Chicago-Midwest

Gom Jabbar, twenty divided by seven, Left Oblique

It was the moment I realized Ron number one, (Ron number one because there are so many of them, like Michaels and guys that chose the name Maliq that they must be numbered or described, because I don't like them well enough to remember them by last name or I dislike them enough to not credit them with full names) Ron number one, like me, like many writers was or is a lamprey of ideas. Latching onto to sharks of language until almost all recognizable elements of self disappears. I was sitting in an unfamiliar booth of a very familiar restaurant on the college campus near my home and many jobs at the time, including teaching at the university. I was enjoying a sort of conversation with a professor of some abstract mathematic philosophy, oddly enough, there have been a lot of them, math philosophers, in my life, but his focus had something to do with generating regular shaped forms from primary numbers and this day I wore a graphic shirt emblazoned with the symbol for Pi and that amused him about as much as the subject of his passion amused me. It was only sort of a conversation because I'd been lusting the voice and words of Sheila, a professor of language, women's studies and African studies. I've got a thing for women with a strong command of words, spoken or text it doesn't matter. It's kind of like the thing I have for women that wear high heeled shoes well. I've lived, partied, ate and worked on or near a university campus most of my life, but had never been a matriculating student, which has always been cool with me. Especially whenever I get into close company with certain classes of people.Anyway, the math professor, I think his name is Ron too, was happily yakking through his tangent about truncated spherical dodecahedron, I remember because I'm a fan of R. Buckminster Fuller and the Raja Casa Blanca soccer team. This is the way things organize in my head.Sheila is or was married to a poet, who also is or was an instructor on the same campus. I am sort of a fan of his writing because it's mostly about Jazz and the way in which his books were composed at the time, I could only read them while walking. Being somewhat dyslexic, I take it as a blessing gift. Noting that not all gifts are blessings. Like my dad who has two master's degrees in language arts and is now a professor and a minister of religion, but in his younger less sober years beat control of the English language into me. Now I abuse it at will, whenever I can, because I can and that is a blessing, but it was not a gift.In walks Ron number one and sits with me and starts rambling about Wham, some mystical substance that holds the universe together, so I ask him is Wham the antithesis of a "Cheese - O -Troll" a term coined by another odd friend at the time James. James likes to intentionally leave letters out of words in his prose and poetry, in seemingly random patterns, my brain has been conditioned to automatically correct things like that, but that's another story.This is actually about a conspiracy that caused me to react rashly and destroy a lot of what I'd written.You see, Sheila had challenged me to pen something about a reoccurring dream she claimed to have enjoyed concerning the ambient temperature of the breast milk from women who lived amongst a certain strain of cayenne pepper and the affect they had on the men of that community. If any of this is remotely familiar, you're welcomed to chime in, because I've misplaced a lot of the thoughts surrounding this and I was too distracted by my lusts and personal project at the time to keep accurate notes.Yet at some point before I'd finished my lunch, Ron number one had finished lusting my Boston Creme Pie, which isn't a pie at all, and talking about the power of Wham to convert his meatloaf into the perfectly steamed broccoli that his doctor had ordered him to eat more often and Ron number two was drifting off into a stream of subconscious ecstatic number crunching around forming a tetrahedron from the tetragrammaton, I remember this because I'm not into Cabala, but I like runes and I started making and flying hyper kites in nineteen seventy two, shortly after meeting John Sinclair while walking across the diag towards "the cube", (which personally I think influence someone in designing the Borg ship on Star Trek) on University of Michigan's campus during the hash bash, when my friends and I walked to Huron Valley Bank instead and filled our t-shirts like aprons with apples from the barrels that sat outside, because we were really hungry and thought it a good idea to share with the students and White Panther guys there. I was still on 'At some point'. Yeah Sheila walked out, my girlfriend and maestro of word smithing at the time, Hope, walked in and asked what was I doing. I told her what I'd done and what I had intended to do, which was continue working on my analysis of the first three books of Dune by Frank Herbert.At that moment the entire diner seemed to go silent and I got that sick feeling that it may be a good time to pack my bags, pay my check and leave, while I still had five minutes to smoke a cigarette and enjoy being outside or hurt someone.Understand. a few nights before, at Cass Cafe, I'd gotten into a heated debate about a really great musician's theory of spherical rhythms, because it made perfect sense to me at the time, that in time, if time is a natural phenomenon and not a mechanical device, all patterns repeat. So a set of sounds will be regenerated to the recognition of someone and possibly acknowledged as a signature. This angered some of the older people present, but not as much as when I said to a rather revered brother in the literary community, "My name is Leroy too". Hell, I thought they could have written me off as being naive, but they took it as some sort of arrogant maneuver on my part and that was cool with me because he wrote a Lo Kue on the spot, flashed it at me and stuffed it in his pocket. Personally I felt honored.But I'm supposed to be writing about destroying a bunch of work. Well, you see, I created this kind of fantasy in which I was a character akin to a young Leto II, possessing access to all of my ancestral memories and the ruins of the Hudson's building was a damned wasteland where a great mystic lived and traded pilgrims rat trap pedals, that he would lay on to scratch the festering skin ulcers that he could not reach in exchange for pedantic ramblings of nonsense extracted from the smoke of some cheaply concocted basement drug. I'd scribbled out these notes until I'd gotten to a part where the women characters in the story would take his "teachings" and use them to seduce themselves into performing random acts of kindness that they personally found repulsive. i did it because I was bored with lessons about musicality, economy of language, breaths, syllable counts, trochees and shit. And I just wanted to write what I imagined into a palatable form. The more I stuck to form the farther away I seemed to move from the people in the literary community and I was becoming angry, because I was feeling isolated and had started missing sneaking into the lecture halls at SFSU.Well one night a group of my former girlfriend's girlfriends were visiting and getting high, talking about writers and lectures and things of that nature. I'd grown comfortable with being held present by this group of slightly older and extremely powerful word artists, serious budheads, music lovers and beautiful women, especially the one I woke up to. At times it was as if gender melted away under the heat of conversation. When one, I'll call her Sophronia, talks about how she had no idea of the weight of my personal canon, which at the time contained works by Butler, Asimov, Rice, Creighton, Gaiman and authors of lesser respected fiction formats. She goes into this deep story of how after a recent lecture related to the topic of Dune and contemporary African American society or something or other, she was sitting in the Michigan Room, listening to Ron number one talk about how he was incorporating a new idea into his theory of Wham, how Wham now had a less amorphous form, still composed of triangles, but always adding up to regular twelve panel shapes whose connecting points always came out as prime numbers. As she described this "new idea" my girlfriend begins to shrink into a corner, while I moved to the edge of my seat, because what I am hearing sounds surprisingly like what I've been writing about rather intensely for the past few months. When her girlfriend says "All rebels are closet aristocrats", and begins expressing how much impact that statement had on her and the point of perspective that she would begin writing from. I got up from the sofa, toward my makeshift desk, a door panel atop four towers of milk crates, picked the stack of papers that I'd had scattered over it and made my way to the back door where I placed them in the barbecue pit poured lighter fluid on them, lit the match, dropped it onto the pile and cried until there was nothing but gray ash.Years later Wham turns into a really shallow commentary on the Heidelberg project and I end up with an equally crappy piece of graffiti about taking a crap that I'd written on a restroom door published by a local but major University and lose a bit of respect for the writing community.But that night I was totally inconsolable, because after all the time I spent working on this piece I'd have to find a new obsession. I ranted for years about how expensive good muses are these days and it just don't pay to get intimate with one, because the reality of who they are will taint your fantasy.It's been about ten years now and I've still got friends in the business asking me to write and publish, but I have yet to find anything as much fun to think about as disembarking the Grand River bus in Capital Park and walking across the asbestos dunes of Hudson's to confront the drunken old minister that commanded his followers to "Clip in".
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  • Yo, Ulysses (I still prefer your other name, Odysseus)!

    I glanced at this between classes when I'm supposed to be making up a final exam practice sheet for my students, but couldn't stop reading it, because it's a perfect example of a Rasan Roland Kirk piece, Man (circular breathing, rhythm, and motif--your writing here really pulls a reader IN and TURNS us like a wheel, like wheels within wheels, and...okay, I'll stop. I'm imitating your writing, like when you write about Hemingway there is always a danger of falling into imitating his inimicable style of dropping adjectives, adverbs, and determiners, because his writing style is so seductive).

    I love your piece, its you--the dry simplicity which isn't really simple at all but complex, and the humane voice that underlies whatever you write. I love this piece not least of all because it reminded me of Ann Arbor so vividly (and the Cass Cafe too!) my environments, my life.

    I agree with you, the CUBE on UM's main campus looks like the archetype for Borg technology and Borg thinking and identity and hell, Borg vernacular speech, for that matter--VERRRRY boring conversationalists, them Borgs: "Resistance is futile. Your unique technology will be added to our own. You will be assimilated.")

    The Borg are like AT&T if AT&T had space ships and disruptor weapons and could do hostile takeovers for Viacom through the use of long, snaking probes inserted into the bodies of their victims.

    Okay, so in Seattle AT&T already can do that...

    But to the point--what I wanted to ask is, would you do a post on geometric shapes and particularly on theoretical geometric shapes that imply the fourth dimension? I've been trying to understand them, and I can almost get my mind around it but not quite. Flatland, and spacetime, and all that. Is the theoretical shape marking a fourth dimension called a 'dodecahedron' or something like that? Or am I misremembering something Carl Sagan said in his lugubrious manner and just misheard him? Are you really good at math and understand that sort of thing?

    Peace.
  • Chicago-Midwest
    Fo' Sho'!

    I'm honored and it'll be fun
    Besides my girlfriend has been wanting me to finish writing something that I've started

    I will finally start penning the piece I've been working for a few years.
    "All snowflakes are formed around a speck of dirt"

    I have this idea of societies forming around "intentional ignorance"

    I'm not very good at applied math, but I've spent enough time around musicians, poets and professors of math philosophies to be able to use some stuff as literary elements

    Woooo! Carl Sagan Star Stuff and ATP
    I'm going to make reference to things like prophets accessing their presynaptic neurons with anointing oils, Creole traditions in dealing with things like schitzophrenia, perspective projection, a tetrahedron as the geometric base shape and my own personal theory.

    I'll even throw in a couple of drawings
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