gross lint pain
in college, my friends and i would get together all the time, go to a coffee shop or diner and do automatic writings. we didn't call them gross lint pain, that's something different. a different story. we called it something different. another name that i came up with after wandering the science hall after hours. more graphic.
The idea is to write a few lines, a paragraph, contribute what you feel like contributing, then allowing the next person to add to it, like the in the dadaist and surrealist traditions. This was started as a protest to War folks! Lets have some fun. Honor Tristan Tzara! Hugo Ball! Hannah Hoch! etc…. We Don't have EnouGh dAda!!!!
Are you game?
as a special bribe to byronius… i will contribute a story about what happened to me in Sacramento when i stayed there after seeing a Jane's Addiction concert….
i'll start…
We've been avoiding the conversation.
I've taken up smoking. I've been sitting at the kitchen table in just my pink robe and an 18-hour bra for a few months now. My gaze is fixed on the red brick of the neighbor's house. I sit at an abrubt angle like I want to be pulled from my chair. There is a plume of smoke surrounding my head, hovering. My lower body is exposed, pleading, but he just keeps walking to the coffee maker.
Comment on December 16, 2006 @ 12:49 pm
“What is more sinister than an elevator?” he finally said.
“I’m — I’m — I don’t know. What — ”
He smiled wickedly. “A sidewalk will take you to many places, but it will never grip you in steel claws and vault you into the ionosphere. Elevators are inhuman and dangerous, because you fly without wings.”
I didn’t agree. I squirmed. What is this elevator stuff? I liked elevators. Once, rode an elevator to the top of the Empire State Building, and saw the Forest of New York, the gray spires stretching out for miles, in a beautiful array of geometries originally marked out by the Dutch.
“Who are you, really? And why is that one brick blue, and not red, like the rest?”
He smiled, and pushed the coffee maker onto the floor. The carafe shattered into a thousand pieces. I flinched –
“I am not a ‘who’, I am an eye of the world. I have always seen you, usually through purple smoke, but now close up –”
He bent forward towards my frozen face, lips nearly touching mine. I could smell his breath — not unpleasant, but something I had never smelled before. Foreign. A strange story, carried in scent.
” — and real. Do you think I want you? And do you think the brick is a brick? Or is it a collection of sparks in space, and you a web of brighter sparks, and locked in this dream for this moment?”
I stared back into his grey-green eyes.
“My coffee-maker,” I said.
Comment on December 16, 2006 @ 3:07 pm
But who are “you?” I asked.
They hadn’t noticed as I’d walked in. I ordinarily don’t join in to these crazed spats they so frequently indulge in, but this time I felt the urge to let them know I existed as someone other than the weird tenant in the uncomfortably small room down the hall. My routine had been tailored to avoid them for the most part. There seemed little profit to be gained by interaction with their obsessive neuroses. Now Dolph’s little show had broken the only useful appliance in the establishment.
“I’m a real person, at least,” blurted Dolph’s squeeze as she hovered in her ubiquitous cloud of cannabis stench. “Of course, I don’t have to explain these things to you. Why not join us for once instead of putting up these artificial walls. You’re not so different.”
Comment on December 16, 2006 @ 3:27 pm
Dolph spun to face their roomate.
“The Who references. Pink Floyd references. I was on a perfectly good freakout run, and you bring up rock bands. Arrrhh!”
Starkey just smiled and gestured at the coffee-maker. “Uh, O.K., freakout run it is, Dolphin. But coffee’s gonna be scarce.”
Dolph nodded. “Yeah, sorry. She’s smoking again. Shock therapy.”
I puffed a cloud at him, and he half-glared and cringed slightly, trying hard not to smile.
“Are you going to Veliko’s today?” Dolph said.
“Uh-huh.” Veliko’s was the new record store down the block. Very hip. Vinyl, cassettes, reel-to-reel, bands, books, coffee. My kind of day-off waste-your-paycheck type of locale.
Dolph adopted a more demur attitude. “Would you scan for any new old Horace Silver?”
I grinned. “You know what you have to do, then.”
Starkey seemed to leap for a quick hallway exit. “Oh, God,” he muttered. “I live with friggin’ aliens.”
Comment on December 17, 2006 @ 12:31 am