To-Do List, Memorial Day Week-End, 2006
1) Pluck this Dusky Jewel... or at least hope to pluck this Dusky Ju-Wuhl. In general behave more like Jim Morrison. Or to be more precise behave in the manner of Val Kilmer behaving in the manner of Jim Morrison. This will involve greater use of Swagger/Sway, swinging the upper body from the hips in what we will call the Cobra, or the Swivel Jut, leaning against things, slouching, exaggerated insouciance, cussing and saying things like make it a triple. Lighting onto stranger’s balconys, kissing them. Walk the sandy beaches of blurry, slurry southern California until I find Kyle MacLachlan. Remember: failed director/actors might become rock stars. Think, Dusky Ju-Whul, Dusky Ju-Whul, visualize the plucking of it, the showing it gratuitously and graciously to people. Think how Dusky that Jewel will feel to your tingling fingers...
2) Blame somebody else.
3) Squint more. Also, purse lips more. (See: Dream.)
4) Deodorant. Consider it.
5) Grocery store. To get: scotch, rotisserie chicken, bananas, aspirin.
6) Stop telling people I will give them a call, or write them a longer e-mail soon. (Unless I specify that give you a call actually means there is a chance that I will call you on the telephone one more time before I die.)
7) Communicate more with my hands. Wave the hands around. I’m seeing all these celebrities on TV, on the talk shows and whatnot, and one and all they seem to have these huge hands, and they wave them about like semaphores, or like they’re guiding a plane in on the runway. They cut daggers in the air, describe incantations, and when they go lifting and swinging these big hands from the throne of their properly and casually crossed legs, when the hands rise and take the air in action, they (the hands) are like a Japanese Movie Monster appearing dramatically before us, climbing from the sea or over a mountain range, suddenly right there, right there in our face, filling the screen, and of course you want this monster to ravage you, you want this monster to have his or her way with you. Hand-Zilla. Be Hand-Zilla. And the faster and more dextrous you use your hands the less they see how small your hands actually are. (Drum fingers on the surface of things? Trapped-in-a-box-like descriptors?)
8) Pity the poor fools. Suffer them. Wear more Jewelry? Dusky Jewelry? Mohawk, scowl.
9) Fish for compliments. Live bait? (I am going to need a bigger boat.)
10) Stop aping around.
11) All male cast of Steel Magnolias. I have lived with this idea for too long. Realize it. Believe in it. Bring it to the stage. Fin-de-siecles and such. Paradigm shifts. Crank boats.
12) Peter Pang in NeverNever Alley... Tinkleberry... Black-Eyed Jonathan & Baby Bear... Crystal Beth... Mister Hook, the Hook... Trip to endless youth, trip out windows and down stairs, into streets, trip into the beds of strangers... you will be redeemed when the dust is sprinkled onto your trembling brain... the Dilated Boys... the High Pirates of Sketch... Madness in Dead Clocks and Clocks That Disappear.... (“I was wounded early/and early I learned/that wounds made me... He alone/who is joined to the horizon/can build new roads... (Adonis))
13) Time is Distraction, a Shore, a Barrier Reef to the Sea
14) Stop saying it is what it is, because quite clearly it is what it is not.
15) Shake the rigor from my eyes. Stretch? Fall apart?
16) Wolverine 5: A Wastrel’s Life... rebirth of the franchise, redemption... both the franchise and I bankrupt and broke.
17) Essay: To Get All Tall & Mighty: One tall can too many: to grossly proselytize, talk shit, opine, complain, brag or judge, as in don’t get all tall and mighty with me, dirtface stinkbalm! Guy full of Guy in the front yard he starts slinging words like hash, he starts waving them hands around, guy decides to climb him a tree, climb like it like he did when he was young, he clumb a shitload of tree, and he’s shure as shit going to do it, knows he can do it, and he starts climbing, laughing, telling them see if he can't, and he gets about 15 feet up, though very awkwardly let’s say, barely, and he slips he slips and falls like so much dead weight to the ground below, in less than a second the terrible thing is done, he's fallen like a busted play to the ground where he does lie motionless, far away from the goonball world. They will say of him, well, he had to go and get all tall & mighty. Shame.
18) “I can’t go home, Grace. I’m a grown up.”
19) Romantopithecus... A storied beast? Hike into the mountain, lay down on dirt.
20) One last play, seconds left, The Fail Mary.... go deep, god, go deep, and please do not drop that ball when gravity sends it dreamlike from its arc into your hands. May we never know heart ache.
21) Sometimes useless, sometimes proud.
22) Call Werner Herzog; more questions about the Ecstatic Truth. And of course he will tell me again that as Miles Davis says, if you have to ask you'll never know. And I will laugh because of course I ask only to hear the echo and the smile.
23) Write the work of Adolescent Fiction I have been putting off—Boy/Girl Party—this the world needs. The world desperately needs the touching and comic coming-of-age antics of Susie Peeler, Lisa Dudley, Buttercup Jones, Danny Manny, Mitch Steadmore, the twins Mikey and Stacey Ponz, the stray dog Rollins, the homeless man Mr. Speedy, the well-intentioned but hapless Principal Dropswitch, all character arc and action culminating narratively with the fateful decision on the part of Benny Dell’s dad Scott, The Cool Dad, to allow his son to host Springy Creek’s first Boy/Girl Party! Sweet. How do you spell sweet? S-P-R-I-N-G-Y-C-R-E-E-K, that’s how.
24) Grocery store. To get: water.
25) Blindhouse Cinema. They most certainly will not see that you have not seen.
26) Stop shaking? All the livelong day. Coming round the mountain.
27) Less Melancholy!
28) I will remember you.
29) A smattering of revolution here and there, tales so personal as to not be told, so dull really, or mundane, as to not be told, like even waking up, getting into the car and driving to-ward the sun, a song in yr throat, hope in yr chest.
1) Pluck this Dusky Jewel... or at least hope to pluck this Dusky Ju-Wuhl. In general behave more like Jim Morrison. Or to be more precise behave in the manner of Val Kilmer behaving in the manner of Jim Morrison. This will involve greater use of Swagger/Sway, swinging the upper body from the hips in what we will call the Cobra, or the Swivel Jut, leaning against things, slouching, exaggerated insouciance, cussing and saying things like make it a triple. Lighting onto stranger’s balconys, kissing them. Walk the sandy beaches of blurry, slurry southern California until I find Kyle MacLachlan. Remember: failed director/actors might become rock stars. Think, Dusky Ju-Whul, Dusky Ju-Whul, visualize the plucking of it, the showing it gratuitously and graciously to people. Think how Dusky that Jewel will feel to your tingling fingers...
2) Blame somebody else.
3) Squint more. Also, purse lips more. (See: Dream.)
4) Deodorant. Consider it.
5) Grocery store. To get: scotch, rotisserie chicken, bananas, aspirin.
6) Stop telling people I will give them a call, or write them a longer e-mail soon. (Unless I specify that give you a call actually means there is a chance that I will call you on the telephone one more time before I die.)
7) Communicate more with my hands. Wave the hands around. I’m seeing all these celebrities on TV, on the talk shows and whatnot, and one and all they seem to have these huge hands, and they wave them about like semaphores, or like they’re guiding a plane in on the runway. They cut daggers in the air, describe incantations, and when they go lifting and swinging these big hands from the throne of their properly and casually crossed legs, when the hands rise and take the air in action, they (the hands) are like a Japanese Movie Monster appearing dramatically before us, climbing from the sea or over a mountain range, suddenly right there, right there in our face, filling the screen, and of course you want this monster to ravage you, you want this monster to have his or her way with you. Hand-Zilla. Be Hand-Zilla. And the faster and more dextrous you use your hands the less they see how small your hands actually are. (Drum fingers on the surface of things? Trapped-in-a-box-like descriptors?)
8) Pity the poor fools. Suffer them. Wear more Jewelry? Dusky Jewelry? Mohawk, scowl.
9) Fish for compliments. Live bait? (I am going to need a bigger boat.)
10) Stop aping around.
11) All male cast of Steel Magnolias. I have lived with this idea for too long. Realize it. Believe in it. Bring it to the stage. Fin-de-siecles and such. Paradigm shifts. Crank boats.
12) Peter Pang in NeverNever Alley... Tinkleberry... Black-Eyed Jonathan & Baby Bear... Crystal Beth... Mister Hook, the Hook... Trip to endless youth, trip out windows and down stairs, into streets, trip into the beds of strangers... you will be redeemed when the dust is sprinkled onto your trembling brain... the Dilated Boys... the High Pirates of Sketch... Madness in Dead Clocks and Clocks That Disappear.... (“I was wounded early/and early I learned/that wounds made me... He alone/who is joined to the horizon/can build new roads... (Adonis))
13) Time is Distraction, a Shore, a Barrier Reef to the Sea
14) Stop saying it is what it is, because quite clearly it is what it is not.
15) Shake the rigor from my eyes. Stretch? Fall apart?
16) Wolverine 5: A Wastrel’s Life... rebirth of the franchise, redemption... both the franchise and I bankrupt and broke.
17) Essay: To Get All Tall & Mighty: One tall can too many: to grossly proselytize, talk shit, opine, complain, brag or judge, as in don’t get all tall and mighty with me, dirtface stinkbalm! Guy full of Guy in the front yard he starts slinging words like hash, he starts waving them hands around, guy decides to climb him a tree, climb like it like he did when he was young, he clumb a shitload of tree, and he’s shure as shit going to do it, knows he can do it, and he starts climbing, laughing, telling them see if he can't, and he gets about 15 feet up, though very awkwardly let’s say, barely, and he slips he slips and falls like so much dead weight to the ground below, in less than a second the terrible thing is done, he's fallen like a busted play to the ground where he does lie motionless, far away from the goonball world. They will say of him, well, he had to go and get all tall & mighty. Shame.
18) “I can’t go home, Grace. I’m a grown up.”
19) Romantopithecus... A storied beast? Hike into the mountain, lay down on dirt.
20) One last play, seconds left, The Fail Mary.... go deep, god, go deep, and please do not drop that ball when gravity sends it dreamlike from its arc into your hands. May we never know heart ache.
21) Sometimes useless, sometimes proud.
22) Call Werner Herzog; more questions about the Ecstatic Truth. And of course he will tell me again that as Miles Davis says, if you have to ask you'll never know. And I will laugh because of course I ask only to hear the echo and the smile.
23) Write the work of Adolescent Fiction I have been putting off—Boy/Girl Party—this the world needs. The world desperately needs the touching and comic coming-of-age antics of Susie Peeler, Lisa Dudley, Buttercup Jones, Danny Manny, Mitch Steadmore, the twins Mikey and Stacey Ponz, the stray dog Rollins, the homeless man Mr. Speedy, the well-intentioned but hapless Principal Dropswitch, all character arc and action culminating narratively with the fateful decision on the part of Benny Dell’s dad Scott, The Cool Dad, to allow his son to host Springy Creek’s first Boy/Girl Party! Sweet. How do you spell sweet? S-P-R-I-N-G-Y-C-R-E-E-K, that’s how.
24) Grocery store. To get: water.
25) Blindhouse Cinema. They most certainly will not see that you have not seen.
26) Stop shaking? All the livelong day. Coming round the mountain.
27) Less Melancholy!
28) I will remember you.
29) A smattering of revolution here and there, tales so personal as to not be told, so dull really, or mundane, as to not be told, like even waking up, getting into the car and driving to-ward the sun, a song in yr throat, hope in yr chest.
posted by j | 2:52 PM
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