#241

Read The Hakawati, by Rabih Alameddine. Loved it so much. Classic shit. Then I reread the Digger omnibus. Unflagging quality. So fucking good and really took me back to what passes for some of the good old days on the wide world web. Now I have picked up Here I Am, by Jonathan Safran Foer. I think the rule for awhile will be thick books, content and provenance secondary but at least every other book should be new to me. Want long trawls. Will definitely read War and Peace again sometime in the next couple years, I think. Completing that book may mark a milestone in my life, on par with The Silmarillion and reading Nietzsche. 

*

Saw a red-shouldered hawk in flight above the car on a drive just now. 'Twas Ezra who spotted it. Its tail band was wonderfully stark, bright flashing cream arc across dark chocolate fan. 

*

Left the post at that for the day and ended up finishing Here I Am the next. Now it is the day after that, and I have read the first few pages of Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry. Maybe I'd better publish this before I have to amend it again. Maybe I really should just shut up about what I'm reading for the rest of my life and amortize that time into reading more. It is not outside of reason to say that everyone should do the same with many, if not all the things they talk about and do. 

*

Here I Am was excellent (it's laughable. I could never stop myself, so I why do I bother to think of it?). I want to read it again. I want to read everything again. Why can't I get a Guggenheim or something for that? Be good to cut, say, a nickel a word, keep writing for free. In this economy, you say? I can make it work, I reply. Life takes so much goddamn time and energy to live, setting aside how much life it costs to get money to sustain life (almost always most of it). Give me the money to live--just to live--without the sacrifice of this time, and I would read not twice as much, not four or five times as much, but ten at least. How ten? Out of one hundred and twenty-six waking hours in a week, roughly, at least forty are spent literally on the clock, but at least twenty more are spent around the clock, like traveling to and from, and thinking about it, and getting ready, and so on. It's fucking tedious just to consider it. Then, the cleaning, the care of cats and men, the cooking, the eating, the shitting and showering, the going out to get stuff or see people, the consumption of other media in other mediums, the creation of art, the listening, the seeing, and so on ad scholastica. By which I hope to evoke the pedantic listing of everything I do and perform.

Anyway as it stands I barely get to read ten hours a week, broken up and scattered. That's nothing, and pathetic. If I were able to read books the way I work shifts--eight-hour blocks where nothing else is expected at me, and slacking frowned upon--you would not see me fucking around with my paltry however-many books a year. I would not have just ten bookshelves and be pruning them when able. I would live at a library, and I would read its entire ever-expanding contents every five years or so. Fuck you if you think I'm lying. I'll read your stupid tits off. I'll read your stupid dick back into your body.

--JL

#50

Hey, fifty! Or, L.

*

Look, this fucking hawk took a rabbit right by the sidewalk on my way home from work, right by a busy street. Nevertheless, it chose to stand its ground right where it was, and I was thirty feet away. It allowed me to approach to a distance of less than ten feet, and when I had been there for about forty seconds, it began to feed, in spite of me and in spite of the flow of cars and occasional cyclist whizzing past us.

Oh, she was a big girl. Cooper's, size of a young bald eagle, eyes a modest orbit but a very attractive pale gold, small beak with an elegant hook, very large and well-formed legs, the talons comparatively small and graceful, very attractive chocolate and loam on the dark feathers and a clean white on the legs, more of cream on the belly and speckled breast. I'd never before seen a cooper, or any other hawk, feeding from so close. It was absolutely remarkable, not least because she let me get even closer without interrupting her regular, peaceable tearing at flesh and gut and bone.

After a while the rumbling approach of a bus seemed to change her attitude. She made ready and winged away with her kill between her talons, and when I saw her take wing, I realized her posture had not been forbearance for my rude proximity or fearlessness in the face of the traffic. It was grim resignation, only undertaken to lighten the carcass if possible before attempting to change to a safer and more private location. It had clearly been more likely in her mind that I would snatch her kill for my ape's cooking pot, or some other creature would, or that I would attack her for no reason at all, and finally that noisy giant monsters were like to kill her at any moment.

At any rate, she was able to fly--oh! So beautifully, such a wingspan, such a beat, and what strength and energy and courage, inarguable courage this time, this attempt, this heroic! But it all went cocks-up.

The hawk winged down the small grassy slope leading to a parking lot. It was just at this moment that a black van chose to roll down the parking lot towards the street at the bottom of the hill, screwing up her flight path and forcing her to veer and waste energy trying to gain height early--and it could not possibly have come at a worse time. An ambulance came chugging up the street past the parking lot, and the hawk's trajectory and momentum would doubtlessly have taken her straight into its path.

She immediately dropped her kill, so hard-won, for which she must have been so hungry and on which there remained plenty of sustenance, and flared hard and fast, angling into the sharpest stoop I have ever seen achieved, just a few degrees shy of ninety. For a flashing fraction of a second she was no more than a brown-and-cream brushstroke over a still photograph of the scene, a blurred motion line.

Banking, either to the left or right, might have been the smarter maneuver. The high corner of the ambulance smacked her with a sound that made me shove my fingers in my mouth and curse savagely around them, but she fluttered into a nearby tree under her own power, and when I made my way down there--I'd lost sight of her in the leaves--she wasn't in the tree, on the ground, or the bushes, so she saved herself from the deadly or maiming effects of a true collision. The rabbit lay where she had left it, half-eaten, and the cars had rolled on without pause or comment.

It was pretty fucking crazy, all in all.

*

I had an idea of what to write that wasn't to do with hawks, and I liked it enough that I was going to do it, but man, I'd promised and promised about the dang hawk and it had been days. So there you have the story of that hawk I saw, and I've forgotten the other thing, which happens a lot if I don't jot down my ideas in bullet points before I start elaborating on any single one. Perhaps it will come back to me, someday, and the timing will be such that I am able to type it into this text field.

*

It's funny. Now that people aren't trying to shove it down my throat and judge me metrically based on my ability to perform it on command, algebra seems fun as hell. That's just how I am. I ruined my life several times over based on saying fuck the Man, that old Master, and regret nothing. Algebra didn't go anywhere, and you always, always,

always

ALWAYS

say fuck you to the Master, actually sucker-punch him in his stupid gut and moron face, and when he says that His Order is for Your Good and also for Everyone Else's Good, the GREATER Good, you fucking slit his pig throat for him and pull his filthy forked deceiver's tongue out the aperture.

Remember, the Master is a metaphorical un-man, and what you do to him is figurative! Except for saying "fuck you", because fuck the Man, dude. Fuck that guy and everyone that wants to be him. I love peace, and never seek violent solutions, but fuck the Man. Screw that fucking guy.

*

That wasn't that thing from before. I just wanted to come out with zero prevarication or chance to misinterpret the fact that I am against the Man, and everything he stands for. Fuck him, actually.

--JL

#47

The first hawk was gliding just a couple feet above the treetops, in a place where they reach at each other over a road going up a steep hill, so I was looking up at the bird as though standing in a sharply-cut gully with a river running through it. It was so rounded in the head in its flight, its wings so stubbed and its body so fluffed, tail spread wide and all so creamy white and pale underneath that I thought it was a Cooper's until it lazily banked to the right and the sun flared russet through the tail. 

*

More hawks...tomorrow! I gotta do it, sorry folks. I wrote the second parts of this post first, like a fool, and now it's gone and gotten late and I gotta work in the morning. Well, by all means, you have every right to leave in a huff, but, pray, if you can find it in your heart to forgive an idiotic man, read on. 

*

Funny. I have long believed myself a person who had seasoned into the kind of individual that is quick to absolve others of their trespasses against me. That I was good at forgiving, and have in fact been known for it. This last season of my life has cut deep enough that I find myself in the midst of a flood of rotten but still recognizable grudges floating up around me, and I find myself with new teeth to bite into their sodden, long-buried flesh.

Fuck be upon it! So I'm not as nice as I thought I'd forced myself to become, and lash out like any beast when wounded. Nothing for it but to savor the flavor and try to move on. Steps, time, etc. Every ten shifts, I walk a hundred miles. I have all the time I could possibly want.

*

It just struck me, as I listen to a particular song through headphones for the very first time, that I will never again so long as I may live hear this particular song through the speakers of my old car. I did not miss my old car till just now, when my heart was pierced as though by a thousand bitter spears. 

Life! Ha!

----------> BOOKS <------------


--JL

#29

I was walking home from work today, just starting up a hill. Up ahead, there was a signpost, and leaning against it, a single ski, which had not been there as I descended the hill this morning. It was an old ski, its plastic and its paint plain and worn and faded with use and age. As I drew closer, I saw its brother ski on the grass beside it. Seeing the pair, my mind flashed to what price I might be able to secure for them. Then I thought, Man, I don't pick up no speed limit sign skis.

It was an absolutely phenomenal walk. I saw hawks mating and flying just to fly and the wind was cool and laden with the scent of the woods as they let go summer raiment and don their autumn cloaks. The sun was bright and clear and the sky that polarized October blue.

--JL