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It’s a joke I’ve enjoyed for years, imagining the first sentence ever spoken. “You go first,” has always been a favorite. Others include: “poke it with a stick,” and “here, taste this.”

Now as Donald the Great exhorts a stricken nation that it must immediately re-open its economy, well, “you go first” is certainly back in style.

Jennifer Rubin’s op-ed in the Washington Post “The Test for Those Who Want to Reopen the Economy Too Soon: You Go First” is essential reading. She writes:

“Let me suggest a simple test for those arguing for a quick return to business as normal absent a robust testing, contact tracing and quarantine program: You go first.”

Do you remember when Jimmy Carter visited the damaged nuclear plant at Three Mile Island? I’d like to see Trump visit an emergency room in New York City. I’d like to see him on the front lines of the fight with the same meagre equipment and lack of testing that E.R. workers must cope with.

Once I had diarrhea in Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store.
Once I got lost at a carnival but without diarrhea.
Strictly speaking you shouldn’t care about either circumstance.
The trick of creative writing is to make you care and perhaps even put the stories together.

Can I do it?

So I had to buy new underpants right there in Jordan Marsh. The rest of the day I wandered seasick as any greenhorn. As I fought to keep myself upright and shit free Boston never looked more brilliant, aloof, magisterial, and vaguely hostile—which is to say it looked like itself.

Getting lost in the carnival involved disregard for authority. I’d gone there with my seedy, antisocial high school pals. In the haunted house train ride I hopped out of the car and vanished behind a pasteboard phantasm of Frankenstein’s monster. As I fought to keep myself upright and avoid electrocution what with the cables around my feet I saw how most of capitalism really works—which is to say fetish screams are manufactured with boards and volts.

Everything is now a sign which means culture has completed its work. William Gass was the first to point this out and of course he got the idea from Orwell but I’ll give him two points. Orwell got the idea from the Spanish trenches where Stalinism and Hitlerism were rhetorically deployed like eulogies over corpses.

Of course what is culture says Pilate? Continental aestheticism which colonized the American academy in the last quarter of the 20th century (and still resides there in protean costumes) holds the view that there are no facts at all. No empiricism.

“More than any one thing, the ‘Continental’ school repudiates the empiricist view of the a priori: the notion that non-theoretical facts are simply there, awaiting discovery. Of course, no English philosopher really held such an opinion; the work of Berkeley and Hume is more concerned with deciding upon what is factual and what is not, and with the procedures for determining this.”


(Excerpt From: Christopher Hitchens. “Why Orwell Matters.”)

Of the sinister one must say despondency, the very idea that there are no more facts but only ideas about them—ideological ideas—means we get our daily pittance of spoon fed signage. There are cultural constructions on the menu but no hard tack facts.

Orwell, our true stepfather saw it. He didn’t sketch maggots in a notebook as Hemingway did. He wrote “Animal Farm.”

Which is the name I’ve given Donald Trump’s daily press briefings. They are the Animal Farm. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Give the Buddha a penny and he’ll give it back.
Heard it in a dream last night.
Woke certain he’d been with me.

**

My father died on Easter Sunday.
He hadn’t been planning on it.
What does it mean that Jesus had a warning?

**

I want you to understand me. I come from one or two regions beyond the blurry pasture.

**

I write with my wings and my heart hops in the grass.
I can be any age I wish. Today I’m 100 years old.

**

I used to be a large German cheese but now I am a radio.

**

The field behind
spruce woods
Spring night, blue
and close
beside the first
near post
a child stops
and plays kaleidoscopic ballgames
**

We’re here to be good and endeavor for strength. Such proud words. I fail, much as anyone does. Old Ludwig Wittgenstein sounds like my Finnish grandmother: “we’re not put here to have a good time.”

Terry Eagleton wrote: “Among other more glamorous things, bodies are material objects, and the ultimate objectification of the flesh is known as death.” Thus the incarnate monism of patriarchal politics. A woman’s body is always in situ to be overcome. #TheMeToo movement is not wrong about this. The aim of sexual assault is death, either of the spirit or the flesh. Women’s flesh.

The allegation by Tara Reade against Joe Biden is a serious thing. She claims that 26 years ago while working in Biden’s Senate office he put his fingers inside her against her will. Any person of conscience must not only acknowledge this claim but also recognize the dire effects of masculinist materiality. Did he do it? I don’t doubt her story.

The objectification of the female body, as practiced by men, is in fact death. This is also true of other marginalized bodies. Black bodies and disabled ones are always abstract when the ultimate abstractions are being handed out by the patriarchy which is largely white.

How can I in good conscience vote for Joe Biden if Tara Reade’s account is true? One thinks of Kenneth Rexroth’s great line: “And what is love, asked Pilate, washing his hands….” Do I wash my hands? Hold my nose? Succumb to the variegated sub-rosa indexes of materialism? Do I say some bodies are more important than others, thereby defying everything I believe?

Joe Biden says he did’t do it. As for me, I don’t doubt that he did do it.

As for me, I was pulling for Elizabeth Warren.

We now live in an age of outrageous hypocritical behavior. Objectified materialisms make this possible, even necessitate it.

When I was 14 I was sexually assaulted by a college boy who lived in my parents house. I never told anyone. I was ashamed and afraid. When people say that Tara Reade’s accusations are suspiciously “of” the past or why didn’t she speak up and these are red flags they’re not being honest.

How can I vote for Joe Biden if he’s the Democratic candidate for president?

First, I’ll do it without cynicism. I’ll be voting for Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s replacement on the Supreme Court. Voting for a woman Vice Presidential candidate who will quite possible become the first woman president of the United States. Vote for clear air and water, improved access to health care, a re-engagement with global partners to fight everything from epidemics to poverty.

As Eagleton says: “History, culture and society are specific modes of creatureliness, not ways of transcending it.”

Of transcendence then is this: aspiration.

Is there still a chance I can vote for another nominee? I doubt it. But I’ll vote for anyone who can unseat Donald Trump.

I hate the term “curating”—everyone these days thinks they’re running a damned museum.
I do like crows as well as mint leaves in tea.
Can’t stand most academics who pose as bio-ethicists. Put it this way, they have their thumbs on the meat scales.
The inter-galactic laxative “will” get you from here to Mars.
I once ate strawberries with a 100 year old monk under the midnight sun.
I do like the cerulean atomizations of LSD. I don’t recommend this to everyone.
I can only punish myself if I’m being ethical.
Back to academic bio-ethicists: they never ask who’s paying for their lunches.
I once put roses on Karl Marx’s tomb and then placed daisies at the tomb of George Eliot. They’d run out of roses. I didn’t see how this was possible as there was almost no one in Highgate Cemetery.
I don’t like sun dried tomatoes. Someone has curated them.
I can’t stand Led Zeppelin.

I love Walt Whitman. Don’t like Ayn Rand.
Never been a fan of The Grateful Dead.
Had a dream last night with fungus in it.
Wanted to join the navy when I was ten years old.
Love Joe Brainard. Anselm Hollo. Chet Baker.
Still don’t like Ayn Rand.
I do like Aino Sibelius (from whom Ms. Rand fashioned her false name.(
Sat in Sibelius arm chair once. There was a brach tapping at the window.
Richard Pryor’s standup routine about the mafia is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
I have never liked “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Best novel about alienation by a US author is “Invisible Man” and the second best is “The Adventures of Augie March.”
As a disabled person I’ve learned to distrust people on the left and the right.
“My Morning Jacket” sucks.
Yoko did kill The Beatles.
Daniel Craig is the best James Bond.
The Atlantic Monthly is no longer any good.
I once ate the flower arrangement during a boring luncheon with an alcoholic former ballerina.

No one can tell you how to live with fear. Those pretending to know are frauds. We live inch by inch and blind or sighted we’re in the dark.

As for me I’m fearful not of fate but of the social constructions of physical difference. In this time of pandemic we’re seeing how people of color, the disabled, the elderly, indigenous people, queer and trans folks, impoverished women and children are variously indexed and denied access to essential health care. They always were. But now whether they live or die is under the spotlight. Health care workers and doctors are called upon to make snap judgements about whose life is worth saving. The history of disability suggests we’re not on the list.

So I am afraid. I’ve spent the better part of my adult life arguing in print and on the lecture circuit that disabled lives are lives worth living. But I’m no match for Neo-liberal medicine with its “hospitalists” who crunch numbers to determine which lives have potential value. That was happening before the pandemic and now the unseen hand of the economy is in even fuller play.

Yesterday Donald Trump told the nation “there will be deaths, lots of death” as if he was describing a surplus of zucchini at the state fair, his words offered with no empathy or evident concern. I remembered how he once said he didn’t need to put Braille signs in Trump Tower because no blind people would ever live there. The “deaths” that Trump doesn’t care about are precisely “those people” who he judges won’t be living in his building. I’m not on the list.

In all the fatuous, inane, self-congratulatory hours of lying to come from this White House you’ve not heard the word disability once. Disability is a true word. They won’t speak it.

I’ve met some famous people in my time but I won’t tell you who they are. Who cares? In truth it’s the dead people in dreams one should be concerned with.

Admission one: I’ve never had a dream about Sigmund Freud. Nor Carl Jung (who I like better). I did however once have a dream featuring William Butler Yeats. Just for the record, Yeats was sinister.

A few nights ago I had a dream with John Lennon in it. He was chatty and said that The Beatles gave him a kind of moral compass in his adolescence. I told him I never had one when I was young. Poof. Dream over.

**

I’ve never liked the poetry of John Berryman but I do like this:

“All souls converge upon a hopeless mote
tonight, as though
the throngs of souls in hopeless pain rise up
to say they cannot care, to say they abide
whatever is to come.
My air is flung with souls which will not stop
and among them hangs a soul that has not died
and refuses to come home.”

― John Berryman, The Dream Songs

I like the conflation of Dante, Whitman, “the great chain of being” with just a dash of Buddha.

Now that’s a dream.

**

The best book on Shakespeare and dream is by Marjorie Garber. Shakespeare took the chaos of dreams and made them drastically sensible. Like Mark Twain I think Shakespeare wrote in bed.

Long ago when I was young enough to think the arc of history bends towards justice I thought suede shoes were stylish—not the Chet Atkins variety, but the “Hush Puppy” kind, the beige ones. I was 13 and those were some good shoes. I say so without nostalgia. I’m not Googling 1968 Hush Puppies. The shoes of nostalgia will fuck you up.

Of the Hush Puppies I recall after you wore them for a day or two they tended to stink. I remember my father saying: “Your shoes smell like dead rats.” “How do you know what dead rats smell like?” I asked him. “I was in WWII,” he said.

I tried washing the shoes with dish soap and a rag. This ruined the suede and made them smell like the beauty parlor where my mother went for her “permanents” which were sinister since she was a drug addict and lacquered hair meant there’d be a burning sofa in the near future.

Yep. The Shoes of Nostalgia will disintegrate your meditative salon. Meanwhile I “did” just Google the phrase “”shoes of nostalgia”and found: “nostalgia big in sneaker world” or something like that.

BTW I could never get my father to talk about the war. He fought in the Pacific. There were lots of rats.