Category Archives: shards

November 18, 2018 · 4:00 pm

age shell of a young domain

AGE SHELL OF A YOUNG DOMAIN

 

I wrote a Shard about Age Shells. People wrote back and said, “I don’t know about this.”

“Flesh it out,” they said. “This is the tip of an iceberg.”

“You’re onto something,” they said, “but where’s your zany language that turns everything upside down?”

People long to be turned upside down, even though one of the two fears we’re born with is the fear of falling. I guess that’s the tip of another iceberg. There are a lot of icebergs, submerged in the dark ocean of the mind. I forget what the other fear is. Of being alive? Being conscious of being alive? Not being alive? A broken heart?

I feel better now. I’ve turned things upside down. The crowd goes wild and begins stamping its feet. It growls and howls and waves its hands in the air. A few swoon. The smell of urine fills the stadium. Security shapes into a phalanx; up come the shields, down come the face masks. It’s a tense moment in time. Cracks begin appearing in the invisible surfaces of Age Shells. Gravity spins out of control. Whole galaxies begin rolling inward toward a dark center, like billiard balls down the green felt of chaos.

 

***

 

The Age Shell of youth, say ages 8 to 16. The wild heart at its core. The throbbing that shatters words, laws and mores. The eruption of insatiable appetites, sucking everything in and getting sucked into everything.

It’s the last phase of the transition that began with the passage through the birth canal. It’s the beginning of the end of being one with everything. We are born into hell.

There’s a new take on things. Hell is not where we go when we die, hell is where we wind up when we’re born. Where is it we’ve been cast out of? Wherever it is, we are born, pay our karmic debt through an installment plan of Age Shells, and return there. Knowing this, living this, is the domain of Age Shell 9 through 16.

The mystery is deepest at its source. Wisdom is locked down in the Age Shell of infancy. The enigma is impenetrable. What we flesh out we dress up in doll’s clothes. There is a gray-area Age Shell between infancy and 8-16, but let’s not go there. Let’s call it a day. Let’s walk out into the sunshine and pretend that we’re young again.

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November 16, 2018 · 8:05 am

all my friends are going to be strangers

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

 

They’re always on the move, they’re in Saint Petersburg and then off they go to Stockholm. Some stay in 5-star hotels, others in tents, but they all take pictures with their cell phones and send them to each other email.

I used to sneer at people taking pictures with cell phones, but now I too have a cell phone that takes pictures. For weeks I took pictures of everything under the sun and the phone gobbled them up. Then a young girl who was flunking high-school English, sweet and soft-spoken, murmured, “Could I see it for a second?”

I didn’t understand why she was flunking English, she spoke it perfectly fine. I handed her my phone and in nothing flat there were all the pictures I though were lost, lined up and labeled in sequential code.

“Well will you look at that!” I said.

She smiled. “Would you like to put them on your computer so you can send them to your friends?” she asked.

“Yes!” I said. “That would be great!” Here was a window of opportunity, a chance to redeem myself with my friends in Paris and Rome and the few still in Saint Petersburg–they’d been steadily sending me cell-phone pictures, but when I didn’t reciprocate, the number of pictures tapered off, and then the emails themselves began to dwindle.

“Do you have Bluetooth?” asked the girl.

“I beg your pardon?” I said. I thought maybe my breath was bad or that my teeth were changing color. I was afraid that now she wouldn’t help me get back in touch with my friends.

“On your computer, I mean,” she said. “You have it on your cell phone–see?” She pushed some buttons and brought up an icon. “Is your computer on?” she said. “Do you mind?”

She sat down at my computer and with a few clicks brought up the same icon that was on my cell phone.

And then she did something that drove it home to me like a spike through a vampire’s heart that I was cut off not from one world but two–the world I was born into and this world that had replaced it. And that in between the two there must have been another, a transitional world that I missed completely. She punched in a series of commands on the cell phone, and the pictures I’d taken began appearing on the computer.

“There,” she said, when she was done. “Now you can send them to your friends.”

***

They were meaningless pictures, the product of someone fumbling with a technology beyond his grasp. But I sent them anyway, and gradually my friends began emailing again, asking cautiously if I had any travel plans.

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November 13, 2018 · 8:48 pm

a series of near misses

A SERIES OF NEAR MISSES

I’m causing a stink. Eliciting applause. Generating petitions, a handful of proclamations.

Response is an interesting thing. It brings home the realization of the insurmountable difficulty we have in perceiving each other. Fraternities of any stripe or color aren’t attempts to remedy this ego-driven isolation, they’re attempts to make believe it doesn’t exist. Communication is a series of near misses.

In the past few days I’ve been asked via e-mail if I’ve ever been hit in the head with a tether ball. I’ve been told that I have trillions of cells running wild in my body, so what’s the big deal about a few million getting wiped out on the operating table? I’ve been told that I’m not journaling, I’m blogging, when am I going to grasp the changes that have been taking place?

***

The tether-ball inquiry interests me the most. That’s the way it is with communication, we’re drawn to those things we least understand.

As for trillions of cells rampaging through my body, I think the cells in my body are more in accord with each other than my body is with other bodies, or my mind with other minds. My cells, for instance, collaborate and produce sight. They set my fingers to drumming on a table top, shape my legs into dance, create hot licks on a harmonica, create tears in my blue eyes. Those few million cells that perished under the surgeon’s knife, they were part of what made me hang together, and their demise was not in the natural flow of things. All of which has to do with the rhythms of the universe. Which puts me out there with Meister Eckhart, attempting to exchange thoughts in pigeon Dutch.

As for the declaration that I’m writing a blog–I stumbled into this cyber space world helterskelter. Me and Charles Manson and Meister Eckhart, playing gin rummy on an apple crate.

I don’t have a clue what a blog is. I think you have to register the damn thing somewhere, and then you can blather on at will and people who read what you’ve written can add their two-cents worth.

I’m an e-mail kinda guy. I have a long list of hand-picked-e-mail addresses to which I send Shards. Sometimes people on the list respond, and sometimes I pass along what they have to say, which I suppose is something like a blog. Sometimes publishers who have found their way onto the list snap up a Shard for publication. Sometimes people to whom I’ve sent Shards pass them along, and an exponential magic evolves.

I write the Shards longhand on pads of paper, and then I send them out email. I fling them out there on my own terms, which is what I’ve been doing for over forty years, ever since I found an A.B. Dick mimeograph machine in a garbage heap next to the American Legion in New Orleans. I began writing uncensored and got it out there on a grassroots level.

Email for me is an extension of the mimeograph machine, and for those of you who have no idea what a mimeograph machine is, let me suggest that although you may be broadcasting sound, images and words around the globe at lightning speed, you don’t understand what communication is. You’re Borg, the cutting edge of mankind’s impending total communication breakdown, after which each of us will lie wrapped like mummies, and all our cells will die.

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· 8:23 pm

a writer talks about his trade

A WRITER TALKS ABOUT HIS TRADE

He thinks he’s figured it out, why he writes Shards. He thinks they’re what took the place of letters. Not just any letters, but those red-hot epistles of youth, longhand scrawls on lined paper. But then his pen pals died off or lost their pazam, and there he was walking the streets mumbling to himself–not a good thing; not a safe thing; the sort of thing that draws scrutiny.

But he may be mistaken, who knows for what–a giraffe, a carafe, a nut case bombarded with erratic thought. He–damn, he’s taking over again, the scribe, I can hardly get a word in edgewise before he shoulders his way to the front. Sometimes I wonder who’s running this show. Sometimes we pass each other in the dark house when I get up at night to take a piss and he brushes by me without a word, off to who knows where. He never sleeps. At times I’ve harbored the secret wish to see him gone, but all that’s ever done is trigger a barrage of poems, a short story or two, or a drunken rant. He used to drink like there was no tomorrow, but when he caught me hoping he’d drink himself to death, he stopped cold.

To tell the truth, he sometimes scares me. Just look what he’s done to this attempt to write something scholarly–butchered it; mocked it; ripped it to shreds. He’s been doing this sort of thing for as long as I can remember. When Bukowski wrote me back in the Seventies and said writing about writing was the worst hot dog in the pot, he nearly split a gut laughing. Then he slammed down the last beer in the refrigerator, got on his motorcycle, and went racing across San Francisco in his oily torn jeans and his fatigue army jacket, his ponytail flying in the night wind. He went down to a Valentia Street bar and wound up getting thrown out by a big bartender named Swede. I woke up after that one late for work with a hangover that lasted three days. He’s never once paid the price for anything he’s done.

Just the other day he said he doesn’t take kindly to my putting words in his mouth. Just now, looking over my shoulder, he said that I’m in way over my head, talking about where Shards come from. He says if he didn’t have to go thru me to get to the words he could really go places, places where no man has gone before.

“Do you like that?” he says. “I knew you would. You’re a sucker for herd-mentality catch phrases–remember when you were calling me J. Bennett Jr.? Holy shit!”

“Hold on now,” I say. “That was a long time ago. And that was me. I was calling me that.”

“You think so?” he says. “You just don’t get it, do you?”

“It’s good that we’re discussing things,” I say, hoping for a reconciliation.”

He doesn’t answer. He lights another cigarette and studies me like I’m something in a jar of formaldehyde.

A chill runs up my spine, and I catch a glimpse of something that one day will kill me.

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· 7:58 pm

a thumbnail sketch of the last american

A Thumbnail Sketch of the Last American

A glutton for punishment. The step-child of disparity. A trapped bird in a thicket. A gift-wrapped disaster.

The missing Messiah. Bing Crosby in a time warp. A retail bonanza, a stacked deck.

Mr. Hallmark — bad rhyme, false hope; lapsed memories written in cursive.

Santa’s little smart bomb, the nightmare of Afghani children. Shock and awe wrapped in tinfoil.
Megabyte protest.

Leave no trace said the Buddha, and disconnected his hard drive.

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· 7:54 pm

mother earthers

Mother Earthers

Some people who pride themselves for caring about the planet (they call it Mother Earth) have accused me of writing irresponsibly. They point to isolated short jabs and slam-dunk punch lines and shake their heads sadly. Mother Earthers are too sad to get angry.

On a down day these accusations are like a spear in the ribs. The MEs shrug off the blood and come back with, “Where there’s blood, there’s fire,” which is like a second spear in the ribs for its idiocy and makes me think of Joan of Arc who if she’d been born into today’s world they would have pumped her full of Zoloft and made her a productive member of society instead of a wild woman going off like a cannon and leading otherwise perfectly normal men into battle in the name of a delusional god, cutting down forests to make catapults and ramrods and trampling tiny flowers as they thunder across meadows on horseback in the direction of an ill-fated castle.

The modest pride of these MEs agitates me, and being Zoloft-free my mind conjures a pride of lions, the males mauling the young cubs to death, and then hyenas, out of boredom, tormenting their prey through the long night before going in for the kill. From there it’s a short jump to the family that prays together…does what?

But that’s on a down day, and on an up day I eat three cans of Campbell’s Pork & Beans to achieve the right level of flatulence to stink up this bogus caring world.

If I don’t show some sign of dying soon, it may become necessary to take affirmative action.

***

You’re probably reading this on-line and thinking, “what the fuck?” but what I put on-line is mild. The real action goes down hard copy. I’m talking red-zone yellow pads that get passed around hand-to-hand through a shadowy world of disenchanted youth.

They’re legion and out for blood, and you won’t see them coming.

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