Discretionary Time
It's Thursday.
I write ahead, so I don't get behind.
An old habit,
from when I had deadlines.
I don't have deadlines anymore.
Slacker--I
have to rein myself in.
What do I want slack for? I never even take a day
off.
But it is nice to have time to putter around in the afternoons.
To be semi-retired.
That 40 hours a week, plus a three-hour commute each
day, tended to use up my discretionary time.
I think I'll stop by Justin
and Billie Gaffrey's gallery in Blue Mountain Beach, give them a copy of 32 Short
Reviews of BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS, and a flier.
Between my art tour
of Highway 30A, and my reminiscences of eccentric Florida characters, and my voluminous
correspondence, I should have enough material to fill a sketch book.
Cartoons.
A cartoon isn't a funny-paper comic-strip, it's a drawing of a painting, tapestry,
fresco, etc. Sometimes to scale, sometimes reduced in scale.
Bryan showed
me a cartoon of Art Brew rescuing a damsel in distress, under water, with a gimme
cap showing an anatomically correct boar hog, above them, on the surface, the Creature
from the Black Lagoon, with his web-finned hands, menacing. Purple, twitching, hideous.
An old web hand.
How could I not drive to Wakulla Springs
for Creaturefest? Black McGoon is a major character in my work, running through
the oeuvre like a theme, or leitmotif.
No, a recurring character.
Sometimes I get plot and character confused. Setting and theme.
You god
damned homonym! Doo-doo dick! Dirk Dingle!
Gay Gobble, Dick Dork, and Dirk
Dick!
Brenda and I watched an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm last
night in which the chef at a restaurant Larry David opens has Tourette's Syndrome,
and there is a stunned silence when he barks curses out into the restaurant from
the kitchen, open to the diners, like a stage.
Larry David cusses back.
Then his financial backers cuss. Soon, the audience joins in, and the tension is
relieved, like Lenny Bruce asking, "Any niggers in the audience?"
There was Shelly Berman, a face in the crowd.
Somebody shouted, "Rim
job."
A hagfish has pustules on it, that exude ten times their weight
in slime.
Myxoscopic zoophilia translates myxo, slime, scopic,
to look at, zoo, animals, philia, a love of.
Myxoscopic zoophiliac!
Jacks off to pictures of someone fucking a chicken in the armpit.
Look up
Out Your Backdoor in Google and get hits on sites for anal intercourse. Security
makes a note in your dossier. J. Edgar Hoover, cross-dressing. OCD isn't
Organized Crime Division, it's obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Hand-washer!
Bubba Po-Mo
I'm my own police, Harvey Keitel said,
in City of Industry. I'm my
own
paparazzo. Bad Lieutenant. I ain't
your nigger, I'm nobody's nigger.
I'm
a bad nigger. I holler Fire!
in an empty room. I am to writing as
Tampopo
was to noodles. The antihero of
my own antinovel. Bubba Po-Mo.
Grits and
grunts. Hoecake and tomato gravy.
No salmon. No capers.
Earwax. Toe jam.
Smegma.
Art Brew: The Spent Effluent Collection.
Scenes From a Mall
I'm so glad I'm not schlepping
a slide projector to a presentation.
There
are so many things
I don't want to do.
Visit India. Although I wouldn't mind
Bette
Midler giving me a hand job
in the middle of Salaam Bombay.
My surfboard.
Mimes are hostile.
It's been done, creep.
Come back when your face clears
up.
Now's the Time
Brew was writing a book, an antinovel/diary.
about him and his doppelgänger,
Jack the Raver,
going on the road to celebrate the publication of
his forthcoming
book, and tender of his resignation
at his day job, to write a continuation of
the saga.
Boxes within boxes, lodged between what has gone before
and what
is to come, the good lord willing and the creek
don't rise. Pronounced crick.
They won't know until
it happens. In William Friedken's Sorcerer, the
radio,
or the jukebox, in the cantina plays Bird with Strings.
"I'll
Remember April." How to write world literature
from Point and Shoot, Florida.
Granny Brown in a movie theater
going, "Husk!" Like Larry David
with a pubic hair caught
in his throat. It was the popcorn, don't you see.
Have We Heard From Pine Log Yet?
What did Brew need the Panama City News-Herald for?
He serialized Art
Brew's Daily, by analogy with I. F. Stone's Weekly,
at The Daily
Bulletin, with no lag for production, editing, interference
from Legal, Sales,
or Community Standards and Practices. They're still waiting for
the election
results to come in from Pine Log, the last precinct to be heard from.
Some coonass
in a pirogue paddling them in. On winged feet, Brew's columns end up
in
the Dead Letter Office of American Letters, the worldwide web. A fast train to oblivion.