45

From eight to nine-thirty I sat in beatific silence like a Zen master and let Upanishads roll off my tongue and thought along like a great big victrola playing the French national anthem about how the whole world was filled up with such great bits of love and unending rapture. And how Plato was always like to say things as this: That the reward is beautiful and the hope is great. But Plato was a jerkface, and even I could see that the world was going straight down the shitterr.

The whole little blue marble was spinning right out of control, right with the moon at her perigee and all the while the whole six billion of us were being flung straight down the shitter and into the corona and right into the face of Helios.

At ten I felt so truly restless and annoyed with the idea of simply reading about life and never getting actually around to the whole thing. And so I thought on it a bit to come up with the best sort of solution I could manage, and I pulled on my shoes and buttoned up my shirt and put on my jacket and I left the Gershwin that was playing to blastblastblast and I went into the night and into the woods; the greatbig woods of my childhood. Here, in the cool, were the memories of my youth when I’d steal my father’s pornography andtake to the Pennsylvanian countryside, where I’d build small forts and fight imaginary

space invaders, conquer the Pater Tiber and rape the Sabians that were in the centerfolds. The creepycrawlingsortsof viney greenlittleplants underneath my feet spread on and on through the forest floor and into eternity and then all came back again and through my childhood here and then stretched out into the universe where they’d spin about and grow and ruin all the optimism of a little boy and come straight down the shitter like everything else.

Here in the woods the innocence of childhood and the bitterness of a ragged-looking young man could merge into calm little hummings and float up to the Heavens:

I thought about tea-smoking and Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein and about absinthe and my secretive uterine desires and about my recurring crayfish dream. And I thought that, if I ever did sit down and felt disciplined enough to seriously write a novel of any type, that I’d want to it to be a 900-page manifesto in purely phonetical form of Rhapsody in Blue. But I could not think long on these things, for the paths pulled me further onward, and all my thinkings and bits of enlightenment went off to the place where all thinkings and bits of enlightenment go to die, the Presidential Box at Ford's Theatre.

When I was a child and I walked through there, in that little patch of darkened woodness, I’d always be wont to recite small pieces of Frost to myself. Whose woods these are I’d whisper on and on, with little bits of “The Road Not Taken” interspersed, with lines all pellmell ajumble and my meters not quite right. with New England fairy-tale notions and his

grandfatherly face and his gross little chin like a giant, great lifesize mannequin. He looked like a ventriloquist’s doll, with its creases and wrinkles near the corners of his lips. He was the Whore of the Kennedys’; I detested the bastard and all the boring, saccharine merriment that he stood for. He was an Easter dinner with yer boring family.

Life wasn’t a happy countryside at apple-picking time; life was the soliloquy of Mister Hamlet reeling on and on in the back of yer skullsy’s-wallsies, and worst yet he was a twobit actor screeching his lines and dooming the whole Company to eternal damnation at the hand of our One True God and Master William Shakespeare.

Life was a continual prodding; every second of it was a nagging and an unceasing, crummy little interrogation: was it nobler in the mind to suffer?

You could tell when you were looking from the proper angle up through the trees that the whole world was such a great big steel ball and all its atoms were banging against each other (bangingbangingbanging) and wildly vibrating and playing that Rhapsody and the whole, whole universe was so infinitely small that it was actually making up a verytinylittle pin-sized light reflection in the iris of some übermensch.

I had remained the same; the woods had changed. Now the world, it seemed, had opened up its molten little core and its gross wars and BlackDeaths and spat at me and showed me how terribly ruthless it could be, how terribly stupid and insipid the great big red-scorched earth was and all the little ants and chemicalbrains upon it.

I wanted to end it all and leave this wretched, stenching place. I wanted to buy a bus ticket to Arizona and meet with whoeveritwas that would make me truly happy and mindlessly kiss me and not care if I forgot her birthday, who would wrestle me and beat, absolutely beat the crap out of me if I asked her to, or would listen to me read my short novellas about anhedonia and Heironymous Bosch and my poems and dreams of crayfish.

But I had eleven bucks in my pocket and a ten-dollar note that was ripped neatly in half and balled up and tearing a good deal more, and I knew quite well that I could barely eat a good meal for that much, letalone cross the country and no one picks up hitch-hikers anymore.

I turned over in my head the cosmic similarities between words like “Arthur Miller” and “Adolph Hitler”. And I was bored and tired and felt like a dorkface for wasting more time.

Nature was always betraying me like that when I wanted to walk through the woods at night and wanted to come out of them like I had just meditated under the bodhi tree or flown over the streets of Holy Lhasa, and I returned with a good deal of anger in my skullsy and I went home and into the livingroom and tore off my shoes and my jacket and propped open the window on a wooden stick and pulled down my trousers and pushed Frankenstein into the slot and rewound it and thought that maybe Karma herself was dancing with me, that all of IT was being revealed to me, and as the television played before our feature presentation, the grandgreatmystical irony in it: The

secretude to it. The strangelittlecosmic,alignmentoftheplanets it had to hold; that the cat had maybe, finally, thrown off Mary and wedded with Byron, wedded from the depths of the sea where he rested like a pirate, and in some great twist of fate and poetic justice, that the two of them had given birth, at last and like She could never have done, to an epic piece of lyric: the


	Deadly Ivy \| home 6.7 \| 45 \| 9th \| Here 45 I felt like I was Norman Baits: From eight to nine-thirty I sat in beatific silence like a Zen master and let Upanishads roll off my tongue and thought along like a great big victrola playing the French national anthem about how the whole world was filled up with such great bits of love and unending rapture. And how Plato was always like to say things as this: That the reward is beautiful and the hope is great. But Plato was a jerkface, and even I could see that the world was going straight down the shitterr. The whole little blue marble was spinning right out of control, right with the moon at her perigee and all the while the whole six billion of us were being flung straight down the shitter and into the corona and right into the face of Helios. At ten I felt so truly restless and annoyed with the idea of simply reading about life and never getting actually around to the whole thing. And so I thought on it a bit to come up with the best sort of solution I could manage, and I pulled on my shoes and buttoned up my shirt and put on my jacket and I left the Gershwin that was playing to blastblastblast and I went into the night and into the woods; the greatbig woods of my childhood. Here, in the cool, were the memories of my youth when I’d steal my father’s pornography andtake to the Pennsylvanian countryside, where I’d build small forts and fight imaginary space invaders, conquer the Pater Tiber and rape the Sabians that were in the centerfolds. The creepycrawlingsortsof viney greenlittleplants underneath my feet spread on and on through the forest floor and into eternity and then all came back again and through my childhood here and then stretched out into the universe where they’d spin about and grow and ruin all the optimism of a little boy and come straight down the shitter like everything else. Here in the woods the innocence of childhood and the bitterness of a ragged-looking young man could merge into calm little hummings and float up to the Heavens: (Prayer to relieve you of your skins:) Knick-Knack Ker-ou-ac Give a god a bone. I thought about tea-smoking and Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein and about absinthe and my secretive uterine desires and about my recurring crayfish dream. And I thought that, if I ever did sit down and felt disciplined enough to seriously write a novel of any type, that I’d want to it to be a 900-page manifesto in purely phonetical form of Rhapsody in Blue. But I could not think long on these things, for the paths pulled me further onward, and all my thinkings and bits of enlightenment went off to the place where all thinkings and bits of enlightenment go to die, the Presidential Box at Ford's Theatre. When I was a child and I walked through there, in that little patch of darkened woodness, I’d always be wont to recite small pieces of Frost to myself. Whose woods these are I’d whisper on and on, with little bits of “The Road Not Taken” interspersed, with lines all pellmell ajumble and my meters not quite right. with New England fairy-tale notions and his grandfatherly face and his gross little chin like a giant, great lifesize mannequin. He looked like a ventriloquist’s doll, with its creases and wrinkles near the corners of his lips. He was the Whore of the Kennedys’; I detested the bastard and all the boring, saccharine merriment that he stood for. He was an Easter dinner with yer boring family. Robert Frost is that kind of phonybolony holiday joy. I am become Death, destroyer of worlds, You come, too. Life wasn’t a happy countryside at apple-picking time; life was the soliloquy of Mister Hamlet reeling on and on in the back of yer skullsy’s-wallsies, and worst yet he was a twobit actor screeching his lines and dooming the whole Company to eternal damnation at the hand of our One True God and Master William Shakespeare. Life was a continual prodding; every second of it was a nagging and an unceasing, crummy little interrogation: was it nobler in the mind to suffer? You could tell when you were looking from the proper angle up through the trees that the whole world was such a great big steel ball and all its atoms were banging against each other (bangingbangingbanging) and wildly vibrating and playing that Rhapsody and the whole, whole universe was so infinitely small that it was actually making up a verytinylittle pin-sized light reflection in the iris of some übermensch. You and I are the twinkling on Goethe’s laughing eyesocket. I had remained the same; the woods had changed. Now the world, it seemed, had opened up its molten little core and its gross wars and BlackDeaths and spat at me and showed me how terribly ruthless it could be, how terribly stupid and insipid the great big red-scorched earth was and all the little ants and chemicalbrains upon it. I wanted all those little chemicalbrains to drink a healthy dosage of Drano. I wanted to pick up a nasty habit or two. I wanted to play the harmonica. I wanted to end it all and leave this wretched, stenching place. I wanted to buy a bus ticket to Arizona and meet with whoeveritwas that would make me truly happy and mindlessly kiss me and not care if I forgot her birthday, who would wrestle me and beat, absolutely beat the crap out of me if I asked her to, or would listen to me read my short novellas about anhedonia and Heironymous Bosch and my poems and dreams of crayfish. But I had eleven bucks in my pocket and a ten-dollar note that was ripped neatly in half and balled up and tearing a good deal more, and I knew quite well that I could barely eat a good meal for that much, letalone cross the country and no one picks up hitch-hikers anymore. I turned over in my head the cosmic similarities between words like “Arthur Miller” and “Adolph Hitler”. And I was bored and tired and felt like a dorkface for wasting more time. Nature was always betraying me like that when I wanted to walk through the woods at night and wanted to come out of them like I had just meditated under the bodhi tree or flown over the streets of Holy Lhasa, and I returned with a good deal of anger in my skullsy and I went home and into the livingroom and tore off my shoes and my jacket and propped open the window on a wooden stick and pulled down my trousers and pushed Frankenstein into the slot and rewound it and thought that maybe Karma herself was dancing with me, that all of IT was being revealed to me, and as the television played before our feature presentation, the grandgreatmystical irony in it: The Percy Bysshe Shelley secretude to it. The strangelittlecosmic,alignmentoftheplanets it had to hold; that the cat had maybe, finally, thrown off Mary and wedded with Byron, wedded from the depths of the sea where he rested like a pirate, and in some great twist of fate and poetic justice, that the two of them had given birth, at last and like She could never have done, to an epic piece of lyric: the Public Broadcasting System. Simulacra bobacra fêfæfo-facra. I’m alive, I’m alive: In the name of God! I’m alive.