Relative Motion.

- My younger brother John and I took a motorcycle trip to upstate P.A. along Route 6.

***

"It's full immersion ; like learning a language by moving to that country."

***

After about an hour at 75 m.p.h. the motorcycle decides to sell some psychotropics to your limbic system.
The wind which perpetually makes its way up into your helmet begins to orchestrate and incite elaborate gang warfare with rival pressure gradients on your eardrum that would make soccer rioters at a Roma/Lazio final blush ; so now instead of the wind, a voice like the sound of many waters.

***

The light refracts off of the visor in such a way that you're convinced you are part of a sacred parabolic function that extends infinitely, and infinitely closer to the author of creation. The endless corridor of earth/tree, road/sky dissolves into a miasma of peyote proportions and you're reminded of why you wanted to forget and forgot about what happened in class when you were 12.
And then you come to, and hunker down for a moment : scared that you actually forgot about where you were, let alone the intrinsic danger of riding a motor with two wheels, loaded with camping equipment along serpentine country roads at breakneck speeds next to a younger brother who, you're sure, is convinced he will never die, somehow.

***

The Photos won't capture the essential quality of this.
In lieu, some narrated silent films:

Pine tree, Route 6, Strip Mined Mountain Facade.
"The night I smashed my face up in Italy, I could feel the old pagan gods, those demons of antiquity after me. It started at the statues of Castor and Pollux, the twins, I'm a Gemini, I ran to the temple of Mars, the owl of Minerva flew overheard, at midnight."

A Wendy's on South 44.
"Well I think I have the most winning little man-boobs."


Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon.
"Some sorry sons-a-bitches in those black and whites on the information board actually put a railroad through this thing? To grunt and sweat under a weary life, wow, what the hell did Shakespeare know about working under early industrial conditions in some godforsaken canyon in the woods? Pretty though. John wants to take a picture."

An oil chip road that descends into a wide left turn around a sheer wall of limestone, shale and granite. Two motorcyclists lean into the horizon as in some wild Turner painting, if he had lived in this century. The road hugs the foot of a mountain on the left and drops at a sharp angle on the right before it quickly becomes a straight fall of approx. 100 feet. The overcast sky and abandoned coal mines and steel mills which punctuate the landscape like scattered tombstones imbue the vista with a preternatural cool and gives both riders a feeling that they have survived something, somehow, in ways they can neither codify nor comprehend.
"Whoa."


***

For about an hour after a long day of riding you're caught between two worlds, resurrected not yet ascended, You reply to simple direct questions with vague and near mystical answers. They are answers really, to your spaced out interpretation of what was asked, not the actual question.

***

"Do you want to get some beans?"
"I know what you mean, man."

P.U.I.

- Poetry under the Influence.

Facebook

How the hell, is this person and

How did this one - find me, I should delete this account

Let me stretch the truth and

compare

The Sun

Workdays, Anyday, I feel like the sun is a neighbor I don't want to talk to

he always has good news

trips he's taken, i want to tell him to go fuck himself

Health

Health is word cyclists in tight advertisement-riddled clothing use in the park

men with ipods ; like a bright yellow ball a child would delight in

don't feel words like that today

i just ate an old blueberry bagel with butter and didn't leave the house.

Moon

the sublime mellow silvering slice of the moon

just reflects

On Painting

Desire and Skill, married for the market, take a welcome holiday of perfect freedom

Hebrew

Hebrew looks like tongues of flame in the desert

Peace

Slipperiest, it defies, runs, hides, gives chase

The Rosary

The Rosary is a perfect circle like two hands clasped in prayer, reminds me of french cathedrals, light incarnate, it just makes your bones ache thinking about it - I want to fill my nostrils with the air of those places, satisfy that thing i can barely name oh, hail hail.

You Are Here

Look at any map, and you'll get the idea very quickly - you feel the weight of what's left out

immediately

points of interest, roads, symbols! (to denote function)

a semiotic soup of bland possibilities, you are here (red dot)

no surprises [for fuck's sake]

who you are is someone that's just here, here at the snack bar, eating a stale pretzel.

A Moment of Clarity

the mad drunk cowboys of my imagination are pissing straight whiskey on my cerebral cortex right now.

They stumble out of the subconcious corrale like half-starved wild dogs when I'm drunk like this so they can insult my manhood and steal beer.

They circle me in a mad-frenzy and kick up plumes of memories like the peacock feathers of some unholy fowl.

"where ya' goin' dan?"

she breaks in before i get there

Huh.

Yeah.

Where are we goin' [the accumulated bitterness of a young man obsessed with memory]

"dunno anna, dunno, sorry - you hungry?"

where are you going?

huh "Quo Vadis Amigo?

Nobody bu the misbegotten, the heartbroken, the poets, painters, priests, monks, mystics, forlorn, forgotten, forsaken, the sad, sorry and rejected are wondering that.

Shit, as tom says, i learned more from the books of sorrow than the pages of joy.

bartender, the cowboys need another drink

Meaning to Say

Know what I mean, he didn't mean it, that's not what I mean, Meaning? What I meant to say.

All we can hope for is the proper calibration with these dead things, these words.

I plane the wood to reveal

I'm aiming these things right at your heart, I pick it up out of myself and shape it with my best instruments, the patent words for the perceived intentions, i know you know what I mean.

nobody knows exactly what i mean, meaning has gone through such a hazing these days.

"You like me, you really like me!"

-Sally Field, 1985

Dan McGlaughlin's Interview with Davide Hegel,

28 year old Head Casting Director on The Emmy Award Winning Soap Opera

All My Children

D.M.:
(27, fat, feebly knocks at the door with horror and trepidation) Um…(inaudible)…is'zis…(inaudible)Davide

Hegel:
Hello.

D.M.:
Are you…

D.H.:
You must be Dan, nice to meet you please come in have a seat. So Dan, you've been with ABC daytime for about, uhh, let me see, okay five episodes now?

D.M.:
Can I…

D.H:
You can just put your lunch on the coffee table for now, is that from the truck in front of the building on 66th?

D.M.:
(cough) Yeah.

D.H.:
Oh…( Dan situates himself in the chair, and noisily puts his white plastic bag containing his Styrofoam clamshell on the nattily dressed, young casting director's coffee table, ruining it.)…

D.M.:
I spilled some coffee, it's just a little bit…

D.H.
No don't worry about, don't worry about, DON"T WORRY ABOUT IT hah, hah…What'd you get?

D.M.:
'Scuse me?

D.H.:
For Lunch?

D.M.:
Cheese steak.

D.H.:
They make those there?

D.M.:
I told'em to make me one, they made me one. 'Snot onna menu.

D.H.:
Oh yeah, ha ha, you know people who know people, right?

D.M.:
I don't know him.

D.H.:
…

D.M.:
…

D.H.:
So it looks like you've been doing a lot of supporting cast work on our show.

D.M.:
Background work. Carrying clipboards.

D.H. :
Uh, yes, You've been – let's see what was you're character's name?

D.M.:
Recurring Hospital Orderly Number 7.

D.H.:
Yeeeesssssss…So how do you find the experience of working with us so far?

D.M.:
It's good, ya' know, I bring a book to read. Yeah.

D.H.:
Excuse me?

D.M.:
For the, you know, (Points to the left with his finger).

D.H.:
... Uh huh...Well let's just look at your resume. It looks like your face has filled out a little since you've had these headshots taken, when were these taken?

D.M.:
Oh no, look it's just the angle, see, the angle that the pictures were taken.

D.H.:
When were they taken?

D.M.:
Oh I'd say, maybe…It's 2007?

D.H.:
Yes. It is the year two thousand and seven. That's what year it is Dan.

D.M.:
(Counting on his hands, his left hand palm up all fingers extended, his right fist palm up, thumb and index finger extended) seven, six, five, four, three, two – shhhhhugar – seven, SIX, fivefour, THREE – 2003? I think?

D.H.:
And you're still, ahem, (reads from paper): "Mountain biking, Juggling, Running Marathons, Mountain Climbing, Translating Online Articles into French and Italian for Lonely Planet, Playing Amateur Soccer, Skydiving, Shooting Bows and Arrows…"

D.M.:
Huh?

D.H.:
Your resume, under "Miscellaneous skills"?

D.M.:
Oh, OH yeah. Yes. Yes, I'm still doing, I still do those things. All of them.

D.H.:
Isn't it called Archery?

D.M.:
What called Archery?

D.H.:
Shooting Bows and Arrows, on your resume, isn't it called Archery?

D.M.:
Yeah, it's called Archery, that's what "shooting Bows and Arrows" is, Archery, you don't shoot the bows though, actually you USE the bow to shoot arrows, it's important to know that. It's actually one of the first things that they teach you. That.

D.H.:
Do you go to a shooting range, or a, what's it called…

D.M.:
No, you had it right.

D.H.:
Had what right?

D.M.:
The name, it's called a shooting range. (Clearly lost now) Y'see they use the same name for a place where you shoot arrows with a bow and a place where you fire a gun. It can get kinda confusing so that's why when you call an operator and you say "Can I have the number for the local shooting range?" They made it, I think they made it a law, or at least it's a rule, that's what it is, it's a rule for all telephone operators to say "Guns or Arrows, sir?" or "Ma'am" Politically correct and everything nowadays.

D.H.:
Uh...Well, I think in the digital age we live in now people probably just look it up on the Internet.

D.M.:
Yeah, that's probably what they do.

D.H.
Do you, uh, go regularly?

D.M.:
No I go to Central Park to do it.

D.H.:
You shoot a bow and arrow in Central Park?D.M.:
Well, of course not, THAT'S illegal. I train there.

D.H.:
You train there?

D.M.:
Yeah like, lift weights and stuff to stay in shape for my acting career.

D.H.:
You lift weights in central park?

D.M.:

…Yes.

D.H.:

Well, uh Daniel, I think that, you know - we'll be in touch and there might be an audition for you for an underfive somewhere in the future. What are you reading there?

D.M.:

Oh, this, uh...This is called "The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship"

D.H.:

The what?

D.M.:

Well it's an examination of epistemic autocracy, it's funny, I didn't know that Eisenhower talked about this stuff.

D.H.:

Okay it was nice talking Dan.

D.M.:

I can lend it to you.

D.H.:

That won't be necessary.

D.M.:

No but really, it's cool.

D.H.:

I'll order it on Amazon.

D.M.:

...No you won't.

D.H.:

You're right I won't.

D.M.:

I'll just leave it right there.

D.H.:

Wait, there's coffee there, just (sigh) just hand it to me.

D.M.:

Cool.

D.H.:

...

D.M.:

It's really good.

D.H.:

...

D.M.:

I'll just be going now.

D.H.:

Bye.

D.M.:

...

D.H.:

What is it?

D.M.:

You know that book I just lent you?

Can I borrow it?

Aspirat primo fortuna labori.

-Fortune smiles upon our first effort (Virgil)

Let's talk about language, thought, speech, pissing in empty seltzer water bottles, drinking straight Kahlua in the bathroom, and trying to find gainful employment with no marketable skills.

"Hi, I'm Dan I have a B.A. in Theater and History from Temple University I recently submitted a play to Samuel French about the First Boer War, or the Transvaal War - It's an interesting little ditty, I think that you'd like it. It's sort of a Marshall McLuhan meets Steve Soderberg meets JFK kind of a thing, oh that smell, that's nothing, I think that it's probably the shoe polish I was huffing in an abandoned train yard last night with a Vietnam Veteran named Dominic. Nice guy."

The best writers (unemployed actors) will tell you (me) that the best writing (complaining) is all about setting a tone.

Traditional grammar classifies words based on eight parts of speech: the verb, the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction and the interjection.

No but seriously Welcome to my Blog there will be plenty more Parts of Speech to come.
More than just eight.
This blog was just about setting a tone.