Browsed by
Author: Bartleby

Diner meeting

Diner meeting

Big fat man in shimmer-shine polo;
Walk and slosh from side to side;
Strange lined threads shake and spray
the yellow diner light.

Little head blond round and wise
Aging tortoise mouth and eyes.

Slap back, handshake-hug
a short, jive suit fellah–
a dark skin boy in sheer flattop;
these two guys: men upon the scene.

“Can you believe this?
Yuppies flood’in the place!–!”

Slide together in a booth
To meet across a faux
blue marble tabletop–
plastic over composite ply.

Old school blinking cool.

Earlier, to the tan kid
sprawled along old countertop,
who’d said it was like that here five years ago:
“83 homicides!–83 homicides the last year I’s here!”

Earlier earlier, to the 50-and-some
broad dropjaw overarch nose
local team sweatshirt counterman
leaning forward–arms as struts,
palms pushed against his countertop:

“What’s happened to this place!?”
And Then:
“I worked here 25 years ago–
neighborhood’s completely changed–
who are these people?”

The 90 year old woman, with still a dab of slav
at the bottom of her Brooklyn,
who lived for 60 years down the street a bit,
who stays now above the diner
a small place she shared
with her son,
who’d worked at the diner
before he died–
“but he died”–,
said, after open-arm head-back
“neighborhoods completely changed”
and wrapping weakly ’round frog-faced
“who are these people?”:
“I think its nice.”

Further frog-pout,
and an unconvinced,
but peaceable unconcerned
mountain-sloshing shrug.

AMW/BW

The diner

The diner

Round orange padded vinyl bottlecap swivel-seats, the vinyl worn and sometimes torn, on metal pistons line the soda fountain. An old woman, 5′ tall in a black sweater-shawl and zebra pedal pushers (that show leg to mid-shin) sits at the end nearest the gap between the counter and the grill area. She wears old black leather walking shoes with thick gray socks pushed down and folded over, squeezing her pink swollen ankles an inch above the line made in her splotchy legs when the socks were an inch higher. She rests her toes on the little aluminum-edged wooden runner curling, her arms crossed on the linoleum countertop, around the counter like a question mark. Her straight white hair is cut short and it looks uneven, a little matted; she’s organized it with little metal barrettes that shove it off at odd angles all around her head, reminding one a little like rough whitewater. Her face is small, wizened, graying, with a long nose and small brown eyes set off to the sides. She looks very old and, with her worn-out clothes and slightly greasy hair, a little disheveled.

The old woman talks to the men working in the diner, men of about 50, a little paunchy, with big noses and heavy, forward-set jaws that make you think “maybe Slavic; maybe Italian; maybe neither”. One wears a sweatshirt of a local pro team and faded blue jeans; the cook–who is generally mostly obscured behind the half-wall separating the kitchen from the counter–has on a boxy white button-up short-order cook shirt. There’s a youngish (30s?) man waiting tables who, since it is not at all busy (maybe 8 customers in this large, sprawling diner), also spends a lot of time milling around the counter area.

That waiter is dressed very casual. Jeans and a faux-jersey made of a light sweat material. A Mets baseball cap, worn flat-brimmed. Tattoos all over his arms; also showing on his neck, rising up from his chest. Short hair. Olive-skinned, broke-backed nose; wide in the face in mouth; “Mexican” you think, remembering some college kid you knew for a minute over a decade ago, a fellow student, originally from Guadalajara. The waiter speaks softly; if he has any accent it is light Brooklyn; he kids around with the five year old eating the plate of tiny pancakes drizzled with syrup. At some point, as the pale young brunette boy and his pale young blond mother are about to leave, you catch this fragment of the conversation: the waiter, smiling with a distance in his eyes and a tug at the corners of his mouth (he’s been facing their table, in front of yours; leaning a little back, and right now turning in towards you and a bit down), says brightly, jocularly (with arms up and at chest level, making a relaxed goalpost): “but the intention was there!”

Leaning back, putting the weight on the back leg while tossing light-hearted words and twisting to playful ducks. That sense of a lean-back, relaxed, joking sparring match–you realize you think of that as a Mexican/maybe-Hispanic-in-general male conversation style, some cultural tendency that you think you’ve noticed before. Or maybe you’re making it up.

The diner is full of paintings that reference the diner, pictures of notable moments in its long history, and articles about it. You crane to see (through the rectangular metal staves–there’s a railing between the path along the counter and your seating area) what looks to be the cover of a foreign language magazine that 50 years ago featured the diner–way back when it’s founder still lived, still smiled bald and moon-faced, arms across his chest, wearing that signature soda jerk button-up short-sleeve with a flopsy bow tie. You try to read the words, battling against the staves and the glare of white light on the picture-frame glass.

“Are you trying to talk to me?” Says the old lady, swiveling a little ways to meet your gaze.

“No, I was just trying to read that poster.”

“Oh.”

But then she smiles in that leaning-forward, ET manner that little old ladies are famous for, “60 years.”

“What?” you say.

“I lived here 60 years.”

There’s a whirring sound (a blender?) a little ways down the countertop, making it hard to hear.

“Oh. … That’s a long time.”

“Yes!”, with a little nod, her chin sharp, brown age spots giving her face a touch of reptilian. “Do you live around here?”

You tell her the street you live on.

There’s quite a bit of “what?” said as you try to hear her over the blender; you learn that she lived a few blocks away for 60 years but now lives above the diner: “I live up there” pointing at the high embossed-tin ceiling, “upstairs.”

After a bit she says, “My son ” and you can’t make out the rest.

You say, “What?”

“My son used to work here.”

“Oh.”

“But he died.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“Yes,” with a little nod, a slight frown, pausing, swiveling slowly back to the counter area.

You feel in the wrong; that wasn’t the way to put it; you were impatient or something; somehow off; it wasn’t the thing to do.

A little later a young man–early 20s maybe–, olive of complexion, hair that reminds you of a samurai warrior, in gray sweats that ride a little low, showing a poof of sky blue boxers, sits on the stool next to the old lady. He tickles her a little, gently, on the arm just below the shoulder, while he–long-armed–leans back playfully the other direction. The tickling which makes her cuddle into herself like a small child–but just a tad. Later you look back and he has his hand in hers, opening her small gnarled hand up from the inside; this too he does playfully, tenderly; she seems to notice it only absentmindedly–perhaps she looks a tiny bit embarrassed as she looks down at the diner countertop.

BW / AMW

Accuracy level? Somewhat: remembered afterward and allowed the flow of ideas to fill-in spotty memory, looking to get the gist.

No one’s reading anything we write

No one’s reading anything we write

Bartley Willard and Andy Watson, who’ve quit the land and all its promises, who ride on rigid racing ocean waves in vigorous northern seas, who lounge on sloppy gushy ocean waves on lazy southern seas, who have no friends and no enemies and no postal addresses,

are not working on either “Love at a Reasonable Price” or “Diary of an Adamant Seducer”. Instead, they just write whatever and toss it into a messenger bottle, which makes its way to the Wandering Albatross Press Building, which sits in marble and in honor on Wall Street in Manhattan, a shining symbol on a proverbial hill. But who is there to receive the messages? Not Kent, who waits patiently–a little too patiently?–in the mossy, scraggle-tree-lined Hall of the Mountain King. Not Andrew Cleary nor Tom Watson, who flibbertygibbet the time away hitting golf balls into the sun (yes, it takes an amazing drive!, but demonstrations of prowess don’t turn idle self-indulgences into worthy activities). But someone–some low level flunky, too half-ass and snot-nosed to bother describing; someone collects the bottles as they bounce against the battery with a clattering that startles gulls and tourists alike.

Andy Watson and Bartleby Willard have abandoned their post. Kent Watson is spending a worrisome amount of time pining after them in the scraggly pine clearing where the Mountain King lords it over mountain beasts both plausible and mythic. And Tom Watson and Andrew Cleary, the two eternal presences who’ve run Wandering Albatross Press since before timespace began, have always just goofed around the way gods–being too blessed and immortal to ever feel the calling of an ache or the crunch of a deadline–always do.

So where, dear reader, does that leave you?

And yet what readership does this blog have? Isn’t it true that no one is reading it? So perhaps, by not existing, the “From-Bartleby.com” readership has brought this betrayal upon themselves. Perhaps.

But perhaps not.

For one must never underestimate the depravity of all involved. To my mind, they’re just the sort of feckless crew to abandon their posts–in, of course, their various ways.

There’s no one to talk to.
Except me.
In this circle.
Where I greet myself.

Hello, how are you?
I am fine, thank you. And how are you?
I too am fine; I too thank you.
What’s next?
We could daydream about being rich within a world that stays essentially like the world is now.
OK, that sounds like a pleasant daydream that we could sink into like a bed of soft moss beneath an old oak tree on a warm summer day in the good old USA.
I’d travel.
Oh, me too.
And write in the mornings.
Good idea. I’d do that too.
But after a year of taking airplane trips and road trips and wandering around world cities, then maybe I’d take a class or two a semester. I think maybe I would.
Yeah, there’s a thought.
Oh thought upon thought.
Sure–pile ’em up! like lumberjack flapjacks or snow in Valdez in the month of May.

BW / AMW

The murder

The murder

The murder
The sin
The hate
The rape
The crime

That undid your philosophy
and showed everybody
where you really were.

It had been
a nice idea.

BW / AMW

Another one bites the dust

Another one bites the dust

Keep in mind
that I’ll die.

I used to suppose,
and who can blame me?,
that the gods would make something of an exception
in my case.

Not so much that I’d never die;
I want to die eventually–
so I can go to the next level.

But I thought,
well,
all things considered:
the extreme violence in my soul,
the laughter all through my thought,
the slowness of the my head-turn;
I thought the gods
and blessed influences
such as they are,
which isn’t to say
that I can enumerate them.

Would go ahead
and let me turn to magic energy,
and change from form to form,
skipping from body to body,
from joke to joke,
but all the while
keeping these memories,
even the childhood in the snow
and the scraggle dry air sunlight overlook between vans with a cousin and some wooden guns
by my side.

Maybe–maybe!
Hard to say,
the future being what it is;
but it also seems likely enough
that,
well,
I’ll just inhabit this body
and it will collapse,
and I’ll go down with
the sinking
ship.

Oh dear!
Oh no!

Still,
we do all rise again.
But I didn’t want to forget anything.
And the way it usually goes
is that you forget everything
except the memory of the soul–
before idea,
before feeling,
before perception.
The memory of the soul.

It’s not that big a deal;
after all,
I don’t remember that much of my life anyway.
So I may as well let these
you know
intellectual
and emotional
memories
go
and
sure, whatever,
start fresh.

I guess.

AMW / BW

The Loneliest Boys in the room

The Loneliest Boys in the room

That’s their thing.
That’s their distinction.
Having swallowed the razor.
And forgotten the story.
Having sank to the bottom
and looked up through
layers of waters.

I suppose it is true,
what they say,
that after this life
you live again
in a new body
in a new way
with a new mind
but still holding
the essential
wisdom
learned
this time around
which slowly builds up on the back of your soul like light
building up on the back of a slow exposure camera
that you make out of a shoe box with a pinhole.

Surging forward,
but ah yes
my friends
Surging forward,
like energy pushes up into a wave,
filling the wave,
being that moment.
Again and again.
From before through now to after.

These lives,
these deaths,
over and over,
easy as that,
easy as waking up,
falling asleep,
waking up;
forgetting everything
but the most essential thing,
which you don’t forget,
which keeps on growing,
on the backlights,
getting brighter,
overtaking you.

You say no way,
can’t be,
so many souls
is too many,
and even each cockroach
has a little flash of
awareness within
its panic stream.

But it can be done;
it is done;
there’s no problem here;
it keeps surging forward;
and the Light overtakes the darkness.

BW / AMW

Memo from the Otherside

Memo from the Otherside

What is it like to be dead?
Your body turned to wood then mush then bones then dust?
What is it like to be just a soul up in the great heaven?
It’s fine.
I was worried I wouldn’t have any thoughts or feelings because I’d be without my brain and my body. I’d thought that the brain/body did reasoning and feelings. So that left me with pure awareness. I thought maybe I’d have that, and I’d just be like a goldfish: always watching but not remembering anything, just watching but not holding any experiences. Or actually, worse than a goldfish–at least they get to see the watery wonderworld. Without senses and without ideas and feelings, I thought I’d be just watching emptiness. Doubtless–I figured–it would be great enlightenment because without all the distractions of ideas, feelings, and perceptions, I’d be constantly aware of what really is: that everything/nothing at the back of one’s conscious experience that–like water to an ocean-going goldfish–holds all experience and yet you can’t quite stand back and notice. I was worried–can you believe it!?–that it would be boring to sit all day in the bliss of pure awareness of the True Good that exists prior to all specifics, that creates them and shines through them and rescues them from themselves.
But it isn’t like that at all anyway.
I have no physical form, but there are other ways to think and feel, and my naked soul hooks easily into them. I am smarter, more deep-feelinged; gentler; calmer; more at ease as I drift through the years always still and yet casting my mind anywhere I please so long as it pleases God, who turns out to be rather lenient with us dead people.
Born again?
Into another body on the old world or a new one?
Well, yes–I’ve been putting off those offers for some time. I just can’t see the point.
Granted, it would allow me to work on faith better. Here it is obvious. Here I clearly perceive that honest joyful creative kindless is the only way to go. Once in possession of a body/brain that truism becomes less obvious, so you’re forced to either realize it deep within better and better each day, or slouch around town with a yucky taste in your mouth. Here it is I suppose a little too easy, a little too pleasant, a little too obvious. I guess I really should go to earth again. Hmmm, well–
I could just wait for the endtimes, when all souls melt back into God, which is a happy ending anyway. Of course, one endtimes just hiccups up into another reality, and in the deepest sense, there’s no time anyway and all happens at once. I’m pretty sure no matter what I do, all will be well with my soul and all other souls. Because God’s all set no matter what and just creates and sustains realities as a joyful little bonus. Not that God can choose to do otherwise; God must follow God’s way, which includes infinite creation and caring. But it also includes the knowledge that that’s just for fun, for delight, for the sparkle on the water mirrored in the gull’s eye.
Still, I should make the most out of my existence. I should push myself to become as wise and good as possible. That’s my calling, as a soul afloat in God, which of course I am with or without a body/brain.
Ah well, let it pass, let it pass; I’ll stop in on some old friends and talk about the good old days, maybe even remembering wine so well that we seem to have a couple glasses around an old oak table in a well-lit tavern a thousand years ago.

BW / AMW

On the couch

On the couch

My biggest problem?
It’s gotta be that I already have a girlfriend.
When a man–especially a relatively youngish-looking man with a tidy haircut and clothes that hang well–is single, he always has a brighter future to look forward to. Every time he sees an attractive young woman, he can feel like she just may be the girl for him, that he just may be about to land. A man–at least as far as I can tell–always feels like an old space ship that’s journeyed for a million years and is falling apart at the seams but that is desperately keeping it together to rattle just a little bit further so that it can finally reach its destination: a rich, lush, green, watery, fecund world where he can start fresh. The wager will have paid off! He gave up everything to hold the ship together and push it forward to the end; now he’s old and exhausted and he’s long been bored and depressed and disappointed and lonely and ashamed and confused; but it is all OK, because now he’s touching down and soon he’ll be the infinite expansion of joyful thriving that he always knew he should be, could be–if he could just settle himself into the right woman.
All well and good, all plausible enough: a likely enough story and a workable enough path to salvation–as long as you’re single. But the existence of a significant other seriously vexes the storyline. You see a pretty woman, and the hope-hope motor kicks in, but then you remember you’ve already got a girlfriend.
Do I love my girlfriend?
That’s beside the point.
The point is that I cannot be just about to find my girlfriend, and from this point of view my girlfriend–charming though she may be–has ruined my happiness. Though it would be reductionist and cruel to say she is nothing more than a reminder that I’m not about to enter into infinite pleasure and joy, nonetheless she is such a reminder, and that reminder is enough to shut my life down.

BW / AMW

Game Over?

Game Over?

Looking down at his thick gold, diamond-studded watch with tired eyes, he understands the silver hands and thinks patiently downward.
A man with no real chance–not really.
Thin, pale, 50, balding, unmarried, childless, partnerless, he keeps in touch with a few old friends and relatives, but his mouth is dry and head shrouded in a hazy thud. He smokes the same cigarettes that he set great hopes upon in his early twenties. Watch him shuffle aimless over to the tall windowframe and, entering into the chill near the pane, gaze–his green-tatooed arms crossed over the white V-neck T-shirt–down at the street.
He is tired. His life has been like one long day that gradually wears an energetic family man working man pub regular family man loverboy completely out. I can’t really hope for his future. The green-tinted visor of his hat obscures his eyes as it points down towards Columbus Circle fully occupied in the noonday summer sun.
They say that the trick of the wise is to really believe that other people experience reality from the inside-out just like you do. Perhaps he is trying to wrap his mind and heart around that insight, but mostly he just wishes vaguely for a cigarette and the health to enjoy it. Not that he’s sick–just tired, very tired, like a piece of chalk worn down to a tiny nub on the sidewalk so that the fingers holding it start to get a little sore with the drawing, which–for reasons unknown (it isn’t as if they are drawing anything memorable)–will not stop drawing.
He tries to rally: He thinks of a nice cool glass of fresh brewed iced tea with a full quarter lemon and the ice cubes clinking while the sun lights the whole cylinder to a nice bright redwood. In vain! In vain. The trick that he always figured he’d be catching hold of pretty soon, and which he’d use to vault himself over the grand canyon never showed. For thirty years now, he’s felt a slight confusion: where is the grandeur that he’s just about to grasp, the victory he’s felt prickling on his skin since as far as he can recall–all the way back to when he tramped through the dry leaves, beneath the dry, shaggy-barked pines, looking for fallen branches to stack together for a fort, a great fort, an awesome fort, a fort that surely would–. What was the fort supposed to do?

AMW / BW

I want to go / man in rut / A pathetic freewrite

I want to go / man in rut / A pathetic freewrite

I want to go now.
I don’t know where.
Somewhere relaxing.
If you had money, not needing to work and yet enjoying a gourmet life–
That would be nice.
Then you’d wake up, stretch, and take a long walk or perhaps grab a plane and float over to Paris, where you could wake up, stretch, and stroll around town practicing your French, whiling in cafes, bars, restaurants, parks.
Unless it was winter in New York–then it’d be more practical to float to Buenos Aires, or perhaps Sydney, or maybe just take a road trip down through the Old South, spending a week or two in New Orleans before making your way to Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Prescott, Phoenix, Tuscon, LA, San Diego, Mexico City–gradually building up your tan as you progressed.

But I’m lonely, so who will be my wife?
You can travel with me and have sex with me and hang out with me.
But what will we talk about? And how will we keep the sex both loving and exciting?
Clearly we’ll need a lot of women’s magazines, and a few men’s magazines, and maybe a couple on pop psychology.
And yet that comment is even painful as a joke; even just trying to be cool and toss of an ironic grin makes me feel the cockroaches eating me from the inside out, their little brown grasshopper heads whirring maniacally from side to side.
Who will be my wife and keep me company while I skate through on my daydreamed riches?
Who can I find that will complete me as a human being?
Not in a tawdry, run-in-my-yellow-stockings kind of way; but wholesome:
I want a love that isn’t cheating, that is actually both fulfilling and decent– to feel good and not feel terrible about it.

Or do I just grab a couple pairs of old jeans, white Ts, hiking sneakers, cowboy boots, snap-button western shirts, a sweater and a jacket and hop into some reliable, fuel-efficient sedan? It is the information age now, so even if there’s no one to talk to, there’s still always a lot to focus on.

Who remembers the RV Age?
I watched it up close when I was a child.
Grandpa retires at 62, buys a small RV and him and grandma tour the US, visiting kids and grandkids on the way. A retirement that lasts forever. Unless you get hit by a stray stroke or something.

Never mind.
It doesn’t matter.

Which raises another interesting question. Pardon me if you don’t think it is interesting. I’d write “which raises another interesting question, at least from my point of view” to avoid controversy. I hate controversy and I’d be willing to accept even more awkward formulations in order to keep people from snarling towards me, swatting their big soft paws at my little unprotected head. But I honestly don’t think anyone cares what I say or do, so I just stuck to the shorter formulation. And yet I then explained myself in a long convoluted and not completely spleenless passage where I managed to communicate all that I claimed to not bother communicating and then some.

Never mind–it doesn’t matter.
Which raises another interesting question:
When do you hang it up?

At some point you realize that your dream isn’t tenable. Maybe it isn’t what you want so much as what you wish you both had and wanted to have. Maybe you just realize you’re not going to attain it, or that you’d rather just skip it and attain something else. At some point the best thing to do is to give up, to quit. Your parents told you it is always best to stick it out; as a general guideline that has some merit, but it is not an eternal truth. So when do you hang in the towel?

What about everybody else?
Do they even exist for you?
All you can see is the sunlight glinting on a desert road where you never were in a time before you, beckoning you on, calling you into the glint and the dry heat that smells like stillness.
What about the existence of others? It has a place in your philosophy, why not your heart?

Desperado–!
but as an abstraction:
All the self-involvement and self-indulgence,
but without the riding chaps, the stetson, the infallible six-shooter, whistful woman in every port–

Sour hurt in the stomach, squishing you down, squishing you in; imploding like suddenly deep in the ocean, squished into a long string with some other long strings dangling off it. If I could just explode outward instead of inward! Then I’d get past this glitch.
For sure.

BW / AMW