un apres-midi sans raison

Dans le jardin..

feel funny, head swimming in this heat. Sweat beading out of every pore in my body.

Everything seems so rigid right now. Perhaps that's just reality failing to live up to my expectations. I don't know. Weird mood. I sit simply listen to the incessant ticking of my watch and feel my lungs expanding and shrinking once more.

In New York the parks are carved a long the gridlines, they are simply allotments of real estate. Here, they rest more like organs in the city skeleton all kidney lung and bladder shaped. Pigeons peck at crumbs a vagrant tosses on the head of Van Gogh and chase the falling remnants of their squabbling down into a field of flowers, red and pink and purple and white and yellow ones that reach above the rest like privileged mirrors of the sun.

I feel my inadequacies as a writer most profoundly when I cannot name the flowers and trees in my field of vision. I am a city boy. It seems to me the great authors always write of spruce and elm and juniper, of lilacs and periwinkles, of thrushes and sparrows and mockingbirds. I know the names but I wouldn't know a one of those if they came up to me and bit me in the ass. I know the tree with leaves like spades that make it seem to float. I know the tree with needles that stretch in the light and collapse in the shade. I know the redwood, I know the sequoia, from the parks. The unmistakeble leaf of the cannabis plant that adorns all the walls of the world's college dormitories and that grew beneath my balcony in Barcelona. For birds I know the pigeon - everyone does. I know the cardinal and the blue jay and the oriole, not because I have seen them dancing tree to tree but because I've seen them playing baseball.

How can a man who worships Whitman not know what a spruce tree looks like? It just doesn't seem right to me. I know more of bugs and rodents than I do of forest flora and fauna. Ah well, let's not mourn it or weep because of it, it is what it is and it is what I know.

Gah.

I make myself more than a tiny bit ill. All that time spent in my apartment like a hermit content with the wonders of his cave. At least a hermit could probably make fire out of sticks while I simply sit and worship my magic box of crystals and wire and metal and lights, jacked into some fac-simile of the world.

All things at once, apart and together, sun and sky and trees and dirt and gravel autos water backpack tourists language color sculpture person and person and city and earth. I think this is the hard truth of the world, that all things are facets, expressions, permutations of an infinite oneness; that all things no matter how fractured are inextricably intertwined and dependent upon one another for their individual existence. It's been colored by some as a rosy daydream - we are the world style bullshit that you'll never get anyone to eat anymore. (These love-everyone people are fascists, I tell you - you can't tell people to love everyone much less everything. That's a pipe dream.)

This is about moderation. This is about balance. This is about compromise.

This is about the impossible and if we don't strive for the impossible then we're doomed to failure. Individuals and society alike. If you want to live you have to march towards the impossible, or at least whatever it is YOU perceive the impossible to be.

Wind blows by and berries tumble down all around me. So it goes, the good old man said.

Smile, you're on god's candid camera.

Hm, I said "individuals and society alike" earlier. Hold a moment. Society? When did I stop hating that word? Ah yes, I didn't. Consider it a moment of weakness, when I stretched too far in a fit of overblown grandiosity.

Society - c'est part de la probleme. Society, bah! We're so convinced we can organize ourselves on a mass scale, so fixated on order and regimentation. It is sheer madness. Consciousness and the individual just will never allow it on a full human scale. It's up to the individual and not some blowhard idea of society. Individuals and compromise and cooperation on a daily personal level. Not collectivism, not even "unity." Just respect. I mean, jesus christ people. Just coping wth one another, space and set and setting.

Hey, a boy can dream!
And he does!
And he will continue to, goddamnit!

And what do I think is impossible, what am I going to have to march towards? Nothing more than this, the translation of all these thoughts and idea(l)s into art for human consumption. I think communication of the deepest things we feel is impossible is art is what I'm gunning for.

All that unproductive hermitude; the goddamned regret.

I realize most people probably have neither the patience nor even the desire to hear any of this. Tell someone you're going to Europe and they will tell you to do two things: get fucked up and get fucked.

Lives dominated by this overwhelming presence known as "society," dominated by ideas of moralness, legality and illegality, by laws and governments and the control complex. There's not even any TIME to think about all this because They Own Us.

And here in this garden on vacation I'm aware and I acknowledge that money is making this moment possible for me. What to make of that? I don't know. I only know that if providence has made it possible for me to dream of art and make it real and perhaps affect just ONE person the waz that Robbins Hemingway Byrne Yorke Faulkner Grey Tolkien Lewis Dick Asimov Blake Williams Ginsberg Foucault Burroughs Orwell Irving Miller have affected me, I will be content as much as any human being can hope to be (which I fear is not very - contentment is not equated with comfortability, some forget...)

Birds are singing beautiful songs.

If I can be just one drop in a sea of names in someone else's mind who strives for the impossible I'll feel I've done something worth doing, and I'll likely never even know if that's so and so all I have to go on is faith.

This moment is but a blip on my existential radar. When I awake from this dream, or when I fall back asleep from this waking, there will be a whole other reality to face. Lust and libido; money and survival; wants and needs.

But no matter - these are the moments that make life worth living. One must wade through the shit to get to the water.

In the end there's just me here, my arms and legs all tangled up as I position myself over this book, and while I am here and now and All the pigeons in the tree above me are lined up preening pecking playing mating games and neither know nor give a shit about the pale monkeyboy with the curly hair who keeps his water wrapped in plastic. And the bugs continue sucking my blood. And the air flows in and out like rivers. And a hunger groans in my stomach reminding me that no, this isn't all a dream. My pulse beats like a steady drum. My mind, is nothing but a pool of chemicals conducting electricity. Thought-machine. Lifebot. ALIVE.

YOU ARE ALIVE!