Category Archives: experimental

Where You Been?

“Is there some reason you’re avoiding me?” he asked, after a long hiatus in their conversation.

“No, not you in particular, I’m avoiding all of them,” his old friend said.

“Whoa, ‘all of them‘?  Is it really like that?” he asked, more than a little aghast.  

“I cannot say if it is like that or not, because this is a world of illusion.  Your illusions are not mine and you can’t see what I do.  The questions you ask me are in your mind, a mind that asks itself no questions.”  

“I don’t like where this is going, Mr. Koh-Ann… if that is your name,”  he said.

“Who are you to like where this is going?”  The face on his old friend was like the finely chiseled face on a statue of Sekhmet.  It was the nonchalant face of the eternal cat.

The thought occurred, but remained unspoken, these old friends had not seen each other in several months.    

“I am what I am,” he said, realizing it was probably too late for philosophy or an appeal to his old friend’s sense of friendship.  

It had always been an exceedingly hard world for his cat-faced friend.   Everything made sense, but it was still terrible.

Ten Minute Drill

My aunt turns 85, I think it is, today, is turning so as I tap.  We are going to surprise her with a call, one of our madcap turns on Happy Birthday, wherein I follow Sekhnet’s voice sometimes in falsetto and other times in my most profundo basso.   The victim usually makes a clever remark about the rendition, my aunt will probably just say thank you.

Her husband, my recently departed uncle, was a bit tyrannical with her.   Surprising, really, since he seemed such a mild-mannered man.  You have to watch out for seemingly mild-mannered men, I reckon.  I recall one such man, a Housing Court judge, quiet, affable, bookish and a complete vicious prick.  Enraged complete vicious prick.   My uncle could be this way to my aunt, apparently.  Maybe this is why my mother couldn’t stand to be around them, they bickered constantly about who had interrupted whom first.

But I have already used up half of my allotted time, and to say what?  To speak ill of the dead?  To make a passing comment about my octogenarian aunt?  Well, no.  We have to call my aunt, who identifies herself as my grandmother now when she misses me call and leaves me a voice mail.  She’s increasingly confused.  It’s as if she’s worn out by how difficult and irrational the world is and she’s longing for things to be simple and nice.   Her personality has changed accordingly.  

She no longer fights or protests.  Instead she hums to herself.  She may have a hard time choosing her food at the restaurant where we’ll take her tomorrow evening, if all goes well and we make our 230 mile drive to pick her up at the assisted living facility.   Fortunately, when we order for her, a dish that we know she loves, she will tuck into it with gusto and say “yum!”.  She’ll eat half, be amazed at how full she is and have the rest for lunch tomorrow.

I think of the sorrows of this world and maybe it is not a bad thing that my aunt can’t recall most of them.  She seems to live more and more in the present, with less and less complaint.   I look around at the present I live in and say “damn!”

Thirty seconds on the clock, only time to heave up a desperation shot at the buzzer and….. it’s off the rim.  Damn!

Shot at the Buzzer

My old cousin Eli used to read a section of the Hagaddah every year that was a crowd favorite.  “What has afrighted you, O, Mountains, that you skip like rams, you hills that you skip like young lambs?”  The poetry in his voice was perfect gravel, a workman’s voice, rough and expressive.   I find myself distracted lately, and to that end I go pull the timer off the refrigerator and give myself five minutes until the buzzer to figure it out.

OK, I bring the ball up court in an arena full of ghosts.  Nobody here, who am I talking to?  A rhetorical question? you ask, rhetorically.  At the half court line, 4:12 left on the clock.  Thinking about long dead Eli, he seemed ancient, yet ageless, at 80, 82, 86.   In the last years of his life  we became good friends as I interviewed him like the host of a popular, immensely entertaining talk show.   Forget about the last time I saw him, in the hospital bed, tied down but barely restrained, brain shut down, eyes unseeing, only the will to fight left, fists clenched, fighting that motherfucker death.

1:40 on the clock, no time outs left.  I look over at coach and see he’s gone too, just two black holes in what used to be his face.  Somewhere a plaintive tone signals the one minute mark is now history, can hardly see the damned basket.   Give me the pill, I got the shot.

Do it, Sarge!  The troops call out, 20 seconds on the timer, 14.  Got the ball, 6 seconds, come on, come on.  Time.

Your Proverbial Slippery Slope

Development of the concept

According to the author of Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, the policy went through a number of iterations and modifications:

Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the principle of “life unworthy of life,” coercive sterilization was the first. There followed the killing of “impaired” children in hospitals; and then the killing of “impaired” adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals, in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide gas. This project was extended (in the same killing centers) to “impaired” inmates of concentrationand extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings in the extermination camps themselves.[1]

I Live in a Submarine

I was thinking this as I made my way back to the sleeping hatch before.  “This is like a submarine,” I said to myself, with the stirrings of some other possibly clever lines following suit in that funny way they have, tumbling like monkeys.   I was not in the mood to so much as jot down any clever lines, so tired I was, “shoot,” I told myself, and my monkey mind, “I’ll jot that semi-clever jive down tomorrow.”  Then I turned to the compromised Lazy Boy, a sly smile creeping, “maybe….” I said, then went down the narrow hallway starboard toward the sleeping area.

Except, once I got starboard, goddamn, there was very little air in the hatch.  Fresh air, that is.  I’ll be lightheaded e’er long, I thought to myself absently, glad I wasn’t actually there, my heavy head pressing heavily against the many pillows on the pallet.  There was also a hiss, suggesting either that we were taking on water (very unlikely, I reasoned) or that steam heat was sissing up through the tenement pipes (odder still, it seemed to me).

OK, how is like a submarine?  Well, it’s fairly long, front to back, and it’s become narrow, with my dusty possessions piled aft and the length of it made narrow by things also on the other side.  The fore deck and the poop deck, well, let’s not even talk about such disgusting things at this hour,  I can easily move from the front of the U-boat to the back, and  dive and surface, blindly but with little trouble.  It’s mainly the narrowness of it and the damnable lack of a periscope– or gyroscope, for that matter, that make it so submarinelike.

“You do realize how that sounds,” says the sour-mouthed bowsin, indignant that I don’t even bother to google the proper spelling of boatswain. 

“Like the periscope in this Class D- frigate following sub, you, sir, do not even exist.  Forget about spelling your imaginary title correctly.  ‘Woof, woof,’ as a matter of fact.”

“Sure,” says the boatswain, more sourly still, “why don’t we just boat forget the whole thing.”

Seven Minute Drill

Got to keep climbing, despite the negative chant, the chorus of voices who always say you can’t (tip of the mitre to that rapper who wrote Potential back around 1991) I’d be Dr. Seuss, if I had the juice.  Less than six minutes remain to this scattered refrain, so let me, as they say, make the most of those now 300 seconds.

It focuses the brain, they say, being on the scaffold like this, though it distracts the brain too, the thought that it will all be over in, now, less than 260 seconds.

Thomas Jefferson, my main tragically hypocritical man, stole lines written by a man on the scaffold when he famously wrote that a favored few were not born booted and spurred to ride the rest of us.   He was famously wrong, of course, as he was born booted and sharp spurred, ask his terrified, bloody horse.

“This is how you want to go out?” asks, you, say.

“Absolutely not.  I want to go out with words of inspiration and gratitude for the many gifts of this wonderful life.  Sure you have a right to be sad, even bitter, but why waste time when you have less than 110 seconds before the end?  When you see that tsunami coming to wipe out the earth, right after you gasp ‘oh, shit!” it will not be anger, sadness or bitterness in your mouth.  Terror and wonder, terror and wonder, my friend.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” observed my father moments before he breathed his last.

“Nobody does,” I reassured him.  Then he did it like a champ.

Five minute drill

Hang on, let me get the timer.

Don’t know what this is, exactly, jotting notes here on a WordPress blahg.  Our oldest human need– to make ourselves known to others?   The exercise of writing is a good thing, and as James Lipton said in a recent interview– it is his happiest way to spend a day.  Outside of, he smiled to the camera, spending time with his lovely wife, of course.

I had no idea what a remarkable and brilliant man, and superb interviewer, James Lipton is, until recently watching his interviews of Dave Chappelle and Mickey Rourke.  But the clock is ticking and so, rather than trawl for the links, as I should, I commend them to you, and commend them again, recommending them, as it were.

“Hah! wordplay with only three minutes counting down?” you will ask, drawing a sword.  

“Whoa, why the sword, cousin?” I will ax in alarum, because a second ago it was wordplay and now, suddenly deploying this “s”— yow!

“‘Yow! you racsal?!!– Draw I say!” you will say, waving deadly steel.

I do love to draw, but I’m afraid, with less than two minutes left there won’t be time for that now.  Put by that sword, friend.

“‘Friend?  Knave, draw I say!”

Eyeing the clock nervously, I’m not trying to stall, mind you, but the whole point of this exercise is to keep tapping, like Bojangles, like, I don’t know what.  Why the clock?

Might as well ask God that question.  “Why the clock, God?”  And none of us know, except in this moment when I can see less than 30 seconds left, now 20, when the buzzer will ring and we will be gone, the only trace of us the mess we leave behind.

They Might Really Be Insane

I sometimes wonder about it, where the exact line is.  It’s hard to say sometimes.   A person can be fully justified, and still insane.  Oversensitive, obsessive- compulsive, “crazed”, psychotic — where the precise line is?  Fuzzy.

You can leaf through the DSM and find every one of your friends, relatives, colleagues.  We’re each the product of long-programmed reactions, prejudices, actual knowledge, fears, suspicions, notions of success and failure, collected tics.  

The actual line is not so bright, that’s all I’m saying.

 

koan

 

The Noble Toble was given the tit,

Griff fought the breast;

it was not offered to the baby.

Fittingly Abstract

The dream dreamed that it was not a dream, unperformed task piled upon undone task til they are all-surrounding, heavy as a bag of wet quilts.  In the old days we wrote these on ribbons many miles long, in long hand, while trains rattled and tramp steamers tramped, people embarked, grim yet hopeful.  

Our mothers were alive back then, given the gifts of long lives, gifts they many times fretted over and complained about.   But when the lights went down, and the orchestra throbbed to life as the stage lights came on, their hearts always soared, giddily gulping air as the vault of the sky opened.

“I can’t hear a melody without someone singing it,” my mother, a lifelong lover of the Opera, confessed one day when I’d been unable to completely hide my dismay that she hadn’t recognized Stardust when I played it on the guitar.  I learned to conceal my dismay out of love, and trying to protect her in some small way.  But sometimes dismay can’t be hidden completely.

“Until I hear the singer start to sing, I really can’t tell what the song is from just an instrumental melody,” she explained.   

I was shocked to learn this (though relieved it was no reflection on my guitar playing), because she sang tunefully.  I’d learned the melody of Mairsy Doats from her renditions in the car, probably Swingin’ on a Star too.   She would join in to sing “I’m An Old Cowhand” til the end of her life, whenever I struck it up on the ukulele.  We sang it for her at her memorial at my father’s grave on that hot summer day in 2011.

My father, also a fair singer, also with poor control of his emotions sometimes, and a tendency to snap, would eventually snap at her from the drivers’ seat with a carping comment and she’d clam up.  My sister and I would continue our battles in the back seat and there’d be a heavy, brutal silence in the car, or the radio would blare news.

Funny, to think how well they both sang, that they always both claimed to have no musical ability.  My father was always self-mocking, self-excoriating, really, when it came to his voice, but had impeccable taste in music and an ear for truly great tunes.  He loved Sam Cooke and Bill Kenney and other soulful singers, and he’d deliver his four or five note riff of each selected killer melody with style, off the beat and perfectly in tune.  He loved the crooners, the hip ones.  I wasn’t surprised to find out after he died that he’d loved Bobby Darin’s singing too.

“I’ll never hear Joe sing again,” my mother cried one night over the phone, when the final chemo was done and it was only a matter of time now before a twenty-three year run of relative good luck with the cancer finally came to a bad end.  Joe came by after I told him that, and we looked through some songbooks.   Picked out any we thought my mother would particularly like, or that otherwise struck us as beautiful.

September Song, Stardust, Are You Lonesome Tonight?  We played through them and a dozen more, Joe reading from the computer monitor as I followed on guitar, reading chord charts penciled into small books.   Put some reverb on us, panned us slightly to get a nice stereo separation, it sounded pretty good.  Then I added a second guitar and, on a few, a little keyboard pad.  Joe was backed by a spare trio, or sometimes a guitar duo.

I brought the CD to Florida, played it over crappy little computer speakers for my mother who was sitting on the couch, off to the side.  She sat through it quietly, smiled a few times, but without great excitement, then smiled again when I asked what she thought.  She said “eh….” and apologized for the disappointment I was feeling, thanked me for the attempt, told me she really appreciated it and how sweet it was of us to try, and all that.  

It don’t remember if it occurred to me to tell her right then to listen to it through her iPod headphones, I’m sure I probably did have her listen to it at least once that way before I left Florida.  I left the tunes on her iPod when I went back to New York.  I spoke to her thirty or more times in the next month with no further mention of the songs.

“Oh, the most amazing thing happened to me before, this afternoon,” she began enthusing in that Bronx way of her’s, many weeks later, “I just heard the most beautiful music on my iPod, I don’t even know how it happened, how it got there.  I was lying on my bed, I put the iPod on and suddenly there was Joe singing!” and she began to kvell, as they say.  

Joe has a great voice and my mother always loved when he’d sing opera to her.   She probably hadn’t heard him singing popular music before and she went on about how beautiful his voice was.

“What did you think of his backing band?” I asked her, when she was done.  She was perfectly happy with them, who were they?

“Me,” I said, casually, told her I was so glad she enjoyed it, reminded her of her first reaction, told her about stereo and the fine sound quality of a properly mixed digital recording through headphones, and we went on to speak of everything else.

 One of the great memories of my musical life.

Delcog III

Here on Delcog III we don’t mess around with pie in the sky, or touchy feeliness either.  Life here is as frightening as it wants to be, and nobody on the planet has any quaint illusions that it could be any different. 

“Oh, yeah, Delcog III, isn’t that a bit lame, sir?” a blunt reader might ask.

“A bit lame, earthling, sure, as lame as you like.  It could not be otherwise, no matter what color glasses you put on, no matter what olfactory filter you dial in.  The air here, for example, you cannot breathe it.  When your tank runs out you will die in four or five agonizing minutes,”  the Delcog looked off indifferently, then went back about its business.

And you wonder, who is the narrator here?  Who is Delcog?  Why am I suddenly part of this story?   Is it true about the atmosphere on “Delcog III”?  Am I living in a fool’s paradise of bottled air, will it run out and will I asphyxiate?

“You may scoff at Deleterious Cognition,” said the Delcog, “you may think it is the same as plain pessimism, or depression, mere expectation of the worst.  But it is more than a passive expectation of the worst, I assure you, my soon to be oxygen deprived friend,” the Delcog gave its version of a smile.  It was as bad as the confident prediction of an agonizing death.  

“Cognition,” continued the Delcog mercilessly, “is a thought process that involves perception, gathering information, digesting it and using it to make informed predictions while assessing various risk factors.  You label it Deleterious and we embrace that label, yes, cognition can be deleterious– to wishful illusion, for one thing.  Your dreams, my friend, they depend very much on your oxygen supply.  I note that you are wearing a four hour tank and that the gauge reads 5%.  Let us do the math together– 50% would be 2 hours of breathing time, or 120 minutes.  5% of four hours, therefore, is a tenth of 2 hours or 12 minutes.  I suppose we can round it down to eleven now.”

You know, I’m thinking I don’t have to take this kind of crap from some pedantic literary invention, yet I stand here, under the winking blackness.  I’m interested to hear what this sick bastard has to say.

“Of course you are,” said the Delcog agreeably, moving seamlessly into the past tense, “instead of making your way back to the ship to replenish your air supply you are listening to me rattle on with breath so bad that, I dare say, if you were not wearing the mask and breathing apparatus you would be unable to stand so close to me.  The ship, by the way, is at least seven minutes from us, so in three or four minutes the point will be as moot, as mute, as the song you imagine you are hearing.”  

The music I hadn’t been aware of swelled thrillingly, and along with it a sense of hope, soaring.  That is one amazing aspect of music I sometimes forget, it can fill you with feeling, sometimes impossible to express except through music.  

“Yes, that’s fantastic,” said the Delcog with a slight smirk, “talk about music, since it is more precious, apparently, than life itself.  It’s kind of funny: choosing music over life, since in the afterlife everybody is deaf.”

Now the Delcog had gone too far.  I was thinking about zapping him with my bop gun, raising some funk and a little sand too.  But what if he was right about the atmosphere being poison for me to breathe?  

“By way of example,” the Delcog said, “and forgetting about your insoluble breathing emergency a few minutes from now, you are writing this instead of working on a business plan, instead of figuring out how to recruit the crucial people that will allow your plan to move forward, instead of working on strategies to network and sell your idea.  Whatever you think about capitalism, baby, you’ve got to raise capital if you want your own business.  The widgets your business will make are no different than any other widgets, they’ve got to be branded, marketed, dressed in short skirts and marched out into the marketplace.  You think you are doing something special since you are ‘nonprofit’.   That’s very funny, if you think about it for a minute.  Oh, I forgot, you don’t really have a minute… that’s a little Delcog III joke… you actually have maybe nine minutes, or, actually, two– to decide to hightail it back to the ship and see if they can get the hatch open in time.” 

It was wearying talking to this guy, but I was already weary.  I got to thinking it was a long shot to make it back to the ship in time to save myself.  The music had stopped, I felt sick, sweaty and claustrophobic in my space suit.  I had to get out of it.  I pulled off the face mask, and, outside of the fartlike smell of the Delcog, who hadn’t been wrong about his breath, the air was very much like the air in a dank basement.  It didn’t smell very fresh, but it was fine to breathe.  I winked at the Delcog and went on my miserable way, shrugging into a long sideways leap in the low gravity of Delcog III.