just a stupid directionless day. hot. up too early. got a haircut and tried to write a poem about the diurnal thought processes that emerge in my head when sitting in the barber‘s chair. diurnal is not the right word, thoughbwell-intentioned, and backing up to change words on this keyboard is a hassle. so i shall move forward from now on, not deleting but commenting on errors ithat trail behind. “trail behind“ that‘s redundant… my voice rises in pitch when i get a haircut. not for being scared but for feeling like i am 10 years old. i imagine that my legs are, once again, unable to reach the floor when i sit in the barbar‘s chair. today my legs reach the floor. elephantine tendrils. they feel enormous when i sit in the barber‘s chair. i have noticed this attraction i have to high chairs. bar stools. raised seats. chairs that make me feel like my feet can‘t reach the floor, or anything down below. i sit on such a seat right now. right now. as a child the mystery expanded when the barber‘s put the giant bib over me, covering my body and leaving nothing to my sense of self-image but my head. the soul, i had heard on the AM talk radio, is in the head. the brain. not in the heart. at 10 i imagined this meant that true religion was observed by disembodied human heads, and that heaven (and hell) were filled with heads, heads, heads, all bumping into each other, colliding in bodyless space. that same AM talk radio (talking head) claimed that rock and roll music “sprung up from Miami“, a strange claim that my mother handily refuted, leaving me to wonder where my soul really was. in my head, in my heart … in my hand? today i ask, is it in my pants?
not looking back at what i just wrote because i can not. it is off the screen. floated away.
i read yesterday that beethoven spent more time revising than he spent writing. i read something similar about john updike. puccini, too, and mozart are said to have labored over their scores, which audiences and dumbass critics assume were written at a single sitting.
i just remembered a moment from the 8th grade. we had a teacher that year who was a disaster as a teacher, but all of us were stuck with each other. she was new. we were not. we were 8th grade, man, and we owned that school. we had made it. survived! so when we got stuck with a new teacher who expressed continuous exasperation at our disrespectful antics some of us circled the prey, like the seagulls in the school yard. the incident of which i was just reminded involved the teacher writing something on the blackboard, then realizing she had written something inaccurately, and she apologized profusely, scrubbing out the erroneous information and vigorously replacing it with a correction. as she did this the room fell silent and into that silence our man R. firmly belched out the word “DUMBASS!“ and with that the preceding silence was engulfed by a monstrous absence of sound. the teacher turned, slowly, her eyeballs jiggling in their sockets, her mouth agape, hr attention limping toward R. as he sat proudly at his desk. she might have said something. she might have said anything. instead she turned back to the blackboard, feebly whispering “hokay. okay…“ and she nodded her head, repeating “okay.“
