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?”