Eliot and I were convinced That there was a time vortex To the 1990s At the Target on Ohlen Rd. There was some weird energy In the freezer section That extended out to the street Where you could feel that Just on the other side of Some cosmic membrane Tupac was blasting From low riders.
We went to investigate. For some reason we went to The Arboretum To get money And then we bought booze From the Twin Liquor by the HEB. We bought wedding cake flavored vodka Because it was on sale. We needed the booze to properly Investigate the vortex.
Eliot was going on about gemmatria. He said it was the secret to everything. But it sounded to me Like a way to drive yourself mad.
We found a patch of woods To drink the vodka. It was a beautiful spot Next to a creek.
He was a very sad man. I was not as I used to be. I was living with the woman I live with now. He was battling literal demons In the forest of the green belt Where he lived.
We drank the whole bottle And never made it to The Target That day.
Soon he would accuse me Of conspiring with the spirits In his head To try to kill him. I never heard from him after that.
I, 15 years elder the century, weathered the broke-brawned shelter of millennia. The diamond dust which glistened the middle 20th, now micro-incisions the skin and teeth, makes rags of lungs. Colonial, they say we were better. But now post, we look at the masses, zombie-tired, broodbloods’ eternal shuffle. Nostalgia for sickly things permeates to a time when future existed. Rotary phones and VHS grain stipple YouTube longings. Feast! Feast! Ye hungry eye. Ye huddled mass! Yearning for 30 day free trials! The end of history came too soon.
I guess the good part is that I’m reading more. There’s a biography of Lenin by Tariq Ali that’s spectacular. I read it on a beat up ipad I got off ebay with my stimulus check.
There’s nothing left to watch on all the streaming services. I watched everything I can stomach. It pours out the screen in a stultifying slurry. I don’t want to go all Adorno but every TV show is trash.
On the rare occasions I go outside my minor problems are put in perspective.
I live in a low income neighborhood and I’ve noticed new homeless people about. There are the usuals: Jojo, Albert, Stephanie. But now there are new homeless people. And I mean people who are very new to being homeless. People are being forced out of their homes at an alarming rate.
It’s continually baffling to me that there are people without homes at all. It doesn’t make sense. The resources are there. But the love of exploitation is all too alluring.
Rich people like to tell us we live too extravagantly “Why do you have a phone and the internet and clothes? You should live like a Victorian urchin.”
We like to tell rich people they are living too extravagantly “You don’t need that many houses yachts private planes when people can’t afford insulin.”
Then there are the poor people who defend the rich people: the antelopes who defend the lion, thinking this takes them off the menu
I go to the dollar store for sundries twice a week. Yesterday over 10,000 new cases of Corona were reported in NYC. The workers at the dollar store are resigned to their fates. They know it’s coming. We all know it’s coming. A dark cloud of virus looms.
#4
sometimes I smell the perfumes of ghosts and they send me to worlds without treasure.
#5
when i was in berkeley a had a knack for sleeping in places where nobody could find me and i would walk the 3 miles to downtown every day and get food from the dollar tree and go into the bookstore and try to bargain with the store owner “take every book i have and give me some jim carroll” no avail the proprietor didn’t understand how essential it was that i know the fear of dreaming and walked back to my patch of forest up in the hills so high that it seemed i could jump over the bay