Narragansett Beer, from Latrobe, PA

I should have been born a 45-year-old electrician, if I may extend our conversation into the stereotypical. In many social ways, I feel kinship with traditional blue-collar folk, even though there is nothing in my life that colors my collar that way.

With beer, of which I like many, I love Narragansett. Made on honor, Sold on Merit. And now from Latrobe, PA--qu'est ce c'est? This would explain the recent advertising blitz for a beer whose previous total advertising comprised ancient signs on ancient bars in Rhode Island, Southeastern Massachusetts, and the Cape. But the experience is the same: big cans, old label, LAGER in all caps like that's a vital distinction. And the beer, completely the same. I'm not so stereotypically blue-collar that I abhor change--if the makers of Rolling Rock are promoting this gem, hooray. I'd love to find it more places. And I'd love for it to take over ghastly PBR on the taps.

Why mention this within this blog? I know I am taken with some element of the language of this beer. It appeals to my love of dead authors, I suppose. It draws me to a people I usually read about, and sometimes want to be. It reminds me how silly I am, although aware of this.

Not a Thing

Not a thing to say. No: a habit not to say. Things come and others go, but habits are harder in their subtle clothes, a familiar friend actually sent to kill you.

Cohere

What brings the unexpected together? Surely the comprehensive boredom of the expected unites unexplained worlds in an equal and opposite reaction to its own horribleness. The expected, despite its numerous flaws, is predictable.

Things fall apart, first Yeats, then Achebe, then others have said, but the physics behind this have been in effect far longer: our penchant for breaking from routine and heading into imminent disaster is so ingrained in our humanity that it must have existed longer than verbal language.

We fuck up one world because we can't stand that we have only taken one world. We have ourselves to blame, and this is why we are empowered to mess it all up for the sake of becoming more than ourselves. Forests that burn come back stronger from their own ashes. Should souls be any different?

It was Tuesday

Curves and arrows, beauty to bleed for. A stolen book of nice lines replaced, a lovely meat amid cholesterolic arteries, throughways that pulse with excitement and go sterile with misuse. Hatred has its uses here. So does dreaming, the hair of the psyche.

When a Finnish president wins a Nobel, do bloodways run furious, or do we wait for a dog food commercial to laugh? There is no we here.

But there is here: The only wrong part of us is uselessness. To be useless is not to ignore God, it's to ignore our wiring, a much more tragic circumstance. God thrives on being the underdog, and veins are real besides.

Does God live in our pipes? Only as a blockage--if not, we do not generally live with this knowledge or act accordingly. But put some strain of the heart, and it's Oh God aplenty. What a crutch.

I do not care for crutches. I suffer financially in private, I yearn upon the night, I call for God only when my grandmother mutters next to me in her church. I have suffered and it has been alone. Otherwise it is not true suffering, no?

To suffer with others is an inconvenience. True suffering is to have joy alone. It's amusing how much quantity affects the circumstance. It's terrifying to think that

this just happened, like a ponytail expanding in the wind that wasn't planned, or

a cancer ceasing growth because
it was
Tuesday.

Dilatory Days

That's better as a phrase than Salad Days, no? Of all we have to thank Shakespeare for, I completely despise him for that combination of words. There is no real reason for my disgust. I like salad. I enjoy days. I find the combination unequal to its meaning.

Dilatory Days, that's something I can stand behind. When I get around to standing behind things, or for things, or on things, or even occasionally by things. Now I procrastinate, of course, but only in the habitual sense, not the intentional sense. I'd most enjoy the time to write Are Go posts all day and of course all damn night. Writing about language is my backgammon, my mojito, my devil with a blue dress. Cicero would likely put me with the Greeklings (his term), those who write about doing something instead of doing it. Fine, fair enough. But I still have my voice. I'm waiting for that comeback, Marcus Tullius...what, Roman mob got your tongue?

This is a minor post on a tiny blog. Its purpose is to resuscitate interest in my uncommon words, to leave a fingerprint in martian soil, you know, just in case lives to come that are beyond our language will know that we tried.

Minatory Song

When I rip down this wall, you will fall.

The age of smugness ends tonight. I am the finisher of your epoch. I will not so much destroy you as I will atomize your existence. You will not so much regret the things you've done as you will feel sorrow for the stories your family will tell about your demise after you're gone.

Tick tock, click clock, your luck is fucked.

These threats are not idle or even exaggerated. There is a way that quiet people explode with an aggrevation only understood on a scientific scale. Souls expand and contract in equal ways over the course of a lifetime. Some fluxuate on minute intervals. Some change with the moon cycles. I've been holding this for my life, and the reaction will alter it permanently.

I'm not writing this to warn you. You already know I'm coming for you. These words are like the word Ambulance written on an ambulance. I just want you to know your power and influence: as your life gets worse, the world gets better. Now.

You Change All the Lead [Sadness of a friend]

Sadness of a friend, no isolation is so external.
To be so far, to share the same infinitive sky.
A life
of parentheses disengages,
leaving a single period on a white sheet.

This ink, this blood, these images
among concomitant friends and beautiful horizons,
echoes in my intellect, one body movement from a far lake or, less easily,
a flashlight against a daylit night sky.
These stars are different down here. Everything is different,
what this is, and what this is not.

A hug from the near-dead, a picture of the forgotten,
a richly colored sky on the day we are born.
A compliment from a stranger, a tree branch in reach,
so changes the sadness, so changes the friendship.

Untouched skin, unwatched planets, the core of Gaea's pubis
from which smooth and wondrous paths venture out
before calling back in the grammar of ancients.

My pulse fuels this constant fire, an approaching blaze.
My ink learns. My church burns.
Do you? Light as the biggest cloud, thick as a moan.
With an indication of all existence, you connect with me,
A single, perfect lily placed deep, deep, within my now perfect soul.