COLLECT LIKE A SUPERHERO!

I've had a lot of odd images in my dreams the last few nights. For instance: Verde and I and Karfilov and Mao are sitting around, the location isn't clear, it's night, and Verde isn't wearing pants. She tries to hide this at first (She and Karfilov and Mao are not well acquainted in real life) but gets increasingly explicit as we come under the influence of some airborne mellow or other. We might have all been smoking pot. Which is curious, because I don't smoke pot. What if she and Rojo were having sex last night, toking up, and I psychically tapped into the scene somehow? That'd be strange, and an amazing power to have. Too bad I have absolutely no way to validate this without sounding like a creep and/or perv, although she'd laugh if I told her this story. In the dream, she was really stoned.

A guy working construction just down the street asked me yesterday if I have any drug connections, it was tough for him to ask but he took a chance I guess, I told him I'd see what I could do for him, and I haven't done anything yet.

A few nights ago I was dreaming about some kind of family reunion. It was awkward, there was a rainstorm outside and something else significant about it which I can't immediately recall. Later, I was playing pool with my uncle in a basement, but the pool table was floating on a contained bed of water...if that makes any sense...the basement leaked, because of the storm, and it wasn't flooded, or even very wet, but the pool table was definitely floating. It was listing, too, one end sinking, so I shot the cue ball downward in that direction and pocketed a couple of balls, solids mostly, which of course popped out in the ball return on my end of the table (meaning that they traveled upwards somehow).

Not sure where I'm short-circuiting this week, but it's better than nothing, and it could be worse.

I've been tired, of course. Worked Cinco de Mayo and made A LOT of margaritas, measured every ounce of tequila I poured, except for one which I--gasp--freepoured out of desperation. The time I had off last weekend wasn't enough, and now I'm working straight through this weekend too, and most of next week. One night off, a Tuesday, for a-

-Hm. Heh. We'll see about that.

Mad finally did give me my hat back! The first night it sat on the record player while I was at work, so I wasn't wearing it during the game, but it worked its magic all the same and the Phillies won in the tenth inning. Wednesday night was a shutout and last night they won by five, clenching the series 3-1, after I got my hat back. Maybe that nasty streak they had in San Francisco is over...I didn't even know the City had a team until it shut the Phillies out...

The 7-Eleven near campus is running this ad, by the way, "Collect Like a Superhero." I want to know what Superheroes collect. Does Iron Man have all of the novelty cups that Sev has offered over the years? Where does he display them? When I confirm my powers of psychic voyeurism, I will begin to collect these cups as well.


I hate ad campaigns.

...& Semiotics, {2}: how I invented the metaphor.

I was sitting there in the garden, too, thinking about how that little overgrown yard with its tall and thriving weeds contrasted so sharply to the bed of grass that Lovely and I used to lay on, and realized that I could relate this contrasting relationship to my present circumstances! Was nature giving me a sign, I wondered, or perhaps God?

Well, that depends entirely on your religion. I realized at the same time, however, that if I were living three thousand years ago or so, before, for example, the Enlightenment, or even just before an established literary tradition, I might think that a higher being or spirit with a measure of influence in my life might be sending me some kind of of lesson or message to reflect on. Of course, you have to recognized something that seems meaningful to you as meaningful enough to be more than just a coincidence first. A physical instance, the grass, is made manifest into a mental or emotional response that encourages me in some way. Of course I have to manipulate the sign, or rather, the being that is Me manipulated--interpreted--the sign, if indeed it was one at all, in the way that I am designed [Designed?] to do. I guess, if something is sending me a sign, it probably designed me to interpret it, so we'll just assume this element of the equation works out.

Metaphor, from the Greek, to carry over. I also liked, Meta, "after", "beyond", "with", "adjacent"--a concept which is an abstraction from another concept--and Phorm: put the two together and you have Adjacent Form. I added the M myself.

So I figure, some dudes were sitting around three thousand years ago, bored, like most of them were back then, and they realized that certain physical instances, seemingly arbitrary objects, signs (coincidence?) reflected what was going on in their lives, and translated the sport of semiotics from its practical uses in spirituality to the written page, in essence inventing the metaphor and empowering great auteurs like Russ Meyer in the twentieth century.

I wonder if I would have arrived at the same conclusion if I had been thinking three thousand years ago? It's a mostly discouraging internal monologue (I don't give myself much credit) for another day.

Summer Rain

It's a soft drizzle right now, I was expecting bigger storms. Heat lighting flashed in the west and it reminded me of home. The wave of humidity that washed me when I opened the window was just how I imagined it, and I'm sitting in the window dripping sweat with a damp cigarette hanging out of my mouth. On the outside it's the ideal romantic summer. On the inside, though...it was supposed to be out of an old movie, the whistle of a tired fan and the creak of a lopsided iron bed frame and the glow of the single lamp lighting a shithole of a room, maybe a torn poster of an actress on the wall, maybe my typewriter on the desk, an old jazz record cooing on the turntable, or Hendrix, depending on the month. That's the sort of room I lived in three years ago when I cooked it all up in my head. It wasn't supposed to be the [straightened] round living room with the clean red carpet and the two-hundred pound television and the air conditioning that I have to turn off if I throw open that window because I share this apartment with two other guys who don't know the second thing about the discomfort of reality.

*

Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, 25 or 6 to 4, and Brain Stew all seem to rip off the same musical progression. The original song was written by Anne Bredon and covered by Joan Baez, who credited it as a traditional song. That's where Page heard it first, Baez's album, and only began to pay Bredon royalties in the eighties. What of Chicago and Green Day?

*

I was back in the garden today today enjoying myself a little picnic. There's a wooden table next to a gas grill, which is built right into a short stone wall, and a walkway leading around to the front of the house, and a patch of grass that constitutes a yard, I guess. The whole garden is walled in by tall, thick hedges, making for a pleasant, private cove of sorts. Lovely and I used to sit out there at night, under the stars and when the street was quiet, and have the entire world to ourselves--there's nothing like being in love and being outside and being alone, because you're not confined to the privacy of some tight, stale little room, and you can breath and laugh and be happy and feel free.

The yard hasn't been tended to by a gardener since the season turned, which I thought strangely symbolic. It will, of course and probably only in a matter of days, be mowed over, and then it will appear neat and clean and fresh, but for now it's grown tall and wild: forgotten, but not dead.

Saturday night after I got off of work I went down to Riverdeck, a hotspot on the waterfront, and watched Katharine glare and curse her way through her first official shift as a bartender. It's a busy place on the weekend and she was put to work, learning everything in about two hours of mixing and, well, tending, that it's taken me a year to learn at the Chain. She absolutely hated it: the relentless wave of customers, the lure of forbidden liquor at her back, the clouds of mocking cigarette smoke drifting from just outside the bar awning, the noise, the heat, the motion, the attitude, the drunkenness. I sat and watched it all, throwing recipes to her if she needed them, and trying to catch her eye with an encouraging smile, or to share some silent private joke--

She had none of it, she never even really looked up, or around. The second thing you learn as a bartender is how to avoid making visual contact with people until you are ready to help them.

She did a great job and I tried to tell her so. Once in the middle of the shift--she answered with a tart "Fuck you."--once with a text message during the middle of her shift--she didn't get it until later--and then through a line on Facebook after I got home. I like her. I wanted her to know that she did a good job, and managed the work well, especially for a rookie. Nobody else tells you these things: You work at a bar, grind your feet down to the stumps of your legs and strain your voice and your ears and your patience, but you're still only working for drunk people who want to get drunker: end of the line. Their attitudes alone make the job unbearable, and that's just one facet of the job. So many people...and every one of them convinced they've been waiting too long for your attention, too self-involved to consider for a minute the throng of mad scrambling that they've waded through to get to the bar in the first place, too convinced their needs come first now that they've made it, goddamnit, and who cares who else has been waiting longer?

I tried to compliment Katharine, and each time I think I offended her. She deserves to hear good things. She thought I was being sarcastic.

Again, she hated the job, she never smiled once the whole night she was back there. But, the money was good, and it made the night, I guess--strange way about certain things. I want to take Katharine out, even though she's leagues above me, but I'm worried about something else. I actually like this girl, and I'm afraid that, as it's happened a few times already, pursuing her will only make the future miserable for one or both of us.

That grass grows a little taller with each summer rain. But you're not in the room you want to be in, are you? You're where you are, hearing the rain and feeling it all the same.