When I ended my last blog (The Somewhat Welcome News, 2004-2012), in the final post I said something like it doesn’t take a genius I guess to see why I stopped writing. I didn’t say what the reason was but I remember very clearly thinking the reason was that you have to be honest in order to write, and I was not willing to do that. I was generally unwilling to look at, find out, or god forbid speak the truth. That post was made in 2012 but I hadn’t written much on the blog since 2008. I had gone crawling back to it four years later only to find out that things don’t sit and wait patiently for you after you leave them. Sometimes you have to earn your own trust again.

Yesterday I heard someone say, “I want to get a sense of what everyone’s hunger level and desires are.” She was planning what to do next with her tour group. It was a treat for me to hear, but unless I wanted to mess it up, I couldn’t really thank her. And I knew the prompt was not for me to answer, as I was not a ticketholder. It’s the kind of rain right meow where you can go for a walk in it as a whole activity, without meaning to go anywhere. It’s warm, the air smells good, traffic in the streets is light. It’s midmorning. The rain is falling hard. I’ve come back from the store. On the way home, I noticed the other two fireworks flowers had bloomed and were white, not purple. So the math in my previous post is wrong. There’s a cord in the top drawer that I can plug into the Neo and I can get you some things I’ve written in there lately. Here is the actual footage of me not doing that. Sunlight is nonchalantly falling into the room in a white June-ish after-the-rain way. It’s early afternoon. The fan is blowing cool air from the kitchenette toward the window. On the other side of me a bit of muggy heat swells into the room from the window. There is a parking lot across the street where an orientation seems to be happening. A woman explains how something will go and then counts down slowly and everyone is laughing. After a few other sounds and orders, it’s a man and he counts down and now they scream in unison in a resolute tone. Then a car pulls over on my side of the street and the door opens and a conversation takes over the audio, between the driver and a woman on a porch below my window. They seem to be in agreement between them but opposed to a third thing they are referencing. The conversation wraps and the car swooshes away. The orienting party across the street, hidden by the leaves on the big tree, is clapping, bouncing a basketball on the wet blacktop, and calling out letters. The sun has gone behind clouds again.

It’s a curved thing. You can trace it with your eyes from where it went in to where you think it will emerge again, but it won’t exactly. After work she started to walk but the map was of the same concept, which didn’t stop her from moving north. Soon she walked out from under the cloud and wasn’t where she thought. The arrow is curved. The beauty of it is that you don’t know which photographer will pop up. When she does, she looks like someone you wouldn’t have believed in when you were young, with looped ears, swinging robes, a directness surely born of being brought up by wolves. You sweat your nametag out of your pocket and try to put it back on. When it doesn’t stick, you lick it, but still nothing. She’s looking at you like she’s seen one of you before but not for a long time. “May I take your photo?” You check your hands for what she wants but you’re holding nothing except the defunct nametag and then it hits you, she means take a photo of you with her camera. The lens is curved. Again and again you set your own table and serve what you do not want. Again the cinnamon instead of cardamom, again the bus ticket to where they thought you were going, again the apartment you can afford. It’s only sad because you keep doing it. You could stop. Must be nice to think that. It is though. Why are your windowsills always dirty? Because they always have been. Did you know it would take less than ten minutes to literally wash them? And today is not your funeral, so you’ve got time. Isn’t that nice? She seems inclined to pry, poking around your apartment peeking at things on the sly. Where is her camera? Hidden somewhere in her robes? She seems to have it only when she wants it. Maybe she can teach me that trick. I like to keep the romantics as my clients. Can you teach me that? But to these questions, all she ever answers is Click.

(posted 2021 on Patreon dot com slash Campfire30)

“Are you a performer?”
“OK, I’m not offended, but we prefer ‘circus freak.'”

On my clipboard today are items related to de-listing merchandise and getting it ready to donate. I’ve already fished out a pair of pants and decided they weren’t as ill-fitting as I’d thought and now I’m holding them up and thinking well I’ll get a belt. They are dark blue denim but thin and soft, so soft. They have pockets but if you put something in one, they’ll fall off. They were listed for like twenty-one months but no one bought them. Only the pants thus far have been de-listed. When the leaves are off, you can see the laundromat from here. But it counts as going somewhere, because somebody runs it, other people will be using it, you pass by people on the way there. People here greet each other as if all our lives depend on it. In their tone I hear a point that is hard to answer. I never know what to say besides hello good day and such but I understand that is not quite enough. They mark each attempt regretfully as failed, growing more and more resigned. I know I’m almost out of time. On my last day in my last neighborhood a man came up to me and said you look like you are in the wrong place. Yes, well thank you for your grace in letting me walk away. I will try to remember and do the same for you someday. Sometimes we go down and walk on the strip. There’s a few different places. We use the computer to order something from each and then we walk down the row and pick them up. The pizza grease makes it hard to hold the bubble tea cup. We run out of beverage while the samosas are still too hot. We live here for a year and a half, but we never figure it out. Sometimes the safety instructions are stay down, stay down. Sometimes that’s just an instinct.

Like the odd duck in the rainbow slick, just when you get your fins kicked in, they come along with Dawn and scrub you. Here we all are, trying not to be that blue. Where do you live? A boat? Does it not rock? Does it not lift? Float the notion of a boat, rescuing fish out of water. If your conclusions are real, why must you draw them? Here you are, bleeding, like a person who could still go shopping. The fair starts at four. The fair starts with parking. It starts hot and gets hotter. The numbers from his imagination are stretched like taffy. The ones from life will cast hard shadows from the wash. It’s OK not to answer any questions with your clothes. What are yours? Someone will take an interest. There are opportunities in rain — as in, done that way, like, cast in it. Nothing like a cake. It starts with too many things, whatever it is a number of. Anything that can be used to mark time, like a dozen eggs, or a pair of new, then progressively older, sneakers. There’s a beam of light that shines features on the head of a pin, but the audience never fits it in. Only time can tell these types of stories. In the meantime, what is there to eat. I’m the one who set the cat, and I’m the one who wound it. You don’t know why you’re on the doorstep meowing. Oddly just then someone came knocking. A guest with a domino-print luggage tag on his suitcase, coming from Madrid, who paid an extra day in cash and didn’t speak much English.

Electrical work is sort of like auctioneering. Hard to find anything to eat out here on the highway with all the businesses with all the buzzing lines zipping and the poles blistering hot and splintering. It’s hard to get what you mean. It’s hard to find what you want to eat. And mostly you just want to go to sleep. On waking there’s always windows framing things you weren’t expecting. Going back to sleep, at least there’s maybe next time. But how long can that go on before you reach the state line? On waking there’s always that question, and some loyalty to getting the story back on track. At first it’s easy to repeatedly give up, but periods of lucidity last longer and longer, and continuity becomes more stubborn. Eventually there emerges a constant hunger. You begin to remember the phenomenon of signs on the horizon. Gradually you realize that’s what these are. They keep zipping by until finally a decision is made among them. Your legs are shaky when your feet meet the solid ground of the parking lot. The air is hot and you realize the car had been cooled and you are not dressed for the weather.

A child’s occupation is to do their activities. A child has business to attend to whenever they are awake. Investigations, comparisons, experiments and reports. The significance of reports to a child’s work cannot be overstated. Reports must be given. They must be received. The results and consequences of their receipt must be analyzed. Reports must be generated regardless of where if anywhere they will go. I know I didn’t get all of mine done. There is a loose end swinging somewhere over my head. I grew up in the itty bitty tiny little town of Philadelphia, PA. Anyone who tells you different is a slanderer. It’s like you keep saying okay, okay, here’s the real story, and then starting again. Giving up and giving up and giving up, letting go and letting go and giving in. Nested surrendering that never ends, exhausting like falling up stairs in a dream. It’s not that I decided not to go home. But when the stillness started to grow, this is where it found me. Things will change if you get hungry. They made those flower beds for us. We grew up and went to college, and at the college they had breakfast and computer labs and flower beds, fountains, and couches. It was all a lot of work. I leave the lights around the corner in the kitchenette on when I sleep because I like to imagine I’ve opportunely happened upon this out of the way cot to take a nap on. Let’s say a meeting is in session and I’ve slipped away. Or let’s say it’s a workplace and a workday. Or it’s a party and here is an empty bedroom, or it’s an art gallery and upstairs there’s an empty studio with no door and someone left a cot here with a thin mattress and a throw blanket and a beanbag pillow. Now I’ve lucked out, I’ve found this dim, unoccupied and quiet spot. Around the corner, the lights are on.

I liked the one where Elaine dates a Poor Person. Seinfeld premiered when I was ten and ended when I was nineteen, but I didn’t watch it until my twenties in reruns. I shouldn’t have been so impressionable by then but I was, and the episode reinforced my suspicion that nobody was poor except for us. The regular characters found it a shocking and unpalatable characteristic for a man to have, even worse than being married. There’s another one where Elaine finds out her boyfriend David Puddy is a religious person, a Christian who programs his car radio to Christian rock stations. That makes him somewhat less palatable to her, but that made sense to me at the time. It’s good to watch these things again. It’s only in the present decade when I begin to understand what Kramer did for a living. There was this long running thing where Kramer didn’t work and so we wondered where did he get his money for his apartment and expenses and things. And then there was another parallel long running thing where Kramer was always up to some wacky business idea that made no sense and nobody really listened to. Now I understand he was an entrepreneur who was making his money from some of those same business ventures he was always literally talking right out loud about in English. It was never a secret.

Dorothy always has a smile on her face, love in her heart, and horror in her eyes. Those are the best kind. Kind, so kind. The materialists have to do everything. Thankfully, they can’t mind.  I found an alley with this doorway where I could slip up. It gives us a place to arrange our stuff. Inside our rooms, one wouldn’t even know the weather was hot. Out in the alley the puddles are still and reflect straight lines. Luxurious sun twinkles on black streets after the July rain, and despite the dappled shadows of trees along the sidewalks the heat is starting to hiss upward from the ground again. We are lucky. I have gone out to pick up lunch and come back. I have brought vegetable sushi, swiss cheese cubes, and muffins. On the counter, the tea is ready to be iced. In the tiny freezer are plastic cups saved from fountain drinks now filled with extra ice cubes from the mini tray. Every day is some day, but someday is today. I came back weeks later to read this, and I thought it said the heart is starting to hiss upward from the ground again, which of course it is.

She says it’s lost. Sounds bad. Did you check the car, she said. They say you will spend your life looking for it, but take that with a grain of something. You can see she’s from the future by the pearls. But it’s not. Look under the streetlight by the chain link fence. You both remember how it went down the night you went out. Look for it. Help me look. I told you, it’s not gone. Item One: Did the streetlight go out in the preceding story?

Oh what a loss! They bought him a round. He can’t remember any of it. It’s unclear if Never Paid For It is a secret or a brag. If they go out into the night or to the AM. If there is an apple in the backpack or there isn’t one. A subtle sink or swim to the bottom. See, this is where the rage comes from, you do this. You never lose because you never let the game end. It doesn’t feel like a win. We have your pennant on the wall only because it’s a big draw on camera. Like luxury snacks. From any small grocery in Manhattan. Family reunions are nasty when you know what’s going on. The little ones don’t. That’s funny. She was never in the real Hollywood but this new kind, they get there when they want, they don’t even need a car. On the one hand, what they need is never advertised for sale under rippling flags, it grows at the bottom of one hill at the end of the footpath in the hollow under the tree roots by the stream. On the other, you’ll find it, that’s the thing. You’ll never be able to trust yourself again. Some people get stuck there and never leave.

The ashes and the fishes. You made it sound like a birthday party. You made it sound like a bible story. We get here, the kitchen’s not even open. They were rattling breakfast plates in twenty-eleven. I feel like, when a hand stamp reached fourteen dollars, that’s when we had entered the next age, and that was around when? Still the nineties? We knew those would be hard years. The babies had been up all morning.

You need someone to protect you. I know that. You said you would do it, but then you just left. Ran off to Atlantic City and shacked up with some random and then moved out of town for good. You’re the worst protector I ever had. I pretty much died on your watch. Somebody just died on this show and I don’t even know who it is now thanks to you. You know they used to cast for face shape, now they can do that with computers, now it’s all about the utterances. They didn’t get out ahead of it, which ended up being good for us. Anyone with backstory had the edge. They tried to workshop it for a minute, but nobody believed them and nobody went. They all stayed home to listen. With no one looking, the stage fell out of it.

We understood early that taste was up next. He had almost found his kitchen. You were planning to die with the reels and we knew it. He had his tongue down. You didn’t. In 2007, you were told. We caught up with you at lunch on the downtown mall after we attended his graduation. We told you this was the only thing you needed to focus on, this was your mission. You took it in some kind of esoteric way, and we didn’t have all goddamn day to discuss it, he needed us back by that evening. You wouldn’t imagine we’d stay long in the Velvet Rut and you’d be right. We knew even if you struggled for the longest, your assignment was like falling off a log and ultimately — with Gravity — you’d get to it. Listen, we said. Listen. But it was always a vision. We didn’t feel like we really wanted to watch or listen anyway and from what your roommate said, we didn’t miss anything.

She complains you skip the best pages. But she’s young. Why a rattling from the kitchen, why a sound? That isn’t what comes out. It’s the scrap that gets thrown to the street. Along with the square of light. I don’t buy it. It’s free. Be quiet. Why a rattling from the kitchen? Can’t you smell the cooking?

(posted on Patreon dot com slash Campfire30 on July 23, 2021)

Nested surrendering that never ends, but eventually you have to be honest. I keep coming back to that. There is never any way around it, no matter how many different ways you start out. OK ok here’s the real story! Here it is, you caught me! I’m going to tell you the truth now. And then you begin. Again. And again. And again. Nested surrendering that never ends. At some point, you have to be honest. At some point, you have to get serious. I said, How can I get people to take me seriously? I think I really wanted to know back then, and to be sure, I really didn’t. He said, Be serious. He knew exactly what I meant. I knew exactly what he meant. After years of knowing nothing, this was it. And I said, What shall I do if they laugh? And he said with confidence, Just don’t laugh too if you’re not joking. Now what if I declined all of this knowledge and common sense because he wasn’t very kind to me. I could. I could go to the council and say we don’t associate. Exhausting like falling up stairs in a dream. To be honest, it’s easier just not to know everything. At some point, you stop asking Who am I? and start asking What’s all this? People have asked if there is a political meaning behind shaving my head. People do not ask if there is a spiritual one.

The heart pavilion hallways are always full of a million frequencies from machines and worries.

I photograph written matter that no one ever meant. Evidence of things being said that weren’t. People are meanwhile at poetry readings performing legislation and maybe someday it will all be ruled upon but no one’s certain. I would do it again, but you can’t stand twice in the same sunbeam. You only exist in the world for a while, hence the heartbreak. Anybody writing about the present is unreliable. How can we standardize their upbringing? That’s easy, we’ll give all their parents the same TV. There used to be some talk of intervals. There were dailies, there were weeklies, there were monthly magazines. One day, someone made a digest, the first one. My theme is love, but so what. You don’t know what everybody means by a lot.

You want to go the movies? she asked, as she was sitting alone in her apartment. Yeah, I don’t know, I guess. And she went on the internet and found out about it, what it was, and how to get to it. It’s like having a lot of little friends, I think, they are all your cells or petals or something. I know they are many because I hear them clapping and cheering together when we win. When we wake up and find that the shelves have been dusted. When we eat something very nutritious for breakfast. You remember going to the supermarket and buying little things to use to try to make a go of it. I remember the packages never being opened. You remember trying. You’re looking back at it. I’m looking at it from above, and I’m telling you, that’s not what you were doing. In the middle of the night, out a red dirt road, with a bright moon and very little vegetation, with a black and yellow striped barrier and tire tracks beyond it, that’s where we went. I can’t tell you more than that. Maybe we were in a truck though. Maybe someone was. We had gone to find retrieve or escape someone. We got away or we didn’t catch them. I wanted to run and I wanted to listen to Bruce Springsteen on some headstrings from a portable music thing because that is what that girl in that movie had done and that is what I thought I would do if we moved to the sea, but I was young. An urge like that is never done.