Opera

"Now they are
child stars
child stars
child stars
child stars
child stars
child stars
child stars
child stars
child stars
child stars
child stars..."

-- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood"

--

Taught two workshops this morning (second group was older, better, more suited to games and the ensuing calm), an hour both ways, in the deep woods east from Cincinnati. Apparently we passed George Clooney's house along the way. The creep. Figures he would live on the Ohio River.

The kids who wear the crappiest clothes will surprise you most. The one with the solemn looks, too. If you just pay them a little attention, they flick the switch back to ON and you realize that they didn't mean for the room to stay so dark; they just dared to ask the question, Why turn the light on if no one's around anyway?

So it was good.

--

Lunched with the office staff at a quaint rich condo, up in the Kentucky hills facing the city skyscrapers. Nature's answer to nurture.

There was a harp by the deck and huge windows and we could see the whole city skyline and also some of the shoreline, such as it is. The spinach salad with cranberries and vinaigrette was good, as were the tiny chocolate thimble cups of pudding. I couldn't help but feel out of place, with my casual work shirt, unironed khaki pants and loafers, not to mention my early-twenties-ness.

But it was good anyway.

Turns out, our hostess saw one of my performances in the traveling group. Said she enjoyed it. I can remember the day she showed up and asked if my boss was around. I thought that weird. Little did I know that within two months I would be asking her how she makes her delicious Asian slaw.

--

Got back to the office and had thirty emails from parents wanting to schedule auditions. About two dozen more came in while I was responding to the initial thirty. All of them, the best child performers I will ever see, or hear about. They have all received standing ovations at school functions. They have all taken classes. They all believe this is something they want to do, now, at the ripe old age of...nine.

Some highlights from these:
- A father says his daughter is an athlete and she's willing to abandon her teams for a role on stage. Says she wants to audition. Says, too, that he thinks it's "a long shot, anyway," but is willing to patronize--er, support--her in her new desires.
- A mother says her daughter will come to the audition, but will not sing. She can't sing in front of people. Says it makes her nervous.
- A mother asks if I can recommend some dance/singing/acting instructors in the area. Told her I just moved here myself, really. Also referred her to the phonebook.

--

While dropping a major deuce, I picked up a copy of Forbes, their "Culture Edition." It had a Van Gogh on the cover and many stories about art and how rich folks own most of it. Theatre didn't make the cut, though: They hit paintings, sculptures, and all the rest of the tangibles.

Opera made it. They talked about this really humble mezzo and how she sings at these ritzy dinner parties in front of black grand pianos and talks about being from Kansas before singing "Over the Rainbow."

But theatre and dance--na-ah. It's coming down, folks. It's coming down.

--

Going to the opera tonight. Seeing a dress rehearsal of The Marriage of Figaro, which I've only seen spoofed.

And that one part of Amadeus.

Recently also got a call-back from the same company, asking me to play a Spanish matador in the background for act four of Carmen. The billboards for the show say, "Make it your first opera." It was, almost. I can't make the rehearsals and half of the performances, but gosh darn it, it was nice to be asked.

This one will be fun, I'm sure. I just hope they can sing faster.

"Every game ever invented by mankind is a way of making things hard for the fun of it. The great fun, of course, is in making the hard look easy."

-- John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

--

Found an old volume at the library, a jacketed hardcover edition of the above-quoted book, a favorite of Dr. Reist's. Sometimes, going through the text, I feel like I have heard all this before, and that instead of continuing on I merely need to recall a portly old man in sleeve garters offending us all. Scrawled Greek on the chalkboard, or crude etchings, prayerful obscenities.

I really miss those classes.

I sometimes consider going back to school, not for the degree or job security but for the fun of it. There was fun in the playpen, if I remember rightly. And what are my occupation's studies, the things I learn for work, if not the same pen games but with less lofty and more frivolous ends?

--

Ciardi suggests that we abandon the easy question, "What does a poem mean?" and substitute for it the difficult one, "How does a poem mean?" It is not a finding of meaning but an understanding of how meaning works, how the pieces fit together a certain way, and why they do not fit together in a different certain way, or in an uncertain way altogether.

Anyways: old hat for English readers, I'm sure, especially from Hillsdale. Still, Ciardi's analysis of Frost, Carroll and (so far) some old lyrical ballads returns me to my studies, and not just of poetry.

--

So, for life:

Alas, the Tony Awards are on television tonight, and we've been invited to a friend's apartment for it. The birth of dinner parties. I used to watch and read plays about couples preparing to go to a party or a dinner with friends and hating the preparation, hating the others there. And I always wondered why those couples kept going to these things if they didn't like doing it.

Or, put another way, if you weren't going to watch the Tony Awards until you were invited to do so, why are you doing it?

I'm learning.

--

I noticed today how many different bird calls I can hear from my apartment. Maybe it's because I'm up three levels. Elevated to the canopy deck, the sounds of the streets are far away and the sounds of the sky are close at hand: planes sometimes rattle my walls, the wind makes something in the kitchen creak, and birds twitter just outside the windows.

The other night, I took a book out to the fire escape outside the bathroom window. I brought a flashlight because it was dark and a cigarette because I found it. As I smoked and tried to read, a bat flew past my face and my whole body flinched and I hooted in dumb surprise and the thing came back for another go.

And yesterday, smoking another cigarette I found (the remains of a lost habit), I sat on the porch and read. Bees kept pestering me and finally I looked up. There stood a tree, ten feet from the porch, its wide branches petering out to thin twigs and frail leaves. And at the very tips, golden flowers like balls of pixie dust, hundreds of them posted throughout the tree, and some of them caught the sunshine and made a half-halo around the silhouette, and bees latched onto these dust balls and festooned themselves with pollen and flew away. At least thirty bees that I could see, a score and a half of little black and yellow angels sucking on heavenly nectar.

--

Those bees make it all look easy, their interpretive dances and free flight. It means that everything will be okay.

How does it mean that?

D-Day

"I always liked to hear about the old timers. Never missed a chance to do so."

-- Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

--

Friday night last night and my girlfriend was out of town.

I was running late on my way to the Esquire, the indie cinema a little south of the University. The move theater is on Ludlow, a Bohemian sector with an Indian sensibility, a place where you can see an indie flick, grab some high-quality Indian food, and walk into a shop whose windows are plastered with reminders that Americans killed Indians by the thousands. The Esquire's rustic marquee fits in perfectly. Clean-cut freshman students as well as loving old couples walk along this strip with equal pleasure. The students chatter and the old folks walk stroll in silence.

I parked three blocks away with two minutes to go and ran across a bank parking lot. Seems odd, running to stay on schedule with oneself. I wasn't meeting anyone there, but I ran anyway.

A five-person queue at the box office and I panted a little while I fished out my expired student ID and seven bucks. (Student discount is four bucks and Hillsdale doesn't put expiration dates on cards.) It was seven o'clock exactly, and I was about to be late.

When it was my turn, I stepped up. "One student ticket for Harvard Beats Yale 29-29."

--

Got past the concession lines for the 7:15 feature and made my way around drab-colored corners to the back of the theater, where the film was playing. As I walked in, I heard an old man's voice and thought, Shoot, it's started already. I even missed the previews. In I went and stood for a second, transfixed, confused, before I darted to the nearest chair and sat.

An old man in a dark blue blazer and tie with a gold pin in it stood in the center aisle, his hands on the two seats on either side of him. He leaned forward as he spoke. Scattered throughout the other seats sat three elderly couples, the men on the left, the women on the right with their arms gently resting in the crooks of their husbands' elbows.

I was the only person there under age 60.

The old man spoke and no movie showed on the dark screen behind him. "It was a tumultuous time," he said, a rough, huffy voice that surely once could scream but now was reduced to the low rumble of storms that had come, gone, and passed. "We all remember seeing Martin Luther King on TV; he was assassinated that year. In 1968. And I'll never forget where I was when I heard Bobby Kennedy was shot. Cleaning dishes at work, and one of the girl waiters came back into the kitchen and just yelled it out, 'Bobby Kennedy's just been shot!' And down in Miami and up in Chicago were the riots. So the nation was in confusion, all of us wondering where we stood on all these issues. But."

He looked behind him as if to make sure the movie screen was still there. "But at least at Hahvid, the one thing we all agreed on...was football." Some of the old timers and their wives chuckled at this. "Yale, too, from what I understand. We could all disagree on all these social, uh, political issues, but what did it matter when your quarterback was scrambling on the field? Nothing. Didn't matter. All you cared about--all you could care about--was the game. Always the game. This game in particular."

--

He talked for another twenty minutes and no one minded. He summarized the game upon which the documentary is based, and they seemed to know the story, anyway. I, who didn't know the story and wasn't there for the game--I, the only one in that place who didn't--listened, fascinated. It was like I had walked in on a private viewing for the Yale and Hahvid alums in Cincinnati.

After he finished, he sat, and the film began. It was surprising how low-budget and amateurish, frankly, the movie quality was, but it had the same nostalgic effect my own home videos have on me. Even though it's poor quality, at times embarrassingly so, the stories, the happenings on the weathered faces, the stories within the story, all work a sort of power over me. I get the feeling that I could have watched that movie forever, just listening to story after story.

Poets at open-mic nights say they are perpetuating the oral tradition of Homer. They slam their politics and anguish down while others sip coffee and snap. The young instructing the young.

That's not the oral tradition. This was. The old timers recalling names and information and history and making it all personal. Saying I-was-there, and this-meant-this. Amazing, that some of the men in the film looked so sad but could get so happy remembering the game, as if the last forty years of their lives had not lived up to that day, that in four decades nothing so miraculous as a lucky fumble had ever occurred. You can look right through the folds and wrinkles on the skin of their faces and see youngsters goofing off in old yearbooks, hear the jokes they told. The games they played and the legends they made.

George W. Bush getting arrested for leading the charge to tear down goal posts. Mythical quarterback names and sideline exchanges. Untimely injuries and the regret that followed--one man, confessing that he took So-and-So out of the game on purpose and tearing up from aged guilt. About a football game, all of it, just about a football game. But with sages and socrateses like these, no wonder a sports documentary can wax philosophical.

And Tommy Lee Jones among them. Talking about his Hahvid roommate, Al Gore, playing with brand-new touch-tone telephones. And Jones, just having done a film about the passing of time, the loosened grip of the old timers.

--

Today is D-Day and my girlfriend is still out of town.

At risk of sounding like a prosaic patriot, I have to write a simple thank-you to the old timers. We wouldn't be there without them.

Patrons

"His skin was pale and his eye was odd."

-- Sweeney Todd, by Stephen Sondheim

--

I'm sitting in a library lobby, facing the front doors. To my left, the stairs up to the children's room. To my right, an overweight, sour-faced, short-haired library policeman, at his own desk, labeled, "POLICE." Above me, some windowpanes and behind the greasy glass, the backs of computer towers. Behind me, an old man reads The Encyclopedia of Superheroes and looks up from his reading and squints at me and his eyes linger.

There's a book on display at the table before me. The Adventures of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.

Beside it, a beach chair and umbrella (slices of blue, pink, gold and lime green) with an easel. On the wall adjacent, a black poster with bold white letters: BOOKS WITH BITE. There are bite marks in the corner of the second B, both the O's, so they look like partially covered boobs, or damaged donuts. In the B's, the holes are filled in white, and they look like the ass of someone bending over, seen from the top.

A woman dressed for the cold--thick, Nepalese coat, hat, long yellow scarf--huddles over the pile of books she carries. A boy with shaggy hair murmurs to me and drags away the chair to my left.

And the librarian at the front desk has a voice for the three-card monty and laughs like Philip Seymour Hoffman.

--

Meandering among all of this like a beast in a labyrinth, a young man swaggers. His arms swing wide. He moans from somewhere inside, like cries for help heard in a cave. The noise is noxious above the whispers, typing and data machines whirring. He limps and loses the limp.

He tosses his hair and shakes his head, fending off invisible flies.

He passes the policeman's desk and clicks his heels and snaps his arm in a sharp Nazi salute. The policeman eyes him with caution.

The young man laughs and it is like a gurgle. He goes upstairs to the children's level, and I do not see him again.

--

A dude in a black band T-shirt drops a penny on the brick floor, bends, and picks it up.

Another hugs the shelf of DVDs, one arm around the side, the other fondling the plastic cases.

A mother reads an application form to her teenager, who lays his head on the table, one ear up, one ear down.

--

A priest stands at the copy machine, dropping dimes in the vending machine attached, copying birth certificates, death certificates. He looks about him at the patrons, and he keeps a middle finger on the copier lid, pressing down. The pile of trifolded documents grows on the policeman's desk, and the fat man in uniform doesn't seem to notice. He is typing. The priest eyes him with caution and hits the green button. He stuffs the copies in a big brown envelope and rocks on his feet, left, right, left. The policeman clears his throat and looks at the priest. The clergyman bends to the change dispenser and the coins slide and clink as he fingers them out. As he leaves the library, he steps into the sun and puts on sunglasses. He looks both ways, and disappears.

Pronunciations

"See the child."

-- First line of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

--

Last day of ArtReach today. We lie sequestered on the gymnasium floor, sleeping behind our backdrop while children stretch out for gym on the other side. We hear their chants: "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten--"

It is rainy and humid and the gym doors are both open to help the air flow.

A teacher just came back and handed me a paper-clipped bundle of thank-you letters from the kids who saw this morning's show. Their innocent appreciation is the best: crayon markings outside of lines, a slight feeling of wax to the touch and a heavier sheet of paper, their names scrawled between scribbles. Pencils and crayons. Magic wands.

--

I don't know. I always expect some feeling of finality, a just assessment of the past as it culminates in this day of threshold-crossing, the sense that this transition is happening to someone else. I expect that out-of-body feeling, that sensitivity to moments.

I don't feel that. I feel like I have been sitting in an uncomfortable chair for far too long, watching the same movie. The thought of taking the van back to the office is chorish, not cathartic. It's just the next thing. I'm glad to move on, but I don't feel like I'm moving on at all.

I don't mind.

--

I may be hired also by an accounting firm downtown. As a secretary/accountant, I guess. They have me learning QuickBooks 2009 right now.

If I can land a part-time arrangement with them, I can make serious bank. The next few months could drastically improve my financial sitch. So, I am back in college mode, reading the books and watching online tutorials. Maybe I'll even call an accountant friend or two for tips. Basically, as long as I perform well at the interview and show that I can use the program--or learn quickly how to use it--I've got the job. Another steady job.

Sometimes, life needs legitimacy.

--

Went to a Catholic workshop last night. Had to; in order to lead workshops at Catholic schools, I am required to go through this course. I expected a lot of Do's and Don't's of teaching privately-schooled kids, but it turned out to be a discussion of two short videos about sexual abuse.

Of children. It was rough.

I watched the videos and got distracted by the horrible overacting. It was shot like a documentary but the actors seemed so overwrought, so insincere. It was awkward, because they were talking about such sensitive stuff. Then I learned that only one of the people in the films was a paid actor. They were all really the folks who went through all that, and they were asked to write their own experiences out, memorize them as lines, and recite them as dramatically as they could for the camera. Therapy meets Catholic cinema. Like I said, it was rough.

The facilitator of the event was a nun in plain clothes (mom jeans and a flannel shirt) who pronounced "question" with a kind of grinding slur, so that it sounded--ironically enough--like the word "Christian."

Question. Christian.

--

Sometimes, life needs pronunciation.

Bravado

"It's in our nature."

-- José González

--

I didn't know José González was from Sweden. He's also got a PhD in the works, suspended on account of his music fame. Thus spake Wikipedia.

Last time I listened to the Argentinian Swede, I was on a friend's couch in Lexington, KY, listening to the acoustic passion and trying to figure out how many more days--at minimum--I had to stay in Cincinnati. I felt tethered to the city by a flimsy wire, a contract I'd signed halfway through my last semester because I was a little desperate to show off that I could get a real acting job right out of college. False bravado, an opening gambit of knights before pawns, of buying property before passing Go. The visit to Lexington was a brief reprieve, and I had to be back the next day, but there were eight or so Strongbows between the drive and sleep and me, and so, with little regard for musicians let alone geniuses, as I watched my friend flick and float her hands to the music, I simply nodded and pretended that I, too, had a direct pipeline to God.

The things we do. Now that I've found his CD anew, oddly wedged between "Popular" and "Alt. Rock" at the local library, and now that I've listened to it again, I genuinely dig it.

--

In a related case, another friend told me about this band, Eagles of Death Metal, and their awesomely-titled album, Death by Sexy. I nodded that time, too, maybe even winked at someone else at the table and shrugged. History repeats itself; humans make themselves creatures of habit; habits revisit unkempt haunts.

I listened to that album all day today and I like it, too. I've even recommended it to my sister. Borrowed suggestions are best, like referenced advice.

--

I once stood in front of a group of people and toasted the idea of being ourselves, and not preparing faces to meet the faces that we meet. This was after a girl toasted the same group, pretending to know all of us in some way. I was a little drunk. I thought I was being noble, devoted to this idea of honesty and rawness, like a painted masterpiece proud of its scar.

But here I am, importing songs into my library as if it were my idea. Passing on borrowed knowledge. The things we do.

After that toast, I bided time and treaded inside water for about ten minutes before I excused myself from that fancy feast and ran to rehearsal, around the corner and down a block. I was directing, and I had to pee before I got to the room. I was late. I sat on the couch with five friends and one stranger, all peeved, and tortured them with their own words for an hour before apologizing and sending everyone away. I sat there. There is a mirror in that green room, and I looked at myself in it. I was still wearing nice clothes and I smelled like alcohol and I wondered what the hell I was going to do after I left this covered hovel of a college.

--

Tomorrow, I go back to an office job. I get my own cubicle, as I've said before. And there is a fridge and a coffee pot with accustomed customers, and I will join their ranks and try to keep my head low, below the partitions that separate our stations. Rumors abound. Backs are bitten by unknown nouns, formless serpents, invisible jaws. Microcosmic conflicts, little patches of turf so ruggedly defended, all admist the whir of quiet machines and under the watchful eye of nonseeing puppets and dragons on posters. I go to the other side of the desk.

I become the desk, in fact.

The last office job I had afforded me many minutes for leisurely blogging and tremendous thumb-twiddling practice sessions. Sometimes a bathroom break to stave off the boredom, and while I sat on the toilet lid with my pants up I could stare out the marbled window and imagine sleeping in a park, or sinking my bare feet into cold lake water. I go back to that bathroom tomorrow.

I don't exactly know what I'll be doing tomorrow for five hours, other than nodding and pretending to love the bureaucracy, but the not-knowing almost suits me more than the need to know. Tell me tomorrow. For now, let me nod and sleep.

Quietude

"Being drunk on their plan,
They lifted up the Sun.
A spoonful weighs a ton."

-- The Flaming Lips, "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton"

--

Geekin out right now. The Alan Parsons Project released an albumin 1976 devoted to Edgar Allan Poe. It's called (aptly), "Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe." Orson Welles narrates on the opening track, and there's a five-movement symphony for "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Turns out, it was their debut album. Clever start.

--

Watched Up last night and experienced something new.

For a performer, silence after a winning moment can be a great compliment--some say, the greatest after a standing ovation. But a moment of complete, tense silence is rare in the theatre, let alone the movie theatre.

And even rarer if it occurs in the presence of children. Children make noise.

Yet last night, in a family filled with popcorn-chompers and their parents, there were several amazing moments of quiet, epochs of noiseless wonder as big-eyed kids froze in their squeaky seats. It happened at least three times. It was stunning.

--

Years later than everyone else (it seems), I've taken up with sudoku. Tried it on a whim when I saw it on the back of a newspaper in a hotel, and it had me going for a good half hour. I was dumb enough to use a pen: black splotches in tiny boxes, and somewhere in the blindness, numbers.

Bought my first book last night. Seven bucks for a hundred puzzles.

--

Got into my cubicle yesterday. It's bare and slightly stocked with leftovers from its prior tenant, so many plaster casts and ugly grooves roughed into the desk. Tinkered with the computer, slow going; I suspect it has gone un-defragged for years. It was on when I got to it, idling where it sat. And the phone was on a shelf.

My phone. I have my own office phone. That's a first.

For all the cons about the cube, there are of course plusses: It is the largest space in the Children's Theatre office. It used to be the workstation of the guy who made the puppets and plastic armor (hence the plaster casts on the top shelf, hence the grooves). He needed the space for his projects, and I need it for, I don't know, naps or something. Right beside the copy area and on the other side a wall, so it is secluded. No strange knockings on the fabric dividers, those gray hedges.

As of Monday, I can formally declare my new job titles: Tour Coordinator and Arts Integration Specialist for the touring division of the Children's Theatre.

--

And I have a car now. Drove to Indianapolis this morning to retrieve it from a transmission servicer's lot. Two hours both ways for the '03 Neon that I'm thinking about naming Stella.

It shakes a little when it idles, more so in reverse. But it rides, a powerful golden coaster in the early-morning sunshine, chasing eastward at its origin. And the stereo delivers. As I drove up my street to the city, it seemed a grand amber entrance, me beating every impending yellow for fifteen solid blocks, lights flicking to red as the car passed beneath, missing maledictions. This may sound silly, but it was a rush at thirty miles per hour.

I loved the smell of car in the morning. Smelled like...freedom.

Hooflet

"Our boots was cut to pieces. Clamberin over those old caved and rimpled plates you could see well enough how things had gone in that place, rocks melted and set up all wrinkled like a pudding, the earth stove through to the molten core of her. Where for aught any man knows lies the locality of hell. For the earth is a globe in the void and truth there's no up nor down to it and there's men in this company besides myself seen little cloven hoofprints in the stone clever as a little doe in her going but what litte doe ever trod melted rock? I'd not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. Aye. It's a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other. And somethin put them little hooflet markings in the lava flow for I seen them there myself."

-- the expriest in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

--

The above passage met me today and knocked me over as I sat. Chapter ten of Blood Meridian might be the best thing I've read in months. Maybe years.

For those who have read it: Isn't that image of the judge doling out killing powder as the Indians ascend, and the caballeros/matadors lined up, "circlin past him like communicants," perfect? Just perfect. After he inverts the Inferno, McCarthy gives us a lapsed man of God who took gunpowder from a demonic white man--the antithesis of communion.

On the rim of seeming hell, no less. And after this littele ceremony, death to the red men. Brilliant.

--

Was supposed to be the last day of the tour today.

Supposedly.

Falls

“I was disappointed in Niagara--most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.”

-- Oscar Wilde

--

Was not disappointed in Niagara. Took a total of five photos for foreigners, all of them pointing excited at the picture-taking button. One man wanted it zoomed in and I cranked the nozzle of the lens (don't know the technical term) and retook it and he liked it and thanked me.

Took a total of 287 pictures for myself, and forty-two videos. Few of them contain people. Mostly it's the falls themselves, the water falling in unending rushes like heavy eternal curtains that rumble the earth rather than float in the breeze.

They say the falls recede a half-inch every year, and that 20,000 years ago it was several hundred feet downstream. In 1969 the US Army diverted the river to the Canadian side because the "racks" beneath the "wooter" were eroded and unstable. They literally dried up Niagara. I got the story from a man who has walked the park and loved the falls his whole life, a funny thin old man with a wispy white combover who was trying to explain to an Arabic family what a "refreshment shanty" was and why they would have built some on the cliff.

Another cool old guy from the trip: A crisply bearded sage stood beside me on the boat and wind blew our blue ponchos and he stared hard into the wind with squinted eyelids and looked like a fisherman brazen, defiant, against an ocean gale. He gripped the railing with hands that have known water. His hair blew back from his rough face, but it did not fly and his beard was like the crest of a wave frozen in time.

--

The first woman to go over the falls in a barrel did so for fame and fortune. She ended up fairly famous, but died poor: To avoid starving, she had to sell the barrel on the streets of New York. I don't remember her name. She was wickedly mad when they sawed her out of the wooden hovel, mumbling things and chattering with hypothermia, and she had a bruise on her forehead.

I'm sort of at a loss, too, after seeing this wonder of the world, but not for words. After all, I'm writing right now. I feel at a loss for something else. Romantic idyllic idealization, perhaps, or the greedy traveler's awe.

--

Two last things that struck me.

One: They have black squirrels in Niagara Falls, of the same ilk as southern Michigan. There was a wooden plaque that explained their color and intimidating demeanor.

Two: On one of the nature trails lining the river, I saw a three-foot-tall dandelion. The stem no thicker than a pencil, it had surpassed grass and an iron rail beside the path. Biggest fucking dandelion I've ever seen, man.

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.

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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.