Thu, 19 May 2005

the new devil, hands in his pants
I took a job last week as a door-watcher. There’s a blank white room in an office building just down from the elementary school, with a desk and a chair and a office supply cabinet and a buzzer and two doors. One door is the one I walk in and out of, and the other is the grey door, and should the grey door open while I’m on shift I’m supposed to press the button. The grey door has yet to open, so mostly I entertain myself by putting thumbtacks I stole from the supply cabinet onto the bottoms of my new leather boots and tap-dancing around the room. Tap dancing, I’ve decided, does not need to be as lame as it is generally presented, if you work some bump and grind into it. But then I guess that’s mostly the case with anything. When I’m not sure of how to proceed through the days, I used to try paranoiac-critical dereve, where I wandered around the city, letting the pulse guide me, and pulling predictions out of things I would see which bore some slight resemblance to things I was thinking about. I was doing a lot of speed then. Now I pick a poet, flip through a collection, and pick a single phrase at random, which I sift for insight. Wallace Stevens is particularly good for this, and my Stevens koan for the day, from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.”
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #