Quiet Thoughts on Fighting

"What can you know about yourself, if you've never been in a fight?" Asks Tyler Durden. Good question fictional guy, but with me it's more like vicious shadow boxing.

"What can you know about yourself..."

You think you know you? With friends, strangers, assholes, even all alone in the tub like a Zazen moron chanting to the bobbing of his own body parts like it was the mantra made flesh. But you don't. Making love or hanging from a rope, you won't get the whole picture. Like trying to make a circle from a square. It's asymptotic: you'll only add smaller and smaller sides of the polygon. Hell, I'm not sure there is a way to know yourself anymore. Every context seems hopelessly flawed.

Speak in public.
Join a gym and train obsessively.
Write every day and read your crap weeks later.
Go to strip clubs and have real conversations with the dancers.

It has begun to lightning outside, and I have all of these thoughts around page 32. It's always around 32. Jesus. Bruce Lee. Rimbaud lasted a few years longer, or not depending on your definitions. I've outlasted them all by more than a whit. I've missed my chance to go out all supernova and pretty. I can't one-inch punch, and I can't walk on water. I just get caught up in books about walking London's M25 on foot and digging the psychogeography by a guy that writes a sentence like looking at the Eiffel Tower. Page 32 and my son goes to sleep on the couch, and I think this is going to be brilliant, so I sit at the kitchen table and look up new verbs by candlelight. By page 34 he's wide awake and wanting to play trains. I fight to be patient. I fight to be a dad.

"...if you've never been in a fight?"

Fight. Hell, I'm no badass. Artists these days come off like they are the next incarnation of the Last Dragon? How many times have I, simply because I've been caught up in the cliche? I can't count that high. I can carry my weight and run when I need to, and I'm wrinkled enough to see that it all sounds like a line from Whiskeytown or Sun Volt. And I'm okay with that, too. But damn if claiming yourself as anti-tough isn't the same thing. A man can't even be nothing anymore. Get up and get your ass to work. Do a long day you'd rather not be doing at all. Come home and try to be a decent husband, father, friend, what have you. Call that guy a fighter.

So go ahead Tyler, ask your cool question, but we'll have to define terms if we're gonna' get anywhere.

Break a nose?

How about a bad cycle.

A fight club?

I'd rather open a cult of love
for everything that's still alive
and kicking.

A Gin Remembrance

Birthday gin tastes best, especially when it's Hendrick's. None of that phlegmy twang the liquor so often desposits in the back of the throat. In its place a floral bouquet made crisp, the latter by cucumber, the latter by bathing the whole mess in the vapor of rose petals.

It is extra special tonight, too, since it brings back memories of The Dakota a couple of weeks ago. A night of jazz dressed in fashionable brick faux facade, the chic splash of wine colored cymbal drapes. Another sip and I sudddenly remember where I hid my napkin notes made while a white dragon raised nine-thirty eyebrows with his saxaphone and unexpected madnotes. It wasn't gin at the time, but a dirty brew not likely to be soon repeated. Now the napkins.

Evening star blonde walks out tight but languid diva all practiced jazz chanteuse shoulders and still flat tummy for successful boyfriend and shiny vest made for the C-sharp she starts us with. She looks over at the

Pianist

who is Joan Baez no lie but no wrinkles either and if sex, we don’t care to see it unless she's got a side we haven't seen. Hair frizzed as if it's grown beyond the need. The gray streaks respect and we do for her demure and comfort before keys not playing but played. Only once a glance and smiled up at us and over to the science professor at trap set thin almost eighties piano tie whose name I heard as

Jay Epstein

but I saw as mad scientist Clayton Forrester with match grip and nodding to years of set up take down and across state for what little is divided among five. A little easier he found it to smile in sporty old lettering thin sweater at Joan’s trickling keys and constant smile of singer turned his once in a while way. In bar glass reflection I saw it in his whimsy—a plant still growing and Take Five. Watching him and old friend kept close, the bassist

Terry Burns

childlike chicken dance elbows to a rhythm that outlasts us all. He's always a smile for a friend. A perfect laugh shares himself and said drumming prof while the corner crone ages with her since 1969 standard now without husband Friday night.

For mine and all the aging blonde stakes her claim toward something vintage. Her smile suddenly authentic stops me, a laugh at staid elder on the sax who 's name sounded like

Car

who now contents to play the chassis of this convertable on twilight back road to third base. See he shook her and us all with star point of restrained solo hijinks that reveal nothing short of a learned and subtle genius. Powered her smile for the remainder of the evening, it did and we.

Sax and drums meet eyes for a higher moment of understanding and personal history. Nothing lasts, and the latter returns to his lot, resigned to let his old colleague take the limelight, but never forgetting that fork in the road all those years back. He connects again with the bassist, who has never let him down, his populist fate which he decides, like every Friday night, isn't a bad way to end a song.

So it makes sense that Hendrick's and a cool night like this would recall that night so. Rooted in that neon sharpness to keep the weekend a thing to covet, it also imparted a little something human, something bathed in the vapor of rose petals.

The myth of jazz distilled

a smile not so much imbued

as right there for all to see

the moment your eyes

I've heard said, by those who have lived

here all their lives, that Uptown

rests on living ground. So one day

I parked my car and wandered into the bustling

intersection of Lake and Lagoon

and put my ear to the asphalt.

I did not hear the living beneath

the blaring of horns, but the whisper of unmade zygotes,

the rustle of a hundred missed connections.

I've heard said your face implies you

the moment

your eyes meet the one

you will never have

*Photo by escluso @ Flikr

*Addendum

For reasons I do not understand, the otherness of traveling in Europe does not overwhelm. If anything should, it would be this. Dipthonged language that implies a depth beyond our Americanness. Social custom speaking to a mode already gone by. Even the buildings are different. Most doors in German apartments are exactly the same. The door to the kitchen has the same lock as that of the entryway. You can drink spiced wine on the street.

Perhaps it owes to the power of myth of the Romantic within. We want to be a part of this foreignness to make us feel worldly. Perhaps a cultural memory of our origins. The reason some languages sound like songs from childhood. Other reasons are just plain obvious.



One is tripped up, if lucky, by train schedules and late hostel occupancy, opportunities of taste and secret alleys of consequence, but not by the looming strangeness of it all. The small differences stretch us acceptably. I feel it is rooted in the phenomenon of tourism - itself a living thing, though not sentient - in that one is completely submurged, unable to pick and choose what to imbibe. You grow gills or end up at the bottom of the tank.


* photo by Shanghai Sky at Flikr

Part II: Lines That Encroach like a Web

It is a strange thing to say, but sometimes you find yourself uttering notions of such an odd generality that you are embarrased by them. In speaking of fear and evil, and I will say that strange thing now, that which I have feared most - and thus have found most evil - is the sense of overwhelm in the All. You no doubt see immediately my quandary. It is a queer thing to hear, yet does not seem esoteric as much as simply odd. To single out Everything as an object of repulsion. The individual components are benign enough, but they, coupled with their rippling implications to me and to each other, create a seemingly annhililating blast which all to often renders me frozen and sinking. I attempt to find the balance of these things find that missing call note that we all overloook. Trying to listen to a constant explosion to pick out a C sharp. This great stranger I have named everything from Odin to Progress and my engagement can best be likened to the way a toddler approaches a large dog - a terrible fascination that must be entered.

It comprises a zillion faces, each a simple sound from an even greater cacophony of contexts. It varies and has taken on every imaginable form I can conjure - from the words I perpetually lose my way in to the smoke from my mouth to the electron cloud of possibility each second that comes contains. I reach out to each one through the growl it emanates beneath the radar. To be clear I do not find it all evil in a sentient sense, but in that unique way our species considers evil that which does not care a lick about our survival. Chaotic Neutral. I cannot help but reach out to it, pull myself through it. What else can we do? It is not heroicism, merely the inability to conceive an alternative.

From my chair outside a local bar in Nowhere, MN, I am embraced ineffectually by a network of phone lines. Their angled vectors are the basis for large paintings in the Walker no one understands, but cursorily appreciates. They have birds that dart between them to assure us we are not ensnared. They are exactly what we need and to the proper degree. The lines intersect, convey, agree, and depart as the connection between things in the most simple of metaphors -- the questions from the woman at the next table to the bored 12-year old who would really rather be playing with himself in the bathroom, to the Journey songs on the jukebox, to the reason I have stayed in this chair as long as I have. For a split second I realize that this makes me part of the web itself, part of what I fear, and thus, if I remain loyal to my own sense of connection, part of the larger whorl I have termed evil. Thankfully, the thought lasts only a flash, already on its way, to trailer parks and bourgeois mansions alike, atop strands that connect and back again.

* Photo by Auntie P on Flikr.

Behind the Lines

An aesthete behind the lines mooning over the difference

The one between the sphere of his consciousness (rolling without end like those big marbles on Chinese restaurant Buddha fountains) and the monster truck (“Leroy’s”, it would seem if vanity plates don’t lie) just a few feet away. Hell. I mean he could call it Hell, but would mean no disrespect. On the contrary, he is the sort who would use a mythological term by which to ascribe to it a power, a grandeur greater, by far, than that due himself.

For since childhood, everything overwhelmingly foreign to him he has labeled evil. Vast playgrounds ending in ditches by the road, subjects of interest not immediately mastered, and at one time, a free radical called love. To this day, with three score years of survival under his lucky belt of Orion, his perception still holds true, but now it is the term itself, evil, that has changed. The change is, one could argue, as natural as puberty and twice as important. A change born of experience, of George Bataille, of a realization of his place in it all.

(continued...)

Unterwegs

WHAT I TEND TO LEAVE OUT are the spaces between here and there, where I watch the world with an accountant's eye. But what I omit connects the major organs, veins that are vital but assumed. I caught myself in the car, traversing a minor capillary from spleen to lung of the capitol city. Like snapping awake on a sleepy night drive, I saw going by a million million places from which I should observe the world. A lamppost on West 7th. A Vine Park bush. The fountain where the moon showers more of its attention than anywhere in the city. They were elongated and transient in passing. The only thing that stuck was the blaring ambulance speeding past, The driver's eyes catching mine for an instant telling me he was headed for some memory of mine on its last breath, having failed to honor it properly.


* Photo by Steve Benway (http://www.flickr.com/photos/benway68/)