Avoiding Parades

Slight miscalculation, forgetting that River Days opened with the Labor Day Parade. Back way into the library, then around the promised route to get to the museum, talk with D about his MFA orientation, bring him up to speed on priorities and requests. Thought to just wait-out the damned festivities. Out back for a smoke and we can watch from half-a-block away. Three buzzards circle the parade, which makes little sense at the time, but by the time the thing ends, two hours later, certainly something or someone will have died. Patient buzzards. Nice phrase which I think I might start using in a variety of circumstances, it seems to hold possibility in tone and intent. In line at Burger King, for instance, the crowded entrance at the quarter-mile dirt track, first night crowd at an opening. I sent D back to his work and read a book on Initial Letters. As a book designer and printer, I always learned toward a conservative tract, same font, maybe two points larger, a second color. The work has to speak, the text, or it's just an object, a book-like thing. I think it's the drugs, but I also ate well today, and have already had a couple of drinks. And I feel good, wanting to get on with things, needing to do physical work, prepping for winter. And something else. In my reverie, writing you, I carry on a running monolog, must of which is connective tissue, which I discard, and the thoughts bifurcate, again and again, and I'm familiar with the space and my voice. Happened tonight, and I remembered other incidences recently, where the voice itself bifurcated, and I was listening to several fictions at once, characters in the play. My god, I thought, that's fiction. But thinking about it later, I'm not sure. I think I'm on the brink of a non-fiction novel, make a note to get up real early and go to Wal-Mart, I need a fucking printer. Writing in the dark is hell, some circle of hell. I only do it because there's nothing else I'm qualified for. I appreciate the compliments, but what are you going to do? Put out a spread of readings. It's the next day. Had a couple of drinks and fell asleep on the sofa, between sentences, as it were. Get to reread myself. The buzzards over the parade, and they really were there, were a surreal image. I dreamed about them last night. In the dream there was a gleaming 18 wheeler, with it's 53 foot flat bed draped in black cloth, in the center, on a plinth, was a small white coffin, red roses strewn everywhere, randomly; parade watchers, on both sides, bulged out in two standing waves, to toss more roses. Excellent visuals. Didn't seem sad, but I'm little concerned with the meaning of dreams; the tone of them, the mood, is generally more problematic for me, indicating a level of emotional involvement. When I'm concerned about something I often dream of falling. I prefer Erving Goffman over Freud. I had always avoided reading any sociology, because of a sidebar in Olson somewhere, where he said sociology was a pile of shit, so I didn't read any, then thirty years later I'm building a staircase in a house, somewhere, I forget where, and there's a very good library, actually organized, and there are 10 or 12 books by this guy Goffman, who I'd never heard of, and I thought, what the hell, give him a read. Blew me away. He nails many things closely, his book, "Stigma" should be required reading. Germane to my ongoing point, what we think we see. Therefore the nature of reality. When you look at someone with webbed hands, what do you see?