The Radio and The Internet

I'd spent New Year's Eve with the street urchins of New Paltz, drinking all the beers and booze that could be poured, filling the tissues and nothingness within me with mountains of smoke and the wild breath of starlight and the concernless good will of of the people around me. Woke up the next morning in the hospital for dehydration, and, thinking I was still in New Paltz, I signed what I was meant to sign before leaving and asked for directions to Main Street and started walking there.  Soon found out it was about 15 miles, and kept walking.  Their confusion could be alienating at times, but the urchins weren't completely incapable of hospitality: They'd managed to rescue my bookbag (and all its contents) and stash it somewhere safe, and so I had that.  My mother or Natalie or someone was paying for a bed in the hostel for me for a while (after the a.b. someone told me about got evacuated by the cops) and I guess the family voted it was unfair to leave me outside all ...

There were multiple factors that brought about the death of Sisyphus other than the bullet fired by Peter Nicholas Levanarskie, and while they share little if any common origins in the anthropological or intellectual senses of the word, they are, were all undeniably critical in the cause of his demise on February 20th, 1926.  One of these factors was a man named Adam Black. He was the only son of Polish immigrants (whose names I've only omitted here for clarity) and his first jobs included shining shoes, keeping sweatshop seamstresses loaded with sewing materials, and even doing light maintenance on the manufacturing apparatuses that glass factories depended on before catching a lucky break when his father, an out-of-work plumber who largely spent his afternoons visiting and talking with the other unspoken-for people in his neighborhood, had casually, amiably mentioned the woes of his son Adam in the company of a man who happened to be in need of an extra set of hands to meet an un...

You'll wake up  some morning  with energy you simply  aren't used to. It  will flicker and flood  through your bloodstream,  Through the  dancing electricity  of your muscles and  your nerves. Through,  up and through the  hidden fingers that  have purchased into  the tunnels of  the elusive treasure  of your thoughts; the  warm blood thoughts  of territory, of  appetite, of lust  and hope and  chivalry. You'll  wake up with a  skeleton as firm  and confident as stone.  You'll wake up with  blood as smart as  wine or a  horse with silver eyes.  You'll still be part machine,  of course, but the fear of  a machine  will not be your fear.  You won't be fated to  planned obsolescence, nor  the cruelty of sycophants  and arrogant dullards.  You are not  the prize-addict.  You are not the defeated  wo...

One day in Amenia, I'd been doing the routine management of my alcoholism-autism-general disorder of life -- enduring some uninterrupted hours of sobriety, the usual walking singing coffee drinking cigarette smoking -- plus of course holding lots of doors open for clean old ladies and writing my notes & poems as quick as I can when they allow their shoulders to be used as desktops.  And on this day of quiet joy it occured to me that the bong & marijuana accessory shop might also sell marijuana. (I am originally a weedsmoker from the 90s: Things were, to put it mildly, very, very different back then.)  When I learned I could buy my pot in eighths from them at both a discount and a convenience from my former provider, a modest unicorn entered my day, and everything was better.  Some weeks later, I forget how many, the owner's relocated to Pleasant Valley. So, I bought my weed from there.  There were mostly three people who ran the store at that point. 2 kids in...

As I get into middleage  I notice how the grammar  of anatomy  is expressed  as much  in small, accidental  gestures  as it is  in the grander, more obvious ones.   For instance, yesterday, walking home  with a rolling suitcase filled with laundry,  I fell behind a young man -- late teens, early 20s --  walking with his legs very close together  while video-gaming his thumbs  over the screen of his phone. This  wheat-straw shape of a person  camouflaged in our New York hick sliver  of the world,  and I became preoccupied with the redistribution of  energy across muscle groups across the body  and how it looked like the young man was  walking in two worlds -- one mainly  on the pads of his feet and one mainly  on the pads of his thumbs.  And I thought, I think, How many times have I seen  this exact same thing,  this exact same thing,  this exact sam...

Home is where you make it, and nowhere else. It can be invented. It can be found. It can be created, stolen, taken away. Home is where Larry Fiskovitz was going one rainy afternoon, in the year 2034, on a Thursday in August, when the cool, drizzling rain pattered through the sky, splashing onto his crisp, black windbreaker/skicoat and he stood on the corner of Marigold and Broca Avenue, attempting to catch a cab the old-fashioned way: by hailing one out of the casual, constant herd of the rest of the traffic.  Meanwhile, another man by the name of Jerry Ratbaum, a resident of the New Life Center situated in Hammlett New York (formerly Queens) was piloting his "cab"/a 2016 Ford Chrysler with a rebuilt engine and the assorted technological add-ons like advanced gps radar for superior navigation meant to provide the driver (in some--perhaps unkempt, circles, "Captain") with a convenient shorthand in order to collect more passengers, etc. if only the computerized pharma...

Stop with the nervous precious maneuvering.  No one's buying into your amateur ballerina salesmanship.  Lot of stale juice and flaccid anatomy , sailor-jaws sailor-mandibles   with a thousand too many teeth, reflexively spitting into their hunger.  You ought to make some changes, if this is the case. You don't  have to. You can sit in the premature darkness like some  cotton snail sewing laziness into your pity  with vagrant chatter of tomorrow going...  Speaking for myself, I'm weighing out how some of my heroes  dissolved the contracts of their prohibitive creative rules  for the better. (If your mind went towards violence, pedophilia or  compulsive lying and the absolute dullest forms of circumlocution,  stop reading now. I dare you to talk to a woman,  a real, live woman, whose happened to have had an abortion.  Go for it.)  Well, whether he meant to or not, Cormac McCarthy put his  hand into magica...