What Are You Talking About?

Specifically during the past election, I would get forwarded insanely childish and partisan propaganda chain letters. One thing that I noticed on a few of them was the signature of the original author, furiously pointing out the clear, obvious injustice of having to press 1 for English. This is Amurca, durnit! Speak English! Which, at the same time, made me think of the quote, don't know by who, that says Great Britain and the US are two nations divided by a common language. I could make other references, such as uproars over Ebonics, use of the word "dude," or the great-great grandson of Francis Scott Key getting mad that the National Anthem was sang in Spanish. You get the gist.

But I was reading a blog today which had this little tidbit:

‘‘Physitions teache that there ben thre kindes of spirites,’’ wrote Bartholomew Traheron in his 1543 translation of a text on surgery, ‘‘animal, vital, and naturall. The animal spirite hath his seate in the brayne called animal, bycause it is the first instrument of the soule, which the Latins call animam.’’

Do you know how many of those words are, right as I type this, being underlined in red for their incorrect spelling? Given all the old texts we have access to (and that, in the case of English, a language that is not the oldest in the book) how in the world does someone defend their own language as being correct? A math equation, sure, I can understand someone sticking to that, but pronunciation and spelling? They're just a play on words. How can someone be so stuck as to believe that the rest of the world speaks incorrectly? Especially since they will most likely claim they're defending history and tradition, two things that language is infamous for making a mockery of. Even further, if this person believes that their way of speaking is the correct one, why aren't they using it better?

I really found the word "bycause" interesting because (ha!) it makes so much more sense than the word just in front of my parenthetical laughter. Why did something happen? By cause of... But to say something happen be cause of... makes no sense. Yet that's how it is. Lazy tongues, bad ears, and ethnocentrism have shaped language far, far more than any grammar books. The latter of those three has shaped culture far more than anything else period. Just ask the Aztecs.

We should revamp Ellis Island, we don't ask for enough. Gimme accents, slangs, slurring contractions and action. If someone doesn't speak your language, how do you know they're wrong?

Hold it Up

If someone knew they would get away with a bank robbery but still wouldn't do it, I would never date that person. That sort of integrity rarely leads to honesty, at least not the kind I like.

There's a guy, his name doesn't matter, and his claim to fame is that he's always flat out truthful. Blunt about it. "I'm looking at your breasts," seemed to be his most common thing to admit, or at least something physical/sexual in nature. Which is fine, it's what I'm thinking about most of the time, too, but why is it that bare honesty always seems to revolve around admitting something sexual? Are there things we lie about more than sex, or how often we're thinking about it, or how we'd really like to be having it? I'm sure there are, but at the same time I'm not so sure. I think that, to some degree, it's the easiest type of thing to admit. There are some aspects/secrets that people genuinely don't want to tell, but sex never seems to be in that category, who isn't dying for that perfect social situation where everyone is TOTALLY DISHING about how hot it was and what could've made it hotter. It's pretty fun.

Sexual taboo is, at best, a white lie. We seem to be dovetailing away from the Victorian modes of "chastity," which only served to create new, far more intense fantasies and a handful of effective putdowns (i.e. bastard). Why it is we hate our own behavior I'll just never know, there are so many other ways to be obsessed with sex, but some people can't seem to get enough of what they hate. But I suppose it makes sense. Even if people are doing something you absolutely abhor, there's still (or at least should be) a part of you that's insanely jealous that they're doing it, and noting inspires jealousy like the sex you're not having.

I'm looking at your breasts.

Premium

Human lives are supposedly priceless, so we don't try to value them, just give them up. I think the reason we don't actually calculate the figure is that if we actually found out how valuable some lives are we'd have a hell of a time trying to get them insured.

Afterthought

I mean, think about it, all the good and holy people out there, how could they know of their own saintliness had not every evil thought in the world at one point entered into their mind? Evil is a stranger to no one's mind. If you wonder just how cruel a human can be, look no further than yourself. You'll get there someday.

Hey, don't worry, it goes for niceness, too.

Asshole.

Really Swell

As CA looked down at the ground, he couldn't help but project what he saw in his head, and he could see it just as clearly as if it was being projected. This was a talent of his. He knew of others who had sponges for brains, whose eyes would search the landscape for any trace of filth or indecency, and they would soak it all in, saturate that little sponge they kept up there, and when their head was full with more reality than they could bear, they would wring the sponge until all the shit came flying out of their mouths. A wider arc of disbelief than there was before. How worthless to only collect the things you despise, and even more worthless still to force them on unwitting strangers.

He wasn't careful about what entered into his head at all, he wanted to think about everything. The trick is to always keep enough clean water in your body to dilute the toxins that will inevitably seep in. In his head, which served as a recycling facility for what he had seen each day, he would sort out what mattered, what was beautiful, and what fascinated. Anything that didn't suit him, he tossed aside. For those who believed in rights and wrongs, why did they bother trying to keep track of them? Wasn't there someone waiting at the end who was already doing a much better job of it? Certainly the point of the mountains was to so distract us from good and evil that we might accidentally meander into neutrality. Why have no landscapes been canonized? These things he would hold up within his head, in front of the light that shone from his eyes, and he would project it out for all to see, so that they could know there were still plenty of good films out there, so many objects just dying for a private screening. His eyes are projectors of the most whimsical matinee if you'll only sit and watch.

Come Out Clean

If I could give you one phrase that will make your life as easy as possible:

"It didn't mean anything."

My Basket

Chad had a few water pistols in the balloon, a huge heap of blankets, some decent whiskey, sake, and port, some ginger ale, no tools whatsoever, thirty feet of rope, vegetarian beef jerky, fine silk thread, a few DVDs of M*A*S*H, his laptop and a few spare batteries, a pair of exceptional headphones, four speakers mounted to the steel bars connecting the basket and balloon, a lovely scarf, a picture a friend had painted him, paper, pens, glue sticks, a poncho, and a sack of Italian pastries.

Height 2

What happens when you wonder about the rest of your life every day? Those with a fairly long commute know the answer to that one. But wondering about your life while you're thousands of feet up in the air is very different from wondering about it on the ground, we're still talking about height. You can see farther. You can't see any clearer, but the distance is there and it is difficult for this not to have some effect on your mind. If you are with someone significant, it is something quite beautiful. If you are alone then you will feel even more so. Down there, there's only so much empty space you can see, and there's nothing to gauge it relative to. But up here it's not like that at all. Up here is like watching all the ribbons fall out of a girl's hair, like seeing all the second hands on every clock in the world, you can't speed up an epoch. The Stone Age, the Brass Age, the Iron Age, none of those exists up here. It is just the sky and you, and you start to wonder about the actuality of the sky, since it's just layers, no sky, just space, light bent off atoms that are somehow different during the day and night. This is why Chad kept so much alcohol in the balloon. If you're in an unknown band, it can become difficult to go to other, more successful bands' concerts because of how jealous you can become. In the sky, it's difficult to stay sober or happy because of how insignificant you become, and you figure that if you really are just some blip then why not have a drink. Blipping Around the Basket, or babsing, is what it was known as, at least among those who suffered. There was also the danger of blipping out of the basket, but that signified an idiot more than it did a drunk.

Height 1

In the sky are usually more hot air balloons than Chad can count, many of them unwittingly owing their transportation to the Doldrums we talked about before. Autumn is a season between fall and winter that never ends and is more common than both. It was from all the hot air balloons that it formed, wind currents began to determine seasons more than the calendar, and it's always cold up there, impossible not to bring a bit of autumn down with you, what's a wicker basket but a tree with no leaves. The icy flowers might be a result of the balloons, too, they confused the burners for the sun, tried to grow with just that light, it looked like the real thing from where they were. But even if you're in the basket directly beneath the flame it isn't that warm. Chad thought of warmth in terms of analog and digital. It took him a long time to accept that Graceland was a good album due to its sterile-sounding production, felt the guitar sounded too wishy-washy. But sometimes smooth 80's studio sounds work out well, like when you're proudly walking to your car, or when you learn a moral, such as when Bob Dylan's song Most of the Time played in High Fidelity. You think about these things in a balloon, when you're just in a basket, when your altimeter is broken. You catalogue things and make lists, just as you're different people at work and home, so too are you on the ground and in the air. From the air it's easy to consider the Golden Age, whatever your version of it may be. My own father once asked "What is it about height?"
I didn't know at the time, couldn't answer him specifically. But there is something about it, it's tough to rest your head on your fists and look out the window of a basement apartment, who wants to spend their life watching shoes go by. Up in the air is the closest we get to time freezes and postcards, we can suspend any notion of death (except our own) when we're high enough that we can't see life. Once when I was in the air, I saw a huge flock of birds, and geese, too, all fly out in front of me and I realized that was it. I had seen so many photos, clips of exotic locations, and there is always that flock of birds that flies indiscriminately through the frame, they are, apparently, what signifies a location as the Place to Be. This is because when we see them, we don't see a generation of birds, ones whose parents have died and whose children will outlive them. Instead we see that flock, the one in all the pictures, those very same birds that travel frame by frame across paradises the world over to let us know when we've arrived. Every day it becomes even more tempting to shoot at them, I can feel my rifle across my back right now. But hey now, I don't want to be a showboat, even though I am a crackerjack shot.

Keep Away

As a kid, you are in preparation for older days, and when you are an adult, you find yourself wishing you were back in those older days. When knowledge is specifically for something, when it will help you become whatever it is that you are clearly destined to be, then it is not so bad. But as you age, knowledge is simply byproduct, the accumulation of age, the buildup of lime on your copper pipes. Getting better at the guitar no longer has possibility to it, neither does practicing a sport, these are activities that used to be signs of a promising youth, someone who's really going to make a dent, but after awhile they turn into simple hobbies that others are surprised to find out about. If you want to age with any modicum of decency, you'll learn that the only part of your hobbies you should give up is talking about them to other people.

Spatial Tap

"Roll away, roll away, the man on the lantern, baby."
"You still singin 'at?"
The footage isn't grainy, everything is just soft and unfocused, the fence posts growing up out of the tall grass, no sound as the train goes by, smiling as it messes up hair, tapping your foot on the corrugated floor of the train, water from boots running through the tiny ditches, hands in the pockets, cold and warm, gravels crunches and feet kick around, still frames like moving footage, everything through a window. Off the train and into the basket, basket creaks, ropes pulled away, still frames like moving footage, can't make out faces, every second hand in the world, every clock is ticking, I can do a better impression of time than that, clocks don't look anything like it.

Time Passing Appropriately

I've noticed that I seem to have one main requirement for the music I listen to, the books I read, and the films I watch. It is that I don't want anything self-contained, nothing with a precise beginning and end. As a friend of mine once said about exceptionally crafted works, "nothing as contrived as a story" should ever be able to fit in. I just want to see that period of time, what happened during it, and no more. Let me decide about the before and after, you tell me the during. I want to hear music that sounds like the recordings of someone playing, not like countless hours of studio. The books should be the characters to the point that whatever they do will be interesting. The films should be the same, but with pretty colors.

As for cartoons? Calvin & Hobbes and the Far Side. Every day I try to act as if I'm the child of a marriage like that.

London Mirrors 2

In the mornings, CA would look fearlessly into the mirror hoping to see all the trappings of a fashionable young man in London reflected behind him, with multiple glass bottles that clinked when he reapplied the lid, with perfumes and potions, tonics, and dentifrice with exceptionally strong detergent, all tussled about in disarray given that he was a busy man with many portraits yet to be painted, but just as a camera cannot be pointed straight at a mirror, neither can a face, really, because it gives all the illusions away and you see who is watching who. No one was watching CA, and he was thinking about this while looking at himself in the mirror endlessly back and forth, thinking of an audiobook he listened to once talking about the exact same thing, about staring into the mirror, wondering who that person is, did wondering this make him more or less valid? He was brushing his teeth by this point but the building rhetoric in his head made him want to be done with it, needed away from the mirror, so he didn't do a very good job. Once back in his room, he dropped the towel and looked at himself naked in the mirror which was one of his very favorite things to do in the world, now in his mind he was a naked fashionable young man in his London flat, planning out his day with a firm ass and perfect dick for all to see. CA thought most of his body was nearly perfect and believed that all people should feel this way about their own body, it was maybe the only benefit of being truly selfish. His ideal body was his own body and he felt like a million bucks but still sort of sad because nobody was tapping the account. He pet his dog instead.

London Mirrors 1

CA was at a flower bar sipping on a marigold Tom Collins, pulling off leaves and petals and crunching them in his mouth, trying to look far enough into the distance that his depth perception gave way to foresight, but it didn't work, he crunched down on another leaf. He had theories that everything was layered and that most any problem was a matter of getting through to the right level, it's in there somewhere, and he would keep thinking while listening to music, long, drone sounds that he felt best represented him. Those albums only represented him at certain times, though, and in general he was a treble freak, liked the highs, the lights, the fluttery sounds, those made more sense to him and he thought they were more indicative of the way the mind works. He ordered another drink.

Creation 2

If I remember as far back as I can, I can see the beginnings of Perris-Beauchamp. The process was an amalgamation not nearly so mysterious as the Big Bang or Kennedy's assassination, lots of people saw it, few noticed it. But PB formed in the same way you can get distracted by trash blowing in the wind, everything about the construction was periphery. It happened in the Aboriginal dances, beneath the floorboards of the western saloons, in the earliest Italian mafias. People toss things away, some they realize and some they don't, but ideas pool like rainwater, follow power lines and gulleys, no idea was ever lost. But some ideas do go to hell, mostly the really good ones, the ones too good to ever come to fruition in real life, that are too strong to come out of just one person, all the consuming ideas bigger than their originator, and they keep growing until he goes to hell, too. Perris-Beauchamp may be semi-calm but no one ever alluded to it being the happiest place on earth. There's blood in the hills and some bones, too, every world is built on a skeletal structure of people who won't be appreciated in their lifetime, Perris-Beauchamp isn't above that. Part of it scowls, hates those walking on its back, wants to shake you off. But your brain has those same thoughts about you. If you actually focused on your periphery, you would find Perris-Beauchamp and all the greys, all the birds fly in the direction you think they will, it senses your intent, knows how you want tested. The world is full of non-fiction heroes making it up as they go along.

Seasoned

That year, winter and spring mixed to form one season that produced ice cold flowers blooming day and night, and it became popular to put them in drinks and cocktails. Eventually the flowers would melt into the drink, with roses giving an earthy and simple flavor while jasmine was sweet as could be. You could get a chrysanthemum popsicle if you requested it. And as the trend spread, humans replaced bees as the main pollinators, with gardens growing in their bellies and manifesting outwards in songs and melodies. The audible cross-breeds would then get into the ear canal and settle there, so that as people walked through the motionless and silent beds of frozen blooms they could still hear the gentle rustling of the leaves in their ears. A post-nasal drip became an enviable condition as it gave the sufferer whiffs of flowers all day long with the occasional drop of violet sweetness in the back of the throat. There were a few cases of severe allergies, though, gardens growing in highly allergic environments, and surgery would often be needed, the doctors replanting the abdominal and sinus cavities with less irritating flora. It was, and always will be, an interesting time to be alive.

The Rag

Everybody thinks so
And everybody knows so
But don't tell anyone
That I'm the one who told you so

Oh yeah?
No way!
Is that right?
You don't say!

Honest.

Creation 1

I unpacked Perris-Beauchamp today and spread it all over my bedroom floor. I clicked open the brass clasps of the autumn clamshell suitcase. I swiveled its bank of small wooden doors upright, it looked like an ornate advent calendar, or the wall of an apothecary; all of Perris-Beauchamp tucked away like chocolate figurines, like arrowroot and milk thistle. I spread out the white green of land, I smoothed the ends, my hand slipped off the edges and my fingers came back cold and wet. I pulled out the Mayberry well and placed in a halo of thicket, and tapped it fatherly on its pointed crown. I stashed the old motorbike on the beach where they first found it. I hung the balloons in the air, from tiny ribbons of silk. I pulled the miniature trees from their cubbies and placed them right where I remember them to have been. I dusted the south with a touch of snow from my case. When everything satisfied my memory of itself, I blew a slight wind-molecules of arrowroot and milk thistles, a touch of chocolate, spiraling in the clouds-just enough to set the balloons in motion. I couldn't remember what came next, but I stay and wait, hoping it will come back to me.

Two Things:

1. Some people are against designating anything as a hate crime, which is fine, none of that really concerns me. But I realized why hate crimes are so scary, it took me a while because my empathy levels were so far behind, but it all of a sudden clicked, that when you hear of someone getting the shit knocked out of them as their attacker(s) yells faggot or homo, it's like standing on the street, watching a stranger get beat up as the attacker shouts your name at them over and over.

2. Raising a child must be like having a remote control robot, and the batteries on your remote are almost always giving out.

Renfrow and Worfner

I learned of bilocation from Pynchon's Against the Day. There were two professors who were actually the same person, only he was so divided, so conflicted, so much his own perfect opposite that he split apart into these halves, each forever competing against the other. I think many of us can relate.

But this says more, brings in time, youth, and the ever-growing checklist each keeps of his or her own failings and windfalls. I began to think about this in terms of myself, or perhaps myselves, and began to question just how many people I am. I'm not a religious person, which isn't saying I'm agnostic or athiest because I'm not either of those (even if it could be argued that I am by default). I simply don't care. But I began to consider bilocation as a religious vocation. Explanation is necessary.

Religion's largest power, in my view, is its command of death. Death is scary, but only if you don't think about it. If you do think about it, it's not so bad, and most dead people I know seem to be grateful for the rest. But religions console us with the idea of a final location, the ultimate home, Shambala, Shangri-Laa, heaven, countless virgins, reincarnation, seven levels of hell, the Brahman universe, nothingness/ultimate consciousness, it goes on and on, the afterlife is bustling, people. And you thought you were tired now. If you are extremely devout, I would argue that living is your break and death is clocking in. You know in heaven you never get to quit singing, right? Quite a lot of construction, too. But enough, the point is that religion offers a permanent HOME. Your very own home, where everything is great, perfect, and above all else, you are no longer conflicted. All questions answered, debts settled, bets off.

But wait a minute, it's death that does all that, not the afterlife. Death settles everything, at least for the lucky corpse. So we're just hoping (praying?) that death is somehow better than life, and specifically, we want to be alive again but with all of the comforts of death. This is where bilocation comes in.

I had started to notice that I was quite different at work than I was at home. I realized that somehow, on the 15 minute drive between each place, I would adopt an entirely different set of priorities and goals, separate mannerisms and vocabularies, and not just between work and home, but between home here and the place where I was born, between different sets of friends, certain restaurants, etc. until I finally asked, "Who are all these people?" So I started writing letters to myself from all of these different places to see which Chad had the answers, which one knew the most about me/himself/selves, and, this is the most important part, if any of them knew where the location was that I was one person, where was heaven. Was it at work? At home? In my room? At one point I thought it might be inside my computer, that seemed to be where all the action was taking place, but I got a reply back confirming I was merely writing letters to myself, although some were quite encouraging. And I started seeing this as something quasi-religious, a wandering ascetic sort of thing, and it seemed a much more viable alternative to bathing in the blood of a lamb, most anything does.

So where is the Original Location? When did I split? When will I be back together again? Is the answer in life or in death? And what about the parts of me that have died along the way? Did they find comfort in their death? Did I? Can they be revived to tell me, can they speak through photographs, should I have kept better records? The one glimmer I'm seeing in all this is that if each of me tithes I could buy a boat.