Posted 4:00 AM by Alfred

My daughter lies in her crib, not wanting to sleep. Well actually, she lies down in her crib, I guess, grammatically correctly? But she doesn’t lie down, she lies back and throws her legs up and grabs them and coos and oohs and decides it’s not sleepy time, it’s wakey time, even though it’s 1:30 in the morning. And strange sounds are coming from somewhere in the house or out. Not sure which. And I turned on this computer to try and type down something artistic or meaningful, in honor of the Bukowski documentary I was watching tonite, and in general beatude of the written form and my wherewithal as to my theoretical place in its history, and, sigh, that sound.

Ok, it’s out of the house. It’s next door. A phone, from the sounds of it, that is ringing perpetually. No one to answer it, no one on the calling end that is willing to give up. Maybe a computer calling a computer? The machines call each other now, and they don’t give a shit if they get an answer or not. It’s just a statistic to them, something to register in their mainframes. A small piece of codexed information to process and utilize for some other function.

Well, it seems that my daughter has, well, I was going to say fallen asleep, but now I hear her clapping. Love that sound. Can’t get enough of it. Can’t get enough of being a father, the most incredible amazing thing in the world. I won’t say to not let anyone tell you different, but that’s just my experience. I’ve learned as the world spins that my viewpoint is so often radically different from that of the man on the street as well as the woman on the rooftop. All three of us are at a place at a time and with some sort of function, even if that function is to do nothing at all. A purpose of holding that place, that spot, at that moment, in order so that something that should not have occurred there and then will thereby be prevented.



I was pondering art. Why we make it, why we view it, what it is. Literature is art, is a magazine art, any magazine? Is a basketball game, whether we play in it or view it, art? Football? Hockey? Badminton? There has to be a resounding yes to this question, in my mind, because the body in motion, whether hitting a ball with a racket or making love to an another individual (or making simple whoopee with mindless automotan efficiency) is a tool of art, an expression of something, even, or maybe, especially, if the artist has no idea what that something is. Why do writers write, why do players play, and don’t just say for money, although that’s part of it. The true artists, obviously (or maybe not so) cannot be just motivated by money. But, hmmm, pistol pete maravich, from what I have read, was mainly motivated in his quest to be the first basketball million dollar man, and by all accounts he was the most accomplished artist with a basketball, well, ever.

There is money to be made in art, but there is no art in making money. But that’s too simple, there’s art in everything, and at this point I have to stop using the word “art” because I’ve taken away its power. I’ve taken away the influence of an idea of creating things, movements, images, what have you, regardless of the medium, for the sake of its simple beauty, or its lack of beauty, or the fact that it is interesting, or so resoundingly boring that it becomes fascinating in its resounding rejection of what society tells us is appealing. In any event, it’s something that people strive for, across the globe every day, to make something that no one has made, to affect people, to reach into people’s hearts and minds and present the world in a way that has not been achieved, or has been achieved but not to the degree and proficiency and craftsmanship of what is being portrayed by the perpetrator of said endeavor. It is the sum and disparate pieces of our existence, our main motivation, well, one of the major ones, love and lust and fear and anger and hatred and all the myriad emotions playing a major part, but only the expression of these emotions in concrete symbiologies and representations that are possibly entirely unsymbolistic, only the evidence of what we put forward, and can thereby become something totally new, inspiring in us thoughts and feelings that we never knew were there, this distillatory of our emotions into entirely new entities, that is the core, the essence, the juice, the overlying principle, the thing that keeps us going when it would be so easy to sit in our easy chairs and turn off the brain and turn up the static of the world, but no, we absorb it and make something new. Sometimes. And other times we sit and let it soak our bloody bones and infect our eardrums, saturate ourselves with its soiled essence with no regard to how we can contribute to the airwaves of the planet earth. And other times, like this, we sit, half asleep, in front of a keyboard, and pound away on the keys trying to vainly find some form, function, facility, by which to say, ok, yep, this is why, this is where, this is something, I have created something, and then it’s gone, like a leaf blowing through the wind of a loud machine carried by a man wrapped in layers of shoufas for protection from his own scattering of the city’s garbage into new piles and arrangements, and the cycle goes on, unrelenting and unwitting.

And then the power mongers of the world wake up from their short naps and laugh at me in lighthearted yet mildly disdainful disgust, my naivete both uplifting their spirits and sharpening their fangs.

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