People like to be entertained. They like to have something happen in front of them that makes them feel like they were there, saw something, can remember it thereafter. It’s a function of the fact that most of the time spent on the air occurs without definitive sequence or direction, at least not one that appears until the thing is over. This appearance of the sequence after the sequence has been completed is true of human lives, regardless of how directionless they may seem while they are going on, but it is also true of something like a table: a thing that does not move, exerts no proper influence. The story of any table, in its not moving, likely has more motion to it than a lot of things that traditionally exert arcs, such as a sitcom or a ballgame.

It is impossible for nothing to happen, really. The sentence “Orb fell through water.” exerts no definitive narrative product, but does show motion, and contains numerous hidden elements, i.e.: what is the orb? why did it fall? Many would expect then the orb to have a reason for falling, a product of its hitting the water, a cause and effect. But what if the orb is never mentioned again? Does this mean nothing happened? Could the appearance of the orb and subsequent lack of resolution thereby inscribe in the motion of whatever came after it, say “Days slurred numbers in a holy walk.” Is the orb in the days, slurring the numbers; why? Does the orb’s minor appearance lose its motion in not returning, the way a dog might pass your window? Obviously I think no, and some would argue that even if it doesn’t lose its motion fully it could have more presence by returning, but which is more masturbatory? Masturbation, often an ideological anathema to narrative wanting, seems defined by its repetition, by its return again and again to a familiar stroke, with a final climax that has no question. Sex, the stuff of most here’s-how-we-keep-you-interested,-by-having-all-the-characters-fuck-all-the-other-characters-and-or-die-one-by-one-style media, holds the relic of passing time, in the name of pleasure, such that at the end of it there is a thing on the floor and a happy body and a readiness to go to sleep.

I won’t say anything directly about America here, about how we are encouraged to go to sleep, because one of the functions of America is to make that argument sound like a supposed stroke in the supposed massive aesthetic jack off of “resolutionless art” that is actually perpetrated in the meat and bones of everything that has put us politically and culturally, on a majority scale, in the joke box of history.

Skin.

My father, an American, has dementia. At this late state in the game of his brain’s destruction he has lost grip of who and where he is. Each minute then is a kind of prison, one where most hours he bangs on tables and glass in search of nothing. You ask him why he’s hitting things and in the roll of the dice of his head he scoffs at you without punchline as to why you should already know (know what, you might ask, and there is no answer); or he might explain he is waiting for *gibberish* to come and get him from here; or he might in silence continue banging as if you hadn’t spoken. Recently my mother has been able to get him out of this inherent, directionless violence that comes from a flesh that had never before exhibited such, and is instead able to channel him to exert that energy onto paper. With a crayon or pencil he’s begun in recent weeks to scrawl hard onto anything you put near here, including countertop or mail or magazine, but we try to keep him on the paper. What comes out is almost entirely scribble: lines that in their forming seem to make veils or stormfields or like haridos or skin, but really are just his frustration zapped into the arm and into the thing. His arm will strobe, in intense focus, maybe like masturbation, but removed of what seems the sexual arc: it is a wall. In the mess of it too might come bits of things that cling on the web in there: his name, my mother’s name, numbers, letters that spell nothing familiar, the word HELLO, other. He shows no emotion about the drawings or writing when he’s done with them. He often tears them up. He likes to rearrange the furniture into ways that seem to fit a logic he believes we all are missing, though the logic continues to change. He does not know where to shit, or often when it’s coming.

My father, today, is an author, though he doesn’t care about books. He never really watched much television. He’s never used the internet. He liked watching races, where the cars go around for hours in the same place, though now if he’s seated in front of it he doesn’t notice and he falls asleep. His want for entertainment is mostly a product of not knowing where to put his arms.

What is typing. Today most days for many people seem composed of typing. To construct a sentence, one must proceed through an order of buttons pressed to exert a structure on the symbols that form the language that form the idea to the person on the far end to receive. Youacan tella what ia m trying to sayyyy inthehis sintence i bettthough it is snot ohow a sentencence isssuppossseedddddto bee rittin. Language moves days without days moving as without the words or entertainments or light moving through the window we wouldn’t be able to tell that time has passed beyond the fact that now again we are tired. I often throughout the day find myself compelled to lay down on the floor, with only hours having passed between. These could be seen as days. Each of these are units in which something might have happened to give the feeling of time having passed though if nothing were to have happened I would still have become tired eventually again I guess right wouldn’t I aren’t I supposed to have etc.

Do you remember when John Lydon asked if you felt cheated. Do you remember what you will eat next year when you turn a number older. Do you remember the color of the room you last slept in when it wasn’t the room you usually sleep in the most. Do you remember the first thing anybody said to you. Do you remember trying to remember something when someone asked.

I don’t have any point. I mean that as a person with a body, not here right now. I’ve always hated the political, railed against it, though if anything feels in me political it is the way we’ve been cheated of the idea that we can’t go on as what we are. That something has to fill the air and that stories exist and that we must find them and that when an object or words fail to tell a story that feels like that they have fallen away from something, taken something from us; that it could not be us who is absent, but the thing that is put against us; that a white blob of substance on a floor isn’t the sperm of some inanimate creature having been made and sprayed down there to look like acrylic so that we won’t question the idea that it’s something more than that. I won’t vote until a motherfucker stands on the TV and says it’s time to cut off our hands and lick the good part and put the hand back on again and be full and walk around and think less and not vote and don’t remember because you can’t. I won’t vote.

Have you ever been to a baseball game. Do you want to now.

We don’t need less TV we need less self.

I was at a party of some sort I think a lot of months ago now and I was listening to these people talk about what a writer is and how some things that get written aren’t worth the time and I think I said I think everyone is a writer, that my mom is a writer when she makes the grocery list, and this girl at the table made the most disgusted face at me, like true revulsion, and maybe said something to that extent in the disgust though I can’t remember if she did now or what it would have been, and a little later she got up and said they had to leave and she was a poetry student at the local college probably having taken money from somewhere to pay for doing that and money is a place and I was sitting in the room with her having done that too and we had already eaten all the food.

You really can do most anything you want and a lot of people are really beautiful about it and other people are going to be less beautiful about it but they are part of it too and that is good too and really to do anything you have to invoke the idea that what you’re walking past is nothing and that’s great and fine like anything else and you’re not going to die really but you’re going to be part of something and you can’t choose not to be and the choice to go one direction or another doesn’t deflect the idea that where you are when the story is dissected into something else as humans the story will have its course that must then for those remaining behind you be vivisected and disbursed, and many or hopefully some or even one of those people will know that the thing they knew most about you wasn’t the thing itself or the hair you had yourself or what you said yourself or the words you wrote or what you made or who you paid or what your kids do or even all of that put together but really something without any dimension at the center of you that no one will ever touch or name or know and that’s the best thing about it that there isn’t anything about it but there it is.

This isn’t important, this is passing time, everything is just as graceful as the next thing even the thing that seems the least graceful my dad is hitting the glass again but with slightly less vigor.

I’ve been eating chocolate all this week for some reason, I bought Oreos and a bag of mini candy bars and this kind of Special K that has chunks of chocolate in it though I just fish the chocolate out and leave the cereal. I go for weeks sometimes at a time where I just like to eat the chocolate and the thing about those weeks is that I get really hyper and messy between the periods of having just eaten it and the period where at the middle I get kind of hammy faced and need to crash and I can’t say that it focuses me or does anything of desire or undesire but it reminds me at least that what I put into me is a decision that comes not at the point of putting it in my mouth but in my blood when I get the urge to go and pick the things up in advance. It’s a map. Stores work like money in the same way though they pretend to be the thing that takes the money away. Two women just ran past my window burning themselves from the inside because that’s what running is. Cells dying isn’t a story is it or is it. More cells are made.

You know, do whatever you need to do.

MFAs aren’t teaching people to haunt the classical, the classical is part of what you bought when you woke up here. You can often go to sleep but when you are asleep your hands aren’t yours and what your brain makes you see is only made of the pieces of you cut up and that’s not yours. When you wake up it is a joke or it disappears or it might be a sentence in the thing you’re working on at your desk where the machine is too and people want to talk to you all day even when there’s just silence and the phone isn’t ringing yet and time is fire that has already been to work and is trying to find the car in the lot with all the cars.

Ugh, what.

Say something gross go ahead today is a great day for anybody.