THE INUIT NEED TO FEED

BEYOND THE GOLD RUSH

To: Where the Natural Light is Strongest
From: This Must Not Be the Place
Re: Pop’s Got Dreams

Handclaps all around though it was hardly a Royal Wedding upon your arrival. An hour and a half late on a different train platform I’m not even allowed to walk out to? I should’ve known better than to trust Amtrak with my freedom, my safety, all of that having been so dramatically violated over the last decade. But really, what about my balloons and flowers? What about the video of my video of my video I’m watching? What about the speedboat, Crawford? What about the speedboat?

I never did find out. There for a wedding I didn’t know anyone at, real nice ceremony somewhere in the mysterious hills of Georgia where tennis is for the women’s clubs and community is a thing Catholics take during their Sunday services, but oh yes, let’s please padlock the gate and polish our Escalades to pretend a dimmer past. I think money grew on those trees but they were too well maintained for me to be sure. If I knew then how many more of these things I’d be attending, I would’ve played the spoiler less, that’s for sure. But it made for an educational experience, seeing the world through speedboat eyes.

You came around just as I was beginning to lose my next pair. New eyes are hard to come by, but you’ve done your research. I’m sure you can see it for yourself, can’t you?

Of course you can. It must’ve been as much fun watching a man unravel from the relative safety of your castle tower at the time. Strange how perspective works so well with this continuum, the two of them accomplices in a heist of memory and subjective sightlines. On the one hand, the bridge is drawn and there’s a clear way up the stairs; on the other hand, there’s a moat. So I drank my way to the other side… But you remember that also, of course.

I didn’t notice it immediately. I couldn’t have, there was no time. There was work, there were meetings, there was the embarrassment of having to reveal where I “live.” Been cruising the web for new dwellings this week and one remarkable thing I’ve found is that any place can be made to look much larger with a camera that works and an eye for distortion. It’s all about perspective, bro, I think that’s what you told me at some point. Enhance your perspective. Blur it. Dare to dream.

Consistency of a mushroom, energy for an eight-watt bulb, dark matter for my motor skills. It’s just a deviant art frame, just another living Frankenthaler. The wine flew thrice daily nonstop around the clock around the globe, the infinite geography of imagination. Sand falling through clasped hands from one end of the hourglass to the other. Somewhere echoes a cough to clear the way.

“Well, we’ll look back on this in years and laugh.” The days count off and here I am telling a story not everyone wanted to hear over unlimited mac n’ cheese, speedboat eyes properly affixed. Speedboats for something less legal, I can’t say I called it on the cards in Vegas like that time in the Hard Rock with Bruno Mars. Bait for the anxious, you ate it up and continue the trend upward, apparently. Arms wide open, we see the sunrise in different ways through similar windows. That reference might be too new for you; all you did was jam classic-rock and “work” while you were here. The cadence of hip-hop? The brilliance of Eminem? It’s like you’ve acquired the ears of an infant. Everything must sound so new and different in your emerging para-reality. Wait until you hear [Artist], though, man. Seriously. Will blow your mind for sure.

I don’t wag the dog like you do and I don’t shake the tree to spite the branches whose apples split in rebellion, but even young pups with old frowns have eyes for themselves sometimes. I see three roads as I’ve seen so many others: There’s the past, a blazing trail of digital images atop Arthur’s Seat, unrivaled fresh air and the promise of an open future. There’s the present, full body yoga suits and absurd poses for better sex with whichever name it is you’re keeping close this week. And then there’s the future, defiantly hissing hydra humming two tunes in tandem. I hear them both, but one is much louder than the other. I look over to see if you’re noticing what I notice. You shrug and smile, scribbled notes in small notebooks the answer to all your life’s work. Problem to have.

I listen for what I think is a third song, but it’s just the old imagination at play again. My eyes fail me, but my ears still sit straight. Yes, we are very different now.

GET THINGS DONE, DRINK

To: Handsome Phantom Express
From: Ornament Without Orient
Re: First Edition Guillermo Scott Herren Bio in Hardback

How long have we been playing tennis now? I don’t remember. Something like six, seven years it must be. Three paths diverged in a summer swamp - one takes the road less traveled by and the other follows not long after. Paths can diverge all they want but my mind has a way of bringing it all back together. Covalent bonds and a manner of speaking.

You know what’s ironic? You sent this reply about giving up on the sound industry and then go and write the best thing on Prefuse 73 you’ve ever written - and let’s not kid ourselves, that’s no mean feat considering the piles of unread drafts from 2005 and the lost hard drive information from moons ago that wiped clean what dreams you had to begin with. A lot of ink droplets over the years, as many as have fallen here recently like coins none of us can keep. I’m not sure what this says - maybe only somehow that you can try and run from the critic but the critic is a swift twin, a double shadow, an equalizer in the morning and a hare faster in the late afternoon; you will always catch up eventually. No one’s asking you to review records when you’re 70, but it’s not like you won’t have an opinion of 22nd century J-pop when the time comes.

Jaipur, I mean. Sip it over, #3.

Mass confusion as I opened this. It’s like a letter isn’t enough anymore now that I’ve accidentally switched over to the new[! improved! future! get used to it! it all goes without saying but I say so anyway] format for their messages. Of course I think it’s a nuisance - I feel like the windows are getting smaller and the ads/pokes/”friend” photo albums are getting bigger. It’s not intuitive, I can literally see this happening before me. I guess I should pat myself on the back (like all American students) that I should have the memory for the old ways at all. Windows within windows within windows, it’s frames all around like a religious nut’s Geocities page. You know what I think is actually going to happen? Eventually, we’re all going to return to the protozoan ooze of email from whence we came. I still remember.

Hope the FSO regimen is going okay for you. I guess I forgot to mention, but you probably/might/now know that the answer to your question is what it is. I work at what it is. It’s the same building and practically the same riverside floor I strode into when I moved over three years ago, back when the station was down my street and not halfway across town, when Joey’s Brickhouse had free Monday night buffets and I fell asleep at night telling myself Edgewater was just Chicago’s version of Queens. But who was I kidding? There’s only one. The canon deems it so.

I finally finished Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Don’t bother. A coworker who reminds me of whatever her name was, remember that name? Her? The one? The one on the commune who baked the pies? Anyway, she recently let me borrow a collection of Ionesco’s plays which I’m enjoying more. Here’s a fable I learned from one of them:

Once upon a time another cow asked another dog: “Why have you not swallowed your trunk?” “Pardon me,” replied the dog, “it is because I thought I was an elephant.”

Right? But of course you know exactly what it means. You think you’re not excited? You’ve been out of the trenches so long you wouldn’t know a stone’s throw if it skipped across your pond. But I know better than to say that since I feel the same. The wrinkles relax us, we come into our own eventually, whether that be through clam casinos or brine palaces, I don’t know. Never did, always did, pixie dust and homespun studio recordings no one will ever hear. Kompakt-1 and all the rest lost to the shifting mists of slurred speech.

Unspeaking of, I haven’t forgotten to visit, but plane fares aren’t what they used to be. Thanks for half-assing the overthrow, Benghazi.

A TWANGY TETRAGRAMMATON

To: Avalanches of Invites
From: Sealing the Envelope Tastes Like Cinnamon
Re: I’ve Been on a Tea Kick Since We Last Spoke

To the Bar Mitzvah!
You’ve read.
You’ve learned.
You’ve practiced lots.
(Why, you must be about to plotz!)

I bet you thought you were getting a Christmas card, or maybe a “Thanks for putting up with me that one weekend after Halloween” card, or maybe even a President’s Day card when I said I would send you something (which probably means I just asked for your address, but my recall is terrible and we’re taking a little creative license here) way back in 2010. Joke’s on you! Boy do I love a good Bar Mitzvah card; sadly, my local Hallmark could do no better than this. Plotz. What the fuck. I bet Jews don’t even find that funny.

Which brings me to what I thought was going to be the crux of this card’s message: holidays and their associates. Why aren’t there more obscure cards in stores? I went into said Hallmark in early January, before I regained employment but after I’d thought about writing this, and you know what was already on display? Valentine’s Day cards. I’m like, what about my boy MLK Jr.? What about Washington? Or Jefferson? Or Fillmore? Cleveland (twice, nonconsecutively)? And it was then that I decided that what we need more of in this country is niche holiday cards. I’m talking every occasion here: Kwanzaa, Bastille Day, Talk Like a Pirate Day, Saba Saba, Someecards Abstinence Day, Name (or Rename) Your Kid Day. That sort of thing.

Which leads me to be presumptuous on another point, but it’s not like I mind being candid or forthcoming (in the name of your couch’s dignity, RIP): You need another dog, or maybe a kid. I know what you’re thinking: Pump the brakes, mang! But wait. What if their name was Trey, or Tammy, or Tanisha, or even Tobias (Biblical, duh) so you could say this:

But now it’s here-
what a special date.
You’re a Bar Mitzvah.
Celebrate!

And then be like, “Aren’t you glad we’re a family whose initials stand for all that’s good and right about yogurt in America?” I’d never considered the thought until this particular Breckenridge Vanilla Porter, which now forever accompanies the memory of this card. You’re welcome.

Which brings me to what is the actual crux of this card’s messages: Maybe I drank during the large majority of this writing, but I had it all planned out way in advance. I actually wrote this half-awake, in a liminal state several weeks ago, and I don’t know what that’s worth, but I thought it was something. The structure, I’ve struggled to remember it for days; the right wording, I had to be careful since it’s in fine print this time. I never write anyone anymore like I used to. And you know what the best part of all this is? The best joke is on me.

Congratulations to you and sorry acknowledgment sort of came via text message (I couldn’t write this card as fast as I could text). Maybe we’ll see each other soon. Jesus, my brother’s seen you more recently.

Did I say Jesus? I meant you-know-who. Oy vey.

THE 400 BLOWS

To: The Fall of Tunis
From: A Fire in Cairo
Re: It’s Like Breast Cancer Awareness Out There

Well, that was quick: A guy immolates himself on Monday and by Friday there’s a completely new Tunisian government in place; it really is as easy as Rage Against the Machine used to say it was back when it wasn’t. I bet kids all over Africa listen to Zack de la Whateverthefuck, and that’s fine - Africa needs more empty agitators, because its history sure as hell hasn’t been filled with enough of them. A friend you know recently came up here to walk the stage and complete the graduation process for her MLS, and was telling me about how in the terminal in Charlotte on the way up some woman turned to her and asked casually out of nowhere if she’d heard about the Aflockalypse (as we now know it). She had. “The whole thing is a pretty crazy coincidence,” she says. “You know what I think?” the woman volleyed back conspiratorially, darting glances out across fellow passengers. The friend leaned in. “I think He’s coming.”

Not much of a confidence-booster as you prepare to board a plane. The trip to and fro was by all accounts a success, by the way. These things may not be unrelated.

Which is sort of like Syriana, did you ever see that movie? I did a few days ago. I don’t know why I put it off, maybe I just didn’t care enough back when we were sharing trance states at Sonar. Turns out I’m quite a fan of the “corruption is why we win” scene, of which you’ll no doubt be familiar. I also blame my affection for “hyperlink cinema” (not my term) on an earlier admiration for Casino and Magnolia. College, it turns out, still lingers like a bad aftershave long after I thought I’d showered thoroughly. But this is why I plan on vacating my current apartment at the end of my lease - the power just isn’t there. I seem to italicize anything that remotely approaches media. It streams until the 19th. Get on that.

Speaking of finite streams and power, I have a New Year’s Resolution a few days after the fact: I’m scuttling talk about Sarah Palin in casual conversation because, let’s be serious here for a moment, how many people do you know personally to be an advocate for this woman? I know tons. They’re all Democrats. I’m not sure if “silent majority” is an en vogue term anymore, or if one even exists/ever existed, but I’ve got to believe that if the Republicans offer an option - literally, any other option - nobody in their right (lowercase) mind would pay attention to her anymore. She’s the antidote for a slow news day. I decided this after watching the blood libel speech, which wasn’t even that great except that it had enough instances of her breathing in to warrant an entire YouTube video dedicated to it. I guess that’s the Internet for you, though.

Been thinking about a swing without the vote up to DC recently, though I’m not sure when now that I’ll actually be working again come Monday. You know what’s funny? I feel like I know a lot of people in DC now, almost too many. I don’t blame this on being well-connected; I blame it on DC being cool in an unsavory way every 20 years for its totally despotic and culturally sapping nature, like any city that deserves a good purging by good people outside of New York or LA, in which hope and failure spring eternal in equal measure. I’m getting old, which has nothing to do with grad school. How did that happen?

Austin was a bust, sure, but I have a friend who just moved there (too) and she doesn’t have a job anymore than the rest of us, which is odd considering Formula 1 is considering bringing its developing world-empowering circus to the city for a 2012 grand prix. I’ll make the trip, but only to drag the girlfriend along. I don’t believe in F1 much anymore. The politics and Michael Schumacher ruined it years ago.

At one point I would have agreed that there was no use distinguishing between the two (but he is another story entirely - we’ll have to hash that out over veggie sausage under bat-powered light some other day). I’m here and this city is great and I’m not inviting anyone until I get a proper place with windows to the outside world. It’s no fun living in a closet. Stranger than fiction?

Sunlight struggles through the window at the top of the air shaft: Maybe.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS AGAINST THE MACHINE

To: Headphones Made Just for Me
From: Spoken Like a True Bieber Fan
Re: Chamomile Tea Dream Tone Poem

“When I’m old and bent and sitting in a chair, you come and hold my hand. All right? That’s your job. Okay?”

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in all things that’s what we must come to. First came across that in a Bradbury novel some years back, no surprise which, and it’s been rattling around the corners of my cortex like a marble free of gravity ever since. It’s what we come from, who we are and where we go. We are the particles and we carry them with us to boot, in urns, in brain wrinkles, in errant glances sideways through burnt petrol bus clouds and windswept white-outs. Everyone does, no escaping it. It’s part of the human experience.

Well, most of it. I remember first reading about you late one night alone in a cold apartment and thinking, yeah, sure, refreshing, kind of novel in this age of personal promotion and unending ubiquity. That’s right daring of you, even. Here I am still slogging it out over deleting a MySpace (sorry, My_____) account still unsure of what I might lose. 424 comments and hardly any of them will serve a purpose in 424 years’ time, but it’s all part of losing things. I constantly check which way the glass is turned. We’re always losing things (for now, I’m looking from the bottom up), and it’s this coping of loss that becomes one of life’s greater challenges. We never die, see, because we don’t have the experience of doing that. We can be dying, but you and me and everyone you know doesn’t die. We just experience everyone elses’ deaths and process them as what it must be like to do it ourselves. Experience implies you did it; we never see the other side of death. To my best understanding, anyway. I probably stole that from Kundera.

But what if you never had these memories in the first place? What if you never had anything to go on, were forever the infant? That’s the situation(!) I feel like I’ve been in for the past year, and I don’t know if this was the plan all along or what, but I’m in. It’s more basic than the ‘Channel(s) I knew before. Eternally expecting things to just appear from the ether, but somebody had to make this, someone had to let slip more than a faded fax number and field recordings from Voyager I. Different trajectories, different galaxies, existence from the great beyond: It’s hard and clear or slow and blurry, fuzzy like a third kind of close encounter you can hardly believe. Fucking aliens. We’ll see about them in due time.

But morning comes after midnight like joy after sorrow ad infinitum. So we kept on living, and the kicks in utero kept coming, and we kept eating and drinking and pumping piping hot pits of Indian flowers, and you kept feeding, faultlessly forward on to some kind of big day. An announcement here, a wink and the glimpse of lifeforms there, black and white and blurry and elusive. This is the kind of pursuit I’m into, elliptical courting with lots of sentence fragments broken up by big asides on afterbirth and its cleanup. Elliptical, long a favorite word of mine. Sands stretch farther.

You know how I roll, and on I did like I was made of dough, constantly reimagining us both as Pillsbury side-projects. “Will it juice?” I asked everyone in a starlit closet to no avail. “Who is the prophet of this unheralded arrival?” I had no number and wouldn’t have dialed you anyway. What’s the use. Eventually, something had to drop in meteoric rain.

Instead, situations kept popping up elsewhere. Paris maybe, or Berlin, Tokyo for sure, maybe even Chicago somehow and somewhere I was not told, fulfilling only the most primitive human desires, what we all want as we wanted four decades ago and centuries from now: to live. Ice and snow and diamonds and furs and feelings all come naturally. Everything was temporary, part of the problem for the longest time. No names, no numbers, no colors, no guides. A faded map in another language.

We shared holidays. A low-intensity glow like an electric eel or deep sea echinoderms where eyes are only for looks and there are always at least two seats at the bar. Funny, right? But there it was, as funny as ever, unreal punchlines over Montreal and the freedom of the future. We laughed to it. There you were, a solar eclipse or a Haley’s comet brushing through from the infinite abyss beyond which you came. Like lines on a lunar map, craters on a canvas, coral reef as a nation-state. Hard as diamond upon arrival for some, an ethereal glow for others; both at once for me, if you catch my current. Industrial animal mechanical contractible combustible capitulating anti-capitalist anti-boundary-breaking but maybe not.

Oh yes, it hath juiced. Trust that if not your own blind instincts when the bioluminescence blesses you, too.

“No,” he says. “When you’re old and bent, I’ll be gone. I’ll hold it now. Later, you’ll have to remember.”

CATS GET FATTER

To: Same As it Never Was
From: Porous Cloves
Re: The Good Old Days

Coughs again, this time the mucus sort of jolting out and by sheer force of the gravity of my face, it hits the side of my mouth. I’m no culinarian, but even I know that doesn’t taste right. Black IPA? IBA? What do we call this stuff, anyway? I was mentioning something about the best french toast I’ve had in ages (and if we capitalize “french” in “french toast,” I guess I’m wrong there, but it’s such a minor point and, anyway, Sarkozy speaking on behalf of his people deserves it, the lout) when this thing swept across my bow and doused me in my own plaintive gulp of hot syrup, rich and hard to get out of the hair as you could imagine.

My parents have always highly recommend St. Augustine and I liked it the one time I was there. Speaking of Florida, Miami for New Year’s was a good idea but I can’t afford it (naturally), so I told all parties involved I’d take a raincheck - you can tell the beau’s family for me. I’m thinking late February or early March now, which was what I thought in early November, which means I’m really thinking much later than that; after Buenos Aires, after Shanghai, after everything. I’ll be back east when I’m back east, tomorrow, the next day, the day after tomorrow, whatever. These days, they blur together so easily, don’t they? Can we go to The Dharma Lounge? Or is there somewhere better? I bet there is. Let’s find it. What a waste of a shot last year, by the way. Fool me once. I know, I know.

I’d been meaning to say for a long time what I thought about how one can only imagine what kind of people issues are afoot back in the old stomping grounds. That was kind of clever, reading back, which I don’t regret for a second pointing out even though future tense co-workers are less than thrilled with more than meta subplots. Anyway, I wonder if they’re resolved now… Probably temporarily, or at least it’s different people issues now, right?

But you’ve got to maintain that distance (and you always did) because if you don’t, it’s all going to suck you right back in again. I think that’s happened for a few of us. There’s sort of that inevitability feeling, a friend and I were talking about this because he recently moved up/over/around here (for how long, he’s not sure, but that’s only the point once you’ve admitted defeat and moved back), that you can go for as long as you want, but everytime you return, there’s always a group to welcome you back to whatever Hooper’s is called now with a knowing grin: We thought you’d return someday. The longer you’re out of that loop, the better. I thought Dispatch was on tour. I have no idea. What a terrible band.

So here we go, another year at the same old bar under whatever name you know it now and another round of “So what have you been up to lately?” absentmindedly asked rhetoric where people only want to hear the return volley, which is fine, because I actually have nothing to say - unemployment helps in this regard because the focus is shifted away from the recipient. There is nothing to say when you’ve nothing to do. I mentioned the Koreas, I mentioned Jamaica, I mentioned the world; I mentioned nothing and expect nothing in return, which I might actually get. There are so many first-person pronouns here, it seems unwise not to split the infinitive and run back to you, away from the cornfields and swimming pools of a long time ago. Time, what nonsense. We are all suspended in youth as long as we want to be.

I had been needing a new blanket because the one I had at the time of the second paragraph was shedding (and shredding) at the fringes. I don’t understand and I’ve never seen this happen with anyone else’s blanket, which is why I eventually chucked it to a dump out back just a few hours ago. 2011, maybe there’s something else in store. Is the blanket a portend? I squint my eyes to study the strands closely, but the coughs come quicker now and it’s hard to focus. I forgot the point; maybe there was none. Fucking microfiber: How does it work?

WEAR IT IN HEALTH

To: Koenig at Night
From: Those Baboons Look Lonely
Re: Driving Up La Soufrière Ain’t What it Used to Be

It’s like, you spend your whole childhood getting pushed around by kids with more proportional faces, richer parents, stronger bats, faster cars, larger apartments, larger apartment complexes, louder voices, sharper nails, whiter teeth, prettier passport stamps, gaudier jewelry, longer stories, and better ways to tell them. You’re tooling around in a run-down assemblage of pure urban ugliness, kicking stones and listening to Armand van Helden blaring from someone else’s Mini, swearing you’re going to get a better button-up eventually. The sun rises, the sun sets, the fix stays in.

Then one day, boom - you wake up and you’ve got a gun.

The glimmer in your eyes is as loud as any gun going off, comparable to a Campanian clap of thunder during the least clear of those sweet summer nights you know. This hunk of metal weighing down your right hand, this marvel of engineering from another nation you do not know, something far away probably, this is now officially stronger than any black spray paint the fascists can scrawl across your alleyways, more potent than any red spray paint the communists will inevitably follow up with, and at least as potent as the powerwashers those clowns at the Carabinieri use to take it all down with on day three. Yes, the cycle is about to change - it’s a new sweet summer. You feel Indian for the first time in your life.

Did I say know? I meant knew. Lonely late evenings are gone for good; things are gonna change around here, you can feel it.

You’re rifling away at riverboats and shooting up shallow ravines where even the dead go by boat, just to get a feel for the place. Good look around, great light, excellent angles - this is living the new dream. You might as well be driving a Fiat, even if it is just another city scooter that barely kick-starts before shuddering off on its way. Armand van Helden? This is Supercar’s “Be.” You’re watching everyone else kick away their soccer balls while you blow away the braintrust, the past-present-future axis, this pretty impressive line of relatives. It’s a show of grandeur with all the subtlety of a Kardashian birthday party. Relatively speaking, I mean.

But then one day not longer after, boom - you’ve given up on dreams. You start using without imagination. Now you’re actually following through. You’re recklessly going into arcades, hitting up forgotten pool tables and getting free lapdances you don’t know what to do with. Your nose is too long to lie to yourself in the first place, but word on the street is you’re gonna hate how it melts from here. A few extra euro in it for you if you can figure out what the brand of wheel loader is, because I couldn’t rightly say myself. I guess you wouldn’t have the best perspective either, though, from where I last saw you sitting.

Now, because you’re a shortsighted fool too bent on carpe diem, you’ll never see something else right in front of you: You haven’t changed the system at all. This summer’s the same as the last one with a different name on it, maybe yours and maybe not, but these things are no different. The apparatchik is the apparatchik for a reason; we have people in place to balance out the preordained powers, and with a few notable exceptions (all of them fictitious), that’s how it’s always been and how it always will be. The fix was in for you; the fix is always in for all of us. Change is subversion isn’t subversion isn’t change. You join the problem by opting to fight it.

The thing is, you’re no more guilty than the rest of us. We join the fight by opting in, or out, or not even knowing in the first place - there is no escape. The game is The Game, if you see what I mean. Spiders spin webs around piles of dirty clothes and fillings fall out from failing teeth, it’s a tangled one we weave when we merely want to wave our hands out at this city, look at this beautiful place, it’s a wonder we ever came so far. Leave the lights on for the exposure, it gets a little blurry after five minutes or so, but you learn to cope. You learn to live with the contradictions. We are all Fitzgerald’s recognition somehow, whether it’s in a line after line after line on a table long after the party’s over or in an ostentatious late-night display on live television for all to see. You are a runner; we are our fathers’ sons and daughters of hungry ghosts, and boy are they ever. No bread? I guess pasta will have to do again. Empires have run on less.

But you’ll never know for sure. So go, enjoy the soft sand between your toes, the air around your eyes, the view from the flatlands. Metal rusts, concrete cracks, toxic waste dumps, ending summers on endless beaches, “this thing of yours.” It always goes back to construction with you people, doesn’t it? But at least you wear it with your own sick sense of pride. Yes, go forth and find your place in the fix, the fix we all bathe in blood from.

I DID IT ON MY DAY OFF

To: All Grown Up and No One to Raze
From: They Say She’s Better Off Now Than She Was 20 Years Ago
Re: Streets Don’t Wanna Know

Let’s paint a picture dominated by fast-moving clouds and slate gray skies begging to rain: I was reading around this morning for the first time in days, trying to hit up the usual spots and catch myself up in a world I often barely recognize. This just happens every now and again and mirrors how I run in real life, short bursts and with no real explanation other than wanting to have something to talk about (maybe). I get in a very specific kind of mood and chase the info graphic 24/7/365-til-you-die news cycle dragon in circles until I have no answers, no energy and no desire to know anything near what guys like R. James Woolsley know about the world. But even he falls short, and I guess we both, like Benedict, will have to wait for the light of the next world to make any headway on that front. Dr. No, not in this lifetime.

In and out of pages and articles, a tapestry of North Korean scuttlebutt (shocker) and mishandled monies in the Eurozone and backtalk on the TSA and then, somehow inevitably, Dipset. They’re having a reunion this week, apparently, of which I knew nothing. Cam’ron, Jim Jones, Juelz Santana, the other guy: It’s truly a mid-decade mindmeld of mediocre proportions. Expect pink furs and mostly white suburban chumps in their late 20s who remember running into a guy who claims to be an associate of the dude who tried to off Zekey back when a Santos House Party meant something, but it wasn’t at Santos, it was at a rooftop party after the party somewhere up in Spanish Harlem. These are the same trolls that tell stories when you ask for grocery lists and have the aunts with the neighbors that knew the scrubs for the nurses at Cedar Sinai when Richard Gere was admitted for gerbilling. Mammals your own size? Thanksgiving, indeed.

It’s interesting how things have evolved over the years. Cam helped remake pink the new black and then took rap royalty to its logical color-coordinated conclusion with Purple Haze. Jim founded the Byrdgang, got Stack bundled and tried to make a face for himself as a poor man’s Ghost. Juelz rode Cam’s coattails for a couple of singles before whistling his way to the top and then, just as quickly, right back into obscurity. You whistled your way out of the decade on a beautifully made and heretofore admired book before disappearing into the mysterious ether of the Internet, or maybe you never did; you just took a sabbatical, dropped some entry-strapped blogs on the streets, got off of them and sold off your Ken O’Brien jerseys in lieu of a steady girlfriend and married off to have a kid, stayed in the suburbs, stoked the arcade fire, I don’t know. Whatever it is you did. We age.

Then, like an Irish Miracle or Wesley Walker, you were back on St. Paddy’s Day. Let us do what we once feared least, part one: On and on it went, love letters to a guy who, like Dipset or me or you or Ireland itself, no longer sits in the same place he once did. Chairs get cushier the higher up the ladder you climb and if Smith’s indivisible hand keeps slapping you down the rungs, at least you can breathe easy knowing the world turns faster than it used to and it definitely keeps twirling even as you Tweet from the top step. Quick, in 140 characters or less, can you tell me what you missed?

I can, because this week White Pitchfork apparently rescinded their 10.0 ban and clarified what you should have done in the interim. Think of it, post-Wilco perfection! The only man on earth who probably would have called that ain’t the guy owning the Nets now (Does he even speak English? Does that offend you, yeah?). Dipset has haiku and Kanye doesn’t? Where’s the waters of Nazareth in that? But someone will make it happen. This world’s turning too quickly for it not to, just as that darkness on the edge of town gets lighter with every passing boxset. Our bling brightly illuminates everything, bad graphic design is extremely loud and incredibly close everywhere you look. This town isn’t so big.

There’s this vision I had, distant and incoherent and moving faster and faster but always around, and maybe it’s spiraling toward, I can’t tell with the dizziness setting in, but it’s that there’s another world with another you in it. It’s not me, I know that for sure, because even with all the existentialism I’ve devoured over the years, I couldn’t possibly fake this one. I’m not capable even now. It’s not a mirror image or a mirrorage or a mirror hosting site, exactly, but something resembling a world just slightly altered, in a similar form existing at the fringes of our technicolor dreamcoats and not unenjoyable. It’s a world after the world we know now because, as we’ve established, it turns. There are always others and only a planet of billions can hold them back.

I think about what that world is like without us, monied or not, pink or purple or emerald green, nuked out and fitted up in our finest furs. Strangers on this road we are on, but that’s only because we couldn’t see ourselves in the darkness before. Then I remembered two years ago and how far we’ve all come since. You can pay your power bill online now as long as your card goes through, from what I understand.

Even so, I don’t want to think of how I could envision you as anything less than unattainably one-sided and infinitely one- and multi-dimensional at once and ephemeral and above and beyond this. But before you think twice about returning from the slate gray skies over said Sinai, a wag of the finger: You never know what you miss until it comes back. So don’t - stay away at those edges. For my sake as much as your own.

NO NEWS FROM THE MOOSE’S TOOTH

From: The Shadow
To: The Shadow Box
Re: Day Trippin’ Down the Alcan

I didn’t always crash at 10:45 every night and I don’t think I used to hoard the covers the way I do now, but maybe I’ve always been that way, unaware of my somnolent greed.  Remember “Such Great Heights” and the milk crate we set out to steal from behind the 7-Eleven on the corner? Edward Scissorhands maybe, or Haggard or that shirt I talked you into buying?  Who cares now because what good is any of it in the context of the D.A.C. and hearing what a great guy he was (it’s true), and his eyebrows that were completely wrong, nowhere near how they had always looked, forever.  It’s kind of sick to think that there’s a profession for doing dead people’s makeup, but even still, you would think that at some point in training they’d address the respect that’s owed to the eyebrows of someone who had clearly been growing them out for decades.

After that there was the track, running around and around listening to The Moon and Antarctica or Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers.  Entire Hispanic families would show up, kids pedaling around on tricycles while their fathers and brothers lapped me, despite their jeans and the 80-degree weather.  They’d play basketball sometimes, comically short for the stereotype of the sport, but good, really good, nevertheless.  You’d have to wonder what kinds of homes they went back to after the evenings at the track, and how they had the energy to come out in the first place after the jobs they likely worked all day long. 

Maybe you remember that infamous game of Uno, but probably not all the “creative explanations” I came up with, or the degree to which one can begin to despise a high school counselor.  I stopped reading the license plates of Silver Xterras a long time ago, and the whole concept of nostalgia escapes me now.  I used to be much different, but after you check your AOL inbox enough times with no response from the Last Frontier, and after the videos start circulating with shots of your gutted childhood home, showing the pool you first dived into from the 10 meter now drained, you stop.  You remember, of course, but you don’t live there anymore, never will again.  The glaciers melted into the Atlantic Ocean and the Canal was handed back after all those years. 

We’re onto other things now, but still late for the show, in the shadowed nosebleed seats of others’ memories, crowded out by everything that came before.  Older actors against a better set, ten meters up and poised to jump, years before they drained the pool.

NOT WITH A GUN, NOT EVEN WITH DEATH

To: Liberated Fandom, Inc.
From: Strangers With Haiku Sketched Across Their Faces
Re: The Revolution Yet Played Out

There’s nothing like a little inner beauty to get the heart racing, right? Kandinsky knew. He painted in broad strokes, colorfully at first, then more pointedly and, of course, eventually there was Der Blaue Reiter. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings and all that rot. It was easy, it was effortless. It was water. No wonder the school was so blue - maybe there wasn’t a whole lot of that happening in the H20 of Munich c. 1903. But most people have a favorite color, and he definitely had a thing for horses. History does not note, to the best of my knowledge, what his favorite riding style was.

But this, this feeds back into writing more than music, poetry more than politics, sport more than commerce. There’s the origin story, something I feel like I don’t hear enough about in other forums but which seems to be at the crux of your very foundation. There’s a person’s flow, their body movements both alone and in relation to all the others (which are inextricably linked, I suppose, so why bother differentiating? Or should we sip coffee down that wormhole yet?), and how the political seems to step aside in the midst of the act. There’s an online store, there are massive prints at $50 a pop or thereabouts, there is the small matter of making a living (and believe me, we’re still trying to figure that out, each of us continually, until one day hopefully you’re lucky enough to retire), but there’s also the defiantly universal gut reaction in seeing something free of strings. Hard charcoal, cold paint globs on a paint palette, who cares how it gets done.

It only matters that you do and that it works. Which it does, of course, brilliantly so.

What’s so interesting about the technique is that it comes from a necessity to try something new, to write thought bubbles inside giant letters to illustrate axes or turn men into bird kings and bus drivers. That’s what I’ve always admired about your ilk and what, in turn, has made me so jealous, and what drives me to write things like this that are fawning and resentful and spurning and not a little pleading or presumptuous all at once. I’m primed for it, doubly so, pre-stretched, you know how a canvas can be. Paint me down.

It got me thinking that I could do it, that I could brush up on some skills and have a go. But I know better than to try a thing like that at this point. You can’t paint pros any particular shade of the rainbow. You’ve got to know what you’re working with. A little dab of alizarin crimson here, a touch of the phthalo blue there, and just a hint - just a hint - of the cadmium yellow. The three colors which make up the human world. Black everything, white nothing, vice versa, on and on that goes.

That’s really about all we’re looking for, you know? Just something to stimulate us in a different way, make us see a second life through a different lense, an alternate untapped universe. And for all the enterprising that seems like it’s been going on since the opportunity to expand first hit shore, this one feels merited. Is it the culmination of everything up to this point? Who’s to say? You pull out a couple of darts and aim them squarely at a new history that, according to one source, “actually kind of works.” It’ll be interesting to see what the next generation thinks. They said the same thing about Munich a century ago. No guesses where the next wave came from, Malevich the exception that proves the rule. Visuals are just an imagination you can see. So nice to think so differently about a genie.

A clown as an inflated Kandinsky borne of a floor 94 feet wide. No, they can’t take that away from you.