by Tomorrow's Man
September 2001
Saturday, 1 September 2001
We wait and wait and wait. We watch and watch and while it away. We wait and we breathe just a bit and then we wait. We watch. We fear, we dance, we cry, we wonder. We wait, and we watch, and we breathe just a bit; and then, if we are lucky, it moves.
Sunday, 2 September 2001
128 eyes. I counted them. About 640 fingers. I watched each of them flutter as about 1,408 muscles in 128 arms flew through the air, banging palms together, causing sonic flux by the sunset. We walked arm in arm through the noise, before the eyes.
Applause.
Applause.
Applause.
Woo hoo.
Monday, 3 September 2001
turning falling turning falling breeze turn falling breath red on orange breeze turn fall falling breath breeze cool breeze fall falling turning falling orange red brown and falling breeze chill breeze and falling green turn and orange falling turn red and falling turn brown and turning breeze fall upon the ground.
Tuesday, 4 September 2001
"Words of Advice for Young People" I.
Don't ever shave your nostril hairs. With a razor.
A straight razor.
Trust me.
And when the bleeding's stopped?
Don't try to get the strays with a toe-nail clipper.
TRUST ME.
"Words of Advice for Young People" title courtesy William S. Burroughs.
Wednesday, 5 September 2001
I never knew as much as during the short time when I learned something but thought I had already figured out everything then realized, after deciding nothing, that all that I knew had been everything I had never known before. I still have yet to know as much as I learned that I thought I had known. Then.
Thursday, 6 September 2001
"Words of Advice for Young People" II.
Your tongue will hurt; especially when placed above a steel rail and beneath a rolling Red-line train, weighing approximately 78 tons. It hurts when you're eating a really hot plate of spaghetti and while trying to roll the scorching, strandy pasta between your teeth you chomp an incisor through the thick muscle causing a masticated laceration, sure, but it hurts more when caught beneath the wheels of a rolling train.
TRUST ME.
Friday, 7 September 2001
ten
"...hellicopters buzzing, endless night..."
nine
"...she said she came, but far too late..."
eight
"...why do they call it child's play, mommy..."
seven
"...he said she thought so, she said nothing, then tears..."
six
"...not the way to go, not without telling you..."
five
"...then jumped and fell, and the crystals caved in around..."
four
"...in the streets, on the beaches, naked, crying, ecstasy, terror..."
three
"...we found him like this, but she had been moved..."
two
"...felt it on the tracks; I am filled with locusts..."
one
"...this ends our forever."
Saturday, 8 September 2001
Lurid lurid dental dams the fuzzy face of that kitten reading Ode to Joy three 'peter meters' nuff said atop the mucilage I was just looking for binder clamps ah well it mush be the mustrooms stop doing that, keys
Sunday, 9 September 2001
Don't forget to remember: Whatever makes it great is not consensus. Whether it is Monet's Haystacks or McMullen's Self-Portrait, Plato's Republic or Burroughs' Nova Express, Britney Spears or Merzbow, what makes it great is what it does to your brain, what change it affects in you, what enlightenment you derive from the encounter.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; sure. Enlightenment is in the mind of the willing.
Monday, 10 September 2001
When everything is simple again, chaos begins.
Tuesday, 11 September 2001
Happy birthday to me. Potentially 20,000 dead as WWIII opens its big, red eye and yawns. Goodbye twin towers, goodbye world, at least I'll never be able to forget the beginning of the end.
Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday dear Doom Boy, Happy Birthday to thee.
Wednesday, 12 September 2001
Welcome to the hour of elbows and knees, welcome to the day of bleeding. Welcome to the end of life we knew, welcome to the end of simple joy. Welcome to a time of red tides, welcome to the new era of doom. Welcome to the waking nightmare, welcome to denial of fear. Welcome to your body soon to burn, welcome to your last orgasm. Welcome to uncertainty for the rest of your life; welcome to the male reality you created.
"The Violence of Truth" by Matt Johnson from the album Mind Bomb [www.thethe.com] c.1989
What is evil?
What is love?
What is the force that possesses us?
Where is the beauty?
Where is the truth?
Where is the force that watches over you?
What is it that makes us ashamed to be white?
(when we close our ears to the sound of machine gun fire)
And while the niggers of this world are starving
with their mouths wide open
What is it that turns the coins we throw at them
into worthless little tokens?
Why is it that anything on this earth we do not understand
We are pushed onto our knees to worship or to damn?
Those are the rules of religion
Those are the laws of the land
That's how the forces of darkness
have suppressed the spirit of man.
That's why human beings
still walk on all fours
Whilst in the presence of their so called
superiors;
Somethings telling you
to wake up and salute
The dangers of obedience
and the violence of truth.
Thursday, 13 September 2001
Please go to www.corrode.org today and read my article. Hard for me to concentrate on anything else this week. All apologies.
--The Management (who be inside author's wee affrighted brain).
"Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)" by Matt Johnson from the album Mind Bomb [www.thethe.com] c.1989.
They're 5 miles high as the crow flies
leavin' vapour trails against a blood red sky
Movin' in from the East toward the West
with Balaclava helmets over their heads, yes!
But if you think that Jesus Christ is coming
Honey you've got another thing coming
If he ever finds out who's hi-jacked his name
He'll cut out his heart and turn in his grave
Islam is rising
The Christians mobilising
The world is on its elbows and knees
It's forgotten the message and worships the creeds
It's war, she cried, It's war, she cried, this is war!
Drop your possessions, all you simple folk
You will fight them on the beaches in your underclothes
You will thank the good lord for raising the union jack
You'll watch the ships out of harbour
and the bodies come floating back
If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today
He'd be gunned down cold by the C.I.A.
Oh, the lights that now burn brightest behind stained glass
Will cast the darkest shadows upon the human heart
But God didn't build himself that throne
God doesn't live in Israel or Rome
God belong to the yankee dollar
God doesn't plant the bombs for Hezbollah
God doesn't even go to church
And God won't send us down to Allah to burn
No, God will remind us what we already know
That the human race is about to reap what it's sown
The world is on its elbows and knees
It's forgotten the message and worships the creeds
Armageddon days are here again.
Thursday, 13 September 2001 - continuing
6:56 P.M.
"...we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be..." --Winston Churchill, June 4, 1940
The train ride home has been curious the last three days. Not sure if any of my fellow commuters have noticed, but the large orange or dark blue trash barrels that are so ubiquitous in the MBTA stations have disappeared. I saw none at Harvard Square, none at Charles or Kendall, none at Park Street...I did see three at Government Center -- and two armed Boston Police officers were chatting between the angles formed by the plastic trio.
I also saw one at Maverick Station; where there were three armed officers, two boston Police and one MBTA officer. I never thought I'd feel so good with so many men in blue around me with guns; good? Hm. Less impotent, perhaps.
When I was in London, I noticed they had either ripped out the trash barrels along the Underground and British Rail, or sealed over them heavily with thick tape. London is, of course, better known for its bombings than Boston. For now. London, however, does not have buoys. New ones.
I'm in my studio, which looks out over the Atlantic seaboard. In the near distance are the Boston Harbor Islands -- Calf and Little Calf; The Brewsters: Great, Little, Middle and Outer; Shag Rocks (the only things shagging there are cormorants) and Green Island; and the Graves, whose lighthouse - the harbor's outermost since 1905 - I watch twinkle every night.
Tonight, between me and the Islands, on the stretch of normally open water, are suddenly two lines of buoys - and I do mean suddenly, as in, they were not there this morning. The outer ring is blue, and stretches from the edge of the Harbor to my right and as far North up the coast as I can see to my left. The inner, concentric ring is red, with red lights blinking atop them. I now notice the blue ones are lighted as well...but somehow, those don't chill me as much.
National defense. Along the shores. From Arabs? Do they have a large navy in the desert? Or is there something we're not being told?
?
Perhaps one set of buoys is sonar (boats, subs), and one radar (planes). Sure.
Perhaps it is time to wake up, and pay attention to the lights, the signs, the smell in the air.
Perhaps the damnation of perpetual lassitude is here, America, and this is our test.
"Tomorrow, class, do not forget to bring your pencils and rifles.
Study hard tonight. Class dismissed."
"...we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..." --Winston Churchill, June 4, 1940
Friday, 14 September 2001
Every day, walking to and from work, I cross the Anderson Bridge, a two-minute stroll twenty feet above the Charles River that carries me out of Cambridge and into Boston. In the distance lies the Boston skyline. For three days, as it glittered in the sun, I watched, head rotating with each step, eyes affixed: The Prudential Center (with its weather lights). The Hancock Tower. The Fed. One Boston Place (where, for years, I worked on the 18th floor). International Place. Exchange Place. 75 State. 111 Huntington, futuristic and unfinished. I watch; waiting. I can't not look as I cross. I can't not look, and wonder if it will be there tomorrow.
"The Beat(en) Generation" by Matt Johnson from the album Mind Bomb [www.thethe.com] c.1989.
When you cast your eyes upon the skylines
Of this once proud nation
Can you sense the fear and the hatred
Growing in the hearts of its population?
And our youth, oh youth, are being seduced
by the greedy hands of politics and half truths;
The beaten generation, the beaten generation
Reared on a diet of prejudice and mis-information
The beaten generation, the beaten generation
Open your eyes, open your imagination
We're being sedated by the gasoline fumes
and hypnotised by the satellites
Into believing what is good and what is right;
You may be worshipping the temples of mammon
Or lost in the prisons of religion
But can you still walk back to happiness
When you've nowhere left to run?
And if they send in the special police
To deliver us from liberty and keep us from peace
Then won't the words sit ill upon their tongues
when they tell us justice is being done
and that freedom lives in the barrels of a warm gun?
Saturday, 15 September 2001
The sun is warm. The air is cool and crisp, promising a typical New England Autumn. The ocean whispers the same secrets it has for a million years. The Coast Guard destroyer out my window sits silently, glittering on the water.
I will stop there; the sun is warm; the 213th page of this Carl Hiaasen book is as good as the first 212; the air tastes like a good promise; and that is all I need to know right now.
Sunday, 16 September 2001
12:45 P.M.
Just when I try to re-enjoy mankind: My interpretation of the news today about Pakistan and the U.S. reaching a 'peaceful agreement' over the near future:
U.S.: "So, Pakistan, we really need to use your airspace and land to bomb the living shit out of much of Afghanistan; would that be kosher with you?"
Pakistan: "We understand, U.S., the trauma you have gone through. We know you are suffering through the worst moments in your history, with thousands dead and thousands more sure to die. We know you are dealing with the most devastatingly emotional, financial, and political crisis in your 200+ year history, and of course we want to help in any way we can. So, we assume that this eleven-figure number -- oh, yes, that decimal point is in the right place -- will solidify our unity toward your worthy cause for justice."
U.S.: "Um...you're sure you had nothing to do with the bombings?"
Pakistan: "Why, U.S. ... of course not ... would we do such an awful thing? Now just sign here please. Small bills, if you will. Unmarked. How about some Karhai Gosht? Do you prefer mutton or chicken...?"
Where the hell is my beer.
Monday, 17 September 2001
Ah, what a night. All of those angry men out there with their fingers on triggers could really find a better use for them (the fingers, that is) if they'd just smell mine right now.
No pushing. Line up quietly. Okay, now. Biiiig sniff....
Oh, ah, oh, yes. Slish.
As for the triggers, they can be donated to Big Brian's Broken Vibrator and Dildo Farm, Skankapunkee, MA. It's in the phone book. Brian is dedicated to the refurbishing of all things that cause women (and some men, hey!) to make those wonderfully incredible noises that they make all too infrequently. Imagine, a world that has an atmosphere rich with the constant trill of human orgasm.
Here's to you, Brian! I salute you with my slish-finger.
Tuesday, 18 September 2001
"God Money, I'll do anything for you..."
2:15 AM
Amazing. A week ago, some folks out there in the great ol' U.S.A. woke up, took a shower (maybe), had some coffee (most likely), read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (definitely), kissed their wives and children goodbye (oh yes), prayed to Allah and said, 'hey, Man, I'll be seeing you soon' (I'm sure), headed out to Logan International Airport in Boston, Ma. (yea, 600 yards from my kitchen), boarded two large, heavily fueled airplanes with about 200 other folks aboard who had done those same sorts of routines that morning, and, without hesitation, hijacked the planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York City, killing somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand people.
Hm.
I killed six flies last night when I got home. They seemed to be all over my kitchen but I killed six, and then there were none. I felt bad afterwards. More death, a fact of life, more death, a fact of life, more death, a fact of living, of survival, of society, of politics, of religion, of desperation, of belief, of DESIRE, of FREEDOM, of JEALOUSY OF ANGER OF DESPERATION OF INSANITY INSANITY INSANITY INSANITY INSANITY INSANITY the word plays like a poem from the keys as I type it, a tiny lilting threnody of where we are right now:
THOUGHT?
NONE;
THOUGH
with love and lust and pussy and music and wine and cheese and laughter out there we choose
INSANITY
and WE DO nothing nothing nothing (harder to type but just as true)
keep whining, all you bastards. Keep complaining. This is your world, our world, made by us all. Welcome to it, and remember:
Some of you will live.
And some of you Will die.
What will kill you, though, is giving up on what you are here for.
Heh.
NOTHING.
A concept...more important...than triggers...can believe.
You are here for nothing, you were created for nothing, what you think amounts to nothing, what you want means nothing, what you need is an illusion, your goals matter not, anything you think you add to anything is and will be negligible, though you try.
Understand. And revel in it.
"Bow down before the one you serve, you're going to get what you deserve:"
Nothing.
And you and we will get it now;
And you and we can grow;
Or die.
Wednesday, 19 September 2001
It's not the staring down the throat that's so bad, it's having to see in the mouth that gets me.
Thursday, 20 September 2001
I think Monet would agree.
Here am I, and there goes my shadow, stretching toward the East, every inch of it not belonging to me. Shadow, thumbing its tongue at the sun, but born by that great ball, nevertheless. Shadows creeping across the globe, holding nothing but nothing, the eternal nothing, the lack of light. Here come the shadows, on the beaches, across the green lawns, cooling the porch swings. Cast by the sun, and me, and you, and you, and you.
My shadow belongs only to the sun and forshadowing, and I think Monet would agree.
Friday, 21 September 2001
Remember that day? Remember the curl of my tongue crashing across lips and words, my desires whispered like a hurricane tide, and the buzz of the bee that passed by us as we sat smoldering on the hot steps?
Remember that, ah yes, remember that metaphor, abuzz beneath your dress in your soft silky whites, ah yes, yes, the metaphor of that buzzing bee, remember that oh, I do.
Those lips of yours (hidden in humid white) could have blown a didgeridoo that afternoon, long thick drones slicking its tube with your juice, vibrations as slippery as your 'tween-thigh smile, enough to make me all-over salute you as again that lazy bee cruised by...
...tell me you remember that day...
Saturday, 22 September 2001
I'm always surprised by things, why blood-clots are bad and what butterflies symbolize, and that dragons were worms and red peppers burn but not as bad as a flame on the ass-hairs, that children's dreams are boundless before they grow context and we forget that cows did jump over the moon; I'm always surprised when a kiss is a bad thing, or that hate exists in the same world as sand and the sea, that love is 50/50 and desire is caged or leashed or left in the rain, that we can speak a hundred languages a day and never hear a thing that surprises us back to childhood's dreams.
Sunday, 23 September 2001
You know what I hate? I hate it when, you know, it's like Sunday early afternoon, and you take your copy of Martha Stewart's Weddings up to the bathroom, and you set your beer down on the sink, and you drop your shorts and squat on the bowl, and you turn on the Patriots game even though they're going to lose but you listen anyway, and you really get a good push going when you get an itch on the underside of your left thigh, a really weird itch, and it alarms you enough to make you lift up your Martha Stewart magazine, and just as you do you see the inch-and-a-half long tan and black striped centipede, about 50 legs flying along the inside of your thigh as it marches its length toward your scrotum, and even as you realize that it must have been sitting on the underside of the toilet seat you jump up, luckily knocking it into the water as your first example of the day of a working digestive system splats to the floor, but then you realize that you've knocked over your beer and spilled it all over your Martha Stewart magazine.
I hate that.
Monday, 24 September 2001
Gray is black's excuse for not bleaching the sheets. Grey is white's excuse for leaving the little light on in the bathroom. Gree is not a word, but it sounds cool when you say it alot in a row, with lots of 'eeeees' at the end.
Tuesday, 25 September 2001
Tomorrow, I take to the sky and hope it takes to me. I'll touch the island, and write from there. I promise. I have to -- it'll be the fifth country from whence I deliver Texticity. ooh, the things in life to look forward. to.
(happy birthday, mommy!)
Wednesday 26 September, 2001
St. George's, Bermuda, 13:10 PM
You can't believe this blue. It contradicts. Warm, milky blue, crystal clear blue. Iris blue, cornea of the sunrise blue. Tactile blue, with scent and 'oh, yes it tastes like that', the blue of no flowers, blue of alien skies. Blue, the blue that cheered depression all the sparkling way up.
Thursday - Saturday, 27 - 29 September, 2001
Bermuda Notes: Fear and Loathing in Bermuda...or Was It Boston? DAY ONE.
Awaken, 5:20 A.M. Gods. Odin's blood-fiend, Ydriggl didn't rise until 5:23. Snooze buttons were invented to reflect thin paranoia. Sleep again, now.
6:25 A.M. Re-awaken. Must leave for the airport in 35 minutes. Piss first. Coffee second. 28 minutes left to get to Logan, but only the tossing on of the textiles remains to be done.
7:07 A.M. Out of the house, into the cab, walkman, cigarettes, and Dolores tucked safely into my bag. Realize I forgot to make myself a powerful bloody mary and Logan doesn't start serving until alcohol until an hour after my plane takes off. Total Alcohol Consumption: NOTHING.
7:30 A.M. Logan Airport. The Burger King Croissanwich [sic] for breakfast goes down like ther lump of death it is, but I digest faster as we go through security under the watchful gazes of three men barely old enough to use my old razors, each holding an M16-A4 in an at-ease grip.
(What's it take to be comfortable holding a ten-pound rifle at 7:30 in the morning? It does not ease me to know that those guns, like their M16-A2 predecessors, are designed to fire short, three-round bursts. In an airport, that is imnportant; cuts down on the number of civilian casualties in case a solider freaks the fuck out and starts blasting. Y'know...Too much Dunkin' Donuts.) I couldn't believe I forgot my bloody mary.
8:57 A.M. Board the plane, a 767, total possible human cargo of about 250. My new wife and I are the 14th and fifteenth persons of about 33 to board.
9:13 A.M. We take to the skies. Leg room is ample. Shit has not exploded violently; therefore, shit has not exploded violently from me. My anus and I reach 42,000 feet.
9:40 A.M. The fun, truly, begins. With the plane near-empty, service appears quickly. I have my first drink of the day: A Mr. & Mrs. T Bloody Mary, with Smirnoff -- on the house. On the plane? Either way, a mediocre B.M. is much better than sucking altitude only, especially when free. One more would follow. Total Alcohol Consumption (TAC): Two shots, vodka.
12:30 P.M. (Bermuda Time; +1 EST) On the island of St. Georges (the country of Bermuda is actually five islands or so). Gorgeous. Aquamarine seas, the color those fake contact lenses yuo see on hot chicks that you wish could be real. The rest of the flight was boring, the bus ride boring. All soon to change.
2:00 P.M. (BST) Hotel room, honeymoon-style. Corner room of the hotel overlooking the private cove on one side, and the open azure Atlantic on the other. Mini-bar, and our own sixth-floor balcony upon which to enjoy it. Gosling's Black Rum. Incredible. Both Mini-bar shots gone in fleeting moments (she had 1/2 of one). TAC: 2 shots vodka; 1.5 shots rum.
4:00 P.M. Starving, no vittles in basket since B.K. Go to King Henry VIII (a coincidence, two meals in one day from two kings) for lunch; they're closed 'til 5. Go next door -- a liquor store. Purchase a litre of Gosling's and cold cans of strong ginger beer; combined, they make Dark and Stormys. Call hotel shuttle bus, get dropped off at privatr beach (yes, quite aquamarine). Lay beneath protective palm trees. Swim in Atlantic waters; surface water temperature: 80.3 degrees (it's running about 60 in Boston). Security guard approaches; offers advice on how to mix good Dark 'n Stormys. An incredible hour. Head back to hotel, spinning from rum and starving.
3:30 P.M. Go downstairs, order our first drinks; me, a Dark 'n Stormy, she, a Rum Swizzle (151 Rum and lots of fruit juice...deadly). Discuss our day while standing in waters of yet another private beach/bar, sipping our drinks. Hungry. Go put on bathing suits. TAC: 2 shots vodka; 2.5 shots rum.
5:30 P.M. Shuttle-bussed back to hotel, stumble to room in alcoholic, hypo-glycemic fit. Make another D'nS to counteract blood alcohol level. Notice bottle 1/2 empty and wonder if rum-scented humans attract or annoy sharks (signs at the beach warn of sharks and Portugese Man O' Wars. At the beach???).
8:00 P.M. Shower. Again? Maybe. Drink. Dress. Very formal here, for dinner. Shoes. Jacket. New sunglasses. Yes. Back to Henry VIII for 100 buck dinner. Yikes. But, incredible -- the best filet mignon I've ever consumed. Melted in my mouth like non-buffered aspirin. Bread, salad, garlic mashed potatoes, broccoli, sorbet, and coffee. Bombay Sapphire G 'n T. Glass of '96 chianti. TAC: 2 shots vodka; 1 pt. rum; 1 shot gin; 8 oz. chianti.
10:30 P.M. Back to the hotel, exhausted. Barely able to sip my rum and soda. Finish it, then stumble into shorts and down to bar, where, now, at 11:11 P.M., I sit wrapping this up, about to also finish my second Maker's Mark Old Fashioned.
I am sitting in the humid dark by the sea, listening to the frogs and dreaming.
Sunday 30 September, 2001
Southampton, Bermuda, 24:59 PM
I caught her out of the corner of my eye as I went to sip my Dark and Stormy. She was not a woman who would immediately impress, except that she was standing on that rickety, round metal table, hands on hips, wind blowing brown hair back, staring out across the dark channel and toward the sea.
The wind-flail of her drab green dress startled me; I had to say hello.
"Hello." I said.
"No one sees me." She said. "I've balanced here for days, through the nights and the sunrises, but I'm only as good as my shadow."
"Yes, well, I've seen you, now. And now, at midnight, you cast no shadow; at least, not one that matters. I can see you."
"When you can see someone and not their shadow," she said, "they are already gone; or you have already turned away."
I stood silent. I sipped. I shrugged. I stared. I sighed.
I turned away.