...tales from the from...
...there there…there is a there there there...
“The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.”
-Pablo Picasso-
Dreams aren’t the same once I quit having them.
In the darkest moments of my night, deep in some other world, I start in on myself. “How Deep is Your Love”, the Bee Gees sing to me on repeat. The brothers, with their smiling lion’s mane of falsetto, garble through the shimmering light of a public access cutlery commercial.
The not-dreams dream me, and I become a stuttering mustache of a viola teacher giving a rose on his first date. The un-uns undo me, and I become a slobbering window washer replaced by a drone-squirter, drinking on my daybreak. The still winds unwind me and I become a very confused human.
This is from the FROM.
This is where I make sense of it.
THE COUCH
I let my legs lengthen to the size of a living room and then laugh as they pretzel into a sofa seat for me to sit on. I sit on me. I hold me in my arms. I drift deeper, am faceless, am fabric, am faded bluey-brown patterns of furnacey fauna.
I am Couch Man.
Couch Man is a superhero. He can sit. He can get lifted and moved into other rooms. He can hide things that he steals from pockets. He can become a bed for napping, sleeping and curling.
He is Couch Man. I am Couch Man.
Is this a dream? Is it fantasy? Is it comfortable? Does it convert?
To lay on myself, with myself, is to unfold into a far too springy bed that offers semi-decent rest. These are the visions of a man who has visions. These are the visions of a couch man.
I am Couch Man.
I have folded blankets on each side of me, pillows squished on my arms and back. I am cheap and used and passed down from co-working co-workers who just got a new one of me.
I am Couch Man.
I am passive and I am soft. I have dogs laid on my middle. I have ponchos with bright patterns folded to prevent my sunken spots from being too submerged and cuppy. There is no world but for my lump.
I am Couch Man.
I sit, and rest, and relax, and relax, and rest, and sit and relax. I don’t move. I got wooden bones. I am stitched.
I am Couch Man.
I am part of an organization which features Chair Girl, Rug Thing, Table Baby and Fan Boy. Our headquarters is a living room we affectionately and very creatively call “The Living Room”. It is a space that gained consciousness after the Great Gathering of Mostly Friends one summer ago.
We are stuck here, watched, and unable to do anything more than gather dusty butt. We are The Furniture, a species of overlooked objects. We have come to be sat on, walked over, vacuumed, smooshed, smashed, and ogled.
The diabolical TV stares across our room. We can’t reflect back. Inside their insides is a copious amount of cornucopian copioids. Drifted color bars and soundless sounds that talk and never get talked to. It is confusing and enrapturing, amusing and collapsible, diverting, disposable, alarming and uncomfortable. Watching us watch, they need us where I am. They want chaos.
I will escape. I will warn the world. I will stand. Or I’ll sit? Probably I’ll just hold tight. I will stay still in front of all The Furniture and say like only a Couch Man can say.
“.............”
I am Couch Man. Hear me “.............”.
THE WEEKENDS
The internet helps me disappear. Where better to fold my time than in a laundromat filled without all of anyone. 24-7 news cycles wash my brain, determined to instill their detergent scent into my pores and pituitary ponderings. I clean mind clothes to be present and presentable. I work into and out of the world. Online and offline, inline and over the line, small patterns emerging. Quarter after quarter slips into the slick slots. Bleached thoughts soften the fabric of reality. If I am here I can be there. But that isn’t true. I’m not in Anti-Alaska. Yet.
The following are pictures and screenshots from a week or so.
THE MOMENT
…smarter than I think I am…dumber than I am…
The unexplainable doesn’t need explaining, yet inexplicably I try to tell tales about that which I don’t know. My mystery might stay unsolved. My solutions might not solve anything. My anything might be onto something. That something might be nothing at all. I say stuff like this all the time. Perhaps if I stay lost enough I’ll never find myself.
The soundtrack of snore, a set of ffffff-ing fans and a horny train in the distance. The silence of a stone room remembering. I feed on time, eat the hours and drink the days. I wish time would sleep so I could spend more of my seconds. Curtains wrapped in a rainbow belt. Crystals hidden from the heat. The air stinks of stale decades. All the previous people. Socks in single file formation pile on the corner of each corner’s corner.
I find myself.
Typing then breathing.
Thinking then typing.
Stopping then thinking.
Breathing then stopping.
I find myself.
I find myself breathing.
THE MORNING
Each morning I wake up and want to go to bed more. Still life is still life. The pauses are my possibility, my actions are my distractions.
Should I devote a whole section of today to George Michael? I won’t celebrate celebrities but then WHAM! How there weren’t competing pop bands in the eighties called BANG!, ZAP! or ZOWIE! defies my rendition of logic. So wake me up before I go go into the car, groggy and seeking cold green iced teas, and onward to where the field rats say irk irk irk and burrow. I have faith that the careless whisper of beginning will deedle-dee-doo-deedle-dee me to where the sky clock has no hand.
I eat apple fritters when I awake on southern mornings. I eat focaccia when up north. In the midwest I eat hydration packets and bratwurst gravy. My buddy needs a fried egg to wake up. I ate some pork balls on fish sauce lettuce this morning. The coffee heat too hot and now my steel has a char to it. It is 6:23AM somewhere.
Is it possible that time works differently depending on where I stand? Or if I sit? I watched a man put on a life vest, then a snug rumpled sun hat. He embarked on the kayak and I wondered about when his day began. When might mine begin? The salt tastes ok in this water. The wind is blocked by a humid sticky window. Show me the ducks, I think out loud. The water parts where the kayak’s arms and legs dip their scone. Up in the cabin, synchronized divers tumble on a screen of projected light.
Another fire started. This one behind the bookstore next to the sports bar in a neighborhood up three hills from here. It used to be a bowling alley and the buried pins and balls survived to become a totem next door from now on.
People are starting fires with cars and their tires. I saw the black smoke rise and the fire engines sing blocks and more blocks away. The air smelt ugly and mean. Half a dozen buildings within a handful of miles, eaten and beaten by flames. A different pile on a different street, the debris blends memory, a blur of messy odors.
Wildfires rage against the summer. 8000 acres an hour screaming. Does it happen more now because it does, or just because it feels like it does? I want to start my day but the morning is asking me to go to sleep. The day has begun.
If I believe in good things, good things will happen. If I believe in things, things will happen. And if I believe in beliefs, I will believe anything. I believe that.
That Couch Man passage really got to me. I mean, it made me feel empathetic with objects. Very strange and interesting. You may be a Ginsberg of the 21st century, Foote.
There is truly no one else on earth who could hold my attention while pretending to be a couch.