Nobody's creekbed

songs, prayers, poetry, stories, art, photographs, moving pictures, fondnesses, tall-tales and meditations

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The Anterior Insula and Hwy W

Saturday, May 27, 2006

To-Do List, Memorial Day Week-End, 2006

1) Pluck this Dusky Jewel... or at least hope to pluck this Dusky Ju-Wuhl. In general behave more like Jim Morrison. Or to be more precise behave in the manner of Val Kilmer behaving in the manner of Jim Morrison. This will involve greater use of Swagger/Sway, swinging the upper body from the hips in what we will call the Cobra, or the Swivel Jut, leaning against things, slouching, exaggerated insouciance, cussing and saying things like make it a triple. Lighting onto stranger’s balconys, kissing them. Walk the sandy beaches of blurry, slurry southern California until I find Kyle MacLachlan. Remember: failed director/actors might become rock stars. Think, Dusky Ju-Whul, Dusky Ju-Whul, visualize the plucking of it, the showing it gratuitously and graciously to people. Think how Dusky that Jewel will feel to your tingling fingers...

2) Blame somebody else.

3) Squint more. Also, purse lips more. (See: Dream.)

4) Deodorant. Consider it.

5) Grocery store. To get: scotch, rotisserie chicken, bananas, aspirin.

6) Stop telling people I will give them a call, or write them a longer e-mail soon. (Unless I specify that give you a call actually means there is a chance that I will call you on the telephone one more time before I die.)

7) Communicate more with my hands. Wave the hands around. I’m seeing all these celebrities on TV, on the talk shows and whatnot, and one and all they seem to have these huge hands, and they wave them about like semaphores, or like they’re guiding a plane in on the runway. They cut daggers in the air, describe incantations, and when they go lifting and swinging these big hands from the throne of their properly and casually crossed legs, when the hands rise and take the air in action, they (the hands) are like a Japanese Movie Monster appearing dramatically before us, climbing from the sea or over a mountain range, suddenly right there, right there in our face, filling the screen, and of course you want this monster to ravage you, you want this monster to have his or her way with you. Hand-Zilla. Be Hand-Zilla. And the faster and more dextrous you use your hands the less they see how small your hands actually are. (Drum fingers on the surface of things? Trapped-in-a-box-like descriptors?)

8) Pity the poor fools. Suffer them. Wear more Jewelry? Dusky Jewelry? Mohawk, scowl.

9) Fish for compliments. Live bait? (I am going to need a bigger boat.)

10) Stop aping around.

11) All male cast of Steel Magnolias. I have lived with this idea for too long. Realize it. Believe in it. Bring it to the stage. Fin-de-siecles and such. Paradigm shifts. Crank boats.

12) Peter Pang in NeverNever Alley... Tinkleberry... Black-Eyed Jonathan & Baby Bear... Crystal Beth... Mister Hook, the Hook... Trip to endless youth, trip out windows and down stairs, into streets, trip into the beds of strangers... you will be redeemed when the dust is sprinkled onto your trembling brain... the Dilated Boys... the High Pirates of Sketch... Madness in Dead Clocks and Clocks That Disappear.... (“I was wounded early/and early I learned/that wounds made me... He alone/who is joined to the horizon/can build new roads... (Adonis))

13) Time is Distraction, a Shore, a Barrier Reef to the Sea

14) Stop saying it is what it is, because quite clearly it is what it is not.

15) Shake the rigor from my eyes. Stretch? Fall apart?

16) Wolverine 5: A Wastrel’s Life... rebirth of the franchise, redemption... both the franchise and I bankrupt and broke.

17) Essay: To Get All Tall & Mighty: One tall can too many: to grossly proselytize, talk shit, opine, complain, brag or judge, as in don’t get all tall and mighty with me, dirtface stinkbalm! Guy full of Guy in the front yard he starts slinging words like hash, he starts waving them hands around, guy decides to climb him a tree, climb like it like he did when he was young, he clumb a shitload of tree, and he’s shure as shit going to do it, knows he can do it, and he starts climbing, laughing, telling them see if he can't, and he gets about 15 feet up, though very awkwardly let’s say, barely, and he slips he slips and falls like so much dead weight to the ground below, in less than a second the terrible thing is done, he's fallen like a busted play to the ground where he does lie motionless, far away from the goonball world. They will say of him, well, he had to go and get all tall & mighty. Shame.

18) “I can’t go home, Grace. I’m a grown up.”

19) Romantopithecus... A storied beast? Hike into the mountain, lay down on dirt.

20) One last play, seconds left, The Fail Mary.... go deep, god, go deep, and please do not drop that ball when gravity sends it dreamlike from its arc into your hands. May we never know heart ache.

21) Sometimes useless, sometimes proud.

22) Call Werner Herzog; more questions about the Ecstatic Truth. And of course he will tell me again that as Miles Davis says, if you have to ask you'll never know. And I will laugh because of course I ask only to hear the echo and the smile.

23) Write the work of Adolescent Fiction I have been putting off—Boy/Girl Party—this the world needs. The world desperately needs the touching and comic coming-of-age antics of Susie Peeler, Lisa Dudley, Buttercup Jones, Danny Manny, Mitch Steadmore, the twins Mikey and Stacey Ponz, the stray dog Rollins, the homeless man Mr. Speedy, the well-intentioned but hapless Principal Dropswitch, all character arc and action culminating narratively with the fateful decision on the part of Benny Dell’s dad Scott, The Cool Dad, to allow his son to host Springy Creek’s first Boy/Girl Party! Sweet. How do you spell sweet? S-P-R-I-N-G-Y-C-R-E-E-K, that’s how.

24) Grocery store. To get: water.

25) Blindhouse Cinema. They most certainly will not see that you have not seen.

26) Stop shaking? All the livelong day. Coming round the mountain.

27) Less Melancholy!

28) I will remember you.

29) A smattering of revolution here and there, tales so personal as to not be told, so dull really, or mundane, as to not be told, like even waking up, getting into the car and driving to-ward the sun, a song in yr throat, hope in yr chest.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

dear lordgodlordgod,

take the bones from my face, please. for this i pray and for nothing else. take the bones from my face, please, rearrange them, clear the works, and then put them back, centered, square. take the eyes, soak them in something (anything) and put them back. there be a tension cast from the shoulders, the pit, up and over the scalp, saturating my lobes, my eyes and occipital. the phrase darning needle, lord, why that phrase? why the close work in these too-small chairs? the phrase shallow grave. buried and just out of reach. winnowed endeavor. a thing tumbling into siphon, losing itself. brazen hussy. a big expensive face, a toothsome display. the staunch pilot. the dream in which i kept too close an eye on a group of neighborly people gathered good naturedly in my yard to the front, the side, and off toward the Lee’s field. my face cries for a monstrous yawn, for demusculation. i didn’t see anything, i didn’t see them do anything, i saw them do nothing. it’s like i want to yawn, i’m crying to yawn. i want to peel back my face into this monstrous relief i can almost just imagine feeling. do you know what i mean? a chasm seems to be widening in the world. might i bore a couple holes into my head? trepanation? why this phrase, lord? i look at everybody. they want to yawn. all I see is eyes. eyes peering up from dirt, from surfaces of water, from trees and buildings and asphalt, and they ache. rolling around, peering. it aches, the peering. and when we sleep we dream of yawning, of vacating, but then it is still ongoing, an almost imperceptible thrashing, a keening of molecules if you are alive to the sound. i am dying to yawn, dying. i wanted to keep an eye out, make sure that they were not up to anything over there, anything out of sorts. friend of an old friend? deep perspective in a bleached-out yard. no shadows. crisp outlines. indefinite perspective. the phrase yoked to my wagon. (bottom dragging.)

‘im all bear-assed,
‘im all splotched up on his pink tush,
‘im all junked up and crying.


worn collared shirt, unbuttoned, reveals a gross, red sore, large in the middle of his chest. he often refers to himself as a hard luck fucker. the grace in this world would not be mine, he stammers. he does not quite understand what the word godforsaked actually means, but he likes to use it. he likes the sound and implication of it. he is known to forsook things. i forsook that son of a bitchin carl; or, i forsook bruce and his place; or, my family done forsook me long ago. his old eyeglasses will always be crooked upon his face due to the twin habits of running into walls and coming suddenly to rest, face first, against ungiving surfaces, and then sleeping that way, unmoving, for hours, the frame of his glasses mashed into his pink face.

The Dandruf-Headed Stranger


The dandruf-headed stranger, the bachelor, brushes clean his shoulders and the nape of his neck, sucks in his rounded belly, tucks the tail of his shirt deep into his baggy pants. He likes the grocery store, he likes the quiet activity of the place, the flourescent lighting, the colored packagings like dream wallpaper along the spacious aisles. He likes to place his hand on frozen meat. He likes to see women--women whom one and all he deems lonely in one way or another--steer shopping carts one destination to another, their gazes inward. He imagines their stories, their specific hopes and fears, their misgivings. He likes to think he could well prove something to each of these ladies, possibly invest their life with variation. “I’m a variable,” he thinks, “a wild card.” He likes to place his hands inside mounds of produce, and he then likes to wiggle his fingers. He likes to do this when he thinks nobody is watching him. The slow walking bachelor selects a narrow assortment of easily prepared foods: soups, macaroni, peanut butter, cereals. He does very little of what you might call cooking in his home. In his imagination he has had sex with literally hundreds of the grocery-shopping women of this town. He likes to imagine hurried, sweaty sex in obscure environs. Sex freighted with wild dilemma. He has had imaginary sex in parked cars on imaginary dead-end roads; he has had sex in shadowed afternoon bedrooms behind blinded windows to the imaginary sounds of kids at play in an imaginary adjacent room; he has had sex against numerous pieces of imaginary appliances, atop sinks, and living room couches, and, oh god, untold numbers of living room couches (rooms lived in by unsuspecting husbands and families) have seen the slow-falling imaginary snow of his very real dandruf. Snowy, brilliant afternoons. He is not a bargain shopper per se; he never uses coupons or hunts specifically for sale items--he simply does not eat foodstuffs that cost very much. God, the savings in this place. He misemploys the word frugality. He tells himself that his is a hard-earned and constantly demanding but ultimately rewarding base survival instinct. When a passing acquaintance bothers to ask him how he is doing he always answers in the same straight-faced reply, “Oh, I’m getting along,” and the passing acquaintance almost always says, “Yeah?” and he almost always says again, “Yeah, I’m getting along.”

The name of his band?
Bemused Expression On His Face
The band started by his arch-nemesis?
Knuckle Sandwich