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.