6'5" opera god lives in a world where everything has meaning and synchronicity spills out in every direction. I want to live in that world, too. Sometimes I think I do. Then there are times that magical thinking seems positively inspid, as if one day I had an epiphany: "Ohmigod! It IS all about me after all!" As if God were only an all-inclusive travel agent making sure the prize in the Crackerjack box has a special meaning for me personally.


Then again, there is a convincing case to be made, I believe, for the idea that God, at some point in the twentieth century, became exhausted by the population boom, and rather than puzzling out individual destinies, decided just to assign people plots from literature. My life, for example, is a transparently cobbled together mish-mash of common summaries. (I suspect God did not even take the time to read the book and thus we live out lives based on the Cliffs Notes.) My childhood was King Lear -- bad enough, followed by "The Fall of the House of Usher" -- even worse. Now I'm basically re-living Don Quixote, which is bruising, but, on the plus side, also very funny. It's a disco queer Quixote re-mix actually, wherein Don Quixote and Sancho Panzo are married -- but more about that some other time.


On the off chance that I am ever a ghost, peering back from the edges of life, what I will miss most are these small peculiar events, as when a hunk in a sex dive wants to discuss his spiritual life, or, on the Metro in Madrid, a man with an accordion begins to sing, and must sing double-quick so that he can collect his coins before the next station arrives.


Meaningful or meaningless? I am completely convinced of both. Adorable, certainly -- also obnoxious. And I do feel lucky (also unlucky) to be marooned in a such a world.


(10.22.08, Amsterdam)
(11.19.08, Madrid),

George W Bush: Vindicated At Last?

It may be that George W. Bush is about to be vindicated. Keep an eye out -- the bastard may yet turn out to have been right about everything.

The Bush administration will be utterly vindicated if -- on January 20th 2009 -- we find, under the mattress, three trillion dollars. Three trillion, better make it five. Five trillion dollars, somewhat damp and crumpled since we forgot we had it and put it through the laundry.

And if this turns out to be true, whoa, we are really going to owe George W. Bush an apology.

George W. Bush's environmental policies may be about to be vindicated. His frontier-attitude will be found to be entirely correct if -- on January 20th 2009 -- we find a new treasure trove of natural resources to exploit, as George W Bush has so fearlessly led us to exploit. If we discover, in an old coat pocket, say, a Brazil's worth of rainforest and Greenland's worth of ice.

Actually, considering the damage we've done, we'd better hope to find, in our attics and our basements, alongside the Civil War uniforms and the Atari cartridges -- another planet, brand-new. A gloriously exploitable brand-new planet, maybe two planets, or three at the rate we are going.

If this turns out to be the case, well, the policies of the Bush Administration will turn out to be entirely reasonable.

After all, he always said he protecting us. And perhaps he is about to be vindicated. It may yet turn out that clean water, which he has steadfastly opposed, is actually very bad for us. What if pure oxygen is carcinogenic? Well, then, we can thank George Bush. And it may yet turn out that civil rights are bad for us and we'll be grateful to George W. Bush for taking rights away from us.

Watch: Massachusetts may soon be reduced to a smoldering mass of purple ooze. Why? Turns out gay marriage really was dangerous after all!

And, if all this turns out to be true, well, then we'd better all apologize to George W. Bush, that bastard, because he turned out to be right about everything, after all.

Essay 01.12.09

Out. Only because I am afraid to be out. Checking my hair is just an excuse to make sure I've remembered my ears. And that my penis is -- where it should be and not over my shoulder or next door.

Wouldn't I like to have long black hair dyed on one side lipstick red? As it is, one is consigned to being odd 'for no reason that can be pinned down.'

It is the most natural thing in the world for someone like me to love museums. The space between things!

I remember the relief I felt in Chicago when I realized I only had to keep track of the ground floor. I guess I was afraid I might be hit by a falling filing cabinet. Or executive. (It took me several days to arrive at this realization.)

When he was eighty, Miro made art with two lines and three dots. I don't know where he is now. But by now I figure he must be down to one dot.

(Madrid)

18. Birch, Spruce

My father planted a stand of birch trees when I was born. Three trees for his three sons. One was rather spindly and I thought, "That one's me." Three decades later, spindly or not, that one has also grown into a tree. None compare to the blue spruce my father planted for my mother, her last Mother's Day. The blue spruce towers, fragrant, over the house.

17. Woodsman

I swam splashing to the raft -- to discourage hungry bass and also to attract the legendary scary hunky homo woodsman -- gay yeti of the Granite State -- wandering afoot at night clad in boots and overalls, smoking a cigar and keeping one hand on his axe handle. I waited naked on the raft surrounded by all that dark water and all that black night. And it was on nights like these I began to think I might just be all right.

"If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been completely at the mercy of sex." -- from the memoirs of Anatole Broyard.

16. Bait

Skinny-dipping in black water, enraptured and scared. The water, I knew, was pleased to receive me. Never mind my crooked body -- the water received me unconditionally. The water generous and teasing, nuzzling me between the legs as I swam.

Also I was scared a small mouth bass might dart up and nip the tip of my dick off. I'd never heard of this happening but I was 100% certain it had occurred somewhere and could happen again. Because the very best bait, as everyone knows, is a small thing wriggling and dangling.

15. Lovers

My first lover was a black pond beside a willow tree. An irrigation pond my father dug long before I was born. At sunset when I went to swim, a heron often vaulted up from behind the willow. That heron was a god to me: I addressed prayers to it. Year later, in Amsterdam, I was scandalized to find herons hanging out by the canals, taking donations even, and acting like, you know, birds.

"When you make peace with uncertainty, you find a kind of liberation. You are freed from bracing yourself against every piece of bad news, and from constantly having to work up a sense of hopefulness in order to act -- which can be exhausting. There's a certain equanimity and moral economy that comes when you are not constantly computing your chance of success."

-- Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self (p. 143)