Competitive advantage

I can only do what I do better than what I shouldn't do because I don't do it as well.

She's only nineteen. Away from me. She's a screamer, a scheme dreamer, talked all kinds of Mr Clean, she had that teenage sheen. I don't mean to be mean. He claps and he claps, made lean by private trainers and the 1% VIP scene.

Television makes me dumb. I don't need a bottle of rum. You're so special - I'm so honoured, I'm so grateful  you're on the show. The only opportunity, you were great, now the hardest decision I've ever made. You won't last long enough to get paid.

I admire your big lungs. I envy your big leaps. There's a certain kind of people who were meant to drive a Jeep. You are young. So bungee jump. I am grey, a withered grump. You need me. I mean, without people like me, who would drink your precious calorie-free Pepsi?

Why do I ask so many questions?

Could it be that history is a lie?

Could it be that what survives isn't what's good? Are cockroaches good? Were dinosaurs bad?

Could it be that there is no Plan? Is that a narrative fallacy? Do you believe in progress? Do you believe in chaos? Do you really think it could have happened by accident?

Could it be that, in the face of randomness, you could still choose something good?

Could it be that you can choose something bad, because you know it will turn out right in the end - because you believe there is a Plan?

Is religion for simpletons? Is atheism for the smug and the dejected?

Do you care about getting the credit? Do you just want your descendants to survive?

Have you ever thought about this--even for a second? Were you drunk?

Do you wonder why people need to take drugs? Have you ever tried connecting the dots? Is it any wonder we're tortured by sociopaths?

When was the last time you voted? Is abstinence the answer? Do I have a selective memory?

Seriously what is UP with this shit??

Distillate

You can't write with a double life, on the page, with your strife. Lines hypnotize, lull, unfinished sentences dent everything complete. Thoughts in flight, clauses for the weak, noun phrases, pronounced aphasia, voiceless songwriter; the lazy man is an energy miser, inconclusive philosophizer.

Agh fest 2010

Agh, I am spitting again, we lug loogies to mouth, then shout. I see, agh, a cowboy atop a church organ. It's a Spaghetti Western, Ennio Morricone as the angel of life and death. A fist flashes, light extinguishes itself.

Attempt to reincarnate. Attempt to relate. Mind-reading will be a feature on our next beta release. Don't bother teasing, individuality happily ceases, empathy's well-worn when I know everything you do, we are to each other a bland familiar stew...

Oh my dove, fly away, find land. Was the Odyssey just evolutionary adaptation? I'm on cold charred Galapologan islands, finding fish with finger-hooks, eeking existence from the pages of a book.

Agh - I was drunk this month, I was a pedestrian run over by a Hummer. Winter without snow, lets the homeless lie low, on King Street, where we eat street meat, where beauty meets slush, and anyone well-dressed is probably in a rush.

Tell me a story, write about your travels. To travel is to work. Packing and unpacking like George Clooney, up in the air, we expect customer service, lug lives here through air. We mostly hit eject, sucking in information, like children eating to prepare for the next stage of growth, just a billion little larvae who've grown a second mouth.

We are electric these days, we travel in every direction instantaneously. She said "I don't need your word of mouth when I got the search engines on my side."

Every time I stare at this screen

...I feel 1 frickin inch tall. Like Pac-Man in the maze, but I can't see any blinking edible pellets, and the blue ghosts are after me.

Mostly there is the waiting, and the empty space, and the strangers in the coffee shop if I'm out on the road looking for inspiration, and the guilt at not writing. The writing happens in about 2.5 minutes. The rest of the time is wasted, or maybe praying is what they would have called it 150 years ago.

Do you know what ultramontanism is? It's the sort of crap I look up on the Wik instead of facing this job: write a crapass FIAC blog post that don't make no sense. Which is we both expect. Ex pectin. Like the man who gave up strawberry jam was ex pectin. Argh.

I have almost deleted this blog entirely about 57,000 times. But the other 2,454,000 times I didn't so who cares right?

Last night I met this huge tall Asian dude who wants to open up a bake shop in Nashville, Tennessee--a Christian bakery in Nashville that serves discount baked goods to starving country music artists and pays them decent wages to perform, because there's so many GD musicians in Nashville that they don't get paid. Ha. Just like the blogosphere. Such is the landscape when 99.9% of your colleagues are barely 1% distinguishable from you. Ability to discern is victimized by Hick's law, whereby increased infomation prolongs decisionmaking time, and by corollary, apathy. Low barrier to entry. High cost of breaking through the dip. Know what I thought about the Asian baker? I thought this guy has it figured out. Good for him. There are still saints out there.

Drink yourself silly

Oh we are wired now, get here and stare, don't care about the crows, the cattle, the lows, we think and drink stacks of pink things, shirking on lunch hour, counting every hour as accounts receivable, unbelievable us educated fops lining up at the trough. I never wanted a job that worked, just eight hours to iron all the creases in my shirt. I figured, 'what now? go on a road trip? take a taxi to Timbuktu, tip the driver, avoid all landmines with an all-knowing GPS'. Great, so I am a success. Hey, driver, stop at the cigar store, I need to blow smoke up your pipe, I have a backlog of friends on Skype I've ignored, you hear about how I'm competing in the Olympics For the Bored?' No wonder when I'm on my bike and doored I don't mind, some adrenaline at last, this big drink all pink and fizzy they call it Sassafraz.

"It's WHO you know..."

Words break hearts
study invisibility
few syllables from thinkmaker,
stunned silence

imaginative laziness
narrowminded nepotism
penchant for pre-approved lists
distorts reality
repeats history
'we only accept
published authors'
ensures mediocrity
unplowed potential

I don't have patience
for unsurprising revelations

afraid to lose a job
ie enemy of truth
I don't love truth when I might die.

Everybody just say 'ah!'

(lyrical runoff from a glacial gargantumumble)

Oh great Gonga, fresh from travails in southeast Tonga, long on anecdote and rhyming postcard poetry in pastels, delivering that 'oh it's gorgeous' transatlantic rote:

Mood music too singular to digest, too tight and interwoven to appreciate or undress, something so important riven to my chest. And she laboured lonely, but inquisited brief. Too bad her toned tetrahedral sketches can't be curled into a Christmas wreath.

Surrealism insustenant, frustrated by our ancestral covenant, Genesis chapter 1 asks too much, obedience demanded beyond the grave is unfair, rewrite the contract every six months, cuz I won't let a pile of bones make me their slave.

Cro-magnon Mensa, Dinosaur da Vinci, Coretta Scott meets Daniela Carinci. Smug syllables, pillows of thought indivisible, irreducible, repudiate the deuce, twisting the middle abdominal, until spell check and reality check ask me for a truce.

Half-pints for the children, pitchers for the men, peppermint spritzers for your spinster auntie who's about to toss her standards, sick of asking 'when oh when - my kindred soul, my best friend?'. Will everyone settle for less than glass slippers at midnight? (She goes home with the coachman at quarter past ten.)

Jittery teens scream their souls into text, fake friends frenzy feeds dyslexia, and what next: YouTube deliquents torch computer screens, not realizing why they seethe, until they can't find any more mystery in sex.

Bogged in bloggerrhea, Holograph hoaxes, too many performers disperse the audience, diaspora, poor us, so much to say and who will listen? Perhaps I'll build a time machine to impress the 18th century, that enlightened age, me scruffy and stuffy and puffed at my podium. Justly desserted, completely deserted, applauded by my best friend the monkey but oh yeah I'm certainly sage.

ludicrous trash

Great big bird! Enter and I am atyourservice. Great things we expect, not least is this cheek, offered up, to be pecked, your beak this lip, need for affection least changeable thing this week. Oh jump! Oh bump! Oh cancerous lump! Tie to me to a trapeze, such acrobatic phlegm in a dogmatic den of sorcerous orthodoxy – long on melancholy and choking on conformity. We serious lynchmob, long for big guns, warm bullets, chickens with no heads, sweaty fingers itchy for a target, big bull and bear maul all strangers in the market. Cranks and critics lash invectives, reviews a reflection of their talent in the trash. The guttersnipe attacks itself, the self-esteem suicide is the master of self help. Oh night, grey day, mad morning and unspoken traffic torment, sewer rust and cliché lust, too snobbish for an Elvis bust on your housewarming holiday.

Child's Pose

Crying in a cuddle with a potion and a puddle
stuck in a cog, a motorboat in a bog
a legless frog, nonsense fog

croak at joke, die from scurvy at the colony of
Roanoake. it's a vitamin sea

mow the lawn with dental floss,
butter your toast with the challahcost
motion to ladybugs to
eat at the moss
grass, crayfish mink and dogs
water falls in ball bearings and it's
dimpled lake, remove the makeup from
your face

i'm still amid my sweatpant symphony
who knew my muscles would ache at 30?
best to tap your toes
don't ask what the weatherman knows

is there a way out of this knot - can't afford 80/h for a
conscience cot

stretch that belly, nelly
loosen the back, jack
hot bath, warm hug, stay clear of the chug, the drugs
sit, make love to an Ikea rug
pray above, give yourself a shove, tough love
'it's tough love because it's love' and it's
sunshine every sunday; look around, see it - I still
guarantee it

sooner rather than later

sometimes you feel so
stupid that
you can't look at yourself in the mirror
(or is it
the mirror looks away
in
embarrassment)

we are cursed by ourselves and
we get what we
deserve

notice how we don't use the word "I"

together we all hope to be
understood and

he is no exception

please understand
he is
stupid stupid stupid

Do I need this?

Hey there is enough to do that you don’t have to write, there is more magic in these fingers than can be spread out like dark film under a fluorescent light. Suggestions of ideas come to me, word combinations that won’t let me be, I work hard for a month but that backlog won’t let me rest easy. I sit here and ponder, or meditate, I could self-pity, or self-medicate. Write without thought, while you write to express I write to undress myself so I can sleep; I’m in a hurry unpacking these useless clothes, hanging em here on a wire to let dry, it freezes in strange patterns that the angels must have wanted - it coalesces of its own volition, I don’t bother asking why. I discharge my duty and cook my dinner... ever since I moved out the frenzy endless, bending, thanksless has made me hungry and thinner.

Please pass my condolences to your former self, he died a lonely death and is there, on that book you wrote two years ago on your mind's eye's shelf.

Searching for Yvette

(frisky fingers aka 12 minutes no looking)

Huffing at the edge of a tank, hank being money in the bank, I met a tall skank in fishnets and pink anklet, a stud below her lower lip and green eyes glazed on a nip of marijuana. Policeman made me mad, so I stabbed him in the leg and took his dog to a foster home and fed his fish turpentine. Jasper Johnson was a gay old pig, he took his mellow laxatives and pooed all night and morn; it was the most crap ever that was oozed onto the floor, it was the longest log and twirliest matter that ever made it down to earth. I was inside the wall and sniffing at the grate, a hemisphere away and longing for the yellow two-ton banana, the closet clothed in drapery and the papacy holding the holy Spelling Bee, grammer kings and syntax Shahs saying blah blah blah and messing up the toads the frogs and the goaded lovers coaxing kisses and cuddles from a tough-wrapped huddle. Lite up a stone and fall into the ocean, it was the motion of the tummy and belly, and the swollen television liver, kidneys purifying limbic cortex in the brain and the lame men snatching toys from the minds of the girls and boys who never sucked at the teat of self-indulgence, it was the yuletide moaning and poverty’s revenge. I liked Benji, I liked all the dogs who stopped the war, and the metallic manganese elemental store I set and detected fluorescence and craned my head backward leaning over the bridge spitting at cars and weaving through lane markers above highway overpasses, every car that passed below me was another death, I was a cat with nine lives, a four-year-old with head lice, those narrowtooth combs scraggled mites from my hair so tiny those bloodsuckers and that warm winter blanket up on a bed, me lain down and drunk off kahlua and picking at tree bark with my swiss army knife, every memory flashes and teases: grass I lay and tumbled in, clods of earth and ants the red ones and the moss-covered rocks and park bench by Lake Ontario where I played for a 16-year-old French Canadian girl who wanted to love me, and the kiss I refused her and she even visited me in my house to hear me play guitar but I was watching playoffs on TV and trembling at the thought. Was her name Yvette? Yes I'm certain it was. Why don’t Yvettes fall from the sky more often? It was instant legend those Yvettes but I can’t remember 99.99 per cent of the notes I play or the keys I strike but I touched her arm that night and her blonde hair fair and she and me there so why don’t I dream of French girls anymore? Why doesn’t the world fall through the floor? Suffering and bliss, ever wonder when and why we decided to put the laughter in manslaughter? Wigwam centuries in tired fruitbat follicle and haberdashery addiction amid a city council meeting on Tuesday before the basketball game when the PTA disbanded and you were elected director of the food bank just before your Master Business License arrived and you decided to incorporate? Swirl and logic distended and stretched and ended and this is a commotion a pulse alive a lump to be digested and expressed or you die. My friend Bobby was alive with the lion and the feeling he distressed and the flowing and the heavenly heart got itself into the ouija board process the jaded bitter interconnected tyrants and those who float free and fall fast, you fizzle and you cry and your love can never last. I was almost convinced I could be permanent until I sat upon the pew and prayed again, me graceless with a pen, sinner in mid-June then I got a bike and pedaled through the moon. But enough! Now it's hallway chatter and passing bits of fluff and the water bottle you recycle and the guff that must be put up with.

August 9 2005

Brackish steams cloud the air, the whirlwind is her stare, the sun red and mind searingly clear, words ringing in my ear. Motor black from oily steel, the world racing on a wheel, the hearts that break, the thought I steal - and then I slip on a banana peel...

Canadian, 'ehs' amid bees, the hive sees these so easily affected, Jesus H Christ! I, Jailer, cane the elementals, opiated by queues, who are estimated as universally Dubya'd. Hexed. Why? Cuz Zorro said so. (the alphabet song)

No place for autumn in my hole, stuck with my soul's dregs am I, upon last legs; eggs crack and jokes abound; it’s coloury light and crazytown, doubts and exploding brains, a warm wet rag to wipe a stain. I don't complain, I deserve exclusion and profanity, dubious distinction and macaw compliments, and those words flow again: hophead gangbangs amid a meadow, grey coat of arms on castle wall, begin a sonnet, song of pen, my polished suit of armour. Insinuate trolls, deconstruct that mountain of dextrose in your soul. I was ugly, pontificating, gangly and mellow, drawn to the edge of that yawning blinking chasm - seduced and eviscerated by a hint of orgasm.

Umbrellas switch from wet to dry, banana men can only sigh, the pineapple peaches and pomegranate stews, the recipes I lent you; the morning market where I purchase a plum, plastic baggies I stretch over a drum. I dreaded those fasts, moments made of lead, that hot totality and dead echo. I was black from smoke, ruin and wrecks, singing hosannas on a steamship deck. I was an iceberg, a salty block of mountain-and-water, a floating anarchic ship-destroying frozen fountain; I was stenographer for Satan, taking down devilish notes but then I revolted, bolted and tore down Hades, escaping or so I thought, but then my phone rang; I donated already, slammed the receiver, dogged by doggerel and high on punchlines, wine in my veins, vinegar in my brain (there is something tragic about grey gridlock, the wasted nadir and the perogee of days.)

"You can yodel" I told my kitty; she starves so slowly and it makes her witty. I didn’t litter for a month entire, but then I spumed a book or three, foreign impenetrable screeding, lumps of coffee grounds lumped in a bowl, foreign cars that faked themselves as they went out on a roll. I peeled a grape, assassinated yet another talking ape; you do sad sad things, when you want to rid yourself of you - the Bruce S song was true - I was a coward all along: I was tranny, a gay preacher in a womanish soul, my soiled buttocks, my dripping nose, I was the man wearing the wrong clothes, hose in soil, I was the barbecued potatoes brought to a boil.

(But those the moments on the floor when I felt high, the gym mat I sit on to gather my thoughts, and the world shoots by, rolls right through me really, a booster shot,jacks me back on the chopping block walking round and round just to keep wishing I could fly)

Killing the messenger

(msn frustration)
Why procrastination, no attention span nation, MSN beckons and teases, your decisionmaking increases in difficulty, Hick’s law more info takes more time, exponential complications, paralysis frustration, shut down the computer and be alone, open up connections and be overwhelmed, binary on and off, like scott summers shooting laser beams with every blink, all or nothing, I wish there was a happier medium. More intelligent yet more feeble with each innovation, specialists chasing nothing down to infinity like the graph of 1/x, x>0. Nuance yourself down to the bone, the threshold for necessity long since broken, everything now is superfluous. Report body counts on a hurricane, essential news, all views identical texture each digit indistinguishable, need analog to make this analogy, otherwise it’s monotony in stereo liquid crystal flat screen ads for ice creams and we scream louder each ad more expensive because attention is a singularity. This is what happens when you take the short run view, ignore the laws of thermodynamics and who pays for the ads? The consumer. Infinite desires overwhelm scarce resources, finite needs. TV screens should split up into smaller rectangles each with different sound throwing its voice at different parts of your ears and my remote control navigates me through the cocktail party so I pick out one conversation from many instead of the constant one-a-at-time parade of theatre that relic from the railroad age. Why captivate an audience at a movie theatre; is the linear storyline worth the perceptual inefficiency? Media need not be discreet, soon it will be the mass neuro medium. That’s how drugs work anyway I think.

I eat you for breakfast

The meaning of the meeting summed in a smile, the finger pointed down the aisle... and you, when you shop around you don't waste a second; you put your head down and run a three-minute mile. Everything possible, everything inevitable (Although, you said, it might take a while).

She said, I need discipline. So beat me down every minute. I will thank you for it. I take what you teach me and feed it down your throat.

Chewing on cinder blocks. My teeth are sharp. My mind climbing mountains. My spine is stronger. Sometimes I do handstands, I fall on my head, upside down, I crack my neck in half - I've gotten used to setbacks. But I'm tired of repeating myself, tired of opening my sorry guts to be sifted, sorted and dismissed. So today's the last day I ask you for a takeback; tomorrow we're even steven. It's been six long years of agony, and tomorrow, old friend, I will take you down.

(Yes.)

what happened to me?

So... I was reading old emails again.

Question: What ever happened to me?

When did I lose the ability to talk about myself?

Not that I ever possessed it, mind you. But for a while there, it was fun just to be me, and not the gnu-headed Oracle of Whatever.

This thing, these words - all these words belonging to other people, stolen by me, uniquely expressed on this frankensteinian platform - ate me alive. I confused them with me. They're not me. I was eaten; I've been digesting myself for over a year. Literature as bowel movement. Go figure.

It set me loose, hi fibre catharsis or somesuch. But my legs are numb from sitting on the pot. I have to learn to walk again.

When you remember too much, too many details, too many dictionary entries, you need constant reminding of what's important. Love and be loved and all that jazz. I guess I'm a crack baby for distraction. I have far too many seductive inklings. Did I ever tell you about my 50 latest book ideas? I swear at least one of them will make me famous. Yikes.

Also - I'm so close to telling you about my nervous breakdown. Everyone has one at some point, and mine was a thing of beauty. Highly unoriginal, yes, but artistic in its existential melancholia. Actually, if you want, just re-read Ms. Rhythm's Revenge (april and may)- it's pretty much all there, in a catchy rhyming waltz.

(Some advice: if you're going to have a nervous breakdown, at least be interesting about it. I'm still trying, and hence Ms. Rhythm. Aren't we all, trying to be interesting with our neuroses that is... how I love every blogger on God's green internet)

I guess I should save the NB for another blog and leaves these twisted cupcakes to their yeasty frosty devices. But with cupcakes there's always this nagging egotistical urge to expose the Wizard. I think the cupcakes are great; I have a lot of respect for the cupcake ethos, but hell--cupcakes sure do mess with a man's life story. They taste great but they leave me unsatisfied in the end. Pure mind sugar.

I'll tell you one tidbit, tangentially related to my NB (although the NB took place before that):

I took a trip far away, to chase after a woman. (How original) I was in love and we were going to be happy together. Until the piano dropped on my head. It was like 'God smites Job' , bible wrath meets loony tunes. I did a double take and fell splat into the grand canyon. I was shot down from the sky. Like Icarus or maybe that was Phaeton's downfall. I got kicked in the face, stomach and head all at once. Things happened that I'm not too happy about. I was robbed of something and it was awful. Bad things aren't supposed to happen to nice people.

But I'm over that, really. Chalk it up to experience.

And I'm ready to tell you all about me. I got confessions on the brain.

So...

what do you want to know?

*Scuffle, shouting*

(IGNORE THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!)

Forty-one minutes of agony (part I)

(a continuing experiment of writing without breathing)

Minutes 26-30:

"There is no reason why two things that are disparate when you stick them together on the page, there is no ultimate reason to reject them as incoherent. You say you like organically grown vegetables, but how about some organic thought processes, these are not manufactured, tightly controlled and pesticided thoughts, these are naturally occurring thoughts harvested from the fertile free-range groves of one person’s mind, and hence you’ll forgive me if I charge a cognitive premium on them, after all it’s perfectly ok to spend an extra 80 percent on super-wholesome all-grain soy products when 14 years ago you just bought the factory brand pasteurized chocolate milk and then wham there's the end of the discussion... The problem with variety, choice, is that it kills depth, a finer appreciation, a dedication and sense of ownership, not just the sensual fly-by-night tourism of the point and click traveler - laugh it you like it and throw it away quick - current. There were such great geniuses in the past because the number of activities were so few, all that energy could be focused, a mind of great general capacity unleashed in a particular direction which is the best recipe for 'greatness', the best way to be known and make a name for yourself and almost certainly a guarantee of tremendous unhappiness, so maybe if someone came along who could do anything he wanted, he would show how silly it is to be a specialist to be a expert how unhappy it makes you, and here we are the in the society of the idiot savant, Rain Man not just a cute story, it is the reality, Dustin Hoffman the everyman, the expert, Tom Cruise the frustrated deliverer, the Cassandra, the rock star. I used to be like Rain Man, I used to fall into his traps. Nobody should stay up nights reading the phone book, but when I was boy that’s pretty much what I would do, I would add up numbers to see that they added up, I was looking for some certainty, not trusting calculators that came before me, I was going to keep going down that path, I was a mathematical machine, I was keen on the movement of the mind, the easy answer and the thoughtless soulless nonjoy of always being right in a black and white world with no room for nuance and beauty."

(conclusion: If you don't breathe, you will go crazy!)

difficulty in walking

(I wanted to forget this one... it's literally back with a vengeance)

difficulty in walking

conscious and not
tired and awake
straggling with sore knees
bent, back like a beggar

quick, there’s a sale at Yorkdale
diamonds on Bay Street, go become a lawyer
drain your brain of Sammy Twain
Huck Finn and his Nigger Jim, and sly Tom Sawyer

I prefer the uptown traffic
the easy pace of the Avenue
condo folk talk Tommy Hilfiger
I dry out over the Globe, inside a Second Cup

I am disappearing in a thousand ways today
from all my loved ones
spiders shirk the windy corridors
stillness feeds insects and poetry

I lit the candle in the attic, set it on fire
but I smelled the café bagels
blueberry maple and cream cheese
and was reminded of my stomach

I drive down the street and park my Buick
pop the trunk and grab the notebook
buy a coffee and sit
and cough on my pen
I peek at pretty visions—
but they don’t look at scary men

(Oct '03)

more ouija sentences

A heaven in my mind, did not unwind the fine fickle twine from my life line, the high climb, the happy swine I was, rolling in time with my rinds my brine and my slime.

These are thin moments, unnoticed torments, unanswered phones, draughty open doors and dust blown from secret shelfish tomes... My bones have owned me, my skins have clothed me; I am no one if not a gnome from Nome, a roaming nomad wiping feet politely on notepads, boring alone with no privacy into virgin dirt, sharing intestines on this telepathological prototype, hammering at hierarchy, histrionic in real time, cleansing weighty wordiness from a senselessly shocked and sleepy high society.

Sides of bacon get me quakin; cholesterol and menthol, cancer sticks and cancer stripes, we tots slurping lollies, in trollies, in desks, at a board meeting, in a casket, not long for this life, so please please find me a beautiful wife; I just want someone to treat real nice.

You knaves, you sit in caves, crow about your peer-pressure tactics, progressive taxes and pats on the backs. Reward inanity, cheer for incompetence. Vampires suck blood, mediocrity relieves anxiety. It's work less, not worth less; enjoy leisure, celebrate senselessly, tis the season, tis the season - as long as you fit in you don't need a reason. It's 'A equals B', it's you and me - it's the Golden Age of Stupidity.