Pointy objects in the dark

Currently: Firefly’s corn rows

I felt my way in crepuscular light
watching a movie, knitting it tight
Purling away by the touch of my tips
Needling two for future unrip

Row by row, I bury the hole
clueless, heedless, watching my show
Damon is good, Price is better
Gilliam rocks, knit two together.

Later I find: horror. SHIT!
It’s a gaping, goatse, unknit knit
Rippit, rippit, down to the blow
(Don’t tell firefly I screwed up her rows)

The dark is an absent trapeze net
Experts can do it; but I can’t yet
So take my wisdom if you want to know:

Knit with lights on; save four rows

Word salad train wreck

As an exercise in honesty and shame, I offer an example of a word salad gone wrong. If you can bear reading it, notice how I snap out of it, bitch at myself, then try again with riffs on the word “life”—ultimately abandoning the session.

It served to clear my throat, maybe, but not much else. The danger of word salads is my embrace of sloppy, listless thought (disengagement?), which this one shows quite nicely.

I have no idea what my mind did wrong here. I just couldn’t catch a wave.

Philadelphian flags roared above the shouts of firemen. Unknown licks of flame tickled their extremities, sending shudder pens vaulting towards the stars. Lefty picked a nose pimple, walking upwards upon the air. Superhero? Hardly. Techno-bust? Maybe. Though the story cannot tell you where it came from; you’ll figure that on your own as scrollbars get your click.

Acidic lunch hasn’t strutted mint enough to show him how land (as in farm, not airplane) made down. Clearly, amethyst won’t purplate you if you keep it from the sun. This is the Mars conundrum. Is it sand, or is it burnt sienna? In reality, it matters less than the shadow turquoise. Turquoise can be blue, green, or under a shade of red that produces orange. But it is still turquoise.

Which is why monkeys don’t pick their anuses on sundown. Scent stays well in the heat, just as pain grows acute in the cold. Not! I, or rather he, am upset with Easter. She never liked it. So we found something better to do than hand out eggs. Which I thought was a great decision on your part.

Did that cover it? All forgot everyone. But that’s absolutist, extreme, without the pan pan under-shazamm that is so indicative of spatula wielding.

Ah. This tires. Perhaps because—I hate “perhaps.” I use that bastard word so fucking often I want to pluck its vocal chords out.

And what is this “under-”? A prefix suited for the mystic, or the hypnotist? If so, then what of “Banana”, or all the “B” words? There’s an algorithm for that, ‘cept Reimann isn’t around to draw it on paper, so we’ll never know.

Yesteryear, or Eonyear, what became of you? Life, live, livid, livery. Liver. Is that what we are, the living? Livers? And those of us who avoid direction, preferring the world to guide us into slots that steer our flow, aren’t we half-lifes, Chopped Livers?

Nonsense as inspiration

Word salads are a blast. They are a writing game of my own invention, based on a symptom of schizophrenia. I use them to inject a little (okay, a lot of) non-linear thinking before I bear down and start writing. Try to rearrange the synapses, if you will.

Sometimes I do them solely for self-entertainment. To enter a dream world where words don’t quite match up. Other times I find deep meaning hidden in the randomness of my word choices.

Here’s how I play it: I write structured gibberish. A cut-up without source. Unlike the true schizophrenic symptom, my word-salad pieces tend to have a subtext beneath them. Or, rather, a structure that sounds familiar.

The content, however, is total bunk. Rabbits sealing the colors, ball bearings subduing smirkiness, that kind of thing. Something like LSD without the L, the S, or the D. I continue until a non-verbal pattern or “spirit” takes hold and drives me to the end of the piece. Sometimes this spirit actually becomes a real, fresh idea. My word salads have been utterly disjointed, they have been surprisingly cogent. They’ve offered secrets I’ve hidden from myself, too.

The fascinating part of all this is that usually I arrive at a new idea 90% of the time. Most of them small, but damn, much easier than staring at a blank page for hours, toiling over what the topic of “honor” may offer. And the results are fascinating, if not useful. Sometimes I go back and rewrite my gibberish to make it closer to what I “meant.” Whatever that means.

It’s a jolt, to be sure. But I also pay a price: if I do too many of them, I cannot think in a straight line at all. I jump. I bump. I get clunky and lazy, accepting any mushy idea as valid. And I don’t run the kinds of reality checks before I jot something down, so I tend to write some pretty funky stuff expecting the reader to just “get it.”

But as a temporary boost, sort of like a few hundred CC’s injected into the heart, it does wonders. I haven’t been doing too much of them lately, and I’m the lesser for it.
Here’s an example from my endless collection of word salads. Please realize that this is different from any other word salad, and every other word salad is different than it. It is the way I do it; or rather the result of the way I do it. Yours may, in fact, be much better, wackier, metaphoric, sonorous, imaginative, dull, and so on. I did get an idea at the end of this one; can you guess what it was?

God, when shall it remend? I nought on subsidy for daily shift. For why? So can I at least complicate with the daemons when finally they offer outré? Or would you not like that? What would you do if I did? Punish me? Harm me? This mix has already chaffed my craw. Like rot removing skin, bone revealed to the air, punishment already embraces me. I am tied to the mailbox. Feet missing, eyes but semi-circles of their former selves.

So what? Which horror can you bring me more? Let me help you: place a coffee cup like Tantalus a foot or two away from my sip. Lay a danish on the yellow line of a blur-busy highway. And tell me it is mine, if I leap to get it. Place a nude beauty of ardor to my right, and tell her to serve a cackle in my ear for every ten giggles.

Your wrath is puny, Lord. Though I’d be a dishonest man to say it had no effect. But still, it is puny. For the mind you installed in all of us has acclimation calibration. Samsara is my world, Lord, as serving drinks is to a barmaid. So I choose the outré. You can lick your own cunt, not mine. I defy myself, damn myself. But damned if I’ll tolerate your keen sense of judgement—or is it humor of the Blackest kind?

It’s selfish, sure. “What have you done for me lately?” But you are Lord. Should I hold you to a lower standard than my Earth-bound comrades? Should I emblazon you with gifts and subsequiousness and capitulation and love and all that shit you so greedily desire, with nothing in return? What kind of welfare God are you?

And then to open my spleen and dump it upon the ground for no good reason but that I hungered for a Danish. You’re insane. A psychopath.

And I defy you. My last act shall be the gift of Spark to the world.

See if Your Airiness can compete with that.