further adventures at the bleeding edge of sanity and inexorable, throbbing chaos, with hummingbirds

i’m not wiser, nor smarter,
nor better than you,

the twenty years between
us only
means
that i’ve
had a few more years to see

the sprawl devour the hills,
my teeth rot in my mouth,
our bodies dissolve to pus,
people disemboweling each other
amid flashy smiles,
traitors going in velvet robes,
the house getting it all in the end,
my experience fade into amber liquid and fireworks,
electronic scrap, dusty books
and the smell of a forgotten
old man.

twenty years closer
than you
to the bad breath of creation,
the stinking birthplace of life,
the beckoning maw of infinity

and twenty years farther
from the innocence
you wear like an iPod
at your beautiful, unchallenged
virginal flystrike.

it’s the uncertainty
you feel
when the ground suddenly
falls from beneath you

electric warmth,
erotic nausea, anticipation
of the new world

and your place within it

your battle scars mean nothing here
you must begin anew, and get your
heart broken
all over again.

Of historic note, the Trinity Test took place 65 years ago today.  It was followed up shortly by the famous “you lose” mission over Japan.  You may criticize our President, and perhaps with good reason, all you like but I, for one, and thrilled that we finally have a Commander in Chief who knows how to pronounce the word NUCLEAR, and probably even knows what the dictionary says it means.

[this post has been brought to you in association with Teiwaz and JetFuel - thanks for the inspiration.]

Word arrived today that Captain USA will be performing his latest and most spectacular stunt to date – The Flaming Burro of Freedom – here in Slab City (at or near The Range) on Independence Day.  Despite the punishing summer heat of the low desert, masses will assemble to witness this unique and daring celebration of freedom of expression.  In his own words,

Hello Friends! I have finally found a place where I can truly champion freedom Like only Capt USA can. I want to invite everyone I know to share my joy in finding it. I don’t expect many to join me because it truly is Hells Anvil for heat but there is a crystal clear cool canal running nearby for swimming in during the hottest part of the day. The following correspondence is with a revered slab city artist responsible for creating East Jesus which, if you’ve been to Slab City, you know, speaks for itself in capturing the mysterious fringe of freedom that whispers to us all when society seems to mean everything but. <snip>

The complete exchange between Captain USA and myself can be read here.

Ev’ryone join m’ now in this, by declaration of my pre-10am drunk, *First Ever* DO IT WRONG DAY. Paint your shoes green. Walk around with your pants around your ankles calling for Mommy. Invest half your money in a stock or ETF you fully expect to fail. Listen to a creepy far-right AM talk radio show. Leave the engine running. Pee on the kitchen floor and ask a friend to clean up after you. Eat bacon raw. Overcook the sushi. Shake up a can of warm beer vigorously before drinking it. Call your mom and tell her you’re doing these things. And email me with a report. But don’t hurt anyone and don’t destroy the environment, OK?

fucking DIED the stupid FUCK, Dennis Hopper DEAD at 74, fucking shit, he fucking DIED before I got a chance to meet him, offer him a hit off my spliff and shake his hand.  I don’t even smoke pot.  Fucking asshole, Dennis Hopper, went and fucking died on me, how fucking rude of him, fuck him, fucking fuck, asswipe, asshat fuckhole Dennis Hopper DEAD at 74, fuck.

Rabbitt and friend Jinni in "SoCal Gothic"

Sculptor / Cacophonist Michael Rabbitt strikes while the iron is hot and grabs a prime piece of surreal estate in the East Jesus hinterlands.  Clean it up, it’s yours!  The trash-ridden site pictured here was once a nice little camp with a garden, shade trees and two small trailers that got picked apart and left to rot when its former inhabitants went “on vacation” for a little too long.  Hopefully soon it will once again be a pleasant, shaded camp…

An old friend and musical co-conspirator, Th. Metzger (not to be confused with the bloodsucking white supremacist douchenozzle named Tom Metzger,) got in touch with me via email for the first time in nearly a decade.  I was delighted.  Thom’s mind works in scary and intriguing and inspiring and depraved and scholarly and sharply analytical ways, and he was an important part of my social milieu back in the days of Health & Beauty, Screaming Vinyl, and the other spinoff musical performance art projects that loomed like an ominous gray cloud over Rochester, NY in the mid-80′s.

He told me that a lot of my friends in Rochester thought I was dead.  I found this highly amusing, but kind of sad.  I’m having a kind of Sixth Sense moment now, questioning my own belief that I am alive.  What if I am just a wayward hungry ghost who died years ago in Oakland?

yes, this is a real .45 revolver. no, it isn't loaded. no, this is not a cry for help.

Any Rochesterians who know me are encouraged to comment here.  Thanks.

HE was 44 when he first heard the voices.  They could be heard, in his mind’s ear anyway, hovering in the background noise whenever an engine was running.  He would turn his head to face the perceived source, and soon realize it could not possibly have come from there.  Understanding the cognitive nature of this auditory “aliasing” illusion, he nevertheless decided to investigate the matter further.  In other words, he asked himself what parts of his mind were generating these creepy, internal voices of Rorschachian ghosts.

THE voices sounded, for the most part, like song fragments on a transistor radio near a noisy fan – they would emerge and disappear, like odd, darting specimens in an aquarium.  At times he was sure he recognized them; one was Patti Smith, another a friend from high school.  There were many others that he did not recognize or never heard for long enough to foxhunt through his memory.  In a dark corner, various 8-ohm loudspeakers from different technological epochs known as decades danced to the buzzing shimmy of filtered radio signals, his hallucinations dancing with them, seducing them, chiding them, turning his head this way and that, and always leaving him to his preferred silence when the last tarry fragments were evacuated from his lungs, and his metabolism had made short work of the toxins therein.

ON this particular evening, they had receded.  He contemplated his [tape ends here]

someone i have never met sends me useful, unsolicited information about setting wellpoints.  someone else i barely know has pledged to create an enormous scrap steel sculpture in my back yard.  another someone, a good friend, is bringing me a piano tomorrow.  one day i am lonesome; the next i am overrun with visitors.  i am treated like royalty by high-tech transients camping out under the stars nearby. wildlife populations are thriving. i still have no idea what i’m doing, but i keep doing it anyway.  and it seems to be subtly influencing the textures and geometries of the world around me, odd objects drawn to an aethereal magnet, unreadable, intangible. i dream of disasters, union with strange and beautiful women, the stars fading out one by one, mastering Debussy.

last night i read commentary by JG Ballard on the psychological impact of space exploration, not just on the astronauts but on the public, as being sinister and debasing. today Bruce Sterling tweeted his prediction of first contact with extraterrestrials in 2010 as something to jolt us out of our slump. i am laying in the tense, ionized liquid dichotomy of these two ideas, like a hobo in a boxcar full of warm, radioactive treasure.