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Train hoots at something in the nowhere we still rock through, Dingding crossroads flicker by, Mining towns, once roaring, now shrunk to the railhead, streetlights stoned with loneliness  or lit with leftover sun they drank too much of during the day. . . . And at long last now this world shrunk to one lone brakeman's face stuck out of darkness-- long white forehead like bleached skull of cow-- huge black sad eyes high-peaked cloth cap, grey-striped-- swings his railroad lantern high, close up, as our window whizzes by-- his figure splashed upon it, slanted, muezzin-like, very grave, very tall, strange skeleton-- Who stole America? Myself I saw in the window reflected.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from “Starting from San Francisco”

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This whole thing is sublime, but 4:24-4:54 melts my stomach and electrifies my back, my neck with the ASMR tingle of a ghost’s caress. Like the swan song of a war chariot pounding toward the sun, soul metamorphosed to its purest apogee: the desert blade, golden and holy. Its grandiose old west catharsis reminds of my favourite passage in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid:

“Am the dartboard for your midnight blood the bones’ moment of perfect movement that waits to be thrown magnetic into combat”

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Carb-robbed mind fugues in bed sweat. Hostage sun holed up, beekeeper curtains ravelled over its glass eye like wood plank window bandaids before a storm.

= Bed is hot, breadless brain forgets. I’ve shut the sun, no storm is coming.

Not all dooms are literary. Few feed words.

My office is moving to Markham on Monday and I’m thinking of moving there too. I’m thinking of renting a houseboat and wandering nervously through Amsterdam for three days. I’m thinking of becoming a technical writer, a UX designer, a content strategist, a book editor. I’m thinking of ripping my moustache out and drawing a vodka bath.

I’m not really thinking. I think a lot about the tension in that bass-honeyed Radiohead lyric, “I used to think there is no future left at all. I still think.”

I still think I have talent, but a soul garbage diet of madness and past has crusted my intellect with plaque. The same way waterless muscles melt and must be grown back. Ugh, that rhyme. My writing is bumper car chunky.

Maybe the anodyne corporate daydream is only a financial puberty and not the beginning of an end.

Maybe.

[themadsound]

Julian Bream plays "Granada" in Granada.

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I’ve been watching a lot of Sebastian Silva films lately. I toke to this each sunrise, then go back to bed.

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Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe–and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives–is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true.

Jorge Luis Borges, from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

[themadsound]

My week in pictures.

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I might celebrate minus seven this Friday by doing something special, like going outside for longer than a cigarette.

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I forget this exists for months at time, until it comes to me on shuffle and splits my face wide in a goofy grin. It's easily my favourite mindfuck in music and reminds me of being nineteen, when four-twenty was a date I seriously celebrated, staging this song to watch kindred stoners twitch to its pulse, devouring sloppy waffles in my greasy kitchen. And that whole year, and the last house party I ever had, when random teenagers ate all my groceries and played catch with my diet grapefruits in the backyard, forcing me to live off of leftover weed brownies for the rest of the week (I'd eat one for breakfast each morning and then draw a bath, gasping bong hits in the blurry water, waiting for the real high to kick in). My sisters did a drive-by and cringed at the crowd sprawled all over our claustrophobic street. They thought I'd invited prostitutes and was using exotic drugs I was still too scared to try. Sadly this randomly edited version cuts the closing short, but you get the idea.

[themadsound]

The Sentinals, "Latin'ia"

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He did not remember when he had first started to talk aloud when he was by himself. He had sung when he was by himself in the old days and he had sung at night sometimes when he was alone steering on his watch in the smacks or in the turtle boats. He had probably started to talk aloud, when alone, when the boy had left. But he did not remember. When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only when it was necessary. They talked at night or when they were storm-bound by bad weather. It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the old man had always considered it so and respected it. But now he said his thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy. 'If the others heard me talking out loud they would think I am crazy,' he said aloud. 'But since I am not crazy, I do not care. And the rich have radios to talk to them in their boats and to bring them the baseball.'

Ernest Hemingway, from The Old Man and the Sea

(Reading a sixty-two year old copy of this my sixty-three year old dad never gave back to a library when he was nineteen in 1970, nineteen years before I was born, nine years after Hemingway shot himself. It cost $1.25 then.)

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"Where's the kids? I'd like to say hello to them before I go." "Out playing." "What about the little one? The one with the brain damage?" "He's resting. He has to." "You know, you shouldn't blame yourself about your boy," Kagle tells me, twisting himself back into his car. "I don't blame myself about my leg. It was God's will." "Sure, Andy," I reply with a nasty smile, gritting my teeth. "And don't you worry about your job. If you lose it, it's God's will." "Heh-heh," he comments hollowly. "Heh-heh." "Why didn't you let him stay?" my wife asks. "I didn't want him." It is God's will. I've got Kagle's job. "You were with Andy Kagle today," my wife says. "How can you tell?" "You're walking with a limp. Is his leg getting worse?" "No, why?" "His limp is worse than ever. You're almost staggering." I straighten myself from a position characteristic of one of Kagle's and lean in a slouch of my own against the newel post of the staircase leading to the second floor. "No. He's the same." She's looking at me askance. She's been drinking wine again while helping the maid prepare dinner. Her bleary eyes are tense and patient. (I cannot meet them.) She senses something, and moves ahead carefully with mixed curiosity. "Then you must have been with him a long time." "I got his job." "Did you?" "I was promoted today." "To what?" "Kagle's job." "Kagle's?" "It finally went through." "Was that the job?" "Congratulate me." "Did you know it was his job?" "I had a hunch." "What happened to him?" "Nothing." "What will? I saw the way he looked." "He was fired." "My God." "I fired him today. He doesn't know that yet. But I think he does." "You fired him?" "I had to, God dammit. He won't be fired. He'll be transferred somewhere else until he quits or retires. I can't keep him around. I couldn't use him after he's been in charge. He's embarrassing. He's sloppy. He'll run my work down." "He's got two children." "So have I." "You've got three." "So?" "You're forgetting Derek again." "So?" "You're always forgetting Derek." "So?" "So's your old man." She is drunk and she is defiant. "What the hell else am I supposed to do?" "I'm better than you," she tells me." "You want a new house, don't you? You liked the idea that I was getting a better job, didn't you?" "I used to think I wasn't," she continues. "But I am. You like to think you're better than me. But you're not. I'm the one who's better." "Yeah? And you'd be even better still if you'd lay off the wine in the afternoon." "Your mother was right." "Leave her out of it." "You're just no good." "I told you to leave her out of it." "I never thought I was." "You're always bothering me about money, aren't you?" "No, I don't." "The hell you don't." "And neither do they. We don't bother you about money that much." "And you wonder why I don't tell you I love you, don't you?" "I never thought I was good at anything." There is undisguised scorn, calm, measured contempt that I've never seen in her before. "You don't help much there." "Kagle isn't sore at me. Why are you?" "Isn't he?" "No. In fact, he's the one who recommended me to replace him." "No, he didn't," she jeers, with a curling lip and a belittling shake of her head. "You knew months ago. He just found out." "You're getting good at this." "You taught me." "At least you got something." "But now I know I'm better than you, aren't I?" "Amn't I. There's no such construction as 'aren't I.'" "Puddy poo." "Where'd you get that from?" "From you. You say it in your sleep." "I'm going upstairs. I can't take this." "Puddy poo. What about dinner?" "Count me out. I'll celebrate upstairs alone. I've got to start working on my speech." "What speech?" "The big speech I'm going to have to make to open the convention. I'm the head of the department now. That might not mean much at home but it means a hell of a lot there. I run the whole show. I can do what I want." "Can you get Andy Kagle his job back?" "Fuck you," I tell her. "You're just no good, are you?" "I told you. I warned you. I don't want you ever to say that to me again." "I'll say anything I want," she shouts back at me heatedly. "I'm not afraid of you." "Yes, you say that to me often," I remind her. "And then you sober up, and discover that you are."

Joseph Heller, from Something Happened

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I just found a scanned copy of this illiterate love letter an unsolicited pen pal from Brazil sent me when I was fifteen. Here's a transcript, in case her exemplary cursive is confounding:

"Hi Michel... I am liking to be belongint together with you a lot. The order a picture for me I would a lot to know you. Here it is a very beautiful places if you come, pass in Angra dos Reis, it is a place full of waterfalls and foryst an exuberant natural beauty. I adore to leave, to go at parties to talk with the friends and I adore a flirt. I like a nightclubs a lot and of drunk different. I have blond hair, I am thin, I have 1,63 meters of height and clear chestnut eyes. A kiss... Daiana KISS" No one woos me like this anymore. I hope her eyes are still clear.

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Like carpenters they want to know which tools? They never ask why build?

Anne Sexton, from 'Wanting to Die'

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The chop-board hoof-clap pulse this song whinnies in and out of, from shrill growl to full howl and back to base fuzz again. Toss-up between this video and the one for Toe-Cutter/Thumb-Buster, where each shredded chorus a new pedestrian frightfully catches their future killer haplessly disposing of his last victim.