i wonder if don knots and jim nabors
used to go fishing together,
off camera--
knocking a few back under a familiar dusk sky,
baiting their hooks,
asking each other:
people don’t really think that’s us, do they?
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
go get pop.
we’d be up catching flies in the kitchen.
late nights when my brother wasn’t michelobing.
i can feel it in the air tonight, o lord.
he was older, so he had the technique down.
he’d sneak up on one, take it, shake it like craps dice,
then slam it off the ripped linoleum.
laughing like harlem folks in the apollo,
we’d wait for another one to come down from the drop ceiling,
panels stained, looking like rorschach tests,
as if some bum lived above,
passing out, spilling his wild i.
anyway…
we’d wait for one to come down,
catch it, wing it,
all night long. all night, all night, all night long.
we goin’ to mambo, carumba, keep the
back door open like u.s. borders that create tejanos,
flies check in, but they don’t…
we had those oscar the grouch trashcans
on the back porch. They were clanging about.
step onto the miniature-golf turf that cloaked the porch floor.
dude, what was that?
lids were off. a ‘possum eating stereotypical trashcan trash—
coffee grinds, eggshells, plantain peels, the like.
turns out the fucker had a skull like jaws from moonraker.
convulsing in the corner, hissing.
i pinned his neck down with the spade my brother produced
inspector gadget style
whilst he pumped pellets into marsupial melon.
15 or so spit from a co2 gun he got for christmas;
mr. opossum was o'possible to off.
all alliteration aside,
we were getting a little nervous with rasputin here.
my brother took over the spade-pinning detail,
go get pop!
i ran up the steps and woke him like revere.
excited ‘possum talk filled his thick ears,
he didn’t say a word, put his soles to that awful red carpet,
walked down deliberately in sagging fruit of the looms,
grabbed the spade from my brother,
beat that ‘possum to stillness with a shovel in his undies,
half asleep, his back hairs like armor.
late nights when my brother wasn’t michelobing.
i can feel it in the air tonight, o lord.
he was older, so he had the technique down.
he’d sneak up on one, take it, shake it like craps dice,
then slam it off the ripped linoleum.
laughing like harlem folks in the apollo,
we’d wait for another one to come down from the drop ceiling,
panels stained, looking like rorschach tests,
as if some bum lived above,
passing out, spilling his wild i.
anyway…
we’d wait for one to come down,
catch it, wing it,
all night long. all night, all night, all night long.
we goin’ to mambo, carumba, keep the
back door open like u.s. borders that create tejanos,
flies check in, but they don’t…
we had those oscar the grouch trashcans
on the back porch. They were clanging about.
step onto the miniature-golf turf that cloaked the porch floor.
dude, what was that?
lids were off. a ‘possum eating stereotypical trashcan trash—
coffee grinds, eggshells, plantain peels, the like.
turns out the fucker had a skull like jaws from moonraker.
convulsing in the corner, hissing.
i pinned his neck down with the spade my brother produced
inspector gadget style
whilst he pumped pellets into marsupial melon.
15 or so spit from a co2 gun he got for christmas;
mr. opossum was o'possible to off.
all alliteration aside,
we were getting a little nervous with rasputin here.
my brother took over the spade-pinning detail,
go get pop!
i ran up the steps and woke him like revere.
excited ‘possum talk filled his thick ears,
he didn’t say a word, put his soles to that awful red carpet,
walked down deliberately in sagging fruit of the looms,
grabbed the spade from my brother,
beat that ‘possum to stillness with a shovel in his undies,
half asleep, his back hairs like armor.
Monday, February 13, 2006
like this
Sedans compressed like a and b buttons,
uneaten pork chunks lavished with overdone rice,
waiting to be of some use again.
everywhere
there is white rooftop,
winter wonderland, glazed power line,
snot noses run toboggan time tests,
like engineers from deutchland.
more charles schulz than charles schulz.
it looked like this when we
formed to become a voltron spider.
your casket being the thorax.
i was the right, front leg.
uneaten pork chunks lavished with overdone rice,
waiting to be of some use again.
everywhere
there is white rooftop,
winter wonderland, glazed power line,
snot noses run toboggan time tests,
like engineers from deutchland.
more charles schulz than charles schulz.
it looked like this when we
formed to become a voltron spider.
your casket being the thorax.
i was the right, front leg.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Sunday Outside the Newsroom: Brantacide
Smoke II
At this point in my life, I was sneaking smokes. Life was full of promise, and I had made a bunch of promises, to myself and to my girlfriend and my mom and everybody else in my life who didn't smoke. It was time to quit, I was a grownup, there was that time I caught my shirt on fire driving in the mid-summer swelter, blah-de-blah.
I wasn't buying it. I snuck smokes as often as I breathed air. All these people, the targets of my promising behavior, they knew it, but we agreed to keep up the charade, as a team effort, throughout the first couple years after I left college. It wasn't that hard.
I headed into the newspaper on a weekend to dig into some work -- and to slip into the socially welcoming milieu of fellow-smokers. It was a Sunday, when a team of drones sat at a sad batch of Frankenstein-monster Macs and assembled tiny ads in ancient Pagemaker like Buddhist monks. The ad-building folks had ministrations that seemed precise and appealing even though they depressed me. They took a plastic sleeve with the information about the ad, usually dug up an older version from some far-away file-server, altered it slightly, saved and moved on. Their peaceful movements were calming, but it was the endless re-jiggering of the same dozen words and the same dull images in the same tiny box that put me on the edge of weeping. One column by four inches. Two columns by five. Half page. Forever.
I was at one of my desks sniffing through some old files to see if there was any way I could avoid doing reporting that week when I heard a fracas outside. I had come to work to get something done, surely, and to absent-mindedly think about unspooling my current setup over perpetual lies and fear of life getting a proper start sometime in the near future, and to stare at the tiny sliver of alabaster skin above the waistline of an art student who did paste-up on weekends, but I wasn't above an additional distraction.
The newsroom was wedged in a slight grade; on one side you ascended stairs to go out while on the other you walked straight into to the parking lot. I took the stairs two at a time and heard a reporter named Elkins who was a good guy and gave the impression -- false as it turned out -- that he took his job too seriously. He wore cowboy boots before Washington was taken over by Texans. He was yelling at Dean, a gigantic man who drove a Lincoln which made sounds like a dozen empties were rolling in the trunk. There was no way of knowing whether the sounds were anything other than exactly that, because the trunk didn't open anymore.
"...ducks!" Dean was shouting when I arrived.
"They're Canada geese, Dean-man, and they're harmless." Elkins was angular in a country star from the forties way, and had a concave body on which clothes hung like drying laundry. It's possible that he was thin and strong and wiry, but he sometimes conjured the image of a scarecrow with a notebook. I nodded to Elkins and lit a cigarette with an amused grin. He was sitting on a rusty-looking desk chair and I sat on the ground. Dean was next to his car, red-faced and possibly drunk. The decorum which doubtlessly rules most workplaces was absent in this particular bankrupt newsroom, and reporters, especially on weekends, would drink on the job without giving it much thought.
"They're filthy scavengers and they're shitting all over my car." Dean had a point here. The Canada geese who used the nearby man-made pond as some sort of way-station were pretty gross. They walked around eating grass and defecating pretty much wherever they pleased. I hadn't seen anything like this on my car, but I wasn't in the habit of inspecting my vehicle closely. Dean, however, was.
"They're just birds, Dean-man. Give it a break."
"They're too dumb for their own good," Dean continued. He got into his car and said through the open window, "It's time for some natural selection." Elkins momentarily looked at me with wide eyes and then made for the car in a clatter of boots on concrete. Dean had the Lincoln in gear and was moving by the time Elkins reached him. Elkins smacked the trunk of the car and it was gone across the mostly-empty lot toward a batch of geese not doing much of anything.
Dean was right about the geese not being that smart. Elk and I stood there as Dean tore through the geese hitting a half-dozen while a few others looked on. They had no mechanism for responding to this. Nature's thousands of years of selection had perhaps programmed responses in the tiny geese brains to oncoming bobcats and coyotes but the flight-codes had nothing prepared for an onrushing '79 Lincoln. The birds seemed more disturbed by the damaged remains of their former gaggle-mates than the instrument of their destruction. I have to say I was, too.
Life in the newsroom unfolded in ways that surprised you. I was still relatively post-collegiate, and didn't have much experience with relating to actual grownups who had something like lives. Dean was probably the first example of palpable, irritatingly obvious failure I had experienced at that point outside of a few dispiriting professors over the years. Late on a Tuesday night not long before the geese incident, I had experienced some catastrophe or another which would lead to hours more at the paper long past midnight. I sent home the paste-up people and went to get a Coke from a machine in a poorly-lit alcove. Dean surprised me, sitting on the steps in the half-dark. He was still except for shaking hands. He shocked me when he asked if I had any siblings. He told me a story about racing his brother on 29 down to Manassas when they were kids, when Virginia's DC suburbs were an untamed countryside. He looked away and made a snuffling sound, his hands still shaking and red-white. I started to recede from the alcove as I realized that he wasn't really telling me the story as much as repeating it to himself.
At this point in my life, I was sneaking smokes. Life was full of promise, and I had made a bunch of promises, to myself and to my girlfriend and my mom and everybody else in my life who didn't smoke. It was time to quit, I was a grownup, there was that time I caught my shirt on fire driving in the mid-summer swelter, blah-de-blah.
I wasn't buying it. I snuck smokes as often as I breathed air. All these people, the targets of my promising behavior, they knew it, but we agreed to keep up the charade, as a team effort, throughout the first couple years after I left college. It wasn't that hard.
I headed into the newspaper on a weekend to dig into some work -- and to slip into the socially welcoming milieu of fellow-smokers. It was a Sunday, when a team of drones sat at a sad batch of Frankenstein-monster Macs and assembled tiny ads in ancient Pagemaker like Buddhist monks. The ad-building folks had ministrations that seemed precise and appealing even though they depressed me. They took a plastic sleeve with the information about the ad, usually dug up an older version from some far-away file-server, altered it slightly, saved and moved on. Their peaceful movements were calming, but it was the endless re-jiggering of the same dozen words and the same dull images in the same tiny box that put me on the edge of weeping. One column by four inches. Two columns by five. Half page. Forever.
I was at one of my desks sniffing through some old files to see if there was any way I could avoid doing reporting that week when I heard a fracas outside. I had come to work to get something done, surely, and to absent-mindedly think about unspooling my current setup over perpetual lies and fear of life getting a proper start sometime in the near future, and to stare at the tiny sliver of alabaster skin above the waistline of an art student who did paste-up on weekends, but I wasn't above an additional distraction.
The newsroom was wedged in a slight grade; on one side you ascended stairs to go out while on the other you walked straight into to the parking lot. I took the stairs two at a time and heard a reporter named Elkins who was a good guy and gave the impression -- false as it turned out -- that he took his job too seriously. He wore cowboy boots before Washington was taken over by Texans. He was yelling at Dean, a gigantic man who drove a Lincoln which made sounds like a dozen empties were rolling in the trunk. There was no way of knowing whether the sounds were anything other than exactly that, because the trunk didn't open anymore.
"...ducks!" Dean was shouting when I arrived.
"They're Canada geese, Dean-man, and they're harmless." Elkins was angular in a country star from the forties way, and had a concave body on which clothes hung like drying laundry. It's possible that he was thin and strong and wiry, but he sometimes conjured the image of a scarecrow with a notebook. I nodded to Elkins and lit a cigarette with an amused grin. He was sitting on a rusty-looking desk chair and I sat on the ground. Dean was next to his car, red-faced and possibly drunk. The decorum which doubtlessly rules most workplaces was absent in this particular bankrupt newsroom, and reporters, especially on weekends, would drink on the job without giving it much thought.
"They're filthy scavengers and they're shitting all over my car." Dean had a point here. The Canada geese who used the nearby man-made pond as some sort of way-station were pretty gross. They walked around eating grass and defecating pretty much wherever they pleased. I hadn't seen anything like this on my car, but I wasn't in the habit of inspecting my vehicle closely. Dean, however, was.
"They're just birds, Dean-man. Give it a break."
"They're too dumb for their own good," Dean continued. He got into his car and said through the open window, "It's time for some natural selection." Elkins momentarily looked at me with wide eyes and then made for the car in a clatter of boots on concrete. Dean had the Lincoln in gear and was moving by the time Elkins reached him. Elkins smacked the trunk of the car and it was gone across the mostly-empty lot toward a batch of geese not doing much of anything.
Dean was right about the geese not being that smart. Elk and I stood there as Dean tore through the geese hitting a half-dozen while a few others looked on. They had no mechanism for responding to this. Nature's thousands of years of selection had perhaps programmed responses in the tiny geese brains to oncoming bobcats and coyotes but the flight-codes had nothing prepared for an onrushing '79 Lincoln. The birds seemed more disturbed by the damaged remains of their former gaggle-mates than the instrument of their destruction. I have to say I was, too.
Life in the newsroom unfolded in ways that surprised you. I was still relatively post-collegiate, and didn't have much experience with relating to actual grownups who had something like lives. Dean was probably the first example of palpable, irritatingly obvious failure I had experienced at that point outside of a few dispiriting professors over the years. Late on a Tuesday night not long before the geese incident, I had experienced some catastrophe or another which would lead to hours more at the paper long past midnight. I sent home the paste-up people and went to get a Coke from a machine in a poorly-lit alcove. Dean surprised me, sitting on the steps in the half-dark. He was still except for shaking hands. He shocked me when he asked if I had any siblings. He told me a story about racing his brother on 29 down to Manassas when they were kids, when Virginia's DC suburbs were an untamed countryside. He looked away and made a snuffling sound, his hands still shaking and red-white. I started to recede from the alcove as I realized that he wasn't really telling me the story as much as repeating it to himself.
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