Friday, October 31, 2008

Four Day Blog Vacation: GOTV Being Something of a Ramble Without a Single Sentence James Wood Would Think Well of

Full time till the polls close Tuesday...
A four day time machine.
A slide that will shoot me out the other end when it's over

Then back to normal?

No. There is no normal.
And there's no back to
There's only this and this changing into another this
A feral state of disassociation
Far too much order in my life
It's why I call myself names in the morning
(And I do! I think of some foolishness.
Something years and years and years ago
And say, you stupid foolish person!
Actually, with more what they call swear words.
It makes me feel bad about myself, calling myself names like that.
Where is that coming from?
Better to embrace foolishness than curse the candle.
When I come back I will dismantle the fixtures
Looking forward to hearing the pins and screws clatter across the tile floor, the coiled wires
Tape them together for four more days
Four days
Maybe it will be time to change my name again.
Gets harder every time. Other people are too fixed on old names
Why not a new name every day, depending on how we feel?
Or on the weather. I definitely need a storm name.
If I had a strictly temporary name when I am in a political mode
It would be easier
My cat only knows me by the sound of my voice, my smell
This is good about cats, they let go of your name
Sometimes its hard to find it again in the morning.
This makes me realize, even as I write this, that I dislike having a name.
That I always have.
When I was a child I thought I disliked the name they gave me, like every child
at some point dislikes the name they were given.
But I begin to see that it's not that way.
That all names are equally burdensome.
They weigh you down.
False names are no help. Pseudonames.
In some ways they weigh you down even more.
Bbecause under the false name, like the names people assume on the Web
They are doubly weighty, the so-called real name
lurking under the so-called false name
(all names are equally false, though some are lighter than others)
like I just had an unsolicited call from someone who said she was a new user of Skype with a smoothchocolate body (why did I assume it was a woman?) a smoothchocolate body and white teeth and she was serious (she said)... or was it her teeth that were serious?
I told her I was an old man with no money and my body, while not so bad for being an old man,
is not exactly smooth and not chocolate and nevermind my teeth
so she can see that without the body or the money she has wasted her time sending me this message (I told her as much), but I hope she finds somewhere the sort of love she's seeking--not the love she's asking for but the love she seeking even if she doesn't know she's seeking it,
which would mean we had something in common after all, though not what she thinks or what I might dream about tonight, seriously smoothbody and teeth--not by choice, dreams don't work that way, more's the pity.

Four days and I can dismantle the Orderly Mechanism. I am so tired, so worn down by order... Order that is not even real order but only the illusion of order. What is it for? To keep us busy, Fred forbid we should have lots and lots of holidays like the French with time to think and get free of our names and our order and our schedules and appointments and serious obligations and all manner of whatever is serious and orderly. And I have not had a drop to drink, but I'm about to remedy that. Nothing like that third glass of wine to dismantle the order, to make you forget your name, to wake us up to the kind of dreams we hope we will dream when at last it comes time to sleep.

2 comments:

  1. James Wood called: your bad prose/verse gets a pass because you're on the right team. But you don't get a free pass forever.

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  2. Don't deserve to be called prose, let alone verse... that's what comes out when I'm too tired to make sense and too fired up to call it quits and spare Noisy Dog readers the pain.

    No one gets anything forever.

    Thanks for the call.

    Have to go... I think Zarkosy is on the other line... something about being his speechwriter...

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