Zlo!

Capitalism is a science with trade at the superficial transactions above like street corners meeting at Hollins and Lombard. In my zeyde's brighter years he woke me from the series of dreams with the request I see the train's in the Smithsonian. He was a worker, if there was work, where his parents were workers and people worked to live, not for the banks working off debts. After falling out of love with someone I cared deeply for, my inclination was to write in a journal my thoughts, given to me by my zeyde for a beacon in my darker moments. "Tell me about her," he asked me in later days. "We were never together."

"Doesn't want to live.
He doesn't want to die.
Wants to die. He does," and signed off, "That's life." I could say anything I thought then, which is not apparently so with the government cracked on blogs. The train is the development of my soul with no tunnel, no darkness and no shadowy cave where plants could not grow. I wanted all the elucid memories I thought people had thrust at me to dissolve like threads of fabric from ware and tear, and my quietest moments with quiet sounds as in nature. The emerging train was the change I sought for of confusing spats, and insanity was an impasse. There is nothing worse than a stale democracy, because those monsters will eat me alive. Stale bread is just that, stale bread. A witty aphorism is an acute judgement with a weighted perception, we service our own realities.

People set up distractions at every direction-such as house pets. I went about my business, and came to home to find insane superficialness to amuse me. All I care for humanity is boiled in my soul, I am a chicken in a pot of water boiling. The soup sucks up the grease, and there is always, always grease. Huey P. Newton gave sermons in american-english and to my delight spelled out love and hate with clear rhetoric. The opposite of both love and hate is indifference.

The spacial fabric became alive and active after sleeping dormantly. A room with stationary objects in my field was brimming with ideas. The taste mundane things have, I was aware after closing my eyes. I read Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and the verse Milton penned on the devil's exodus from the old. If someone says I'm evil superstitious, me, joo, I respond in kind, "Zlo!"

"although all men observe a similar, they observe not
the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the
melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in
their series of their imitations of natural objects."

Shelley in "taste." I wrote dreams to illuminate the world, in the method losing the song. The perverse science with the basest, illest function, to live, ate away at my moral consciousness with doubts. There was something eating away at me inside, I saw as through a mirror-"vehicle of delusions! How shrunk is everything as it appears in the glass of nature." Jonathan Swift, a better doctor than t.s. elliot, who had poor health, yet t.s. elliot did not brag his health was poor, as did swift display death, wounds in mundane street scenes. t.s. elliot was acting in good taste, the opposite for swift.

Pope had an architecture, cartography for the towering Alps. The Pyrenees in south france awoke in me a parallel. Somewhere is a monastery with the meat cut off the calf, the fears the consequence of my own faint. The loss of oxygen was a picture, words with paper mache triangles all in the row-"The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, hills peep over hills, and Alps on Alps arise!"

I wanted to be the chemist. Love and action, they are the same, H20, and the binding electrons were my understanding of the universal in mankind. I drank a cup of water, and the fluids in the water shook my dreamworld where quietly my german comprehension broke boundaries. The heart beat in my breast, and my language boiled, dislocated if necessary, language out of an allusive, indistinct ration. The soul is the feelings, hunger, death and my brother disagrees with me because he has the same source.

Chemistry class in grade school was poetry in high school. I remember calcium is not natural in milk, and the elements made calcium bond with molecules, milk. A picture with every element, a character with the charged electrons bond with other atoms; I sing a chorus and the harmony disperses with melody; singing phonemes to make words, letters make sounds. Pushkin makes the assertion, Othello is not jealous, he trusts Iago. I tried to spot a nereid in the mist and became lost. Noone can boast having found God until he can lock himself alone for an indefinite amount of time, and not, think.

The language of want. Karamazof wants kill his father. The proof is in the pudding. If the pudding is the centerpiece, who eats? The table is below, and criticism best when approached from above, is best applied from beneath. In the summer of 2001, I wrote in an email thread with the topic civil rights a quote out of Tolstoy's essay On Patriotism. "The Franco-Russian festivities in October, 1894, in France made me, and others, no doubt, as well, first amused, then astonished, then indignant!"

Dreams are free'd out of time and space, lucid dreams are free dreams affected with conscious decision. The superficial is at the forefront with thoughts. Write your dreams, sure, but always take note your actions. I lecture to a young mozart whose bust is either beethoven, or amadeus with the head broken off, knocked from the top with the victrola. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial, Dickens lectures.

Take public transport, Woolf lectures. "Went looking for job today, unsuccessfully," I find in my notes. I hate moving to new locations. Baltimore has had me in quite a few neighborhoods with me as tenant, childhood and guest. Ideas are bought and sold by a class of wealthy aristocrats in facts to deregulate the nation's public opinion, just as literary harmony fabricates mythological aphorisms less accessible, certain subjects. I am Jewish because after Beethoven, parellel octaves became permissable with an understanding. We did what's right.

The picture of an artist, Charmsky, paints sculptural subjects in a mundane fashion. Charsky woke four times before dreaming the image awoke. The artist is Chartkov, if the famous have no record, or the fates, he is dust on the broom sweeping the museum with a glee for the gloss on magazine covers glossing over the ugly, misanthrope who dreams.

Fame and wealth are the prize in the painting
that hangs on Charsky's wall.
He is no longer without, anything;
contentment breeds indifference.
Patrons shower with compliments, and women,
his goiter surpasses his gut.
Private students rival his shriveling pennies
while he passes his teacher on the street, unnoticed.
Jealousy fumes his thoughts and emotions-
repentance is bought, fruition,
but beyond him, he thinks, at such an eye.
Repentance is reserve for childhood, he is
an atheist who painted the devil and,
and he knows better.

The statesman, a young Maecenas, if he is dumb becomes supersitious too, a poor man's fool. Such is self-love envies all! A creeping skeleton with lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed, Blake writes. Those pearl-drops of love cleansed my heart, and washed my sins away. Only he who has experienced such love can know what it is, as the hymn says: Only he ~ who is smitten with the arrows of love, knows its power. Of those two aphorisms, I find the second enlightening while the sentimental tone irks a feeling of compulsion, or confession. I can say now that was confusion, and those words written by Gandhiji, were at the pulse of love. I feel words pulled out of my mouth, like stale bread pecked at by crows, and eagles, muckaws and flying birds were in the pictures Blake etched with acid and bronze on my conscience, heavy as ahimsa, or leaded water out of the tap. Nothing believes in nothing. No sooner is he gone than he's there, again. One day, nothing dies alone, around his friends and family. The superficial things that seem most important, that worries you most, seldom take notice. The constant changing self like two sides of a coin, either Abe Lincoln ... the Lincoln memorial ... it's one or the other, in the summer I credited those lines with Bob Dylan's signature, he never said such things, but the voice in my head was his. The graphic chart displayed this as a cross with a pyramidal line with a dash intersecting on the negative side at a low elevation for urbane, and at high elevation on the plus for pastoral, the title, the line between nature and the urban settings. Anything beneath sea level had a filter. Anything on the negative had a grammar filter. An author has a person describe a persona, Eugene Onegin; as Pushkin has a critical eye on his childhood, and wears glasses! Geometry represent the souls transformation to independent statehood. To walk outside in the cold and not be cold.

"Graze if you will, you peaceful nations,
Who never rouse at honor's horn!
Should flocks heed freedom's invocations?
Their part is to be slain or shorn,
Their dower the yoke their sirens have worn
Through snug and sheeplike generations.

Deep in the Siberian mine,
Keep your patience proud;
The bitter toil shall not be lost,
The revel thought unbowed...

The heavy-hanging chains will fall,
The walls will crumble at a word;
And freedom greet you in the light,
And brothers give you back the sword.

Three springs in life immense and joyless desert
Mysteriously rise and hurry on;
The spring of youth, unsteady and rebellious,
Bubbling and seething, tosses, boils, is gone;
Life's exiles of the bright Castalian fountain
Drink draughts more pure, more heady than the first;
But 'tis the deep, cold wellspring of oblivion
That slakes most sweetly ecstasy and thirst."

A person can have an interesting thought. Two people can reach an agreement. Three people are in conspiracy, and four or five is a mob. C'est du nouveau, n'est ce pas? This time I'll act honestly and explain it to you. Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or whatever it may be, a man sometimes ... Here I'll stop dostoevsky's rant. Hamlet was a hack at acting. In Rob's living room, I argued with Ainsley Ekhram about my thesis. I pleaded there was no thesis, and the argument was not all there. I was too harsh in arguing my poorly turned phrases, and Ainsley became aloof when my voice cracked with tears. Hamlet wanted in the family of lesser people so he became reckless in his desire, hurting those closest. Ophelia was more a sister than she was his girl, as Imogen was in the family of Cotton, he was in her camp. Has such artistic dreams, so complex and realistic, so full of events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a ploy, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy will never invent.

Kaushik asked me my beau ideal and I told him, Helena of Troy because of her long golden hair. I numbered countless hours wondering how to scale the walls of her tower in the monastery, hidden in the hills south of france in the Pyrenees. Father Ferrapont saw devils. He was a statesman reactionary monk. In the final chapters, Chichikov is dragged to trial in his tailcoat of the flames and smoke of Navarino... He glanced at the tailcoat of the flames and smoke of Navarino and, taking hold of the bellpull, rang... He collapsed at the prince's feet just as he was, in his tailcoat of the flames and smoke of Navarino, in his velvet waistcoat and satin tie, new trousers and hairdo exuding the clean sent of eau de cologne... in baltimore's democratic state, a polemic can easily argue homosexual behavior as a magazine writer critiques fashion, with an eye on the righteous and noveau; in a republican state, there are no gays. The census does not record any. If you're a true revolutionary, you've already ended up when you've started down. There is no direction, only misdirection. Expression is a spiral in the two-dimensions boxed-in, as it were. For I have always held that it is only when one sees one's own mistakes with a convex lens, and does just the reverse in the case of others, that one is able to arrive at a just relative estimate of the two. That is Gandhi's Himalayan miscalculation on the dye farmers. I remember walking home from school with Richard Lee, and bullies were following us because Richard wore purple. I told him I had a knife in my pocket... a butcher's knife, and he always left me alone on following weeks. If not the brothers, bullies on roller blades wheeled up because I had looked funny when we were walking. They broke Richard's glasses on the grass, and they all laughed. I shot the finger as they rode off, and those bullies got off the porch like hill billies and chased us, me with my contrabass strapped on my shoulder and hardly five feet tall, and made it a few blocks from my house where they caught us. Go ahead, I said, you'll have to break my bass if you want to hit me. I knew exactly where they lived.

His friends were smarter than he, and pulled him away. I wasn't afraid. It's either be the bitch or be somebodies bitch.

Bubbie

On the 24th my mother lit a candle for my zeyde's bubbie. Riding in the saab to see grandma eleanor, gerte, lauren, dad and zach, gerte told stories about Sophie and her five daughters, and Meridith, one of her five daughters. She visted Sophie's daughters in the bronx with Joyce, her sister, and Seymor was brought up on a farm. Uncle Erving used to talk to the sheep.

Gerte and eleanor told stories about their husbands, seymor and royal, departed, grew up on farms. She was brought up in the bronx, and eleanor went to school at Columbia, but was brought up on a farm with her siblings, aunt Mil, Howard, John Paul, Rusty, and the plumbers. My cognition is rusty, because all the names are faded, worn like old things departed husbands collected, aged widows throw in the trash, or donate medicine. Seymor and his pill bottles with exotic treatments for ailments, and royal's old vinyl records are some worth somedays, so eleanor gave those to her children, jeff, steve and ben.

"Sally growler," Howard taunted eleanor on the farm. Mil and her went across fields to flirt with boys. Reminds me of gerte and goldie, whose escapades ellude me, with my foggy ears. I'm sure two secretaries with time on their hands had many pranks in the depression years. When gerte was on the farm in the summer, she was taunted with gertie.

The Voorhees were pilots, plumbers, mostly pilots. Growing in the waning, yawning years before the second world war broke out, before the first war had barely died out, on a farm with dreamers, visionaries are seeds pastoral poets put to music, lyrics, or display on the televisions. Howard sees the highway driving past in his portable home, and sees the crop the seeds have sewn. Shooting fish in a barrel, lauren and zach discuss verbatim, are the fish shot with a rifle, or is there a hook, spear, knife, or is the saying merely metaphor. Did the euphenism derive from the early pioneers in the 1680s. What is a metaphor, sheep?

Regradation

Graduation with the syllables whistled with the phoenetics intertwining is heard as gradation. After my graduation, I was with my sister on the greens on Goucher's lush campus, and my adviser spoke with me dressed in an ignoble faculty gown. She advised I speak with career development, after my hard years at school with no advice for post graduate work, I assume because my course work was substandard. My sister, after all she does to assist, had nothing to discourse.

I am smart, I thought, but should take some time off. I work too hard. I work until I feel sick. And after twelve months of being out of college, I had been in the hospital for a sickness of hard work, and dumb persevering heroism. So stumbling on campus, and I say stumble because I have been having balance problems. I can walk veering slightly leftwards, but standing in the same place, or distraction and my mind goes blank. I am falling, not failing.

I'd describe the experience as follows. If I close my eyes, and I know someone is there to catch me, I cannot fall. It's not that I don't trust, it's just that my mind has too much acumen. I'm too bright.

I saw Caitlin on campus today, but did not remmember her name, just that I knew her. She told me, she remembered the name of the dog, and Laura Orem strolled past with her dog, Lylo. I thought she meant me, or something I wrote, about a dog, anyhow. Well, the dog's name was Bette. It's a dog eat dog world, or a man eat dog, eats man world, which was the moral to the short short fiction.

I delivered the letter to the Graduate studies department that was meant for Fred Mauk, which was accepted by an Office deskman. Then deciding to go home, rather than remember the girl whom I could not, because she looked younger than I remembered, and she is my age, most likely thinks I'm a drug addict, or sleep addict, because I feel terrible. Walking on campus after graduation, is like regradation, it just isn't right.

I thought about the dog's story, and had a 3'5' disk with some old files. Deciding to see the contents, I drove back to Goucher thinking their computers must be old, a little bit of public school knowledge, all schools have old hardware. The library was busy. I was dizzy. Walking through the upstairs, seeing the sign on the writing center door with a classroom full, where the computers once were. I walked down the stairs leading to the first floor from the opposite direction that I came from. As I walked around the corner to the adjoining room, I sped up on my feet and when I came to a stop, almost fell down. A faculty member came up to me, almost staring right at me, and I was caught off guard and busied myself with the computers there, which had no 3'5' drive. I kept on walking out the next room full of people, which seemed to all stare at me from glowing monitor screens, and across the big room, sped out the door where the air was calm and cool.

I tested the files at the public library and the data was nothing interesting. The Real Thing was Open. The guy that works there was pretty mad. He said the window glass had been broken in, and I didn't hear properly. It took me a moment, and he was spinning some, like everything else. "Oh," I said, "I couldn't tell walking outside. I have nine dollars," I told him, "Can I get fries, drink and gyro?"

"Sure," he said, "One Hero."

"Cheesesteak," I said, "I meant cheesesteak, fries and a drink."

"9.50," he said, "That will come close to 10.00 with tax," he said.

"What can I get for 9.00 dollars?," I asked.

"I'll give you a cheesesteak and a drink," he said, "What drink do you want?"

"Coke," I said, "For here," because it was cold outside. I sat down and watched the television news. He went to the back of the store and was carrying a pane of glass, and then went to the stove. The meat sizzled and the meal was satisfying.

I tossed the trash and exited The Real Thing. The glass was all along the front of the store. He said, "I had an extra pane there just in case, so there is still glass like," he gestured over to the neighbor, "like that window over there, see?"

"Yes," I said.

"Exactly," he said, "Who would do this? Crazy people," he said.

"That's exactly right," I said, and waved and walked off. I should have asked for work, but honestly, I was too distracted, and as soon as I looked him in the eye, I started to fall over. It's not that I don't trust him, it's just I can't really trust.

6:07 am

Crayon drawings on white sketch pages, the kind for painting and not for the designs of buildings on plotter paper, the layout in blue prints, an s's synesthasia sounds rose as salmon fishes swimming, spawning crystalline, transluscent streams. The flowers on the crayons are yellow with purple scribbles, the dark O in the flower's bud is purple, red, yellow and ochre. The sky is white with the yellow sun in rays spread in curves like the cut a knife slices in a tomato. The stems are green, dark with the brown line on the bottom of the page illustrating mud. On the porch sitting cross-legged, bow-legged in the city stoops, marble cracked foundation, the threads treading thyme in lost yards belonging in kitchens long ago, longing for the minutes with loved ones that can never be relived, but then who'd wish to rather than see the pages.
The yellow belongs to the Z, and the red A, if the order of colors can be remembered how the wax covered the pages. The blue is C, and the dark green is H, as the colorer is aware the spelling Z-A-C-H and not the elusive K, which is also green but not quite so. The scribbles are purple as an R, and the yellow squibbles with the white incandescently are Y, R-Y.
The cat's name is Little Nemo, or as the animal namer pronounces the name, Leonard Nimoy, or TV's Spock. The cat was found crawling beneath the floor boards in the alley between the row homes, and his other namesake was a dreaming child on the video game label. The television showed advertisements with a sea captain on a boat with pets that were puppet. Leonard Nimoy was there with television's Michael Dorn at a viewing of the planets in the park.
The term Otitus Media is the definition for fluids in the middle ear, where the first divergence from the synesthesia hypothesis varied.

Roumanian's in the attic

The espresso maker was malfunctioning and the strainer clogged with microscopic dots from coffee grounds and soapy suds. In the bed in the attic the sheets were stripped bare with laundry clinging to the sharp corners on the bed. There were three sleeping places on the dusty hardwood with mattresses at differing elevations on the plateau that bisected the octagon in the attic with comfort below the plotters desk clasped against the length, squaring a third of the width with magazine clippings and coke cans illustrate a birds perspective flying on the ceiling beneath the attic boards moaned with the scarred footprints, the ceilings pounded while the frothy white skies flash lightning.
“The espresso machine is not working properly,” Cob said with expressed interest to the Romanian house guests. “Here is coffee.”
Art slept soundly upstairs while Vera was listening silently. The coffee mugs put on the coffee table on a magazine stack with a plastic milk carton. There was a sugar ramekin with the design red and black triangles intersecting in circles. The sugar bowl was a souvenir purchased after the abolishment of serfdom in 1746 causing the stress spoken on U as awkward in place of the form O with the preference on the Romans.
“... because you want sweet,” Cob offered the sugar bowl, “sometimes.” He had a fresh brown glaze on his teeth enamel from sugary sweets.
“Yes, thank you.”
“The stereo is playing Blixa, he plays in Australia,” Cob said.
“We’ve heard Blixa,” she said.
“Really?” he asked.
“Small world,” she said.
The water pipes piped hot water in high pitches through the hole in the ceiling beneath the bathroom in the living room. In the suburban houses the maintenance upkeep to hold the ceilings plastered are universal in bourgeois cultures. The obtuse coffee waiter was glaring at the hole in the ceiling with the reckless abandon an insect honey bee buzzes in the beehive. He hurried up the stairs in the attic where Art slept wrapped in soft blankets. Slowly piercing the warm walls where a poster with a glamour snapshot with Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx smirk with hands clasped on ears in black and white. She was not yet dressed warmly squirming underneath the sheets in the hot attic. Cob asked if she knew the record player because the needle was dusty. He wanted in which direction to brush without damaging the delicate point, and barely awake, she shook her head with frizzled hair. He fell down the stairs with loud, clomping horse steps and an awkward silence between Vera and Cob was broken with an anecdote.
Before leaving Brussels, her house threw a large party where the whole town was invited and she wondered if the same was held in Baltimore. There was a commotion at the bon voyage affair where a boy was thrown down stairs that was hosting the house. His nose was broken.
“I asked if he needed to go to the hospital. He said, no, and that was that. The last day hovering over the host worried, and he did go in the ambulance because he was hurt. The bus driver on the ride to the airport that morning stopped miles from the airport, drove no closer, so walked the rest.”
Cob nodded his head and the buzzing coffee echoed with loud, industrial clanging on the woofers. After performing routine maintenance checks on his white 1988 convertible, the tour guide had made an offer to drive the Romanians somewhere. He briefly considered the word usage “you” had in the American-English vernacular to the Romanian “you” or “thou” which had a stark contrasting meaning.
“Who wants to ride shotgun?” Cob asked.
“Here,” Vera rode in the backseat crowded with boxes and books, and Art rode passenger with Cob, her shades on and the window up blowing her wispy hair. The eight cylinder engine pumped oil with a cholesterol reading slightly worse than the chauffeur who wore an oatmeal tan cap and a brown checkered long-sleeve, button, wool on his person. The engine slowed nearing the docks and hacked with phlegm closer to the stores on Thames street.
They ate at a diner with hamburger and fries and cooled in the air conditioning while the slow, less-than-eager waitress was relaxing in her quiet servitude. The Romanians had a pocket with change to pay the costs, and Cob offered his credit card with the girls not yet having their social security papers.
“The houses in Baltimore are so diverse here when in Romania, everything was so close together and you can see houses in 1920 with those in 1950,” Cob said, “and what’s that?”
In the parking chalk line straights with parked cars was a reporter’s camera on a television tower filming. “There is a tattoo museum close-” Cob said and as he started the car, there was a click and a cough. The 1988 was dead.
The girls waited in the car while he got out and lifted the hood and pressed his hand on the radiator. He was gone in seconds inside the pizza parlor beside the stranded, parked clunker with a dollar in change in his hand, asked the flipper if he had a carton of water he could pour on his car. The flipper gave a pitcher with water for a purchase which Cob bought for the Baltimorean sitting outside the pizzeria. The water sizzled on the metal radiator with no steam and trailed a rainbow thread on the gutters.
Cob and the girls stared at the crossing waiting for a tow truck when an automobile came to a screeching halt skimming a pedestrian. “I’ll kill you,” the hood yelled, his muscles flaring and shaking in his purple sweats.
“I’m calling the Police!” the driver shouted, staring at the whitey standing by the benches.
“You hit me!” the hood yelled, and started walking away, and seeing he was walking, the car drove off.
The hood walked up to Art and whispered in his ear, seething mad, “you want to have his babies!” pointing at the whitey.
Cob looked over.
“You saw that!” the hood said.
Cob nodded his head.
The girls and Cob stared at the clunker with the hood staring up held in place with a metal pole, and the hood was on the curb on the pizzeria eating a slice and drinking.
“You can have a drink if you want?” he said, “any of you!”
The tow truck hooked the clunker and drove the 1988 to the shop. Him and the girls had a ride on the bus. In the evening eating in the backyard garden with the unripe figs hanging leaves canopied an umbrella on the table shading the moon. The girls stare in the darkness when a light flashes. The heavy heat in the hot summer nights, and the girls had never seen lightning bugs.
Stare at the darkness long enough and a lightning bug says hello. The attraction the bugs feel is mysterious. Lying stiff in bed at night with the windows open and the ceiling fan blowing hot air, there is a spark in the darkness before sleep comes. He feels falling staring in an airplane, and after the girls, his brother called on the telephone long distance on the globe with the endless congruent oceans asking, “where did you meet those girls?”
We met at the train station.

For Pop's Rosin

My fingers are parched. I thought to myself, my hands are aching stretching my fingers so the bones snap, and I drank a glass of water before an endless feed of trash through unseen wires embedded deep with the thoughts troubling, doubling in my sleeping head. On the pillowcase, I stare with cheek resting on teeth rubbing against the plastic mouth guard, gums and stepping out on the floorboards, the yellow sunlight, if I could see myself in a mirror, the upper jaw impressed leaving an indentation over the lips and gums, the ultimatum was still only a half-filled glass. Rosh Hashanah was in a week before the night Yom Kippur. I drank a cup of water in the morning with ice, and the jangling at the bottom of the glass spoke because no one else was there, and I was prone to listening to notes that weren’t there.
I play the first five bars of the Kol Nidre. The bass hefted the loveliest melodies on the screechy swagger my bow carved from tip to frog, arching airily across the thick strings like a stone skipping on water. The sliding bow had no friction. The notes were distraught towering at the solo’s peak when subdominant and dominant whining in the autumn notes, whistling like a finger on the frost on an iced water glass.
Leaving home and heading ten blocks to the Starbucks.
“I’d like a double espresso,” I told the counter clerk handing her his credit card, “and can you show me the espresso beans you have?”
“You have a grinder?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She walked from behind the counter to a furniture display case with the coffee brands and the espresso Bold nestled in the right hand corner. “You see that?” she asked shortly a head shorter than me with hair braided, coffee with milk skin, robust figure.
“Thank you,” I said, “Oh no, I’m not buying anything.”
She said, “That’s where if you are looking.” The espresso was warm in my hand now after I had signed the receipt in my pocket crumpled in a fractal.
“Where are the newspapers?” I asked, and she pointed to a stack with The Sun and New York Times. I saw before skimming the news on Hebrew schools in California, where my brother was employed in a caviar café. The New York Times read with my cup of espresso heat came through the condensation on the paper cup warming the palms with a fresh scar from a bicycle accident that sent me wheeling across the pavement.
“Shabbot Shalom,” I said from behind the newspaper and raised my hand to wave as someone I barely recognized pushed forwards to the barista, nods in passing.
The peristalsis in my esophagus was energy enough even without a breakfast, and I began to sing the prayer said over wine to the tune If You Are Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands forcing rhythm to the words in meter. I was on the same street parallel to home and lost the melody, whistling and breathing with lyrics, the pounding heart in my chest, and my wonder that the store behind a row of construction did not have rosin, and was not even open for business.
The morning was bright and I was glowing with warmth that I was rehearsing tonight the Kol Nidre for the sunset on Yom Kippur. That evening I was escorting my mother to the synagogue to hear the cantor sing, and there I was going to ask if I could play the Kol Nidre and I was far from the perfect notes. The warehouse was closed and with no sign on the knob, there were no signs the warehouse had exclusively kept hours with only a phone number as evidence there was a warehouse there. “There is nothing there,” I exclaimed in my head with construction workers across the street working and wondering what I was doing there. There was Ted’s in Mount Vernon, and the longest distance I knew was three blocks where I had walked.
At the bus stop, I had my hands in my pockets and an old woman asked if I had change for a quarter. I stopped when there was no bus and told her, “I don’t have any nickels,” and as the houses approached over the horizon, an old man called from his porch, “I want to be like you. When I was younger, I wanted to be you!” and a young man shook his head and smirked at the grin on my mouth panting.
A concrete wall with graffiti had the painting of a rose growing from the cracks tearing in the sidewalk. The graffiti paintings and chalk scratches in the sidewalk made the stroll in the neighborhood like visiting the museum.
“Hey brother!” a man sporting a Jesus Save’s red cap stopped in the street with his hand outstretched and shook my hand. “Want to get high?” he asked blurry-eyed, a black, bristly beard with a funky smell aroma between the two.
“No,” I said. “I used to.”
He said, “Not used to no?”
“You look like you are looking for something?”
“I’m looking for water,” I said.
“You can walk into any store and get water,” he said, “where are you trying to get to?”
“University,” I said.
He held his arms crosswise. “You ask anyone!” he said. I turned around after a few paces and waved, and the man said, “Not used to no!”
“No,” I muttered, “thanks, goodbye.” I walked a quarter of a block and passing a street shop with men sitting with a bottle of water on a table. “Excuse me.” I edged my feet closer like a child dancing at a wedding.
“I’m trying to get to University?”
“You don’t know where that is?” the man asked with a thick beard.
“I usually drive through here,” I said thinking the streets were in bad need of road work.
“Here is not so nice to live,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, but really Waverly is an affordable place to live.
“Take 33rd,” the man said with a thick beard.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Listen, need anything else?”
I paused for a moment to think, “No, thanks you.” I was hovering on the bottled water like a bee. I was dehydrated and walking back to the 33rd street heard a street crier selling movies from an exhausted building with boarded-up windows and grassy potted-plants. He was sitting across the other side of a fence, and from the street ahead was the thump of a beat box and a boy drumming rap lyrics.
The rapper had rhythm with no noise. The latest happening in the neighborhood was a front porch set afire as a threat to a mother’s phone call reporting dangerous crime, and without lyrics. Her neighbors’ porch was torched because the arsonist mistakes the woman, suspiciously with no evidence contrary even with daily rounds on the street for the day without leads. I was a stranger there asking directions to a crime scene, 33rd. At the crossing 33rd became University and in a few blocks University became Hopkins. In the X and O café the poster advertisement was a bald shaven, black Russian Jew with a round face blowing the silver, amplifier horn torn from an old horn. He was ahead in a crowd with cheering protestors and concert-goers in an outdoors amphitheater in a crude black and white with red streaks impressing on the consumer the red states. I was in the café cooling off with an ice mango smoothie.
“Did you see the heat index today?” the waiter asked the people in the cafe.
An hour later I walked through Ted’s front door into a vestibule and squeezing my thighs with hope the urine did not leak out, I came in. “Carlson,” I said as I saw Ted because I preferred darker rosin and Carlson is the darkest brand. Ted moved behind the counter and said, “Sorry, we’re fresh out, but here ‘can see if we have.” As a half hour earlier a woman, my mother came and asked for a case of bass rosin. Ted had none, but just then as he was saying that, the delivery truck pulled in the parking outdoors and had a box with Pop’s bass rosin.
“My son prefers dark rosin,” she told Ted. “If he wants, you can return the rosin for a refund,” he said, so when I asked Ted for a case of Carlson, he might have thought this was a joke that I intended to get a refund for the Pop’s.
“Oh, Pop’s is fine,” I said, “whatever you have.” I was happy to get out of there as in truth, I was so exhausted trying not to mess his blue jeans. Pop’s rosin, a word of warning, must not be left out in the sun or the rosin will melt. Pop’s rosin or tree sap is wrapped in white paper creases in a red snapped case.
I went to the shop enmeshed in placate wood with steps leading, OK Natural, and asked the clerk, “Can I use your bathroom if I buy something?”
“Sure, go right ahead. Take the steps, they lead next door that’s closed,” the clerk said. After using the facilities, I had a water bottle marked for sale with an orange sticker to the cashier. Sign over the register said, no credit cards less than five dollars and VISA.
“I only have Discover,” I said.
“Take it, that’s fine,” the cashier said, “but come here later and buy something.”
I observed for blurry moments the passing footwear and walked having drunk the water with ease across long stride streets with breaks in the red concrete where rounding bicyclists knocked tires against the hardened curves. I read the awning vanished beyond the vanishing point, The Jesus Saves Rehabilitation Clinic, banner. The path was not too hard to the café and there I had my bottled water. I had the separate brands on the table unequal distances with my eyes adjusting for the closest bottle. I was watching behind the bottles like a bushman, the curly, orange woman with her small aquiline and small comfortable man. My feet had no feeling and were dead weights and when I closed my eyes, rolling swirls appear, and I could not stop the café from shaking. The cashier was reading her newspaper behind the counter. I hoofed my dead pyrrhic feet over there to ask for the tap.
“The tap is over there,” a voice said from behind the display case of pastries on the counter.
In a moment, I saw where the girl had motioned with her hands and scooped the ice with a plastic cup and she said loudly, “don’t look at me!”
I was simply enjoying the clouds and the violet rays peeking behind the houses when I was struck dumb. The weedy aroma was at a bus stop close to home.
“You have the time?” I asked the boy smoking the marijuana cigarette.
“Eight o’clock,” he said.
I cursed under his breath and began to rush home. I was late. I had never telephoned my mother and was dead tired. I did this for Pop’s, for the Kol Nidre and my mother who would be less whining when the bow sang on those strings. I was late, was in trouble and my mother was crying. The sunset behind the clouds and the violet night was blue, gray and black.
I knew I would be late for the Sabbath.

Cleaning the fingerboards and getting lost

I don't like the picture ending my last post, the dark eyes logo belongs to a website promoting a band I have never heard of, and I begin to think my representation is a mis-representation. I auditioned with Well-Dressed Records last July to perform with the band Krestovsky, and after driving there to the headquarters in Bolton Hill, the Toyota Supra broke down at the top of the hill. I asked the manager of the independent record label if she had a container of water that I could pour over my automobile and she had a green flower pot. The car steaming was left on the corner with the hood up while the promoter listened to me play with Alex Krestovsky.

He was drinking a malt liquor in a can, smelling of beer and whiskey. I declined drink as I gave that up, and as a pet peeve playing and drinking alcoholic beverages is a must not. As the strange roleplayer over the internet RE:'d alcohol is a mocker. The broadband preacher was on the mark, because the togetherness or what the Hindus call darshan is lost if there is the rhythm section drinking water and the guitar soloist slightly brimming. I can't even stand the smell and I'd rather not talk about drinking at an audition, even if I was drinking vodka, he was sipping malt liquor smelling beer in a can. He'd wonder, if that is so distasteful, why not drink expensively if he is a cheap boozer.

I'd little to say about the style of his playing and he seemed decided over a few things that he must have not thought were my business. I hate interviews and came off mockingly terrible. I asked him had he heard, "You have come in your hair and your dick is hanging out" and he had, so I finished my sentence, "then you will know what I mean when your next song needs to be slower, because that is really how to make it sound You Have Come," the older version not the sped up kind.

I note that having rosin on my bow would make the last piece have gone better, but I cannot replay the song here, and unless that interview ended up on YouTube. In answer to what brought me to the String Bass, "My great-grandfather brought music from Russia to my Zadie who passed on to my mother and her children, and my uncles and theirs," which is needlessly complicated, "Oh, Gary Carr, and I've been playing for seven years, twenty-three years." I hate that question, because I always feel I am stabbing my teachers with the tip of my bow. I left wanting to know and not having said a whole lot, but the car started and ran down the hill where that counts, and the only thing I regret is rattling on the creator of my K-Bass at great length, as it seemed to offend Mr Krestovsky.

I auditioned with Koussevitzky, under rehearsed second movement of the 2nd Concerto with un-rosined bow sounding bright as a cello to an audience expecting Indie. Thumped out a few Charlie Parker tunes, Blues for Alice and Confirmation. I have yet to recieve any confirmation from Well-Dressed Records. I'm quite the idiot in shorts and white shirts with a sporty Hassidic Jew beard and shaved head. I was imitating Charles Mingus shown below:


What a Prince Myshkin there! I walked seventeen miles from Towson took York and Greenway to 33rd street and up University Parkway all the way to Ted's in Mount Vernon. My mother stopped by there on her way from work and bought me a case just hours earlier, saying that her son preferred dark rosin. I came in close to closing and asked for a case of Carlson, dark rosin and Ted said he only had Pop's. There had just arrived a case that morning shortly after my mother, and I had gotten the Pop's but missed the irony until greeting my angry mother, an hour and ten minutes late for the Sabbath and she was worried sick which I won't bore with the dialogue we had. Here is a picture of the Prince Myshkin:


There are stories out there if you just have to find them, and the chance to get out and perform are proliferate as nuclear power in the Star State. I write and have as now, two stories under my belt I need to write, "For Pop's Rosin" and "Romanians in the Attic," and my belt is at the belt shop which I won't get until Saturday when the belt serviceman is moving for a new location. Where, I have yet to wonder?

Stitches

Typing with my left hand while my right is in stitches. Yesterday, I fell over the handlebars of my bicycle at the bike shop, and walked the bicycle to the store clerk, who fearing a threatening law suit, did not mind the blood on the frame. After eating a vegetarian meal with the folks, drove to GBMC with my mother and signed in with no signature. My mother always tells hospital stories in the waiting room, but this time she mostly read her school books while I watched Gene Wilder's Frankenstein and Jack Nicholson's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The physician's aide sewed the laceration on my hand after injecting me with several needles. She had very nice eyes, neither of which I will dot with my handicap, though worth noting Dottie coincidentally asked a Rabbi in Florida if he married my parents in GBMC and he replied, yes. Here is a resembling drawing:

The lovely blond nurse at the desk asked if I had a tetanus shot in the last five years, and I mention her because of the blondes in the Wilder and Nicholson movies, because the question was not unimportant. I could not remember the last two years of college but I did remember my last tetanus shot was after smokey scratched my toe which became infected and turned green and moldy. That was when I was reading Kant, after I had read Joyce which puts me in the Spring 04. Today I am laying low and watching 80s movies with oddly nurses bed fellows with wanted men.

The Jews

Driving through Pikesville on the Sabbath for the first time ever, (never drive anywhere close to Pikesville) there were three Jewish sisters standing outside of a very nice, stone house that looked that the building had been owned for almost 100 years by the same Jew. Felt strange driving around looking at Jews, because there are traditions there that here, southwest, nobody takes seriously. The donning of Jewish hats, coats, long socks. However, we both observe the same holidays, in different ways. There is no way to go back, like traveling back in time to see the dinosaurs. Somehow feels that the dinosaur is me.

Victor Frankenstein

David (le mans) bridge was the man that frankenstein was bought from 10 years earlier, where my bass currently resides on the living room carpet. The carpet has water damage from when the toilet exploded, but the bass is relatively unharmed, and unmanned!

Egyptians

After leaving the house this morning at the crack of my own ass, sometime around nine o'clock, was three quarters of the way to the Chesapeake Bass Viol shop in Annapolis, Maryland when the realization that my wallet was by the computer hit me. David (le mans) Bridge was not overly concerned with that so long as the check was in the mail, which my mother will mail out, and the money will be reimbursed. He has an interesting workshop with basses leaning against the stands. There is an intoxicating aroma wood shaves off in beautiful Spring. The bass is limber when we held one other in my arms on frankenstein's neck, the split is hardly noticeable with the tone buzz free. Strummed a few notes to the tune of "I love the weather we're having!"



I was enormously distraught over a dream that I have been having where I wake up suffocating. . .

Jonathan David Jackson asked me, "did you see any darker people in Serbia?" After speaking with a professor about gypsies, we became stuck on the colors black contrasting with white. The painting of a river elipses is the example we wander towards, with the silt on the bank flowing with the currents on the water; originally, the argument does not wash away the characters B&W. Using word shades-colors is a sample on the brush that swiftly swipes on the pallet nature with a vowel or consonant like a bear paw. When synesthetes talk, listen language answers with a cross-wiring in the brain with reds, oranges, with the textures, shades that are not unlike cartoon characters. We must always remember that we were once in the land of Egypt translates to the hieroglyphics of who we are, what we speak.



We are becoming diseparate, things are getting worse, only because we cannot remember the things that make us alike & disimilar. People just get uglier; bears are lovely.

28/2/07 Spent the morning playing video games wrote a few words of my blog

28/2/07
Spent the morning playing video games, wrote a few words of my blog, took a walk with wires hanging from my ears to the Giant Foods and saw David Starck at the Starbucks with a nice young lady, I think, did not say hello because my thoughts were elsewhere and hardly even was aware that my rudeness might be noticeable to others, bought donuts with creme filling and later that day eating at the kitchen table, read a blurb about where to get the best donuts in the Baltimore Sun. There were a few tough looking news people by Channel 2 where earlier there was a dead bird lying in the road which was pointed out to me.

Afternoon was spent pacing around the kitchen and the living room listening to the stereo, Klezmer, while I noticed the candle for Zadie's yarzheit flickered with my walking so fast, so my pace became slower, noticeably.

Looking up pictures of pirates on the internet, which you'll observe are posted here, here, and here.



Here is a picture of the thief that stole an ice horn from the dwarves, hid among the warriors of light and steals a second horn. The gonif attempts to steal fire and when confronted with dying, he morphs into a giant salamander. I also looked up pictures of monsters. There are the Chupacabras that are notorious goat suckers, de Loys Ape, or the link between man and beast, maimed with a bullet before conversing with Doctors, and the Loch Ness Monster, 1977. Was this a hoax perpetrated by a band of hooligans or was the monster a dinosaur that has survived extinction for eions only recently emerged from an underwater cove?

Happy Passover!