SATURDAY NIGHT I had a dream: on a train like an Amtrak with curving atrium like windows that were easy to look out of. I had a seat at the very front, not as a driver but as a passenger looking to my left at great gray clouds churning above the plain. It was not raining or nighttime, but the clouds were dense and it was dark and it seemed like it had been forever since we'd seen the sun. There was a sense in the dream that at any moment the clouds could turn apocalyptic at anytime, that the world would just end and there was no knowing if or when it would happen.

I was a little nervous about the uncertain timing, but was resigned to the situation and life on the train. It was full of international students. No names, but they were the kind of students I work with a lot at my job. I walked to the back of the train into a kind of supermarket brightly lit by florescent lights and spoke with a Dr. Chang (the scientist from the television series Lost). He didn't have much to add to our situation other than "wait and see." There was also a sense that there was nobody left to ask for help, that if the clouds had not already over taken others then they were in a situation similar to ours. Before I woke up the clouds lightened just a little and I remember saying to a group of students, reassuringly, that maybe we'll see the sun again, but it was still obscured and I didn't really know.

On Sunday I told my roommate about the dream and he said he had the same dream, half jokingly. He suggested that it was about the self dying. That didn't exactly sound right to me. Once in a graduate school workshop another student asked why I was always invoking the end of the world. My newspaper horoscope on Tuesday read "Your idea of "realistic" can come across to other as apocalyptic."

**

Before I went to sleep on Saturday, my roommate and I attended the second half of a symposium on poetry and medicine. The first speaker was a somatic psychologist specializing in sound. She lead us through some sound/song exercises and spoke about music being capable of more than entertainment. She also spoke about a particular interest of hers: Alzheimer's, how it runs in her family and the fact that she has done a lot of work around it and other forms of dementia. I approached her afterward and told her about the sound my father's been making for the last three years at Clearview (one of the "care facilities" he's been in since the spring of 2003); a kind of guttural chanting sound that he repeats over and over:

garh...barh...varh...arh...carh...barh...garh...barh...varh...arh...carh...barh...garh...barh...
varh...arh...carh...barh...garh...barh...varh...arh...carh...barh...garh...barh...varh...arh...
carh...barh...garh...barh...varh...arh...carh...barh....

The first time I heard him do this was in the summer of 2006. Amy and I had taken him outside the facility for a little fresh air, and while standing on the little patch of lawn on the hospital's hill overlooking farmland, he strung together about four of these sounds and then stopped. Almost like a conversation, he would start and stop sporadically, with space in-between. "It sounds like he's saying car, doesn't it?" Like some kind of mystery. "Dad, do you mean car?" He would start again. We took him back inside.

Over the past three years he's come to do it more and more. So much so that his voice has grown hoarse: garh...barh...varh...arh...carh...barh... like a broken machine. I imagine the frontal lobe dissolving to reveal a lizard mind, or a cracked and broken skull leaking liquid the color of brake fluid, or a brain exposed like a cartoon zombie. I told a brief version of the above events to the speaker, waving a hand over my face to signal "no cognition." My question: what does the sound mean? She answered, shocking me out of the closed circuit of my imagination: "Whatever it means, it's not for you."

**

I felt strange walking to the BART after the talk, a little bit out of body, reminiscent of my first year in Providence during the Winter of 2003, goofed up on anxiety and panic attacks, and in serious need to talk to somebody about dad stuff, life stuff; seriously paranoid and unable to open my mouth. A kind of psychedelic nervousness that all of a sudden came up after the event. I felt strange but couldn't put my finger on what exactly the feeling was.

How the dream relates to all this I'm not sure, other than the fear that my mind is closing as well, the clouds are coming etc. but if most people I knew didn't also think there was something uniquely wrong with them I might be able to present this theory with more confidence, that there's nothing particularly unique about a writer with a death wish. Anyway, on Sunday, after a morning of reading and feeling weird, I struck out for the grocery with my headphones on and in the middle of an MF Doom song ("That's That") (of alllll the possible music,) I started sobbing in a good, necessary way.

The clouds. Like the ones I watched over the southwestern Wisconsin hills steaming towards the farm on an armada of wind. Dark clouds, storm clouds, and when the tornado warning would appear in the bottom left corner of the TV I would look through the long narrow rows of windows to confirm the fear. My father was away at work and it was just my brother and I waiting for it to pass. The tornado never came but the storms did, and with them the lightening striking all around the house, the highest point around. I'll stop there. The wind is huge tonight as I write this, Monday might. The last week of school.

flat little gopher ears...







so cute!

shiny matted fur...





how I would like to hold you!

cheeks stuffed with trash...













i could give you so much more!

From this morning's paper:

Sally Quinn, a Washington writer and socialite, who met Mrs. Robinson at the lunch hosted by Mrs. Heinz Kerry, described her as “the perfect grandmother you’d kill for: cozy, nice, sweet, friendly, dear."

hello and good morning. good afternoon good evening. happy International Worker's Day May Day May 1st Spring the end of Winter etc. thus concludes the month of April and the sound of music posts and now it's back to...i'm not sure what I'll be posting in May. I was thinking more collagey kind of things, scanned things but we'll see.

i'm sitting in the speaking lab after a couple students didn't show up for their appointment and have a little time before the next appointment. there's only two weeks left of what has been a pretty good semester, doing mostly ESL and writing lab work, leaving plenty of time to read write and make things, which has been a little bit missing from the daily how to since last summer. that is to reiterate, it's been a mellow semester. two more weeks and then a month off. the government says i owe them two thousand dollars in misreported wages. not true.

this weekend, if you are around San Francsico, i highly recommend attending Anna Halprin's "Sprit of Place" performance, that roommate Chris, amongst many other performers, has been rehearsing for for the last five months. okay? alright. see you later.

Inspirational Message (mp3)

Heroes (mp3)

Recording (mp3)

accident/direction (mp3)

Two Mixes:
Nelson Will Take Over From Now On (link to mp3)
About LD... (link to mp3)

Quietude, 2003 (mp3)

urp ii (mp3)

Berlin, 1945 (mp3)

Johnny's Cabin (mp3)

The Hindenburg (mp3)

thus concludes march's poetry extravaganza. in case you came late to the sequence, the last one is first and the first one's last so as, the intended order of "I've Wasted My Life" is chronological, moving from march 1st to the 31st. does it matter? i'm not sure, but there was an intended order...

anywho, this month is music if you can call it music month, where i'll be posting mp3's of various recordings, probably not at the breakneck (!) pace of march because i don't really have all that much that is finished enough to post but regardless, that's the plan, let's say every three days beginning tomorrow.

all is well in san francisco, week nine (of fifteen) of the semester. spring is here. i'm a little annoyed right now with my roommate about the dishes but in general am in good spirits, need to go the grocery, plan to do some house cleaning this weekend, am thinking about mundane duties but will stop there. read an interesting book called "On Deep History and the Brain" by Daniel Lord Smail, a kind or argument against the notion that history began when we started recording it and the possibilities of a history that includes our psychotropic (read: chemical) needs, including religion, coffee, and gossip; the pleasures one gets from a text message compensating for the withdrawal symptoms of modern day loneliness. sort of. for anyone who has been watching the end of Battlestar Galactica (it's a such a great series, if you have the time), the book argues against the idea that civilization grew from a "seed," further illuminating the show's version of creation myth. anywho. i hope all is well. time to go to the grocery (it was closed yesterday for Ceasar Chavez day).

Cash is King

If you only have enough money to pay two months rent, keep your money and risk eviction. If you know the bill collectors are going to take all you have and want more, don't give them anything. Owing one hundred dollars is the same as ten thousand dollars if you don't have either. Besides, you'll need it when you begin your new life.

Poetry is Expensive 2

Approximating a new P.M., a sudden mistake producing waves of grain and raccoon activities to rival not only the erupting magnificence of the drunk mastodon waving its tail over the ferns, but also the poor man selected as replacement for the tiger. A right way for everyone, a calling, a punching bag barely ahead of our reaching fists but just enough so as to dodge any indiscretionary clucking telephone or lame reel like a film strip letting the light bulb through. Germany, advancing and how long have I asked to be refrigerated shuttling from line to line as such that we no longer have radio to live through, no TV to practice memory skill. We reason as the world prepares gumbo and gammy hens, blood meridians where place asks place to be so barren and inhumane. Allowing us to go free, allowing us to winnow our way towards distant and exotic lands where responsibility can be measured by those who don’t know us.

Believe me I laid on my bed this morning of no consequence. Of no sequence asides from differential equationary partition vision of imaginary happiness, and lines of inebriation partnering with Japanese flowers as bulbous as the bread bellies and their feet sauntering. As Richard Wright Pulitzer dustballs, as part of the menial gym rat lame duck bridal shower pole position. Help me believe this is the fire side gospel, this chit chat macabre violent spasm piece together, the system of puzzlement over Broadways expanded as highway trucks ram their diesel engines through pavement and pay dirt

I wash. I bring you my notes.