Trudgery.

Because I'm back from a vacation that was good in many ways, but left me exhausted, because it is sunday night and I am up early tomorrow but hacking away at things I'd hoped to have finished a while ago, both professional, personal, and artistic, because my face is cracking up like a cheese pizza, because everything has felt especially heavy today, we'll just go with a Mark Lanegan song.



more about stuff later, later.

Pacific City Has a Newspaper

It is called "The Sun." Today is the last day of a family vacation, about which possibly more will be said, or possibly nothing at all. Liralen is waiting for this computer, which does not recognize her name as a word.

Steampunk Cartoons

after hours of reading Ryan Johnson's writings I grew huge bat wings and crawled into the hollowed steeple of a disused church, where I thought about the differing types of adjectives that I and my girlfriend would use to describe me. The church turned out to be an airship run by gears and cogs and a man with a tophat and monocle, who refused to address me unless I bowed properly.
we are going to France, he said, but not Paris, they are all persnickety cheese eaters, we are going to Real France, where no one has a sense of fashion or good taste in music. These are the real parts of countries, he said, spinning a globe and poking at it with a disingenuous cane. Can you do anything about these wings, I asked, because there was no one else to ask, and he looked educated.
No, actually, you are our backup plan in case these gears fail. This will be your one service from now on, he said, little knowing that I'd long since gouged my eyes out in a ritual that did little to aleviate an inborn sense of guilt.

All Things Curved, Cartoonish

the saxophone's slow slope,

the drummer's snare taps, gathering gradually

the guitar player slides into place for a full fifty seconds

before a shift the players
just

nail, just

barely.

i do not know jazz enough to tell you

if this is good or bad, but can say there is something

(i'm sorry) phallic about the saxophone, if not literally, holistically

(what a weird looking dick) in pieces, mabye, like three or

four (quite large) dicks taped together,or less literally, 

just something SPIRITUALLY phallic

and I'm reminded of a carlos santana interview
where he stroked an acoustic guitar slowly, with two
fingers, back and forth, as he talked about the

sensuality of the music, the shape of the instrument

like a beautiful woman

without a head.

i do not know if the guitar player likes santana. that

is probably beside the point, what i do know is

it is too light

outside

and the shades

aren't drawn

and it will be three hours

until it feels like a jazz club

and sweet potato fries

dipped in ranch

and a laptop

belie the potential of this place

for nostalgic poetry, completely

displaced from the overdoses

of yesteryear's jazz

but I do know

that the servers are neither sexy 

nor grizzled enough, in their loose

buttondowns. They are, mind you, sexy and grizzled enough

for real life, or most bars, but they aren't SAXOPHONE SEXY,

where all the women become fluid cartoons, in 

teetering proportions and official classy sex uniforms

from a deliciously repressed era,

all the men, cowled and coiffed and quick with a line

and probably good at the saxophone

and there is no one in here like that

except for this one couple, at a table,

with ranch and potato chips

and with a diet like that,

you know they aren't here for the music.

Grammaticality aside

All Things Gets Paid

will probably be the title of my next chapbook, and it will probably happen soon. A couple pieces to pair down, shape up, narrativize, but we go forward with this.

5 American Americanisms

1) Crispy bacon.

2) Use of "American" as an adjective denoting newness, rawness, difference, frontierism, "the west". American slang. American Gods. American hearts.

3) Boots, and the various ways one finds their feet in them, and the uses for those ways.

4) Threatening to move to Canada.

5) The snide dismissal of Europe, internalized along with the near-reverence, the longing for tradition.