Shoveling Words In A Hole
All day I'm scribbling words on scraps of paper and shoving them in my pockets. I think of these words as a hedge against my general state of empirical blackout, but the sad truth of the matter is that at the end of every day I toss my random notes in a shoebox and mostly forget about them. Every once in awhile I sift through this stuff looking for lost thoughts or ideas, but I'm continually perplexed by the words I chose to write down in moments of seriously questionable inspiration. That shoebox has become my personal archaelogical dig, from which I lamely attempt to piece together some account of my daily (semi)conscious life. Frankly, my little notes generally refuse to make any kind of sense at all. Even when I jot down quotes from books I'm reading I'm seldom able to figure out what it was that struck me about the words in the first place.
What really is this whole enterprise but an expanded version of my shoebox? I have no illusions that I'm doing anything but shoveling words into a hole, but as long as I'm doing it I figure I may as well be vigilant about it. I've always thought of a journal --as opposed to a diary-- as a project for people without events, and that's me in a big fat clam shell. What I have in place of events is just this long, endless string of words and thoughts that mean absolutely nothing at all.
You can have some of them:
Read the fucking hat: Alaskan Bush Pilot. No, I'm not a bush pilot. Do you think I don't know that for even one minute?
Look at my hair, for God's sake. I look like Paul Anka.
All that stuff in the basement makes me feel like I have a job.
My thing was always going to be, you know, the really big cowboy hat.
Speak as if there are dogs listening.
Every day in gym class somebody was throwing a ball at my head.
Overheard: I am carving a new spear.
I guess I'm just more comfortable when I'm throwing things.
Certainly I've never felt exactly necessary.
Starting to see angles with no good reason.
When was the last time a guitar said something really interesting to me?
All day it seemed like she vacuumed the stairs, over and over, up and down.
Some of the little bastards had bedrooms full of trophies.
Andrew Hill: the most elegant man on the planet, falling down the stairs.
Cradle fighting hyenas.
"Oh the stone cold panic of never..." Louis MacNeice
Pissing nitrates.
The cartoon wolf and the crucifix. Second hand and the swizzle stick.
Are you going to finish that sandwich?
A priest at the picnic table, carving commandments into the surface, his own, not God's: Free James Brown.
Six black birds in a crabapple tree, stumped by an aluminum foil balloon.
How many doors would you have to knock on before you found a Lee Dorsey record?
As if it wasn't me who fine-tuned the goalpost from its lowly status as a primitive schoolyard joke.
Give a man a metal detector and you give him a passport to adventure.
Let's give visitors from another planet something to really think about.
Is that a savage or a saint above the television, with a pomegranate in his fist?
Chuck Berry --that filthy man-- is the soundtrack to my empty afternoons.
When I was younger I still laid awake at night wracked with visions.
A motel clerk in Montana, watching Sunset Boulevard in the middle of the night.
I try to never pray on the toilet.
The last lovely frames of John Huston's The Dead.
I once stayed in a hotel with the Flying Wallendas.
Years ago, in San Diego, I killed a pretty little sailor boy with a tamborine.
Grasshopper in the dollhouse.
Cattle. Spoon. Dirigible. Pitchpipe. Rump roast. Saddlebag. Spatula. Spatula. Spatula.
Sweating hot dog, rolling all day in the 7-11.
Orange in the sand, loose, dribbling in the surf under a brokedown moon.
Two priests playing catch in the churchyard.
Small you a no right, you no see true. You no happy? Why you no heart smiling?
Look, here's a photograph of Bob Hope's house in Palm Springs.
Snorkel. Bassoon. Poultry. Honkytonk. Delicatessen.
The ass-kicker doesn't do background checks.
Your shoes, madame, are exactly the color of the banana seat on the beloved stingray of my youth.
Small children, wobbling, flailing at a broken mule.
Robert Johnson sneaks a cigarette in the airplane restroom.
Why were you put in such a ridiculous pair of shoes and made to stumble around on the planet?
A woman pulls a magazine to her nose in the grocery store, inhales dramatically.
Getting to be pie season.
What was that rat-faced bastard's name who was always on Hollywood Squares?
Young, all day, whomping and wheedling, bringing it on.
There's a tractor crawling along the shoulder of the highway, hauling a phone booth.
Eric Dolphy twirling sparklers in a dark room.
More of the hurtful precipitation.
At one a.m. a woman in brown velvet pants, juggling nothing with her hands and crying into a payphone.
The fat little girl whose mother was dead and whose father had been arrested for stealing jumper cables was sitting in her bathing suit in the middle of the lawn, a sprinkler dribbling off her back.
Nurses were starving and wore stiff hats and fell madly in love.
I suppose you're thinking that it takes a lot of guts to play the flute, which depends, really, on what you're talking about when you say "play the flute."
Prophecy would be the end of me.
The strange little tenor --single, Catholic, lisping, and alcoholic-- would stand alone in the middle of the raquetball court, singing, oblivious to the taunts of the children taking turns at the peephole.
Maybe tomorrow I'll get up and eat like shit.
Overheard: "Why don't we ever go bowling?" "Oh, man, there are so many reasons."
Know this: whatever the darkness that hobbled me, there was always a dog swaddled in light, whispering me in off the ledge.
The giant's life, it's no walk in the park.
Everybody out there was bumping against me, suspicious, trying to guess my weight.
I didn't feel like jerking around anymore. I'd been a lurching spectacle in that town long enough.
I feel like one of God's pets, one of the lesser creatures, nestled in shavings.
I cannot get that old photograph of the blind ventriloquist out of my mind.
Thank God, Lee Morgan.
How did they get Monk in that little red wagon?
I never met a futurist who didn't have a few screws loose.
When I am going up the river through the trees and there is darkness and hush and shadows, when I am going up the river those drums I hear, Elvin Jones is beating them.
How the hell does ham become a tradition?
That was precious, wasn't it? That old fellow explaining Captain Beefheart to his grand daughter?
Get out in the fucking yard like a man.
4:54:54 PM 
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