July 20th -- eyes of cows

I'd recently written in a letter to my mother that I was pretty sure I was smart. I'm not too sure "smart" is accurate now. Thinking about it, "enthusiastic" & "passionate" came up. Something bred out of the majority of society.

You can see its lack in the eyes of cows.

Not that I'm not a cow, I may just be one of the ones that wanders off a bit to stare at the trees outside the barbed wire -- or one of those rangy-horned, sagebrush cows that scamper indelicately off when you're hiking in the Puebelo Mountains. Ones who've gone to seed a bit, whose meat is used for jerky & their hide for boot leather -- still dim, but Remembering, nonetheless.

The eyes of a deer, or an elk -- that's an entirely different story; one I hesitate to even start in on. The depth of a deer's gaze, the sex in the elk's (of course I'm thinking here of a full-antlered stag in the rut -- pounding the ground with his powerful, impatient steps, ripping up bushes for practice and release). I'm not ever going to go into it, I don't have the time to write such a volume -- or the maturity. My feet are still unhaired, and my hands soft. I'll wait until the bottoms of my feet are shod in thick leather, and my hands tawny & strong & brown like a rancher's tanned grip.

July 20th -- Federico Garcia Lorca poem

Fuck Yeah! (Lorca trans. Bly)

New York


(office and attack)
to Fernando Vela

Beneath all the statistics
there is a drop of duck's blood.
Beneath all the columns
there is a drop of sailor's blood.
Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood;
a river that goes singing
past the bedrooms of the suburbs,
and the river is silver, cement, or wind
in the lying daybreak of New York.
The mountains exist, I know that.
And the lenses ground for wisdom,
I know that. But I have not come to see the sky.
I have come to see the stormy blood,
the blood that sweeps the machines to the waterfalls,
and the spirit on to the cobra's tongue.
Every day they kill in New York
ducks, four million,
pigs, five million,
cows, one million,
lambs, one million,
roosters, two million,
who turn the sky to small splinters.
You may as well sob filing a razor blade
or assassinate dogs in the hallucinated foxhunts,
as try to stop in the sawnlight
the endless trains carrying milk,
the endless trains carrying blood,
and the trains carrying roses in chains for those in the field of perfume.
The ducks and the pigeons
and the hogs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood down,
underneath all the statistics;
and the terrible bawling of the packed-in cattle
fills the valley with suffering
were the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.
I attack all those persons who know nothing of the other half,
the half who cannot be saved,
who raise their cement mountains
in which the hearts of hte small
animals no one thinks of are beating,
and from which we will all fall
during the final holiday of the drills.
I spit in your face.
The other half hears me,
as they go on eating, urinating, flying in their purity
like the children of the janitors
who carry delicate sticks
to the holes where the antennas
of the insects are rusting.
This is not hell, it is a street.
This is not death, it is a fruit-stand.
There is a whole world of crushed rivers and unachievable
distances
in the paw of a cat crushed by a car,
and I hear the song of the worm
in the heart of so many girls.
Rust, rotting, trembling earth.
And you are earth, swimming through the figures of the office.
What shall I do, set my landscape in order?
Set in place the lovers who will afterwards be photographs,
who will be bits of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, I won't; I attack,
I attack the conspiring
of these empty offices
that will not broadcast the sufferings,
that rub out the plans of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle
when their mooing fills the valley
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.


--Federico Garcia Lorca
trans. Bly
News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness pps. 110-112

May my invective poetry/writing be as fantastic, may it be so.

July 20, Notes over Breakfast -- poetry musings

Notes over breakfast -- Gerard De Nerval, "ancient energies" poet. Late 1800's.

[all from News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness Bly]

German tradition of "animal thinkers" Boehme & alchemists, Goethe and Novalis, Rilke.

Spanish: Jimenez, Machado, Lorca.

North America: Jeffers, Wallace Stevens.

Wow -- Wallace Stevens "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand."
"Whales weep Not" D.H. Lawrence

               Oceans

    I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths, 
against a great thing. 
                    And nothing
happens!  Nothing... Silence... Waves... 

--Nothing happens?  Or has everything happened, 
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

                     Juan Ramon Jimenez

God! I love those spaniards: Reminder: look for good translations, Jimenez, Lorca, Machado, Vallejo.

July 18th, Garden of Forking Paths, Quantum Physics, notes on Book ideas

I'm reading The Garden of Forking Paths -- and realized that it was published 5 years after the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics -- 1957 -- published '62 -- It's Borges's musings on this, I'm sure of it.

****

Ideas for Lookout Notes book:

Zeroxed -- linen paper outside -- stapled. Cover, a photo of Hickman zeroxed onto cover -- tape showing that held it on. Maybe a photo of me on back cover.

Intro: this book is created from excerpts of correspondence, journal entries, & "legitimate" writings put down while I stayed in a Fire Lookout Tower in the Mt. Hood National Forest. I've limited myself to very little editing after-the-fact, I.E. after I left the tower. Thus, the flavor of the pieces were maintained -- and the roughness. Enjoy.

Sign & number them.

Introduction --
Place --
Miasma --
(fantasia, catharsis, revelation)

Excerpts from radio messages -- definitions out of books (watch copyrights), incoming correspondence.

Send one to Snyder & Whalen.

"Dedicated to Gary Snyder -- whose work has never failed to give me hope -- both in the human race, and the artistic process.

And to my friend Ross Christian, without whose example I would not be writing today.

Blessing: May this book give permission to a flood of publications waiting to happen within the talent group of friends, so far unpublished, who are like a crowd at a banquet, plates at the ready -- waiting for someone to scoop the first serving."

Things to work on: format develop & allow for an intense amount of flexibility -- maybe prose - verse, adjunct prose; maybe chapter intros & maybe no explanation whatsoever -- maybe chronological order -- maybe titled chapters -- maybe not.

"The format developed organically, it isn't chronological -- or sequential -- it follows flows that occurred over the 4 months there. It's natural."

July 18th, insect teaching

(after finishing a small writing)

"It's so simple you see" -- the fly hovers between transparent wing clouds, swings back and forth in front of the mountains,
"It's just life, that's all. It's not a hard thing to do at all."

He flies away, and leaves me at the desk to write this down.

July 18th, The Sun, A Butterfly, and Chinese Poetry

Let it be said that the day was warm -- that the man laid nude on the catwalk and his flesh drank deep the nourishing rays of the Sun.

A shadow passed, and I looked up into a grey stormcloud, hinged bright penumbra halo.

I got dressed, and went back out to the walk, noting the flight of a Zebra Swallowtail below. So angular -- in my youth, the swallowtails in general were diamond & ruby to this butterfly collector -- but Zebra were nearly unheard of in the lowlands where I lived, and were especially prized. Never in all my childhood did I kill either species to impale them with a pin. Not that I wouldn't have at the time -- it just never happened.

Now, watching the jagged geometry of it's flight from above -- I wonder at the design it's tracing. A fractal perhaps, like the view from the top of the juvenile Doug Fir tree beside it -- perfect geometry. Or something more delicate, more subtle. "nonsense" to the uninitiated -- but a fluid, consistent 'chaos' to the new Scientists.

As a child, the erratic flight always seemed a programmed evasion technique; but I had a particular relation at that point. Now, I wonder if its sketching something more important to my understanding.

Maybe it will be one of those visions that lets gates fly open in your synaptic mass, like your first orgasm, or psychadelic experience.

I notice another butterfly off in the Rhododendron field, sketching its own, similar, chaotic pattern. I am reminded of a poem, "Visit to the Hermit Ts'Ui, by Chiien Ch'I -- written in the 8th century, in China (translated in the 1960's by Kenneth Rexroth).


Visit to the Hermit Ts'Ui


Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies,
Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows.
I envy you, drunk with flowers,
Butterflies swirling in your dreams.



Ch'ien Ch'I
(Love and the Turning Year;
One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese
Kenneth Rexroth, P. 67)



I look out over the butte and realize I'm in a garden of pink Rhododendron flowers & small, precise conifers. I realize I'm alone, and will be for months. I realize I'm watching butterflies -- and have been for nearly an hour.

July 17th, Writing a good letter

"You know you're writing a good letter when you jump up from your desk & pull down 1 or 2 books, and when you hunch over your notebook like a kid with a magnifying glass over an anthill."

-- Me


"God must not engage in Theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us." -Jose Luis Borges

July 15, Writing to The Old Man -- Dizzying continuum

So I might write to The Old Man. Everyone's got one. He's out there, and I'm writing down all the debris I pass as I walk backwards into my future. I'm saving the images of the debris, so he and I can laugh and joke about it when I get there. I sweep the debris away, and continue to walk.

The coordinate-system is all fucked, too. There's the up/down & side/side. That I follow. Then there's this arm that reaches up into the up/down and across the side/side. It's not sharp & black or grey & easily readable by false light, like the other two. Its that red-brown of a horse. And it's a strong, muscular, organic bend like a horse's neck turned - to.

When you're contentedly traveling your grey side/side, you'll hit this (with it's color, that can only be seen correctly in sunlight and still is a mystery/beautiful) and suddenly be stretched out flat -- your head in the future & feet in the past - or vice versa. Suddenly, dizzying continuum. I wrestle with this. -- gotta pee.

****

The wind sounded like a car coming up a wet driveway.

****

July 15, The Weather and I, Dancing

(I wrote a cathartic, painful letter to an ex-lover -- and the weather cleared a bit & then closed in -- and now the storm is above me, and I'm fasting, and the rain increases as I want to write faster and faster, not knowing even what I'd say -- just trying to let this stuff come through me -- what this weather resonates, what it says within me -- that I can't tell the outside from the inside -- that as I looked out the window of the lookout, I expected windshield wipers to come on and clean my view -- that that's a perfect analogy to my consciousness, that I even took a walk around the catwalk, but came back in. That it's raining outside. That I'm alone, and it's raining outside. That the current of a poem I heard a few times before is coming into my mindpan. That I can't, don't want, to control it. That the rain and thunder and dripping is a percussive orchestra -- that there are rhythms there, that I'm relating them, that they enter me, that I am relating them, that there is a rhythm here, that I want to express it.)

****

I'm becoming ecstatic, I imagine myself listening again to that poem (I'll write down the name later -- I've got it on tape). I imagine it affecting my whole life's work; I imagine academics & professors discussing the influence, rationalizing it; that, when asked, I just scream out "Because it got it, it got me -- right in the gut. It got me right in the gut, and I stayed there, and that it gave me a hard-on, and it gave me a context when I was ecstatic."

And then I come to a realization -- there are forms of writing that I've read and only partially digested, that give the ecstatic experience context, aesthetic context. They give me a structure to let this feeling out into. They build structures that resonate and allow me to communicate when I'm ecstatic. That I need to read those that illuminate me most -- those that give me a stiffy.

Lopez comes first to mind. Erdrich poetry. Sometimes Rilke. I can't see the ecstatic crunching down into form and words as easily in Rilke sometimes. Who else -- who else do i walk away from with a hard on. Lopez -- man -- he gets me like few others. Lopez -- and someone else, there is someone else, who I can't think of -- who makes me pace & rant after reading them. I did that after Chaim Potok -- but that was mood, & company, & timing. Lopez always does that for me. Rilke used to. Erdrich can. I'm going to nap -- to dream.

w/love, Bp

July 15, Storm moves out, napping contemplated, fasting

It's just beautiful outside. A storm has broken, the thick cloud bank & 15 mph winds, hail, & thunder rush in about the butte & then retreat again, quickly, into silence. The clouds have lifted, and there's a dark cloud above -- the ridges & peaks are offset by brilliant white mist, thick & curly, that travels down the drainages like baby dragons. Then the wind stops, and they sit -- curled & banked, like Tibetan fire in frieze -- blazing white against the dark blue-green ridges. One of my "chow-dog" ant friends just crawled around on my left hand as I wrote, tapping staccato with its bent, drumstick antennae.

As the clouds move back in, I have a strong desire to nap, to let this all sock directly into my subconscious. Why pretend -- just because my eyes are open doesn't mean I'm awake. Maybe I'll experience more if I'm asleep and unconscious. Maybe then my antennae will flow about in the wind like feathery tendrils of sea polyps, pulling perception in, like barnacles grabbing zooplankton out of the surf.

It is fogging in again. I'm writing while pacing slowly. It's raining. I may still take a nap. The fast today is burning out my back & arms & gut, slowly -- it feels like ashes re-lit & slowly blown on. Especially in my hands.

July 14th, William S. Burroughs

Finished Nova Express by Burroughs. I like the ideas, the subliminal stuff, etc. Didn't enjoy the cut-up sketches -- made my head hurt.

July 10, writing exercise -- laces into atoms

The Good Reverend is on his way up to the tower, yeah!!!!!

[The Good Reverend is a nickname for a good friend of mine. We met in Berkley the year before I was working at the lookout and became fast friends. I think the name came from the fact that he was studying comparative religion and biblical Mediterranean languages when I met him. He's smart and contemplative and quiet, with a wicked wit and generous heart. One of my only visitors up in the tower that summer. Visitors had to be OK'd through the Forest Service office and driven up to the tower by the forest patrol. It was all very uptight, since the lookout is within the Bull Run Watershed, which supplies water for the greater Portland area and many counties near it.]

[What follows is another writing exercise with a bizarre prompt... no idea where the prompt came from.]

Don't you hate it when you reach down from your bed to tie your shoes, and the laces fall apart into atoms.

****

Last time that happened to me I was sitting in a hospital bed, stinking of 3 weeks of sponge-baths and catheters, and cruelly bitter sweat. The thin mattress with its cheap egg-crate foam was bothering me so I swung my now skinny legs, covered with dark purple constellations, over the edge of the bed, and pulled on my socks. I hadn't realized until then how dammed bright it was -- and how flimsy. Everything in the room was flimsy polyester cloth (easy to wash I guess) and thin-walled aluminum pipe. I hated the rattle of the rings against the pipe as they pulled my curtains closed.

I could see outside the window today, and the huge trees out there (horse chestnut I think) just glowed in the sun. The sunlight seemed to set them off, like a candle does a lover's skin. I sat for a long while with one sock only half pulled on, staring out into the breeze and foliage outside. I could make out a lawn and curb -- and barely, some cars. One car pulled away, and the movement shook me from my reverie. I looked around, a little embarrassed that I'd been sitting immobile so long. I reached down, slowly, to pull up the other sock. I hated the look of my skinny, wrinkled arms sticking out of the over sized, one-size-fits-all smock they gave me to wear. I looked like a dried-up old desert crone, or a dark-skinned concentration-camp internee.

I lifted one shoe off the floor with my toes -- it was one of a pair my daughter had sent me -- brand new running shoes, with extra-soft soles & they didn't weigh a thing. I pulled it over my thin, wooden foot. Not bothering with the laces, I reached down with both feet to grab the other shoe.

At this point a nurse walked by in the hallway outside, it's walls a stupid mustard yellow. Luckily, she didn't see me sitting up, or she'd be here in a minute, her strong hands pushing me back into that thin-mattressed bed I hate so. I pulled the shoe up to my hands slowly, and felt incredible, dull pain throbbing along my vertebrae, like a diseased snake had replaced my spine. I could see it now, all dull & yellow, pocked, with scales missing.

I slid this shoe on. Something changed and my stomach registered it with a twitch. I crinkled my forehead & squinted my eyes to see. The shoe, halfway on my foot, was vaguely transparent. It was letting off a fine shower of particles, too small to see -- but sparkling. I "humphed" and pulled the shoe on as forcefully as I could, as though that would set reality straight. I reached quickly for the laces, but they slipped through my hands, disintegrating into a transparent whitish cloud, then reformed & flopped again to the sides of the shoe. I sat there a long time, hunched over -- staring at my right shoe.

A nurse's footsteps passed the door again, but this time they stopped. You could almost hear the incredulous stare that must have crossed face when she saw me there, sitting up. She rushed into the room, and I felt the strange tightness come over me as her cloud, her essence, crossed mine. I could smell her perfume as she reached down and grabbed my thin calves, pulled the shoes off me.

She was muttering to herself like a disturbed chicken. I was smiling, and would have been chuckling had I the energy. She took my legs, and pulled them carefully onto the bed. She was very, very careful -- and as strong as a Russian masseuse. She laid me back down, and I was still so amused I didn't even think to protest. She was muttering something, I can't quite remember what, something about "ungrateful old men," and "people who won't let themselves be taken care of."

She was quite peeved -- not only because I wasn't dead yet, but because since I did this on her shift she had to handle a cadaver that still breathed. Somehow that breathing made her look at things she didn't want to look at in her life -- like that useless marriage she carries around like a cross on her back, or a bundle of luggage too large to carry. Yeah, she was peeved. I almost bust out laughing, but I was sure the pain would make that a bad idea -- coming in like a thousand spears into my gut. No matter -- it had been a successful day anyway.

"Special Significance" -- writing exercise. Hanbleceya ceremony

[I was knocking around rough drafts for essay answers to college entrance forms, and this one asked about an event of "special significance" in my life. Don't recall if this ever made it onto an application or not -- it was probably going to Evergreen or Prescott college.]

"Special Significance"

In the spring of 1991, a friend and I walked into the newly-thawed hills of Eastern Oregon to fast. We had been planning this for over 6 months (if "planning" is an appropriate word to use here). After finding our individual spots together, we camped 1 night at base camp, made some sage tea, and had a couple hours of sleep. We headed, individually, to sit in a circle of stones fasting for 3 days and nights.

Our newly-met Cherokee teacher told us it was a fast, not a vision quest. "You hear "Vision Quest" and you expect something -- you two go out there and fast, sacrifice for the people."

It's been 2 years now, and I fully expected to have a more recent example to use for this exercise; but in considering the events, i realized I couldn't have done any of them without this crucial first step.

Many things happened there. For one, I melted into a landscape more thoroughly than I had ever thought possible. I was joining the birds' morning salute songs by the second day. Secondly, & this was more subtely realized, I faced my own death, or mortality. I knew I would die. I *felt* that reality, and it changed me in ways I'm still discovering. One of the most marked being a switch from a fear-based mind, to one of trust & intuition. I am more free now than I've ever been.

Upon returning to Portland, Ross and I were already planning our 6 1/2 month trip through mexico & the Southwest, by thumb & freight car. That, too, was an incredible adventure. But as for significance -- it remains based in those 3 days. I would not be sitting here, as I am today, without them.

July ? again, extirpating nasty image from head

I couldn't get the image out of my head, so I'll write it. I had been riding along in a green forest-service truck, and the driver was talking about all kinds of "waste-birds" -- crows, starlings, gulls.

The gulls were the worst, he said, they would cover the field all white when he turned it over -- digging around for bugs and whatnot. "Shit, we hated them dammed things. We'd sit on the back of the tractor with .22's and just picked em off, one by one. Then we'd plow them under."

Then, sensing my ecologically correct attitude, he said "they eat up all the eggs. They did a study, where they put poisoned eggs in dummy nests, and killed off a whole load of 'em, and you know what? The waterfowl population that year doubled. I hate them dam birds."

"I remember seein' em, dead, around the sewage-treatment plant. I guess they'd get into the used condoms. They'd pull 'em out of the treatment ponds, and then couldn't digest 'em"

The image seared into my brain, like a hot brand. Now to get it out...

A slick commotion of white & grey features, bright beak & eye lowered down to the surface of the roiling shit-stew, dredging a worm-looking thing, transparent neon orange, from the muck. Then swallowing it down as it flew away, it tasting not only like the sewage below, but with a texture meaty and satisfying. It felt good and substantial in the stomach. The seagull flying away, full and satisfied.

A couple days later, the same seagull stumbling around on the cement next to the piping & meters at the treatment pond. It's hot out, and the bird is delirious from all the toxins re-circulating in his bloodstream, the rubber lodged somewhere in its lower intestine, plugging him. His world sways & flashes & drops about him as the delirium gets worse.

Soon, an organ just pops, ruptures -- the pain increasing to a pitch unimaginable to our culture anatomies. The shock aiding it to pull free of the strong magnetic attraction of the body, of matter, and allowing it to fly away, towards the sun -- the big garbage dump in the sky.

July ?, 1:21 AM -- frozen corn, horror films, lack of someone to woo, Dreads and plaster

Can't sleep. Got a bowl of frozen corn to munch on, and took a look at the moon through the windows. 5/8 full. My calendar is way the fuck off then, it shows 1/2 moon, waxing, on the 12th. The way its going, it'll be full in a day or two -- unless it was full a couple days ago.

Outside, it's got a pale, ghostly demeanor. The butte looks like a moor (again) -- once they'd have a poor, busy 1950's teen stumbling about in scared -- her ponytail all in a whirl. What a sadistic crowd we were (are). Wanna see kids chopped up for having sex. Every scene you see the soft-porn aspect of a teen slash-em-up movie -- you know the kids are doomed any second. The ultimate production of a crazed society formed on the protestant work ethic. "Fuck -- and you die, kids, -- gimme your money, thanks."

So I'm sittin here (on the Group W bench -- I mean I'm sittin here -- ), munching on frozen corn niblets, in the mood to write a corny love letter, but have no recipient in my life for such a letter.

Reminds me of the new, hippie chauvinistic I ran into a while back talking to some trail crew, or wildlife biologists -- "you aughta find yourself a kind little Betty to take up into that tower with you." "yeah, a Little Betty; you mean woman, right?" [lyrics] "where dehumanizing the victim makes things easier, it's like breathing with a respirator (Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy)."

What was I saying? So, got no-one to write to. No one to woo.

I'll just read a chapter of Wild Mind & write instead.

****

Instead of that, I wrote G. Doten a letter, a writer who I met while working for an Irish stucco & plaster company in the bay area. He, a burgundy-haired, dreadlocked, Bostonian with a thick accent -- was their mudboy. Also their token drug-user. He writes shorts & scripts, etc. We should all be famous some day. He may be the first of my friends to rise up.

Federico Garcia Lorca Poem

[after a night of many dreams involving the sea]


Gacela of the Flight

I have lost myself in the sea many times
with my ear full of freshly cut flowers,
with my tongue full of love and agony.
I have lost myself in the sea many times
as I lose myself in the heart of certain children.

There is no one who in giving a kiss
does not feel the smile of faceless people,
and no one who in touching a newborn child
forgets the motionless skulls of horses.

Because the roses search in the forehead
for a hard landscape of bone
and the hands of man have no other purpose
than to imitate the roots below the earth.

As I lose myself in the heart of certain children,
I have lost myself in the sea many times.
Ignorant of the water I go seeking
a death full of light to consume me.


Federico Garcia Lorca, Trans. Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili in The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, P. 167

July 5th writing exercise: I don't remember

I don't remember: I don't remember my Dad saying goodbye to me the many times he left as I was a child, before & after the divorce. I don't remember being born, being compressed in a space that I didn't fit for 26 some-odd hours -- I don't remember my first kiss, I don't think, unless it was that one girl I hated in first grade out under those 3 enormous trees that sat in the grass outside the 1st-graders rooms, the ones that were also on my block, and had paired winged seeds. They've cut them all down. She had foofy little skirts, and her underwear was constantly visible.

I don't remember: fish -- fishwives. My first fishwife. Anything of that sort.

I don't remember: orange fishes, orange oceanic fishes staring out at me from amongst kelp, and how I felt them, underwater exploring for the first time and underwater for so long I was finally arousing suspicions that I was part fish, or dolphin. Or how nothing under there, under the swells, under the greendark water, seemed to treat me any differently as they would a seal, or lumbering manatee. And how the eelgrass tickled my leg slimily and I got scared & realized how much I couldn't see with a mask on and how much this looked like 1,000 leagues under the sea, or batman and how there were always monsters, or bad guys in James-bond underwater viper machines out to kill you when you were down here -- and sharks -- I'd forgotten all about sharks, and suddenly my fascination with what was right on the bottom below me, amidst the eelgrass and red algae that clung to the rock and hid all sorts of interesting aquatic life, vanished, and now I was interested in keeping an eye on that vast sandy-grey-blue that you saw when you looked out towards the barren sea, and how a huge shark could lumber out of that grey like a bear out of a wood, or worse yet, streak out like a cheetah after an antelope, and how I was a big, soft, alien & stupid piece of pink meat floating like a chunk of bait amidst a plane of rocks, and alge too small to hide me, but too deep to push off of to get a good escape -- and my mind raced to swimming back to shore, my fins carefully not breaking water, not splashing too much, to not attract attention to myself and how I would crawl up on the grey pebbley beach and my parents would finally pay attention to me because I'd have a big, lacerated bite in my leg, and I would have swam in bravely anyway, and would be laying on the beach bleeding all manly-like, rationally, glad that the sting of the salt-water was cauterizing and disinfecting my wound for me, and I would wave off help and walk to my towel & lay down in the soft, warm sand with my leg hanging over the edge of the terrycloth, bleeding into the sand, and I would be getting better already, and I respected the shark and knew it wasn't evil really, just doing its thing, as per nature. And the more I thought about it, I would love the shark, for its primordial nature and how it touched me, and made me a man.

July 5th Writing Exercise: I remember

[These writing exercises, I may have mentioned before, aren't supposed to be punctuated at all -- your pen is not supposed to leave the page at all in fact. I couldn't resist punctuating them in my journal, and for this blog I will cut them up into some paragraphs so it's not quite so hard to read]

I remember: I remember thick cotton stockings over my legs, and the nicks and scrapes on the black paint on the wooden floor of the Stage Right, the night of Tosca's opening, when I was a 10-year-old kid, and I had a goat in my arms like a nativity figure, and I was nervous and excited despite the fact that I didn't have to sing. And I knew that Barbara & John (lifelong neighbors as a child) with their salt-and-pepper hair were out there and my Mom -- I think, and maybe my Dad.

And I remember something about the director-lady or the director's assistant, and she was nice, and hustled us around backstage and helped us with our costumes - and we got dressed in a long room with white countertops in front of enormous mirrors with lights all over them just like you thought they'd be backstage at an opera-=house or theatre.

I remember the pudgy-faced black curly-haired little Italian kid who lived in our apartment complex and had gotten us the parts, and I remember how his arms and fingers were fat like a baby's and how he was so arrogant, and self-assured because he'd done this before, and his Mom doted over her young Opera star, gave him candy (covered with olive-oil for all I knew) and how I really didn't like him much but he was one of the few kids in the neighborhood who could speak English, it being mostly Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants pretty fresh off the ship.

They lived across the street crammed 10-12 in a 2-bedroom apartment, and you could smell the fish, bitter cooking smells at all hours of the day and night, and it was kind-of off-limits -- I never went through that complex where the kids walked around the gravel-covered parking lot in thongs (flip flops) and torn shorts -- circling around on little bicycles, their grandmothers & great grandmothers nearby with nothing better to do than watch the children, where they were in a foreign land, and the cars drove by fast, and I'm sure the grandparents didn't speak the language at all and were thusly afraid of everything and pulled their culture they brought with them in the seams of their clothes, and the smells those clothes carried, they pulled that culture in like a flower-stand on a rainy day, the pulled it into that little apartment building, or more likely, into that little apartment itself, all thick with the smell of old people and pickled fish and sesame oil, and I'm sure they hit their kids if they spoke english at all, and sat in those cramped dark apartments and tried to recreate Vietnam, but couldn't because the Safeway up the street wouldn't allow it, nor the advertisements they put in full color in the nearby papers with coupons to draw out the poor-- reluctant ones -- I'm sure it wasn't allowed at all and that the system got in after all, and the kids started buying their own clothes, with bright colors and stripes and spent more time in the parks, now that their bikes had bigger wheels and ranged farther and farther, and they didn't have to depend on the timed efficiency of the schoolbus every day, and they got aloof as they grew tall & handsome, and drifted away.

July 5th, Vampire dream

The dream was cinema-graphic, about 2 vampiresses. They were gorgeous, and lived at a stone mansion with a vineyard. One was a gilfriend of mine, and we all slept together in the same bed, but when I had first walked into the place my girlfriend vampire had sprinkled Holy Water & crossed me, so I would be protected from both her and her friend. Apparently there was a connection between the desire for blood, and sexual desire. The vampires were passionate people, passionate lovers.

July 4, Childhood recurring dream

As a child, I had this recurring dream. It always started out with a vast blackness, and a low, resonant hum. The kind that moves your ribs & stomach around until you were hungry, and made your palms hot & itchy.

Then something would appear, a planet usually, and usually Jupiter -- your favorite planet as a kid, with its big red cyclone eye. It would appear in the distance, crystal clear & light strong & sharp amidst the clean blackness.

Slowly, after a long time, you'd notice that it was getting closer -- that it had been the whole time, but you hadn't noticed until now, when it took up almost all of your view.

You'd remember now that this was the dream where you crashed into things, and your heart would beat faster as you traveled through the roiling mists of methane & gas you would resist, twisting your head in your sleep this way and that, pushing against the sheets, sweating.

Then you would fall against the surface of the planet. It would fall right through your chest & different layers of the planet, they'd be getting bigger, too.

Little in your bed at home, you'd be calm again; eyes closed, but seeing something far off and truthful.

Soon there were large objects with space in between -- like planets themselves, but closer together and all a field of color -- then, as they got bigger, one would head towards you all alone with its buzzing, it would be transparent & loud with a sound like mad bees.

You'd break through its definitive, but transparent shell & inside were things that moved too fast to be seen, but you knew they were there, and your heart would beat faster and faster, but this time you didn't squirm, you were too far along, and the last stage was irresistable -- no way to stop it. And the buzzing would become a whine, and a light would grow and grow in front of you and the noise was unbearable, and you entered it. Its cold, but somehow like the Sun, and the noise would tear you apart if you stayed, and you'd wake up in your bed -- the walls and the window and the vine-covered fence outside and your sister in her bed, dark in the corner, all seemed very far away, and you very small amongst it all; very small and very light.