24.3.09





An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

At the arrival of the storm, the front door to the
second-story condo blew in, since it faced the wind.
Giant trees somehow avoiding the buzz saw and dozers
in Central Arizona for a century swayed madly, and to
the good fortune of my own little endeavor in empirical
science, a string of multi-colored toy balloons (perhaps
the casualty of a Latino car dealership upwind in
downtown Phoenix) swished across my line of sight,
speeding by about one-hundred feet up: a perfect
weather balloon. I’d say it was doing sixty (even though
I can’t detect the red-shift and all). Conclusion: A big
storm was zeroing in on the southwest from L.A., across
the great desert through Barstow, but who really knew
with this paradised-out moonscape, this beige, maxed
out marketplace plain, with its golf courses and
manmade lakes and steaming foundations and swimming
pools? Could have been enough moisture around to
evaporate up enough for a couple of lakes of rain ... a
heat box for the fire.

Anything to keep my mind off the cautious company
I was living with, who, like my girlfriend’s cat, looked at
me as if she wanted me to die. Or rather, for me to go
away and let her die. She lived by the darkness of the
television light, in gloom, in defeat with selfpreservation
… a satisfaction of being only minimally
depressed within the perfection of her sphere, a void
onto itself … in a prescription haze….

Regardless, what the trees lack, the wind whispers.
Like a suburban monk, I was, making sure to keep a
light touch whenever I touched the landlord lady nurse’s
refrigerator as her rayo-light-TV obliterated the room
from it’s darkness, a flickering firelight of cop shows,
cop dramas, cops in love, in law … a very strong law
enforcement vibe and then yer off to bed kinda light and
white noise … And, me, talking about the weather: The
atmosphere of the southwestern desert struck me as
unearthly, as guided by angels. After growing up there, I
didn’t recognize it anymore. There was no antidote for
this mercurial snakebite. By the great nimbus beasts that
took shape in the late afternoons, the clouds taking on
characters with each gust.

There’s the dragon. There’s the wolf. The snaky front
with its long tail slouching across the desert, only to
explode into a microburst at five in the afternoon. The
archangels of global warming in full view, perhaps.
About as clear as the chemtrails, also over Phoenix, I’d
say. But I’m at a disadvantage. It’s hard to tell anymore
what the normal weather patterns are when you move
around so much. The sense of something supernatural, as
in moving by abnormal physical shifts in the sky, is a
feeling only enhanced by being pushed around by the
winds in life. I had just come down from Oregon, fresh
from a record season for rain on the Pacific Coast. Forty
straight days of rain, in fact. A record for January and
February in the deep misty wood along the shore that
drove men like Lewis and Clark into dreamy
depressions, in a place where the local natives thought
White Man mad to want to live there, a foul stenching
woodsy murk on a tsunami terrorized coast. Where the
winds shook the house, but nobody ever mentioned
anything about a storm the next day. Where the angry
seas at the 45th parallel pummeled the seawalls along
Highway 101, threatening to break through its lines
within the next century, not to mention the next 10 years.

She leans into the sea
keening a song
from the Madonna Disneyland
of the deep as hailstones
ring white pins honed from Hawaii
and a tide of low pressure
rounds up upon the shore
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
a crowny curtain of thorns
Unknowing from the unquiet
slumbers of lost ships
still melting in icy currents
below the surface,
the seagulls scatter
and defecate upon her:
Rise, O rise, storms across America
Your plastic passions await you
as cars stream in from the Orient
and gas passes through your ports
of entry, pleased, as they are
from the total penetration
of the perfect plan
Star of India, our captains
catch colds in the bowlegged
polarities of warm seas
and freezing skies
The sun, well-timed,
is a clock-face ticking,
hidden from our view
America, may the tilted jet stream
blow a gale of Goth up your nose
May the ocean rise and plaster
a new continent where truth,
chased in the wind, wakes
the ghost dancers from
the Pacific to the Atlantic
Before the living dead can get out of bed
Shipwrecked sailors
found lost at sea
discovered homes
in their own faces,
in bindles of woody words
crushed to hand-length bits
After forty days of fire,
forty days of rain,
the northwesterly El Nino
sheared shanks of wind
off the Oregon coast,
then brought a low blow
to slap the soiled temples
of the City of Angels
Driftwood is piled b‘fore desire
against sandy beach stumps
and stop gaps, infinite and wise:
Infinity stopped here for a day,
a deluge for the dead,
so I could admire
our wood chips,
our broken bones
A winter-long wind shear
plucked the breath
from my pressurized lungs,
turning my fire to water.
I floated some, then burst,
mounted a floating oar
then sank into an orb
of sand
The sun, beyond the grey wail,
shaped a man inside here,
inside this calamity of clams;
one-part plastic,
one-part fishhook,
a bonny redwood mast,
a skull & crossbones flying,
walking the plank on dry land
without an anchor, who cares?
Setting these banalities
of life aside, let me perscribble:
Glass floats on the beach,
I've found, and the ebb-tide
of the avenues are a roar
of trucks in the rain
On Tuesdays, Great Food
is closed in a seaside town;
and what a tree lacks,
the wind whispers;
and loving couples
strand tennis shoes
on the frosty morning shores
as missiles are clicked
into load in the underground
caverns of Iran. Also this:
The electric truth sheds
the oil slick skin off the CIA
and sickened seagulls
reel in the ninety mile winds
and Pennsylvania miners
with black lung bibles
defuse the threat
with another tragic
mind blast
The sun goes up
and Mercury goes
into retrograde
as our satellite's
telescopic echo fades
and techno-pop
becomes the sea
in which we wade
The camera's eye
is just a catch
for this cuckoo cluck house,
our mourning latch
and what is least
is that which lasts
as buzzard gulls sift
through black morning trash
and I try to unlearn
this noisy cache
of highway moms
speeding by bullet blasts
and taxi driver Thanatoss plants
look like gods in camouflage pants
Glass floats on the beach,
it's endless, at last!
The end is coming near
and it's coming here fast
It's time to drink
from the pirate's flask
and toast a tune
to all of that glass,
to the sun, the sky,
the nuclear smash,
the currents, the past,
the pounding surf,
the manic search
for meaning and gas,
the molten glow,
the melting snow,
the rivers that run
through those who know ...
Glass floats on the beach,
the ebb is endless,
it's here, at last


We had arrived back like refugees, yes, and we
never quite got our feet back on the hot cement of
Phoenix, either. She called out to the sea when the
storms moved in, in full fury, to Tiamat, to the lost Gods
of the beaches, worn away, keening into the wind … like
the wind’s daughter leaning into the wake of a pirate
ship!

But this sense of disturbed timing goes back further
than that: to the fire in the sky. No doubt I was pushed
this far by a very last lick of sun that touched the planet.
But the first thing I have to say is I had a hard time
getting anybody to believe me. Seven years ago, maybe
a decade or more, by the time you read this: Our story.
The whole thing was too preposterous and prescient and
certainly my description of the event as “a lake of fire in
the sky” didn’t help at such things as counseling sessions
and divorce proceedings. In fact, I had a hard time
getting anybody to believe anything I said in those days.
Not about the lightning. The polarities. The dot-com bust
looming. The bloodbath to come … the one-click wars
to come: Ever since that period in 2000, the weather has
become preternaturally strange to me, just as I had
become preternaturally strange to other people. Clearly,
it was the ways in which I was trying to say these things.
Something to ignite a concoction in my head. Something
without a compass, without a needle to get a handle on.
My best friends then, usually women, said I seemed
haunted.

Especially after that concurrent histrionic state of
mind, due to the stolen election of 2000. The country
had been hijacked by a band of Skull & Crossbones
pirates. By 9/11 it was clear. Anyone could see. I lost my
job. Got a divorce. Refused to own a driver’s license.
Tried to get off the grid. Ran into the Colorado Rockies
dreaming of same fabled web site to make it all ring
clear, then ran back to Boston in time to find the world
at war, a nation pumped up by its delusions,
shadowboxing with an idea, an ancient Christian foe as
old as the Crusades. When the solar storm hit New
England in the fall of the year 2000, in fact, most likely a
series of storms, it appeared to me as having biblical
portents, but denial in those days of the Y2k craze was
strong. The world had just moved on. Any
prognostication about the dark days ahead was met with
derision by co-workers and family members. It was the
holidays, after all. Nobody wanted to think about it. The
election had finally done the work of a global stun gun.
The wrath of God stuff could be safely removed to
points of conjecture in the land of god and cannon, and
thus, put off for until now as back story spinning out of
control.

23.3.09








An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

I rush over to her condo. This is a moment that must be shared. The Senator John Kerry is prepared to concede. He will give no fight for Ohio, though in time we will learn there is something clearly wrong with the count. It seems fishy. The ballot machines have had their dials turned toward counting giving peace a chance as zero, pure evil as one. I rush over, in tears by the time I get to her door. The emotion of the fulminating moment pouring through me, just as it must be pouring through exactly half of the voting nation. She answers the door and we embrace, weeping madly: The whole world is done.
Within the hour we are charging up a shale rock mountain in central Phoenix and she is screaming at the creosote, the sky, the wide sky that never answers back. She runs ahead up the trail. Pissed off at everything. Including me. We had messed up on the previous night in terms of getting to the polls on time, and when she’d found they were closed, tried to start a personal insurrection with the poor tired blue haired women running the voting station in a community meeting room at a church in the Arcadia District, a predominantly Red voter part of town, maybe a mile, maybe two, from one of the homes owned by Senator John McCain in Paradise Valley, a town with a statue and unapproachable (in terms of, hah, pedestrian access) cactus and stone inlaid monument to the late icon of conservatism, Barry Goldwater. I’m afraid the blue-haired ladies are getting ready to call the cops, so I pull out of there as she fumes.
The mountain we are climbing now is just a mile away, too, and as we rise along the trail, which is now a sidetrack from the main thoroughfare as she apparently doesn’t want to be around any human being, we can see the rooftops of the fabulous rich down below us. They are reddish-roofed haciendas on sprawling properties, lush with swimming pools with small waterfall amenities, global greenery. They have the entire Phoenix Mountain Preserve for backyards. They are in excellent defensive positioning to insulate themselves from the rest of humanity. But now they are under assault from the rear. She is at the top of the peak now, overlooking the glory and security and shallowness of the rich and she’s throwing stones at these houses. The stones disappear in the sky. I join in. But the homes are still too far away. The stones, like our uncounted votes, disappear into the blue sky. We cannot hear the sound as the well-thrown stones land, harmlessly in the vertical desert below. So then she starts yelling at the city itself, at the state that never wants anything to change because it’s immune to war: Things are just too good. I join in.
Fuck youhoooooooooo! Fuck youhooooos! You fucking vampires! Fuck you all!

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots

Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...

The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?

I swear in the heat like a pizza oven

Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways

The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high

Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs

Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count

Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away

Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby

Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone

Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow

The apocalyptic dread is all over me. Inside my head. Surely now, we will be attacked again. Though Phoenix is a long way from the East Coast, where all of the terrorist mayhem took place four years before, my paranoia is running unchecked. We devise escape plans in case of attack. When the lights go out, are if the sky turns to fire and we somehow survive, the best plan is to walk north to the mountains since the automobiles and highways supporting them will be of no use. We will move to the mountains north of Cave Creek and Carefree. I know where there are springs and water and game to be had as we worry ourselves into a survivalist mentality since, after all, we are sure to be attacked again and if, say, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power station were attacked the winds would head generally northeasterly and if we went southeasterly … oh hell, a few days later, weeks, then a month past, and nothing happens, my swirling brain gets calm enough to get toward a more practical plan. Because, you see, we felt the real problem was our inability to mix with people in such a hotbed of conservatism where no change is necessary, where the stores are chockfull of goods, most people are fully employed, where hundreds and hundreds of SUVs continue, shamelessly from their daily grinds to their convenience stores and big box meatlockered retail hubs and back to their TVs at night to feed on channelized fear and gory, glorified entertainments.
To escape the city to seek like-minded souls in the presumably more stable confines of small resort becomes … a kind of solution we can both get behind … so off to the small towns we go …

~

The Bull Run Fire came to about my doorstep. Five miles east, wind in my face and the fire plume, a violet volcano was close enough to see the white washed coat of burned juniper to force the Saturn in the nostrils. It was burning as a series of full plumes on Hackberry Mountain, south of the Verde River Valley in Central Arizona. But the mountain and the nearby mesas appeared to fizzle out and dampen around a many shouldered beast of fire and smoke.
We had been living in the Verde Valley for six months, on the edge of BLM lands holding a good portion of the General Crook Trail as it wound its way up to the Plateau. Then a major fire, started in Carefree maybe 60 to 80 miles south as the crow flies from the easterly banks of the Verde River, as it flowed to the desert canyons north of Phoenix. Big suckerfish Phoenix. We had escaped, but not for long. The fire started at some high-end hacianda had come all this way up and over and across the mountains, burning great fields of sage and juniper and sajuaro; the mountains of central Arizona blackened, from highway to shining highway,, burning more than 100,000 acres. As the smoke climbed onto the ridge, we went home and made a list of what we would need when the call for evacuation came, feeling a strange craving disaster to bring the memories awake, the dreaming down as great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk across the purple ridge, purple with weather, as our precious things shake in their cupboard, and nostalgia elucidates the decision making process.
Lightning pounds the mesas and the wind pushes down in atomic bundles and white orange flares of violence; A curtain on the sun is a dirty window of light, as we blow out compressed desires, pressing the sky, re-animating us.

18.3.09



The popular angst over AIG

The national outcry this week over the AIG executives receiving bonuses creates a nagging sensibility that I can’t just seem to shake. For some reason, it’s more bothersome than the Halliburton fiasco. Now, there is no bone in my body that believes I could rationally explain the AIG situation to you, dear reader, although I’m sure there are people on this earth who think they have a full grasp of the situation and are in the control room, right now, trying to fix that mess. Maybe ... the ability to fix it part, I mean … the world is just too full of people who think they have the answers and they are complete idiots for believing so ...

But for the rest of us, all we really share is a most profound sense of mystery. We watch the responses on television from our elected and appointed officials. These responses redouble the failures in common sense, thus increasing the sense of mystery and angst about how millions of dollars in bonuses can fall on the so far anonymous executives at AIG. The highlight among these folks was Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, who thought the AIG executives who took the bonuses should kill themselves.

Later, he apologized for that statement. But he was only voicing the popular consensus against these lucky bastards, who almost brought the economy to ruin, were rewarded so handsomely for their apparent failures.
Compared to other situations … for example, how can the New York Yankees not win the World Series every year with a payroll of maybe a half-billion dollars … shouldn’t they give the money back? … Why should anyone win $1 million on “Survivor” for being the most dishonest, cutthroat asshole on the show … Oh yeah, Halliburton … and that Bridge to Nowhere … but there’s clearly something paranormal about this AIG bonus issue that is really bringing people together.

The Obama Administration is going to send a strongly worded letter to the AIG executives, asking they give the money back. This doesn’t sound workable, to me, but hey, it’s worth a try. I’m sure most of us would send a check for $1 million back if we received one in the mail if we were asked, politely, to do so. Especially after the monkeys began to fly out of our arses.

Despite the sweetly amusing hopelessness of that cause, there’s still one more class of individual who must receive a most gracious notice … before I get to the actual point I’d like to make: The Republican response. All of the events leading to this week occurred, in fact, during the Bush administration. The contracts. The bailouts. Everything.

But still we see them on TV, trying to pin it on Obama, who hadn’t been elected yet, and was only partially responsible for the entire bailout package last fall … although I seem to recall Sen. John McCain trying to take credit for leading the charge on that one …

Yet, now that I’ve gotten these surface observations off my chest … at least in tune to my own flawed poetic sensibilities … I can find something positive about the whole bailout mess. Finally, after all, there is some maintenance going on with my most immediate city environment with these bailouts, my TV tells me … because the deep science of this is that, like some solution to an imbalance in the subatomic world, we need a healthy AIG to keep the heart of the demiurge a-poundin’ … but more than that, the national outrage is focused on something it can actually do something about … other than terrorism … asking a couple a hundred executive assholes to have common sense. Not that I believe they ever will. It’s this newfound desire for common sense … after an age of anything but … that’s what’s giving me hope.




Paradigm Lost, Journalism Unbound

They are falling like trees made ill from the insides by bark beetles. But the destruction is self-induced. Major newspapers are going out of business because they are no longer convincing bridges between man, his nature and his history. While declines in advertising lineage and the energy costs of distribution of flattened out brittle-bricks of newsprint to their readers became too expensive to support these institutions, these are perhaps only last straws, fatal blows at precisely the wrong time, swan song signs of an overrun paradigm lost. Those financial facts are merely condemning occurrences upon structures built with unstable codes and limited belief systems about what it means to communicate fully. They became like pencils. Or, horse-drawn wagons. Obviously. Obviously.

Who has a sharpener anymore, anyway?

The major dailies, built upon a sense of objective reporting, could no longer be considered as virtuosos of realistic detail. While the internet ran off its mouth like a prairie fire of subjectivity and emotional observations of history in real time, newsprint became more and more obvious each day as the dinosaur trying to chase the lightning bolt across the sky. Instead of maintaining a sense of themselves as vehicles for accurate perceptions of reality, the internet gave a glimpse behind this false projection like Toto sniffing around the curtain for the phony Wizard of Oz.

Now, as major dailies fall like burning towers from city to city, editors and publishers are being sought out for comment. But their views cannot be trusted. If they actually knew what was going on, for example, if they say that perhaps if classified advertising had remained, um, classified to newsprint publishing alone, then all of this could have been avoided: well, that just doesn’t fly. Like anything else that enters a period of decline, they are just creatures of denial. We are actually no more able to discern the full sensibility and causality of decline than a newspaper article can still concoct itself as an accurate replication of reality. Media literate Americans, caught flying down freeways for longer and longer periods of their waking days and unable to reach for their newspapers, have chosen (are forced, more like) instead to absorb information in far more varied ways, leaving their newsprint antiques on the shelves, on their porches or on their coffee tables unread, where they remain daily, weekly, always challenged by the other numerous new ports for media.

Newspapers became saltine crackers served to a populace dying of thirst. So if there’s any good news, it depends upon our ability to find a new diet, and that requires becoming more savvy about the impacts of media in general.
For example, I don’t buy that we are less literate due to these events; that democracy is imperiled without these stanchions of objective reporting to save us from authoritarianism. The sober, unsigned editorial became far less effective as an object for social change or preservation than, say, 100,000 raving bloggers creating an emerging consensus on the very same topic. The daily newspaper, it could be argued, was just a group-think tool for the autocrat, as supporting dicta for supposedly right-thinking morality (just as local TV news broadcasts are mere tsk, tsk mouthpieces for law enforcement activities caught on videotape). Like I said, objectivity was always a false presumption.

In the decade-plus since the internet has become a popularized reflection of reality, it also nonetheless fails in that category, but the general sense for this, too, has yet to be realized en masse. The internet is now perceived as the projection of immediate reality, but once again, it’s no more effective for that than the poet crowing from the hilltops, as far as I can tell. But, perhaps, the good news is this: That reporter, once hamstrung by the dictates of their journalism dads striking out words the observer wishes he or she could print, is now free to include every thought along the way.



An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

I rush over to her condo. This is a moment that must be shared. The Senator John Kerry is prepared to concede. He will give no fight for Ohio, though in time we will learn there is something clearly wrong with the count. It seems fishy. The ballot machines have had their dials turned toward counting giving peace a chance as zero, pure evil as one. I rush over, in tears by the time I get to her door. The emotion of the fulminating moment pouring through me, just as it must be pouring through exactly half of the voting nation. She answers the door and we embrace, weeping madly: The whole world is done.
Within the hour we are charging up a shale rock mountain in central Phoenix and she is screaming at the creosote, the sky, the wide sky that never answers back. She runs ahead up the trail. Pissed off at everything. Including me. We had messed up on the previous night in terms of getting to the polls on time, and when she’d found they were closed, tried to start a personal insurrection with the poor tired blue haired women running the voting station in a community meeting room at a church in the Arcadia District, a predominantly Red voter part of town, maybe a mile, maybe two, from one of the homes owned by Senator John McCain in Paradise Valley, a town with a statue and unapproachable (in terms of, hah, pedestrian access) cactus and stone inlaid monument to the late icon of conservatism, Barry Goldwater. I’m afraid the blue-haired ladies are getting ready to call the cops, so I pull out of there as she fumes.
The mountain we are climbing now is just a mile away, too, and as we rise along the trail, which is now a sidetrack from the main thoroughfare as she apparently doesn’t want to be around any human being, we can see the rooftops of the fabulous rich down below us. They are reddish-roofed haciendas on sprawling properties, lush with swimming pools with small waterfall amenities, global greenery. They have the entire Phoenix Mountain Preserve for backyards. They are in excellent defensive positioning to insulate themselves from the rest of humanity. But now they are under assault from the rear. She is at the top of the peak now, overlooking the glory and security and shallowness of the rich and she’s throwing stones at these houses. The stones disappear in the sky. I join in. But the homes are still too far away. The stones, like our uncounted votes, disappear into the blue sky. We cannot hear the sound as the well-thrown stones land, harmlessly in the vertical desert below. So then she starts yelling at the city itself, at the state that never wants anything to change because it’s immune to war: Things are just too good. I join in.
Fuck youhoooooooooo! Fuck youhooooos! You fucking vampires! Fuck you all!

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots

Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...

The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?

I swear in the heat like a pizza oven

Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways

The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high

Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs

Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count

Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away

Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby

Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone

Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow

The apocalyptic dread is all over me. Inside my head. Surely now, we will be attacked again. Though Phoenix is a long way from the East Coast, where all of the terrorist mayhem took place four years before, my paranoia is running unchecked. We devise escape plans in case of attack. When the lights go out, are if the sky turns to fire and we somehow survive, the best plan is to walk north to the mountains since the automobiles and highways supporting them will be of no use. We will move to the mountains north of Cave Creek and Carefree. I know where there are springs and water and game to be had as we worry ourselves into a survivalist mentality since, after all, we are sure to be attacked again and if, say, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power station were attacked the winds would head generally northeasterly and if we went southeasterly … oh hell, a few days later, weeks, then a month past, and nothing happens, my swirling brain gets calm enough to get toward a more practical plan. Because, you see, we felt the real problem was our inability to mix with people in such a hotbed of conservatism where no change is necessary, where the stores are chockfull of goods, most people are fully employed, where hundreds and hundreds of SUVs continue, shamelessly from their daily grinds to their convenience stores and big box meatlockered retail hubs and back to their TVs at night to feed on channelized fear and gory, glorified entertainments.
To escape the city to seek like-minded souls in the presumably more stable confines of small resort becomes … a kind of solution we can both get behind … so off to the small towns we go …

~

The Bull Run Fire came to about my doorstep. Five miles east, wind in my face and the fire plume, a violet volcano was close enough to see the white washed coat of burned juniper to force the Saturn in the nostrils. It was burning as a series of full plumes on Hackberry Mountain, south of the Verde River Valley in Central Arizona. But the mountain and the nearby mesas appeared to fizzle out and dampen around a many shouldered beast of fire and smoke.
We had been living in the Verde Valley for six months, on the edge of BLM lands holding a good portion of the General Crook Trail as it wound its way up to the Plateau. Then a major fire, started in Carefree maybe 60 to 80 miles south as the crow flies from the easterly banks of the Verde River, as it flowed to the desert canyons north of Phoenix. Big suckerfish Phoenix. We had escaped, but not for long. The fire started at some high-end hacianda had come all this way up and over and across the mountains, burning great fields of sage and juniper and sajuaro; the mountains of central Arizona blackened, from highway to shining highway,, burning more than 100,000 acres. As the smoke climbed onto the ridge, we went home and made a list of what we would need when the call for evacuation came, feeling a strange craving disaster to bring the memories awake, the dreaming down as great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk across the purple ridge, purple with weather, as our precious things shake in their cupboard, and nostalgia elucidates the decision making process.
Lightning pounds the mesas and the wind pushes down in atomic bundles and white orange flares of violence; A curtain on the sun is a dirty window of light, as we blow out compressed desires, pressing the sky, re-animating us.

17.3.09




Paradigm Lost, Journalism Unbound

They are falling like trees made ill from the insides by bark beetles. But the destruction is self-induced. Major newspapers are going out of business because they are no longer convincing bridges between man, his nature and his history. While declines in advertising lineage and the energy costs of distribution of flattened out brittle-bricks of newsprint to their readers became too expensive to support these institutions, these are perhaps only last straws, fatal blows at precisely the wrong time, swan song signs of an overrun paradigm lost. Those financial facts are merely condemning occurrences upon structures built with unstable codes and limited belief systems about what it means to communicate fully. They became like pencils. Or, horse-drawn wagons. Obviously. Obviously.

Who has a sharpener anymore, anyway?

The major dailies, built upon a sense of objective reporting, could no longer be considered as virtuosos of realistic detail. While the internet ran off its mouth like a prairie fire of subjectivity and emotional observations of history in real time, newsprint became more and more obvious each day as the dinosaur trying to chase the lightning bolt across the sky. Instead of maintaining a sense of themselves as vehicles for accurate perceptions of reality, the internet gave a glimpse behind this false projection like Toto sniffing around the curtain for the phony Wizard of Oz.

Now, as major dailies fall like burning towers from city to city, editors and publishers are being sought out for comment. But their views cannot be trusted. If they actually knew what was going on, for example, if they say that perhaps if classified advertising had remained, um, classified to newsprint publishing alone, then all of this could have been avoided: well, that just doesn’t fly. Like anything else that enters a period of decline, they are just creatures of denial. We are actually no more able to discern the full sensibility and causality of decline than a newspaper article can still concoct itself as an accurate replication of reality. Media literate Americans, caught flying down freeways for longer and longer periods of their waking days and unable to reach for their newspapers, have chosen (are forced, more like) instead to absorb information in far more varied ways, leaving their newsprint antiques on the shelves, on their porches or on their coffee tables unread, where they remain daily, weekly, always challenged by the other numerous new ports for media.

Newspapers became saltine crackers served to a populace dying of thirst. So if there’s any good news, it depends upon our ability to find a new diet, and that requires becoming more savvy about the impacts of media in general.
For example, I don’t buy that we are less literate due to these events; that democracy is imperiled without these stanchions of objective reporting to save us from authoritarianism. The sober, unsigned editorial became far less effective as an object for social change or preservation than, say, 100,000 raving bloggers creating an emerging consensus on the very same topic. The daily newspaper, it could be argued, was just a group-think tool for the autocrat, as supporting dicta for supposedly right-thinking morality (just as local TV news broadcasts are mere tsk, tsk mouthpieces for law enforcement activities caught on videotape). Like I said, objectivity was always a false presumption.

In the decade-plus since the internet has become a popularized reflection of reality, it also nonetheless fails in that category, but the general sense for this, too, has yet to be realized en masse. The internet is now perceived as the projection of immediate reality, but once again, it’s no more effective for that than the poet crowing from the hilltops, as far as I can tell. But, perhaps, the good news is this: That reporter, once hamstrung by the dictates of their journalism dads striking out words the observer wishes he or she could print, is now free to include every thought along the way.



An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

I rush over to her condo. This is a moment that must be shared. The Senator John Kerry is prepared to concede. He will give no fight for Ohio, though in time we will learn there is something clearly wrong with the count. It seems fishy. The ballot machines have had their dials turned toward counting giving peace a chance as zero, pure evil as one. I rush over, in tears by the time I get to her door. The emotion of the fulminating moment pouring through me, just as it must be pouring through exactly half of the voting nation. She answers the door and we embrace, weeping madly: The whole world is done.
Within the hour we are charging up a shale rock mountain in central Phoenix and she is screaming at the creosote, the sky, the wide sky that never answers back. She runs ahead up the trail. Pissed off at everything. Including me. We had messed up on the previous night in terms of getting to the polls on time, and when she’d found they were closed, tried to start a personal insurrection with the poor tired blue haired women running the voting station in a community meeting room at a church in the Arcadia District, a predominantly Red voter part of town, maybe a mile, maybe two, from one of the homes owned by Senator John McCain in Paradise Valley, a town with a statue and unapproachable (in terms of, hah, pedestrian access) cactus and stone inlaid monument to the late icon of conservatism, Barry Goldwater. I’m afraid the blue-haired ladies are getting ready to call the cops, so I pull out of there as she fumes.
The mountain we are climbing now is just a mile away, too, and as we rise along the trail, which is now a sidetrack from the main thoroughfare as she apparently doesn’t want to be around any human being, we can see the rooftops of the fabulous rich down below us. They are reddish-roofed haciendas on sprawling properties, lush with swimming pools with small waterfall amenities, global greenery. They have the entire Phoenix Mountain Preserve for backyards. They are in excellent defensive positioning to insulate themselves from the rest of humanity. But now they are under assault from the rear. She is at the top of the peak now, overlooking the glory and security and shallowness of the rich and she’s throwing stones at these houses. The stones disappear in the sky. I join in. But the homes are still too far away. The stones, like our uncounted votes, disappear into the blue sky. We cannot hear the sound as the well-thrown stones land, harmlessly in the vertical desert below. So then she starts yelling at the city itself, at the state that never wants anything to change because it’s immune to war: Things are just too good. I join in.
Fuck youhoooooooooo! Fuck youhooooos! You fucking vampires! Fuck you all!

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots

Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...

The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?

I swear in the heat like a pizza oven

Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways

The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high

Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs

Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count

Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away

Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby

Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone

Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow

The apocalyptic dread is all over me. Inside my head. Surely now, we will be attacked again. Though Phoenix is a long way from the East Coast, where all of the terrorist mayhem took place four years before, my paranoia is running unchecked. We devise escape plans in case of attack. When the lights go out, are if the sky turns to fire and we somehow survive, the best plan is to walk north to the mountains since the automobiles and highways supporting them will be of no use. We will move to the mountains north of Cave Creek and Carefree. I know where there are springs and water and game to be had as we worry ourselves into a survivalist mentality since, after all, we are sure to be attacked again and if, say, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power station were attacked the winds would head generally northeasterly and if we went southeasterly … oh hell, a few days later, weeks, then a month past, and nothing happens, my swirling brain gets calm enough to get toward a more practical plan. Because, you see, we felt the real problem was our inability to mix with people in such a hotbed of conservatism where no change is necessary, where the stores are chockfull of goods, most people are fully employed, where hundreds and hundreds of SUVs continue, shamelessly from their daily grinds to their convenience stores and big box meatlockered retail hubs and back to their TVs at night to feed on channelized fear and gory, glorified entertainments.
To escape the city to seek like-minded souls in the presumably more stable confines of small resort becomes … a kind of solution we can both get behind … so off to the small towns we go …

~

The Bull Run Fire came to about my doorstep. Five miles east, wind in my face and the fire plume, a violet volcano was close enough to see the white washed coat of burned juniper to force the Saturn in the nostrils. It was burning as a series of full plumes on Hackberry Mountain, south of the Verde River Valley in Central Arizona. But the mountain and the nearby mesas appeared to fizzle out and dampen around a many shouldered beast of fire and smoke.
We had been living in the Verde Valley for six months, on the edge of BLM lands holding a good portion of the General Crook Trail as it wound its way up to the Plateau. Then a major fire, started in Carefree maybe 60 to 80 miles south as the crow flies from the easterly banks of the Verde River, as it flowed to the desert canyons north of Phoenix. Big suckerfish Phoenix. We had escaped, but not for long. The fire started at some high-end hacianda had come all this way up and over and across the mountains, burning great fields of sage and juniper and sajuaro; the mountains of central Arizona blackened, from highway to shining highway,, burning more than 100,000 acres. As the smoke climbed onto the ridge, we went home and made a list of what we would need when the call for evacuation came, feeling a strange craving disaster to bring the memories awake, the dreaming down as great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk across the purple ridge, purple with weather, as our precious things shake in their cupboard, and nostalgia elucidates the decision making process.
Lightning pounds the mesas and the wind pushes down in atomic bundles and white orange flares of violence; A curtain on the sun is a dirty window of light, as we blow out compressed desires, pressing the sky, re-animating us.

12.3.09



An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

I rush over to her condo. This is a moment that must be shared. The Senator John Kerry is prepared to concede. He will give no fight for Ohio, though in time we will learn there is something clearly wrong with the count. It seems fishy. The ballot machines have had their dials turned toward counting giving peace a chance as zero, pure evil as one. I rush over, in tears by the time I get to her door. The emotion of the fulminating moment pouring through me, just as it must be pouring through exactly half of the voting nation. She answers the door and we embrace, weeping madly: The whole world is done.
Within the hour we are charging up a shale rock mountain in central Phoenix and she is screaming at the creosote, the sky, the wide sky that never answers back. She runs ahead up the trail. Pissed off at everything. Including me. We had messed up on the previous night in terms of getting to the polls on time, and when she’d found they were closed, tried to start a personal insurrection with the poor tired blue haired women running the voting station in a community meeting room at a church in the Arcadia District, a predominantly Red voter part of town, maybe a mile, maybe two, from one of the homes owned by Senator John McCain in Paradise Valley, a town with a statue and unapproachable (in terms of, hah, pedestrian access) cactus and stone inlaid monument to the late icon of conservatism, Barry Goldwater. I’m afraid the blue-haired ladies are getting ready to call the cops, so I pull out of there as she fumes.
The mountain we are climbing now is just a mile away, too, and as we rise along the trail, which is now a sidetrack from the main thoroughfare as she apparently doesn’t want to be around any human being, we can see the rooftops of the fabulous rich down below us. They are reddish-roofed haciendas on sprawling properties, lush with swimming pools with small waterfall amenities, global greenery. They have the entire Phoenix Mountain Preserve for backyards. They are in excellent defensive positioning to insulate themselves from the rest of humanity. But now they are under assault from the rear. She is at the top of the peak now, overlooking the glory and security and shallowness of the rich and she’s throwing stones at these houses. The stones disappear in the sky. I join in. But the homes are still too far away. The stones, like our uncounted votes, disappear into the blue sky. We cannot hear the sound as the well-thrown stones land, harmlessly in the vertical desert below. So then she starts yelling at the city itself, at the state that never wants anything to change because it’s immune to war: Things are just too good. I join in.
Fuck youhoooooooooo! Fuck youhooooos! You fucking vampires! Fuck you all!

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots

Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...

The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?

I swear in the heat like a pizza oven

Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways

The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high

Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs

Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count

Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away

Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby

Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone

Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow

The apocalyptic dread is all over me. Inside my head. Surely now, we will be attacked again. Though Phoenix is a long way from the East Coast, where all of the terrorist mayhem took place four years before, my paranoia is running unchecked. We devise escape plans in case of attack. When the lights go out, are if the sky turns to fire and we somehow survive, the best plan is to walk north to the mountains since the automobiles and highways supporting them will be of no use. We will move to the mountains north of Cave Creek and Carefree. I know where there are springs and water and game to be had as we worry ourselves into a survivalist mentality since, after all, we are sure to be attacked again and if, say, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power station were attacked the winds would head generally northeasterly and if we went southeasterly … oh hell, a few days later, weeks, then a month past, and nothing happens, my swirling brain gets calm enough to get toward a more practical plan. Because, you see, we felt the real problem was our inability to mix with people in such a hotbed of conservatism where no change is necessary, where the stores are chockfull of goods, most people are fully employed, where hundreds and hundreds of SUVs continue, shamelessly from their daily grinds to their convenience stores and big box meatlockered retail hubs and back to their TVs at night to feed on channelized fear and gory, glorified entertainments.
To escape the city to seek like-minded souls in the presumably more stable confines of small resort becomes … a kind of solution we can both get behind … so off to the small towns we go …

~

The Bull Run Fire came to about my doorstep. Five miles east, wind in my face and the fire plume, a violet volcano was close enough to see the white washed coat of burned juniper to force the Saturn in the nostrils. It was burning as a series of full plumes on Hackberry Mountain, south of the Verde River Valley in Central Arizona. But the mountain and the nearby mesas appeared to fizzle out and dampen around a many shouldered beast of fire and smoke.
We had been living in the Verde Valley for six months, on the edge of BLM lands holding a good portion of the General Crook Trail as it wound its way up to the Plateau. Then a major fire, started in Carefree maybe 60 to 80 miles south as the crow flies from the easterly banks of the Verde River, as it flowed to the desert canyons north of Phoenix. Big suckerfish Phoenix. We had escaped, but not for long. The fire started at some high-end hacianda had come all this way up and over and across the mountains, burning great fields of sage and juniper and sajuaro; the mountains of central Arizona blackened, from highway to shining highway,, burning more than 100,000 acres. As the smoke climbed onto the ridge, we went home and made a list of what we would need when the call for evacuation came, feeling a strange craving disaster to bring the memories awake, the dreaming down as great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk across the purple ridge, purple with weather, as our precious things shake in their cupboard, and nostalgia elucidates the decision making process.
Lightning pounds the mesas and the wind pushes down in atomic bundles and white orange flares of violence; A curtain on the sun is a dirty window of light, as we blow out compressed desires, pressing the sky, re-animating us.

1.3.09


From “Ginsberg Rolls Over,” the latest book by Douglas McDaniel






Colfax Avenue Daydreamer
After a One-Way Ticket, Yeah


The more the caffeine sugar jar
jumping in my head got to my
celebratory cortex cerebral,
the closer the pseudo God-man,
the Dark Knight found me on the corner
Hindu-fied, hypgnogothic
in a Tarot table of a place
with schizms of pagans
shuttering in their wastes
into plastic party hats
and flower throwing anarchists
looked at photos of the police
in the basement down below
I climbed a ladder, O Jungy Jacob,
found a mandala, stepped outside
of its snaky circle where every thing
was included, including myself,
that is, whoever, whatever ...
I calm in resident outbursts
like the middle finger sticking out
the jail cell door,
like the politics of unification
breaking old systems down
Of course! Of course! Of course!
A Gemini like Yeats would come up
with mysterious plans, a vision,
to keep his humanity from blowing apart ...
Just as sugar is stirred by a thin coffeehouse
straw, when all I needed really was a Guinness
in the Irish bar down the boulevard,
a geisha, and some noise ...
Find me a place to go, go, go ...
O angel of anxiety, get me away
from these, these, these ...
well adjusted brothers and sisters
safely bolted down by America's
college scrubbed lasses and guys,
trimmed in buzz cuts,
maintaining low maintenance
They just got a cell phone call
and I became unreal

II.

Passionate are the intensities
on Colfax Avenue,
long as a dynamite fuse
lit during the gold rush
Kerouwacky, not so much
romanticized as realized:
This age of wandering long
in the shadow city
And there have got to be
bus drivers, fully passive
aggressive, on the gas,
on the brakes ...
Shaking the Kundalini
right out of your backbone
Dark arts of mythic Batmen,
cops with cameras, old
Thana'tost around hippies
with beards as long as sad stories
Black women, Rosa Parksy,
quaking the whole busload
into fear with endless rants
about stomps upon her feet
Long and wicked from east to west,
this hard marbled street,
this historic incubus to commerce,
open desire, cell phone walls:
The distances between neighbors
In the summer it'll burn,
seems to me, recreating '68
where I almost cut
my hair

A Poolside Chat
with Winter Birds


Four pigeons
by the whirlpool
coodling up chlorine
Flying life, safe as ginger
in a cabinet,
extrapolates lifespan
The wingspan
of swimming pool pigeons
is dependent upon supply,
depth and demand
It is to the good fortune
of the young chicks
that their short necks,
soft beaks, cannot
reach down to drink
Six poisoned pigeons
find survival in the short-term
risk at the swimming pool lip
Later, they will plummet
to the floor of the concrete
corridor
Anonymous slaughterers
break off with the wind,
bleached and careening

Deconstruction of Arizona

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots
Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...
The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?
I swear in the heat like a pizza oven
Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways
The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high
Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs
Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count
Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away
Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby
Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone
Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow