flipsided
I knew Uncle Uncle was dead because the phone rang four times then stopped. Four minutes later it rang four times again then stopped. Four minutes later it rang four times again then stopped. Four minutes later it rang four times again then stopped. That is the code in my family when someone passes on to the other life. Sixteen rings: four sets of four rings every four minutes. After waiting a bit of time, I called Mother Mother back. When I asked her if it was Uncle Uncle, I could hear her nod over the phone because her chin whiskers chin ground against the receiver: it sounded like the inside of a conch shell, crackling and constant and soothing. "Four hours: I'm there," I said. I thumbed the hoop of my coffee mug. "Do that please yes," Mother Mother replied. In my family, when someone passes on to the other life, we exchanged phrases in four word groupings only. I hung up the phone. The receiver, it felt warm. On my ceiling I had a mobile, a mobile made of paper elephants the neighbor kid down the hall fashioned from coat hangers and construction paper. The neighbor kid down the hall: I could not remember his name. In fact, I don't think he had a name at all. Or a concept of time-he was unable to tell time, he was unable to understand it at all. But the mobile, he made it for me. The mobile: it was brilliant, the elephants were of varying size and color (one was purple-purple!) and most had tusks made from rounded toothpicks. Thank god he had used the rounded ones; I hate squared toothpicks. Like most things, they do not feel right. Leaning back in my chair, still thinking about the phone conversation, I brought the coffee cup to my mouth and I suddenly smelled Uncle Uncle. Well, his old cabin anyways. Being in his cabin was like being inside an enormous wooden can of Folgers. And, consequently, as the mind always has a habit of doing, I thought about one of my first memories of Uncle Uncle. It was about the day he took me to school, the only day. It was the day we had the field trip to the puzzle factory. In fact, the following story is a shrewd jigsaw puzzle itself. Carved from memories and sprayed and splayed onto cardstock the color of decomposed flesh. I recall taking a field trip on an enormous yellow school bus, my first trip on such a bus, actually (this is not the point though this recollection beats with some clout, a hearty core of the quickly appearing past), to the puzzle factory in Poontonkla City. Forty-five minutes, trees gaunt and many-fingered, erupting from hills like plastic hands from the neighbor's front lawn that overdoes the Halloween accoutrements. "What a waste of resources [plus rough sigh]" or, even better, "...and there are children starving in Africa [the end of a sentence that had never even contained a beginning; or, always had, really]," things relatedly Mother-Mother-uttered. We left with the large pieces jammed into an industrial-strength Ziplock pouch, the cardboard vittles. The hand-drawn scene (certainly lots of thick, ropy reds) partitioned and divided like Balkan nations. Squiggles, hazy and bordlerless and paradoxically ever-shifting in a falsely static state. Someone open their bag, back on the lurching bus, the sound of the shards falling to that grooved vinyl, that light chunky song of a hundred cardboard notes, shimmering with all the shimmering shades, tumbled and fumbled about. At Uncle Uncle's we found notebooks, loose leaves and sheaves of paper, Moleskines with cracked spines. It was not exactly a mystery to piece them all together. But it was a puzzle. A puzzle not to dissimilar from the ones we all got that day at the puzzle factory field trip. In principle anyways. Uncle Uncle's pages and sentences and words added up to so much more than one-hundred pieces. A hundred thousand; maybe even a hundred million. Nearly insurmountable were Uncle Uncle's paragraphs. Can we work together to fasten them all in place? Will you help me connect all these pieces into their rightful residences? Because I am late to this game already, I am so late to this tawny game. This amber fawn of language, spotted and white and quivering in the shorn grasses of relinquishment. Vast, grand these things. But, just as we collected the pieces back then on the school bus after the field trip to the puzzle factory in Poontonkla City-and it took some time, nearly the whole return trip-we can all team up on this. We students. Because then we collected all one hundred of the shapely smithereens. We did it, all of us. Gangly armed and huskied ones. Freckled, flat faces and sunken-eyed ones (even then, that poor soul, that poor soul yet to even set foot in the mines, shy still by a decade and a quarter). The boys, the girls. Ducking and diving under the green metal seat frames, rolling over the wheel-wells (those black half-moons beneath our cannonballed forms). Warmth and movement and commotion, accented in each pothole, each highway off-ramp. But we got them, we got the pieces. At last. The bag has certainly long-ago ripped, if there had even been a bag at all, for that matter. But they are here, the curlicued shards, somehow both jagged and supple, buxom yet innocent. A reconstruction, a reshuffling. An arrangement, bright and beautiful, Uncle Uncle's words: Something about nothing is morally bereft in your rhetoric, he says. Something about the bells that scream out in the shrill courtyard, something about the boots that clomp like the hoofs of exhausted horses. Something about she turning to him, something about him hoisting his khakis up from his pancaked hips. Something about him hating belts--"they dig," he's said almost countlessly. So, something about his pants falling and something about him hoisting. Fall, hoist. Like most things, like moist things. But again: boots, courtyards, noises. Her loud swallows, the enormous girth of her throat--that is a similar sound for him, similar in so many ways. The boots, the courtyard: the Quorum. Yo ho ho, he sings. The baseless foundations of your subject matter. Issues, conflicts--the Quorum excels in these trades, at least those are the common judgments many parlay to one another in the dark corners and the cobblestoned alleys. He stops, suddenly realizing his words, he pen-written words. It is his father's script, or might as well have been. And this isn't a new assessment, by any means, yet one that still pulls his breath away a bit more each time he realizes. Some day he may fully absent of breath, of puffed lungs. The fields are clearly sown and harvested. And quickly at that. Arrangements were made, mistakes occurred. He picks at his beard. It is this great, cascading mane. That, if anything, may be morally bereft, that facial integrity and its devout compromise. These are but two of the forces, two of the driving voices behind this unflappably dodgy narrative. These two, this man and this woman, they have started again from the ubiquitous scratch. The void and they have but days to solidify the larger picture. And they know it. He ravages a chicken breast, a yellow marinade drips from his peppery fingers. She consumes smoke, only smoke. She eats just that, just smoke. Drums, this time, serenade their meal. A regularity, that accompaniment. Outside their shutters, the tattoos shudder across the hides, the driftwood frames. These drums: so barbaric in their construction, in their visual make-up. But their sound, irrevocably timeless. That phrasing, the two feel comfortable throwing it around because they are well-nourished. Well fed on the generous rations of yellow chicken and smoke, respectively. But they are equal, this man and this women, they embody fairness and levelness. But they eat now and in this eating they may have moments, just slight, slight moments, where this equanimity leaks its composure out onto the bear-skin rug. Coarse, virile. Indeed, they eat now, right now. They roll back their eyes with each bite, like some sort of open oceaned shark, like some sort of groaning, banal metaphor for action. I won't bend over backwards or forwards or anywards for them, he says and slurps at a greasy digit. He's not entirely sure it is his own, not anymore. The skies fill with a kind of jewel-like substance, glassy yet dry, spear-shaped yet blunt. We should not really beat around this bush anymore, she replies, her face shrouded behind her wafting food. Sustaining of a sustenance. This is a real thing of beauty. Pass me a napkin, dear, he says. Eyebrows cocked: delicate stalks of wheat. It is all just recycled anyways. It all just becomes so unclean so quickly. Heels, eyes. An unnatural blueness to their sheen. Orbital glows and unhindered, unencumbered calisthenics-these are the things of the Quorum, if we are to get back on task here. The bubbles rise, lofting themselves skyward, into the bejeweled shafts, engorged then run through, foisted upon their own foists. Pants hoisted and falled. Pass us another, the licked lips slither and tongue. The foils, the executors of the Quorum insert themselves, per definition. The creamy head reaches her hand, the frigid glass an entire non-issue. The primary order of business for today, it seems, is the hyphen. The hyphen, it seems, is on the proverbial chopping block, it seems. Nothing is ever what it seems, her scribe informs, scribbling and scrambling away from her goading gaze. Glaze the clay while it's just a tad wet. She pokes a finger entirely through his ashy tablet: too wet, she squints, disgusted, a lemon-eating look squirts across her dusky façade. The scribe, beholden to all that which has thrived from the robust yields of decorum, does all that he can do, scrabble backwards amongst the pillars, the icy, ivy-laden pavilions. Acres and acres of memories flood back to him, Madeline-like, pretentiously, recognizably. This was originally designed to be someone different but, amongst the folds of reflection, it is all just the same individual. Interconnectedness. This is the singular word to define it all, he says, everything. She brushes her hair away from her broad forehead, clears her throat and it sounds like a cathedral organ. The bellows, the pipes rumbling through the mountains of onlookers, over their valleys, their bald heads that glow like fireflies in the torchlit dawn. And grievings with these weavings, too, she adds, smoke twirling around the ringlets of her downy hair, through them, auburn tunnels ending in some sort of meadow filled with moths and blooming answers. How long have we been here, she turns grim, even more so than usual, how long have we been here with the Quorum watching, watching over us, she asks him, making sure to annunciate that last triad of words with the utmost delicacy. This all seems so laughable, doesn't it? So banal-the Quorum, he asks, really, has there even been such a group in anything but in a world of creation? This just has to be manufactured, he ruffles his own straight hair, it looks like a nest of broken twigs. At what point do we delve into our reserves, she stonily observes him prodding at a hollow oak bough. It is less of a question than a statement. More of a demand than a declaration. His fingers poke deeper into the rotting wood, collapsing it further, denting its steadfastness much more completely. At what point do we look back into those things that have been lain to rest, he confirms, back turned. It all sounds so fanciful, so ludicrous, his words, she thinks. It is because they are, this whole place is, her thoughts keep building atop another, but the scaffolding holds. For the time being, as they say. They both wonder when it will all turn into a thing indifferent. But that, too, has had its time to shine and shine it has, shined and failed. Preposterous, turgid. No one talks like this, she raises her voice to him. This time he turns, brown tree trunk dust snows down from his hands and he sneezes suddenly. They laugh, they laugh at this until she doubles over and he has to sit down lest he fall down. It is a silent laugh. They have now broken some sort of previously ungraspable milestone. They know this, even as this silent laugh reverberates through the dense, dead forest. She can still remember what it was like before they got to this place, this place headed by this group, this Quorum. The eerie Friday morning walks to work, empty streets. Even this place now isn't as desolate. Odd and botheringly ironic to her, really. And the music does not sound like it used to. It is in his voice, the difference. Gravely, croaking. This parking lot is overgrown, gaseous vents have opened up in the cracks, recently. Fissures that press us towards a specific view, a very direct look into the very elements of this place's appearance. The genetic constructions of stones. The codes. Open-air garages. Contrasting breezes in and out, the vibrant pulse of the land. He still believes in lucky pennies and she is always working on something else. Speaking of cheap stuff, he draws up a list of proposals, a list of all things gregarious and brilliant. These are exercises, mere practices in practice. They walked over the pebbled sidewalk, barefoot and in slight pain. Intercoastal waterways breached, divides parted by the wings of those that are in good company. Rare straights, direly forwardly thought. He could look at her ringed hair and feel young, congenitally youthful. Wild. Knock away the dirty clouds, resetting the endgame. Ashes, ashes, pawns fall down. Throwing back your insufferabilities, calling out your invented language. They are waiting. They are longing. He can remember the day she saw her eyelashes for the first time, like a paramecium's cilia around her almond orbs. Singularly celled, feeling his way along in the darkness. He had just come in from the cold, because when they first met he lived in a place that was always cold. And he was always coming in from it. The shifting ice blocks of the inlet, the quiet of the snow, snow with not even that slight hissing. He talks about it with her, still. Probably too much. Though her hair ringlets are a mousy brown, a smooth pelt, he still finds comparison to the natural landscape of this place in her locks. Because the snows were not always there, the ice not always packed in like coal in a railcar. At Uncle Uncle's cabin, rummaging around amongst his maple syrup canisters (he tapped no less than twenty trees every season), I thought again about that field trip again. But why? Mother Mother was resting in Uncle Uncle's bed, the sheets stripped and burnt last night, I'd been told. In the kitchen, pacing, I thought again about the trip. He'd taken me to school that day, to the bus that then took us somewhere else. The place where grim men made puzzles. But on the school bus that day, there was this one kid with no name and who had no concept of time. He'd found seven of the one hundred pieces, all together in the crevice of one of the green, seatbeltless benches. He had been charmed with the ability to forego the constraints of the physical universe: absolutely no idea of how time operated, how it moved forward, unceasingly. How it could seemingly stop when jumping from the apex of a swing-set session's arc (How many minutes did I freeze in these flights?). He'd walk around the playground, this kid with no name, without an idea of what it meant to be efficient in one's steps. He'd make the highest possible number of movements to get to the slide (and then wait at the top of the ladder until yelled at to go). He didn't have some sort of learning disability, he wasn't what some would call autistic, he didn't have Asperger's or anything like that (I only know what those words mean now, of course, but I knew then he didn't have one of these debilitations). The only thing he suffered from (if it could even be called that, a suffering) was the inability to perceive the movements of minute and hour hands on a clock or how the sun shining through the jungle gym bars would alter the shadows as the flaming star traversed the horizon. He knew day from night, but only in the sense that the states of light altered, not from the progression of the universe towards death but that it was a simple on/off duality. And furthermore, he didn't think either that this switching between lighted existences was done by some sort of deity. He just considered the changing of the days as one considers the shades of bricks on a courthouse when walking by to pay a parking ticket, or the smell of French fries in the fog on an oddly hazy afternoon in, let's say, Erie, Pennsylvania. And this kid with no name brought his lunch to school in a brown paper bag, like almost all of us (very few had the cartoon character lunchboxes; the brown bag was more "grown up"). Except that this kid with no name, his brown bag was filled only with smoke. He ate only smoke. It wafted out of his sandwichless sandwich bags, this mystical magical fogginess. It would circle around his face as he cupped the smoke into his mouth. And he chewed it, his eyes turned upward in contemplation of something we could obviously never know. But how we would have loved to. And what did it taste like? This kid with no name, he wasn't skinny but he wasn't fat by any means. He was built just right-this smoke clearly nourished him in some manner. His whole family were Smoke Eaters, apparently (I'd only heard that through the traditional, and reliable, elementary school conduits of hearsay). But it was this kid, this kid with no name that found seven of the one hundred pieces that day on the school bus, returning back from the greeting card factory tour. It wasn't more than the other kids found. But it wasn't less. That was just how this kid with no name functioned. Even keeled and just below the radar. Just barely below. The smoke eating aside, of course. You had to take that piece out of the equation. The Quorum certainly ran things best in their smoldering shroud of secrecy. They did their best to work beneath the daylight, to push their lead amongst the fuddled vista of this existence. The days passed, though sometimes the Quorum would not recognize it. Only sometimes but sometimes was enough. The struts, the mosquito flit, all of the extremes were recognized when the momentum was conjured, however. When the days did not fail to stretch out their many-armed extensions. Expansions. Things happened, papers were moved into place, in front of the faces of those who were supposed to see them. The words appeared on their papyruses, sketched into the folds of the ruffled pages. Origami had not been invented here yet. Clay tablets became things of the distant, distant past. The style of clothes and how the men would wear their broad hats. The formation of chairs to suit the curvature of newly fused spines. The length of walls from each other. The height of the grassy ceilings. The tilt of certain trees. The depth of the roots. Things shuffled, priorities were born amidst the death of others. Forebears became a commonplace notion while lips became dry. Enough of that history, he says to her at last. She turns from the fire she's been lunging a deft branch into, the tip is charred into a color that neither of them could possibly ever have a name for. He can smell his own crotch, unwashed sweat and shit. Things do not much very fast here, at night, around the singed ash and oak boughs. Crackling and cackling, embers flutter upwards. Flames collapse and die, then phoenixly the orange and yellow heat laps at the air again, nipping at their faces. She turns, throws the burnt log into the pile, and begins warming her hands. The tenseness, the disconnect between something so straightforward as tapping your fingers to your thigh and the delay of the noise that follows, he sighs, shaking his head and staring at her supple hands in front of the fire. Yet they are notched, mildly mangled at some of the joints. Kiosks of light, pillaring between the breaks in the burning twigs. He remembers that time, in another world, really, when she crossed in front of him, after having turned the corner, her green sweater perfectly exuding the attitudes of the season then. He'd been looking at picture of that frozen place, the other place of ice that he used to tell her about, his other lifetime, a life that existed in the world even before that other world before their current world. That life was so much removed from his current one. If this could even be called living. He softly grasped her fingers, still cold in front of the flames, still bumpy in his palms. He keeps twirling his head around, like an owl, to see who is coming from behind him. That is what this place has done to him, that is what it does to anyone who travels here, certainly those on foot as they had. Things are ill-fitting here, all clothes and ideas and socks and thoughts. You learn how to hasten your pace, how to increase the strides and the efficacy of your gait. As a trade-off, you lose the ability for well-thought plans, well-laid articulations. Befuddled lips and confused tongues take the place of intelligent discourse. So, of course these are the casualties of an accelerated life. Recharging the advancements, revisiting the plans for retreat. The pressure in the air plummeted and ears began to ring-the history of most things resides in these two polarities. Contracts established, dotted lines signed with our beady black eyes. We decreased our lives by a day, a single day, she asserts, the backgrounds blaring behind them. A jealousy from the masses, the sprawling humanity with its decidedly persistent halitosis. A devout consistency and concentration in the phallic clouds. A shift, then a carrying and moving on. The score and the rating determine things now, here in the acreages overseen by the Quorum. Just keep pedaling, he tells her as if she is lagging behind. But she is not. She never has. Take your positions: that is their slogan. No one knows what it means, of course. They all just keep looking vacantly and vacuously out the windows. Devices make them forget about the approaching cold. The impending scales of winter. Some just want to keep repeating the same words over and over and over and over again. Some just want that weak sense of irony; some, quite simply, just fall-down drunk on it. The rampancy of such intoxication is not lost on me, she had told him once. He laughed at this, but not because the message had not been true. We need to do something about the light, she had also told him once. He remembered this now because he had responded in almost the exact same way to this statement also: with a laugh. But, again, her words were not false. He laughed because her ability to portray the truth unequivocally was so jarring it that it was humorous. Anxiety in the announcements, these loudspeakered phrases push things forward. Corners always have to be turned. A few more instances perhaps, a few more carefully mandated scenarios. Forceful additions from our own doings. These are the kinds of things he thinks about when he sees her curl away from him on their bedroll, resting on a pallet made from the bones of no less than six trillion tiny birds. Release this burden from your back, he gestures with his chin to the half-dozen heavy pouches lashed down across her shoulders. He says almost with the inflection of a query. He is not confident in his suggestion. He knows she will reject him, not angrily or offensively. But she is strong-willed. Everything else stems out from that, like the silver streams of a courtyarded fountain. Threads slip through fingers, unnoticed and unfelt. Mother Mother, collapsed in a chair framed in elk antlers, said to me: "I am never ready for tomorrow. This is not some philosophical treatise, not even close. It is an extreme frustration. A suicidal wish. I am not ready for tomorrow. The seas rollick on the coasts of my memory. That is not some literary treatise, not even close. This too is an explosive frustration, throbbing below in the tense groin on my mind. Things bursting and splitting out, without thought, without foresight. Thoughts pile up like fabric caught in a sewing machine. The devices keep churning but the productions have long been the same. Copies and copies that have the ability and the volition to mutter such things again and again. Reviewing the traditions of language, the clichés of our embedded histories. They flaunt themselves here, like barren trees, like the easy way out. I cannot do it, I cannot maintain this flurried and hurried pace. I could never see myself running a marathon. These pieces, they are everywhere still, they are all about the floor, the seats, the cold laps of indifferent souls. Water flows subside, the tides lighten their grip. The rates of the circumscribed order. Tracked and adjoined: we become our own saviors. That is rubbish. I am not capable of saving anything, let alone myself, let alone these scattered pieces. These ashen cardboard tiles with their meaningless borders. Totally without definition, without the proper effects. Denied, unmotivated. Unclassified for anything in particular, the mysteries, the long and hot showers that steamed the mirrors where we used to write messages to each other. I am not ready for tomorrow, I am never ready for tomorrow." Mother Mother said all of this, to me. She said it to me, her arms somewhat akimbo, like vari-angled number sevens, she said it to me from Uncle Uncle's old chair, the chair that embraced the air around you with elk antlers. It couldn't just be regular old wingbacks with Uncle Uncle's chairs. They had to have come from something somewhere that had lived once. That had thrived once. Just like Mother Mother, Uncle Uncle enjoyed the puzzle within the puzzle. He enjoyed the many layers that life had to offer. Even things that were not life at all, but just words. Words are not life, Mother Mother used to tell us when we were little (I told this to the no-named kid down the hall from me decades later; I'd told him this then he presented me with the elephant mobile that now hangs in my humble kitchen). But like Mother Mother, Uncle Uncle loathed words. That is why he had so many pages upon pages of them. Words within words, stories within stories. Indentations keep us here, he says, watching her trim the small plant. Even with such grisled hands, such burled knuckles, there is a deftness in her fingers, a dexterous care and attentive design. She turns. Naturally, she responds. For no reason in particular, he imagines her when she was a child, before her hands became so unruly to themselves. To have known someone when they could not have even known themselves. He wants to tell her, the her of now, the her cutting away the crispy branches, still green but teetering on death, dying before their time, the her now, he wants to tell her to sit down. Sit back and re-evaluate. What would she say to that, he thinks. He both knows and does not know. How can this be, he thinks, laughing to himself. What, she asks him, turning back to plant maintenance. It does not make sense, the direction of her face to her words to his mumbled chuckles. Somewhere, upstairs, a pebble or a marble drops, bouncing with a few surprisingly heavy echoes before rolling away, down over their upward eyes. They follow the noise. They always do and always will. They have to, the noises are what keeps them from death. The angles of the lights, this is something they have had to deal with so many times. The intensity, that is another related factor they know quite well by now. The direct connection to their demeanors. We missed it, we missed the chance, he says. The pains, the delays in the communications are all but inevitable by now. Things appear and then they do not, she told him once, in bed, in their post-coital recoil. He grunted a sort of affirmation, but it meant something. His monosyllabic responses always do. And she knows this now just as she knew it then, even in that initial sound. We are behind, she says, bringing him back to the now. They should work together they should work together and they don't it is not working this all natural gel capped cocktail a headcrest in the silhouette of the dusk the breeze manifested upon the rock faces tipping our hats to you to them to all of us because they are able to work together work in compliance with one another spiraled arms of galactic boundaries and they have stayed their time they have buried a sibling here in the night in the couple dozen miles of roadways scant with the antlered digitizations of our alleged visions they impede and they console and they carry pocketfuls of coin of small and circular sculpture and the sound qualities of my tryptophan. Here is a story for you, he says. I wrote this once because you were not there and I really wanted you to be. "They hunted pronghorn antelope by attaching something shiny to a post in the ground," my father said, "and then they would go hide behind a rock with their bows and wait." He sipped from his longneck of Coors, gripping the tapered mouth between thumb and forefinger. I did not know which Native American tribe 'they' referred to, exactly. I had stopped listening just prior to the part about these peculiar stalking methods: the goading uses of light-catching mirrors and minerals. Even gaunt, spindly quadrupeds could not escape the shimmering allure of fate, apparently. Just the words, the simulation of it, had ensnared me. Before my father's historical flourish-how had the conversation even regressed to this?-I'd been unable to avert my eyes from the squeaky full-court presses and lofty three-point arcs that played themselves out on the bar's staggering flat screen. But now, pulling from my own bottle, I stared at my father. The age spots on his forehead dotted like a significantly distant constellation and his hair appeared thinner than just yesterday. "Pronghorns," was all I could dribble back to him. My mind flew. I tried to imagine feathers and arrowheads, plain winds and small pebbles in the bases of grass strands. Except I only saw beaded loincloths, black braids, and clear inaccuracies. This was too hard. We all just seek horizontalness, a quiet singularity. My father and I drank from our Coors bottles, nearly in unison. Nearly. I looked back to the massive television. Kobe missed a free throw (it hit the front of the rim and bulleted right back to him) and the crowd around us rumbled loud enough, like a summer thunder clap, to mute the game announcer. I swiveled to the passing waitress and ordered another beer. By the time I'd pivoted back to the giant screen, the evolution from tactile visions to something cosmic laid its fluttering groundwork: there was a close-up of Kobe, gnawing on the top of his jersey, that Laker-yellow illuminating the faces in the darkened bar-booths like a searing quasar into the cold-bodied space. She just sits there, as if tasting a cabernet. He waits for her to spit it all back out. That is the correct protocol to follow, that is the proper etiquette to adhere to, right? Who is he asking? She finally speaks: Last night I had the strangest dream, something in the vein of some great writers somewhere from the East. An old friend, now misremembered (probably purposely) got a bunch of vintage cameras from this old lady who gave them to him after he did some work for her or something. He comes to me with them all, thinking I might know something about them. One of them is this old Kanusaki F4 (which I don't think is a real model), it looks normal, like an old top-of-the-line film camera except it has to weigh about fifty or sixty pounds, which is so incongruous based on how it looks. It is really hard to pick up. Weird. But then my eye is drawn to this other one, a Yashica, (a real company, once) it is long and narrow, like a giant harmonica. It sits in a case and has the original instructions. I pick it up and notice the back has a television-looking screen almost the same dimensions of the camera, say three inches high, eight or nine inches long. Turns out that even though this is a film camera, it had the ability for you to review your images and delete them, much like a digital camera of today. How this worked, I don't know. The old friend and I decide to go a roll of film and try it out. We do that and then go to this abandoned warehouse, you know, those industrial-looking things, lots of concrete and lines. We turn the corner and get into this courtyard and there are about five or six Japanese guys setting up for a photoshoot: lights on these big tripods, wires everywhere, a solid white backdrop pulled down from a roll. They all turn and look, in unison, they are all wearing 1960s era business suits, thin ties, something tells me they are Yakuza (by the way, I don't really know where this dream is taking place, geographically). They seem to have been waiting for us, like we were going to be the subjects of their photoshoot. I just had that strange feeling. One of them comes up to me and offers me 1000 dollars cash for the Yashica camera. I turn to the old friend and we talk it over. I can tell these guys want the camera very badly. I tell him 2000 and its his (for some reason, I felt I had the ability to negotiate with something that really isn't mine). The main Yakuza guy suddenly transforms into this white house cat and starts clawing at my arms. I struggle to grab him, he starts clawing and my face and hissing. I manage to get a hold of him, hard, I can feel his cat body kind of squish beneath my arms as I put him in this chokehold type move. The other five Yakuza guys approach and I tell them I will kill their leader if they don't back up and let us go. That's when I woke up. It is his turn for the silence, returning it back upon her. And he does. Not intentionally, he is trying to not do this on purpose, necessarily. No, he does not want her to think that. _____ Something about the sparrow's cries that certainly helped me fall back into a meditative state. Something about having a macciato alone, outside in the swampy air (that is the right word, still, I think: swampy). Something about a culling into a relaxed mindset. Something about the expresso being immune to my nerves (or the other way around). Something about these nerves being dulled after all; something about the nerves being dulled and lulled. Something about not knowing or noticing my ass growing wet from the plastic chair's puddles. Something about aches languishing, something about getting blown away. Something about color coding. Something about everything shining with purpose. Something about everything sweating its tones, its shades of existence. Something about assigning pigments appropriately and astutely. Something about, at times, in being over- and ill-used. Something about the visions of dogs and birds. Something about birds of prey, praying from above, something about their thermal eyes not deceiving them (they cannot). Something about lives depending, and such. Something (again) about coded colors. Something about lights and darks pertaining to highly specific tasks. Something about a bout. Something about contrasts, something about warmth. Something about a brightness that was almost forgotten and misremembered like a small tale from youth. Something about dreaming in color that is both probable and improbable. Something about impossibilities; however, something about them fading quite easily. Something about eyes tingling and born under the faceted lamps, the beams, the patterns of waves lengthening. Something about strings of sunlight. Something about compression. Something about the fibrous propensities of the skyward, skeletal oak. Something about metacarpels, wooden and firm, flickering into the blue like stiff flames. Something about hard but stringy flames, those. Something about filamentals. Something about outward extensions. Something about the feel of cold water on my warm hands; something about the feel of my watercooled hands on my face. Something about inhaling. Something about the sharp, crisp breath on my own throat. Something simulated. Something that is always just simulated. Something about a sequestered sentence. Something about a non-sensical sentence. Something about awaiting your judgment, something about the ruling. Something about opening the portal to the other places, something about the sides that pinch closed once more. Something about you picking the shredded shards, the shattered strings of your grandly orchestrated movement. Something about transitioning away from the station. Something about time that is running out, or at least something about it always feeling that way. Something about a nipping of rearward-facing quarters. Something about me thinking of falling snow, suddenly, something about the graywhite of its spread, something about its simultaneous vertical and horizontal blanketing. Something about it all just floating there as a continuous, vibrating cloud. Something about a perpetual precipitation that has become solidified. Something about needing the explanation about the process of sublimation (again). Something about me wanting to witness an example of such an act. Something about me wanting to see a human being break down into a gas, something about a vapor. Something about the question of what would such an air taste like? Something about breathing in this gaseous being. Something about the process, something about the reversal of this process, something about the re-solidifying-something about wondering what that would look like. Something about this stage enacting once they had been previously engorged, sucked in to another being or thing. Something about the steel fins of the flying shark. Something about a lurching below, something about a lurking below the concrete horizon. Something about glass sheets, and something about how they not fear the implosions of the asphalted plain, something about the shockwaves of painted, ground pebbles. Something about all this rippling outward through my visionary parallax. Something about the silken layers of cloth, something that is taut across my aforementioned barriers, something about the expanses of yesterday. Something in the time of the divine premonitions, something about the wheel, something on iron trees, and something about us constructing our souls, something about we who manufactured out special fields of hearing. Something about them building up their dire, divisionary fences. Something that is yet still, something that is somehow burdenless. Something frontiers tarnished, something about meadows left unburnished. Something about it all rotting like so much bad rhetoric, something about it ringing as stale, putrid, and gangrenous in our mouths. Something about the numbers that do not correspond, something about them as never doing so. Something about actuality, something about reality. Something the chaotic and the unfounded inquisitionary matters, something about these matters being carried out amidst a pool of frying grease. Something about the slime that covers it all. Something about igniting it all and watching it burn up. Something about learning as it all takes to the air in a rash coverlet of darkened hazinesses. Something about the cavalcade of de-abstractions. Something about its mouthfulness. Something about its curious subtraction of letters, something about its singularities of the over-arching soliloquies. Something about sibling rivalries and something about these same siblings' revelries. Something about an altercation and alteration in an invocation of evocated divulsions. Something about transparency. Something about the sun that is shining completely bright, something about it shimmering utterly direct. Something about directness again. Something about it all coming across as neat and sculpted and thoughtful as words. Something about it having that perfect appearance for once but not for the first time, still. Something about the overuse of subpar discourse and something about the overuse of calling it overused. Something about over-calculations and something about it being too well planned. Something about the crying and the wailing and the creeping about. Something about it all just existing as this enormous emulation. Something about this being nothing new, something about this concept at large. Something about curtailing the heavy curtain of questions, something about the heavy cartload of dubious queries. Something about me having to be taken away from the purged ground beneath my two feet. Something about flight and flying. Something about this all entailing those usual senses past the standardized déjà vu type feelings. Something about wondering when the moment will present itself as these words still appear before me. Something about blue irises and just gazing and glancing at awe at the inky symbols and manifestations. Something about apparitions. Something about not wanting this to be so, so old. Something about this disastrously rancid presentation. Something about this as benign and something about it being quite far from the sole causality of rot. Something about anvil cumulus mounds laying in the white forgery of sky. Something now about wispy cirrus, curling and wispily whispering to the smithy. Something about a world without end. Something about islands in a large lake, a lake shaped like an arrowhead. Something about me being so tired of these childish games, of these immature dealings. Something about a question that asks when we can forego the entirety of this little dance. Something about not knowing that answer. Something about going to sleep all ready and slipping into the deepest of slumbers. Something about which one could never awaken or return. Something about laughter indeed being the universal language, something about it being the basic linguistic equalizer. Something about the need for silence, however. Something about that becoming the one true desire. Something about blots of ink, something about those blots dotting this page and something about this drivel being all irrelevant. Something about this being the lot it. Something about an ellipsis of cloud, something about riding along and above it. Something about the rollicking and rolling barrels inherent in cloud-riding. Something about the destination nearing, about the delirium that has yet to be cast out against itself, into the pitstoves of my mind. Something about wanting to know what will become of the shadowy hand (something about wondering how this would only turn out had it been in the hand of a southpaw). Something about it then containing the more creative gemstones of myth's accordance. Something about the myth-something about wanting to know what it could pertain to beyond its already unencumbered and unclassifiable vastness. Something about sunpatches on saguaros. Something about the dogs in the ballfields. Something about that wet desert smell, something about those palo verde trees exuding an odor as green as their trunks and stalks and limbs and boughs. Something about fogs rolling in through the canyons. Something about wanting to share it all with you. Something about eating a pudding pie outside the Chevron with a pint of whole milk. Something about the nastiness of a pay phone. Something about seven pound icebags for $1.59 each. Something about traffic in the rare swaths of humidity. Something about things rich in Vitamin D.
---------------------OR THIS..................
, the other side of the night.
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- Nikon D7000
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- 100
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