UNREMITTING FAILURE

Piercing

We got our penis pierced, this was years ago now.  We don't know why we did it.  Yes we do, our pal William talked us into it.  We're very suggestible.  Anyway, it hurt like Hell.  William said, "Oh, it's just like getting your dick caught in your zipper."  Yes, if you're talking about one mighty large zipper. 

We don't know what we thought having our penis pierced would achieve.  It's really rather a useless arrangement.  It's not like we get to show it off to people, friends or strangers on the street.  It's like our little secret, one so boring that nobody else wants in on it.

We also have a couple of tattoos, but those we can at least show off.  One of them even makes a cameo on You Tube!

It says something about us

That one of the items on our bucket list is "rob a bank."

We're Trying to Read Gerard de Nerval's "Aurelia"

It's his chronicle of his descent into madness, the final installment of which was discovered on his person when he hanged himself in January 1855.  But we're not having much luck.  It's all a dream, Aurelia is, because Nerval was a mystic and the things he saw in the throes of his madness fall into the realm of visions.  And we've never been very much on visions.  (We're no Blakean.)  We prefer Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, which we just finished.  Hers is a nuts and bolts account of what living with madness is like, not a long series of fantastic visions.  But we're going to persevere, because Nerval is a great hero of ours even though we've never read much more than a few of his poems.  He was singularly ill-adapted to live in the world, and to that we can relate.  He wasted the bulk of an inheritance on a two-bit actress, Jenny Colon, bought a giant bed and then slept on the floor beside it, carried around a human skull to drink from.  In short, he was an intriguing person and a kindred spirit, and wherever he is we hope he's drunk and happy. 

We Gave a Guy in Our Building a Buck This Morning

Old black guy who said he had to get to the VA.  We gave him the buck, he said, "Have you served?" We said no.  "Lucky you," he said, "I was at Da Nang, buddy of mine stepped on a mine and it blew off his feet.  He kept asking for a blanket, said his feet were cold.  I still see it in my dreams."  The way we see it, a story like that is worth a buck.  Contrast him with the cigarette mooches.  We do the majority of our smoking outdoors, and people are always coming up to us to bum butts.  But they don't have any good stories.  We'll generally still give them a cigarette, but we get nothing in return. 

An uninteresting thing about our life: we will only smoke standing still.  We will not walk down the street with a lit cigarette.  Instead we find a good place to stand and smoke a cigarette, and that's where we stand while we smoke our cigarette.  This policy is probably the reason cigarette mooches are attracted to us in the first place.  We're a stationary target. 

Sometimes we'll say no, you can't have a cigarette.  We'll say this if we don't like the cut of the mooch's jib.  We like it when they at least pretend to be embarrassed to ask.  People who come up to us and phrase it more like a demand, they can forget about it. 

We don't understand cigarette mooches, really.  We've never mooched a cigarette in our life.  We'd be too embarrassed.  Sure, we've bummed smokes from friends, but that's the extent of it. 

Some people offer money for the cigarette.  We never take it.  They say, "Can I buy a cigarette off you?" and we answer, "No, but you can have one."  We will always give a cigarette to the money offerer because he or she is making a good faith effort to do business, not get something for nothing.

Rereading this post, we realize it's boring as shit.  But what are we supposed to do? Schopenhauer said that "all life is tossed backwards and forwards between pain and boredom."  Hopefully this post was just boring, and not painful. 

Art Expert Unremitting Failure Squints at: Francis Bacon!

Our definition of a good painting is one that a normal person doesn't want hanging on her wall.  This is why Francis Bacon is our favorite painter.  Normal people don't want a screaming pope screaming at them from their living room wall.  They want water lilies, or a van Gogh, or a Mark Rothko if they're geometrically inclined.  There is no romance in any of these things.  The true romantic longs for the awful rendered in a way bespeaks the truth that the life of man is nasty, brutish and short. Bacon gives us sides of beef, distorted and contorted nudes, and portraits that couldn't have much pleased the people who sat for them.  In short, he did his best to liberate art from beauty, that slavemaster, and we'll be willing to bet there isn't a public office anywhere in the world with one of his prints on its walls.  He seceded from the decorative, like Lucien Freud only with more gusto, and we're happy to call him our imaginary friend.    

Small Mystery

 Oh, obese bird of night!  Reveal to us the secret of the trash can in our bathroom here at work.  Upon it is affixed a sign that reads, "Trash Only."  What could that possibly mean? Have people been throwing cash into it? 

We've Decided We Need to Start Every Morning on a "Gentle Note"

Towards this end, the first thing we do upon arriving at work is listen to Seals and Crofts' "Hummingbird."*  Aside from "House on Pooh Corner," it's the wimpiest song ever written.  We listen to it, and we wilt into a state of total spiritual acceptance of whatever horrors and indignities the day has in store for us.  "Let us soar in the atmosphere of Abha," sing the duo, "Lift us up to the heaven of holiness, oh source of our being, oh hummingbird."  Abha is the capital of Asir province in Saudi Arabia, and we're hard pressed to see why we would want to soar in its atmosphere, but we've decided to put away our petty qualms and just let S & C take us where they will.  We just finished listening to "Hummingbird," and we feel a deep serenity bordering on stupor.  Everything is okay.  Everything is fine.  It's like getting a lobotomy, only instead of instead of going in through the eye socket Seals and Crofts go in through your earholes. 

*It was our former custom to start every day by listening to Black Flag's "Six Pack." But what kind of recipe is that for serene living?   

a calming view of the Asir Mountains; we are floating peacefully above them

The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

Thus far, all of our desultory efforts to write a blog entry today have come to naught.  It occurs to us, with a shiver of horror, that we've said everything we have to say.  We've made fun of the Little River Band and Leo Sayer, extolled the philosophy of Kansas, ridiculed the kimonos of Rush.  We've run on at great length about the futility of participating in the political process, derided the accepted tenets of humanism, and expounded our opinions on paintings by the great masters.  And for the life of us, we can't think of a thing to say that we haven't said before.  Perhaps this blog has outlived its usefulness. Or perhaps we need a change of attitude.  Gerard de Nerval, when he slept over at another person's house, would not sleep in a bed.  He had a portable wigwam, which he would set up in the center of a room, and sleep in it instead.  We need to be more like him.  He was like a character in a story, or in a dream, and his books were dreams, just as his life was a dream.  He never lacked for a thing to say.  Of course he hanged himself, but that's a small detail.  The important thing is that he hanged himself with a length of silk that he contended was the garter of the Queen of Sheba. 

Water Will Kill Your Writing

"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."  Thomas Berger

We've been drinking lots of water lately, and we think it's making us less creative.  We want to write what isn't there, but we can't with all that water sloshing around in our belly.  Creative writers should avoid water, and not just because, as W.C. Fields so wonderfully put it, "Fish fuck in it."  It impedes creation.  The true writer should be water deprived.  Coffee, booze, wine, these are the true liquid refreshments of your true writer.  Balzac famously drank some 50 cups of coffee a day, and he wrote lots of stuff that wasn't there before he wrote it.  And don't even get us started on Faulkner, who drank gallons of Mint Julips made with Jack Daniels and when asked why he did it said, "There's a lot of nourishment in an acre of corn."  Name us one famous water-drinking writer, we dare you.  It reminds us of the trip we made to visit our English girlfriend's parents and her father, an old Raj hand, asked us if we drank.  When we said no, he said, "In India, all the teetotallers died." That just about says it all. 

Reading

The writers who have changed our life the most are Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, Louis Ferdinand Celine, E.M. Cioran, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Bernhard.  In the second tier we'd include Thomas Berger, W.G. Sebald, David Foster Wallace, Evelyn Waugh, and Barry Hannah.  Nikolai Gogol gets an honorable mention, and we intend to reread his "Dead Souls" one of these days.  The writer we wish was on our list is Thomas Pynchon, but we've never been able to get even halfway through "Gravity's Rainbow," or "V" for that matter.  We did enjoy "The Crying of Lot 49."  "Mason & Dixon" we never even picked up.  Pynchon is our great white whale, and one of these days we're going to bite the bullet and plow through "Gravity's Rainbow," even if it kills us.  Our brother Jeffers has read it several times, and swears it's a hoot.  Us, we just get lost.  You'll notice we don't mention James Joyce.  This is because we do not like James Joyce.  We've read "Ulysses" several times, and that was several times too many.  As for "Finnegan's Wake," it's the kind of book you want on your bookshelf.  Just never ever pick it up and open it.  It's learned gibberish.  

 

Blagh.  Stylin' though, big time. Love the eye patch.