City of Dreams

I’d forgotten how rural and old and dreamlike Port Townsend is, how the old brick and stone buildings that line Water Street at the base of a high cliff seem to permanently gaze into the dreams and aspirations of the late 19^th century, when high-masted ships like the Glory of the Seas or the Susie T. Plummer lay at anchor in the waters by Union Wharf and bars and bordellos provided entertainment for the sailors and bolstered the booming economy. Port Townsend is quintessentially western, but salt air and fresh breezes blowing in from the Strait of Juan de Fuca ruffle the puddles and invigorate the nerves, imbuing everything with a distinctly marine character. Even if you don’t sail or dive or do much in the water except drink it and look at it occasionally the vastness that is the ocean reddens the brick and makes the glass shine harder.

Roberta and I rolled into town about 2:30 last Friday afternoon and looked for a place to get a snack. We’d gone to Port Townsend to visit a friend and just relax, just be somewhere different than Seattle for a day or two and spend the night in a hotel. We love hotels. Motels, too, but mostly hotels. There is just something inherently fun about spending a night in a hotel. We parked in a lot outside a promising series of shops, the largest of which was quaintly named Quimper Mercantile, on Water Street, which is a community-owned company. People of the Quimper Peninsula own shares in it. Quimper Mercantile didn’t have the kind of snacks we were looking for, but they seemed to have a colossal miscellany of everything else: shoes, bed linens, towels, fishing gear, jack knives, fat woolly socks, climbing carabiners, boots, raincoats, frying pans and gardening supplies. It served the purpose of an old-timey general store.

Outside, while we standing on the curb wondering where to go next in our search for snacks, a friendly woman who had overheard our request for beverages and snacks gave us directions to a small deli called Getables, a few doors down past Taylor, offering cheese and pickles and baked goods and a variety of beverages. I fished out a concoction of mandarin orange from a barrel-shaped container full of ice while Roberta nabbed some water and two sandwich halves stuffed with lettuce and turkey. We paid for our "getables" at a beautiful counter of wooden laminate. I remarked on the counter to the owner who told me he’d bought it at IKEA and then added that he’d coated it heavily with polyurethane, which gave it a high gloss. It looked new, but was over a year old.

We’d made reservations online at the Washington Hotel, which we located between a dealer in rare books on the north side  -  Rare And Antique And Collectible Books  -  and a boutique of vintage clothing to the south which wrapped around the corner. The boutique was aptly named the Wandering Wardrobe. We found the address and sign for the Washington Hotel, inscribed in modest black letters on a white background, but no grand entryway, not even a lobby. Roberta punched in a code and the door opened. We walked up a long flight of beige carpeted steps at the top of which a giant fleur-de-lis reposed on a small table. Our room was toward to the back. Classical music played on the radio and CD player adjacent upturned wine glasses and coffee mugs. An abstract painting of white and black hung above the commode. From a distance it looked like zebra skin, but upon closer examination it looked more like black water moving sinuously among chunks of pure white ice. A blue vase with a bouquet of cattails reposed on an end-table to the north of the bed. I looked out onto the graveled parking lot, where our rental car was parked in front of an old wooden door upon which was written “Overweight Mermaids,” underneath which a large white arrow pointed to the south, ostensibly to another cellar door that was hidden from view. It was odd not seeing anyone as we got situated in our room. It felt as if the hotel were run by fairies who chose to remain invisible.

It was, as advertised, a quiet room. I wasn’t sure whether the adjacent building of antique cars was intended as a warehouse, a garage, or a parts shop dealing mainly in retail in which old men with crinkly faces and white hair sprinkled astute queries with colloquies of helpful advice. However, I could not see any human activity, just murky silhouettes of what appeared to be machinery, oil cans or transmissions. I tried closing the blinds, but the cord wouldn’t budge. I fussed with it a little, pulled the valence out a little and tried to peer through the little hole through which the cords ran, but couldn’t see any switch or gear or toggle I could try to loosen. The cords remained as frozen in place as if they’d been nailed to the window sill. Well, I thought, why worry if there’s no one in the antique car building. It was a continuing frustration, however, to look at those cords and not believe that there was probably something very simple I was overlooking, some little switch or button, and so bring the slats down with a mild clutter and bring shade and privacy into our room. Roberta speculated it might even work by remote, like the radio and TV, but there were only the two remotes for the radio and TV. No wand or doodad that might be connected with window blinds.

 

I have trouble with gadgets. I have trouble with icons. I don’t understand what they’re intended to mean. The windows on our rented Camry were electronic, and all but the windows on the driver’s side refused to go down. I thought the wiring had gone awry, but discovered later, while we were waiting for the Seattle ferry that the two little icons representing padlocks that were indented in white on the two little buttons above the small levers that maneuvered the windows up and down, locked and unlocked the windows. Locking car doors made obvious sense, but windows? What was the purpose of locking windows? Roberta surmised that it had to do with keeping little kids from playing with the windows and falling out of the car. I found the lack of a manually operated window and all this electronic gadgetry maddening. I was used to muscling the windows up and down on our old Subaru, not to mention every car I'd owned in the past. This dependency on electronics unsettles me. I like levers and buttons. I like things you can push and pull. I like dexterity. I like engagement. I like the joy and sensuality of a well-designed object. I am especially perturbed, as in the case with our new dishwasher, when even the buttonness of buttons go missing and there is only the mere implication of a button on an otherwise smooth surface of shiny plastic. Pressing a sign or an abstract image instead of a tangible device is disquieting. I need physicality. I need solidity. A world of pure signage makes me nervous. I know how slippery signs and symbols can be. Here, at least, was something tangible to press. I clicked the “off” icon and Roberta’s window rolled down with a gentle hum. Sea breezes wafted through the car. I could hear the ruffle of paper as the whitehaired woman in sunglasses read the Sunday paper in the white Lexus parked in the lane to our left.  

It felt good to walk around Port Townsend. The pace was decidedly slower than Seattle, and the people appeared to be normal people, not the zombie-android-smartphone addicts I see on Seattle’s sidewalks and streets staring fixedly in hypnotic trances at a smartphone or iPad. And they were friendly. People offered information with gladness and zest. There were no homeless people, no one cadging money. Everyone seemed to feel very much at home. I counted at least five bookstores, high glass windows in Victorian buildings of brick and stone revealing the spines and tantalizing covers of hundreds of books, including stacks of Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life. I felt simultaneous ascensions of joy, nostalgia, and loss in seeing all these bookstores and living testaments to the enduring invention of the book, colophons and vellum and luscious Moroccan binding inviting the eyes and fingers for communion with the word, the beautiful printed word. Not the word behind the cold corporate plastic of a computer screen, but words embedded in paper. Fully committed words. Printed words. Words in frigate cohesion creaking with yardarm ideas. Words between visions and propositions. Between funny feelings, heady sensations and radical speculations. Between firm, tangible covers. Between tender buttons. Between fables and caves.

Port Townsend appears to be a remarkably literary town, which may be either a cause of, or side effect of, Copper Canyon Press and the annual arts festival called Centrum. Centrum, unlike Seattle’s Bumbershoot, where the literary arts have all but disappeared and have always been treated like the poor bedraggled cousin to the pop music acts which now dominate the fair, continues to showcase the literary arts.

Roberta got up early on Saturday morning. She made coffee and read Colin Jone's Paris: The Biography of a City, making herself comfortable on the gigantic leather covered daybed in the spacious sitting room. The bedroom was filled with sunlight. As soon as we got dressed we went out to have breakfast at Sweet Laurette’s. Roberta looked it up on her smartphone, which gave her a google map in diminished size. Only one of the streets were named. The restaurant looked further away than I’d imagined. We walked south on Washington street to the Haller Fountain, a half-naked young woman in dark bronze strides gracefully forward above two cherubs riding monstrous fish, an apparent hybrid between dolphins and demonic goldfish, water arching from their snouts, the cherubs blowing into conch shells from which water also jets in spritely arcs of fountain classicism. The woman holds a swatch of thin drapery above her head, her right arm in a graceful upward curve, her left arm descending gracefully to her hand, whose fingers extend delicately in feminine charm. The fountain was the donation, in 1906, of Theodore N. Haller, intended to honor his deceased father and brother. Haller’s dedication speech included a poem about the Greek sea nymph Galatea. The statue first appeared in 1893 at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It is said that a local bar owner in Port Townsend named Charlie Lang placed trout in the pool at the bottom of the statue and trained them to jump through hoops. The Taylor Street stairs behind the fountain lead to the uptown business district, where Sweet Laurette’s is located.

We found Sweet Laurette’s easily enough, but it was about 7:15 a.m. and restaurant didn’t open for breakfast until 8:00 a.m. We sat on a bench in front of the restaurant but it was too shaded and chilly so we got up and walked around. Roberta noticed a crow pecking at a freshly killed mouse. The crow picked up the mouse and flew to the corner of the building across the street.

We visited an old yellowish clapboarded building that looked like a grange hall but was in fact a movie theater. Today’s feature was Man of Steel. The agitations of the crow we’d seen earlier caught our attention and we saw a young gray cat playing with the dead mouse which the crow must have dropped from his perch on the corner of the building. We wondered if it was sheer carelessness on the part of the crow, or if the crow had seen the cat and dropped the mouse in order to get her teased and agitated. The crow hunched down and let loose a barrage of squawks on the cat while the cat pranced around the mouse not quite sure what to do with it. She eventually surrendered the mouse and the crow flew it to the top of another building.

Port Townsend’s Rose movie theater, which first opened in 1907, was close to our hotel, but we hadn’t time to go see a movie there this time around, which didn’t matter, as we’d already seen the feature film, Mud, with Mathew McConaughey, which is a damn good movie. The main character is none other than the Mississippi River. Mud is an appropriate title for this movie. The imagery is so visually intense you can smell the water and catfish, you can feel the current and the pain and bewilderment and joy in the voices of the people. You can feel what it’s like to start an outboard motor and the complex emotions of being betrayed and loved by a woman simultaneously, in very much the same way a river brings sweetness and bounty but can also kill you.

Sweet Laurette opened its doors where a small group of hungry people had gathered. A young woman led Roberta and I to a table in the center of the small restaurant and gave us some menus. I was leaning toward pancakes when we first entered, but started worried about calories and being stuck in a car all day and gaining weight, and written in small letters beneath the three offerings of pancake (Lemon Ricotta Pancakes, Lemon and Blueberry Dutch Baby, Apple and Pear Dutch Baby) was the warning that it may take a little extra time to get these dishes made. I decided to go high protein and ordered a Croque Madam, “all natural honey baked ham, gruyere cheese, two fried eggs and mayo-Dijon spread on griddled sourdough, served with griddled potatoes.” Roberta ordered the Farmer’s Market Scramble which consisted of griddled potatoes and toast and whatever the “season dictates” in the way of fruit and vegetables. June was dictating cantaloupe and honeydew melon. Roberta said the potatoes weren't quite crispy enough for her taste, and the coffee could have been a little stronger, but everything else was fabulous.

The wait staff at Sweet Laurette’s were all women and were liberal with the coffee, which I thought was strong and tasty. I noticed some odd scripture tattooed on the wrist of a young woman refreshing my mug of coffee and asked her what language that was. I thought it might be Hebrew. She said it was Sanskrit, and was a prayer from the Bhagavad Gita meaning, roughly, oh lord please remove all illusion so that I may see the truth. I told the waitress that we may be illusions and she cracked up laughing. 

 

 

The Ghost of Jackson Pollock

I find truth in my fingers and fidget until the meanings get tangled. I make stupid decisions. The decisions converge and gurgle the light which has splashed on an accordion. It isn’t a matter of properties so much as unities that divide and come together, divide and come together, until at last the volume in the room blossoms into Cossacks. Once sand always sand. I bombard the paper with words along the side of a mug of coffee with the Beatles on it. I am in a state of drifting, which is achieved by swinging on a trapeze of the imagination. Meaning has paths. Let the decisions be made by goldfish in England. I am plunging into pepper and salt I am prickly and heavily fleshed I am terrestrial and truant I am becoming a hairy pulsing example of the way a wheel turns.

It is wonderful that water has swimming in it. Swimming which is round, the way swimming was meant to be, aesthetic as a crawl. It is difficult to adapt to paint after summoning genies in words. The insistence is only natural in a pasture of buffalo. The spiritual unfolding of a moment is imposed by the stars and a singing goddess with fierce eyes. The simulation of fog is like throwing a yardstick at a guitar. French fries have already been a symptom. A spirit of tin is tumbling around in a limousine. I have a parrot on my head, astonishing and hypothetical. My intentions get lost along the way. Redemption is a jewel hanging from the throat. I think it was made to agree with the skin. I can wipe my lips with a napkin, but his does not solve the bend in the river, or the strength required to be honest. Honesty is a harrowing employment of nails and the eradication of control. Its attainment disturbs the hierarchy.

We are on a hunt for meaning. Generosity makes sense. So do chains and pulleys. Sometimes it is simple, like pouring water from a bottle, and sometimes the words represent themselves as words only, and the purpose of directing them toward meaning reeks of vanity and composition.

I am in a state of feathers and hear a waterfall. It is unpremeditated day, polished and cherry like a sideboard whose secrets are hidden in the top left drawer. I maintain consonants in the expansiveness of ghosts whose beliefs are scorched by reality. There is no burning but ice and dust and cans of paint in a reverie of feathers and fire. The artist at the edge of existence rips the knowledge of asphalt in half and floats into a state of light that isn’t electricity but muscle and feels the churning of testimony. The sky, full of bright blue air, is crushed like an insect and weighs four hundred pounds. It is all penetralia. Autumn cavorts in the street. It is immediately stabbed by a strong wind and the sky grows into itself and hoists itself up and blasts out a big dwelling of sticks and leaves called earth.

The ugly feelings are the fertile ones and in grammar the nerves attract words that lead to lyrical disasters that must be soaked in creosote and boiled down to a pulp. Qualifications gnaw on the bones of the poem. The air flirts with the nose. Poetry must be a maximum usurpation until wisdom arrives and blooms into a monumental curl of frostbite. The easel is arranged by the window and accumulates itself into a joke. The city stirs into life and the ghost of Jackson Pollock scours a pan with the ugly feelings he has earned by crying an agonizing gravy on a surface of limitless grace.  

Bubbles of Soapy Dream

Bubbles of soapy dream float out of my mouth and drift around the room. I’m going to resurrect an irresponsibility, rub it shiny and bright with paradigms of elephant piss, and then restore the biology of the harpsichord. They say the earliest harpsichords came from Italy and were made of cypress and had a robust tone. The Italian builders were phenomenal, but it was the French who developed the performance practices of the 16^th century lutenists into ingenious quasi-polyphonic textures and a subtle use of arpeggiation, and made that cypress travel the light of heaven.

The trombone is an entirely different animal. It has a telescopic slide, an orotund tone, and a gleaming pulchritude. The muscle of embouchure rides its reach of perfect metal to the birth of rapture. It is to the harpsichord and piano what the heron is to the estuary.

There is an ocean in me screaming to get out, a black dish on a white table, and a shore of black sand where a knot ripens in convolution. Persia is the dream I’m having now. Yesterday it was foolish lace and old barbed wire fences, a memory of snow blowing in a deviation across the highway in North Dakota. It was 1972 and pronunciation was slow as a sockeye salmon lazing under a winter sun. Later I thought of eels in an East Anglian slough. I am slender and uncontrolled. I hear a fluttering beyond the pigment, raw umber on a background of hope. I wear an empty hat and an empty sweater. They remain empty even when I am wearing them. This is their circumference. This is their delineation. Here is a feeling rendered in syllables: a coat on a hook in a barber shop. Feathers of a hawk. An alphabet of trees murmuring haiku into the night. An alphabet of broken violins below the skin gratifies the water word by word healing the wounds of these things with thunder and ice and a bird of infrared feathers defining reality with a penumbral grace on a snowy street. I choose a brush and go to work on my hair.

I have conflicts around the creation of reality. I never deny a bud its blossom, but the language hints of an invisible structure like the hole in Noguchi’s Black Sun. I hear it whirring round itself. The mind corrects the dark like a yo-yo. An adjective rips the air and yawns in a glass of water like a suitcase full of scarves and craters. There is a hurricane caught in my nerves. My other car is a toadstool. I’m a cemetery cat. I’m a tattoo nobody can decipher. I’m a finger pressing a button on a jukebox. I’m an immodest raw umber and soft as a ghost of hydrogen. I feel the creak of a staircase in a house that has ceased to exist.

I’m obsessing over personal injuries that I drag from place to place. The life we are in is invisible. My thinking is gray. It fulminates and whistles. I can feel a splinter beneath an old wooden bench in Montmartre. Audacity is its own reward. Metal is never introverted. It doesn’t need to be. It twiddles an autumn leaf behind an arras in a Rocky Mountain dream. What amazement there is in typing. I see young girls busy with their thumbs making small messages and wonder what theaters we are when cartilage is so willing and supple and the presence of fish is so ruminative and driven. I can do marvelous things when the drums are pounding and the coupons have been well perforated and the avocados are fresh and have the sound of drums.

I can move my finger along the rim of a bowl. I can create a subjunctive mood, if I so wish. I can shape reality so that it looks like a bank teller or a hole in the ground. Europe weeps in its gloomy rain. I walk along the highway. I feel like a glass of milk shattered on the floor. There is milk and glass everywhere. The floor is light beige tile. I have made a hat of carefully chosen twigs and a ruffled collar circa 16^th century Holland. My mind plays with the dark like a big potato. Like Noguchi’s Great Rock of Inner Seeking. My elbows are on the table. I’m eating the sound of a harmonica. I’m authorized to do this. It’s my poem and I’ll cry if I want to. Cry if I want to. You’d cry to if it happened to you.

What? Life, the imagination, poetry, chiaroscuro boxing, convocation, fabric softener, stirring anthems, rain and umbrellas, the umbrellas of Cherbourg, the umbrellas of Pocatello, Idaho, sensation and trembling and sexual Tuesday. The caresses of people of buying things in thrift stores. If my palomino weighs two pounds I can describe it better. But it will be a very small palomino. It will be about the size of a word. The word palomino.

Here is a real palomino. It is real because your mind is at work picturing a palomino. I write palomino and you see a palomino but who gets credit for the palomino?

What is a brown and ravenous muscle doing in my wallet wallowing around as if there were no tomorrow? Euclid gives it motion and presents me with a phantom key. He defines the line as a breadthless length. But why should a line have bread? I take his point as the end of a line. The edges of a surface are lines. These are lines. This line has an inclination to cry. This line has an angle and is called rectilinear. This line is waiting for a hotel clerk. This line is perpendicular and standing on its head. This line is running parallel to a phantom area code hugged by a feeling of fat and one day they will meet in Colorado and equal the same thing as a bath towel.

The whole is greater than the part. Things which coincide with one another equal one another. To construct an exhortation use three sheets of plywood and a stick of gum. Accelerate it into the stratosphere and explode it. If in a triangle the square of one of the sides equals the sum of the squares on the remaining two sides of the triangle, then the angle contained by the remaining two sides of the triangle is right. If not, it isn’t wrong, but it will not resemble Kentucky. It will go naked and cut itself on an oyster shell. It will be Tuesday. It will not be Wednesday. It will break apart and fall across the surface of the sun’s core.

This is just a rumor, but I heard that there is a trombone so extreme it can create a powerful insights and relationships. It can create veins through solid metal, and a wide range of molecules including France and mulberry. Beef gravy. Insoluble rickshaws. Unicorns. Unlawful sex. Flickering chins. Enormous pharmacies. Hypnotic real estate. Bubbles of soapy dream.

If such a trombone exists, may it extend the bistros of faith. May it varnish the zygotes of Neptune. May it ripple through my being sweetening everything with the stir of its vibrations and the trembling of its tone.   

 

Going on Account

It’s true. I’m a pirate now, sailing my own private Caribbean, sails flapping, halyards straining, desperation feasting on the pearls of obdurate hope. I am scudding the seas to redeem the dream of romance. The moon shines like a glass of milk breaking on the floor. How do I shape reality? I twist it into a flower of iron. I am bursting with confusion. Rain walks on my head. I hear the fabulous echoes of a thousand sirens singing a thousand songs. My beliefs are long and wide like the flight of swallows. Well then, let’s have a toast! There is a whisper of blue on my suitcase and a memory caught in my nerves whose suppleness of perspective has become spatial as a drop of rain and unravels the ghosts of murdered desires. My fingers burn. I work the yardarms. I cram each sentence with an ocean and a catastrophe. I ignite the gaze of midnight speculation. I wonder if I can write as great as Kerouac. How far does the sky go? It spits images against the eyes. The dead walk the waves with apples and balloons. Technicolor angels brush the clouds. Coral snakes and alligators swarm in my sperm. I live the studio life of the Bateau Lavoir when Picasso painted his harlequins and sad blue women. I study the architecture of hunger. I listen to intuitions. I have a map of heaven and a map of hell and they are the same map. I’ve seen great wonders. I’ve seen colossal beasts emerge from the depths and skeletons dance on the waves. I’ve seen Paris and London and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. I wear a hat built of carefully chosen twigs. It moves me to build a worm. The feeling is rendered in syllables. The feeling twitches into life and squirms. What is despair? It is Europe weeping in the gloomy rain. It is a subjunctive mood broken into fjords. It is being alone in Mexico City. The life we lead is invisible. Reach into yourself and pull out a blazing evocation. The horizon lures us into travel along the rim of a bowl. Wounds are healed by the sound of the harmonica. Word by word I feel a poem aching in the bone of the arm making its marks on paper. I feel the rupture of a wave with a thousand wild arms. The mind plays with the dark. Jokes about the cemetery have the smell and chill of the ocean at night. I feel the creak of shifting planks, the hungry egos of poets. The brain is a pudding. Audacity is its own reward. Iron is widely literal, and that is a good sweet sound when it is uttered by a harmonica whirring round itself in a delirium of music. I like my coffee black. I like the woman who sells combs at the public market in Havana. I like Noguchi’s Great Rock of Inner Seeking. The water is yawning above this structure of sculptured thought. What amazement in trying to scrape the cartilage of need from the bones of disdain. I sense the presence of fish. It is the sound of drums. I’m cold as a wet boulder. I move against the current. I smell the breath of old wood conversing with its element the sea. I feel the agitation of an invisible placenta in the ancient womb of night. The worse pains are the ones that sit on your heart like egrets of regret. The greatest treasures have nothing to do with gold, or jewelry, or coins. They are the things we find in corners. In dreams. Goats on an emerald hill soft as the break of day.

 

What Really Matters

I’m haunted by morning because your neck is beautiful and the blood is apparent in its audacity. Let’s bring a punching bag to the birthday party of a crawling kingsnake as structures howl for space and stir me like nothing else. A word crawls out of my mouth in fingers of mist. A Rolling Stone throws rocks at the moon. Wheels converse with the road and ripples turn into waves until a caustic puppet appears and crackles with Strindberg. Your heat feels so good my dear infinity bursts out of a garden and grows into meaning like coins of pure sterling. My mind is empty and parallel to a hug. Wrinkles and crinkles of skin jackknife into patches of blazing paragraph. The sparrows are so quick and alive that a turmoil flowers into a study of the Etruscans. We age together like hawks.

The garden is a component of dirt. Picasso is a word of sparkly syllables framed in fat perspective. My attitude is tilted toward properties of summer. Handstands venerate the earth. Let us chat and imitate dogs in an opulent hotel of popsicle stick machines beside the white chickens as the wind scribbles its thirst on a river. A swallow is an insoluble bird. I carry a rupture wherever I go. My pockets beg for sloth, the gnarled avidity of death. We slap the water instead and my pockets get personal and warm and correspond to clarinets. We are little streams to one another beside the post office our thoughts flow through one another like the algebra of coal or a canvas full of rain.

The greenery of morning is an out and out flower of congeniality an enthralled attitude and a shivering pavement. A painter sneezes the grammar of oak which is complex as an oyster if you get my drift. A head is for healing the erudition of rubber. Cotton redeems the audacity of flags which an evasion interprets gleefully in my heart of hearts as a decipherment of space. I cook a philosophy over my belief in the lotus. “Bomb” is a poem by Gregory Corso. It crackles like algebra in a hydrogen jukebox as we crash through the wall looking for Jim Morrison and go humming in the mud of the past as if it were Tuesday and rippled through a paragraph like this morning’s coffee. In other words, palominos in a pickle personify the spread of words.

Words are tangential to the duty of cabbage, which is to grow into convolutions. There is a literal confusion about metaphors. Structure cuts through a lobster. Its outer body has a coppery sheen. This is water whispering. Color steers toward volume. My belt buckle clangs when I walk. The guide is lost. I am diving into life in a book of tinkling shadows that squirts tattoos whenever I open it. Charcoal and enamel combine to mean Technicolor peacocks in a metaphor of clouds.

There is a feeling of arabesque as an odor meanders through my nose and a touch opens my anatomy to raw umber. I answer it by flowing into a road of vowels and midnight towels. The plot has dissonance and static I ruffle my feathers and howl. I see pink horses shout and push themselves around a porcelain washbowl in which soapy water glitters with stunning clarity. I push a gaze out of my eyes as my pen rattles with words. I try to get the words out of the pen there is an eagerness to do this and a spatial orientation that writhes among the syllables a drooling vowel hectic in battle expands into a door let me know if this is too impersonal and I will sail it beyond the horizon I am burning to say so burning to do that burning to represent language as a form of diffusion a formula for woodwinds a universe of trunks evoked by an elephant. I run and construct a whisper because the plywood merits pronouns and a haul of flip-flopping fish argues for seclusion. My words are your words. Let them sparkle like a liniment.

My cuts amuse. My beliefs are shiny. A word is a chrysalis of syllables. The ceiling sneers at the floor. I wander among the potatoes and wonder what saga best explains the architecture of rope. Sunlight simmers on a shoal of catfish. The river fulfills the dark purpose of perforation. The water answers with a conversation among introverts. Space drools with gravity up the side of a glass bowl with a tint of green.

Poetry is a device for understanding cocaine. We laugh at a blob of blue hooked to a harmonica. The need for music is great and seamless as an insect carved from granite. The shivering never stops. This whistles amid physical examples of Burgundy and the barrels gush with truth. Go, grab a dream and sleep. There are parables to discover. Sleep is immaterial. What really matters is being unconscious. That’s where the fun starts. The surfaces drop through themselves like paraffin and molasses and curves evolve into a deeper understanding of volume. I dream of a big trombone. Cartwheels moisten the lines of a poem with little fingers of rain over and over again. My pen is talking to me. It says anguish wars with definition, and I agree. Bones are enthusiastic. You can tell, because of their structure, and congeniality, and large crimson lake singing in a cemetery. The river keeps going, and the blisters clap their paradigms, smelling of mythology and boats. 

Car2Go A-Go-Go

Roberta’s Car2Go card arrived in the mail on Monday. I needed to go to the bank, so we thought it’d be a great convenience if we spotted one of the little white and blue Smart cars that make up the Car2Go fleet and drove it to the bank. There had been several Car2Go cars parked on our street or very nearby for the last several weeks. We found none, however, and so we ended up walking. Some cirrus caught my attention in an otherwise flawlessly blue sky. It seemed uncannily vivid and well-defined, accentuating the China blue sky with dazzling lucidity. It was so veiled and feathery it was difficult not to think of it as some form of sublime consciousness. Was this a moral universe after all? Was there truly a higher power underlying life’s random brutality and unfairness with a mysterious order and angelic harmonies? Or were these just cirrus clouds, feathered by the deposition of water vapor in the thin air of high altitudes, measurable, gaugeable, knowable as anything else? That same day, 2,000 miles distant, a murderous two-mile wide tornado would devastate a suburb of Oklahoma City, leaving twenty-four people dead.

There but for fortune go you or I.

After I finished depositing a check, we went to the see the new Startrek movie at the Boeing Imax theater, which was just a short walk from the bank. We enjoyed the movie. The dialogue is crisp and witty, the villains are truly menacing, the special effects are eye-poppingly exciting in 3-D and the story is full of suspense and spectacle. I’ve always liked the underlying themes of Startrek: Kirk, who is all impulse and gallantry and threatened with having his rank removed for insubordination, is contrasted brilliantly with Spock, who is all reason and logic and at war with the emotions of his human side. There is always intensity and great friendship between these two characters despite frequent outbreaks of resentment and irresolvable ethical dilemmas when one of them saves the other from sure death but must break Federation rules in order to do so. Chris Pine assumes Shatner’s old role with an almost seamless realization of Shatner’s mischievous, devil-may-care sparkle and this astute casting coup is even more evident with the role of Spock; Zachary Quinto is totally convincing as the young Leonard Nimoy.

Boeing Imax is the perfect location to see a Startrek movie because it is located on the old Seattle World’s Fair grounds. The theme of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, which was called the “Century 21 Exposition,” was a futuristic celebration of science whose evident intent was to demonstrate that the United States was in no way “behind” the Soviet Union in the domains of science and space but was, in fact, at the very forefront of stellar discoveries and technology. I was fourteen at the time, and remember it well. I saw the Space Needle rise out of the ground from the vantage point of my drafting class on the third floor of Queen Anne High School. As I attempted to draw precise configurations of screwdrivers and C-clamps (never to the satisfaction of the humorless prick that taught the class), I watched as concrete trucks filled a thirty foot deep hole for the base and the massive steel beams that form the legs and upper body of the needle were welded together, one by one, so that it looked like a giant weed growing out of the ground.

There is great cruel irony for me in this now because the 21^st Century is thirteen years old, but I’m not here. I’m still in the twentieth century. I neither own or carry a cell phone, despise digital technology and its consequent undermining of intellect and literature and destruction of books and print media, and although I keep a blog, it is a headache-inducing inner conflict in which I simultaneously feel the empowerment of instant self-publication and the degradation of instant self-publication.

As we walked up the long spiraling ramp that leads to the Imax theater, a series of photographs caught my interest. This was part of an ongoing Nikon Small World competition and exhibit of scientific micro-photography. I gazed at several and was stunned at the power of the images: what appeared to be a cracked yellow sun with blood veins emanating into space was, in fact, a “3D lymphangiogenesis assay” of cells sprouting from “dextran beads embedded in fibrin gel on Bing.” A membranous tornado of green and black peppered with luminous blue dots was a “Single optical section through the tip of the gut of a Drosophila melanogaster (fruitfly).”

We hoped to find a Car2Go outside the Seattle Center fairgrounds. There were none. Roberta uses a Samsung "dumb" phone. It is your basic, serviceable cell phone with no Internet access, so there was no way we could obtain the Car2Go availability map and reserve a car. The bus proved the more convenient option. We rode the number 2 to the top of Queen Anne and went to the Five Spot café for dinner. The Five Spot is a “themed” restaurant of “Regional American Food.” Every six months or so they change themes from one U.S. location or event to another. The décor and food on the menu is a reflection of the theme and is often quite clever, and good. The current theme was “Blue Highway,” a.k.a. “Highway 61,” the highway legendary for its musical history because it drops down from Minnesota to run through Saint Louis to Memphis to New Orleans. A papier-mâché rat, spider, and snail hung in the center of the restaurant and were occasionally animated by electrical device. I think they were supposed to be musicians in a band. Paintings of blues and rock ‘n roll greats adorned the wall: Otis Redding, Etta James, Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King. Elvis Presley, dressed in his over-the-top regal high-collar rhinestone studded getup from his 70s Las Vegas period, lunged flamboyantly in front of a pizza delivery man.

I was torn between the slow smoked Tennessee brisket (“dry rubbed & hickory smoked for ten hours; served with baked beans, spiced & blistered green beans & sweet ‘n hot Memphis BBQ sauce”) and the St. James Parish Bowl of Gumbo with Andouille sausage (I love Andouille sausage), chicken and shrimp slow cooked in dark roux and served over herb rice. I decided on the Tennessee brisket. Roberta ordered the Crossroads Pan Roasted Chicken, topped with “habanero Voodoo sauce and served with Brussels sprouts and griddled cornmeal cake." I also got a Crater Lake root beer to wash it all down. The meal was good, the pork was tender and juicy, the baked beans were stunning and the green beans were eminently toothsome, but I don’t think it was anywhere near the $17.00 dollars they charged for it. The portions were rather small and the humbleness of the food did not merit such a heady price.

The next day, a Tuesday, we scored our first Car2Go. While Roberta was at her doctor’s appointment downtown, I googled the Car2Go map for available cars and found several just a few blocks distant. I texted her the information, hoping the cars would still be there. Roberta called after her appointment and I checked to see if those two cars were still available. They were not. I found another one on Columbia. It was still available when Roberta got there, so she was able to drive that one home. We felt triumphant. We went for a run, and when we returned approximately an hour later, we showered and dressed and walked down our easement to see if the car was still there. It was. Hallelujah. Unfortunately, someone had reserved it. I wondered if you could do that, I told Roberta, but it didn’t seem fair, so I went no further and didn’t bother to check. Roberta explained that yes, you could reserve these cars from your computer or smartphone, but there’s only a half-hour window to make it to the car before the time expires. That still didn’t seem right. I mean, there you are in a hurry, your card awkwardly wrestled out of your wallet or purse while struggling to hold a recently purchased guitar or cherub lamp in your other hand, and the car smackdab in front of you has been fucking reserved. That sucks.

Back home, we checked the computer for more cars. There weren’t any close enough to make it worth our while. We just wanted to go to the QFC at the bottom of the hill and get some grape juice and root beer and anything else cumbersome to lug up a steep hill. We checked again a few minutes later and the car Roberta drove home was still in its same spot and had become available again. Maybe the person that had reserved it changed their mind, or got caught by a phone call just as they were leaving and their time ran out. Roberta reserved it from our computer and once again strolled down our easement to the car. Roberta held her card over the reader in the windshield, unlocked the doors and got in and opened the door for me on the passenger side. I watched as she went through a series of moves on a little computer screen, questions about the condition of the car, etc. Then she put the key in and started it. There was a high-pitched electrical whine which died down in a few seconds as the car resurrected into mechanical life.  

Roberta described her driving experience: she said felt a weird surge of power when she stepped on the accelerator, which was due to the fact it was electrically powered. Other than that, it was easy to maneuver. It had a radio, which seemed always to be tuned to KEXP, which was fine with me. I like their music, except for the occasional rap. We brought our juice and root beer down to the underground parking lot and resumed our ride in the Car2Go bucket. I couldn’t get the trunk open so I had to hold two big paper grocery bags on my lap. Roberta parked it on the street again and we walked the rest of the way up our easement. The total for that day’s Car2Go driving came to $17.00 dollars.

We drove another Car2Go car the next day, on Wednesday afternoon after Roberta returned home from work. Earlier in the day I’d heard a report on NPR that money in savings accounts was vulnerable to getting chipped away by inflation because interest rates were so low. That did it. That was the tipping point for me. The incentive to keep my money in an IRA just vanished. It wasn’t that I believed this reporter on the instant, I’m far too cynical and skeptical a person to do that. Everything the report said jived with my own observations. My bank statements were proof. The money in the accounts did not compound with interest. Inflation nibbled on its value like rabbits raiding a cabbage field in the dead of night. The NPR reporter advised making your money work for you, invest it in something that appears to be appreciating, real estate being the most obvious. A car is not an investment, it depreciates the instant the wheels leave the lot and hit the street, but it’s enjoyable, it’s fun, and it is a vital piece of equipment in a city like Seattle where the public transit system is barely adequate and is dying from lack of funds.

We went online on our computer (you really do need a smartphone when you’re on the go for a Car2Go) and found a Car2Go at the bottom of the hill, on Valley. Roberta reserved it, showered, dressed, and we walked down to take command of the little tin can and drive it to the credit union where I could shift some money into my checking account. I was sure now that I wanted to buy a car. I knew I was giving into an addiction, a driving addiction, car addiction, listening-to-music-loud-in-a-car-addiction, but three months of bus riding, taking taxis, renting cars, and now using the costly and not particularly convenient Car2Go system had persuaded me that my recent headache-inducing conflict over whether to buy a car or not was leaning inevitably in the “buy a frigging car you dope” direction. I had made my choice. 

I must also admit to some grieving for our old Subaru Justy, which I suppressed for obvious reasons. It was a machine, not a pet, not remotely a living creature. Yet the old Subaru had felt like a friend, a member of the family. I did feel bereaved. I just wouldn’t admit it. Buying a new car would help with that hole it left.

Roberta started the Car2Go and we headed toward Mercer, which used to be the easiest way to get to Fairview and Eastlake until Paul Allen began evolving his empire south of Lake Union. Half of Mercer was closed. It looked dicey, so we headed to Dexter. Traffic on Dexter was heavy and slow. I worried that we would be trapped there long enough to miss the bank being open, but eventually we made it to Fairview, made a left, and minutes later found ourselves at the bank. The transaction was quick so we kept the Car2Go and resumed driving it back to Queen Anne. We parked it on Queen Anne Avenue North and walked to Uptown China, a restaurant we used to frequent much more often when we still had our Subaru. We waited in the entry for someone to seat us. There is normally someone there. It was unusual to wait. The service is normally quite good at Uptown. While we stood waiting I spotted a couple we did not like and certainly did not want to enter into conversation with. Even a brief chat would have been painful. So we crept out before they caught sight of us and had dinner at Athina, a little further up the street.

Our trip to the bank had cost $13 dollars, roughly. That means that in two days our Car2Go use totaled $31 dollars. A taxi would have been cheaper. I looked forward to getting a new car. There was dread, and guilt, but mostly the relief of an addiction finding its way to wheels, acceleration, and appeasement.

 

Addendum:

Roberta found a Car2Go at QFC shortly after getting off work. It was available, so she drove it home. It's a short distance, a quarter of a mile at best, but it's a steep uphill climb, and she had a bag of groceries. The cost for this ride was $2.23. We used one several hours later for a total of nineteen minutes to drop a book off at the library and pick up a prescription at Safeway. This ride cost $8.46. I must say it was eminently convenient to run these errands in a little Smart car, but still relatively costly. It should also be added that none of these destinations were accessible by bus.

To Drive, or Not to Drive

One afternoon, after getting off the number 4 bus on Galer, we heard the wind whistle through the radio towers atop Queen Anne. There are three altogether. The third is further to the west. These two rose high in the sky humming the rough overtones of a tempestuous sky. Rags of cloud blew through the girders. These three radio towers, seen from a distance, have always given Queen Anne hill a regal look. The hill itself has an elevation of 456 feet, making it the tallest of Seattle’s seven hills. The tower furthest to the east, the KING TV tower, is the one chosen to hang Christmas Lights on every winter, the day after Thanksgiving. The tower was erected sometime in 1947 and made its first television broadcast on November 10^th, 1948. Seattle had six hundred televisions. A crowd gathered downtown at Frederick & Nelson’s department store. In order to strengthen the fuzzy image within the studio, the crew applied white powder, which gave them a cadaverous look. For further contrast, and so that it might be apparent that mouths were moving and words were being shaped by animate skin, men applied brown lipstick, women blue. They looked like zombies. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I’ve begun daydreaming about owning a car again. I get headaches from it. I’m heavily conflicted. The idea of getting into a car again, a car that we own, that awaits our every whim in the back parking lot, fills me with joy. But I’m against cars by principle. They’re destroying the planet. The consume gas and oil and emit toxic fumes. Thousands of arable acreage is covered with asphalt and concrete to accommodate their grease-leaking hulks of rubber and steel.  Instead of soaking into the earth the way rain is intended to do, percolating down to nourish roots and worms and microorganisms, it flows into the sewage system and thence into Puget Sound where it creates a contrasting brown with the sound’s usual midnight blue of white-capped waves. But we have come to find that riding the bus is effortful and time-consuming and I miss driving. I miss shifting rears, maneuvering in traffic, listening to my CDs at full volume, and subverting time and space with heady accelerations. I miss the convenience of having a car at our immediate disposal. It’s an addiction. The walk to the bus stop, the wait for the bus, the gymnastics of riding the bus, are not that bad. And you don’t need to pay insurance or get speeding tickets or parking tickets or search for a place to park. Yet I long for the complexities of a car, and cannot get the image of a shiny Subaru Impreza out of my head. The delicious curve of a steering wheel. The sound of a seat belt clicking together. The wistful glow of dashboard lights.

Roberta signed up for a Car2Go. We haven’t been able to use it yet. It takes days to get the card, or whatever they send you in the mail that will allow her to activate one of their cars. It’s like applying for a passport. The Car2Go gives me a lot of anxiety. I’ve read less than enthusiastic things about their call center. And the range of things that can go wrong is quite formidable, including not being able to log off while the clock is still ticking and you’re being charged by the minute and the call center has you on hold for an interminable amount of time, or being immobilized in Seattle’s dense immovable traffic, or getting into a fender-bender with a clueless adolescent with no insurance, or an attorney in a brand new BMW. What happens then?

Today the sky is a mottled disarray of blue and gray. The day feels neutral and vague. I make some scrambled eggs and slather some strawberry jam on a piece of toast and watch some people in Switzerland argue in French on TV Monde. I can only pick up certain phrases. The thin woman with the thick black shoulder-length hair appears to be in distress concerning some beach property that belongs to the family. She has a son with a mental disability. She talks to a young man full of hope and enthusiasm who tries to encourage her to take some form of action to defend the beach property, though I can’t tell what it is specifically. Another man, who appears to be her husband, is a sourpuss. He appears to be in a lot of pain. He’s never happy. He’s always at work and when he’s interrupted by the woman he gets angry. Abruptly, there is a scene in which she’s swimming in the lake. The water must be freezing, but she appears very relaxed.

I will not be swimming in Lake Washington this year. I don’t want to get sick like I did last summer and spend an entire day in the hospital having antibiotics dripped into my veins. I will go swimming in the imagination. I will twang and twinkle and dream. I will weave sensations of the outer world into inner worlds and roll the inner worlds into the outer world by way of language. By way of sentences. By way of a brain crawling toward a thought, delicate as the heart of a bubble. Is there anything more explicit than a human leg? There is meat loaf. There is a man playing a lute. There is the clash of cymbals.

Yesterday I saw a fire engine on fire. Black smoke billowed out of the cab. The fire engine was parked right in front of the station, a temporary station, which is a large white tent. I wasn’t sure if this was intended as an exercise or not. The firemen were dressed in their fire-fighting gear and running a hose of water into the cab to the put the fire out. How in the world does the cab of a fire engine catch fire?

I think about fire. I think about words. I think about money. James Kunstler writes that the Federal Reserve intends to juice the financial markets with U.S. Treasury bonds and miscellaneous securities with the goal of putting downward pressure on longer-term interest rates and thus supporting economic activity and job creation by making financial conditions more accommodative. Which is a polite way of saying fake wealth. Smoke and mirrors.

There is often a kind of poetry to finance. Their operations are so delightfully abstract. And unreal. Money has no reality. Its value has no reality. You can’t eat money. You can’t eat gold or silver. Where does value come from? Who makes value? What is extrinsic value? What is intrinsic value? Intrinsic value is value that something has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “in its own right.” Its value does not derive from anything else. Thomas Hobbes believed the goodness or badness of something to be constituted by the desire or aversion one may have regarding it. David Hume also subscribed to the view that all ascriptions of value involve projections of one’s own sentiments onto whatever is said to have value. This makes it the whole argument subjective and muzzy. It does not help me decide whether having a car is of higher value than not owning a car. Neither Thomas Hobbes or David Hume drove cars.

John Dewey, who did drive a car, at least once (he hit a tree), suggested that since the world is always changing in such a way that the solution to one problem becomes the source of another, and that what may be an end in one context is a means to an end in another, it is a mistake to seek a timeless list of goods and evils, of goals to be attained for their own sakes.

Which makes intrinsic value all the more elusive. This is I know: rivers inspire reverie. Sunlight penetrating the foliage of a thick forest is beautiful. When a hedge of wild lilac loses its petals the sidewalk gets a thick coating of deep blue petals. A window without a dream is just a window. When an image crashes among its words the sentence convulses into a coat hanger. Removing a hinge pin and coating it with olive oil will quiet a squeaky door. Chaos gets our attention. Car rental agencies never give you the economy car you request but a much bigger car which also happens to be the only car available at the moment take or leave it. Perceptions wander my skin when I shave. A horse is virtuous and paper when it is written in blue ink. Cézanne discovered a universe of cubes on a prominence of rock. There is a pivotal point in everyone’s life where one’s narrative trajectory alters quite dramatically and goes in a different direction. Nature is a riddle. There is a latent pterodactyl in all of us, and DNA is a helix.

Why is DNA a helix? I find that curious.

So are fingernails. Fingernails grow with a strange rapidity.

The good news is that my Achilles tendon has stopped hurting. It stopped hurting the exact same day I ordered an aerobic step bench to exercise the tendon and prevent it from hurting. It had been hurting each day for over a month. And stopped. The very moment the sent for article was charged to our credit card. Some things are magic. Some things are not. They’re not exactly magic. They’re another phenomenon. One that involves coincidence, and credit cards, and luck.