There are only 14 minutes til 9:30

God’s on the job I’m feeling

Down like a mob looking

Down.  On a Clear day October 23

The heart’s tiny from the 22nd floor. 

Our copse leaves candy blue sky pieces.

The TV next the window’s parallel

To skyscrapers and sky and centered

By a bald man in a nice tie and expensive smile. 

Hands rap the desk it’s

Seguey.  Three minutes, three

Monitors: wards experiencing UTP delays #3 (31830332220s):

Normal;  Emails multiply like interest in my inbox,

Normal; SPZ7 +8.90  23 stocks, two major indices

Waiting beneath the screens

Culture is that in which stories incubate, grow, live out their story lives.   There’s no other kind of culture.  Psychically, socially  — our lives are an environment, no more “alive” than atmosphere or noosphere.  What live in truth, in the way we believe ourselves to live, are the beings that act and breath in us — not what we call gods, but what we call stories.  To understand it, is like reimagining ecosystems as beings.   I can’t totally explain it yet. These things they live forever, in many cycles, while we deplete and replenish our flesh, language, and media.  There are those in whom great stories culminate — in great seizures of fame, crime, birth. . . .  Those people are the most “nutritious” made of the softest most fertile stuff, to receive the spirit, and keep it feeding.  Most of us are rank clay: home to the same story of birth, hardship, vanity, and death.

You’re too modest to get famous, not to mention it’s already passe.  You are modern in your way, not theirs. You are real.   And really, celebrity is so turn-of-the century it makes you embarrassed.  You want to look away in shame when you see newspapers with today’s date gauchely print the paparazzi’s epigone art, as though such things were still cutting-edge.  It makes it hard for you to even read the newspaper: you hurriedly flip through the pages, sometimes tearing them, trying not to focus on the print until you get to the weather report.  You care about the weather; it is around you, it is yours – not theirs.  Later, you will relax and enjoy the companionship of your friends and family.  You will talk about matters that touch you.  Personal matters, some serious, some light, for you are neither dour nor flippant. You will not repeat the chatter of the masses, you will not indulge in that big false consciousness, the news.  You discuss things known to you, and much is known to you:  your experience is deep, made rich with your sensitivity, your powers of observation, your empathy.  Yes, you regret how others chatter and devour themselves, repeating one another’s repetitions in a mania for information, in the passion of the hub.  It saddens you, their desperate desire to resemble money itself, or simulate a market: a medium or place of exchange.  But you are unique.  You love many people too much to dwell on these vague, abstract non-people: the masses.  This is not to say you’re a misanthrope, quite the contrary!  You are filled with love, and willing to make new friends, and you are always open to new experience.  But, you understand your mortality and your limits, and you know you can only truly maintain so many friendships, and harbor so much of life within you: you don’t wish to transgress god-given boundaries for any mere tallies or collections: you know how deceptive such ”values” are.  Your values are based not on numbers, but on sentiments, and you have a genius for sentiment.  That is to say, you allow yourself to feel, and you understand your feelings – it’s no big deal, to you.  You are content and humble.  More is not always better, you are wise to that.  You are wise, but you do not boast your sagacity, nor do you think it especially virtuous; the fact that wisdom is so rarely found, does not make yours precious to you, for your inner economy is much different from the outer economy dictated by supplies and demands.  If there were more people like you, the world would be a much better place.

After listening to the Big Doe Rehab a dozen times now, I have to conclude that Ghostface takes rap too seriously.  I adore good ‘ol “Face” (interesting how, the rapper who started without a face is now known as Face: absence implies presence, doesn’t it ghost!?) and I’ve loved Face for a good long time, but he’s gotten so good I’m starting not to.   

Most of the other rappers of his generation have long since cashed it in.  Smart.  They got kids now, and relatively practical automobiles, and try to get on reality shows where they can flaunt their parenting techniques – sure they show up at a recording studio from time to time, on the strength of their bling-like laurels, they do a guest verse where they stereotype themselves at their 23 year old best, shit, maybe they do a whole crap-shit album, but Ghostface keeps changing his flow up, and keeps getting better.   

He’s gotten so good, and why? so some white guy who’s 30 years old can blog about it?  Dumb dumb dumb.  He’s the one who needs a big doe rehab I’ll tell you what.     His flow’s been working to this long line (sometimes upward of a minute long) and he’s like rap’s walt whitman – except definitely definitely not gay: not even the furthest reaches and forgotten corners of his chromosones are tinged with even a single homosexual amino acid – the building blocks of homosexual life.   

But in the end Ghostface looks silly having become perhaps the greatest rapper ever: as silly as a few hundred balding heads bobbing to his percussive voice, and raising their white hairy arms in the air even though they should be getting a good night’s sleep.

(Btw, I really pulled a Royal Tannenbomb when I first listened to this one — didn’t dig it a bit — ah, the manic-depressive critic. . . .)  

Oh, and even though Ghost makes a minstrely fool of himself by rapping large-cap, no uncappable capital -the best line belongs to U-God. Something like “And such and such, Ghost plugged me with a slut/ Don’t hug me, or bug me – I’m ugly when I fuck.”  

So knowing him, next go, ghost’ll probably come back with a line that clinches expression: facier than all the putting the ace in face and the AC inside of that, keeping cool in the summer of money something.

 Pulmonary vision is supplanted by the resolution that though it’s hard to party,

Even Agent Cooper wants the Torah, that November day in Dallas, impossible to solve, easy to understand.  It’s easy for the police because they look at the newspaper longer.   Coincidences conspire toward the infinite.  The author’s name: the letter D is used four times: the reader.  After hundreds of metaphors  try to become stairs and mirrors, readers from other nations build in the temple of the article.  They add their own centuries, the temple of every possible mathematical operation, bullet wounds in the body. 

 Three!, says a coroner with the confidence of a first grader whose grandmother (who thinks the child’s a genius) holds up three fingers.  No one can even agree on the temperature at the time.  He is the president, facts accrue until they fall into mysticism.  Nobody knows who killed JFK, implicating millions.    

 So that’s the nature of the impossibility of reality, that woman of regal proportions in fur, bejeweled by a grand stair and a chandelier, made up to look thirty-two, but near, is fifty-some, the fox in the light, fake.  Wait - the fox, dead, is real.

Ideas are like any life-form, a cascade of code.  Cascade, mutate, cross-pollinate: pick up a fish here, lose a shark there (autotomy?): the usual prom.  The fittest filled-out sequences, when put through the machine, ilume not always large jaws and sharp teeth, but also cuddling and cooperating: like the old Quaker game, Population. 

Stories are alive statistics: winged things: some persist, some perish; the swarm’s the thing. So authors change a verb here, they reverse the birthdays of two characters there.  The beaurocrat, the mardarin; masonic, surgical.  A cataclysm can mutate a form into transcendence; two middle-class septeganarians, a chance meeting at a bar between two divorcees: then, a baby is born.  No, the baby is found in the woods.