Is there any point in commenting on the weather?  I’ve always ridiculed Chicago’s media for treating snowstorms and heatwaves as hard news.  In this city, lousy weather is not news.  A perfect 70 degree day with sunshine and blooming daisies is far more newsworthy than the bitter cold or oppressive humidity for which I (of western European stock) was not evolved.  But this most recent spell was at least instructive.  I learned that when I abandon my routine I turn into a hirsute snarling beast.  For a few weeks (an amalgam of holidays and and snow days) I ate a lot of bad food.  I don’t mean tasty holiday delicacies like plum pudding and roast goose but processed food-like shit such as Oreos, cheddar flavored potato chips, soda and cheap waxy milk chocolate.  I exercised sporadically and all but abandoned my meditation discipline.   I didn’t leave the house on Monday, bought puppy pads for the dogs and wore pajamas all day.  Yesterday, I took a shower and that felt like a victory.  Before settling into my late evening orgy of TV and snack foods I checked my business email account.  I quickly ripped into a client who I felt wasn’t taking me seriously enough.   As I endured the next morning’s traffic I could feel anger and anxiety building as I replayed the previous night’s pique and carefully constructed and emended my justifications.

I arrived in my sanctuary of an office, meditated, exercised, meditated again. It will take days or weeks to get back to a reasonable level of serenity.  Some people can afford to slip around and break rules but I’m like a convict on parole.  I’m not some people.  I have an addictive personality.  The more deadly forms of abuse are in remission but the faulty hardware remains.  I have a tendency toward anxiety and depression; these are my natural states and I have to work hard to prevent entropy.   I suppose we are all evolved to be expert hunter-gatherers.  Some of us have easily adapted to urban life and some must work harder.   I so love a sofa, a plate of chicken wings and a reliable connection to Netflix. But here I go… so hum.

I was hoping that my medical malpractice science-fiction story would be ready for consumption but now I see that it needs a lot of work.  I’m a neophyte with fiction so I will take my time and struggle through it.  In the meantime, here’s another poem from my personal archive:

 

 

The Death of Plasticman

I ate nothing but brittle things:
Cold cereal no milk, stale Chips Ahoy, no beverages.
I turned off the humidifier
And collapsed like that old hotel,
The dynamite expertly placed.
My eyes rolled around.
Feet waddled aimless, shod, smokey and crispy.
My wife coughed
While the cat stood
And swept me up, brush and pan

(This poem was first published at http://sobs.org/poetry/the-death-of-plasticman.html The Site of Big Shoulders)

 

This is the beginning of something.  I have a new piece of short fiction that is under way.  It’s a little science fiction story about memory, addiction and medical malpractice.  In the meantime, in order to establish the discipline of posting something each week I’m posting some poems, some of which were written a decade or so ago.

Ring Avulsion
This risk is exaggerated
But you are lately an overweight man
Wearing the same ring for 15 years
And on that day, you were slim and optimistic

You are abstemious
And many such accidents occur
Under some influence or another

You are abstemious
Yet given to impulsive behavior

The ring could be caught on an iron fence post
or the edge of a door handle
Finger flayed, filleted or spontaneously amputated

A small risk but quite real
And avoidable
If not for your insistence on “authenticity”

Philosophy 395: Love, Sex and Virtue in Augustine and Aquinas

A student is coming home from night school,
his brain distended with unruly content,
residually swollen, flashing messages.
Ideas, like sugar and caffeine
make him walk faster
keep him awake at night.
A believer, convinced by ontological proofs and ineffable experience,
he is a believer but disagrees with Augustine’s apocalyptic chastity.
A believer, he respectfully differs with Nietzsche
but Nietzsche, who died in a catatonic stupor, excites him
his unpolluted, unsentimental lust
for truth and perfection.
A part-time usher, cashier or clerk
who eats cheaply and walks to school
who wears a polyester uniform, black trousers, black shoes
who notices the other students’ cars in the parking lot
their graduation presents.
He fends off sundry seductions
alcohol and opiates, permanent employment
deferring his surrender to nature, gravity, and reproduction.

The apartment is infested with ideas.
They keep him awake at night.
He thinks in progressively tinier circles
spiraling concentrically to a singularity, the ontological core.
Nietzsche, who died in a catatonic stupor, excites him
but he agrees with Descartes
that God cannot possibly deceive.

Larry’s Archive

Larry’s large apartment could barely contain his archive.

A diverse record collection:

opera, show tunes, Gielgud’s Ages of Man

Sondheim, Hermione Gingold, Blossom Dearie and Mabel Mercer

but no working phonograph

Playbills, sheet music, clippings

from People Magazine, the Times and Tribune,

The stuff of some impossible encyclopedia

The furnishings of deceased relations,

(ordinary objects held as sacred)

Appropriated properties and costumes:

a confessional kneeler, 2 cardinals’ robes

a six-foot rope of fake pearls, about 1 inch in diameter

red, low-heeled ladies’ pumps, size 11

Clutter is not the same as filth.

He kept the place clean and free of bugs,

rinsed out his soup cans

before flattening them and throwing them in the bin,

paid the rent with obsessive promptness.

He worked out to the same Beethoven piano concerto every morning.

The notes, played from a well-worn cassette,

were elongated and distorted.

He either ignored the gradual distention

or did his push-ups in time to a perfect memory.

Rental Agreement

The City of Chicago is made mostly of buildings.

Our fame rests on severe black steel clad in milky terra cotta,

massive airy monoliths embellished with burly scrolls,

hermaphrodite children of art and industry,

unencumbered by gravity or modesty

with elevators and broad windows in audacious plenty

born like the bricks from fire, confidence and necessity.

Ride north toward Howard Street or Kimball.

Notice the naked backsides of the flats:

dusty pink bricks, black burned bricks

bricks shedding flakes of faded advertisements

for Goldblatts, The Boston Store and other defunct concerns.

Soft, rounded undisciplined bricks

recline between beds of unkempt mortar, frozen in mid-ooze

while a better class of brick, the red and orange constituents of the facade

lie smooth and sharp cornered, their mortar neat and subordinate.

Inside, varnish and paper once carefully chosen,

now a secret beneath biannual coats of chalky white paint.

Where brass, crystal and mahogany once filled this redundant height,

chipboard products of Sears and Ikea cower in the corners.

Oaken floors dressed then in Persian wool,

now obscured by wall to wall or scratched and blackened irretrievably

beneath plastic boxes of kitty litter.

This city is made mostly of people who live in the buildings:

an insolent suburban refugee wearing a facial-hair uniform

will default on the last month’s rent

a politically active liberal arts alumnus

keeps the cats that spoil the woodwork

fiancées from Bucktown, Lakeview or Rogers Park

practice their union prematurely on unhygienic futons

a nervous, thrifty couple encumbered by student loans

must decorate their nursery without Blues Clues wallpaper

or glow-in-the-dark stars

Student’s Landscape

Some say they are better than men.

They use spikes and chains to protect them from the saw blade.

In boy painters they sow teleological wonder

especially in winter when their design is laid naked and black against a white sky.

From the snow emerges a vast rugged cylinder, alive but immutable.

In ordered randomness, she divides herself

from trunk to limb to branch

to lithe and spindly twigs

and finally to nothing,

but invisible, chemical transactions with the sun and wind.

Some use them to argue for design.

They paint bold illuminations in black and green.