COMING SOON: Let me teach you about Hill Aspecting.

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40% Chance of Rain

"In life we always, it's - it's almost automatic, we've been taught to do this ever since...forever, in this shithole."

I'm thinking two things, right now: There is no telling where this interview is going to go, and there is no way to know how much this man understands.

"I'm crouching low to the earth, chuckling to myself over the learned foolishness of the white-man with me as I reach my index finger into the hollow of the negative space of a heel print that was clumsily left in a gravel driveway off of some abandoned and forgotten access highway and describe everything about my pasty-faced friend, right down to the salad dressing that my new partner from Washington D.C. (with whom I am simultaneously amused and disgruntled at having to work with on this murder case but it's okay because I know things about him that he doesn't know about himself and I'll eventually help him have the greatest moment of self-disclosure in his life) had on his appetizer salad at Applebees last night. That's what the Bulakawi were like with me, when I asked to be allowed to be a part of their 'Slefkra' ceremony. One of them actually pointed at me, and with tears in his eyes said 'Ei-au-topo.' I came to find out it means 'hole' like a hole in the ground."

Really.
He tells me I remind him of Gary Webb. I think I'll take that thin-mint now, Doctor.

I'm weighing my desire to get away from this man against the possibility that this isn't going to be a nelson pickle of an afternoon. A nelson pickle is a dangerous situation to be in: where everything conspires in situ to produce a composite and holistic negative experience. The cosmic tumblers of the universe click into place, and you can pronounce the words in your heart "I want the opposite of this."

"So we always designate rough numerical probabilities for the likelihood of something happening or not happening and we do this to give ourselves some kind of ded. reckoning, it's not astronavigation anymore, and your average harbormaster thinks a sextant is something you pitch in the woods on motorcycle trips for quick regret creation. No. It's crappy cosmic craps and the odds are not good on planet casino."

"He's got a 50/50 chance of living."
"There's an 80% chance I'll be there."
"And so on..."

I don't know where he's going with this so I go:

"And you see our tendency to negotiate with our fates, rough-hewn them how we will, in terms of percentages and probabilities as.."

"It is a function of our sense that nothing is certain. And that's just not the way it is.You're missing the boat here little dog. John Zerzan was right but he didn't go far enough. An ancient Greek never asked him why he used the word nautus for boat. Nautus was nautus. It could not have been not nautus. But Our words....whoa."

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

"There's a 40% chance you will like the book you're about to read. You put the book on the desk. There could never be a 40% chance of desk."

It started to rain.

The Bulakawi

"They wouldn't understand you in any language" he giggled between bites of his thin mints. "That's the most mind-blowing thing, I felt like I was on acid just being around them."

I'm sitting in a Grey-hound bus station near Birmingham, Alabama. My quarry is a middle-aged, rail-thin "professor" who has just published a book about, what can only be described as his mid-life crisis. But not any mid-life crisis, most middle aged men just buy a new car or take a kick-boxing class, or start to tend to drink a little too much.

This was a mid-life crisis on steroids, to the tenth degree, multiplied by a million.

"It was birth, auto-generation, a crystal consciousness chrysalis of a million, million illuminations. An entire kingdom, there is no scientific taxonomy for the discrete and enormous differences in perception i have experienced."

He wants to talk to me, and take me hiking or something like that.

December.

Pebble: The Trickiest Dog in Vietnam

By the waters of the Song Tra Bong river, the tireless little mammal made a mental checklist. Intuitive, preternaturally sly and wily beyond belief the plucky little pup gathered all of his wares.
"I'm sure to succeed with all of THESE" said he.
The relentless sussuration of the southeast asian water over the stones of the Song Tra Bong was carving out a not unpleasant mental niche, a tumbling little mental brook, a stream of consciousness while he attended to his mysterious and inscrutable ministrations.
Considering the rapacious and fiercely Democratic eating habits of the Ho Chi Minhsters, Pebble's long and uninterrupted sojourn in the eastern-most country on the Indo-China Peninsula is nothing short of miraculous.

- Excerpt reprinted with permission by Dr. Ivanhoe from

"Pebble: The Trickiest Dog in Vietnam and Other Stories by Dr. Ivanhoe"

What can we learn from so-called 'primitive' cultures? What did observing a half-rottweiler half-weimerammer for twenty seven days while I had dysentery teach me? It could just be possible that I am half insane and struggling with bi-polar mania since my bitter and acrimonious divorce, or could it be possible that I could have made the discovery of the millennium! I detail in my book that the liminal, the subliminal, the arcane, the esoteric, the hidden, the forgotten, in other words the True Doctrine is right in front of us. And it wants us to be whole, functioning, loving human beings who don't need full custody AND the summer house in Kennebunkport because that's just crazy! My experiences with Hollywood Screenwriters, Tijuana Sex-Workers, Vietnamese Canines, African Wizard-Shamans, Zeta-Reticuli from Sirius B, NASA Physicists, Catholic Exorcists, Franciscan Guitarists, Desert Jinns, Egyptian Sorcerers, and many, many more colorful characters will show you that reality is what you make it! And How you make it!

Dr. Ivanhoe is the author of 27 Non-Fiction books. He has a Ph.D in primitive narco-anthropology and evolutionary nano-biology from the controversial Royal Phrenological University. He currently resides in Spokane, WA with his half-rottweiler half-weimerammer dog "Pebble"

Contact: DRIVANHOE@gmail.com

Superpower

If I had superpowers I would want to be able to cast a spell that made it so every time somebody gets loud and violent they get proportionately quieter and smaller.

I thought of this when I was teaching today.

That way you could put all of the maniacs that start wars into a Polly Pocket house and watch them silently commit tiny atrocities. I’m not sure if it should work the other way, I don’t think the planet could hold a Mother Theresa or a Trappist Monk or someone like that.

Draft Application Essays for a Teaching Position in a Philadelphia Public High School

What are your three (3) most important reasons for wanting to be a teacher?

What very deeply troubles me is “anomie” or the alienation that runs through the whole of modern culture – you see it’s the sense of man becoming thing. George Steiner has another name for this: the “Reification” or thing-ification of man.

I am the result of this process, relinquishing my freedom of thought because it’s just much easier to just be entertained. My students and I are cut from the same cloth, the cloth of modernity: iridescent rags, tricked out to catch the attention of the moment. The church of chuck taylor and tie-dyed hair, you see.

How much do you want to know about your students in order to be helpful to them?

I don't care, I really don't care to know too much about my students. That's kind of uncomfortable information now isn't it? Where is the diginity in this? To me essay questions like this presuppose an institutional insecurity that is more commonly found in pre-teen girls. Parish priests were embedded in people's lives more intimately without needing to know thier parishoner's freudian perversions. I won't answer this on principle, no wonder we're a nation of jibbering hooligans.

What three (3) things do you most want to know about your students?

(sigh) I want my students to have dignity, precision and eloquence.

What do you need to know in order to begin your lesson planning for a class?

I need to know which sparknotes I have to read in order for me to sound like I actually know more than my students.

What four (4) key components do you believe you must include in your plan?

1.) How you can spot criminals just by looking at'em. Yeah.
2.) Halo 2
3.) Halo 3
4.) Q &A

When you think about your students, in what major ways do you most want to influence their lives?

10 years from now I want them to think to themselves "I don't think that I learned anything in that class."

List and describe two (2) core teaching strategies you most utilized in your classroom.

1.) Deceit
2.) Obfuscation

In 3000 words or less, what do you think are the "Most Important Qualities of an Outstanding Educator?"


3000 Characters of Less? – the Most Important? So not just important or really important, but the most important qualities of an outstanding educator. Well let’s just define our terms, why don’t we?

Outstanding is an adjective which means prominent, conspicuous or striking. An educator is someone who is a specialist in the theory or practice of education. Now I am not a prominent or conspicuous person skilled in the theory or practice of education, I am a frivolous and easily distracted 27 year old that has spent his more tender years in a furious dissipated wander getting drunk and stoned trying, in my desperate and idiotic way to try to alleviate the burning, inescapable stigma of my own sins.

But I have learned a few things.

And I think that I could reach a lot of these pups, mired as they are in a culture that is essentially demonic in value, origin and practice and at least suggest an internal dynamic framework for appraising their lives and what they think that they want out of it that is wholly different in its aspect and appreciation, rooted in the teachings of mother Church.

I would never say that though, I would lose my job.

You see meaning has to do with purpose, value and importance. It’s usually the focal notion that we use to appraise and order life, as we know it. What’s important to us? Why do we want the things we want? Do you really need a SideKick 3?

My years of blinding stupidity and rampant self-destructive behavior, though they were wasted and I will ask God on my deathbed to give me that time back, have borne fruit.

These trenchant insights along with firm guidance are what I have to offer as an outstanding educator.

Bell Tower

"Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?"

- Bob Dylan, "Jokerman"

Some things I just do not know how to talk about.

The defining characteristic of my time at college was the presence of an ubiquitous horla, a demon of hurry and worry that clung like a vampire to my soul and opened doors for me that were probably, in retrospect, better left closed - namely any door across the street from the Esther-Boyer College of music, a building whose name I can honestly not remember.

Annenberg, or something like that.

typical, in a very sad and predictable way.
it was a restless amble from school, to work, to the library, to the movies, to all of the holes in the wall where the din of pothead suburban girls and idiots like me would fill the air with smoke and the cacophony of their appalling wit.

"For that which I do I allow not: for what I would do, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me."

an absence of any kind of integrity or individuality. It's kind of like a liberal military, everyone still wears the combat boots, and occasionally the camouflage, ironically enough. A lot of Che Guevara T.Shirts and Fidel Castro hats. The metaphysical uniformity prerequisites (M.U.P.'s) of your average theater student guarantee a certain kind of amputated soul. Moral relativists and drug-abusers apply here, dissenting opinions are wrong a priori. But the need to be liked, or even made to believe that one is liked is a stronger and more virulent flaw/need of your Mass Man than the desire to be right. Oh Vanity. I'd rather be happy than right anyday of the week, so you think. What a red herring, How would you put that in a film?

"We chased the perpetrator, His name is...Happiness?"
Other detectives agree,
"yeah his drivers licence says that...",
"Yup that's his name..."
First Detective "Yeah, so anyway, we caught this slippery little bastard, and It wasn't him. We didn't get what we want we shoulda been chasing this guy"
He holds up a picture. Ahh. Him. Damn.

But really, Are we that embarrassed by our own need? I think that we are.
In a plural society everyone thinks that tolerance is the royal road to happyhappy, but it's not being fair to anyone's point of view by saying that everything is relative.
So the point isn't really to learn anything and actually be right, the point is to say everyone is right.
So no one is right.

There was one time at the Bell Tower when I was at the nadir of my personal abyss. I was totally alone, I lived at home, I missed everyone I just left from my old college and I had absolutely no ties to anyone from high school or my neighborhood. High school was a furious and veiled confusion, this was different. I was very much aware of my own circumstances and my own misery. I was wearing an over sized winter coat and listening to a Walkman. Yes, I'm pretty sure that I was the only man on the planet who still owned and operated a Walkman in the year twothousandandoneannodomini.

And I began weeping like I was keening at an Irish wake.
Not crying like, Oh I don't want anyone to see me, weeping.
And the Bell sounded, an electronic bell, in the bell tower.
I didn't go to my classes, I didn't go to the gym. I just went home.
I wasn't wrong, or right, I was just lost. I couldn't locate myself with any compass.
On any map. I couldn't navigate myself out of my circumstances. I was just at the Bell Tower, in North Philly.

Gin-Soaked Raisins

A thing is only a thing in that it is discrete and individuated. A row of ninety-nine uniform, identical bottles might be on that prosaic wall but I'm taking ONE down and passing it around, therefore it is a categorical imperative that I enjoy the capacity to make the distinction "Yes, this one participates in 'bottle-ness' but in its this-ness it is a singularity for reasons we can neither codify nor comprehend."
I am a beautiful and unique snow-flake, in love with a mother-f*ckin' pistol on the West Coast, butchering a Toby Kieth song in a bar on a Thursday night.
This past Thursday night. Wondering who wrote a song about Kabbalistic numerological drinking, passing last supper style a beverage as old as the Tigris and Euphrates.
Where do these things come from?

I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say here people, my galloping ego seems to have gotten a couple of furloughs ahead of me.

I'm not sure I know about what I write, but I do write about what I know. Pennsylvania University students, a girl name Jeanine who studied graphic design, Tom singing an Elvis song (and not too badly, good key for him) and a certain amount of certainty that I can think myself a king of infinite space were it not for the fact that I've been having some wild dreams that scrape that threshold you can sense every now and again, beyond which is the party on the white shores. I know the economy is in the trash bag in the trunk of the Cadillac but I am smiling. I'm shaking hands.
Everyone is there.
EVERYONE.
And they all look great.
It was a very specific dream.

Sorts Illustrated

Learn Them Hungry

Welcome to our beastly country.
Eager to know how you got here.
The mainstream, that brackish torrent – some thirty year olds drinking warm busch pounders must have been dickin’ with the sluice, I told the City Council that thing wouldn’t hold – we’ve had a little dutch boy situation for the past fifty years with that thing, just a couple of steadfast conscious fingers holding back the flood.
Finger in the dam and all.

“We were watching the turkey vultures, ya ever see those things. Majestic looking.” Slurp, Belch.
Well you’ve flooded the streets through your ignorance and carelessness – Goodness. Look at everyone, swimming in it.
I think that they like it, bobbing their heads, wearing garbage.
These little island tips of civilization.
They’re lighting bonfires on church roofs, there’s a drum circle over the tabnernacle, they’re skin diving for cans and pampers.

Oh the detritus of western civilization imagery is just too obvious, don’t you see?

Something else has happened here!
Something more than just the events

I can’t picture bracelets that make soft tinkling noises and fine linen shirts for your wedding day anymore. Where is the pithy rejoinder, the times that are the froth of joy, the time when you and Brian wore suit coats and bought coffee from McDonald’s and went to the movies in the Andorra Shopping center?

Teaching taught unteachable crooked untaughtedness; nasty furtive eating and the flick-flick-flickering visible darkness of pinched thoughtlessness.
Slab sat dat phat cat, yea?
We must learn to learn, lean and hungry.

Yes

"... then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "

- James Joyce

Love is hounds to my ankles and away, to pull against your will even though you've left all of your books.
It is never the time, and now I know what insane people feel like.
You are the third thing, and my whole life I thought that there were just two.
Will I? Yes, yes, yes.
Yes.
the union of the two most awesome things i can think of, in the universe: love and power, and it's put into this place where we can see it.
That's the, that's the, yes that is the best - THE BEST thing.
I took her by the hand and we neither had to try or do, I was all, I was fifteen again into a magical place, that is blessed blessed blessed and she all her
all her yes
her all her
all her everything
I feel myself going weak in the knees and little gin orbits
going 'round and 'round and my bowels all a chicken noodle soup, and sprite and champagne empty stomach.

Love you?
I am you.

This is it, it, it.
She is the kiss on the shore, IS the every one of her atoms holding tiny flags, they are marching, we are marching, Democritus' atoms holding together the
the spirit under the wings being held like some kind of infant, and it's just been so long.

And I have missed you,
and November is beaten with a knotted branch on the baseball field while traffic lights wink at no one so late
and programs for not us anymore talk to no audience and peals of purchased laughter.

Yes. It is morning somewhere.
Yes.

Shadowboxing

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

-Blaise Pascal

Movies are stories with shadows and lights.

- George Lucas

Tawdry bits of rubbish, I'd actually like to say to her.
I put my hands up, I swear every time she watches "Sex and the City" we have a fight.
You're Othello, and that's Iago, sweetheart.
Well you're Bruce Banner and beer turns you into the Hulk, only in your case Bruce Banner is a retard and the Hulk looks the same as Bruce Banner he just transforms into a fatter and more retarded retard.
Touche.
But I think better of it, because neither of us are even there. My words which launch like little invective bullets evaporate in the white-hot heat surrounding her like an ungodly demon aura, the way all of creation looks through barbecue inferno air.

What's the opposite of a halo in those old medieval paintings?
She doesn't hear me, because she can't. Because to hear someone you have to admit that they exist, and I don't, to her.

Fiction is our great friend (I think to myself very quickly I don't think it actually the thought just appears in my head behind the ugly thrush perched in my head singing some kind of twilight dirge in a rock-opera by Metallica - it's hideous the whole thing, loud guitars a lady wearing some sort of Gothic Teutonic costume festooned with tired occult symbols, only WWF fans could buy this and its even worse because its in my head, my powers of invention have produced THIS) because in reality the spirit is largely invisible and in fiction we can make it visible.

"Is this heaven?
No, it's Iowa."
Same thing.
Fiction.

And besides we're too old to be fighting like this, I thought you said that you wanted to go and you don't but remember when we and I was hoping to what are you really angry about love, what is happening here, we love each other right, we love each other, right?
(I'm on the fire-escape now)
No I'm not mad, I never raised my voice, this is life, life is good but hard it's not the T.V.'s and the movies, you're right where you should be life is fits and starts mostly fits - Celebrity the great curse of the generations after Reagan.
(I put the cigarette out, the moon and the beer have gone to my head)
Drunken Lunatic.
Now you've got jokes.

To the men that grew up in the great silence, when television, radio and its attendant miseries couldn't even be imagined, I think about you in my unquiet, roomdark unsimple in cluttered thingdom-ness.
Wishing to unlearn what my eyes have taught me in telemovieinfotainment land, memories are favorite films and we speak actor quotes.
They've hardied all the boys and betty-crockered all the girls, so i meet a girl from India and find the differences aren't the differences between "Armegeddon" and "Deep Impact" but Man and Beast.

Fire on the Mountain

“It’s an interior holding, a clenching – years ago you had a plurality of well understood, field of relations (words, mores, customs) that permeated private and public life that were informed by common sense and a belief in purposed appointment, inscrutable as the world may be. Again these were never taught, they seldom had to be self-consciously articulated but it was a time that the individual inhabited personal dimensions of liberty and apprehension that are hard for us to imagine today.”

"Who are You?"

"Um- I like beer, football, I like South-Park, uh..."

"Yeah, exactly, like describe yourself - we can't do it anymore we're working with the wrong first definitions."

“OK, but people have always been such as they are now? I mean look at Chekhov: people then were just as screwed up, lazy, alcoholic, depressed, horny, sad, and stupid as they are now.”

“Yeah, but he was writing about a certain group of people in pre-Bolshevik Russia – I mean go to any party in Germantown and you get the idea, it’s just one group of people who have enough money to not work, but not enough to move or properly maintain their estate, so they’re just kind of dwindling along with their money. The great mass of humanity lived in a world without usury and without…”

I’m cut off, I can hear a huff like wind over an open mic and I know she’s already starting to flip through the channels on mute or look at her facebook page.

“So it’s the whole self-as vacuole – I equals what I see equals what I buy equals boom, boom, boom, And we’re made into animals in the jungle again responding to shapes and colors:
GREEN= GOOD, RED = BAD.
You’re a pariah for a bumper sticker.
We don’t know anything. We’re a people that knows how to feel good at a rock concert. It’s all impulse and instinct. Not a lot of room for, prudence self-control, and all of that.”

“The Mountain is still there though”
“Yeah, the mountain is still there, but if I can’t see it, then how do I climb?”

Astronavigation

Traditionally, a navigator checked his chronometer from his sextant, at a geographic marker surveyed by a professional astronomer. This is now a rare skill, and most harbor masters cannot locate their harbor's marker.

****

Willy Wonka: This is the great glass Wonkavator.
Grandpa Joe: It's an elevator.
Willy Wonka: It's a Wonkavator. An elevator can only go up and down, but the Wonkavator can go sideways and slantways and longways and backways...
Charlie Bucket: And frontways?
Willy Wonka: ...and squareways and front ways and any other ways that you can think of.

- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

“Hey Dad,” I go “Why don’t you just go down Lehigh, you always take Somerset but look at the string of cars, man.”
“It’s quicker this way,” he goes.
“No, it’s not.”
The building is an ominous and frightening geriatric, pigeon shit-encrusted New Deal icons that would make Manly P. Hall smile loom like hieroglyphics and slogans like “Noble workers of the future” sit like weights on your shoulders.

****

"Why write about a man getting into a submarine and going to the North Pole to reconcile himself with the world, while his beloved at that moment throws herself with a hysterical shriek from the belfry? All this is untrue and does not happen in reality. One must write about simple things: how Peter Semyonovich married Maria Ivanovna. That is all."

- Anton Chekhov

2:33 PM
me: let's face facts here Christy
Christy: oh boy, here it comes

2:34 PM
me: ok WHAT do you think I'm gonna type here?! HA
Christy: haha - i honestly have no idea
me: you must have had some idea - if i got that kind of reaction

2:35 PM
Christy: i just know that you're about to set me straight
me: you bet I am, hey what time is it there?

****

"…namely the idea that architecture is an ethical art…that architecture is intimately concerned with personal morality…"

- Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture

“Yeah it’s just one of those things isn’t it? One second later and you wouldn’t even have been there.”
“Yeah, your star is on the rise, huh?”
“I don’t know”
“Where were you?”
“Just standing there on North Broad across the street from City Hall.”

****

"Fourth dimensional patterns within eternity's monolith would seem merely random events to third dimensional percipients: events rising to an inevitable convergence like an archway's lines. Can history then be said to have architecture? The notion is most glorious and most horrible."

- Charles Howard Hinton

"No, honey, look do you have the GPS thing on, did you turn it on?"
"Yes, I'm staring at it right now!"
"Ok, look if it says Hagy's Mill then you don't want that exit - that road doesn't even exist anymore."
"Really?"
"Yeah, they filled it out or whatever and they built a McDonald's and a Pep-Boys there."
"When?"
"Where are we headed again?"

Pharmakos.

Dramatis Personae:
Dan McGlaughlin: 27, full of wishes.
Ari Kaufman: 50-something, doctor.

Dan:
Hey Doc, It always feels good to have to see you again. It's really great to sit in your waiting room, Lunesta Clock, Lexapro calendar, Zoloft pens, Cymbalta paperweights. They should make like, a Phenobarbital Sewing Kit or a Risperdal knife set, wouldn't that be a really bad idea?

Doc:
As always your abstract attitudes and sad jocularity which comes close to the kind of abreaction that might categorize what takes place with you in my office as 'constructive' are always welcome. Why don't you have a seat and we'll get started.

Dan:
"My Doctor said I had A.D.D. he was all 'Blah, Blah, Blah'", Hey what'd you do with the little 'click clack'?

Doc:
Newton's Cradle? I removed it after last session.

Dan:
Why's it called Newton's cradle?

Doc:
Well, I guess because these demonstrate Newton's first and second laws of motion.

Dan:
Oh...like, math?

Doc:
I think this has to do with physics. Although Newton was an accomplished Mathematician as well.

Dan:
Music is the universal language:
I'm just trying to find a decent melody.
Song that I can sing.
My own company.

Doc:
You're quite the philosopher Dan.

Dan:
No, that was Bono, U2.
I remember the first time I heard "Pride" and in parentheses it said "In the Name of Love"
I hate that, like, pick one title.
I liked watching Gregory Peck in "To Kill a Mockingbird" and I could never parse why the complex taxa of his person was significant.
I think that it was the first time I saw an adult acting like an adult.
He never got mad at his children.
Well, maybe, he got mad and everything but he always sublimated that anger into some kind of parental tactic that educed the appropriate lesson and realization.
I think the comparisons with God are patent: Slow to anger, merciful, just.
I mean, there's hierarchy in science right Doctor?
Why wouldn't there be...?
I'm sleeping like 20 hours a day.
Am I just lazy?

Doc:
Same Symptoms?

Dan:
Well, I can't eat bread, I've developed a tick where I have to flare my nostrils and snap my fingers every couple of minutes and it feels like someone is grabbing me by the hair and pulling me back and to the left every time I hear the word 'Seriously' and every time I see one of those traffic signs that indicates that there is a curvy road ahead.
It looks like a car on wobbly stilts.
Wobbly like unstable, not wobblie like industrial workers of the world.
Communism.
Jewish intellectuals.
You're not a Communist are you Doc?

Doc:
(sigh)

Dan:
No, I'm just messing with you. I feel fine, I'm cool...You hate when I do this.

Doc:
Yes.

Dan:
Sorry.

Doc:
Did you give any thought to what I asked you to do?

Dan:
Yes as a matter of fact I did but I think the list points to a more significant question.

Doc:
Is that it?

Dan:
Yes.

Doc:
May I see it (beat) ... Oh, yeah this is not exactly what I was looking for.

Dan:
I know because what I really want is No More Future. Not in the world anyway, not in travel, not in geography, not in variety, just you know. Interior and Silent.

Doc:
THAT'S crazy, Dan.

Make A Wish Foundation

My Doctor Had Me Compose A Wishlist As Part of A Diagnostic.

1. RMJ Forge Tactical Axe
2. Jivaro Clan Shrunken Head
3. Beetelgeuse DVD
4. 1968 Fender Stratocaster
5. Depeche Mode, Greatest Hits
6. Red Bull, Lifetime Supply
7. Supporting Role in next Linda Hamilton Film
8. 20' x 20' Poster of Sirhan Sirhan with "Cost" written in white letters over his face
9. Large Tiger tattoo on my torso with the entire text of the Lorica of St. Patrick in it
10. 15 inch Macbook Pro
11. Copy of Richard C. Hoagland's and Mike Bara's "Dark Mission" with dedication "Fight the Darkness Daniel"
12. Xbox 360
13. Full-time job with Ohio Airships
14. Toilet bowl with the word "Science" printed on it in gold leaf
15. Small Tattoo of George Orwell's face on my right palm with a cartoon bubble that says "Talk"

An Actor's Note to a Director

Hey Listen,

I know that we're still doing a run and everything and I know that this kind of Thank You Note is usually reserved for closing night parties, or Tony Awards' after parties in swanky New York Penthouses but I'm bursting at the seems here! I mean the comparisons with Scorsese, Kazan, Stanislavsky are patent as far as I'm concerned.

There is one specific moment that I think was pure genius. You know what I'm referring to?

Of course you do!

What a curve ball! I never thought my neighbor would have had this genius: You take the boring, mundane and rote little piece of business of my character coming home from work and backing his motorcycle down the driveway and into the garage and turn it into a mythopoeic struggle for his life just by throwing sand all over the driveway!

Genius.

I wonder what acting challenges I'll be surprised by next?

Gratefully,

Dan

Starring.

EXT. We hear COLDPLAY’S “DON’T PANIC” as we PULL OUT from a void, black as pitch, as vast and borderless as OUTER space to reveal SWIRLING SPIRALS like GALAXIES of kaleidoscopic radiance that dazzle and beguile the sight with all of the brilliance of a rainbow-faceted jewel. Geometries of hue and chroma pop and squint in an ebullient dance as we PULL OUT to reveal a MUD PUDDLE with dark spectrums of OIL SLICKS as we PULL OUT further to reveal…

EXT. (NON-DIAGETIC MUSIC STOPS) THE LINDEN COGENERATION PLANT along the NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE. Automation systems, valves and measurement dials, instruments the size of busses and oil tankers groan and hiss like the ventricles of a BULBOUS MECHANICAL ORGAN. Endless folds of pipe, ductwork and wire, twisted, coiled, bunched and organized work their way around forests of cylindrical metal, scaffold like structures and soot-stained smokestacks. The SUN, a blazing roar and devouring red abscess sets through a CHEMICAL HAZE which hangs over the plant like bar-room smoke in hell. We see ONE MAN standing on a metal CATWALK that straddles the span of three large PULP VATS. The man standing at the edge of the cat-walk is nattily dressed and in his bearing we sense a casual entitlement, ease, élan and elegance. The air of a man who wants for nothing and has lived his life far above the HOT STRUGGLES of the POOR. Categories of mephistophelean intelligence play around the thin cold smile on his lips as he turns to address a SECOND MAN who is approaching with unsure steps across the CATWALK. This is DAN, slightly overweight with EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS, he is wearing KOHL’S KHAKI’S, an OSCAR MEYER WIENER promotional T.SHIRT and is suffering a weather-induced contraction of an old surgical scar from a HERNIA OPERATION which causes him a great deal of PAIN in his CROTCH AREA.

NATTILY DRESSED MAN
Well, (he pauses to light a cigarette)…look who it is. (The SMILE again)

DAN
(Through a RED BANDANNA which he holds over his mouth, which has CAMP COSBY written in WHITE LETTERS, which he took from his young cousin BEN.)
Huh?

NATTILY DRESSED MAN
(SMILE Fading)
I said (LOUDER) I said ‘LOOK WHO IT IS’

DAN
Oh yeah. ‘Look who it is!’ Yeah.

(We begin to hear faintly, a HEARTBEAT, and the song “RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL” by Van Halen.)

NATTILY DRESSED MAN
You don’t seem surprised to see me!

DAN
(THE HEARTBEAT CONTINUES TO GROW IN VOLUME)
Uh, nah, You know I used to drive past here on the way to New York when I was dating whatserface. It always caught my eye because I would fantasize about what kind of life I would have had if I was the kind of guy that was good at math and maybe went to school for engineering or something like that…AND if I wasn’t stuck in some car with a moody woman who, despite her INSISTENCE that she knew exactly what she wanted and that’s what separated her from the rest of the crowd, had no idea what she wanted and she secretly hated men. She would stare out at the world from behind those icy, bitch eyes and curse the world for not IMMEDIATELY conforming to her will, and for being "so stupid". Do you know that she would actually say "Thank God I'm not like people." – God, I wasted so much time, I mean so much time and she – You know I think she is THE REASON I had I.B.S.

NATTILY DRESSED MAN
(CUTTING IN)
Christ Almighty, shut the fuck up. Do you know why I picked this location?

DAN
I imagine I picked it.

A TWO SHOT. Two men bookend the frame, the catwalk a straight line between them, plumes of noxious smoke curl about their feet like tumbleweed.

DAN & NATTILY DRESSED MAN
(SIMULTANEOUSLY)
What’s that supposed to mean? (Beat) What do you mean? What do I mean? (Beat)

We SMASH CUT to a CLOSE UP of NATTILY DRESSED MAN, a single bead of sweat rolling across a THROBBING VEIN on his LEFT TEMPLE. A SMASH CUT to DAN, breathing heavily, SWEATING PROFUSELY. EXTREME CLOSE UP of NATTILY DRESSED MAN, eyes blazing with a sly preternatural cunning. EXTREME CLOSE UP of DAN, bags under his glassy, HUNG OVER eyes. THE HEARTBEAT is now A DEAFENING ROAR, and as it begins to CRESCENDO we cut to…

INT. A BEDROOM IN ROXBOROUGH, a 27 year old man wakes up in a cold sweat from a fever dream. His BOWELS are a fluid, acrid mass. His feelings toward himself, his life, at sea. He doesn’t move an inch, but we see the violent wrench from the nether-regions of his subconscious entirely in his eyes which crack open, violently like GRAVES during the RESURRECTION.

DAN
(VOMITING THE WORDS)
Oh shit. (Beat) I thought that he was going to make me listen to “Songs for a New World”

VOICE
Ay thoot’ee mayt too!

A SCOTTISH VOICE, as thick as Molasses and as guttural as a TUVAN THROAT SONG, seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. The young man sits BOLT UPRIGHT IN HIS BED and cannot find his voice as he tries to locate THE SCOTTISH MAN, who sits in a cornflower blue reclining chair near the DOOR to his BEDROOM in HIS PARENTS HOUSE. The YOUNG MAN, DAN tries to turn a light on as….

SCOTTISH MAN
Ass ye’kehn see the lais’eh’no gunt tee werek…The lais, the lump, th’iliktrikal kahn-dull.

DAN
What?

SCOTTISH MAN
They kinnuh hear ya’neither.

DAN
What?

SCOTTISH MAN
Widduh ye like tuh myeet muh burruds?

DAN
Your What?

SCOTTISH MAN
Muh burruds, muh burruds, ye know, tweet tweet…burruds.

DAN
Oh, birds.

SCOTTISH MAN
Thessuhwudeyesed. Aye. Burruds. (Beat) Dinnae be efreed. Thess essa revol-yushun uff the mynd.

On REVOLUTION OF THE MIND the far wall which faces the street begins to crack and moan as the dry-wall, lathe and plaster begin to shift and re-align. They SLOWLY separate at the center into FOUR DISCRETE SEGMENTS like the PETALS OF A FLOWER until the ENTIRE WALL has peeled back and curled itself into it’s CORNERS. There is a silence, relentlessly patient which lasts several moments. During the METAMORPHOSIS OF THE BEDROOM the SCOTTISH MAN got up from his seat near THE DOOR and began thumbing through an INTERLINEAR ENGLISH-GREEK translation of the NEW TESTAMENT which he quickly abandoned for a copy of WATCHMEN.

NOTHING IS HAPPENING.

DAN
(Sigh)

SCOTTISH MAN
Not all petunias have the pretty pollen.

DAN
What?

SCOTTISH MAN
(Producing something that looks like a PIPE and a SLIDE WHISTLE) Enough’a’thess shyte. (Sounds a lilting, and high pitched call) Welter-Wayt! Turbulence!

TWO ENORMOUS HOMING PIGEONS, the size of cars SWOOP down from the NET OF STARS, the O’ER HANGING FIRMAMENT as soundlessly as the WIND in the GRASS and PERCH on the TRUNKS of TWO TREES which COMPLAIN a little under the burden.

SCOTTISH MAN
Ya know when a star dies?
(His accent now gone)

DAN
Yeah, a supernova.

SCOTTISH MAN
All Gold, ever. Was made in a supernova. Gold is the photograph of a dying star.

DAN
(Making a bad joke) and Plumbium is a Comet's used Condom.(sigh) Sorry. Wow. To be a star. The Promise of the Possibility of Living Forever.

SCOTTISH MAN
Time to fly.

Cheesesteak Fishermen

"Hey...Did you catch anything? Get any bites or anything like that?"
"Uh...Nah"
" ..."
" ..."
"Do you wanna getta Cheesesteak?
"Yeah, this sucks."

The Phillies vs.The Dodgers

The Phillies whooped the Dodgers.
Me and Dad and John stood behind home plate up in the 400 level
in the gentle, constant breeze
that came from the Philly skyline,
gathered speed
over the vast parking lots
and rolled over center field.
High and Inside served Guinness.
So we drank Guinness
and watched the Phillies whoop the Dodgers.

SeaBoards

Mental Sunshine
There is a resort on the tropical shores of my mind , the tide
laps up on the white sands like a playful dog.
We're all wearing shirts with Hibiscus leaf or topical fish patterns,
stenciled palm trees swaying in a department store breeze.
Fresh crispy leather sandals from the discount rack.
"Hey, that guy from 'the office' where he's gay in that movie, what was he reading? Prowst? Howdya' say it?"
Proust.

Atlantic Movements
tiny gods, create and destroy civilizations of sand and shell
- sacrificed in the deluge of salt and sea.
Umbrellas pop like colored mushroom tops,
tanned, fed and dreaming fauna bob like corks as the lifeguard's whistle calls like a clarion.
The sleepy waders hear, and move, a little, and everywhere the taste of salt and old stirs, gently,
the leviathan of ageless and nameless things in the soul,
a flutter of sea-birds in the heart.
Floating in the memory of you, every now and then,
touching the floor
of sharp and pointed things.

Anna
I hear you
rattling around in the back of your sentences, your drinking laughter
when your talk is a room of messy unlabeled boxes, spilling on the linoleum,
hiding your bottles in your baskets
On the freckle, on your neck an old man is selling poppies (he was personally effected)
But your hands are lions that do not tell the truth
and your mouth is a beautiful iron gate
some days, when you are not here, it is easy to touch you
and speak your name aloud

These Days
These days are a cigarette smoked under an oak tree, the sussuration of a blackwater creek (they skip past me on the way to parties, or playing frisbee)
Like young lovers they cast their desires into the air like autumn leaves, embrace fiercely.
I tickle these days.
These days are so good I give them names and play hooky with them.
These days see people's faces.
They are the D chord on a guitar, the first time I read "the Weir", my first girlfriend.
These days are a trumpet solo: a flurry of ecstatic notes, a band of freckles, tanned fingers, ice cubes (white wine), all the people I can remember.
These days ring in my ear like blessed solitude, holy silence,
a whole hierarchy of fecund joys that whisper fire languages.
They appear on the horizon, a candle-lit cathedral (like a Spanish galleon), carrying special things.
I gather my angels on the shores of night, singing softly, fingering beads, to wait for
these days.

A Zoo at the End of the World
Bored Pandas munch bamboo, and pray secret death prayers in their sad, childless eyes.
Cassanova, fat and insane-drunk, throws mixed nuts at them while he drinks singapore slings from a sunbleached "Superman Returns" 64 oz. Slurpee Cup."You fuckin' deadbeats!"
Mothers whisk their daughters away to the Aviary to see the rare California, white-tailed whatever.
Icarus breaks his fall with a bouquet of runaway, mirror-backed Gorilla balloons holding valentine's day hearts that say "Let's Monkey Around" with a loud pop into the Polar Bear's Pen. Children from suburb's with Parents on Saturday watch in horror as an emaciated, adorable, caged, wild animal feeds himself.
"Flew too High" a bored father says as he checks his messages and puts his cell phone back into his fanny pack.
The lion stalks his bubble-gum, cigarette speckled cage and dreams of dark ebony faces with ivory teeth.
"I used to spar with gods and Nubian princes, my life was a repast."
"Christ!" Ernest says with a shake of the head "Some limey poof went lolling around Africa with a bottle'a'laudanum naming things in latin and now this," Hemingway rips off his shirt and jumps into the cage.
Julian, John Wayne, and St. Peter are staring into the Cumaean Sybil Exhibit.
"This is fucking horrible," Wayne says, "Let's get a snack and look at those happy, little sea-otters."
At the snack bar two black kids are playing tag, one trips and skins his knee. "Slow down kids" Bukowski says, putting his cigarette out against a bronze statue of of Sir Francis Galton. He takes a flask out and pours some Powers Scotch into his Coke Zero can. "These hell dogs are gonna come after us next."

A Little Beach Music
The sound of those paddles.
The ball doesn't even bounce.
They have to stand so close together and no matter how good they are they still drop the ball every five seconds and joke about it like they are really enjoying themselves but there is an edge in both of their voices that is so obvious that it becomes even more obvious that they are both straining under an enormous effort to try and convince the other person that they want to play this stupid (what do you even call it Beach, Paddle, NoBouncing, Loud, Plastic Ball Annoy Everyone Else On The Beach,Tennis) game it's Orwellian.

2 plus 2 equals 5 to this couple.

ICE CREAM, GET YOUR ICE, Non, Va BENE Non C'e Male Si? I should have said something I remember a little, oh 1$ bottles at the Ocean Drive I should, how much do you think those pilots make?Yeah, he looks like your typical college kid, Hail Mary full of Grace, is it Sunday? No that's just some radio station, a radio station of nuns,

I have let's see,
No I've read too much non-fiction on this vacation,
I have to pee a little.

The Ocean is huge.

I mean huge.
I don't even think that it can convey it's hugeness to me.
Bully, it's just big because it's a function of it's sense that it's winning.
I don't know what that means.
I can't remember the last time that I was amazed.
Vince Walsh, that might have been the biggest moment of self-disclosure in my life, I just don't remember to remember that some days.
I wonder how he's doing?
We want to be amazed. Like Children with soft watery eyes, in darkened movie theaters.
We want glorious and transcendent things to happen. Mostly just money. I would buy a house with a tunnel and a mag-lev train that would go to Mike's house and Tom's house in my basement.
Francine and Haley would love that.
Mike's Kitchen is turning into a monster.

They shouldn't even sell boards shorter than those 7'4" funboys, that kid has been out there an hour and he hasn't caught one wave.
I should switch to the tin whistle.
Not as cumbersome, less maintenance.
"A Lazy man I'll not Maintain"
Who talks like that? These guys over here talk movie. That is their language. The commerce of words and images of motion picture studios. I'm just like that too.
This guy keeps touching his biceps and looking into the distance. He's posing. Tool-Box.

You can spot the fathers. I am not a father, but I feel for them. I think I know the yearning for a little peace and solitude that they experience. Bags under the eyes, still a little hung over from the temporary escape, old Phillie's hat, head buried in a book. Clancy, Leonard, Koontz, King, maybe Scottoline never Percy, Greene, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hemingway. I've never seen a copy of "The Old Man and the Sea" in the hands of an old man by the sea. He's already thinking of the million fucking things that he has to do to make ends meet.

Children Oblivious.

The mothers are eaten by the same things but differently, stretched a little more somehow. I don't feel that kind of pressure, not yet, certain I will someday.

Come to think of it: Why would an Old Man by the Sea read "The Old Man and the Sea"? Mortality, wasted potential, feelings of failure and inadequacy. Some things really do hit too close to home. They accuse too deeply, reveal too much. "So near to my heart this fatal wound sin" and all of that. For the late-twenties set:

1.) The Gospels - If you say "Jesus what a sweet guy" you haven't actually read him.
2.) High Fidelity - For any selfish man who has experienced regret and listens to music.
3.) Lost in the Cosmos - Ever felt alone? You are.
4.) The Philokalia - Everything is emphatically not "all good". Your instincts are correct.
5.) A Refutation of Moral Relativism - It's right there in the title. This little knockout doesn't pull any punches.
6.) The Closing of the American Mind - Learn from a great American educator, the late great Alan Bloom.
7.) Grammars of Creation - Your mind has been systematically impoverished through the impoverishment of language.

Sea Isle City
I found it when I took a vacation, it was in the bushes, right underneath the deck.
Some kids, maybe, or a pickle jar that fell out of the recycling container.
It snapped into focus: all of the houses and families and dollars, incessant scramble, the tumblequickrecline vacationdream sandbooze from the Atlantic City Expressway
the pine tree corridor, the wardrobe to happy shores of coppertone and beachfiction, where cumulus clouds take long rides and sit in the sun all day.
Walls of laughter and forgetting are built like sandcastles out of cases of coors light, sunburn, and crabcakes.
I found this place, on vacation.