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January 26th, 2022

I Called For A Renaissance And Got The Wrong Number

Where do ideas come from?

I was recently asked this question and the voice in my head jumped at the opportunity to pontificate. It made ethereal claims about humans being conduits of divinity. Highfalutin notions of a spiritual nature, things I cannot actually grasp at.

What a bunch of crap, I thought.

Really. What do I know about ideas and where they come from. Ideas are things of their own. They come from driving through a car wash. Walking down the street. Ideas come from sitting on the crapper and watching documentaries on the Renaissance …Which is precisely where this idea came from:

 

I’ve surveyed the landscape long enough, the way it rolls in dull droves, laps in waves of mediocrity like a heavy modal sea, and remain uninspired by the banality of it all (Save for the culinary creations of Yoshitomo, Au Courant and the like). Should the seasons desist there may never be variation again. Sure, there are still remnants of the usual snow storm here in Omaha. The whiteness lines Maple Street in Benson, the Commons, Downtown, Little Bohemia (A seen not worthy of a double-take).

And within these cultural confines the images of a commonality have extinguished the exaltation of exceptionalism.

Necessity delivers stillborns in low-ceiling rooms where the conjurers of a creative sort walk around hunched forgetting evolution has gifted them a backbone, something to prop themselves up and stand erect to perceive outward and upward beyond the sepia tones and belief that conveying a moodswing is deserving of praise, deserving of a place among the cosmological champions of a rich and vitruous past.

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. Too critical. Perhaps it stirs the gut a bit and brings emotions to a boiling point (You know, the ones used to splash paint on the wall left open for interpretation). I recognize it is a bitter pill to swallow. I take the prescription myself and demand that I get better. Do better. Hold myself to a higher standard. Invent. Develop techniques. And for this sort of panacea I look to the past (Much like those who’ve came before looking for a rebirth).

I study Roussel. The thoughts of Shklovsky. The style of Steinbeck. I constrain myself to the laws of OULIPO. Lift my spirits with Erasmus and Rabelais. I read the classics and scour their vestige for clues to a new way of getting it down. Of telling it how it is. And if Marinetti is correct in his futuristic presupposition that “war is the sole cleanser of the world,” then let us make war with ourselves, our work, because we define our reality.

We breath it into existence by speaking it from our tongues everyday.

By accepting the status quo as it stands we are deserving of being the belly button lint of a nation with a deep history of conflict, of struggling to define new boundaries and testing the limits of possibility. Form first, then deviation.

In a world of immediacy and instant gratification, where are the fruits of anticipation? Of longing mastery? Of earnest waiting and preparation to glorify greatness? Everyone wants their cake now and to eat it instantly, then they expect more. It is gluttonous, ravenous, ingratitude for human potential, for the development of the right stuff. Get in the mix and mix it up. Take paper and make weights from the stuff. Let that sink in.

 

After I wiped and flushed it all away, I moved on to something else. Praise of Folly, maybe. I don’t remember. Then I walked to Lola’s for coffee and their WiFi to finish a Road Humans (A project Guff and I started while on the road but had not finished because there was too much too fast to compile all while on the road) and a documentary on the Medici. Those patrons. Buffets of the Renaissance. And afterward, when I got home, there was yet another package at the door. One much larger than the other two before it. Inside was a work contrary to my porcelain postulation.

It was evidence that someone out there has followed through with their philosophy that even imperfection is a form of mastery, and made tangibles of a childlike nature.

Of wonder and playfulness. Inside the box was a tv cutout stand and a three inch by three inch book with the word “Fre” written on it. There seems to be a sequence here with these unusual gifts. And inside the book were these words of wisdom cut from magazines and glued to its pages:

 

“who can Buy FLU Art And tar bag sky. It’s too Hot For big Log Gas … and hug HAM DRY! The OLD MEN WAR will not Fit THE New Gay Pie!”

 

Though I don’t understand why it’s me he’s chosen as his audience, I’m beginning to appreciate what this Mooney has to say. I wait in eager anticipation for what comes next from this strange and elusive creature, all the while thinking to myself, “Show me the Mooney!”

 

 

April 27th, 2022

A Dead End Is A Second Chance At A One Way Street

Begin again.

These two words have become a mantra for me as I continue to fail to live up to my potential, as I have failed to grasp the ax of ill intent before it has been acted out, before it has cut down those in its path…

 

April 19th, 2022

Write My Epitaph Drunk On The Poems Of Neruda

They found his body near the entrance to the stable. His lungs had filled up with smoke and collapsed. In a catastrophic moment that was the end of it…

 

April 13th, 2022

Who Is The Master That Calls The Grass Green, And Other Gardening Tips

I was blind, but now I see. And boy is it difficult to look at, even though I can’t seem to turn away…

 

 

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