My body is beginning to pay me back for years of abuse — physical, spiritual, moral, and intellectual — all self-inflicted. Fifty years ago, already older than I expected to be, I wrote a poem that has a line in it that often blurs in my mind with many things written or translated by W. S. Merwin, whom I had the pleasure of hearing and talking to somewhere in North or South Carolina when pterodactyls were a kind of prosodic device only real effete Eastern intellectual snobs were permitted to harvest and use in their poetry.
I can no longer remember that line, although it had something to do with things being as they are and as they have to be.
I have broken all of my fingers and toes in the course of this ludicrous lifetime and have never worn a cast. I have two pairs of crutches, just in case I break something else. Most of these injuries were discovered years after they occurred in X-rays looking at other problems.
When I was hanging turkeys in Springdale, Arkansas, for $2.35 an hour with a Master of Arts in English Literature and Composition, I earned my overtime by going in early to sweep out the blood tunnel before going to the nursing station to get rubbed with some magical green liniment and splinted and taped before hanging eleven or more tons of Thanksgiving toms for the NOMF™.
Fortunately, I had switched to a typewriter back in the fourth grade bcause of a crazy biddy who whacked me for trying to write with my left hand, so it didn't really matter that I couldn't hold a pen for two years after Springdale.
I apparently broke most of my toes before I was six, some of them from wearing tap shoes as pre-schooler and kindergartner that I grew out of before the folks could afford replacements. Thank you, Wizard of Oz!
I broke four ribs during a failed suicide attempt in Lancaster, South Carolina, in 1975 that I couldn't afford to have fixed, and I did major damage to the heel of my right foot a couple of years later while jumping off the loading dock at the printing facility at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which led me to join the People's Temple, where I experienced an uneasy feeling during a ceremony where I was on my third cup of Koolaid and several hundred poor people were on their way to being gathered and transported to a cooler in Washington, D.C., until their unclaimed remains were turned into pet food.
But that's another post. This one is about walking on the beach at Cape Meares until I realized that I can't put off surgery on my right Achilles tendon too much longer.
I am tempted to ask Dean Kamen to design a Segway with flotation tires, and I'm sure he'd consider the feature request, but I would never get my exercise if I am going to continue to live forever and watch everyone else die, stupidly, which was, after all, the thing I told Mrs. Criscola I wanted to do when I grew up after that malignant bitch sent me to Principal Yellen's office after I responded to her question about what I wanted to be when I grew up with Cruel. It was not a joke then, and I still haven't attained the ideal, but I'm working on it.
I love a few things and some people, but I don't think that even water-boarding could force me to reveal what or who they are. The inanimate objects probably care more than the people at this late stage in human dissolution, and I will admit that I need the ocean.
The blurring of ground and field is what keeps me here. I despise the binary world in which I have been living and working and breathing and having to put up with on a daily basis through at least four wars in which people I knew died for no reason.
Fuck. Everyone dies for no reason, except those who die for bullshit, aka God and country, aka ideology, aka zombie food. Let's be serious people. We are all stillborn. Some of us flail around longer than others. The best we can hope for is to prolong the suffering of other stillborn cocksuckers and cuntlappers who still believe in God and that whatever the fuck It is has a plan.
I ask you what hell is this? Mrs. Faustroll found dozens of similar formations that she attributed to an artist who apparently sets up installations between Cape Meares and the South Jetty at Tillamook Bay because he hasn't learned how to masturbate yet.
What I like best about this stretch of beach is how quiet it is, even when we have to put up with five or six other people and thousands of birds. I don't really like birds or people or other terrestrial species, but put them in the proper context, and I can take them without using the most radical option the table, although I wouldn't rule them out.
Look at this cacaphony of pelicans and gulls between me and a rock at Arch Cape. That happiness is at least as gentle as a warm gun.
I grew up in New York City, and loved the Atlantic and Long Island Sound, where I learned what shit and condoms look like as they floated around, and I still at times miss some of the old fishing grounds at Port Jefferson, Orient Point, Freeport, Sandy Hook, Great South Bay, Riverhead, Pawley's Island, Sheepshead Bay, Topsail Beach, and Edisto, but the wildness of the left coast is so much more appealing.
And the final picture is Mudhoney in the stoned Pacific. I enjoy watching the depthfinder heading out of port on a charter and thinking about how this part of the world periodically sinks into the sea, miles at a time, wiping out life, both civilized and uncivilized, in a matter of weeks that may have taken centuries to establish itself. When I consider what I have witnessed in my limited time on the planet and compare it to what I've read and the people I have interacted with, I think all of life is good, and even the stupidest, cruellest, most fearful and destructive forces are essential to keeping the universe sane.
Not that I really give a fuck about it one way or the other. I just want to be entertained.