Double Dippin'

Until I can produce some original Triad material, I suppose I can stick up the writing of the semester that relates most directly to you fellows:

How to Be a Casual Smoker

Do it only when dark runs deep enough to make the cherry matter, let the glow

look like a funeral for a firefly, like a pyre.

Smoke when the streets are singing love songs to the traffic that won't come, smoke like the

last Marlboro man who doesn't know he's out of time.

Don't stand; sit on steps, or stoops, or stain your white washed denim lime and lie in un-mown

grass, make strangers' yards complicit in all your ploys.

Breathe. Stunt your breathing. Now, drink in the contradiction, see those Kamel Reds burn up

and brighten 3 a.m—barren of all but boys.

Do it even though you've never known addiction, do it like a crossword puzzle:

curled up and cozy, wasting/fighting/killing time.

Flick the ash without aiming, let your dust lie where it settles, say a secret prayer

that it might find the strength to start a minor fire.

Ramble On

I've been wanting to write a triad piece this fall. I'm sopping with language. Sloppy in it. But every time I start to freeze parts of it and just chunk into it with my ice pick, it melts away in a great splash and evaporates with a swirling flourish out into the street. Yeah, I live on a street again. The last time I tried to do this I made gifs instead, they're one post back, and a definite copout with respect to the kind of shit I feel I ought to be reflecting on at the moment. My street is chattery, it's weird to pick apart the sound that leaks in through the windows and the walls into its constituents. As far as I have been able to discern, there's no great bird wakeup overlap point in the early morning where I am, relatively near to central park. I haven't gotten up early enough to go to the park and listen yet, but heavy paper season isn't quite here, and I'm still sleeping a lot.

Question: When you wake up in the morning, how do you know if it's rained? My first clue comes before my eyes open, wet paved traffic squelch/sffffft.

Wait, so, yeah, I live on television. Television?! Television. Two blocks down is the Seinfeld diner. I'm plagued by people talking about their Ivy-Leaguedness, as though this particular corner of the beehive/anthill/macroprocessor were clearly peopled by enlightened souls, reeking of destiny and floating gently above the slippery, gritty surface of the earth.

Someone outside is at this moment screaming: "HEEEEYYYY, HEY HEY, HEYYYYYYYYY! I'm NOT IT! WHY YOU CALLIN ME A IT!" She's barely audible over the sound of police and ambulance sirens, and a barbershop chorus of sadistic leaf blowers revving over and over and over at medieval trip stair intervals.

So yeah, it's a television show about …? Not important at this point. Probably not even possible to pin down.

----------------------TWELVEHOURPAUSE------------------------
Last Night: Screaming/Slapping match; Pimp/Ho?; Husband/Wife?
Reading, I heard some commotion, but didn't immediately focus on the loud voices issuing from the sidewalk. The tone rippled my torso from taint to deep guts.
Him: (gravel) … Bitch! You betta gi me what I needa get off, NOW!
Her: whimper, Awright Awright
(presumably she hands him something)
Him: Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?! Thas all you got for me!?
(pauses, then she starts making noise as though being searched/groped)
Her: GET OFFAME! GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF OF ME! AHHHHH! HELLLLLLLLP HEEEEEEEEELLLLLPPPP
(Fades off into indecipherable speech)
Him: (interrupting) OH YOU CALLIN FA HELP NOW? GIMME DAT HIT, BITCH!
(he must be squeezing or menacing or something sinister, because she's freaking the fuck out by this point, hyperventilating)
Her: PLEEEASE OKAY OKAY OKAY, OKAY
(a big pause in the dialogue and i hear her kind of panting, can't see them out the window, tucked under the cafe awning. can't smell crack, suspect he's ingesting somehow)
Him: (almost persecuted) THAT AINT GONNA WORK, SLUT! HOW-MY SPOSA GET OFF LIKE AT? THA WUN'T NO ROCK AT ALL!
(abrupt change, voices under diesel, fading, conciliatory)


So, I was rambling about TV, and how I get the privilege of waltzing around bleeding money into these fancy sets and their nights of heavily creamed blackness. That shit is boring. Yesterday, in Central Park, I saw a group of Native Americans, presumably, playing drums, dancing and having a fire while the sun went down behind the buildings. I was so jealous; couldn't stop looking around at the sunset colors splashing through gaps and into this municipal courtyard.


I want snow - I want the world wrought in bleak potential, wind-scoured and sun-flashed and its soft and malleable bits clinging together for warmth and feeling. How are you guys? I can only hope better than me, as I rack-up vague credentials, tangible debts and monstrously radical theoretical that too often seem hopelessly irreconcilable with, well, seriously? capitalism. How is the future-vision morphing for you both?

Thinking about semeiosis and what it suggests about the capacities of appreciation, mimesis, and memory is something that always loops me back to you guys. Last summer, in terms of what we did together, albeit as mere dyads, was frankly transcendent. Modes of appreciation reembodied, grammars resumed, interpretive chains plumbed, memories re-narrativized. We need to get the rings together - bind ourselves in the swirling grayness, really summon captain planet.

If Rico ever calls me I'll make definite plans for travel - hope to see you both there!

MORE SUMMER GIF TIME

Can't Stop

LAKE AND BAKE