Field Notes, #40, June,
Notes from the field, winter and spring mixing into summer, mixed up chronology but i did what makes sense to me
The people on billboards are either celebrities, personal injury lawyers, or women who work at clubs with no windows. I think a lot about the local personal injury lawyers because they engage in a serious world-building practice- billboards, radio, buses, benches- all carry their messages. Their messages ring through Philadelphia, implying car crashes, pianos falling from the heavens,
You might get hurt, and I can help you, I am really really good at it,
hear the sounds of me being good at it, thunderous booming voices, ka-ching sounds on the radio,
see me being good at it, my portrait on the freeway, money raining down from the sky,
feel me being good at it, take a load off on this bench and know,
I am here for you.
I want someone to be there for me, but I also don’t want to get hurt.
I have been recovering lately, tunneling outward from some interior project, looking out from the edges of my body at everything else, seeing everything else and realizing the work I have to do, how to do it better this time, tunneling back in.
I’m crawling on my stomach pushing myself forward with my big toes.
Last night in my dream I was living on a mountain that was half light and half dark, like the moon. Everyone was so concerned about writing a perfect play to tell everyone about the darkness and the light and I was just like… I’m sure they already know, doesn’t everyone know about the darkness and the light?
At home the bathroom tile is growing bulbous.
my dad texted me that the world might end next week, he heard it on a podcast. I have to work that day and am discontent with the idea of being at work at World End, even if it doesn’t happen the idea bothers me. if the sky started opening up I would pull over in the big truck and get out to stand outside and look. i think some people would try to keep driving so i would try to pull up on the sidewalk.
I kept telling people all week what my dad had texted me. on the porch at the music show (one day before the date predicted world end event), my friends and I kept saying,
“See you tomorrow at Rapture” .
It was a joke… but also part of me believed it more than anyone else, i think even more than my dad, but not because really of what he texted, more so because i secretly always hold this feeling that tomorrow the sky may open, or some giant light might come forth from the earth, or everyone suddenly becomes aware of something. It wasn’t that i believed that the world was going to “end” the next day, but because i always feel like it could. Sometimes i feel a little embarrassed that i take things so seriously, i joke around a lot, and things are really really funny to me, but that also is serious to me, joking, because the world might end.
The world kinda ends all the time, but there are a few different versions of that.
PERSONAL WORLD END
IMPERSONAL WORLD END
SELF PRESCRIBED WORLD END
UNIVERSAL WORLD END
END END WORLD END
You have to remember that all of this really depends on your definition of “World”. And “End”.
Does world mean reality? Does “End” mean change? When we say, “the ancient world”, we mean the ancient reality and all its physical markers. We actually mean, ancient reality. When we say, “my world is ending”, we mean our reality is changing in a way we must contend with. When we say “the world is going to end tomorrow”, we mean reality will never be the same for anyone. The world has certainly kind of ended before in many ways.
At home the bathroom tile is growing bulbous.
At home the bathroom tile is growing bulbous, right over the toilet.
I text the landlord a photo and tell him I am getting a bit concerned.
The landlord says he will come, and I await him,
devout to his potential and timely miracle.
The brown pigment wets deeper, sags, reverse spire,
leaning in to touch me,
i pee in the sink to avoid my anointing.
I send another text with a photo to the landlord, to which he replies
omg
and nothing else.
He has never said omg before, I think it’s kinda funny, but I’m not sure what this means about the timeline.
My uncle called me a few weeks ago, he was telling me about his family and about work. i haven’t seen him in a long time. He owns a cleaning company. He was telling me about how his love for God extends into his work- not many people clean like me, because I care, because I am cleaning for God, for love of God and love of neighbor. I have no idea how I have my own company, I never could do anything right, really, so, it’s surprising, but I think that’s why, because I do it for God. I thought about the phone call when watching the teenager inspect the fifty-dollar bill at the supermarket, is she inspecting that for God? She seemed laser-focused.
I have a high tolerance for pain in every sense of the word. I used to play games with myself when I was a kid, I’d take my pulsing skinned knee, investigate the feeling, lift it up into my hand, place it away from me, watch it, ow? Hm. It’s just a matter of waiting.
in my bank account, hm just a matter of waiting. Take the number, move it to the back.
In the city it has been cold. The snow came and went twice. I haven’t driven my car in two months. It was stuck in the snow for a few weeks, relentlessly plowed behind an ice wall on Chestnut Street.
Am I a dark pinpoint on a white sheet? What? Stop that.Twenty-three years ago, I marked a tree with a rock and tried to divine how long I’d live. I threw a rock into a hole in the tree's center and counted how many times it rattled inside.
The ceiling tile bursts while I am away, I come back having missed any spectacular force, having to believe its sound and trajectory through the evidence, the gaping hole.
Ah Yes- Something Has Happened Here.
It’s been getting warmer.
The landlord replaced the tile and put the ceiling fan inside the ceiling so i can hear it up there when i turn on the light. I’m sure it’s doing horrible things with the debris in the ceiling, filtering it down here, down into my body. It’s not my problem anymore really, almost, except for a little bit longer.
That same wind
That has been circulating
For eternity
And refreshing itself
Over ocean waves
Is sent back out to see us again
Try to coax them alive
On the long drive,
For work,
I have pangs of…something,
When I see the Burlington Coat Factory
On the highway,
Grief is like this,
A department store,
Haven’t been there in a long time,
I don’t really go to stores.
At the casino i rode the mechanical bull,
I really wanted to keep riding it forever,
A game of a living thing,
It’s hard to stay on, :) but
If i could only try all night,
I would learn the patterns and tells.
( It’s not actually alive, )
And cannot respond to me,
Only i, to it,
i could become perfect.
So Everything for me is really important,
I’m worried i messed up and
Will have to do life all over again,
The thought of those early years
Is very exhausting,
I was close at 10 years old,
To figuring out a perfect plan for living,
But, well, whatever.
i don't mean that.
The friction and static
From our bodies and blankets
All winter
Shakes loose,
Starts tapping the budding magnolias,
The spring turn,
Candy petals biting
Bright new air
I’ve been squatting in the old apartment, all the furniture gone, just the blankets on a matt on the floor, the cat bowl, water, the pile of rocks-
At night with all the radiators exposed, no longer behind bookshelves, the cat digs furiously, pulling out ancient dusts and debris into the moonlight, eating them down quickly, like doing this will fix something or like it is a scarce resource, left behind things, deadness,
Half awake I try to tell her, we have so much more to go, just rest, but she continues. This must be her way of doing it so i don’t have to.
At night, in the car, we move the rest of the things, I have help this time.
I get worried that all closeness lends is weight to hold till failure.
I don’t really feel that way. I love people in my life, they lighten me like a whistled cave, bouncing off the back dark walls, shaking things loose and open, they don’t even know that, you can’t see a whistle travel. I just get into my head all these disappearances, and all these violent stagnations. But I have been feeling happier, and the hardwood floors in the new apartment have been sending through me some sort of positive spiritual signal. I feel shot through with an arrow that is radiating calmness through my center line. I got an email about my ex’s electric bill payment.
Everything has been better lately than before, the hardwood floors to fall back to at home have strengthened my fortitude. At night I sleep sideways on the bed or with my head at the end, and not because of terrible restlessness, like before, just because any area will do. I can traverse the bed like the hands on the clock at the shopping plaza and everything is just fine.
One thing not quite as harmonious as the clock bed or the hard floors, or the porch latch, or the car key, or the windowpane, or the kitchen table, or the blood stain, or the clothespin, or the cat bowl, or the toothbrush, or the tea bags-
Is that the produce has been rotting quickly. The counter seems to me to be some sort of accelerated zone in which time acts upon the beet, or sweet potato, or apple, or banana, unfettered. I thought that this might be a problem of association, the bananas are too close to the apples, to the avocados. The banana’s Ethylene gas, the changing chemical, must be pulling everything to death. I moved the bananas over. But the lemon still rotted quickly in the basket. I wonder if the roommates are noticing. For the beet to be hard as stone one day, and soft the next, does that not indicate some strange temperance, in which the top left zone of the kitchen has disciplined itself to atrophy?
I’ve been placing the lemons around the house, like orchids, to see if they acclimate better somewhere else. Perhaps on a string over the doorframe they will ripen in due time and without any expedited changes.
When short horned grasshoppers are faced with environmental threats, such as drought or food shortage, the serotonin in their brains trigger a full transformation in which they undergo a
gregarious phase. Here is a quote from Wikipedia, I am still learning.
Normally, these grasshoppers are innocuous, their numbers are low, and they do not pose a major economic threat to agriculture. However, under suitable conditions of drought followed by rapid vegetation growth, serotonin in their brains triggers dramatic changes: they start to breed abundantly, becoming gregarious and nomadic (loosely described as migratory) when their populations become dense enough. They form bands of wingless nymphs that later become swarms of winged adults. Both the bands and the swarms move around, rapidly strip fields, and damage crops. The adults are powerful fliers; they can travel great distances, consuming most of the green vegetation wherever the swarm settles. (Wikipedia, Locust)
This plague form the Locust take has been on my mind, as I move the lemon around the home, as I sit on the hardwood floor. I want to know more about their transformation, if they have to sit and wait to transform, if they build some sort of den or cocoon to go into, if they do it alone, if they do it when others are around, if they know they are doing it.
I was thinking about calling my old boss just to say hi and see how he is. I want to tell him that my life is better now than it was before, when I was not sure about where to live and when I was calling him frantic for time off to go deal with death in New Jersey. I just want to tell him about the hardwood floors. I’m not sure if I can do this because calling him might come off as sexy in some way. I don’t want him to feel that way. I just want to say the hardwood floors are really good for me, and thank you so much for helping me with my car, and thank you for understanding when I was acting erratic, and please tell everyone that I said hello, and say that I miss them.I just looked out the window and saw a man letting his dog out in the rain, holding his shoulders like a kid in the cold, arms crossed over heart, god protect me, dog pee. I am a man but I am cold the same way I was when I didn’t want to wear the jacket to school. I do not want to get the jacket, it will only be a moment.
On the porch smoking the cigarette it is raining and the willow tree reaches toward me slowly lifted in the wind, and then falling back away, swelling, almost touching my cheek. Imagine the wind blowing suddenly and being smacked in the face by the wet tendril, that would make me laugh. Is this romantic? Maybe it is because it doesn’t happen. It is just the idea. Ideas are romantic.
I eat my cereal at night on the stone table, sitting on the floor in my room. The table is small and about 5 or 6 inches off the ground. I think it is the perfect thing to do, to sit at the table. I feel simple and unafraid at the table. The locusts turn to color like poison snakes in the gregarious phase, yellows, oranges, black stripes.
If you are in plague, how to tell? When did the body change so much? When did intake become razing? Do you feel yourself in there? Can you see the body menacing forward? Is the spirit watching the brain, the veins, dancing in attunement to survival? Do you feel yourself inside from before? Or is this yourself, after all. Or is it all yourself- the same combination of elements filling a space differently, a reordering of the presentation of an animal, just conditions and timing, like moving the orchids across the room, different light, different air, different sound, and the bloom comes this way or this way or doesn’t come at all. I feel so utterly calm these past weeks, the hardwood floors.
It is getting hotter. I do the work for the company and I sweat buckets and buckets. I sweat buckets and buckets for the company. I think about how you could never keep a job, you were too honest to give one second up, you had to dedicate your life to enacting misery and could not put it on hold for even a second, you didn’t know how.
I forgive you for your life and body trained at death.
I love you and I am very sorry.
I had it in my head just now that maybe if I knew everything I knew now, I would know how to fix it, if I could talk to you now I could show you all the things I have done to change my life. I could show you how I learned living. But this is probably not true, I know that I am so influenced when someone acts out my shadow, I might be helpless against it, we might both turn inward.
And yes, I was thinking how .
And I just feel sorry for us. For then.
I was thinking about how happy I can be sometimes, and how sad everything was back then, and it sent a shudder through my shoulders.
lying in bed, touching just a finger to that old spot, I also felt such joy. ?
(?)(joy as a placeholder for a different word, i felt such ability, i am allowed to be compelled, i find) , Walk on my hands everyday for 25 years, stare at the pooled waters on the sidewalk.
you know, I just flexed my feet and felt that my soul really is pulled through my body right now.
I can feel myself fitted across my feet and stretched through my middle to the top of my head. This thing floated around me, halfway inside, hanging at odd angles for years, and tonight it is pinned down. hm. huh.
It must be the hardwood floors in the apartment, they have really had a positive impact on me.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Hi, i just don't feel like saying much more, I had it in my head i would but now I don't feel like it. A few months ago I was addicted to watching a 36 part video game walkthrough for the game "Haunting Ground", old ps2 game. I wrote so much about it, but don't feel like getting into it right now. I've been doing intense manual labor. i built some flags, thank you for reading yeah, Thanks and talk soon. If you have a letter to the editor please find the link below.
Homework:
you are not graded you do not turn this in
if you have a letter to the editor please leave a comment or you can put it HERE hello? seriously hello? letters are anonymous.