Niagara

"And yesterday I saw you standing by the river,
And weren't those tears that filled your eyes?
And all the fish that lay in dirty water dying,
Had they got you hypnotized?"

-- Led Zeppelin, "That's the Way"

--

In a Quality Inn near Niagara Falls. I've never been here before. As we crossed a bridge from one pod of New York vegetation to the next, a big blue spider spanning a big blue river, we could look to the west and see the spray above the trees.

Passed Buffalo, too, and guessed at stadium types before seeing the dead cavernous shell of a stadium in ruins, the antique pomp of Rome mixed with the industrial horror of Oklahoma City, a gaping monument apparently under destruction. I don't know what stadium it is. It looked like what might remain if someone set fire to the whole shebang, and the seats were still in rows up the one side still standing, a nonexistent audience watching cars drive by.

--

The area is strangely mute for New York. At least, compared to what I remember of the few times I've been to the state. Because I'm reading McCarthy, I want to imagine what it was and what it will be, after and before men and gods have ruled the tainted land, all in favor of desperation and violence; nevertheless, the hotels and shopping centers lie before me, telling stories of people who spend and are satisfied and nary a drop of anything is spilled. The grit described in the books turns to specks and clouds of dirt grinding up my gears, spoiling rugged joints and cranking shreds and etching jagged gashes onto my conical constructions, so many straightened steeples. The red sun overflows the horizon rim and spills over flooding the filled junkyard with hazards unimaginable, veined imps dying in the dawning revolution, with its students and conscientious favorers and indifferent spectators.

All this goes to say, I see what I don't. The leaps made in fiction are hard to refrain from in reality.

--

Drank a whole bottle of Chateau St. John, their 2007 Cabernet Sauvingnon. In the litany of clowns were Gaffigan, Martin, Cook, Hedberg, and some chick ranting about medi/pedis.

I long to return to the beat way of talk, the ancient beebop of speech. Two summers ago, while reading On the Road, it spat off like saliva forgotten in the dusty air, but now, it takes some conjuring. Even with a muse like the waterfall that splits the states from Canada.

--

Tomorrow, as I've said, is a blank slate borne from confusion, a world within a world of the same shade. I seek to fill it with the things I seek: with words and books and sleeping in parks.