It’s another day, this lay fallow on the processor, barren like a cat-killed moles womb or scorched earth. It’s another, one just like the day before. I set this all to the digital paper in the order which it came balling into the world, except this intro, an after thought.
The weather has not been the only strange thing crackling the ozone up in here --- hey, does anyone still use that expression? For that matter; Christ on a corn muffin. Is that common? Is it blasphemy? What sort of deity condemns an immortal soul to eternal damnation for calling him out his name and insists it’s a legacy so that you can’t call his kid out his name or his baby momma (e.g. Sweet Mary Mother of Christ on a corn muffin)? Yeah, I don’t know why the for that matter I guess I still think it’s funny to write verbal expression that people use as though something just suddenly dawned on them and the window for its being topical is too high and narrow not to give it immediate preamble.
The weird shit crackling the ozone up in here did not, however, bust up south eastern Illinois and parts of Indiana (a state on whose behalf so few shits are given that parsing it into SE, SW,Central, NE, NW and such is pointless outside it’s borders. Sure, Indianapolis has a famous racetrack which compared to nascar is almost aristocratic, but, still, it’s a bunch of guys driving around in a circle).
Ah, shit. Preamble on preamble and still I’ve said nothing. Yesterday, the day just like this one if we were to judge days by our interactions with them, and I submit we do, not collectively, but individually, I may have been going somewhere, today I’m lost, and yet I meet and have met these few minutes with same flat affect and cool gaze. To react is to give yourself away, admit defeat, lose the battle of wills. There isn’t much at stake, not for me, but the walls crumble down around me, not like the counting crows song but like the gospel song about Joshua; I fit the battle of Jericho and the walls come tumbling down. To free the city he had to destroy it.
A few years back I was looking for a copy of Alexandra leaving, a Leonard cohen song. I found this instead;
The god forsakes Antony
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
- Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)
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