diisalitervisum

[diisalitervisum]

“So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.”

I can remember the heat of the summer and the recycled scrubbed air of the old (and atypically outdated) minivan with kat as we stopped off the new york interstate turnpike at a mcdonalds which I could've sworn I had been to before (past life genetic memory rendered subconscious fast food propaganda, why spend money on commercials when they could do it with deja vu) and ordering a big mac and fries and kat was so pretty even then and she was worried because I was spiraling into myself, an atavism of paranoia and dread and disgust and shame and if only she could've understood but she tried to-- story of my life, women not understanding but appreciating they don't understand and being attracted to the obscure silhouette which they construe to whatever fantasy hardboiled phillip marlowe mystery man they desired. I sincerely question how many women I've loved have loved me and not what they decided I was to be, present memory included. Your ipod whirred warm, small file repository converting left brain melody and right brain rhythm from a series of zeroes and ones, silicon vinyl summoned by a crate-digging finger flick. Talk was sparse and you got angry after we had arrived at the cabin, you took it personally that I was being quiet. The wood, exuding a too-perfect mass produced approximation of cabin scent, reminded me of what I imagined freshly printed money to smell like (not too far from the truth) and the air really was cleaner up there. An ethereal plane; the all-encompassing bed of dead pine needles rusted ochre and the patches of moss and the way you'd lose your breath climbing up the steep incline towards the cabin from the lake and the bleached-bone deer skeleton which is still there, ivory skull grinning into nothingness, stirring a shiver down your spine if you looked for too long. The lake, serene and diaphanous, murk populated by ancient fish and waterweed phalanges which would tentatively coil around your ankle when you least expected it, causing your skin to crawl and inducing goose-pimples if you didn't have them already because of the water's temperature that cut you to your hollow and cleansed your soul, coercive. The way the midday sun would radiate into the weathered boards of the small dock and the sound of the lake caressing the boatside in arrhythmic metronome. The sunset fox-and-phoenix fire bathing the coniferous audience, stoic and knowing, acknowledging the death of another day and at peace. The stars, brilliant as a hundred years ago, luminescent pollock dollop of the gods, and the vegetative chill which facilitated hoodies and sweatshirts, sweatpants and jeans, told your parents we were stargazing and went to the dock and you hitched down your leggings and we made love like we never had before- quick, feral, mutually selfish. The flies that plagued us at dinner at the old hotel and the way your father made aloof contributions and your mother, ever the impassioned orator, asking about my meal and my major and my favorite books. Your sister's innocent insanity, envy-inducing and I hope she never loses that madness even if she only gets to stretch it in the company of her kin. Local boys hit on her and I pretended she was my girlfriend, sent careening back to their pegs and greased chains hooting and howling like a backwater pack of coyotes. We took a long walk around while your parents shared dessert and cocktails and I treated the two of you to ice cream at that strange little place around the corner. It was all so quaint and out of the way, the mountainside that time forgot. I remember playing poker and after several losing hands I won it all back, beating everyone, much to your father's chagrin, by a bold bluff which I can only attribute to beginner's naivete. Phil's innocent love for you and him getting too high while you huffed and puffed on your high horse and wondered aloud why I had to smoke to have a good time- but I don't, I said. It's just something I like to do, like your tanning, which you thought essential to your beauty, or covering up your infinitesimally asymmetric breasts, but what sets you apart is what makes you beautiful. What is beautiful is what most approximates the divine. That look of concern with your lips pouted and your brow knitted lightly, your father's eyebrows that you disdain carefully cut into a socially-acceptable feminine form. Your father's hairline, too- strange and square, jutting up your forehead- I wonder if you'll bald? I hope not, you'd never be able to handle it. Not now, anyway. Coming back from being with phil and you on the dock up to the fire your father had built and he was a few beers deep and grinning from ear to ear, wolfen, sizing me up with a calculating eye and holding sparse and idle palaver. Phil couldn't say much of anything but I covered for him. I remember going out on the kayak one morning and being in awe of the magnitude of the lake, the sublime intrinsic terra incognita, but having to cut back into the wind to return to the cove where your dock was and getting a decidedly intense workout, tacking without a sail. The first night when the sun was setting, riding in your father's gorgeous boat, your mother perched like some greek goddess, phil stumbling about, you and I holding hands and exchanging glances while jules tried to document as much as she could with her camera. The waterfall- how could I forget? That gorgeous park we went to together, lichen and moss and rocks and the churn of freshwater flowing and leaping from rock to rock and that goddamn picture jules snapped which I would hate (bodily self-disgust) were it not for the way you were looking at me, like you loved me, like I was something worth loving. And jules and you tanning on the dock while I read the tao te ching in the boat bobbing slightly, or those fucking embarrassing night terrors I had, subconscious digital yell into the visceral bandwidth of night, or the way you and jules fought like little girls and I knew then that you were younger than I thought. Or that bene gesserit bullshit monotone report voice you'd slip into when addressing your parents, the "um, well- (insert diatribe here)" which drove me insane because of how fake it was and how your parents didn't see straight through it. Or buying those horrible sweaters with you, or shopping in that old, poorly-lit and basement-cool gift shop with you and your sister. Or holding your hand, you always wanted to hold hands. And the ride home wasn't so bad even though jules put up a fuss to come with us but I wanted another chance to show you that I wasn't a hollow dissociated emotional mess all the time but your father's word prevailed (even though he didn't challenge me the night before when jules and I were debating and she lost her cool- J: "But if you just listen I want to come to a compromise--" T: "There is no 'compromise'- either you're coming with us or you're not. And you're not." J: (cue tears) "Why don't you just please listen to me?" T: "you're pretty good at fake crying." J: (tears ceasing immediately, eyes narrowing) "I hate you.") and I acceded to it because deference is the better part of honor and driving the whole way, left hand on the steering wheel, gunning it to make time, riding bumpers to scare drivers out of the way, listening to you sing and jules complain about the music choice and those sidelong smile-glances we'd share wherein one of us would ask "what?" through a grin, not expecting an answer. And upon arriving back your sister went for a run and we made love on your living room floor just in time for me to go to close the bakery, and you even showed up that night, as if you still couldn't get enough of being with me despite the previous three days in appalachian paradise, I didn't understand and I still don't.

2011, recalling 3 days in late july/early august 2010.

[diisalitervisum]

Влюблённостьь

Vadim Vadimovich

We forget-- or rather tend to forget-- that being in love

does not depend on the facial angle of the loved one,

but is a bottomless spot under the nenuphars,

a swimmer’s panic.

While the dreaming is good-- in the sense of “while the going is good”--

do keep appearing to us in our dreams, beings in love,

but do not torment us by waking us up or telling too much:

reticence is better than that chink and that moonbeam.

I remind you that being in love is not wide-awake reality,

that the markings are not the same

(a moon-striped ceiling is, for instance, not

the same kind of reality as a ceiling by day)

and that, maybe, the hereafter stands

slightly ajar in the dark.

[diisalitervisum]

I love the quiet of the night-time, when the sun is drowned in a deathly sea. I can feel my heart beating as I speed from the sense of time catching up with me.

“I Remember”

Feeling the past moving in Letting a new day begin Hold to the time that you know You don't have to move on to let go

Add to the memory you keep Remember when you fall asleep Hold to the love that you know You don't have to give up to let go

Remember turning on the night And moving through the morning light Remember how it was with you Remember how you pulled me through

I remember, I remember I remember, I remember I remember, I remember I remember, I remember

Feeling the past moving in Letting a new day begin Hold to the time that you know You don't have to move on to let go

Add to the memory you keep Remember when you fall asleep Hold to the love that you know You don't have to give up to let go

Remember how it was with you Remember how it was with you

I remember.

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“She was not really reading, but nervously, angrily, absently flipping through the pages of what happened to be that old anthology--she who at any time, if she picked up a book, would at once get engrossed in whatever text she happened to slip into "from the book's brink" with the natural movement of a water creature put back into its brook.”

I remember walking into work one day, book in hand, and there was k nose-deep in harry potter and sitting beside the large hardwood island used for bakery prep. I don't know which HP it was, but I remember the stare I received when I introduced myself. there were no customers, so I pulled up a chair to the other side of the wood island and dove into stephen king's it. She left at some point thereafter, and the next day when I came into close she was there again, same book, same place: yet she was wearing a shirt with the sleeves cuffed like mine.

I remember at one point we were helping a customer together and I noticed that the back of one of her cuffs was coming undone and I fixed it for her. I will always recall the resulting red that bloomed in her cheeks.  

[diisalitervisum]

drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead

They Come

Ha Jin

Sometimes when you’re walking in the street, returning home or leaving to see a friend, they come. They emerge from behind pillars and trees, approaching you like a pack of hounds besieging a deer. You know there’s no use to hide or flee, so you stop and light a cigarette, waiting for them.

Sometimes when you’re eating in a restaurant, your soup served and your dish not ready yet, they come. A steady hand falls upon your shoulder.

You are familiar with such a hand

and don’t need to turn around to meet the face. The scared diners are sneaking out, the waitress’s chin is trembling when she speaks, but you sit there, waiting patiently for the bill. After settling it, you’ll walk out with them.

Sometimes when you open your office, planning to finish an article in three hours, or read a review, but first make some tea, they come. They spring out from behind the door, like ghosts welcoming a child to their lair. You don’t want to enter, seeing cups and paper on the floor. You’re figuring how to send a message home.

Sometimes when you have worked day and night, dog tired, desiring to have a good sleep after taking a shower and an extra nightcap, they come. They change the color of your dream: you moan for the wounds on your body, you weep for the fates of others, only now dare you fight back with your hands. But a “bang” or an “ouch” brings you back to silence and sleeplessness again.

See, they come.

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But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous gloom and winding mossy ways.

Insomnia's mean verse: the surface tension of the past is weakest before sleep. It breaks often, and I go a little crazy: "In the dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning". I wonder who you are: if you're content, if you're happy, if you're facing the human condition like the rest of us and are struggling for either. Your tumblr remains as it has since I first saw it: a series of images in which are reflected your desires, your definitions of beauty, your half-laughs, your intellect (diffracted through stylized quotations), your upwellings of soul. Why did you start posting again? Why can't I sleep? I'll wake tomorrow and this light madness will fade as it always does, banished by the sun as vapor by the dawn: "The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself-- Yea, all which it inherit-- shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave now a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

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give that final good luck and good bye

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZE7OchG3DY

hey, thanks, bruce.

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I am elated- I am free; I feel our love with a benevolence known to slight eternities: the fossil of a seashell, the glint of sea glass, the moon's beams on the sea.

"three days later, they dug me out. I never saw(r) arthur again but I bet wherever he is gone he's having a damn good time."

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speak, mnemosyne

Like heating up an old hard-drive, my synapses begin to fire and portray an image of the bakery the likes of which haven't been reanimated in a long time. Memory is an exercise in imagination, the brain's reconstruction of images that aren't images-- you envision them in some form or fashion but they're never really projected unto any screen within. Divine! Warm. Warm as I see it now. Warmth. Those nights were warm. Balmy. I remember how she'd open up the store from seven thirty (or was it beforehand?) onwards and got off an hour after I usually got in, at three thirty. She'd stay longer if there were a lot of customers. During the week she'd often come back even after she had clocked out just to hang- she'd sip a drink and lean against the chromium counter in the back which housed, from left to right 1.) the CD player/music unit with the auxiliary cord for ipods 2.) next to the music unit were costco-bought drink receptacles, large ones- we'd fill one with tea we brewed and one with coffee and we'd open up the hatch on the stainless steel ice machine and scoop a plastic cup full (imsorrybutweonlyhaveonesize) and then pour a drinkfull. 3.) Next to those costco dispensers were white ceramic jars in which we kept utensils to give to patrons upon their request (or upon the administration of a bagel with a spread if they didn't want it to go). There were also two small white ceramic jars which we used to store single-serving packets of butter or cream cheese to compliment the bagels. 4.) a wooden cutting board right next to the small sink we'd use to wash our hands in the eyes of the public 5.) a paper tower dispenser above the sink, and napkins next to it on the edge of the counter-top unit. We charged three dollars for ice coffee, two for regular: your choice of light, dark, or decaf; sorry folks, no decaf iced. Those three hot coffee carafes were disgusting midway through the summer- Since the opening was so small we could (or rather, josephine could) never get in to scrub it clean of coffee scum every night after we poured them down the drain. Best we could do was rinse them with scalding water and let them dry upside-down. The creamer and the milk were kept in single-serving units on ice next to the coffee, and nobody seemed to notice that there was a trash bin RIGHT NEXT to the edge of the coffee counter. This lack of understanding resulted in customers  a.) throwing out their used single-serve packages back IN the holder they picked them out of or  b.) leaving them on the counter directly NEXT to the creamer/milk receptacles. Marvelous logic in action, really. (It should be noted that the receptacles which the creamer and milk were kept in were the same we used to melt chocolate baking fondant in the microwave for all manner of dipping- caramel pretzels, fleur de sel, caramel sushi, strawberries, caramel drop oreos, etc.-- they were also used for the planned dregs of caramel batches which would inevitably accrue in stacked formation on the white wooden shelving units above the chromium counter-top, slowing growing older)  Underneath the chromium counter-unit were storage bins upon storage bins, some stacked with cookies and cupcakes, others empty- all would usually be filled after we closed the store for the night. On the white wooden shelving units above were all manner of large mason jars filled with bakery related goods which we NEVER used and were only there to accent the shop. On the absolute left of the shelving unit, above the music player, were a series of six (or nine?) mason jars devoted to our coffee beans (fresh from the asbury roastery from a kind lesbian woman whom I'm pretty positive jack NEVER paid) labeled with either "light", "dark", or "decaf". Parallel but closer to the front of the store and in front of the recessed lighting was a blackboard sign that displayed prices which were never quite right.  Around back was the industrial sink, manned more often than not by crazy but well-meaning josephine who never seemed to come during day or opening shifts. (Now that I think about it, it was better that she came at night because by then the baking was done and she could prepare for the next day.) Three or four large refrigerators lined the wall directly behind the chromium countertop, and for the first two months of summer there was a horrid smell which reared and gained complexity and depth day by day until jack had all the madison marquette workers come through and give the whole thing a good scrub-down, wherein the problem was recognized to be emanating from the first fridge on your left when you passed through the aperture to the back-- some quantity of milk had spilled down into a catchpan on the bottom of the fridge and had been decomposing there for some time. The first fridge was filled with dairy products of sorts and the single-serving packages we gave out to customers- butters, milks, etc. The second was filled with random things- now that I think about it, there were two fridges and two freezers. The second fridge had cupcakes and cakes and things of that nature in it- the third unit down, the first freezer, housed all manner of forgotten frozen things, among which were frozen ravioli and vegetables bought by jack for his consumption at home.  The first freezer I used for cooling down my batches of caramel/ the solidification of the products I made with the caramel. The last unit/second freezer I never opened with any regularity: it merely existed. I think it was partially obstructed by the presence of one of the giant steel drying racks which housed all the equipment we used- the one perpendicular to the last freezer was for things that had dried, the one perpendicular to that one was next to the sinks and held all the newly washed pots, pans, and baking utensils. This back room had red tile, I think. The industrial sink had three sections, the leftmost of which was supposed to be used strictly for sanitizing things- we had a vitamin-sized plastic jar with a twist-off top that housed the sanitizing tablets. I recall coming into some trouble regarding the strength or use of those tablets when the health inspector came through. There was one huge swinging faucet head, and a runoff sprayer on a spring. To the right of the sinks was an industrial kitchen-aid for making big batches of cookies and the like; I remember more than a few times having to either lock it into place or take it down for her while she was using it.  To the right of the kitchen-aid was another chromium countertop/shelving unit, which housed ALL sorts of things we used in baking... Underneath this were three plastic bins on rollers- one with flour, one with powdered sugar, and one with granular sugar. I can't even begin to recall the amount of things we had on there- Food coloring, extracts (one or two large peppermint extract cans), A dubious half-depleted bottle of kahlua, knives, spatulas, spoons, whisks, etc etc.... Next to this was a "sexy firemen" calender (undoubtedly a jack purchase) and a small bulletin board of random things. The ovens were next to this, just out of the doorless aperture. The one on top was used for baking, and the one on bottom was kept at a steady 500 degrees Fahrenheit for toasting bagels within a matter of seconds. A huge vent unit was above this. Next to the stacked convection ovens were two (or three?) cooling racks with zippable covers in which we used to store the goods after closing. (I shudder to think of how much shrinkwrap we used/disposed of that summer. Enough to craft a translucent bathing suit for every homosexual man on the boardwalk during road trip weekend twice over, probs. Thrice over, even.) There were two large windows (or was it one?) behind the wall which the ovens and cooling racks sat flush against, which gave a spectacular view of the beach and the graded incline leading to the beach bar/ public restrooms. I remember her sitting here, looking at me over the rim of the one-size plastic cup, while I gazed back.

[diisalitervisum]

what seest thou else in the dark and backward abysm of time

Fall/2013

          If I dream intensely and recall them, they end up intricate narratives. Side-effect of reading too much, I suppose. I've had many involving her, but in some she played a greater role than others.

          In this one, I faced those kinds of disjointed events that only cohere within the strictures and structures of dream-logic: running hand-in-hand down a long glassed-in hallway awash in a gleaming seaside gloam, receiving a residual check amounting to $7000 from her father as he closed out an account inexplicably set up in secret for our eventual marriage, making love the way that the dreaming memory so cruelly (through its absolute lack of guile) can re-enact.

           I felt empty upon awakening, a true Caliban:

"Be not afeared; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,

That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me; that,

when I waked, I cried to dream again."

           A low distant madness began to knock in my soul, and I went through a flurry of search terms. I found a tenuous thread into her private existence that I slowly tugged on as a spider or a fisherman would, hoping the catch would yield some keyhole to peer into her being.           I didn't find anything substantial save for an old tweet wishing her a happy birthday-- which, wonder of wonders, fell on the very day of my dream. The weirding confusion that somewhere fate was stage-managing the whole affair crept upon me. Maybe it's in this way that the universe is given some semblance of order: within intermittent coincidences that seldom are noticed?

          The next day I worked a booth for my company in a street fair held by the wealthy hamlet we relocated to when the winter settled. The sun shone in bursts that would wax and wane with the caprice of a patchy overcast, my smile slowly progressed into a labial cramp over the course of the glad-handed politicking, and I saw her no less than eight times. She existed exclusively in my periphery: the fall of her hair, the half-akimbo contrapposto in feminine parody of my own, the ancestral olive-and-aurelian complexion intrinsic to Mediterranean genetics.  A co-worker sat with me, and over the course of our discourse I related to him the events of my dream running over into my day-- that I was now seeing piecemeal ghosts of someone I used to know in the gestures and traits of those I never would.

          "Sounds like the dream hasn't ended yet," he said.

          A cloud passed over the sun and the color drained from the revelry in the street the way stage lights darken by gradient as something (scene, act, production) comes to an end.

[diisalitervisum]

“Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.”

           It was something out of a storybook, really.

          The atmosphere hung heavy with rain-scent and the brooding undulations of black clouds were back-lit by sporadic hemorrhages of light. The streets were flooded in large patches where the water table had risen. When the rain began again I decided to chance the drive, reasoning that the water wasn't going to stop falling anytime soon. I remember thinking that if I had delayed our meeting at all, even by a day, it wouldn't be the same. A passing image of huddled fates crouched on the side of highway nine bloomed in my brain, ears ringing as one of the crones plucked my life-line and cackled, basso hum emanating through my temples like the rumbling thunder overhead.

            On the highway I watched the lightning play in the distance, clouds markedly darker towards the ocean, knowing that I was headed straight into the thick of it.  The shore was as bad as I thought it was going to be, and after driving through a deceptively deep plash on ocean ave, I decided I should park and walk the remaining distance.

            I walked onto the boardwalk by the casino after traipsing through yet more wine-dark water and lit a cigarette and watched the storm roil just off the coast; a silent nightmare of spastic irradiated flashes upon the churning sea. The rain had stopped. The entire boardwalk was deserted and rain-soaked, save for the odd store-owner or weary clerk surveying the damage to boardwalk furniture. I remember seeing her sitting shrouded in light through the only propped-open door into the arcade. We engaged in absurdly trite formalities, she took issue with my being so austere when I dropped off her things, and we discoursed in diffidence for a while. Whenever I try to concentrate on any one thing I said to her I can't recall specific sentences: they were all things that I had been meaning to say to her all summer, soliloquized during late-night rides in my jeep with the windows down.

            She was so very tan. We got up from the arcade and moseyed down the boardwalk towards the casino and spoke more, an easy tête-à-tête. She took my hand after I offered my arm. Just as we reached the entrance to the casino it began to pour again, and we stood in it together, alone, for shelter. She told me about her summer job teaching swimming lessons to three- and four-year-olds, her mom's new jewelry store, and about her boyfriend, whom I had met when I visited her for a few days the February previous in one of those ironic twists of existence too cliché to make up. We talked about songs that were "ruined" for us because they conjured up images of one another and about how the boardwalk was a place we both had a hard time coming back to.

            I told her I hoped she was happy. I tried inadequately to convey to her my understanding of an "ideal" happiness in the arcade, a set of precepts gleaned from novels and discourse with friends: breaking realities down to their component parts, striving to cultivate an artists' eye in learning to see the color of light and shadow, the perpetual and never-really-fulfilling human struggle to see beauty in even the most terrible situations—"in all the beauty that god sees fit to surround the lonely.”

            After the rain had stopped, when it was time to go, I walked her back to her car. We embraced, and she started crying again. We kissed, softly. She got into her jeep and drove off. 

During summer thunderstorms, like the distant dim barometric ache of a healed fracture set hastily, I still softly lament not being able to reconcile my life into a gentle concordance with hers.

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tonight,

inception was sold out. surprise surprise! but it seems as if the resulting night was a lot better than the movie would have been. it always catches me off guard how the simple things are the best things and how the best moments are always the moments that go by the quickest. nights like tonight are the memories i’m going to hold tight to this fall and will become the moments that will define this summer. 

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dear you,

i don’t think you’ll ever see or read this but i really hope that you do.

you have changed my life, my outlook on life and my outlook on myself all in just these past few months. i wish i could thank you for everything you’ve done because i don’t think you know the true extent of it...

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you will always be my boardwalk love. 

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my favorite.

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hiiiiii timmmyyy

[diisalitervisum]

perfectly dysfunctional.