free to disassociate

Hey,

The Nightwatchman

I, personally, have never been killed by an African killer bee. Yet. I like to end sentences that way, with an elliptical, ambiguous, “yet”, signifying either that I haven’t yet had the pleasure of one of life’s sweet delights, or that I have heretofore averted some catastrophically shitty circumstance. They say there’s always tomorrow. They say, “It is what it is.”

It turns out, a lot of dumb people say a lot of dumb shit. They like a lot of questionably dumb and awful shit, too. They like Colorado. They like cheesecake - ricotta and cream cheese, both- they like that old 1950s style smut pornography that is also called cheesecake. Cheesesteaks, earthquakes, heartaches, heatwaves, close shaves, tidal waves, escapades. In my mother’s abnormal psych textbook it said that kind of rhyming is indicative of schizophrenic behavior. It’s called canning. Spanning. Free Bradley Manning. Gym and laundry, tanning.

My sister always loved that abpsych book. I liked the nursing books better. The color plates of exotic skin lesions and cut-away diagrams. There was a page with a black and white photograph of a man, loinclothed, sitting astride his own engorged testicle. Maybe that’s why I ended up where I am now, which is on the 5th floor of the Intercontinental, which is California, which is here.

I recently took up reading graffiti, with which very few other words rhyme. Nefertiti. That was the name of the librarian on 8th street in New York City, where we took the kids to be read to, twice weekly. That was across from Tompkins Square Park, where I once saw a squirrel on a tree branch, chowing down on a chicken wing, which upended everything I thought I understood about food webs and Darwinism, class warfare and the welfare state.

I asked B, “Why are we reading all these books all the time? Are we keeping track of all these ideas?” He didn’t answer me, because I haven’t really asked him, yet. But my own answer was that we keep reading because our eyes are restless. He didn’t say (yet) that our eyes are at any moment threatening to wander right off their sockets, roll out of our heads. It is when we are sleeping that we are most vulnerable to their escape. Therefore, we must read ourselves silly, especially right before bed, to wear them out with words and ideas. Preferably aloud. Eyes cannot understand speech. Spoken words are the static white noise of the visible spectrum.

To keep my eyes in, I turn my wordthoughts into pictures and objects. I lay these out so I can sort them and make piles. Shiny ones to the left. Flying ones to the right, on the shelf. Then, I can walk through the museum of my own thoughts. I’ll be the nightwatchman, and run my fingers over silver treasures, which I will call argentine because I am the nightwatchman and the curator, and I say it’s a prettier word. I’ll creep up, stealthy, spear in hand, on the wooly mammoths in their glass case dioramas: I am the neanderthal in the corner. I am the taxidermied vulture circling above the hyenas. I am an open book of tropical disease. I am a killer bee, pinned harmless in a box.

Knock, knock

Q: Knock knock.

A: The bartender says, we don’t serve your kind here.

Q: Why did the hipster burn his tongue?

A: Two frying pans are on the stove.

Q: Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

A: You’d think one of them would’ve seen it!

Q: Who’s there?

A: A neutrino walks into a bar.

ampersandrew:

country boy makes path
through fields, wandering free
city boy follows streets

and the dreamer goes between them in her mind.

There’s no easy way to ask this,

but mom, when you die, can I have your measuring cup? You know, the tall pintglass tumbler with the masses written on it? It has columns painted on, showing how much each volume would be- in grams!- of the life-sustaining substances: sugar, flour, salt, water. Except it’s French, so it reads, sucre, farine, sel, eau.  

When you die, I’ll have to learn the things you do by instinct and feel. You know, I’ve been buying frozen pie crusts for years because any I try to bake won’t be half as good as yours. A good crust takes practice and appropriate proportions. I’ve been avoiding failure and anyway, your recipes are in incomprehensible masses. Four hundred grams of butter is a carton of your old cigarettes, half smoked. A thousand grams of flour is your shawl over the back of the chair. How much sugar is a sparrow? How much wine is left in my glass?  

I bought one for myself, one of those measuring cups, once. Mine has only liquid measures: tea and table spoons, cups, ounces, milliliters. I already know how to convert those to the other: three teaspoons to a tablespoon; 16 tablespoons to a cup, which is eight fluid ounces, which is half a pint. All-American measures you never got the hang of. I don’t need the algebra, so I never use that cup to measure a damn thing: I just drink out of it. Like right now, I’m enjoying the last 25 of a 75 milliliter pour of red wine, looking at the flour trailed across my kitchen table.