inertia kreeps (s/he watch channel 0)

4:20 a.m., cell phone ringing in the middle of a dream about a waking demon, a roving beam of light (& you are in there, somewhere, naked, our attempts to connect repeatedly interrupted by noises, knocks on the door, someone cleaning in the next room);

private number—warning signal, wakeup call, dueling avatars of the necropolis weaving conflicting yarns, underworld shadows of East L.A., all tangled up divvying up insomniac space, all addicted, caught up in some metaphysical hoodoo voodoo shit—are you the source of healing, or the source of illness, and regret?

"Lopsided accounts are always pornographic," s/he says/sighs, and quoting films, a flickering moment, a winking eye, a missing frame (or 2, or 4) that betrays just who/what you are channeling here—

discrepancies in details, the devils in the details, the debutante in broken heels, i.e., etc.—

(3 times in 4 years now, I've run into her in a sprawled out city of millions. We do not share the same crowds, the same routes, the same lies. Nevertheless, there she was, wearing a long pink coat on her long, thin frame, brushed wool, longer hair than I remembered, gray tennis shoes.

Remember? The fire alarm went off that night, we all rushed out the library—"Please use the emergency exits, this is a real thing"—and I watched you as you moved further and further away (had you seen me?), the pink of your coat melting into a kind of orange metallic gray across a quad of grass black with night. Then you stopped and posed there half in shadow, a few times disappearing, but I made sure to keep you in my line of sight, watching like a wary beast from the corner of my narrowed eye for any sudden movements while you stood several hundred yards away, talking into your cell phone. At some point I realized that I still had your number digitally programmed in my own cell phone, from four years go—still had the same phone from four years ago. I thought about blocking my number, calling you, watching you answer my anonymity from across the quad. I thought about the demons we once channeled, the pornographic desire, the necrophilic impulse in the realms of the senseless—Koreatown, Wilshire Boulevard, 9th floor of the Gaylord, gray carpet/walls/sky/dreams, neighbors banging on the wall, 4:30 a.m., hours tearing at each other, ripping organs, shredding flesh, a pool of bodily fluids/wastes gathering, spreading, rising around us, once vibrant with the illusion of life, now stagnant, fetid, releasing something into the atmosphere gray and tortured, toxic, creeping, spreading first through internal organs and systems then through words then eyes then out, through windows, across the city/ocean/void/disguise—)

What are you channeling?

Who let them in?

Where have you been?

What is your sin?

fool dis-closure / sin fin(ity)

1
That moment when you realize that you’ve won the argument, but lost the war.

(HA: 1 for me—ZERO for you!)

Ah, well.

One day, I will probably wake up and realize that one is indeed the loneliest number; zero, the face of infinity.


2
Proof of friendship: We stick around when others push their drama on us.

(Yes, but—what I forgot to say, at Tacos Michoacán on Broadway, as the three of us debated our options of how to deal with another friend’s unfolding drama, and this is an important Yes, but:

Maybe there is drama, and maybe there is something else.

You have to untangle, on the one hand, all the drama and ugliness each of us deals with and puts onto others as part of our needs from and interactions with other humans in a fucked up, oppressive situation, and on the other, all the narcissism, egocentrism, and pathological behavior that warps and perverts any attempt at human connection, healing, and relationship with a closed-circuit, highly analytical, neurotic loop—especially among Americans, especially among white Americans.

Some people, I am willing to participate in their drama and craziness—consider it a privilege even (hiding out together for days in hedonistic bliss to avoid dysfunctional families and emotional confrontations, insisting on helping someone who insists on refusing my help, engaging in long, drawn-out analyses of personal issues and problems, etc.). Others, I refuse. One situation offers the possibility of healing—for both of us—the other offers nothing but more sickness, disease, alienation, deterioration. Expansion; contraction. Growth; diminishment.

My ability to discern between the two, and my willingness/unwillingness to participate, arise from an intersection point of tangled strands of acculturation, assimilation, colonization, and color-coded consciousness.)

hybridy-bitty / eye2eye

new audio and text at THE SICKLY SEASON:

1.NGUGI WA THIONG'O AND SESSHU FOSTER (5 november 2006)
Ngugi and Foster give a reading/Q&A at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, LA.
LINK TO AUDIO:
http://sicklyseason.com/dialogo/ngugi-and-sesshu.htm

2.BREAKING DOWN THE HEART OF WHITENESS (15 november 2006)
In the face of a hostile response from their professor, local English 1A city college students in a class I work with take on white privilege, race, and racism, and break it all down with a group presentation.
LINK TO AUDIO/TEXT:
http://sicklyseason.com/dialogo/heartofwhiteness.htm

.............................................................................

woke up this morning to lots of love from friends delivered via various digital media. it's strange, weeks will go by when I don't hear from anyone, emails are left unreturned, I get stood up, etc, and then all of a sudden everyone is nice to me all at once.

the magnetism between people, the vibes we put out there, the ebb and flow of karma, shared, invisible cycles.

I am supposed to speak to Sesshu Foster's writing class at Cal Arts tomorrow about hybrid genres. This seems to me like one of those concepts that could be very useful but also very slippery and easy to employ in the process of academic pomo neutralization. Hybridity as a concept is useless unless it is based on a fundamental, radical hybrid of the personal and the political. If we gotta get all academic n shit, I like Gloria Anzaldúa's mestiza consciousness better. Also, Chela Sandoval's differential consciousness—love as a political force for personal and social transformation: that's hybridity. Mary Pardo's studies of women in East L.A. and how they bridge the spaces of home and neighborhood, private and public, through their woman-centered activism, education, and community building—that's hybridity.

Fortunately, if anybody can make these kinds of personal/political connections in an exploration of hybridity, it's Sesshu. Case in point: The class tomorrow will be discussing Joe Sacco's brilliant comic book, Palestine, which details the torture and state terrorism inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation. The book includes an introduction by Edward Said, whose ground-breaking text Orientalism I happen to have just read a few weeks ago, so I am looking forward to the discussion of Sacco's book.

I was thinking about all of this earlier this morning as I made myself an egg scramble of nopalitos and chopped-up tofu dogs, with a side of homemade beans smothered in panela cheese, and three flour tortillas, and a cup of coffee.

There is a part in Egyptian Nobel-winner Naguib Mahfouz' (December 11, 1911 — August 30, 2006) epic Cairo trilogy in which one of the main male characters, one of the patriarch's sons, falls in love with a woman who flirts with him over a period of time, and then once he has fallen in love, she goes away, disappears—which of course makes him fall even more desperately in love, intent on marrying her at any cost in order to bring her back. It's a small, throwaway comment, but years later, it's one of the things I remember most about those three thick novels: Mahfouz points out that the woman had played the oldest trick of all on him, the disappearing act (it's all in the timing), and he fell for it.

Sometimes it's so beautiful and funny and silly and sad and all fucked up, all the crazy stupid funny things we little monkeys do, knowingly, unknowingly, how the world spins, and we just sort of stick on to the side of it and hang on as best we can with our grimy little opposable digits—

(from Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha:
“I’d hold my arms out straight till they ached and I’d spin. I could feel the air against my arms, trying to stop them from going so fast, like dragging them through water.... Round and round; it was better with my eyes open, trying to get my eyes to hang onto one thing and stop it from turning.... I didn’t know why I did it; it was terrible—maybe that was why. It was good getting there—spinning. Stopping was the bad bit, and after. It had to come; I couldn’t spin forever. Recovering. Stuck to the ground. I could feel the world turning. Gravity sticking me down, holding me, my shoulders... The world was round and Ireland was stuck on the side; I knew that when I was spinning—falling off the world” (173).)


A friend recently sent me an anonymous photocopy of a poem by the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, along with a photocopy of the book cover the poem came from, with a mysterious P.O. box return address in East L.A. It's a beautiful poem. At the time I didn't know who had sent it, but I loved the mystery (Sesshu—maybe this is (one of) the purpose(s) of mystery?—loqueras, library liaisons, lowrider bicycles). I found out later who had sent it, and by that time, I had requested the book from the L.A. Public Library. When I went to pick it up, I thumbed through Ojos para otro mirar/Eyes to See Otherwise, and found the poem that had been sent to me, marked with a small, square, orange post-it note, sticking, hanging on, page 95, the note blank, microscopic traces of flesh, oils, scents, transit through urban space, ELAC, LL3, meta-poem, hybrid genre, giant steps, my favorite things, hybridity as the mystery of that fuzzy contact-overlap between life / death, past / future, intimacy / anonymity, myspace, emails, cel phone text messages, digitally recorded voice messages, the Braille of another's flesh early in the morning limbs intertwined as closed eyes still skitter over a mestizaje of half-awake physical desires and half-asleep R.E.M. dreams that weave reality/non-reality back and forth across the spaces between you—the sounds here, the tastes, the smells: muffled, musty, sour, sweet, pungent, all of it mxing, intermingling, to begin the task of building the day together.