the siroccos of the hyperreal

i've been in foreign places quite a bit the last two years, and i can't help but think about how angry all these people are at george w bush for an unjust war.

everywhere i go, i hear it. i hear it everywhere i go.

the thing that pisses me off about it all is how ignorant everyone is about the rest of the unjust wars in the world. how quickly we jump on the media bandwagon to assault just this one war. what about the saharawi? they've been victims of an unjust war for over thirty years.

saharawi people are completely forgotten all over the world.

west african refugees of war escaping the napalm and aggression of morocco, and her monarch, have lived unjustly in tent cities in algeria for decades. whole generations of children are growing up without a future, and without a country.

and nothing is changing. no one is doing anything. nothing is getting better.

a brief quote about the situation:
"[Morocco] acknowledged the sovereignty of the Western Saharan nation in exile, the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) which was founded in 1976. On the other hand, Morocco refuses to this day to relinquish any claims to Western Sahara.

But the 200,000 Saharawis in the camps have proven they will not give up either. They have chosen a life in exile, hundreds of miles from home, rather than live under the rule of a king whose reign has sought to erase their existence."
from http://www.wsahara.net/camps.html

if you want to talk about america's injustice, fine. but, let's also talk about how spanish backroom deals with morocco and mauritania during the latter half of the last century threw a whole culture into the desert winds.

desert winds come and tear down the tents. the winds are called "siroccos".

i guess all these new firestorms blew new breezes into the datastream. all old injustices swim down beneath the sandstorm.

if an american walks into a bar and says the word "iraq", a firestorm of hot air swarms through the datastream to swallow dissension like napalm melting trees.

if anyone - american or not - walks into a bar and says "saharawi", people look at you funny. then, they take another drink and worry about what they saw on the news.

kurt vonnegut is dead

long live kurt vonnegut.

so it goes, old friend.

aborted beginnings

the ghostly skeletons hang over the rooftops - electric scarecrows stripped of rags and straw in bad weather reaching for the signals in the sky. the wind blows the spindly things around like broken weathervanes.

i'm across the street at a cafe, eating a bagel and drinking coffee. i'm watching the rain fall through the antennaes like falling down pine trees or broken umbrellas. i'm waiting for lightning to strike the roof of a church.

in european cities - most of them - the tallest thing on the horizon are the church towers. i'm looking at this church tower on top of a red stone church in mainz. the top of the towers have these gothic crosses that look just like the scarecrow antennaes all over everything else.

scarecrows keep things away. these broken scarecrows pull things down from the sky. cable television. salvation.

i'm sipping the coffee slow because i'm about to puke and i don't want to puke. before i came to this cafe, i had woken up under the bridge between mainz and kastel. i was fully dressed. i wasn't at all hungry.

my mouth is all full of brown hair, little flecks of bone, and the aftertaste of blood.

i know exactly who i ate when i was blacked out.

some people sudoku, i flash

in need of brain teasing, i do not sudoku. i struggle with the difficult art of flash fiction. for example:

People Got Married

We watched "Billy Elliot" and took a shot of
tequila every time we couldn't understand what someone
said because we're from Mount Laurel, NJ, and we don't
speak like that.
We drank too much tequila.

In the morning, I asked her if she’d been
dancing since she was twelve, and she told me that
she'd been smoking pot since she was twelve, and I
said I had been, too.
That was the only real thing we ever needed to
know about each other.

Then the sun hit our hangovers, the clothes
came back on, and I volunteered to take the movie back
on my way to work.

I said to her, I said I'd call you.

She asked me what people did before phones.

I shrugged. I guess they got married, I said.

She started to object to that, but then she
rushed to the bathroom to throw up all that tequila.

I said it again to her, I said I guess people
got married.

Then I left her like that.

(yes this is from ye ol' archives of things i will not send off to publish - a.k.a. the b-sides... it means i didn't do anything yesterday because i was working.)

if everyone who fell in love with anyone always had their love returned, the world would lack in necessary confusions.

with this simplicity in our love, we'd seek to confuse our hatreds. we'd cause confusing arguments for no reason with strangers instead of lovers. we'd break into neighbors homes to smash dishes. we'd fly to foreign countries to shout "what were you thinking!" at the top of our lungs to our enemies who had done actually nothing that was really so bad.

wars would arise not from conflict but from gossip. one nation would be so irrationally angry at another for taking the patriotism of the citizens that whole armies will jump out of planes drunk and itching for a fistfight just to prove their hatred. another nation might have heard that two others were in collusion, thus needed immediate nuking. in fact, with simple loves, all of our wars would reflect our confusing hearts instead.

thus, it is for the best that our loves are rarely answered. let us be confused in love, not war.

unrequited love is actually a nucleur war averted.

you do want to stop nucleur war, don't you?

god save us from this kind of person

reading the help wanted ads is enough to scare a sane, free-thinking individual.

if i ever meet someone as excited, organized, multi-lingual, cheerful, energetic, hard-working, honest, selfless, and clean as these ads seem to suggest people are, i will probably hit them in reflex, just to give them a black eye.

of course i take heart that these are advertisements seeking such people. these ads, they never go away.

thus, there must be a shortage. god, let there be a shortage. perhaps they don't exist at all.

part of me thinks this is some kind of hidden code, wherein a conspiracy of sane people search out the crazies so we can lock them up somewhere.

that must be it.

urban explorer

after midnight mass, i missed the last bus home.

i walked home in the dark, my eyes watching for shadows because it's 1 am in the big city, and one never knows.

i avoided the main roads and the train stations - i felt safer walking than catching a train down at that stretch of city - for the wealthy strips of apartments and mansions and condos with elegant cars and elegant gardening. i felt safer surrounded by security systems and sleeping citizens with expensive dogs and good phones. if something evil happened, i only had to trip a fence alarm to bring the polizei.

i got lost because of the night and the new, twisting streets of elegant homes, but i wasn't completely and totally lost. i had my landmarks in the skyline, i just hit them from a weird angle through all those rich homes.

i wandered onto the military base between wiesbaden and erbenheim, but i was on this obscure end of it. i flagged down a passing MP patrol car. i asked him if he knew the way to erbenheim from here because i was lost.

he told me he'd only been here two months and he had no idea.

i asked him how to get back to the autobahn because i figure i'd rather walk the main road fast at this point (i was getting sleepy, after all, and the bars had been closed for over an hour, and i had already snuck around the train station and the city park where the dealers pace the dark) than be lost until sunrise among mansions.

the MP told me how to get to the autobahn.

i laughed inside because i've only been here two months, too. i didn't tell him that.

i know my way around, mostly. i've walked these roads up and down for days. i've climbed every mountain i could find (wiesbaden's is called Neroberg). when i was lost that night it was because i was walking through the winding houses instead of the highways and pedestrian paths. if the sun had been up, i'd have known north from south and i'd have found my way home fine.

i've been working here, too, for two months. i've learned my way around mainz, wiesbaden, munich, berlin, freiburg, himmelreich, titisee, buchenbach, bierstadt...

this tough guy in a patrol car at night carrying a gun is supposed to be the adventurous one, right? he's supposed to be trained in maps. he doesn't even know the cities a half-hour walk from where he rests his head.

easter vigil was beautiful, even if i had to walk home. the adult converts are christened with oil. everybody holds a lit candle in a dark room in this gorgeous eighteenth-century church. streetlights hit the stained-glass windows at strange angles, enhancing the hidden messages of midnight in the glass.

a drunk kid opened the side door of the church and shouted "teuffel!" as loud as he could to shock the church before running off. people startled. but, the ceremony didn't stop. cantors sang in unison. people prayed with one voice like a single organ with every key held down.

and after dark, when i missed the bus, nothing evil found me because i knew how to get home safe, even if it was a bit slow.

people used to ask me what i really wanted to do with my life before i sold my book. i didn't tell them about the writing, usually. i usually told them i saw myself as an urban explorer. i always look for new places, new hidden corners, new cafes, new roads, new directions and how all the people live there.

i wanted to explore the old ceremonies in an old congregation in an old church. i did. then, i got to explore the city in the dark, when all good boys and girls are too afraid to walk from wiesbaden to erbenheim on account of bad boys shouting for the devil in the dark.

i got home just fine.

i'm an old hand at urban exploration.

sweaty people singing with horns in their hands

blue knights drum and bugle corps, 2005.

brings back memories of the late nineties...

present tense/past tense

i've been catching up on the backlogged typing typing typing that i needed to do after fifteen days of restlessness.

i have a constant tic that speaks volumes of my own mental state. in my writing, i must struggle to keep present tense and past tense separated and in their place.

i live in both. everywhere i look i see things that carry memories and i experience those memories exactly as if they were happening right now. everywhere i walk, i carry all the memories i have collected like a wikipedia wherever i turn my head.

i annoy my friends and close relations with my kneejerk encyclopedic nature - often encyclopedic knowledge is malformed inside of my mixed up head.

when i am writing, the verbal tenses blur from one to the other.

when i am living, the verbal tenses blur from one to the other.

i am where i have always been and where i always will be. home is a denim jacket and a pair of good pants. bed was a warm, dry place. homes blur. i open my eyes and stand up and my feet walked down the old paths of old houses long lost, apartments abandoned and to be abandoned.

each lost friend, lost love, wears the skin of the now and carries the weight of the lost friends and loves of yesterday.

i never know the day. i never know the time. i never know my destination. i know walking. i know arriving. i know departing.

i cannot always separate my dreams from my waking state, and that isn't insanity.

that's normal.

yesterday and i have all we need

i have to leave you, tomorrow. i’ve decided that yesterday and i belong together.
we’re moving in together. we bought cats. we’ll stay in this big apartment, north of the city with our cats.

don’t worry, tomorrow, you’ll be fine without me.
ignore all those people that say we belong together -- we don’t. you’re no fun. you’re cold, and responsible, and i think…

well, i hate to put it this way but it’s just that you seem like the type to kill the person you’re with and don’t even get me started on how you’re never home.

go ahead, tomorrow, and buy the dog we said we’d buy. buy the house on the island without me. buy all the electronics and automobiles we dreamed about because yesterday and i have all we need.

nothing new today so i'm just gonna plug cool stuff a minute

i'm busy working on my computer after my little adventures. but, do check these two things out.

firstly, somafm is one of the coolest radio stations on earth.

www.somafm.com

(my favorite stations are cliqhop, spacestation soma, and indiepoprocks)

if you listen, you should drop a dollar their way. and if you start to listen to commercial-free indie radio from san francisco, you'll never look at the noisebox the same way again.

recipe for hip party = champagne, gin, chexmix, and cliqhop as loud as the pc speakers can blast!

also, you should go read a book. here's one i found in a used bookstore in freiburg, germany, surrounded by diet books and self-help gurus.

in the altes pinarchitek, i saw a painting by gerard dou, and recognized the model. it's the same girl that i saw in this poorly reproduced .jpg from another painter named barent fabretius: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Barent_Fabritius_001.jpg

after poling around, mr dou has painted this young woman quite a lot.

http://www.kunstkopie.de/a/dou-gerard.html

look down and watch for any woman named 'young', be she a mother a cook or a girl in a window.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Gerard_Dou_004.jpg

both gerard dou and barent fabretius were in rembrandt's workshop as students. i poked around a while, to see if i could find a familiar face among the budding dutch movement of masters:

http://www.allposters.de/gallery.asp?aid=85097&item=1343193&Referrer=&SAID=85097&SAIDTime=4%2F4%2F2007+1%3A02%3A45+AM&maid=85097&AffClickThroughID=956625000

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Samuel_van_Hoogstraten_-_Vrouw_bij_een_half_open_deur.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/The_Holy_Family_by_Rembrandt_Harmenszoon_van_Rijn.jpg

carel fabretius - alas - was a true master whose work was destroyed with the man when an armory exploded. very little of his work survived.

still, i like to think that he painted her, too, in some stage of her life. she was beautiful, after all, and at least five great painters mastered their art by mastering the lines of her humble face.

she worked in the kitchen. she plucked ducks. when she had her child, she placed the child at her feet near the fire.

there's a picture of a young boy by gerard dou. the kid looks just like his mother. among all gerard's self-portrait's, i think i see a little bit of his face in the child. just a little bit of one.

ah, love. many of the art websites mention that the portrait done of this girl was the first great, distinctive work by these different artists. i bet she was their first love, too.

i wish i could find her name.

i smell like a train station

i smell like stale bread, crumpled bits of greasy paper, empty juice bottles, concrete dust, sweaty train seats, mostly-clean urinals, hand soap, toothpaste, coffee, stinky boots, sweat socks, mud, pine sap, iron, and money that has changed a thousand hands and will change a thousand more.

i made it to my sister's place all right. i've got to wash the trains off me.

check in tomorrow

i was hiking yesterday, all day.

i am too tired to type.