Monday Monday Monday can only mean that I made it through another Sunday. Sundays, I think, are endless units of experience, no matter where they are lived or what happens within their boundaries. I wonder if there are books written on the subject of Sunday. I don't know if I could stand to read such texts, but if there are books and novels about utopia and about california and "the state of mind that is route 66," then there bloody well oughta be a book of lists about all the Sundays spent trapped inside, being forced to go to church, forced to mumble centuries-old creeds and listen to harshly uncharismatic homilies, forced to play tag-football with people twice your age, forced to mow the lawn and somewhere in the busy trap of that empty day you find many opportunities to compulsively check the mailbox, knowing as well as anyone that mail never comes on Sunday. It's hard to believe Sunday has survived the century. You'd think Woodrow Wilson or Ben Franklin or one of the founding fathers would have phased it out by now. Or is it a union thing, like the 5-day workweek? I wonder if very many people would even know what on earth I'm talking about if I just walked up to them and started demanding answers and conversation on the subject of Sunday. Probably not, since I myself can't begin to describe what I'm talking about or what I'm saying with these very words.
It seemed hot as hell today, and it's almost December. It's hot, come to think of it, in a Sunday kind of way. Maybe Sunday is purgatory, and maybe at some point at the beginnings of our great nation there was a movement afoot to banish Sunday from the calendar. But Sunday was further instantiated by those founding fathers who foresaw the timely coming and going of the seasons as running amok in the coming decades without the addition of yet another hour to a dreaded Sunday. But who does anything in their busy day that in any way reflects the deeds and initiatives of the friggin' Founding Fathers? Not I.
I suspect that the institution of Sunday has been manipulated and distorted over the centuries to reflect puritanical climes and political agendas. People have been tortured and murdered for not observing and respecting our precious Sunday. I guess Sunday probably is the result of some parliamentary discussions, themselves mocked by uncomfortable wigs, religious necessities and constituency agendas, and its existence must date back to the Julian calendar and the steady squishing of all the world's frame of reference by imperial motives. Somehow, the customs of Sunday stab my days like a rowdy ambush from the Holy Wars, and I'm boring myself with this stupid, bottomless jabber.
I was almost named Mark Julius Thomas, but mom thought I'd get a lot of shit during school, and that the other kids would call me Julie. Instead my middle name is Alexander, after Alexander the Great, who of course was homosexual.
My brain is spinning around in the way one's brain may spin after sleeping for 13 hours straight. What a relief to wake up and know that I do, in fact, have the day off, and there is no need to leap nekkid from the bed and into a cab in a futile attempt to make up for a couple of hours at the office which would have been spent looking and acting furiously busy whilst accomplishing very little.
I'm been having problems with my headcandy lately. Zoloft, Trazodone, and Ambien, if you must know. I thought last week as I think right now that I really need to not take these stupid things any more, not because I'm over the problems I had before taking them, but because drugs and substances are not good things, especially if they can so easily consume my head in flame the way Zoloft does.
I quickly discovered, of course, that getting yourself off of something like Zoloft quickly becomes not a matter of principle but a matter of discovering that it is a drug whose handling requires the benefit of close professional supervision. I obviously do not know what I'm saying when I say it's time to quit taking this stuff. It's like some lazy kludge saying "Yeah, I think I'll run the Marathon this year." I know other people respond differently to it, but I discovered once again that trying to ween myself off of Zoloft on my own is an extremely bad idea. And it is impossible to describe how it feels.
I'm in the colorado of my head, lank and
rotten twaddle of distress
gone trailing dotlessly at
attention frying houses
roasting lobster gripping
hoary dreadlocks with my
bitter shoulders.
She's in there with me,
thrilling my neighbors to
the powers of urinary
confusion, hocking
raspberry corn chips at
the heavy summer breeze
where shadowy scissors
clip the heavenly sac she
summoned with my
curses and my pants.
I'm a lot of staring, lots
of wasting. Mine is the
carefully trembling grip,
the steady panic
tempered by hexagonal
engines skimming holy
magic off the rise. Only
poison, only common
paste and punctuation
spoil her bones.
She commands a canyon
full of cartoon characters
to "Point the trinkets at
the children. Let me drip the
honeyed crock!" And into
the night we carefully
styled our loving torture,
drizzling tepid popover
batter onto the promised
land, teasing faithless
priests with three-headed
coins and worthless
mathematics, learning that
the Serpent is the
only God in Eden.
"Louder, louder, there
has to be more noise,"
I shouted. "Can't you make
some noise?" The inside
of my head was a
catastrophe of
swallowing and
emptiness. "I'm getting
tired of sandwiches and
tortured bowel
movements! Give me
vacuum grunts and now!"
The Flavor-Seal sucked
hard around my misery,
push went my nose to the
desk, o I begged her
sugary trapnest to travel.
Fat but squarely
subjunctive, I clutched the
carcass of a hawk we
found on Woody Allen's
window pane.
"My clarinets arch their
pimply necks and lignify
your blistered fossil,"
she sallied. "Lime honey-ribs,
truck your jumpy drool
to the pesky retard
at the back of the bus.
Your pus is soppy
horseshit I could coax
from thread to fashion
to hearse and then to
cockroach guacamole.
Now your salty dutchmen
reach the ceiling for
deathly thunder. Hurry,
trills, the rafters are
severed by housy
creeds!"
Yesterday saw a first in my life. I actually fell asleep while playing the piano. Was playing D Major scales, and thought of them as extremely boring stuff and why not put my head down on the music rack so my neck doesn't get tired, and that's what I did, and next thing I knew I was in dreamland, effortlessly moving from D Major to a-flat minor and then I was locked in to understanding bizarre musics-of-the-spheres that I can't even begin to describe much less notate. It was all over within seconds, of course, and I don't s'pose a body could go on playing like that for very long, although I can think of any number of recordings and performances I've seen in which it certainly seems like pianists are doing exactly that. Once in college I was playing in a Brahms Viola Sonata in someone's senior recital and I started dozing off. I didn't even care, either, although I did think it a good idea for my own sake to try and stay awake for the duration of the performance. Looking back on it, I should have let myself fall asleep, or at least appear to fall asleep. There are very few things one can do on stage during a classical music recital that are truly memorable for the audience, and that would certainly have been one of those things that people talked about for the rest of their lives. He fell asleep and just kept right on playing!
I know of one probably apocryphal story that circulated around Oberlin while I was there . . . was about a time a stagehand accidentally pushed a Steinway grand right off the stage during intermission.
It's always amazed me to reflect on just how much those violists and all the other instrumentalists at Oberlin and at other schools expected of pianists who "accompaninnied" them for their recitals and auditions and other performances. Alas, any amount of griping on the subject will not change anyone's outlook on the matter, and well after they're out of school pianists everywhere will forever allow themselves to be "hired" into collaborative musical situations for no payment whatsoever in exchange for "the performance experience" or for some other nebulous benefit.
