I layed in the sun and felt tired. My eyes were closed. When I opened them, the world was all pale blue--like plastic wrap. My wife wasn't wearing makeup. She said she felt car-sick. She could spin spider webbing around an entire day like this, not a waif of gold in sight.

On Rails

I was running. My car was broken-down behind me. I walked down a little embankment that led down to a dip beneath a massive highway interchange. It appears that the hole in the concrete was somehow etched and drilled through the concrete, and there were blocks of the grey-greenish mortar laying in tapering piles on either side. The little 'roadway' which humbly tucked its head beneath the known world was divited at its base, like the metal on an escalator step, and was muddied by traffic. What kind of traffic? The gap wasn't wide--it would perhaps fit a small pick-up truck-- and not much taller. It was about 3 average car lengths long; this gave me pause. There would be no space to dodge an oncoming car if I were to be caught halfway through. Head on collision with a car. What was the speed limit through the hole? There had not been any discernible speed limit signs or any other posted directional notices for quite some distance along his walk. The world had grown out of physical signage. Eyesores. By now nearly every car had navigation systems I suppose. I ran through the hole. The air was brisk and dank as I ran and reached the other side.

My friend was laying on his side propped up along the thorny wooden edge of a half torn-out cable car, connected to the cab of a semi-truck. He was draped over a strangely comfortable looking muddy-red satin sofa.
"I'm hiding here."
"Who from?"
"There are people who are trying to exact revenge on me."
"What for?"
"Its hard to explain, but you're part of it. If I had any self-respect left, I would have shot you in the head when you popped up from below."
I looked down at my feet. They were ragged looking, what was left of the red and white tennis shoes blended with the trash of old pornographic magazines and soda-cans, yet their image and gentle tremble, sent up a the hopeful and contrary feeling they were still vaguely biological. Unlike the rest of it, they still smacked of humanity.
"How many of them are there?"
"Four maybe five."
"Are they armed? Or should I say, do they have a reason to be armed?"
"They should be, but if they're not that's their fault. I'll rape them and shoot them in the head one by one."
"What is it about me that you think I'm involved?"
"You know what it is you were supposed to become, and you fell though on your duty to that fate. You're simply a conscientious-objector and not with any moral rationale. It's just that you see the perfection of fulfilment and you're trying to muddy it, as if you could bar-up the doors and barricade yourself against its fulfilment to break the line. Are you just curious--Do you want just to see the springs and bolts and conveyor belts inside the God-machine which would take you otherwise so inperceptively towards the goal, but now have to work ever so hard to take you from one side of the map to the other?"
"It gives me character. Also I don't want unwarranted attention."
"Unwarranted? I think what you're thinking is that this fate which I have correctly divined for you is actually some mutated form of parental expectations or some such self aggrandizing predilection; the instinct trending towards power and wealth and entropy. I'm telling you that you should be doing God's work, not your own. "
"If it's attention that I deserved to have anointed on my head as a result of work I had done for myself and by myself, then I could want it and enjoy its many advantages. Yet this is not the kind of attention we're talking about Chris."
We walked together, me with my ragged shoes and Chris with his insanity and green stripped turtleneck into the 'interior'... some kind of shack made up of boxcars semi-trailers on four sides and above a patchwork of brightly colored tarps tied dripping and flapping against their bearings. The wooden slat walls and smashed black steel door ajar at the entrance gap was the only part which was imprinted with the idea of human construction. It's wooden slats let in grey city light, and a smashed black steel door knocking against a rusted open deadbolt with an unsteady pulse of KONG, GONG, KONG-------KONG . The rest was just arrangement. Wire and tube wheels laid prostrate on their sides with bedding materiel and sawd piled on top for comfort. It was an elegant hovel when it came down to it. Grass flooring here, sanded plywood flooring there. No glass or screws or parts of screws to embed painful angry wounds or tetanus into Chris's foot and body.

We waited there in the semi-exposure, in the oasis for three days. On the third day a family came bobbing like fire in an open red and yellow jeep. A mother, a father, two daughters, one about twenty the other semi pubescent. The man opened up the door. He wore a tall boxy red trucking hat. We let them all in. "Nobody's here" the silence said, "Abandoned" the steel door agreed. Chris staged from behind the slatted wall in front of them, jumped and threw himself at the father with an aluminum bat, the presence of which had been hidden from me. He smashed the man in the head knocking off the hat in a swift, diagonal convincing burst of mad contortion, then slumped over the unconcious man, now lumped flat, in the shape of a lambda. The women were not panicked. They were lined up.

My wife sent me on a relaxation trip to New York city with a camera. The metro system looked down on turn of the century brownstones and apartment complexes. In one small hovel two elderly eastern-orthodox Russian ladies with brightly colored scarves wrapping their sagging face like over-ripened fruit, spoke in small puffs of white breath--they passed by in a high pitched scream of the steel rails, oiled and hot. I passed an architectural masterpiece covered in brown winter creeping vine, and reached for my pocket in a burst of energy in search of my camera, but the beauty had passed by the time I had the little machine operating. Little towers of brown-red brick and spotty brown and green vine with thissles of grass growing on small ledges and rooftop gardens gave this part of the city a warm countenance. 

Sickness, and mind's rest breaks out in a cold sweat. I cannot stand the smell, the stench that sickness breeds in bloated sickly bowels, and shots of bacterial fumes puff, puff out of a dumb, hemorroidal sphincter, ruining the crispness of fresh air. Maybe in Japan dead plants stink like this--Oe Kenzaburo is always keen to describe the foul aura created by detrital plant matter. At least in this arid-super-arid environment, these shots of methane are the worst thing I can think of smelling. I'm sure this is the scent of death--separated by incidental shifts in a state-of-being, like the difference between pig and pork. One is reminded of how the body is a vulnerable sack of flesh and reticulated nerves wrapping bones and blood vessels---it's a wake-up call; moreover it's a call to action. 

The faux-wall door on the white tile shower wall led to a parking garage where Chris was waiting with a tall monster. They ran in circles. I wanted to ride the water-log ride that took me on a tour of the high-rise theme-park in the dusty hills.

Why did he wake me up? I did not want to process this order so late at night. I grabbed the throbbing bottle of kerosine and sprayed the stuff on a stack of paper and then on myself--I lit it up, all of us together.


::The Long and Winding Road::

Weeds on the ridgeline. Twilight. Empty provencial homes. Passing Storms.

Its sad. I see the dreamscape, but I cannot deliver on its promise. I just want to press the GO button. I just want it to explode and send sparks of shrapnel thudding into my dumb face and head. I want it to jerk me up like a steel wire on my wrist connected to a rocket. I want to lick and smell the future. I've felt dead for a while now. When will I recieve the next coordinates, the new line of attack?

Something to be given even? I'm not quite sure. I sort-of believe in fate, because I could see the lines of possibility so clearly once. A moment of clarity. Extacy; the future, they intertwined in a rare moment of bodily perfection. Complete equilibrium. Nowhere I'd rather have been.

I have begun to agree with the naysayer POVregarding recreational drug use, and specifically marijuana. Its simply mind numbing, and nothing could really compare to the all-natural dopamine that dripped into an alert mind at just such an instance, a passing point, a wave of temporal digestion fruit.

Tora Tora Tora

Crew Cut and I sat on wooden benches inside of a rusted out garbage bin at a turn in the mountain pass. The side of the garbage bin opposite of the road was broken at the hinges and open to the forest, providing a strange rusty-framed vantage for the eye's journey down the various steppes of the pass as it dropped in noticeable gradients like a shading scale or broken staggered piano keys. The distance decreased between steppes, the action of an imperfect collidescope, some architect, we saw this all clearly here from our metal nest twirling down into the predawn black. I imagined seeing camels and a grotesque band of draped nomads fluttering somewhere in the void. We switched about looking though a leather and brass telescope.

With a sudden flurry of movement from his otherwise still body, Crew Cut alerted me to the appearance of a green column of Russian tanks and personnel carriers which were rapidly approaching our location at the bend in the road from behind the bulge in the mountainside. The men were walking beside the tanks, and began reconnoitering the area presumably for IEDs and RPG/sniper teams. Their canteens, ammo packs and various other, black-shaded hanging regalia clinked and popped loudly. The men now behind us, behind our rusty metal sheath, were marked by frequent audible signs of exhaustion, a fact which only increased the numbing fear in my head. Our garbage bin was a prime target for a security sweep. We had come prepared, however, with the disguises of homeless men, papers from the nearby town for Bruskehbki to use as shitting fodder, vodka, a pair of man-sized cardboard boxes and so on. After dispatching the appropriate signals, we quickly disassembled our radio equipment, and piled the "trash" into a plastic deli bag along with drying cured meats and packets of soy marinade. Instead of staying silent--we decided to call their bluff and appear roaring drunk.

We were being held at gunpoint. Crew Cut started up in dance and they shot him in the belly and cracked him in the skull with rifle-butts. He's not breathing regularly---forcefully. Now and then his body pulsates and blood red sloppy vomit slides out of his mouth off his face between vollies of foamy white convulsions. He's dead and his eyes are empty now--this struggle is just for show...I cry as I wipe the bloody vomit from his chin with a moth eaten, filthy sock.

I see her from outside a metal gate locked by grey handcuffs. My wife and I are waiting, bloodied for her as we cry for help--we wonder if she will help or if she will shoo us away, knowing the harm we could be carrying with us.

Image

Lights flashing on skiffs in the bay, and the rain pelts the waves in sheets. 

Concrete tunnels, lights flashing at the top of radio towers to ward-away low flying aircraft. 

The world may end when the supercollider is used on wednesday. 

dorm, cabins, campus warrens

My wife is in an etiquette class--she learns in cabins how to properly sit, eat, jump, back flip, tour and exercise. I watch her troupe back flipping in a cabin. Later I see her with a tour group--Japanese taking pictures of the lake front, as I'm driving out of the campus, through the woods and beneath a grey overpass.

The open doorways of neighboring dorms. Televisions on--the hive, the collective. Our family eats out at a nearby country ballroom diner. Other families have paid for private, closed rooms, while our table is semi-private, and shared with one other family opened to the hallway. Its Christmas dinner.

Our new house has four sets of stairs--each of which diagonally crosses the other, and is too long...I guess this is the appeal, but my dad and I comment on the stupidity of the arrangement. The new house is an investment house, and will pay off later despite appearances.

My father is sick in the bath tub--naked and keeled over, I try to comfort him--the feeling of things approaching their end.

Convention

His wife looked at books on the shelf as I observed her in glances. Out of earshot, her husband--unshaven hair crawling down his neck and up his nose, talked about short skirts and warm weather. A pendant for a politician hung blinking dumbly around his neck. A blank individual with a German last name...a someone or a nobody; probably both.

Numb-Leg

The nurse, speaking like a newscaster about my infection. A scrape in the middle of the affected area is bubbling at the core with watery blood, the round edges caramelizing with coagulant.
She begins plying at the outer ring of the infection, like a block of otherness lodged in with living flesh. Using a small dental probe, she etches into the side of this block wedging it out--Her index and middle finger are the fulcrum.
"Can You feel it" She asks puzzled, with the apparent ease of a Nazi eugenicist who's simply curious--lifting out the dead block. The Parasites inside of the block of flesh had made their nexus in that part of my leg--I see the earwax yellow residue honey-combed and broken as the nurse lifts out the main portion--The moon white of my shin bone stands out. I still feel nothing to indicate that a chunk is missing from my leg, save for the disgust and a throbbing numbness.

Life v.2

Wipers wash water drops distorting vision, flattening it back out to consistancy. I arrive here, at my place of work.

A nun was shot through her large fast food wax-gilt cup. She didn't realize she'd been shot until I pointed out the gunshot wound.

cracking slowly through the carapice. Reality dripping and globbing, the colors swirling in tight coils like goopy oil paint sticking to itself.

Living the life---Contained in it is the code of the maintained life that shoots up through the human-being’s back like the spinal chord; and segmented just the same. The human animal—this is conventionally refers to an authors sense that this idea is somehow ironical, which it clearly isn’t—is the driving force for all human action, and interaction. Art is sex, art is bodily hunger art is nerve ending disturbances, and left-over dream-cake. Life is also—as all things left to themselves for a great long time—cluttered, an absolute mess of images, feelings and sparks of empty-train inspirations, waiting for you to board. Who’s conducting? Where’s it headed—why are there so few on board (besides this woman in a black hat, and the teenage-baseball-boy in the next compartment)? So much of life is rooted in the fear that the living life might be hurt or pulverized in the train. Spiders down a secret tunnel, crawling, biting, laying eggs on the forearm—infection, abscess, gangrene, amputation, sepsis, death.

I knew enough about the destination to know it was not likely dangerous to my life. One can often see the habitable, nesting inertia of the longer life necessitates the hammer- smash of little jaunts such as this. I drink cranberry juice; the sun doesn't set as the aircraft travels with the day across the ocean--so I pretend, looking through the glass, and the warped fellow travelers, bloated male-flight-attendant, Sky-Mall Magazine Text--blazing red like auxiliary power on a submarine. Cleaning my fingernails. My shoes are uncomfortable. The man sitting next to me asked if I work for a famous IT company; I don't.

Everson

I Wrote This a While Ago:

The death of Everson was expected. His father died the same way. Sleepless nights and half conscious days, he drifted along until his death caught up with him—nothing dramatic. He was standing on a dirty side street, with Coke cans and cigarette butts choking up the sewer drains. Greasy uneven bricks surrounded him, and the recesses of the broken tenement house windows made him feel like he was in a soggy bird-cage. An immigrant boy sat on a green knoll behind a waist-high chain-link fence in front of one such house. With his drippy nose and scant clothing, the boy was like a fixture—more like the bricks than like me Everson thought. As he admired the boy’s head with its crew cut and sanguine unknowing expression, Everson began to die. The pain itself was not all that great. It was rather like feeling his body go to sleep—like a creeping nothingness. The pop which could have rendered him unconscious, instead greatly distorted his sight. The boys head blew up like some repugnant circus balloon. Confusion at this sight together with a diminished sense of equilibrium caused him to crash instinctively to the ground whaling like a stabbed animal. The man tried abortively to escape his confusion, as if waking up from all nightmares was practice for this moment. Slipping into his coma, he began to give up and make peace with the nothingness, as all dying things must do—in this regard Everson was certainly a pragmatist: if going with the flow meant less pain for him, then why fight it?
Everson was not an important man. His life was middling

Ice Water

Everything depends so very much on ones state of mind. Even a belch can be sensuous to observe, whilst in the midst of undulating gentle pleasure-pangs of a tired afternoon bowel movement. This goes for gum chewing, and apple biting as well. Sometimes it is a natural bodily function which delivers one to the happy role of defenseless observer--alternately one could have finished ones own lunch, only to be completely drawn-in by a classmate girl's periodic, coquettish little sips from a soda can. The variables of these moments, these human vantages, are infinite, but there is some structure which is important to note--1) The human warmth 2) Digestion 3) Pheromones 4) Mono no aware. The fifth idea, that of vulnerability is never more important than during these reveries, for one could be swept up by a broom, shot by an intruder. The feeling is rather like what one imagines is felt by the struggling anaconda after it has eaten a puma or a jackass, laboring in a grassy estuary hoping not to be caught hiding with its secret digestion, its secret pleasure locked in its head and in its gut, utterly cognisant of the impossibility of escape from those who might seek it out to slit its guts and release its pleasure---either way this prize cannot be held onto forever.

There is a special sound as I sit here in the study with the window opened near. Resonance--a sort of buzz-ring, created by distant cars with their spinning tires, overnight road construction projects, the amalgam of AC fans, late night baseball game skylight generators, 757 aircraft engines---All cutting into the air, slicing it, crushing it, pushing it, sending it retreating in all directions in effeminate clearish purple curly-locks of turbulent micro eddies cracking and whipping, crying, complaining. The battle is far off, sound pillowed-over by distance and obstructions, brown-painted fences, generic aluminum siding, awkward children at play in roller skates on the road slowing traffic, sometimes nearly dying, for games.

Practice. We started giving names to each tooth. One was a porcelain dental implant so was it's neighbor. We like not to think of the screws and cement bonding them to our maxiofacial bones, and for now at least, gum tissue does the job of disguising the complex, sharp, alien infrastructure. One interesting phenomena concerning these teeth is that since they bond directly to the bone, there is no give. A normal tooth can sway 1/4 of one millimeter in either direction without causing the least discomfort-these teeth are hemmed in by a feeling of tautness--they are pulled in and tied neatly then cushioned by bone meat. Normal teeth can also 'feel' the rough surface of the tongue running over them, glazing and cleaning them. The porcelain teeth can jostle against their screw anchor, but the anchor itself is completely stationary--this feeling of inescapable stillness combined with the general bulging shape of the artificial tooth along its rear (as they're designed to prevent the introduction of foreign particles into the makeshift gum-sockets) leave the sensation of a blankness, a vaccuum; the small death-penalty: Two gravestones. In short these porcelain teeth felt like death; Immutable and unnatural. Rocks around which there swirl the liquid complaisancy of life spreading around them--life made to adapt, to swell and create new, albiet auxilliary, models for subsistance.

There is a restaurant where the cows come before you, just like lobster in the tanks, before they are sloughtered for your dinner. The cow is lead before you by the tall French chef's-attendant. You see your soon-to-be dinner as it lives--A lazy dumb, fat, drooling, terrified--simply delicious creature. The walkway is a clean steal one. The tables are situated around the walkway as if this were a fashion show. This is not so different from a fashion show. The lights are all pink red, and the floors, square pillars and ceilings are black. The design is clearly meant to echo and inspire in one the creuel machinations of the sloughterhouse, though tasefully softened by the eleganty festooned company and the perfessional slim-fit service, the lightglobes, the did-up faces all turning and eyeing the prey; hands shuffling between smoke, heads bobbing in silence then variously instigating muffled constipated little bouts of excited discussion. The cow ambles by and turns at the end in a half-moon. Anus showing behind tail, urine dripping. This thing is alive and is slowly, calmly (calmer now) lead back to its death-room--each shadow dances in and out of pink globe light, a spotlight for each conspirator taking turns to sign up--eyes turning (and cow eyes turning) shooting around aiming for others' enlistment, seeking the collective approval--the carnivalesque courtliness of the Killing. It's screaming.

My father and sister had me in the back seat of the car. My sister always wanted to be my mother, and I imagine she saw this as her chance. The road branched to an off ramp which led up over the green strata of deciduous trees which had caged us. I knew this was a wrong turn, and I told my father this, but he was headstrong. Realizing he was wrong, the car parked in a rocky-high parking lot on the edge of a ridge overlooking the highway and the ramp-exit. Looking to the the side opposite the highway one could see a bay, the land curving and forming a calm u, with black jetties like the jaw-bone of the mouth and tow-boats bobbing like loose teeth at the inlet.

Back on the highway, the grade increased and we reached the apex of the island; a vantage from which we could observe both sides of the island. The windward portion side had evidently been carved by wind and water to a much greater extent. We drove down on a road, which as far as I could tell, was attached to a cliff-wall. The mall was nestled at the bottom there beyond the range of discernibility. On the road we encountered a scenic rest area, where a Japanese man and his little girl were in the middle of the road, taking pictures of a sprawling canyon road spread before us like a great frozen flame.

At the mall we looked at fossilized crabs, walking chickens made of blocky plastic, boxes of talking dolls, and an antiquated television/stereo set from the early 1980's. At the mall movie theatre they showed previews of an upcoming Lucas detective fiction/noir movie; all dressed up in satin red and blue, clouded light-globes and cocktails party and punctuating 1920's gunshots. We walked on. The mall was expansive.

The light-buzzing numbness of the after flight dehydration--the sodium food and low air pressure plugging the intestines and bloating the soft-tissues. The reanimation of constricted muscle-groups poisoned by alcohol and lack of sleep. The want the need the pain of piss passageways, stinging from piss rationing.

Being called stupid, being called foolish, childish, head in the clouds. Watching the faces of deformed, listening to their demands, pretending not to hate their blemishes, scars of anxiety, burn victims patchwork hands, pressing small-change into them with average handed bravado--perhaps bad luck comes to those who touch these hands--Smiling back at the lip less, feigning personal connection with the fuckability of those who could afford gleaming strait orthodontic lines aside from all else. Realizing she works in a Liquor store beside a discount market beside a slumping commercial oriented knitting supplies and RU-486 byway. She didn't check my ID, which is strange considering that people ID me going into porn shops, and I'm 23. I'm strange like her she likely mused--the camaraderie of the strange faced--We're I to see myself as being considered a compatriot with this one, when I was 10 I would be horrified and demand to know what was wrong.

A childhood friend once told me that if he could have one wish granted, he would like to see himself as he would appear in 10 years. I thought that a very strange wish at the time. I find the thought stranger now that he is a stranger to me...a darker, more sadistic, and driven to given to the rockets of home-house-marriage and brown leather loafer old boys club, brass and fern bars, on the happy periphery of ivy leage regalia, confused biologically--wanting to kill the mother, friends with the sister above the mother type.

Green room, green darkness. A massive pillow, wrapped in plastic, green and red with a Greenbay Packers logo...Made to look like a brick of cheese. Friend convinces me to mix it with my thoughts of starships, attacking me in my face with plastic models exploding for 70's pre-programmer age nerds, finding ways to invent the ways they would waste their time, smocked in hawaiian shirts, curly long hair and bearded, unlike me (evermore). They WASTE thier time with beauty these guys. They WASTE their time with perfecting (to what end anyway?). THEY LEARN TO COMPLETE THE RUBIC'S CUBE IN LESS THAN 45 SECONDS, FROM ANY POSITION. I Tell their girlfriends "I WANT YOU DEAD" in so many words, throwing friesbees above razorsharp steel clotheslines for them to cut their own heads off at catching. Heads toppled down from egos presuming to teach me about the mores, muddy formation off the coast of Ireland; fucking bitch stupid erudite clumsy dork fucks aborting their clever oversensitive bs out of existance thankfully.

Eye Shot.

The idea that one can really capture a moment, the idea that this can be put away, stuck in amongst cured meats and digitized photo albums, is the idea who's actualization is desired greatly. For instance, on purple night A Soldier rides on a horse into a clearing and sets his sights on a lonely group of peasant farmers, for whom practice at mating thoughts of pink/white breasts are all consuming---he rides quickly, becomes somewhat disoriented by strange flashing lights in his periphery, and hopes the villagers natural aversion to travelers down this road and distaste for generally hurried/tawdry/emergency/non-imagined encounters will prevent their foreknowledge of death from above--The soldier is well on his way, when two plastic men translucent heads and plastic red LED light shines through nicely like laser pointers through a lump of wet sugar, jump out from behind Soldier---must have been waiting, cocked, for just this situation they spring---Each discharges their rifle weapon just a nanosecond apart from the other (the machine plastic men don't believe it is seconds, in fact belief systems are of no importance, because no records are held, history is deleted, and commands are brought forth and that is all. Note: the plastic men are vessels) blowing the soldier mans left eye out of his skull along with a deadly portion of his brain, chunks a solid black spray, which when slowed down could be syrup but at high speed remains solid black--a long enough interval, the command master hoped, for the soldier to take note of half the previously useful targeting instruments becoming the slop-shot (dead soil detritus) black shrapnel, the result of being targeted in turn. Now the idea comes into play--The two shots' trajectory can be traced with dotted glass lines (this should conjure up visions of mothers dipping thermometers into oral cavities, anuses, urethras) in a grey clay, electronic model which uses as it's basis a set of photos shot at THE DEFINING MOMENTS of the lead up (prepositioned Polaroid cameras shoot the change of expression on Soldiers face along his path which was predetermined by youths masturbation, line of attack, camera placements in conical linear formation tapering towards the youths--from that face of expectation, to doubt, mouth slackening, nothingness sets in to death, to SEEING THE FAILURE-the result of death, the idea that death comes inevitably between some mundane command and its completion, the command falling blankly like an anonymous orgasm, in the trash. Pictures also relate the change in color from frame to frame---the Polaroid cameras of the third interval are tripped to set off flares, igniting a half-ring of red-flash powder that etches the frontal boundary and highlights the Soldier-man focal-point; The results are conclusive.
We circle around this future dark black world in tramways. Disturbingly a man shows me to his closet in which he reveals there is a faux wall---he pulls the barrier away to reveal further a set of wood-plank stairs leading up to the blue light of a narrow transom portice. A skyline of future dark-black-world, its islands, factories, and soggy forgotten parking lots. Is it still an Ariel view if that view is connected structurally to the ground by solids? If the world was moving in fast-motion and I was normal-speed, would my hand rip from my body if I were to catch a baseball? I point at the man who I'm looking at now from the the bottom of the stairs at the barrier of the secret room. He and three friends are curious of my opinions. I sign at them a gun with my fingers, and move my thumb to signify I'm Killing You.

Mother and Father took me to the Olympics. I was worried we were parked too far away from the Olympic stadium to trace a path, but we parked on a hill and it offered us the perfect vantage--the hard part would be getting back to the car. The opening festivities began, below the overlook, Red People on stilts clamoured together like autumn maples in the wind. We FORGOT THE CAMCORDER--it's like going to the picnic and forgetting the basket of food! Elise urges me to compete in the relay event--but I find out its an obstacle course (like so many traps, there's usually a fail safe measure built in; a zip line leading out of the castle spire, to a nearby museum window.) I am intent on escape, but Elise and her Nazi-shaved athlete devils insist on forcing my hand--so I stop her behind me--she's below a ship piston swinging down in accordance with its design and command--precipitously-- pounding flat Elise's slender frame, disorganizing, cracking it so fast as to spray living goo on my shins (It suffocates me, this writhing sheath of death ejaculate, reminiscent of happening on to a sandpiper's nest and crushing its fertilized eggs in my naked palm; sharp shell skin; recycled glass mosaic). Watching it in the museum theatre, horror-flick catches my attention, but not for long enough to assuage the inertia of some more pressing pet-fascinations.

Hurricane into Avalanche

My mother is holding me coddled between her legs and hugged in her arms, me facing out. We're on a ship--a black iron tanker--that's struggling to stay afloat, in a powerful, rotating storm at sea. We are surrounded by an armada of ships in a staggered line all going the same direction. We move with the divoted waves in such a way, one could say we are surfing with the grain. Our ship captain, realizing that we are sinking, decides to aim our ship against the grain, into bubbling, watter-slapping stomach turning rushes of seawater, in search of the eye of the storm--a place where we might seek shelter, temporarily--perhaps waiting out the worst of the storm, and at least allowing us to gain the upper hand in bailing water. The waves turn to blasts of snow, coral reefs into exposed rock, seeking shelter becomes slipping downhill at high speed, the caps of waves are transposed onto the image of snowy mountain peaks---escaping downhill. Escape Wyoming, and pissy overflowing urinals eddies swimming with brown hairs of chew, worm eaten hand soap--holes in your hands---looking in the mirror, wiggling a front bottom tooth swaying it to rip the root, the root pulling back with tenuous small losing forces, the hippo that's eaten slowly and strangely without complaint--blood? Little blood.

...

Sitting at a restaurant just opening. Not a regular time for eating, nobody here. I'm a child, I can't be older than 9. I sit at the bar--the waitress, Japanese, thin, hair in bun, must believe I'm here with my parents somewhere in the mall--that this is our rallying point. The black leather bar stool is rounded at the back like a carved out black bean. So here at this restaurant where understandably I'm not hungry, at Rally Point ALPHA, when a normal time to eat is certainly not now, I decide to order a salad--a mango salmon salad--Appetizer? How about a house salad--yes with deluxe french dressing. People start coming in. Perhaps I'm attracting them.

Kobo's Stance, Position, Angle.

Japan Today Discussion September 26, 2006

Topic: Japanese Swimmer A---- M--------- goes missing while swimming off the coast of Brazil.

(The requested article has expired and is no longer available. Any related story, discussion and/or links provided below)

User Comments (1)

"So, in fact, he may not have disappeared while swimming; he may have disappeared while walking (i.e. been kidnapped)." Comment provided by B---------

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A short respite from slow-rhythmic flapping, sickening now, rubbing swollen tortured underarms with hands now dry wells, devoid of oil, each crease painfully registering with each clinch. A man in the middle of the ocean mused on one of the few tactile concepts left to him: the relativity of warmth. The contusions here close to the arm pit warmest, shoulder cooler, water cooler still and temperature dropping. Near zero visibility below the surface presented the man with a more painful mystery. Dipping one's head in below, there is a faint mauve cushion of light undulating with the wavelet triangles, but descending further there is pitch blackness. Was it slag-sediment flowing in with ebbing twilight tides, snaking its way from some offshore geothermal hot spot? The clicking and ambient rushing of sand (or was it some dark entity employing echolocation?) kept time below. The unknowables terrifying--sensation of human hair, wool even, brushing against ultra-cognisant thighs--awaiting the death, puncture of the skin--skin thus rendered the flimsy first and only line of defense in this soupy black brine. Could creatures adapt to this filth, or--as he hoped--would they swim clear of this area during blackout conditions. He imagined himself amidst cracks of thunder wielding the closet flashlight--beam searching for matches candles and pewter candlesticks--for fun usually--the city blackout always provided a chance to light candles and not out of necessity (city light pollution almost always painted these fronts of precipitation see-through melange; tamed by electric man; impotent, effects to be mitigated, terror only of the ancients, a passing spectacle).

To be lost with no hope of return. Lost and engulfed in some damn impossibly frightful liquid mass tasting of buckwheat and salt-brine--simply clay sediment brushed up by an offshore tropical depression? A possibility, yes--Always. Nothing in sight of course. At a point when he wished he could resign himself to death, he was stuck in circular pangs of the will to re-trace the origins of his predicament---the static held suspended in it shards of causation. At exactly 5:03 P.M. A------ had left his luxury suite at the new Dolphin Hotel--a day which now seemed to lose definition in this exhaustion; the mind as runny egg (had he actually been in this soup for 2 days or just one, had the drugs he had taken caused this--he did recall two sets of hands that were not his throttling his underarms, causing this swelling, rubbing the swelling--I thought salt brine took away pain. Maybe just the pain of cuts--Right, right--shark bite victims lose sensation of their lacerations almost immediately due in part to the numbing effect of salt-water. Supposing I cut into the flesh here (pointing at tortured under-flesh, rusty purple now in correct lighting he's sure), I could sleep easily--perhaps shrug this ringing state of annoyance.

Falling with Kobo Abe through his Kangaroo Notebook

Kobo's protagonists are real. They eat and sleep and shit mixed in with everyone--mostly unaware of the super-majority of people that are likewise unaware of them. Kobo's idea of hell is related to this idea of anonymity. In Stick, a Kobo short story, a man becomes a stick--he is relegated to the role of the observer (so common in Kobo's work--this idea of relegation, impotence, kanashibari, a man staring out from behind a one way mirror).

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Japan is a place so rife with objects, the rims of it lit up by such garish bright neon Kanji, radioactive fallout, girls day--it isn't surprising that a man such as Kobo or his protagonists are forced by means of a naturalistic inclination (at maintaining the self, a self unchanged-- pure in its unitary sufficiency; views held by conception, genetically in an unavoidably, predictably, appropriately minor proportion of the human population) to grow sick in view of cosmopolitan life--a perpetual motion machine fused with a positronic brain--fastened with today's 'refinements' pearl inspired yeast disinfection applicators, live organ transplant, particle accelerator awash in ultra-pure water, suicide machines, Oscar Awards. Indeed sickness would appear to be Kobo's temple. As far as cosmopolita is concerned, sickness is a perfectly logical rationale in forgiving a man's desire for isolation. The desire may be innate (at which point Cosmopolita decries it as unforgivable, backward 'hiding' from the 'truth' Cosmopolita claims to possess--but these offenses are of less concern to Kobo's protagonists. It's not that Kobo sees his men as gratified by non-cooperation--they're as sadly perplexed as anyone would be weathering a winter storm in only their socks as they observe a dinner party taking place through the frosty windows of a warm cottage (and all the jovial participants are staring right at you).

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There is a point which needs to be taken up with feminist theory here--The male escape fantasy. Traditionally this contains the image of a married man--the man who by virtue of having conquered that woman, having seen the top of the mountain, has no where to go but back down, to see what lies beyond women. It is a conceit of feminism to presume woman (the symbol) holds such distinct, shall I say King-making power over the whole of manhood. It is an aggressive blubbering attempt at claiming ownership of not only men's desire on average to copulate and create progeny, but also by association their aim at creating those things which lie beyond corporeal nesthood of women. Kobo's men have a male escape necessity. Their situations away from the nest, observing the nest, observing those who oblige the nest with nestmaking prowess, noting the repetition, but crucially noting the separation--the impossibility of reattainment, consecration--flicked painfully by a callous nurse the non-understanding penis engorged by an erection plunged at the urethra, and bleeding, through a plastic catheter. This is Kobo's man.

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Circular on rail traps. The environments---The topic for the next idea. Stay tuned.