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After watching the Biden/Palin debate, I got online to see what the media were reporting because, you know, what we think matters far less than the narrative the media promulgates. But I got sidetracked by a cool little program at Wordle. You paste a bunch of words into a field and out pops a "word cloud," such as the one I posted using Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Naturally people had pasted in the words of Biden and Palin to see what each emphasized, and the results were interesting, and I suppose if you have a mind to, you can search and find those word clouds, or you can make your own, because this post isn't about the vice presidential debate.

Wordle takes the words you paste in and sizes them according to their frequency. It turns out that Biden's most-used words were "John McCain." Palin has great love for "also." (Common words such as "the" and "an" are deleted.) And not surprisingly, Stevens' favorite word in his blackbird poem is "blackbird," with "blackbirds" a bit further down the list.

You can cheat, too. Instead of using actual sentences, you can simply type in random words, repeating the ones you want larger. But that gives me moral qualms; it's the behavior of a cad, a rogue, of someone you nod at as you pat your wallet.

When we were kids the ice cream truck came too often past desire. These days like desire it melts in the car anymore.

Anymore kids wear big pants, big to the waist, wide to the floor in coffeehouses. Like Disney these days, the youth anymore in large pants, often swimming in shirts in a Fairfax coffeehouse where a one-armed boy paints floral watercolors and the kids dream of novelty and Jim Jarmusch movies.

I know this. They’ve told me. They listened for precisely fourteen and one-half minutes in a coffeehouse in Fairfax, to my thoughts on cheap coffee and Tom Waits in Down By Law.

I don't know if I believe it, but his voice is like vision I told them, like a Whitman line long, like the line itself can save us long, drawn out past margins long from one blade of grass to far past the cup of coffee need for distinction or libidinous preference long.

Their large pants (I won’t leave this alone) swallow their thoughts like consciousness; like consciousness they are aware of their pants, though some of the young girls who know I talk of long lines for them wear tight shirts or mini-dresses purchased in the vintage convenience store around the corner.

None of the boys wears skirts of any kind.

“Don't ask me how we got here,” I say, anxious now for their hung-hipped approval. “The short line won't save us these days.” I continue to speak as if I’m making sense. “We must acquit ourselves as philosophers writing of a man who has swallowed his dream and now like a kid wants it all, and all comes too often these days anymore.”

Late night phone call.

I breathe.

Maybe it’s one of those

I can’t wait for her to call even though she doesn’t know my name, doesn’t know my number, thinks of me as furniture, last spoke to me in monosyllabic metronomics (nice-to-see-you), so therefore I’m at home alone brewing a pot of tea in my old stained teapot. . .

But no.

It’s the Mastercard Middle-Man up late!
That false messiah of the minimum wage, who, after securing 110.48, asks me, I swear, “Is there any reason for your late payment.”

A number of things:

Simple:

No money.

SmartAss:

I’m sorry, but the card and I have irreconcilable differences.

Metonymy:

Sometimes the hand charges forth on its own.

Metaphor:

If I don't go into crushing and un-repayable debt, the terrorists win.

Simile:

My bill to me is as a bowl of tapioca.

Tapioca, the Ur-stuff of my youth, the sticky mural-painting on my mental Maginot Line.

"Tapicoa," I say to him, "brings it all together, a portmanteau word jabberwockeyed together from

1. tapestry: a wall hanging of history, and
2. William of Occam: the famous Doctor for whom all of reality was merely abstraction."

"I’m not just an Occamist," I say, "I'm a Tapiocamist—a believer in the sticky tapestry of abstraction of which you, I, the MasterCard, my fitfully imagined lover, and a stained teapot on my sideboard are all part."

*click*

What we have assembled against money, friends:
music, poems, that labored breathing when it all might arrive again,
and this tapioca.
Have your creditors join you in a bowl.

It's a curious thing when private urgency is more safely expressed publicly. Don't do that, he said, keep your reserve on, your armor polished, let the scarf and not your expression reveal your colors. Seven years looking away, shouldering the load, biting the tongue, pushing that damned heavy rock, fingering the memories before carefully wrapping again in plastic bags and storing in old shoe boxes. That it's impossible is quite beside the point.

And when, unexpectedly, she gets out of bed, shuffles through the laundry and trash, grabs the pills and cigs, and turns her despairing eyes elsewhere, suddenly the defining weight is gone, and that old secret longing peeks out, gains courage, and takes up residence again. How long does it take? How long can you not say? Is a lifetime enough?

So you write in code, put the image in a frame from Wal-Mart and set it on your desk, tell stories to others and yourself. It's no secret. You clean your car, clean house, talk of friendship, be brave. Curious how the weight gives you purpose, buries you, crushes the more exquisite pain, and curious how now, among the quiet of the ruins, the aching serenade so quickly finds its register.

                                       Humans are not reliable witnesses to their own impatience.
                                                                —James Gleick

We have a room. Someone wants to experience room temperature, but crisis number one crops up before the complication, which occurs later, before peanuts or auctions or trips to out of the way places where one can get a really good deal on natural disaster insurance policies: floods in the desert southwest, things like that. Someone wakes up—no, someone gradually achieves a measure of consciousness commensurate with being woken up. Up from what? Drugs? A countertenor at the wrong place and wrong time, a spell or something fantastic? How do we receive information with which to answer questions like “who gets the phone calls now,” and “where is the empty space once it’s gone?” What if, quite simply, we are offered very little information and must discover our way without tampering with the present condition, which is delicate and tricky and useless to most native creatures. So much we must plan for, so much at which to fail that we risk boring or repeating ourselves or, worse, breaking our own hearts.

Pay attention. These are rules for readers.

To repeat, it begins thus: whoever is one theater is unique. This is one of the things we know. It is important because it is one of the four things anyone reading has been told. First, one is told that one is a special person, and one knows this bears repeating, though knowledge of its repeating is not the second thing one knows. The second thing one has been told is that given one’s appearance one would have a difficult time explaining it (a blue teapot, a piece of tape) to anyone else. Third, one has been told that appearance reveals that anyone is liquid, which includes knowledge of what it means to be a personal physical trainer, though this is not the primary thing one knows. Fourth, one has been told that it hasn’t always been thus, escorting us back to one’s knowledge that one is a special person and neither teapot nor tape, and that liquidity at times is important in today’s market though it could lead to inventory management problems, labor issues, and distractions molded in the form of sexual companionship, which is a plot device and complication.

The real story, then, is sex, or perhaps the bones of one’s left hand. Every now and then we have to give them their dinner, the rustics, the pallid squalls—who are they to know the issues that define inspired context? Listen! You liked her in blue, you liked her in red, but mostly you liked her in blue, which is totally inapplicable and probably irresponsible given the momentous narrative issues being resolved here, and mostly it's dumb to reflect on, but we've said it anyway, and it is wise because the soapbox is a little crowded, and I ain’t getting’ my ass kicked for nothin’.

Upon request, I'm tossing up this performance piece from the late 90's.

                      Understanding American Beauty

did you walk out of the theatre and decide to get in shape?
did you take a turn around the block in your friend’s sports car?
did you feel as though you’d had a vision?
did you try to imagine the entire scope of your vision flooded with nipples
      and rose petals?
did you imagine you’d be free?
did you have extra cheese on your pizza?
did everything feel like sweet release?
did you vow to start dating younger people?
did you remember to ask them first?
did you swagger a little when you walked by the food court?
did you turn to your best friend and say that you were going to get you
      some pot even if you had to ask a student?
did it seem like Blake finally meant something?
did you sit around with a couple other 35 year old men and get real high
       on a Wednesday night?
did you listen to Dark Side of the Moon and grow quiet during the aging
      without success parts?
did it all make sense for a moment?
did all your desires seem permissible?

did your street seem lined with elms?

did you take out that Grateful Dead album?
did you put it on the DUAL turntable with the belt drive and adjustable
       counterweight you bought in 1982?
did you remember to tap your thumb just so on the album cover
       so the seeds and stems shot off but the grass stayed on?
did you use your driver’s license to separate it because it felt a little edgy?
       your state employee id? your kroger plus card?
did someone mention a book by Jorie Graham?
did you feel intelligent and under-appreciated?
did you proclaim this the best thing you’d seen in years, three ex-scholars
       flirting with the underbelly of middle age?
did you feel just a little suspicious?

did you think it would work?
did you imagine that your white-ass street would become colorfully delicious if you ran around it a few times? did you fall asleep in a haze hoping for the good dreams anyway? did instead your grandfather come to you in your dreams in a filthy shirt and whisper to you during the constantly rolling 3am focus-flickering credits? did you ask him why he liked the movie? did he snicker on your shoulder, “no niggers in American Beauty”? did your vision of self-indulgent freedom collapse?

and that vision, what was it like?
was it like trying to conquer the materialistic billboarded countryside
      through a celebration of kudzu?
like making a tautology out of your newfound desire to write poems?
like switching cigarette brands?
like writing poems about switching cigarette brands?
like turning your back on writing poems about switching cigarette brands?
like moving to a little house on Douglas Lake with a woman you’ve
      given up writing poems about switching cigarette brands for?
was it like every move you’ve ever made?
like trying to write your dissertation in a Franklin Planner?
like disappearing into a three year self-inflicted numbing nightmare
       of software development?
like redefining yourself by wearing big trousers, by wearing black trousers,
      by wearing trousers with holes in them, by wearing no trousers at all?
like wearing skirts for an entire year?
was it like acting in a play about sentimental genitals when all you’ve
      ever had is sentimental genitals?
like reading Walter Pater in fluorescent light?
like adopting the culture of your ancestors in an effort to block your own?
like finding some other country to celebrate in an attempt to ignore your own?
like finding a friend to celebrate who has some other country or culture
       to celebrate in an endeavor to replace your own?

was it like the response you have to a movie that offers only a mirror
      to block the billboards?
was it like a rose by any other name?
did you see American Beauty?

A cohort in crime who has watched what he cooks
eats a bowl of contemplative knowledge

when tainted with smells of a best afternoon
for tourist behavior lost interest

when what sends our belief off to handle the press
and checks any interest at all

when the diners are full of behavioral loss
in theology's blessed mistake

when tourists can check for significant crimes
and be filtered through affable bondage

when many times she's had to put on a lens
which can taste like a stone under water

when baptised for silty and salty advice
that cheerable isn't cherubic

when camera and stone come for dinner at eight
and nudgable isn't polemic

when a boy is a curious house when he dreams
the languorous afternoon plotted

when no man’s wax seal offers promises made
allowed somewhat corrected on Sunday

when eating with carelessly carroted hands
he knows a fair hymn when he hears it

when a love becomes something for sin to forgive
and homespun on wheat bread is salary.

It was a mattress on a floor in a three room garret walk up in the student ghetto in Fort Sanders, a little piece of Knoxville sliced between the University and the railroad tracks.

I was in early love, when the sex was good and the conversation better. On a mattress with the smell-memory of love, on the phone with her and talking politics and hope-knowing that our man was going to win the White House and the years in college and graduate school, part of the twelve years of something other than what we wanted and that we blamed for much of our directionless or at least baffling and stumbling lives, would be redeemed by a leader who was someone we wanted and something we needed.

And what we needed was a reason that sounded and felt and moved beyond the move from book to book, and love to love, and ache to gasp. We'd been against something for so long it's all we knew.

Much later we'd find that sex drove late when time bent late on car trips home--it's simple but true but all we knew when new was now was need and love when else was need and need was now.

And a room was small and dormer was full with bookshelf and window and wall with couch and door and floor with mattress and phone with hope and line with love and minds were mixed and busy and heady with next.

And Kate was young and spry and chased mice and lived on the topmost furniture and voted democrat.

And things of course became awful in long but superb in short and several months were political and full of sex and kerosene because she smelled like kerosene and dogs and curls and god I can't smell any of it without thinking of what we hoped for in the early fall of 1992.

And our man would be in office and our tears would fall on pillows and a flood of past would pass and there were dogs and love and love and love and worlds would mend themselves.

When all we needed was a reason and the reason was our need.

Sour day. Wrote some web pages for work, but my heart wasn't in it. The mark of a true technical writer is to care about industrial process heat efficiency when you don't, well, care. Last night, in an effort to secure some files from hackers, I downloaded an encryption program. It made mincemeat out of them, including a story I was a couple of thousand words into. If I were in the kitchen, I'd knock over a jug of milk, just so I would have something not to cry about.

Although we live in the city, we see wildlife: skunk, raccoon, possum, and, just now, a doe and two fawns. A grumpy morning, rushing to get dressed, brushing the teeth, gathering the kid's school papers for the Tweety backpack. But then deer. We stood at the window, lost, three as one.

The undropped shoe, the thin strip of moist paper, the hushed anticipation as Caesar ponders. That dread between the yank of the ripcord and the pop of the chute, between the question and the answer, between this way or that.

It's one of those pensive days; brooding over the past, listening to melancholic music, watching the ripples. I'd make dinner, but that'd be pointless. I'd drink a beer, but that'd be irresponsible. I'd write emails, but that'd be spam. I have a friend who works with rock and stone, trees and plants, earth and mud. I work with a keyboard and monitor. Maybe I could throw some dirt at the screen.

My six-year-old daughter just said, "I know gymnastics; I've been practicing." I said, "You have? What can you do?" She said, "I can do a criss-cross apple sauce." She then proceeded to do a somersault. I said, "Zoe, that's a somersault." She replied, "I know; I just like calling it a criss-cross apple sauce."

For the record, my favorite humorous bit:

Do you know how to titillate an ocelot?
You oscillate its tits a lot.

Hey, this is the "A" material, folks.

Cuervo Gold, Maker's Mark, Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Smirnoff, Absolut, Finlandia, something to wet the whistle.

I've noticed something peculiar about this blog site.

Camels, Winstons, Pall Malls, Marlboros, Dunhills, Silk Cuts, oh good grief, Mistys, smoking the old lungs out.

Along the top, where the Ebloggy logo resides ...

Acapulco Gold, Maui Waui, West Virginia Ruby Dew Drops, Laughing Buddha, the fine Columbian, Phototronic thingies, fluorescent lights, tomato plants, hydroponics, and all that other stuff I read about in the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics.

... is an ad banner that seems tied to the content of my blogs.

Debbie Does Dallas, Marilyn Chambers, Behind the Green Door, Ron Jeremy, Deep Throat, Asia Carrerra, and other classic films and stars of American cinema.

At Jim's Diner on Fry Street, full-figured luminescent girls wearing tie-dyed peasant dresses and no bras would glide from table to table, braiding the men's long hair. A newspaper, coffee, cheese omelet, and a lovely girl running her fingers through your hair -- a sacrament, a gift, we knew that even then.

The Second-Hand Rose, right next to Jim's Diner, across the street from the big white house where we lived, had funky old clothes, wild hats, feathery boas, long hanging strands of beaded necklaces and ropes. The hippie chicks would enter wearing peasant dresses and exit wearing Carmen Miranda and Mae West.

On the balcony of the big white house, sitting in a hollow of big leafy branches, we'd watch unobserved the comings, goings, encounters on Fry. The girls wore sandals, flat shoes, or nothing, soles to the ground, rooted and powerful. When they moved, their hips swayed like grain on windy days.

Italo Calvino, in his Invisible Cities, keeps this one for himself.

Too many cigarette butts in the coffee cup. When I set my cigarette in the cup to write, it burns the filters on the butts. Instead of writing, I could flush the contents of the cup, and no more burning cigarette butts.

It's an article of faith that we have certain things in common -- those things that make us us and not something else. According to this doctrine, everyone suffers, everyone loves, everyone dies a little when given the finger or shown the door. If this weren't so, writers, therapists, entire psychology departments would be out of business.

A corollary to this principle: nothing is special. Only the telling makes it so. Every writer writing something real takes pain, gussies it up, slaps a bow on it, and gifts it to the world. The accompanying card is implicit: "Here's my nightmare; I hope you fucking enjoy it."

Strangely, there is joy in this.

Late at night, when I've given up on the day, I pick my daughter up from her mother's side and tuck her into her own bed. I kiss her forehead and whisper in her ear. Every night I do this. I want her to know, even in her dreams.

I'm ridiculously, absurdly, beyond-all-bounds-of-reason giddy at the moment. Cool dude that I am, though, I shan't respond right away. Better to wait three or four days, or a couple of days, at least. Or maybe just one day. Ok, how about I wait a couple of hours? I mean, I should be able to maintain the cool quotient if I wait at least 15 minutes, right?