Friday white sale

Hello there. My network is free today. Welcome. I live and work in New York City, the try-state area. So there. And I can get back into Brooklyn on a day pass if I want to. Mingle with the effin hipsters and eat some pierogis. I reach into my pockets -- my god they're deep! -- and play strangle the snake. Feeling for loot. I hear somebody say into their phone, "The ferries are running on a weekday schedule." Good to know. Maybe take the BQE to the LIE, then head out to Lake Success.

I look across the river. The clouds, well, they look like clouds -- when M. says she can see Christ's face up there I get suspicious. He isn't up there -- he's down below the surface of the river, in the muck. Fish food. Toxic shite, that fella, especially today. Making me sick to my stomach, it is, watching the Commemoration Industry ramp up to its Anniversary Gala. Tall buildings, cranes, gravestones. A cross with a body nailed to it. The Freedom Tower. I forget what they're commemorating. I forget whom they're commemorating with. Hardhats, social workers, gay couples, illegal aliens. Who knows? Maybe those who love guns and go to church. Maybe the cops. My stomach heaves and my bowels hiss. All this commemorating is hard to take. Even Bach sounds treacly today.

Anarchy -- shite, monarchy -- no, levity -- or maybe some kind of gravity, the herky-jerky clutching at one's nuts, trying not to wee wee publicly, what is it that rules the little aboriginal privileged individuals living in this secular, nay molecular, millennium? The one we inhabit. The one that can be quantified. Reduced to scale. Surely it ain't the Bible. The law? Or have they overcome the need to observe the law and given themselves over to love instead? Love works like a balm in the brain when it isn't driving you insane. Believe what you want to believe.

Doctor Feelgood tried to remove them from my reptilian eyes, those scales. But it didn't do any good. He turned the crank. I could hear its gears. But nothing happened. The machine stood still. M. said, "If you'd only listened to me. Jesus is always with us. He's just waiting for you to invite him in." I could've kicked her then. But I didn't. I just looked away and watched the city's veins open up. The light was changing and the wind was coming on. I imagined Florence in the last decades of the 17th-century, the plague waxing, the tyrannical rule of Cosimo III the reactionary, the population decimated, the Dominicans putting screws to sinners. The Arno filling with blood. They lived in a world of blood and shit, only one way out of it. Unlike us.

Garish, garnish. Vanish, varnish. Ain't no apparition crawling down the cross. Not if you see it. Sipping fine wines and conversing with intelligent beings masquerading as sex-bombs, wearing TV costumes, real housewives kinds of clothes. Nothing real about them. Better off listening to James Brown sing "Hot Pants." Looking for a white sale.

I don't want to quibble over privileged information. If you see Christ in the clouds, that's okay by me. I don't. Maybe one of us is wrong but until we find out, let's just watch the river lift the city a little bit, lift the spirits of its inhabitants, they're so tired of the devil's stratagems. They just want a nice long weekend. They've heard so many lies, too many lies, the lie is dangerous, the lie is a ludicrous attempt at seduction. This is America -- they don't want to be seduced, do they? For real. Show me your evidence, evidence of what? The dyer's hand?

The hand darkened with ink, hard to make out. Somehow it's implicated in original sin. The city is getting dark. Goddamn daylight, the way it disappears when you need it. Listen, poot, poetry is perjury, that's why I much prefer prose. I trust the way it works even it's telling another lie. The ferries are running on a weekday schedule my ass. Our loved ones will keep us from reaching the summit of Mount Olive. Everyone lies in this pseudo auto biography.