Having my way with Ulysses

Offal

Not that kind of relish.8:00 am

Oh the nasty bits the sweet sweet nasty bits.  Saw Anthony Bourdain drunk pontificating about offal again but oh god I like it more than he does.  Liver fried nicely in onions with mustard, chicken gizzards scooped with the blood from the bottom of a roasting pan oh that sticky blood, antichuchos grilled hot and just a little crispy, kidneys sauteed in butter with a bacon or most of the time without.  Oh yes the pork kidneys their fat uriney goodness plumping up nicelyinbrownbutteryummmm.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

McNow

Mkgnao

8:06 am

McNow drinking milk, I love that sound.  Stupid cat.  They’re really very smart, cats, they get everything going on. Notice what they want to notice.  Evil.  Cold.  Those wiskers stick out so far on her.  Wonder what would happen if I cut them off, would she still bring us dead rats?  The tips glow in the dark maybe.  Out of food for her, she better eat the whole rat herself.  Rat would enjoy that.  Vindictive.  Smart.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

The man in black absorbs

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree: where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.8:15 am

Wearing black conducts reflects refracts heat.  Black more professional.  If it were possible to stay in front of the sun forever, never let it past, just travel ahead of it. Won’t get a day older, technically.  If the sun were slower or I could speed up.  If I could get in a plane and just move ahead of the earth as it spins away from the sun.  This is the real time travel.  Like astronauts going to the next star and then home to dead relatives.  If it moved more slowly I could wander in front of it on a plain.  It would seem as if all is stopped.  Could steal more time that way.  Or I could walk to the east, know the lands unknown.  I could find a gate there, and a sentry like Tweedy say, leaning on a long spear.  Wander Der voglenish meshumed.  Turbans, carpet shops, Görünmeyen Adam.  The hooka, sellers in streets, fennel water, sherbet.  Meet a robber?  Hello brother,  I am one like you.  What are you stealing?  Shall I help you? Sundown mosques casting shadows on pillars.  Another time even, another time again, another time more.  A damsel with a dulcimer playing to the shivering trees.   Mother calling children home.  Fading gold to violet garter sky.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Times 15, um

I have my reasons, I reckon.8:21 am

Prices look high.  $1.49 a pound, times 15, carry the 4, and if / = division neglecting the remainder and % = division keeping only the remainder and a = year%19 and b = year/100 and c = year%100 and d = b/4 and e = b%4 and f = (b+8) / 25 and g = (b-f+1)/3 and h = (19*a+b-d-g+15)%30 and i=c/4 and k=c%4 and l = (32+2*e+2*i-h-k)%7 and m = (a+11*h+22*l)/451 and easter month = (h+l-7*m+114/31 [3=march, 4=april] and p equals (h+1-7*m+114)%31 then easter date = p+1.  Hum.  Unsolved.  Let it fade.  Waiting behind next door girl at meat counter.  Name Woods.  One kidney left, nice thick drops of blood on dish with it.  Vigorous hips.  She has list, chapped hands, sausages.  Don’t buy my kidney.  Mother oldish, whacking a carpet with crooked skirt swinging.  A good swing at each whack.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Would it kill you to find a nice Jewish commune?

Whosoever's heart icon reaches 0% and is thus teleported to his or her home location while wearing this garment shall not suffer everlasting fire. 8:24 am

Saw something about the new American Kibbutz movement. Vegetable gardens, movie nights. Separate rooms.  For each according to availability from each according to mortgage deed.  Urban, no olive trees, no orange trees, maybe some chickens, but the urban ones much more sophisticated and not their country cousins.  Certainly no roosters.  No cattle blurred in the heat.  No children’s dorms with communal care (female) so their mothers can farm.  No farm.  No children.  Carefully non-denominational non-communistic commune.  I worked with cows.  Not a farm, Chehalis livestock market, auctions on Fridays.  The smell of lowing and the sound of dung.  Slapping a palm on a prime hindquarter.  Whack.  Crooked skirt swinging.  Tried to walk home behind neighbor girl, lazy thing.  Wearing a brown scapular, protects from burning, or rather after the first Saturday it does.  Picture her second life foxeyed with a ferreteyed policeman, prime sausage, lost in the woods oh please Mr Policeman.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Citrons

Eve likes citrons too.8:27 am

Not going to fill out the application for the Ravenna Kibbutz, but still an idea behind it.  Rent is reasonable and then there are the movie nights, workshops, bonfires, gardens.  Pruning things.  Ripening cherry tries.  Not exactly citrons in the Levant but urban kibbuitzniks can’t be expected to reproduce precisely the kibbuitzim of their grandfathers.  This is a simulacral situation.  Nice fruit the citron, can’t find them here.  Forbidden fruit.  Heavy sweet waxy perfume they have.  Wonder if Citron is still working in the movie business.  Rusty he was, marketing.  Gatherings with him and Mastiansky too with his cither, Molly singing.  Bohemian nights those were. 

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

friendofafriend

There is a limit.8:30 am

Saw whatshisname whatdoyoucallhim from whatsits outof.  Didn’t see.  He is a facebook friend of a facebook friend, I know him well.  See pictures of his kids.  He likes that new pie shop.  Follows politics, posts about the mayor on his bike all the time.  Back bent like a programmer, head stuck forward.  I know too much about him but don’t know him more than to say hello.   Tried to say hi but he didn’t hear.  Street sweeper spraying the road just then.  That’ll make it rain.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Sun break, wholly.

Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea.8:33 am

Clouds are beginning to cover the sun slowly, wholly.  Darkening the city again, dark on the plain too it was when those dead cities felt the rain of brimstone  as they called it.  Whatever that is.  Sulfur?  Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom.  Dead names next to a dead sea and old. The oldest race, the oldest people wandered from and back to there, from captivity to captivity to death to life again living and dying and spreading.  An old woman wandering the street with a bottle by the neck.  Dead.  The grey shrunken cunt of the world.  Desolation.  Age crusts me with salt.  Well I am here now.  Yes, I am here now.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Backward eye

I see nothing8:42 am

Email from Milly and she sent a text to Molly.  I took her her phone just now when a text came through and there was another on the screen.  She stuck the phone under her pillow when I handed it to her, but I still saw through halfclosed eyes.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

All cats are kosher

Whats pork to you means meat to me.8:45 am

Molly particular about her tea.  Scald the teapot she says so I do.  Pour in the boiling water, swirl, dump, four spoons of tea, water in, let it draw.  I do it first then make my breakfast.  Pork kidney it was today fried in butter with lots of pepper.  Cat wanted it, but give her too much meat and she won’t mouse.  Plus she’s kosher.  They never sell pork cat food for that reason, cat’s won’t eat it.  Gave her the paper to lick instead.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

The simulacrum is true

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth -- it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. 8:51 am

Silly Milly gave me a genuine reproduction crown derby moustache cup for my birthday when she was five.  Four.  I gave her the real imitation aberoid necklace she broke.  Then we played pretend with the mail, me putting pieces of folded brown paper into the mailbox for her.  Look Milly, you got a bona fide letter and I’d present her with the fake, and look here’s a forgery, and see Milly a fabrication, and this one’s for you a fiction, and here’s yours an invention, and what have we here the make believe, and for you an affectation, and look here’s your pretence, and Milly somebody sent you a fraud and a mock and a pseudo and here’s a counterfeit sham and an unreal inauthentic and oh how nice this one’s the implausible and here’s a subterfuge and a phony and a simulation and the simulacral just for you my darling.  Oh she is my lookingglass from night to morning.  We laughed when she found Mr Goodwin’s mirror in his hat, that polite old perve, bowing Molly off the stage.  Look what I found!  Pert little piece she was, sex breaking out even then.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

I want to and I wouldn’t like to

Who was the text from?8:57 am

Stale incense smell in the bedroom.  Doesn’t seem to bother Molly though.  Boylan coming to work on her show, she’ll be singing something from Don Giovanni with J.C. Doyle and some other sweet old song.  Gathered up laundry to do.  Her panties.  Voglio e non vorrei  socks, garters.  Voglio is that right?  Her clothes end up all tangled up together in the bed.  Altogether smells like foul flowerwater.  Warm, mingles with the fragrance of the tea.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Met him what?

It must have fell down.9:00 am

Molly looks at me with the same young eyes as that first night when.  She saw a word in a book, “metempsychosis” and wanted to know what it means.  I told her it was an idea from Orphism, that it is the transmigration of souls.  Schopenhauer talks about it in The World as Will and Idea  but he sees it more as a dichotomy of will which persists (male, from the father) and intellect (from the mother) which does notThe Orphic idea has more poetry to it.  The soul is eternal and desires freedom, the body is finite and holds the soul captive.  It is a contract broken by death.  Death.  But the soul ends up reimprisoned in another body and so it goes.  Nice, no?  Beautiful, yes?  Well.  Anyway, I remember Schopenhauer said something like there is a contradiction in every individual existence because all that rises is worthy of being destroyed.  She mocked me with her eyes (young, a contradiction) and her response was O, balls! Tell me in plain words.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Ruby pride of the

Is she in love with the first fellow all the time? Molly working that one out.

9:03 am

Flipped through the book Molly wants me to return.  Ruby: the Pride of the Ring.  Illustration promising cruelty enough. The caption: “the monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath”  but Molly was disappointed.  Nothing smutty in it.  Wants me to get one by Paul de Kock next, likes his name.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Did you finish it?

Tell me, I am all eyes. 9:06 am

I remember that trapeze artist who fell at Teatro Zinzanni.  I had to look away, difficult to do in that place.  Everybody stopped.  Everything stopped.  Time stopped as they say, although in that case it would have to have started and all my evidence says something else.  One of the preformers was wandering around the tables offering people tastes of ice soup for a laugh and when it happened she was staring directly into my eyes bent over the table lifting my spoon toward me.  Dark liner.  Glitter lids.  Only the music kept going, a jazzy soundtrack to horrible pain.  She never looked away.  We locked.  I still see those eyes.  And I heard what she didn’t say.  I looked away.  I had to look away.  The staff played it cool, professionals, and had people laughing and eating again fast.  Tough job that.  Break your neck so we break our sides.  Breaks my heart.  Start them off young I imagine so they metempsychosis.  The soul of a trapeze artist in the body of a what?  Our souls after we die.  After before, no difference.  When is Dignam’s soul?

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Some say they remember their past lives

And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because he was paralyzed by horror but because at that prodigious instant Melquiades' final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.

9:09 am

After thousands of years of people reincarnating, with all the coming and going and waiting in chairs and general foot traffic, heaven’s lobby had become a crumbling old ruin. Indra asked Vishvakarma, who was an archetect along the lines of Dedalus and Frank Gehry, to fix up the place a bit and so he did. It was splendid. Dripping with jewels. Gardens. Towers. There were walls that could sing and there were stairs that rotated to the past. In some rooms you could smell the light just by virtue of the placement of the windows in ratios corresponding to the sacred formula (√5+1)/2. In one room he had squared the circle and in another he had trisected an angle and doubled a cube. I don’t even have to tell you what he did with time. Anyway, it was a ton of work and when he was done he was done and wanted to leave. Get paid and leave. Problem was, Indra wanted more. Wasn’t satisfied with good enough. More building if you please and even if you don’t please. So Vishvakarma had no choice, really. He went over his head to the supreme being. Well, this god in charge, this divine fixer, told Vishvakarma not to worry, be cool, just go back and I’ll take care of everything. The next day a kid all in white with a tattoo on his forehead (what parent is going to let that happen? must have been fake) showed up and marched right up to Indra as if Indra wasn’t The Man. And this kid said look, when are you going to be done with all this construction? No other Indra before you has ever built, well paid to be built for him at any rate, anything half as big or a third as great. And Indra, amused that this kid had what appeared to be the balls of a water buffalo to talk smack to his face just like that, said what the hell do you know about other Indras? And the kid said look dude, I’ve seen it all. I was there when they built the pyramids and that was like yesterday. I’ve seen the bang at the start of the universe and the one before that too. I’ve seen all the universes and all possible moments and the containers of moments and the things those are packed into besides and each one has an Indra, so don’t give me your shit. And while the kid was talking and Indra was turning purple with rage a line of ants marched in like they owned the place, which in fact they did. The kid cracked up to see this and laughed until Indra was nearly apoplectic with fury. Finally the kid took pity and revealed his true form. He was the fixer, the man in charge of the man in charge of the man in charge fifty five times over the whole time. Indra fell all over himself apologizing and in his curiosity which he could not contain even in front of the Supreme One, he asked what was it about the ants that was so funny? And the supreme being said those ants? Every one of them are former Indras.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

קדיש

This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory so that the son of Bloom may be glorified through it.

9:12 am

Have been looking at The Bath of the Nymph print we got from a magazine last Easter, can’t remember which one.  DDI?  I paid about $190 to frame it in oak.  Looks like Molly.  Slimmer.  Easter, now that’s a concept.  Resurrection is nothing like metempsychosis where you don’t know where your soul will end up, no.  A tree, a cat.  No.  Get resurrected and the body you died in comes back too.  And not like Lazarus either, all fucked up and reeking of grave rot.  Come out Lazarus, but woof, you stink! Go back in Lazarus.  No.  I want him back, but the way he’d be if not.  If he hadn’t.  You know.  Rudy eleven years ago today.  My boy my boy.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

From my DD

Most Illustrious and Beloved Lord Father, As for the citron, which you commanded me Sire, to make into candy, I have come up with only this little bit that I send you now, because I am afraid the fruit was not fresh enough for the confection to reach the state of perfection I would have liked, and indeed it did not turn out very well after all. Along with this I am sending you two baked pears for these festive days.... Your most affectionate daughter S. Maria Celeste Galilei9:18 am

An email from Milly:

D Papli,

TYVM 4 teh lvl b-day pres.  Its hella bomb nd super perty. :^)  Evry1 sys im all th@.  I got moms bx of creams nd m writn.  Their kewl.  ^_^ Doin gr8 in pic job.  Coghlan tk 1 of me w/ his OL.  wil 4wrd.  did gr8 biz yda.  Wuz nc & all teh bfls wer out.  Mndy were goin 2 hang @ Lake Padden, nmjc.  aml 2 mom & lyl 2 u & *K* :-# & tx!  Im catchn ppl ltm.  Thr wil b a show n teh Greville Arms Satdy.  Thrs a yg Im crushin on named Bannon his fam $_$ he cn wail to Boylin’s (omg I wuz gonna tipe Blazes Boylin’s) song bout teh seaside gurlz.  Tell him lol Milly sez hag1.  TTFN.

4eva ur dd,

Milly

btw sry 4 typos, g2g b4n

M

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

The Gods themselves are simply agents of a great high mystery, the secret of which is found in mathematics.

Before a thousand years have passed -- a span that, for eternity, is less space than an eyeblink for the slowest sphere in heaven -- would you find greater glory if you left your flesh when it was old than if your death had come before your infant words were spent? 9:24 am

Milly is fifteen but I remember like yesterday calling the midwife when she was born.  She was the same one.  She knew instantly Rudy wouldn’t live.  God is good she said and she knew better.  He lived eleven days.  He’d be eleven now.  If I could overreach, into this now or out of this now.  Oh it is a difference of all enormity.  I was so proud.  I’d give my every eyeblink.  She knew at once.  She knew.  From the first.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Troubled affection

Le canard non9:21 am

Milly Bloom Milly Bloom.  I’ve read her email a couple of times.  She met some kid.  Ok, she knows how to take care of herself, but what if she doesn’t?  Nothing has happened.  Sheesh she’s a wild child.  It’s her destiny, it would seem.  She is vain.  Very.  Doing ok in that photography job, makes $1080.  Not bad.  Could be worse.  Had that fight with her about the bracelet.  Wouldn’t eat, speak, look at me.  Smart ass little shit.  Milly Bloom Milly Bloom.  Remember that time we rode the duck.  Rough day, was a wild ride, but she wasn’t scared at all.  Her hair and that blue scarf flying in the wind.  Oh Milly Bloom you are my darling.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

A soft qualm

Why are you shocked if a goddess sleeps with a man and makes no secret of it9:27 am

She met some kid.  Milly did.  Prevent.  Can’t prevent.  She’ll have her firsts.  Kiss.  etc.  Better keep her occupied.  She wanted a dog, something to carry in a purse.  Maybe I’ll just take a trip up there.  Work out a press pass with McCoy, get it paid for.

Prevent some of it.  Molly reading, braiding her hair.  Texting.  Friend of the family.  That will happen too.

I feel a creeping regret, up the back of my spine, back of my neck.  Spreading.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Dirty cleans

The free range stuff is always so much better.9:30 am

Need to reclaim the back garden.  Full of ivy.  Moss in the grass.  Blackberries taking over.  Impossible to get rid of.  Ivy too.  Rent a goat maybe.  Want to manure the whole place over.  Compost.  Chicken shit especially, very good for soil.  Good for lots of things, not just gardens.  Met that chicken shit farmer up in Vancouver.  Wore a black leather jacket with a white drip of his product stuck to his back left shoulder.  Bought a round for everybody, a happy guy.  Should be happy, he farms white gold.   Maybe find some cattle dung.  Grow some peas.  Lettuce, always have fresh greens then.  Don’t want bees, though, don’t need to be stung again.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Yielding but resisting

Life might be so. It did not move him or touch him but it was something quick and neat.9:33 am

Cat wants out.  Miaow!  She didn’t like hearing that.  Molly calling the cat, she wanted upstairs not out.  I’m feeling a heaviness, a loosening.  Want to finish thought, will bring laptop with me.

Ok.  Look out window at nextdoor windows.  Nobody.  No big hurry.  Keep it in.  Restrain myself.  Ah well, last resistance yielding.  Allowing bowels to ease themselves quietly.  That slight constipation from yesterday gone.  Hope this isn’t too big to bring on hemorrhoids again.  No.  Just right.  So.  Powdered cascara bark, nice Northwest plant.  Doesn’t take much.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

A Stitch in Time

I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?9:36 am

Thinking about writing a story, maybe with Molly.  Read one about a laughing witch.  Matchem’s something by Beaufoy.  Could write something and put it on Amazon, see if it sells.  Invent a story for some proverb, but which one?  Infinite supply.  What was that Molly used to say getting dressed?  Used to write that stuff down.  Well, I’ll think of one, touch fingers.  Better start now, procrastination is the thief of time.  A rolling stone gathers no moss.  Time and tide wait for no one and while we are postponing, life speeds by.  What many be done at any time will be done at no time, as they say, and wasting time is robbing oneself.  Oh I thought of one.  What was that.  It’s gone.  Like holding water in my hands.  Wish I could get that thought back.  Oh well, an ounce of gold will not buy an inch of time.  Every moment is golden, you know, and those who neglect time, time will neglect.  Better make the most of the time I have left because you don’t need a watch to know when it is time to die.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Timing

So, how idlers' wind turning pages on pages, as innocens with anaclete play popeye antipop, the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds, annals of themselves timing the cycles of events grand and national, bring fassilwise to pass how.9:39 am

I don’t enjoy getting dressed with Molly.  I timed her this morning:  9:15 did Roberts pay you yet.  Five minutes.  9:20 what was Greta Conroy wearing.  Three minutes.  9:23 what was I thinking when I bought this comb.  One minute.  9:24 cabbage makes me gassy.  Fifteen minutes.  Made me nick myself shaving.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Allude to it

Till breath do us part.

9:42 am

Molly met him a couple of weeks ago.  That Fantasia party.  Explain.  The ostriches dance in the morning, then hippos in the day, elephants in the evening, and aligators at night.  With some overlap.  Strange film.  Hyacinth Hippo dancing the hours with Ben Ali Gator.  Girls like the bad boy.  Story a bit different in the original.  La Gioconda loves Enzo so much she gives him to Laura who loved him first.  Prior claim.  Still, La Giaconda has our sympathy in the bloody end.  Molly is convinced he has money from the smell of it on his breath.  She squinted into the mirror in shadow, showing the lines in her eyes.  Maybe it won’t pan out.  With him or with me.  Get out of the way.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.

Heigho

Poor Dignam!9:45 am

Can hear a ferry in the harbor.  Three longs blasts.  Man overboard.  Likely a tourist fell taking a picture.  Get one of me, I’m king of the world!  Splash.  What time is it?  Quarter to.

Intercourse, eyeball to eyeball.