Analog by Night

“Sometimes I had a mind to ask her if she’d ever let herself be fucked by a Shetland pony.” (Miller, Sexus 233)

The cabin is just off a small gravel driveway about 1-2 miles from the ferry docks, so it was pretty painless getting here, and it’s been easy to make trips into town for dinner and little things I need. So far I’ve cooked both nights and made myself lunch. I brought a few things in my cooler, and have purchased about as many to support those dishes. I had bread, but no butter or sandwich meat. I had chicken, but no marinade or sauce. Over the past two days I’ve gone through almost an entire jar of green peppercorn dijon mustard, and probably a pound of chicken breast, but it’s been excellent. I’m not as fond of this place internally as the other two places I’ve stayed. There’s a small iron stove that looks like a woodburner but burns gas that has to run almost constantly to keep it at around 67 degrees, and my feet still tend to be cold. » Read the rest of this entry «

I think the impulse to write comes from being filled up with a swarm of words and thoughts for each of the experiences I have. I feel a kind of rapture, for things I see. Sometimes it’s loathing and disappointment, sometimes its embarrassment at the garish and undignified design of things. Sometimes my feeling, for the things that excite, which is nearly anything I give my descriptive eye to, is huge and broad and powerful. It’s as though, when I stop to stare, my stare becomes an abyss, a vacuum, a rich immersive symphony of words and emotions. Yet there is nothing but quiet on the outside of my head. Or worse than quiet, there is the verse, chorus, verse, and bridge of the doddering song that civilization makes. » Read the rest of this entry «

Dorothea Brande reprints this passage in her book Becoming A Writer,

“Agnes Mure Mackenzie, in The Process of Literature, says, ‘Your loving and my loving, your anger and my anger, are sufficiently alike for us to be able to call them by the same names; but in our experience and in that of any two people in the world, they will never be quite completely identical’; if that were not literally true there would be neither basis nor opportunity for art.”

I tend to quickly lose respect for people who abandon the effort to explain their experiences to me  on the latter condition Mackenzie speaks of. Usually it’s the position of someone who sees race or gender as some sort of impenetrable experience force field. Do they believe themselves to be at the opposite pole? It just seems obviously lazy. Of course, by being who I am, I am not you, but my experience of you is made enormously less alien or impenetrable by the very language, cognition, education, period and design that makes in you that awareness. Start there, and come to me with your experience of difference. If you do not, I can not be expected to celebrate you, redress your grievances, or know how best to exist peaceably alongside you.

“Life is four hundred and forty-four horsepower in a two liter engine.”
– Henry Miller

“Drinking: X people drink not to show off but to get quietly tight.”

- Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Paul Fussell, 1983
Tight indeed.

I was trying to tell a friend of mine what book I’d like to read, and it turned into a rant. She got the first part of it, and here’s the rest of it:

See the kids these days have the 80′s all wrong. They seem to think it was just fun and neon recklessness. But they enjoy this recklessness from of a place of LOVE of life. Their’s is a hedonistic depravation that comes from being young and having too much life and energy you don’t know what to do with. That’s why it works so well with the other du-jour moda: neo-psychedalia. (You like the French and Italian mess I just made there?) Both of these little past-times are born out of the itchy weightlessness of an EXCESS of security, not fear. Not insecurity, but the 80′s were ALL about insecurity. And therefore the meaning of their neon is different.

The truth is the 80′s were one of the most desperate eras of the 20th century. The 70′s had just happened, and the 80′s were this kind of hangover/wake up because the excesses of the 70′s had really wrecked us. The 80s came out of a MAJOR recession. A stadium rock/drama/operatic bubble that burst.  When something as huge and dickly as the 70′s blows it’s collective nut all over your decade, you have to do something else. You can’t riff on that, you can’t do a 2.0. You have to stop doing the math and start inventing fucking algebra.

You’re left with new wave and punk as a way out of the giantness. Stripped down, bare, dirty poor, roots. What do we have to do now? Elect an actor as president?  What a perfect wait to set the stage for the most clownish, throw-your-hands up, and yell fuck it decade we’ve seen yet. You want malaise? YOu want ennui? You want numbness that would make Roger Waters cry out of sympathy?  Look at America between 1979 and 1991.

Did I mention the AIDS? The AIDS came and dominated most of the decade. I remember hearing commercials on the radio as a ten year old that made AIDS sound like a army of marching germs that were 60 miles outside of your home and killing everyone.  I remember it sounding something like this, “AIDS is a an epidemic disease for which there is no cure and a 100% fatality rate. If you get it, you die, and the numbers of people getting it are growing.”  I heard that for YEARS, not weeks like SARS, or Bird Flu, or Swine Flu. YEARS

Let’s take that fear and add sick, fucked up impossibly anal greed, horrible car design, awkward graspy fashion that was so space-age nobody could decide between puffed up shoulder pads, stiff collars and stillettos vs. the Bronxy acid-washed jeans and sweats (of every shape). Then let’s let Hall and Oates, Kenny Loggins, and some poorly saccharine bitter divorce pop dominate the airwaves.

The 80′s was nothing but people re-structuring. With no real ground to build on. which is why the 90′s came along and tore all the poorly, falsely, unredemptive fakery out again. And replaced with something infinitely worse. Intimate pseudo-sincerity.

Here’s what society HAD in the 80′s that it is definitely now missing: A real, palpable, scary-as-shit threat. Because of nuclear Russian, AIDS, crack cocaine, and the bursted bubble of the 60′s and 70′s that hadn’t redeemed them, people ran topspeed in two directions. 1. was a kind of super-selfishness that made the stiffness of the 50′s seem warm and yummy, and 2, complete abandonment of self.

Remember that the 80′s were nostalgic for the 50′s. There’s a lesson in that too. The teens living then were close enough to it to be curious about it, but too close to the 60′s and 70′s. That was the era for their parents and older siblings.  I think we are always a little in love with the decade 1-2 decades before we were born.

I believe that the youth of the 80′s were genuinely disaffected, genuinely so scared one minute and hopeless the next that they really DIDN’T give a single or double shit about anything, and were infinitely liberated by that. Naturally their hearts and minds went towards desperate escape with cheap pot left over and watered down from the 60′s, and even cheaper sex, and most interestingly a new born love affair with extreme acts of human depravity. Murder junkies.

what’s wrong with falling in love, over and over again. Feeling finally that someone may love you. Maybe it’s foolish, and life doesn’t permit it. Maybe when the world speaks, it says, timing, or permission. But if I smell your perfume, and I look at you, and I see that your eyes are brimming with water because you’ve heard me, and then, for once I believe someone else, then I hold that close. I hold it close, I listen to it over and over, and maybe it’ll never happen. Maybe not, but I can thank you for making me feel in love, and loved, and like the door is still open.

There’s a city, and a village, a music, and a home, and a book, and love, across a great divide, but there is a bridge called faith, and called accident, that goes to the other side. On the other side we can hold hands in celebration, without shame, and we can drown in the fullness of those swells. The ocean maybe means forever, and it’s dark and tempestuous and huge. In the swells of the ocean everyone is drown, everyone goes under and is lost and taken away. So that fullness swells up from the inside and is; you know what it is.

We are before that ocean and before that bridge. We are in our bodies, we are in our words, and all of them work together for us, because it is possible, because we long for love, to be held up, to be held down, to be spoken to softly and sternly when the time is appropriate.

Because we see too deeply, we see into hearts, and hear the voices in chorus from the other side. We know that across that bridge is the happiness, is the relation, and that same feeling we hold privately in our hearts.

When I tug at you, when my hand drifts across your back, and your hand and your face, I am only trying to help you hear the voice across that bridge.

The mythology of the West is that any lone cowboy with a pistol can defeat even the most absurdly insurmountable foe, especially if it’s evil. This got me to thinking, What if the US was confronted with a threat from space. No, not aliens, that’s been worked out in that Will Smith hosted Documentary ‘Independence Day’ I’m talking about space itself, like planets and shit. Like this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16187534/

What would we do about it? Well, naturally the response might be something like this:
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20061214-124040-1562r.htm

Yeah but you can’t just NUKE the SUN? That’s silly. Sounds like it at first glance, but as long as Charlton Heston lives the dream lives too. (Damn dirty apes!) Maybe it’s silly to think ‘Muricans could beat nature, even space nature, at her own game, but it’s not like we haven’t thought about it.
Like this:

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html

Divorce is a sound that is born in clip.

I remember these girls (and guy) opening for REO Speedwagon in 86 at the Topanga Valley Convention Center. I think it was the “What would JCPenny Do?” tour, but then again it could have been some sort of Sub-Humane Society benefit. I don’t know, I just remember seeing one of them collapse from the heat during “Joanie’s Sorry (and Chachi cried)” before falling asleep on my Aunt Bakie’s blanket.

I remember my tiny sunburned belly full of homemade apple juice, and the slow doping affect of Oscar Mayall (organic varient) bologna hugged between two sugary slices of rainbow family walnut bread. I nearly choked on the smell of Californian sweat wafting from my Uncle Harold’s armpits. It smelled of sandalwood and alfalfa, and was the push to sleep, the push to forget.

Thanks to the band for providing my young guardians the stage and poetic preamble to the dissent that would later become a two year divorce. They had their divorce, and of course I began mine. I divorced my family and I divorced the twin boys I used to ride bikes with down Strawberry Lane in the depressed ‘burb I was born in four miles outside of town.

How can you be in love with two sets of plain brown eyes? The eyes you know are open when your feet accidentally touch during a sleep over. How can you not weep with joy after the hand connected to those eyes brashly jumps across the table to smear jelly across your face only to be tasted itself by tremulant lips? How can you not remember the light red crease in the olive skin set in the waist by elastic shorts. A crease you might get a peek at everytime you jumped on the trampoline together. I divorced those boys, because the twinness of my gender and my feelings pushed the sound of my beating heart into clip.

That summer, that show, those three marginally coordinated girls and the facetious absent meanderings of the “Teens” keyboardist, foggily bound my memory. A memory of divorce, a memory of the kind of separation that would never end for me.