Time to think about ice ages again

sometimes i sail without a rudder on these things and start like a dagger stuck into a tenth grade history class map of the world. somehow the dagger always ends up in Kazakstan or in the South Pacific somewhere, both places being pretty much attractors for random stabs at our topography, space junk hitting the planet, causing another adaptive radiation of foraminifera or inciting mammals to riot and finally start laying eggs again. my little simulcrum ran a great many errands with me today and met the supreme challenge of sharing her ducks head on. megapode birds lay their eggs in piles of warm sand or sometimes in heaps of rotting manure, the challenge being to keep the decomposition going long enough to sprout baby birdlets with no nest sitting and presumably with more time to devote to laying more eggs and gathering more manure and I guess what I would like to say right here is that things are normal again and I can think about ice ages again. ice ages. so strange to be in one of these eras, a mass extinction era and an ice age era together, but all planets have phases and I suppose intellect and technology together are an invitation to those very practices that precipitate mass extinction regardless of the mindset that started it. technologies in and of themselves benefit environmental cataclysm because even the bone tipped clovis points were a superweapon in their time and many a mighty short faced bear must have faced them and feard its own obsolescence. too bad they did not live long enough to shoot with muskets, like the first grizzly encontered by Europeans, keen to test their killing devices against the super beast of the new continent. the killing of a grizzly or an elephant or a sperm whale is not a victory over nature for that matter because the biosphere has been looking for a path to the next extinction for quite some time now, setting it up with this peculiar orbit and snow covered albedo, in cycles, and now the mighty mosquito and ragweed will move out of their hidden strongholds and pave the way for the dominion of rats and beetles, horseweed and thistle. what mighty beasts will come in the future, after we are gone, in what way will we have brought them into being?

Amon Amarth - "The Pursuit of Vikings" Metal Blade Records

for you dan

you have made it through, spongy and magneto, horse and pig. you were among the first packed and now you are unpacked, sitting amid santa and missus claus salt shakers and thrift store kittens one without a cranium and used to store matches. this place has shelving and plant life. there are onions present. i can listen to any cd i can hunt for, because any semblance of order has been taken from them, an illustration of the futility of a life spent organizing cds. we had a party for the abandoned monkey, and the monster bowling pin left behind and unthought of. yesterday an orphaned wheelie pal, a caterpillar with the artifice of four wheels to improve on evolution's foolishness in not bestowing caterrpillars without wheels, made it home in a plastic storage cylinder, a bug in a jar. i am glad i am here because i belong here. i moved to this neighborhood at the terminus of last century because the rent was cheap and because it was the perimeter of the old wicker park and here i am again, as a renter, feeling at home and in place. i have met strange echos from the past in the form of my downstairs neighbor, who moved out as i moved in, who was my old cta companion twelve years back, and remembered my face immediately. while i was off getting married buying a house and having a baby here she was all those years with george, her husband, who had the mifortune of dying a year ago and has now managed to neglect the gardening, being dead. i promised her i would garden this place and carry on his legacy and the task of removing their old possessions from an old haunt bothered her exactly one iota, give or take an iota, less and now i must plant ferns and bulbs. i have crossed the x axis, i need to be here.

you are a welcome friend wise one.

Aploogies to the Ones I Left Behind

Stuffed monkey, thrown in a corner, staring upward at the ceiling. Houseplants to numerous to mention. Bas relief of the Last Supper, as served by skeletons, over-sulfured wine barrel. 11 Gallons of homemade wine in a French Oak barrel. 35 bottles of wine, some homemade, some amazing and old, vases. Monkey, the relief helecopter is on the way, and there is a seat on it for you. Fern, same thing. Some of you have to stay behind though. Painting of clowns squeezing the life out of Charlie Brown, bathtub full of old magazines, old shoes and purses. Some of you will find a new life in the punk rock haven to come. For the rest of you, your time has come in a catastrophe and I am woefully sorry. I will miss you, old house.

Yet Another Instar

This place is monolithic. Everything has been decontextualized. It is a bacterium trying to live with one gene after another missing from its genome and heterochromatized into a cardboard UPS shipping box. Oh, I wish I had the time and resources to continue this game until every gene but the barest housekeeping functions is inactivated, but the moving trucks come Tuesday afternoon, and that is an hour and a half away in -I have baby to take care of- time. The new place is a cipher now. It is a few keys needing to be copied and have monkey labels applied to them. It is the reality of a crazy landlord and a wonderful walk to one of three coffeehouses in my future. All around me though, are projects I completed, thinking I would be able to enjoy their status as finished in something approximating my old age. This thought drove me to do them, but in hindsight, each one of them was an intellectual exercise akin to years spent writing poetry. These poems float across my field of vision every few hours or so, because packing means delving into hidden corners and finding memories stuffed away in corners, or mailed back to a person from their parents, in an attempt to clear their own corners. Why they do this, house-owning parents, I do not know, but I have carried stuff in my hidie holes for other people, and some of this stuff will be orphaned with the new tenants of this place. The thought of them changing their mind, and leaving me to pitch this place to the bank as -yet another forclosure story- is both liberating and terrifying. One one hand, my new status as overseer of this place is terrifying, on the other hand, it fascinates me. In what way would I become a crazy landlord. I can hear them, the moving trucks, the moth crawls out of the cocoon, the bee chews out of its brood cell and into an open sunny world. Yet another instar. Yet another.

Prepared Statement

I wrote this monologue during those great old days at the Testing Ground, at Sweet Alice, in 1995. The neighborhood was still rough, and everyone was either addicted to heroin or at least thinking about how cool it would be to try some of that Nigerian heroin that was hitting the market and turning everyone into zombies. Drinks were cheap and I was in love. David Sedaris, though I know you are not reading this, I am sure you heard me read this one.

I don't know why I like to kill surfers. Perhaps its the stupid, self-satisfied looks on their faces. Maybe its their values. I just like killing them-seein' their skulls split open. My name is Donny. I'm a Venice Beach punk. I killed my first surfer in 1988. I was sixteen.

It was at the gas station on Sepulveda boulevard in Sherman Oaks. I was tryin' to sell this dickweed some ice. Ice was new in 1988, and back then, everyone wanted it-even surfers. This guy was big, really big, with a cocksucking health club body. He must have bought it at Gold's Gum. Stupid fuck tried to mess with me, goin "You're jerkin' me around, dude. What is this shit? LIke, I thought you had the goods..." He grabbed me by the collar of my trenchcoat and shoved me against the bathroom wall. Asshole thought I was tryin' to rip him off, because he bought some two hours ago, and now it was gone, and he wanted more.

As a rule, surfers are stupid. Back then, people didn't know about ice, including me. Ice makes people paranoid fucks. So I shot him.

I was carryin' a .38 snub nose in my pocket and just grabbed it instinctively as he pushed me against the wall. It went off. There was blood everywhere, and this dead surfer wearin' a UCLA tank top with a 6" hole in his chest. He was still struggling. I could hear him gurgling bubbles of blood like he was trying to speak. My trenchcoat was wovered with blood and pieces of him. I was a kid at the time, and I didn't know what to do. So, I just did what my instincts told me. I dropped my trenchcoat over the guy's face and walked right out of there. Dead surfer.

I killed my next surfer two hours later-on purpose this time. My buddy Dale and I were on the way to Madame Wong's to see Operation Ivy, and we stopped at a convenience store to buy St. Ides. Back then, white people dank malt liquor. The Korean guy behind the counter didn't have a problem with us buying the brew, but two pricks behind us kept hasslin him. It was a big, stupid jerk with long hair and his small, vaguely-faggoty looking friend. They kept sayin' shit like "Where's yer mom?" and "You're not gonna let them buy that, are you dude? They're underage." Under normal circumstances, maybe we wouldn't have killed them. The thing is, we were on crystal meth at the time, and thought we were badasses.

St. Ides comes in these 32 ounce bottles that break really nicely when you slam them over a surfer's head. Just hitting someone with a 32 ouncer usually won't slow em down much, but it causes em to raise their hands to their face so you can give em a boot to the balls. By the time the big asshole was on the floor, and I was stomping on his face, Dale had already taken the other one out. Dale never fucked around. He knifed the bitch. Just then, I got this floating feeling like "this is really happening, you can't turn back now, mutherfucker.", so I just kept kicking his head sideways until I knew I had broken his neck. Dale had already emptied the cash register. The Korean guy had split, he was out in the Street on Wilshire Boluevard. As if somebody was going to stop. This is the big city, dickweed. We left out the back door. I was nervous as shit, but Dale was already pounding a pint of JD.

Funny thing is, nobody caught us. I had a few homemade tatts on my forearms, back then, and it couldn't have been easier to identify me, with my jacket and safety pins. Maybe it was a language thing. To the Korean guy, we were just another two punks from Venice Beach. Who knows? The police suck, but I'm not complaining.

I started killing surfers on a regular basis about a year ago. You can call me psychotic, but I just know it has to be done. Surfers are the lowest form of life on the planet, the embodiment of all the really fucked up shit in the world-so I kill them.

A lot of people have a problem with the queers and the spades, but those ideas are out of date. How can people that fucked-over and shit-upon be the problem with society? I think the real problem is surfers. Surfers have a lot of money and don't have to work for it. Most of them have rich parents. By definition, every surfer has the money to buy an expensive board and wetsuit, and a lot of time to jack off at the beach. Look at any MTV segment, and you'll see what I mean. You see them running around with their disgusting, Barbie and Ken bodies, promoting the same materialistic crap people have been indoctrinating us with since we were born. They're tools-just look at the music they listen to. The Beach Boys played for Reagan. Get a clue, assholes.

It was my dad who taught me to shoot a rifle. He learned in the Marines. Asshole. You know the mutherfucker in Apocalypse Now who is surfing while that village is getting napalmed? That was my old man. He was a survivalist. Kansas City encourages that kind of thing. Before I took off to LA, he taught me how to clean a rifle, target shoot, the whole redneck works. Asshole. I would ahve shot my old man, if I had the guts back then. He was a prick, just like a surfer. Looked like one of the Beach Boys and thought it was cool to cheat on his old lady. Bang-later, dad.

I find it amazing that I could shoot four different surfers right off of their boards, on three different occasions, before the pigs caught up with m. Stupid fucks. I don't expect to get convicted. My lawyer says I can plead insanity, but that's not what I am gonna do. I'm gonna plead self-defence.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,
So, we are in the middle of it..this moving event, and I am dismantling the only world you ever known, piece by piece, and expecting you to act normally and go to bed on time. I brought you to the Zoo the other day and we saw ducks. You have been a good little nugget. We are moving primarily because this place is not good for you. Lead paint enters the bloodstream and disrupts the migration of neurons. That is why we always mop together in the morning, Ruby, you are such a good little cleaner. In the new place, we will mop less and spend more time hauling laundry for blocks to the laundromat.
I wonder what damage I have done to my own brain with that heat gun, that sanding. I hope there was not too much asbestos in that beaverboard we have everywhere. Technologies change, and since the Romans we have been poisoning our children with lead to make them docile and stupid. I do not want you to become docile and stupid and therefore we mopped for months and now we are moving. It is impossible to live in a place like this and not work on it and the act of working on it is what must have made your lead levels so high last fall. This fall we will be walking distance from a decent park and dad and mommy will have a coffeehouse and a pub to go to. I have missed those things, though I will miss the chorusing crickets here. I will miss turning over rocks in the backyard with you and I do not know what to do with your sandbox. You will see more of mommy though, however, and I know that is what really matters to you. It will be much easier for her to get back from work and see you, and that is another reason why we are leaving.
We are renting this house to punk rockers, lesbians, and the sort of young people who live collectively and like to pay very little rent. First of all, this type of person never has children, and second of all, I think they are the only kind of people I could act as a landlord to. The break things, yes, all the time, but they also know how to fix things sometimes and I understand their behavior. I have no idea if this plan will work, but it gets you out of the house in time to keep your refusal to utter the words for "Juice" and "Green" from worrying me even more than they do, but we live in a society where doctors have made any departure from normative behavior and illness, and I think you communicate just fine with your "Yes" and your sign language, and your animal noises. I understand you pretty well and you know it. The fact of the matter is you are important and I do not care fuck all about economic investments when they get in the way of taking care of you. Many, many people were hit hard by the depression the country went into basically at the same time you were born and we have done fine so far so we can afford to take a hit if we have to lose this house. The truth of the matter is, Ruby, that fixing this place up was a fun exercise and I would do it precisely once in a given lifetime, but I would do it that one time. Your mother has itchy feet and mine are more planted, but this city is like a hundred small cities and we long to return to those other places.
We will bring all of the cats, of course we will. We will also bring your rubber duckies. I love you, Ruby.