wading around the Nougat Shallows, with the best, the sweetest intentions
i get to the thing that i want most, the full laser-centric focus of ego
i care not of my happiness but my auto-creation of exuberant moments
flick a switch of licked wicks to spark some carefully-distraught wit
why am why do feel emotion touch and make contact and then
fleet,
fleet,
the /// up up up/// doesn’t equal up when you rotate about the prescribed axis.
it’s just a flip of the sign, bit of a switch, on to off, threshold not soft
a physi fizzy urge reminds me that i still have to eat, consummate my deal with existance
Are you ever singing along to a song and that next verse, that next chorus, that next line hits and the music changes and your eyes and throat well up and you can’t continue because it’s all just too beautiful?
Knowing the words to a song and knowing what you think the words are is another funny phenomenon; there are so many chances for meaning being lost in translation, and if the phrase is something that really sticks with you, to have it attain a new meaning when you discover the actual words can be bewildering. I have what I consider to be a faux-photographic memory, but not just for visuals, but for little sounds, little feelings, little snippets of perception; they are seared into my neurons, and the network of those cells fires in certain ways sometimes, other ways other times. So sometimes I have scarily accurate snippets of what I think something is, but at the same time, they feel ghostly and fleeting. The point (wait, there’s a point?) of this stream of consciousness was that I’ve been a lyrically-minded person for about as long as I started listening to music. But it’s gotten more and more pronounced over the years, and, as exponential as so many other things are, I find myself under a barrage of lyrics floating into my head at all bouts of the day. And I want to share them, to sing them, to explain them, to interpret them to everyone around me.
Back in the days of AIM (AOL instant messenger for the uninitiated), my group of friends (and their groups and, supposedly, their groups) would post lyrics as their “away messages.” It was in this way you could give the slightest clue as to what you were thinking at that moment that you went “away” to do something else. This happens to a much smaller extent on Facebook, as now we post the songs or the videos of the songs themselves. The context is fleshed out, less open to interpretation, and more exact.
My latest grappling is the paralyzation of doing anything because of the sheer amount of choices; too many choices is arguably why Americans have more anxiety than other nations.
Also, this:
“The more you know, the harder it is to take decisive action. Once you become informed, you start seeing complexities and shades of gray. You realize that nothing is as clear and simple as it first appears. Ultimately, knowledge is paralyzing.” – Bill Watterson
I’m far too concerned about whether the signal/noise ratio of what I’m feeling will come across, instead choosing, perhaps poorly, to internalize the sentiment, the moment, when even a misinterpreted interpretation isn’t wrong or even misinterpreted in any way. I think I need to remind myself that we’re all playing together, and play is more fun with others.
Anyhow, below are bittersweet lyrics to the song that prompted this post, “Gravity Rides Everything” from Modest Mouse’s grand concept album from the year 2000, The Moon and Antarctica.
—
Oh gotta see, gotta know right now
What’s that riding on your everything?
It isn’t anything at all
Oh gotta see, gotta know right now
What’s that writing on your shelf
In the bathrooms and the bad motels?
No one really cared for it at all
Not the gravity plan
Early, early in the morning
It pulls all on down my sore feet
I wanna go back to sleep
In the motions and the things that you say
It all will fall, fall right into place
As fruit drops, flesh it sags
Everything will fall right into place
When we die, some sink and some lay
But at least I don’t see you float away
And all the spilt milk, sex and weight
It all will fall, fall right into place
—
One last thought: why is going online to find song lyrics feel like trolling slums for nefarious purposes? The top hits for lyric destinations are ad-infused, malware-tinged, borderline unusable sites that likely have you copy/pasting what you need and then getting the hell outta there as fast as possible. Are there any crowd-sourced, wiki-like sites that have vast amounts of lyrics?
semantic static, tic-toc’ing its way into my past-present. its static?! it’s(sic) static! statis phases patiently promulgating latent mazes of intelligent wonder logic—~~~> great grazes upon verdant carafes of tannin sippage; tumble down into bouts of mended sewage for lack of gutter habits. pretend i’ve known the tragic, the tragic; come, medic, mediate my laugh magic. i don’t do quite so well in this now catalogued angst fuck-bust; earth is a pile of fascicratic war savage, is, be, we, you, me… queasy n’ free?
[the static, the noise]
pearly-esque off-black lended catalogues;
ringed only as ear lobs;
swinging to-fro-to for pendulatic grotesque lures;
baby-faint vesper realms of gossamer-leaned reducing valves;
prof-led sunset led into thoughts of borealis helms;
[end, the static, the noise]
i miss her over long span break melts;
we visit with nap-graced warm pastel blanket folds;
she watches with iris-doe-sublime rounds;
as i play my games from nostal-past japan realms;
i’ll hurt her later with my unquenchable demand, chiaroscuro static farms;
she’ll cry and cry warm clear color clear drops,
reflecting out upside down, why does refraction angle? answer: its vector-town;
a whole opposite of observations posited by naive physical welps.
her tan is tan and mellowy-toasted;
dirt paths in mejico will yield her steps most-moistened;
she’ll lay for me with waiting apprehension;
i’ll kiss and kiss because she’ll be a memory—it’s not my fault for that was not me;
but i’ll still describe her in color for your eyes to see for you’ll never get her feelings, those feelings have flee’d.
oh. boy. entrance to convenience mart, calm cool soft dark night, with likewise air, these lights interior are killing the dark half-trans ether. i’m inside and they, the rays—if they can be called that—don’t blend with the colors, don’t feed the colors, rather just boost the colors. it is too bright to be in this store whilst on smooth unwind-down mescaline; to be about these colors of punch-you-in-the-face-region pink, cartoon-crab green, buy-this-box pan palette; to be about these halls that are too bright for a store while on this fun phenyl. slight misadventure, mostly unnecessary; there are better side torrents to add to the mescapades around this area. slowly browse candy in time bubble without sense–what could possibly be making that sound? i’m with it enough to know that that is not normal; the ceiling is having a seizure populated with earthquakes and ventilation shiver-shakes, run by motors that can only be described as ceiling-dwelling. it’s loud and no one seems to notice or care; this must be pre-approved. i leave with hand-fulls of product, exchanged bill money (less confusion that way) with an older gentleman who doesn’t look into my larger eyes, despite me wanting him to. i hope his night isn’t as sad as he portrays it to be.
The Book (and Guide) of Outhouses is decidedly less imprudent than the contemporary yet still unassailable The Book (and Guide) of Yarn Farms. When the Genre Wars of the 20s started, the men in charge were not doing push-ups in back alleys or routine basements; they were not relaxing on gentle swings, jetty neo-crags, or experimental hover foams; and only somewhat importantly, they were not dissolving grains in pushable stacks, flying gyrocopters unscruplously into lunch-meetings, or walking their dogs. No; they were instead cooperating on heliotropic diversions of the Eastern persuasion, grassroots coal refinement, and paradigmatic poll generation. They also enjoyed plenty of local lemonade. In reality, these men were men in suits, that dressed in those suits in the morning, took them off at night, and preferred laughing to the alternative. They understood that not all wars were bad wars. They understood that context had precisely the gravitas it deserved amongst those who mattered. And they especially acknowledged that they liked being alive and publishing products. A statistically significant portion of the men and women who were not the men in charge were rather open about their extreme ambivalence to the topic, and most topics in general. It was a lamentable fact that very few historians sought to emboss the latent, gripping nature of this specific crevice of national history. But then of course, there was very little for the public at large to relate to.
There are things in life that come out better the second time around. More vibrant, more robust. less forgettable. One that works as such a pleasant surprise is the heated up food left-over. An oven can do wondrous things. It’s a way of solidifying and then coaxing out an item’s essence. You can make moist, soggy bread into dark-tinged, crisp, sharp peninsular crusts of bookends, thin-sliced contents’ surface areas imbued with new flavors of sun-dialed degrees. Pizza will swirl with sequeled textures. Taco shells a mishmash of taste paints blurred into their walls.
Make sure to take out the lettuce out of the burger. The tomato is a judgment call. French-fries occupy a unique lot in food life: they are nearly and perilously un-reheatable.
Don’t be mistaken: rainwater can’t be reheated in the oven.
They say you can never go home again. But sometimes you can: it just feels (and tastes) a little different.
on the path to a room, he sees bulwarks of rhododendrons. he is blocked and such, with sight (to a dappled degree), with sound (similar reverberational degree), touch (physically, though some damage could be inflicted), smell (provided by, effusive, pleasant), taste (don’t try this). mentally he acknowledges that with his knowledge and reasoning that around is better than through, in regards to this moment, here on his way to a room, so as to keep up the conveyor belt of ordered moments leading to… to… what’s that that was so important? he will duly note that piqued curiosity when it’s expedient. now he must get past these rhodos. a cheerful lip-smile rolls off and away from mouth, as heel arches push with curved momentum shoed feet, alternatingly onwards. reaches for the door, and is in.
synesthesiac metallic interminglings (steal the sunsetting light parts, praying for pigments’ proselytization)
beat back the ‘i-see-you-ceiling’ creepers, crags steeper, then deeper still.
soft firmament ultra in-betweens; let dusk point-process the left-overs so twilight can be rid of tangles.
a polished carve of edge-detected, roan-saturated oddities, packed up masked with blurred bevels of alpha falafel scrapes; flakey beastly butter splashed on for savory sequitur, post appetizing, pre-deserting the table before dessert of eye-candy hard-browns, boston-cream clouds, and squirrely soaks of dusted speckled egg mounts concave clicks of chinaware where care has been spent and saved and vested, velvet flair will provide with an air of servitude sans attitude, for provision, provision, provision…
candied cellophane, alasking its way to transparental unit unties with hemispheric realities—escape! bring the cosmos, net it up, sift the hand gestures til ways are worthwhile. moose will see these, flighted birds will see this, the underground fish will see them, mediums around us will absorb but not abscond, for we will see these colors before we’re killed.
[this poem is a bit about a dream, a bit about a reality]
enigma puzzle play
dream in stained-glass terms;
what I got was hours of complex rambles
fumbling through jewel’d drawers
in search of that oh little something more
do I force her here n’ onto this page, this space?
to amend a love that I beneath-the-surface hate?
prepend my end with a blow—
with obvious traits
to be off with it! to halve a problem, stir it with quixotic confusion
and then let it bake
?
will the frosting lure onto stage
bits of imagery that will hide mournful tastes?
exeunt preludes, ye errands are afforded!
let’s start this middle at a blissful rate:
streamed staircases => ornamented cabinetted contrivances => bit-crushed side-sampled data flakes
from my memory’s mind,
child’s tries,
topiaried menace bites,
pysch-whirl spikes of close-your-eyes dys-paradise
[inter-inter-interlude:
i’m lost in here, (in here), ((in here))—i’m lost in whatever this here be.
its grey and blue cold stone carved walls, a spacial puzzle crafted by merciless Celctic burdened bards.
i loop beat myself with anxieties in threes,
search fail repeat
perma-feedback thorn-barbs confuse my innocences,
i am dronelike dead fried,
deep hurt then dried,
with drips of cold spark dew bulbs, til i nullify my neutral eyes,
fall back up the tunnel with worse-than-wrong cries...]
[[[º]]]
what I make of it all, lest you think it fake, is a real spindle of tragic yet trivial fare;
this burden is [two-second breath of medium depth] fair
—this of which i’m so lately aware—
yet now it’s a lesson left on a page ready to file back in rotational space,
back inside, inside, inside…
there are still happened moments inset in there, that there of mine,
constructed, found, redacted, frowned,
intertwined with better bits, those better bits, my better bits…
my pocket has tangled itself, wrapped around, strangling its contents. how it has gotten this way—without the influence of amusement park admission to the washing machine—is beyond me and beyond bilateral categorical means of storing my items temporarily while out, about, and on top of most streets around town. i want entry with a hand, to silence a phone that is trying to tell me something. i’m trying to tell it to stop telling me something, of which it has ceased trying and has now accomplished. alarm vibrate that will remind me things i wish to remember. a game against time, real-time hybrid turn-based, tick discrete elements by; i’m on top of the situation, if only i could wrangle my pockets. the other one is less troublesome, but i expect it, if having the chance, will tumble about papers with words and numbers on them, reminding me with its slightly warmer inner temperature that yes, better in there than on the ground. i stop what i’m doing: the navigation; the head turns for anti-car/bus/train collisions; the enjoyed voluntary breathing of air, seeing of sights, feeling of footsteps on solids; calm meditation on my favored paths in my new neighborhood in my new city; and use my knowledge of mechanics to unfurl. i hit big red stop on sleek black device—it acquiesces. i return to convenience store, under cover of day clouds, to retrieve bargained drugs from man behind counter—i got to spend non-consecutive phone-moments with people, lengthy waits, convincing them that yes, i am paying for a service and you like me, your customer, don’t you? you want to help me take the steps that will lead to other steps and steps on the ground for me to meet with others that will make me a healthier version of myself; that is, if i pay more money and time to those that are in positions of allowing it. it’s fine: i have a bag and another bag with other things from other moments that day, with items held outside of bag(s) for the better to carry them with. it is time to return to space within walls within other walls, for the purpose of daily activities that would prefer to be done in the nighttime.
first, heavily layer on the auger-hollowed aubergine. this is the base needed and requested for this particular project. if done right, this background will disgust to the point where each floating dollop of paint catches the eye as pin-fine relief and pleasure; the optic nerve should receive a primary buff of star-fuzz, rotating scrubber encyclical motion pads, expertly nano-programmed with the finest artisan algorithms. this will provide the recipient with forever-altered associations and a classical conditioning response to the used hues.
next comes the mescaline blue; its job is to only summon itself and provide unlawful neon piercings. it doesn’t even look at the nearby colors. it doesn’t need to.
albedo white is wholly next. it will have citrus-warm temperature still lingering underneath its brighter flecks. this is to provide contrast to the aforementioned blue; they are different realms, and will only correspond in the viewer’s brain-driven eyes. it will, as researched in trial ch#ff8000-x53, be a firm handle and flip-switch to remind the viewer how bright things can be.
finally comes the penultimate and the ultimate—necessarily in that order—patina blue-green and grape glaucous. they act as dampening fields for mortal observers; eyes will thank these colors (per a sanctioned interfacial exchange) later in old-age retirement. they will look of an unnatural paint substance, and will make the resulting canvas either more or less surreal, depending on previous experience and nature of the viewer’s philosophical character.
rowdy triangles,
collapsed mangle of tree vibrationals
lapse in sensory valvalidity
reduced to grandiosity through express mind mentality
up and down and prepositionally around
who cares about sound when these images are around!
waves of noise might as well drop dead to the ground
useless for rendered stasis so profound and gained and
found and found and found.
ultimate surrender may be preferable
to forever lending away the visionary’s splendor...
walking on walking on so many streets with their materials, treating me to themselves
camera ops, photo splotches never to be canonized in film, but to rest within my brain bits, waiting for soup to be stirred or souflet’d or merangued into being.
the reinforcement of me recognizing my self as an artist, or at least one in the disposition of an artist: the true artist follows through, or does so passionately, with a fiery fire cavalcade of creativity and emotion and intent. those accidents that are everywhere! unintended, splendid, far-reaching implicated in the moments of…
all the fuzz comes in, jet flying outside above, competes with yawn seizures and nervous tongue swabs for corned teeth, hunger piped through enzymes, interpreted through stems, relayed to agents, without vision’s lens–a separate sense! of just a yum, and mmm, a slurp, a hrmm, friend of ole’, factioned with your, out of a shoppe, we hope to hop, with gullivers filled, with brand new slop. da duh da duh da da da da duh; on the streets sir, keep it on the street! “sirree,” don’t y’ mean? ohh, wut of it? make it to be a purty past-time, eh? labeled with recognizable kwalities, ehh?
===
+
soon he began his strategies for neon propagation
left lended errands inside their place of business, crock’d door open (feel swinging open sign hit, bounce),
sucked in wet rain drops propped dense in gravel’s tarry stench
gave off mini worlds of curved blur, punched swirls
they ended nearby heat warms through endothermic transforms
they proved their elemental worth now
he stepped in between their rather puddly gather swarms,
to chagrin of grinning street pores,
keeping dry rather worn sneakers
worn about his featured feet, meeting land rather swinging now
touched pairs, down grooved stairs, to alleys rich in mason wars
competing as human lairs for human affairs,
pushed in after turning door entry nameless placeless off-map
time to bend beams of noble novelness, blasting apart darkness fondness,
it’s better in here with gaseous excess
he’ll build and curve with nocturnal progress.
Hey linguistically-inclined people, question: Is there a term for when a word is followed by the same exact word in a sentence, whether it’s of a different usage or not? For example: “I thought that that shoe was boring,” or “I like to ramble on on all sorts of subjects.” I’ve found that I’ve been increasingly doing said behavior, and I need a label for the categorization and completionist fetishes.
Feel free to provide any elite examples of your own in the comments; there are a lot of these, and we must hunt them for posterity’s sake.
- D
P.S. “He told her her style was Herculean.” (Sorry, I had to.)
People we know have done this. You may have done this. It’s ok. But listing “the color green” as one of your favorite “things” in a favorites list is a tired practice (slightly less egregious is listing it as a favorite “color”). I admit, it’s a great color. Likeable, symbolic, and all-around robust. But our eyes are built to like green; the rods quiver and shake in its presence. We’re senstive to its presence as a poet is senstive to every goddamn thing he or she perceives. There’s a plethora (pleth-flora?) of shades to choose from. Make and choose your own. Here are my favorites:
robin-hood green
straight-up green
light-saber green
dashing green
neon green
tinsel green
forest green
sea-glass green
green-green
it’s all right here, really! i guess you don’t believe me.
see, it’s all about items. you may not be able to see them, you may not be able to care about them, but they’re there and they’re doing things that likely you cannot do. they will go parasite para-sailing (weekend retreat). they will hibernate on the weekends because they don’t realize that weekends are fun-bearing days. they will eat and eat and eat. and eat. they have taken the classes imposed upon them, in good nature and with what humour they have.
here self-flaggelation is not a crime. we try to encourage beneficial practices. we’re here to foster, after all. we try not to make our care rare, you see. you see that, right?
but that’s not all! not even close–but we are making progress.
when we say that they’re loco, we’re really just happy for them! you see, they move. a lot. that is, if movement can be defined by moving from one place to another. of course they don’t move far. but how can they? they’re here in this sphere.
the microscopes were generous donations from Dr. Shalworth. he lives in what he describes as "the finest shanty around", but it’s really just a house, up the street, and maybe around a corner or two. anyway, he likes a pipe smoke, he likes his gray hair, he likes protozoa, and he makes a mean apple pie. i mean, a mean apple pie.
anyway, back to the daycare. after Hibernap #1, we begin the afternoon with a series of classes–all voluntary, of course–that are there to enlighten and enrich these tinies. some of the choices include Vacuum Patterns, Economy of Consumption, Host-Parasite Relations, and General Play Techniques. it’s a good program we have here.
we’re equal-opportunity. of course, we have to exercise some level of authority, but this is really more of a pragmatic matter. we really care about these protozoa. we’re pro-proliferation, and we’ve had but only a few scant setbacks that were largely out of our control and heavily resided in matters of scope. environments are residences, and we’re all our own kings, at least when we really inspect ourselves. it’s the kingdoms that need work.
(use provided contact info on flyer for more information)
treed landscape with buildings upright. sitting down with girl whom is wanted, pastly, immediately, to be. the worst of the food is consumed, drank, or otherwise rended on corrugated plates of frisbee-like demeanor. now that we’re poisoned we sit and wait for it to make us sorry for listening to our brain chems. we should starve minutely from time to time, to return to proper edible nourishment, preferably in good company and preferably not in a boxed room. we can stand, but we don’t. we tell stories of squirrels and circuses. and what animals are fed. i once asked a little girl what she thinks turkeys eat, and she delighted in her quick response, "chicken!". if dinosaurs were birds, and birds were dinosaurs, we’d have the same number of current species, except one would have been formerly the other, and the other would have latterly been the former. i’d fly on a unicorned raptor with jesus, and jesus would be so into showing me his new unicorn-raptor basket that he uses to keep his cadbury eggs and other treats in. it’d be a fine day for flying, and we’d more than likely stop at a few glades and meadows in our day’s adventures, stopping to say hi to a few young friends on this special sparsely-populated lush planet, vibrant with greens and yellows and water blues, but also soft with pastel pinks, purples, and orange dream-sicle derivatives. the air would never be uphill, always like it was its own wings. i’d spend a dream eternity with one love, another with a never-loved, here or there with happiness smiles, usually in the sun, but also in underwater caverns of the swimmiest water, with that special type of oxygen that evolved to never need gills for proper extraction. the sounds of these stoned places! dark grey blended brown and film of purple influence just carved there, there to hold this liquid substance so it can hold us–it allows bouncing frequencies to be olympically achieved and then there’s the water’s collaborative stroke; sine-wave cave, tangent-tsunami of pleasure drops, co-mingled natural physical splendor that we get in our heads.
we stand, poisoned; it’s a damn fine afternoon on a damn fine stretch of land, and we can’t waste it by rotating in the same spot. we up. we toss. see birds content to walk and chirp on the same sidewalk i walk.
what i wouldn’t give for some french-fries with mentholated seasoning.
device-failure, you are supposed to tip me off to dreamland awareness and hence lucidity, but really you just aggravate a moment here of my day, a moment there of my day. you are the product of a shoddy complacency variable tied to constants and other variables out of man’s control, that is to say, in Nature’s control. but really, on smaller scales (Nature seems less influential here, in a heartrending twist of common laity perception), you should have no place except at timed intervals in which an agent of recourse is immediately summonable. i should laugh you off, though if i’m laughing all the time, my face will hurt, and then when i want to laugh for real my face may still hurt, and then my laughing will be impeded by unwelcome pain, but i’ll probably be able to laugh it off, lapping up the warm moments of smiles and shared social air. but then at a point more laughter pain will just wiggle in and spit-blur smudge a great grain of an enjoyable moment, a feeling. tie your exaggerations to a stick with knotted rationality fiber; if you do, do it with extreme imagination and premeditated precision; these are trying times and vocal space should be freer of vexings.