Numbers

Every number has a face, a personality, a body, a soul. Some are more famous than others.

1. 1 is beautiful, solitary, pure. Not nothing. We can all understand 1. Upright. Nearly invisible. Powerful. Unified. Phallic. Adam.

2 is balance, harmony, love. Twins. Parallels. II. Eerie. Peaceful. Eve has joined.

3 is where things get complicated, where choices have to be made, where someone's feelings are going to get hurt. A direction is chosen. I> Cain and Abel. Love triangles.

4 is the beginning of war, democracy, servitude. Greater possibilities arise.

These numbers all have consequences, ancient powers they carry around with them. This 7 is a descendant of all the 7s that have ever existed. It pumps the same blood. 49 is 7s ancestor. 14, 21, these are 7s grandchildren. They are haunted by the ghost of 7, have traces of the same features. Everyone possesses their own 7. 7 is made of my history of it and the shared history of all of our 7s.

8 is a sculpture, a piece of art, an individual. We can visualize it. :::: We can conceptualize all of them till 10. Then they group too large. So do their shapes. A 9-sided shape is almost too much. A neuftet makes too much sound. They have to group into orchestras after a certain mass. They have to cooperate. The individuals get lost in the shuffle.

The greater the number, the more diluted. Is 639 familiar to you? Is it an old friend? A celebrity? It's too complicated to identify. It is a stranger. A vague, complex face in the crowd. I feel sorry for the higher numbers. They are lost in the flood, nearly meaningless. Only meaningful in specific instances, often rounded, forsaken. Discovered accidentally, not anyone's destination. 27,888 probably means something to somebody. A lottery winner. A salary. Too abstract to visualize. Too scattered.

As the years have stacked, so have our possible sums. Billions, trillions have moved within our grasp. Soon we'll have to invent new numbers. Split up the ones we already have before they're split for us. Go beyond the horizon. We'll reach google. We already have.

Decimals are crumbs falling past our concern for them. We need special calculations, tools, to tweeze them out.

0 is the most profound idea. The origin, like God, like that of all life, born out of nothing, from a concept we can't explain, define, we know not where from. Divide any number in half as many times as you'd like, you will never discover 0. A place only comprehended against something, by not knowing. You just have to trust it exists. We've all felt it, but we can't show it to anybody else. You can't see 0, but all numbers end up there. It's a circle around emptiness, lassoing the invisible. 0 is where we came from and where we will end up. It is a hole in the body, in the ground. It is a cup, or maybe a funnel, a sieve. 0. Starts with one of the unlikeliest letters. "Z". 0 is too big to hug, to hold in your hand, and yet you always do. 0 resets the groups, stacks them. 10, 100, 1000, those 0s in their bodies are like water and air, nothing, life giving.

Infinity. Infinity is just the end of 0s stride. Will we ever touch the end of the spectrum? Will we ever live till the end of time? We spend our lives divying up the infinite, making boundaries. What else is there to do?

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Some people have Saturday night
and some people have Sunday Morning

The Little Blue Globe (a song)

Up in my parent’s attic
Sifting through the remnants of the things that I did
I found the little blue globe
That used to glow in my room as a kid

Dusted it off
Plugged it back in
Wouldn’t you know?
It started to glow again

There’s a little viewfinder
if you look into it you can see the world.
Over time the pictures have been
burnt out and blurred

There’s a red cape flaunted by a Man in gold
There’s an Eskimo fishing out in the cold
There's beautiful women with jewels in their faces
Lands so far they’re only fantasy places

The years have passed,
and I’ve gotten older
Circumstance
hasn’t brought them closer.
But the globe still glows
And the globe still spins
Still carries the dreams
Of all of it’s men.
Still carries the burden
Of all of their sins.
I’m so glad it’s
On my shelf again.

Our pockets will be emptied

Our pockets will be emptied
and it will not be terrible
It will lighten us for flight

Lola (She's Putting on Her Eyeliner)

She’s got black wine bangs and rainstorm eyes
And a bouquet blooming from her breast
If you see her in the window she’ll turn off the light
Just to rob you of her silhouette

She holds hands with her shadow when the sun is out
Says that it’s her only friend
She doesn’t trust the candles in the jack-o-lantern's mouths
But she dances in their blazing grins

She’s putting on her eyeliner
I’m watching in the mirror
From the edge of her bathtub
Her cheeks are black and smeared

BRIDGE
I remember her walking
Nearly 20 blocks when
She went home sulking
In the snow


Lola
She tapped me on the shoulder
Lola
She kissed me on the cheek
Lola
We had an understanding
Lola
That this was meant to be

She tells me she doesn’t know how to live
Never learned to push and shove
She takes all the pity that I’ve got to give
But she won’t let me pawn off my love

BRIDGE

Lola
She’s putting on her eyeliner
Lola
She’s looking at herself
Lola
In the bathroom mirror
Lola
And nobody else

She told me that she don’t remember how to cry
Or the last time that she wanted kissed
She told me she’s too beautiful for suicide
Then let me trace her burning wrists

Lola
She’s putting on her eyeliner
Lola
I’m watching in the mirror
Lola
She needs a congregation
Lola
I guess that's why I'm here

Leo and Artie

LEO

You can't be afraid of anyone or anything. Why should you be? Where does it get you? Nowhere. You gotta tear through life like a cannonball. You can't let nobody stop you. Momentum. Force. These are the qualities that you need in the world today. You gotta gather some mass. It's the biggest planets that got the most gravity. Life should orbit around you. You should be the sun, the center of your goddamn life, this flaming fucking ball of fire that'll torch up anything that fucks with you. You gotta feel things, you gotta express those feelings, even if it means somebody else doesn’t like it. I’d rather be an asshole than meek. You can't be some little shard of meteor just twirling around.

Now, Wally is ten times better than any of the crap out there. I mean it, Wally’s terrific. He really is. I just hate to see him waste it. Life has always got to be ripening. It's got to expand and grow and unfold in new directions, and if it doesn't than you might as well blow your fucking brains out right now cause you're dead. Just climb into your grave and go to sleep. Good night.

Fear is worthless. It is a worthless fucking emotion. You see a girl, a group of girls, six feet tall in their spiky heels and their hair all poking up like fucking pineapples, go talk to them. The only thing you can do is go talk to them. If you don't, you're dead. You see a guy bigger than you, being an asshole, tell him he's an asshole. Sure, he might sock you in the mouth, but you told the truth, and that's the best goddamn thing you can do in life. Nobody ever tells the truth anymore. Our whole lives, all we do is massage our discomfort, smooth things out into convenience. Well I'm tired of it. I want rough edges, goddamnit! Show me something baby! Show me something real. There's a whole palette of emotions out there. I want them all! I wanna know what it's like to starve, I wanna feel despair, elation. You gotta throw some Hail Mary’s. Maybe not every play, but sometimes. If you avoid these emotions, these wide thrown emotions, if you clamp some lid on your low-simmering melancholy, this ennui that everybody seems to be feeling these days, well that's it now, isn't it? Not for me, goddamnit. I'm loud. I say what I mean. I feel things.

All this alienation, everybody's alienated. There's some kind of society happening that everybody seems to be alienated from. Where? Where is this society that no one seems to be a part of? That’s pushing us all over the edge of the cliff. I got news for you, Mack. You’re standing in it. You are it. We all are. Fuck it. Who cares? The worst thing is to be alienated from your own feelings, to stuff a sock into the mouth of that voice screaming inside you to go fuck that girl in the neon dress.

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ARTIE

It’s really quite odd how different dog piss smells than human piss. Just this morning I was sitting out on the deck with a cup of coffee and my little notebook and Rudy, one of our dogs, came up and splashed some piss on the deck about ten feet from me. Bosco, our other dog, not one to be outdone, came over shortly thereafter and squirted his stuff all over the same spot. Well, I’ll tell you, the stench got to be so rancid that I had to get up and go inside. I could not bear it. And yet, just the night before, since they’re redoing the bathroom and our water’s been turned off, I was pissing on the fence out back. I’d had a bowl of Golden Puffs earlier and I don’t know if you’ve ever had Golden Puffs, but one of their most charming qualities is that they make your pee smell exactly like them! So here I was pissing in the grass in the moonlight and up wafted this wonderful smell of Golden Puffs and I quite enjoyed it! I lingered for a few moments, drinking it in, and Rudy came over with a quizzical look and he stuck his snout down there and investigated it and I went inside with a big smile on my face.

For many people, this would not be a significant part of their day, let alone their lives, but for me, any time I piss in my backyard, or sleep in a tent or someone flips me off in traffic, it’s newsworthy. It can shake me up for quite a little while. I mean, here I am telling you about dog piss! I don’t know.

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LEO

Wally used to do this thing, he told me, where any time he would enter a new room, first thing he would immediately figure out what his escape route would be if he somehow became trapped. (Laughs) Which wall he would scurry up, which window he’d climb out of. I mean, that’s just about the ultimate in paranoia. In a way, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what the syndrome of being Wally is all about. This is a cat who never enters into anything, a relationship, an institution, a gas station for chrissakes, until he feels it’s absolutely secure. He’s always circling outside things, sizing them up, figuring the odds, and he always takes the lowest risk or nothing at all. Subsequently I think he’s lost out on a lotta opportunities, a lotta living.

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ARTIE

I don’t know if I like all this self-improvement that’s going on around me. Granted, I’m a deeply vain fellow. I can’t go out in public if I feel I haven’t had the chance to preen myself properly, if I’m insufficiently coiffed, but I can’t help but think all these vegetarians and people who go jogging and only use organic products aren’t doing it because they want to help anyone, or save the world, they’re doing it purely out of vanity. What this says to me is that these people think they’re so important that they owe it to the world to preserve their physical and mental facilities as long as possible. There’s a thinly veiled disgust in these people’s criticism of the fast-food diet’s many of us are on. They’re not against double cheeseburgers because they’ll kill you, they’re against double cheeseburgers because they’ll make you fat and ugly. I’m not quite sure what to make of these people, these brand consultants and triathalon runners, these goal-oriented people devouring life like it’s a Powerbar, working 60 hours a week, running ten miles a day. Where are they running? It seems to me they’re not running to anything. It seems to me they’re running from something. Have you ever looked at their faces? They’re miserable! They heave and burn and sweat, their arms limp like little Hamster claws, an excruciating look in their eyes, like they’re doing everything they can to ignore the pain. They look like they’ve been running from Godzilla for 3 days straight, liked he's coming to crush any love anyone may have to give them.

Don’t get me wrong, people have to do things. I mean, we can’t all be Buddha sitting under a tree. Life sweeps you forward. We have to eat, we have to maintain life. We have to live. And it’s very hard to find a moral way to do this, especially one that society will allow you to have. I mean, it would take a lot of courage today to go around like Walt Whitman or Jack Kerouac “afoot and light-hearted” just wandering around or hitch-hiking and expanding your consciousness. The world doesn’t seem to want you to do this. It wants you to pack your consciousness, your opinions or thoughts or whatever, into a little tin lunch box. If I were to take my rucksack and go stand by the side of the road with my thumb out the police would immediately throw me in jail! That is, if some homicidal maniac didn’t chop my head off first. But, supposing I got past the police and the axe-murderers out there, I mean, is there anything really left to see? Is it all just one long corridor of strip malls lining Route 66? Is it one neon smear of Appleby’s and Wal-Mart all across the land? Maybe the whole blasted world is just as it is here, all Golden-Arches and pavement and telephone wires.

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LEO

Despair’s got a kind of sweetness, like wine. It's a thing rotting, it's a poison, but it's delicious, in its way, it's intoxicating. I savor it goddamnit. I savor it. Granted it ain't my preferred mode of life, but I'll take it. As human beings, the best things we can be are vessels for emotion. Sure, we always strive for happiness, but we shouldn't settle for comfort goddamnit. This bland, banal, numbing comfort. Life is not merely a waiting room for death, with muzak playing for everyone to ignore and quaint little paintings for no one to look at and flowers stitched out of fucking synthetic plastic that will never die and won't make you sneeze. Fuck that! I want knife edges. I want broken glass. I want to go out tonight and have an orgasm that explodes like a supernova, that echoes and sends shockwaves through the whole goddamn galaxy. I want poetry. I don't want fucking romance novels.

REASONS FOR LIVING: DECEMBER 10 2009

THE CIRCUS - CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Never seems to come up much in discussion of Chaplin, a really funny movie, with perhaps the most astonishing image I've ever seen in a Chaplin movie, the finale where the Circus train speeds away, leaving the Tramp behind in the center of the traces of the Circus Ring. A bittersweet punctuation on the end of the silent era, the end of vaudeville, the end of the golden age of comedy.

ELVIS PRESLEY - THAT'S SOMEONE YOU NEVER FORGET


Written by Red West based on something Elvis said, may be The King's most haunting record. A hymn to his dead mother.

GREAT JONES STREET - DON DELILLO
Pee-pee-maw-maw

THE RANDYS
The best band in Columbus, Ohio, but you aren't gonna find another band like this anywhere. Romantic without being schmaltzy, harmonies like clouds of perfume, a crowd full of girls in pretty dresses dancing, actually dancing.

THE DICTIONARY
Frank O'Hara supposedly read a page every day. I thought that sounded like a good idea, so I started. Try it. It's a weird experience.

MERLE HAGGARD
The guy invented the identity that essentially every male country singer utilizes today: rich baritone, twangy guitar, bump-chicka bump-chicka beat, songs about America, hard work, and drinking. Great because you can't really call him one thing or the other. His beliefs are complicated and his music is deceptively simple.