Corn In The City

I saw this on a Sunday morning stroll last weekend. Basically, in an effort to promote ethanol, I think, one of the managers of a local gas station here in town planted a squirrelly little row of corn out by the sidewalk. I guess people were, um, bothering the corn. And so down on the curb there was this sign, duct taped to the concrete. Please, leave the corn alone.

If we could all just let the damn corn grow, we might be able to learn a thing or two from it. But no. We cannot do that. For we are squirrelly hominids. We must poke and prod the corn. We must tear, spindle and mutilate it. We must, in short, bother the corn. (And if there were just a few more rows of maize here, underneath the sky, we might even trip & lose ourselves in it.)

Dick Tracy

Me and the family atomic...LIVE! Somehow, I recently found myself in possession of a little Logitech web camera. It's been wrapped in an impervious, impenetrable urethane shield of some kind for the last couple weeks, staring out at me from the floor of our closet. But yesterday I finally plugged it in and tried "video chatting" st Skype.com for the first time.

Video-chatting: I found it to be sort of like Dick Tracy's video-wristwatch. But the cool thing about Dick Tracy was that (a) he could "video chat" anywhere, anytime and (b) it was a frickin' wristwatch. Now, that's cool. I'd need a wrist the size of a small cornfield to wear my desktop computer as a watch. Anyway, though, if you're reading this and you want to video-chat for free with the Jon-Dog, go to www.skype.com and check out the specs. We could be thick as thieves. Oh, and no. I don't work for Skype now. I'm just a guy who wants to be Dick Tracy. Sort of.

I never get tired of bitching about how little sleep I get.

Today the cable guy came and hooked us up with a phone/internet combo. He was very cordial and had the demeanor of a Buddhist monk I once knew. That same monk, it's worth mentioning, de-monked himself, grew his hair back out, and is currently teaching Queer Theory in a certain private university in Colorado. Anyway, our cable guy reminded Janelle and me of this monk. So we kept whispering behind his back while he hooked up our cable. We whispered things like "What if_________never became a monk, and instead installed cable? How weird would that be?" and also "Maybe this is _____________, only in some kind of bizzare-o alternate reality. And so I guess maybe we're bizarre-o versions of actual us..." and so on and so on until the poor guy left, at which time I went online and updated my iTunes album art. Like that was an important task.

Anyway, this is my cow-daughter. She's stoked because she's up at 6 a.m., on some wild evolutionary tear that makes you realize that all humans are are these strange tubelike quarks that zip around, sticking their fingers into logs and experimenting with the world until something interesting happens, and if nothing interesting happens, then we just continue on our wild tears until the earth itself relents and sends a comet, gila monsters, or jazz music to occupy us. In Eleanor's case, it was a pair of socks that occupied her for about an hour this morning. Taking them off, putting them on. Over and over and over again while I slowly caffeinated myself and watched the sun blearing in through the window panes here in our lofted duplex. Back in the bedroom, her ma caught up on a little sleep. And dreamed of more and more sleep. If you are reading this and you don't have an infant son or daughter, please, for us, sleep.

Abdul

Betty Page x 2. She’s looking at you saying “The water’s fine. Dive in!” And so let us dive. Into the day, into time. Into Whatever Comes Next.

This morning I started writing a story about a schizophrenic who experiences his first psychotic episode while living with two twin brothers from Senegal. I don’t know where this story came from, except that it’s a composite of actual things I’ve witnessed, and some details I just snatched out of the duende’s grab bag.

As I sat and wrote about themes of cultural lostness, existential lostness, man’s search for meaning, and psychic unravelings, Stella grazed on the kitchen floor, picking up bits of egg and bagel fallen from Eleanor’s breakfast. Cars rolled by our house, which, since it’s a duplex and we live on the top floor, is very much like a tree-house. When the page gets too empty-looking and oblique, I can turn my head and stare out a window, at people’s backyards, or the cars rolling by. In my treehouse, I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot.

The Africans came from a guy I lived next door to in college. His name was Abdul, and he played soccer. He was tall, very dark skinned, and looked like a prince. He was an orthodox Sunni Muslim and probably the most good-humored person I’ve ever met. He roomed with a guy named Tromal, from the A-T-L, who was trouble, mostly.

I remember coming home from work/school one day and finding Tromal sitting outside of his apartment door. “Get locked out?" I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, “but Abdul’s in there, he just won’t open the door.” Tromal had a look on his face like someone had just peed all over his pristine Nike Air Jordans.

“Why won’t he come to the door?” I said.

“Because the muthafucka’s in there praying and shit.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I can see him. Take a look at this shit, man.”

I cupped my hands and peered through the grime on the tiny window, which was set at eye-level on the front door. In the middle of the living room, on his green prayer rug, the stately Abdul was on his knees in full prostration.

“Open up, man!” Tromal banged on the door.

After making two or three more prostrations, Abdul slid back the latch, opened the door, and, smiling down at Tromal, said, “I am sorry to you, Tromal. I was praying. You see?” He pointed to his prayer rug, flattened on the floor like a tiny magic carpet after a long day of flying.

Stolen Bicycle Land

I'm currently at Iowa City's Java House, where a large portrait of William Carlos Williams is staring me down. And you can laugh about this if you want to...but would you even believe me if I told you that yellow bike has now been stolen as well? Indeed. That makes two bikes in one week. Both plowed under in the mud of ephemera. Unlike red bike, yellow bike was actually stolen from our home a couple nights ago. So it goes, right? So it g.d. goes...

Our remaining bicycle - blue bike - will soon be padlocked to our little garage out back. If I were to lose blue bike to the thievin' bastards of Iowa City, it might be too much for me to bear. A major blow to morale that could be easily avoided by hoarding one's property. Wait, did I just utter the history of Western Civilization?

It's important to keep your home safe. And so this weekend, while people were stealing bikes off my front porch, I was designing and installing a stairwell gate for our home. Made solely out of scavenged material (except for the hardware), this bad boy's built to last...and to keep my tot from teetering down the flight of stairs that empties up into our living room from the front door.

Here's how I made it: I pre-drilled pilot holes into the drywall and studs, then lag-bolted two plates on either side of the stairwell, countersinking the bolts. After that, I attached hinges to a futon frame I found on the side of the road and cut down into a gate with non-climbable vertical slats. Then I hung those onto the plates. A standard safety hook n' eye latches the gate together on the opposite side of our living room (out of view and graspability of Eleanor's little curiosity-paws). I tested this gate out extensively. It ain't going nowhere. It will outlast you, me, and all the stolen bikes of Stolen Bicycle Land. (So there, thieves!)

As If I'd Find The Thief Nearby

This is the rim of my yellow bike. I'm riding it today because my red bike got ripped off while I was at the library a few days ago, leaving Eleanor and me to hoof it the mile or so back home. If there's a universal law I've subscribed to most frequently the past ten years or so, it's this one: Leave everything unlocked to repel thieves...but don't be a sucka. Muhammad said it a bit more poetically: Trust in Allah...and tie your camel. Guess I was a sucka. Guess I shoulda tied my camel.

And so at roughly 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday I was seen exiting the library on a late summer's day, with the sun at my back and all of Creation basking in the sun's terrible incandescence, staring at an empty gap in the sidewalk where the Red Bicycle should have been. "Oh snap," I said to The Eleanor, who was riding on my back, "the jig is up."

I spun around like a keystone Mevlevi dervish, as if I'd find the thief nearby, crouching under a Dracula cape. But no. Just humanity. Billions of perfect strangers going about their daily business in the town square. Children laughing. Fountains spurting. An old man with bright blue eyes scratching his arse with his palsied, spotted hand. Nowhere was my bike.

There is a tendency to blame oneself after such a misfortune. And yeah, okay. But yet sometimes one simply needs to trust in one's fellow man. If one's fellow man happens to let one down, it has to be okay. That is, one must find an inner-way to make it all right. Such is the lot of modern man.

"It's not the end of the world. Just the end of a bike. And the birth of a sunny walk home." This is what I tell myself, though I only half believe it. I really want to catch the thief and break his toes. "You took my bike, you bastard." But the ship is perennially going down. Everything is passing.

Earlier this week, I got the news that one of my old clinical supervisors from grad school lost her son to a swimming accident. He was eighteen and full of life. Got pulled under a pier and didn't come back up. So in a world of degrees, bikes don't mean shit. We can't break the toes of death - or life's slings and arrows - but I would if I could. I'd be sadistic. And in my my own mind, on my best day, I am Sadistic Toe-breaker of Suffering.

World Afire

Shortly before we left Georgia, Janelle & I built a big bonfire in back of my folks' place. We've been in Iowa almost two months now and this is surreal. Our new home isthe second floor of a house. When I look out any window, I see the gridwork of streets where there used to be grassland prairie. Besides that, I see clouds.

When I was younger, I discovered that I could break clouds apart with my mind. (Putting them back together was considerably more difficult.) Later, as a young man, I learned that the clouds are my mind, and that the mind is all there is. This was a lie, however. I now know the truth. This is the truth:

Well, we did it.
We moved to fucking Iowa
And said goodbye to a perfectly problematic life
In Georgia.
About this, the levelheaded
say things like
“Solvitur ambulando” and
“Wherever you go, there you are,” while
the spiritually compelled lid their eyes gently
and assure me that “There is no direction you can turn
and not find the Creator.
Such is Creation.”
And so this morning I rolled over
in the land of corn and soybeans,
almost all modified, grown, and blanketed
by a malignant alchemy
that won’t rinse off with water,
where I have come to sit and stare at an empty page
and see if I can invent my own faith,
to see if wherever I might end up, I can maintain my
secret belief that I am crude royalty of some kind,
to find out if anything is really solved by R. writing,
and to divine whether or not
there is a direction I might lift my eyes,
away from this chemical world,
far beyond God, and even
out past the neighbors
and their television sets.
Not to end pain,
which would be a futility,
but just to try and retrieve from
the thieves who have stolen them
some of the right words
and to stare the dog down,
in his flesh colored jowls,
and snap back
with the kind of violence
that can give birth to a robin’s egg,
a vulva quaking with promise,
or at least a decent short story,
crowned with what I have seen.