Hap-Hap-Happy New Year's!

Happy New Year’s Day, Dear Reader-Warplings!

So, dear warpling, it’s that time of year again, the time during which old clichés such as “It’s that time of year again” are readily dispensed and all, and we’re all of us awaiting the new year—2020—as of 12:00 AM tonight. Well, lil warplings, I’d just like to drop in and say hello. Again. And again and again. I’m here with a sack full of potatoes to wish you all well into your new years. Many of you will have resolutions. Many of you will have forgotten or otherwise abandoned your old ones. Many of you will be watching a ball drop somewhere in NYC, NY via televised show or w/h/y, many things and such, and on. I’d like to at whatever capacity serve as your constant reminder that we are able as much as ever to communicate and interact with one another well, and that that actuality is something meant to reassure our existence here on this orbiting sphere. The ghost of my beloved late pup Lulu (a Labrador/Chow mix, with a blond coat and a half-black-half-pink tongue) sings me lullabies in dream, dances bipedally with me into the nights of some long-ago other life. We are good friends, Lulu and I, and I dearly miss her. I think—when I see dogs on the street, pups leashed to the vectors of their respective owners— about her dear meek presence and the way she’d occupy my room with warm company as I’d watch movies and pet her and sleep beside her. I remember many things about her. When I see the other dogs alive and well today, it puts me in my place in time as I am then and now and makes me somehow more aware of my own age, of my own mortality, of the way I’ve lost so much and gained so little. And, for someone who wishes not for an afterlife, it can be a little lonely to say the least of as much as I should. There will no longer be that scent of her puplike sprawl on my blankets or her shed blond hairs gone everywhere, awaiting the vacuum cleaner and all, and there will no longer be her eternally deep brown eyes to look into to wonder what she’s feeling inside about me and her own life and her own life’s feeling. I’d had her since I was six. I’m now twenty-three and more lost than ever in some ways. I think sometimes, when I see the other pups, about my youth and the joyfulness and hope endemic to my young mind as I’d look with sureness to my future and all. I think about the burden of knowledge, the many-faceted ways we accept defeat and defeat acceptance. A lot of the time, I’m just too sad to function. Not necessarily because of the pup—because of Lulu—but because of too many unique variables and their myriad iterations to put into words. And so I’m here again, dear reader-warpling, with the obvious news that a new year has sortuv like dawned or w/h/y, already begun, as of my publishing this little note. And we are all of us still here, imbibing tasteful drinks and sharing anecdotes about our long lost pups and feeling sad sometimes and happy sometimes and both most of the time in such a way that it can be too difficult to put into words to adequately describe for our fellow man and whatnot, all that as-it-were “jazz” and so forth. You by now probably get what I’m laying down or whatever. So but I’d like to give you a couple of my resolutions: Here goes: I’ve resolved as of tonight to set forth a schedule by which I can release at least fifty episodes this year, this twentieth year of the twenty-first century: fifty episodes of The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata forthcoming, awaiting incubation and scripting and recording and publishing and so on. Another resolution: I’ve resolved to send at least one manuscript to an agent by the end of the year. These things, resolutions (and all [and all]) will require use of my “Empowered Women Empower Women” planner—a handmedown from my beloved mom—with which I’ll be able to chart out the days and plan ahead and hopefully get my so-called act together w/r/t the craft I’ve dedicated my soul to. So then, another resolution: a final resolution, for you, about me: That, by the end of 2020, I’ll have a different mindset than the one I have currently. That I’ll feel like a new person, w/h/y. This one, perhaps the most abstract and easily the most difficult, is something like a grand quest I’ve set out to complete. It is my assured hope that, with each blog post and episode published and communication signal sent out from the antennae of my heart, I will strive toward some greater version of myself. To be a better me. To be the me a purer past self once dreamed it could become. So there it is. Happy New Year, family—my dear sappy warplings—and I wish thee all a joyous renewal.

Much Love,

BK :^)

Some Real Brain-Sap Shit: v: "Jötunn"

            I haven’t set the schedule. I haven’t made the light switch obedient. I haven’t logged into the terminal or made my bones any warmer. I haven’t seen anyone like you before or thought it possible I could meet anyone like you at a time like this in a world like this. I haven’t been to the places you have been or made the kinds of friends you have made or touched the things you’ve touched. The jelly membrane of the skin of your fingers sets a heat into my shoulder when you place your hand on my shoulder and say, what you say when you say it. I fill up the glass with opaque seltzers such a combination as you’d call a “suicide,” and we debate about its flavor’s integrity to the original concoctions from which it was made. I bite my upper lip in thought and mentally repeat the word I was told to repeat to regulate my breathing and lower its focal point along my torso. You tell me people are like their own cups of coffee all different mixtures and types on the inside but, outside, exactly similar. The same cardboard sleeves. The same plastic lids. The same 12 oz. paper cups. You tell me of the few who survived their dives into Niagara Falls. You tell me of ancient Norse mythologies and the presence of these mythologies’ monsters in your more recent dreams. You tell me of what it means to be the type of person whose light switch is obedient, broken-in, tamed. We sit and discuss many things within things. We sit and sip beers and placate the room’s heat with light clothing and minimal movement. We get up and retrieve cool bottles from the refrigerator and pop open the bottles with mistlike plumes. And we clack the bottles together and say “cheers,” what we say when we say it, and ingest. You tell me about the dream of the wintry forest and the eminent Jötunn, of the bleached-white cloudscape and the powdered snow whose hoofprints encircle you. You tell me of the red-tipped antlers and the sounds it makes and imitate the sounds as you heard them in your dreams, and I cannot describe the sounds.

            You say what you say when you say it, and mention the dream recurrently throughout the conversation. You mention your broken bleeding leg staining the immediate snow cherry-red and how you are so scared of this thing with antlers, partially obscured by dead trees, staring at you. You mention how you cannot move and how you are stuck and how you cannot imagine feeling such a level of fear in real life. My hand wanders its way to yours, and we touch, and my fingers interlace with yours, and you look at me in the eyes from what feels like a great distance.

Some Real Brain-Sap Shit: iv: "Negative-Blink"

Body in Heaven, the news is coming in braille again. It’s the same old relay: “Pigeon flies at Dawn.” And we just have no idea. Maybe wind on your skin, through your hair in strings. Some twinkling starshine would send this amping beetle rigid, petrified mid-scuttle where its horns (respectively labeled + and -) would almost connect via electric shock! Oh dear, you may be thinking, what a sight for these modest eyes. Did you not already know of our union between Planes of Existence? There were thoughts your mortal brain’s mind’s eye could be filtering through this very moment, at the mere suggestion of… the Planes of E….

Body in Heaven, how did we get here—to this place in which the walls uphold a void ceiling, simply nothing, so black and tarry in this poor lamping we cannot be sure there is really anything at all, above us, in here? Maybe (and) there will be a voice beside you, which answers: You came to see Rodrick, didn’t you? And maybe you won’t be totally sure. Maybe glasses and shot-glasses of foreign liquors (liqueurs) at the table before you: a bottle of something called Dineros Prosperos, baroquely labeled, whose liquid sparkles cherry-vermillion. Maybe (and) there is music playing… from the background-audio of a VCR tape which stutters on-box-TV-set and which features a young Marlon Brando. But are we paying attention? the voice of the woman beside you might ask. And (and) where is this Rodrick, this person you’re purported to be here for? Maybe you aren’t totally sure you should look to the woman beside you on the orange chaise-lounge of if the observance itself would somehow drastically change her, “her” as for him, “him” as in you, from your limited perspective.

Body in Heaven, we are receiving what the Ancient Egyptian Spirits refer to as the “Mixed Messages” and “Bad Topical Settings” and such. Always in braille, recently. Can I just, the woman beside you might ask, make a suggestion? And maybe you respond, Yes. Maybe you say Yes and maybe she touches your arm. It would be at this point you’d be compelled beyond formal function to look. So you look and what do you see? What is she, as person? What is the nature of the creasing skin about her mouth whenever it is her speech evokes Zygomatic Joy, a beatific smile? What is the probability she will change again at any moment, expression dependent on the expressive reaction she sees in you, her interlocutor, the Constant Variable, the keenish listener who, according to the level of your liqueur’s glass and its difference from hers, doesn’t drink much? What (and) will she say when you can’t break the silence? Is there (it) something you could say to positively affect the continuation of her suggestion-making? It—is it something in the air that dries your tongue and compels you to reach for the glass? Maybe you nod. Maybe her smile intensifies; maybe it remains docile.

If it is time to die, altogether, then please—o Body in Heaven—take me now. Maybe a draft in the room, all hairs on your arm about her hand’s warmth standing at attention. But where is Rodrick? Why is he absent? Where is this mythical prospect of a person?

Rewind the tape, she says.

Maybe you notice the static snow. Maybe it’s too dim, in here. Negative-blink: open your eyes: you can’t remember.

Some Real Brain-Sap Shit: iii: "Unnamed African-Blue"

There is a whirly-bird crossing the sky, clouds-and-all, spinning propellers and vacating birds from overhead sheet of unnamed African-Blue. I sit at the coffeehouse parsing the ligaments of a dissected thought: we in the invisible undetectable rain of a clear day fall over internally at the thought of the thought of sadness: of the sadness that is at the heart of everything it is we do. The thought like the pinned cadaver of a large toad, forceps and blade readied in the mechanical hand, awaits unchaste obliteration: a desecration of the mortal concept. It writhes to life when linked to a tiny IV of Life Juice (.75 CCs) via membranous catheter, looks up to the surgeon at hand, to its pinned limbs, to one of the ceiling fans just behind surgeon’s head, to the pupil of the surgeon’s right eye, to the surgical mask of blue fabric which veils her exclamations. Someone along the plot might think this a bit of an amateur experiment. The Instructor doesn’t know. He doesn’t know he’s just a variable in the concept of the thought-as-toad-cadaver of the mind of the brain of the head of the body of the person who is me who is sitting here at the coffeehouse parsing him, the analog relationship he shares with the big picture. There are seconds of minutes ticking away from the clock inside, the clock that is the multiple clocks on the watches of the wrists of conversant patrons, biding their own—time.

The coffeehouse closes in an hour. People have begun vacating the -house, have left their napkins and trays of crumpets and local ANTI-HERO DOUGHNUTS for the employees of the -house to pick up and dispense into plastic tubs and clean and/or wash and ready for the next day, assuming as always that the cycle is eternally repeating: the fractal it is: if you go deeper in, you see all the same patterns. There will be a clap! and a hum and an “All-righty folks, closing time!” and the sounds of footsteps and lost conversation and clear-plastic cups hitting waist basket’s trashfiller, etc. There will be a great falling-out between the patrons and the employees as time comes to its inevitable surge of negative movement. Would we back up, see the sky again, its cloud-cutting whirlybird, the fly skittering along wood table at which I sit and parse, the people at the East tables at the edge of the deck having their own uniquely cherished conversations, we might even notice that we are ourselves dreaming: that we are not really even here, right now, in this setting: this place of places: this moment. That we are really in the mind of a writer looking to his screen as he types in the necessary words to communicate a thought: a thought of a thought of a thought in which thoughts take form as things, as people, and such—whether anthropomorphic toads or not. That we are nothing more than the variable in this one thought within someone else’s head’s skull’s brain’s mind’s capsular Imaging System, like bubbles rising to a surface through which the air can be inhaled, like the smoke the origin-thinker inhales to acclimate his bloodstreams with the need for a dose of nicotine.

Could you please turn the lights down, then? It’s getting late. I think I might let it pass over me like a ghost, or a shadow of a ghost, but that it is light: that it is the opposite of shadow: that it is somehow something like antishadow, the ghost which heralds the sunrise: the impetus for the energy which constitutes light: the energy of the finger which pulls the switch to initiate the light. I can do only so much to communicate to you the state I’m in. My head never seems quite right. Meaning, by head (of course), the “mind,” the “mind’s eye,” w/h/y. I am a courier from the deepest level of the original thought’s thought’s thought. I am happy to have you. For, without you, I would be just another black smear on a page whose canvas is the anti-shadow which began the thought-parsing to begin with.

Some Real Brain-Sap Shit: ii

I began the day in a cocoon of cotton sheets, duly immersed in the Dream at Hand, trying to find a means by which to transplant the Tome of Mental Wondr with some more inhabitable microbiome. I watched time elapse slowly as a great flock of swallows passed my window, eliminating possibilities of where I might be, geographically, for I wasn’t home anymore. Recently it’s felt as though I haven’t been anywhere—not specifically: Nowhere Specific. I woke from the dream at hand to find my feet the shape of starfish, to see that I was morphing into the creature of unknown origin I’d known in the Dream That Had Been at Hand. If I were left like that, my marionette strings cut from each joint to which they’d been tasseled, I might just go clinically insane from the lack of outer control. But here I was, focusing in on my feet: suction cups on the bottoms of my splayed toes, electric-pink matter of flesh, etc. I put on my glasses. There was a song playing. It was the song of the man to whom I’d given my basket of pears. The man originating from my dream. The faceless man. I recall quite clearly his musings on what he referred to as “The Song of the Space Pegasus,” a canon akin to those of Bach’s, something like choruses of many voices rising and falling in unison, merging toward something like a True Center of Things. I recall as he told me these things in the dream the way he’d move his head, which was veiled on all sides and atop by black bowl-hats, thus the facelessness. That I recalled yet clearer the degrees of references he made to the significance of the individual pears of the dream’s fruit basket, but that now—beyond the state of awareness of the Dream at Hand—it (the significance) eludes me.

Would we ever come to a more satisfying conclusion to the story of the Dream at Hand? Would that we would, I would say. But I haven’t (said). I’ve left the rest of my belongings in a storage unit my Other Half is now inhabiting. I have never met him or her, but I hope he/she is taking good care of the many terrariums, that he-/she’s spritzing the land-corals with their corresponding Liquid Vitamins. I left my Other Half a short note about which vitamins to give to which vitamin-deficient corals, labeled per terrarium. I hope he or she speaks English, that he or she can read the note, and enjoy the Paid-Programming of the box TV-set which shows only antiquated British dramas at .75-times their original speed. The set is slightly broken, so the uncommon static might unnerve him or her. I had a nightmare my imagined Other Half was growing Salvia divinorum in the land-corals’ artificial habitats’ apparatuses, rolling cigarette papers and clouding the storage unit with Salvia smoke, killing the corals. I woke from the nightmare dampened by perspiration, cocoon of sheets splotched in sweat and my own countenance temporarily horrified.

When we wake and see through our windows these great flocks of swallows, when we assess the status of our dreamstates, come to terms with what we truly believe we are inhabiting—whether it be a cage for us or a cage for Them—I think there is at last some hiccup in vision of our Immediate Surroundings: some hallucinatory stop in the unspoken conversation of thoughts we’re constantly having on an internal level. I hope that, should I wake again, before I go to sleep, I find some respite in the blue of my wallpaper, or the next color of the wallpaper of the next room. I hope that, when the sun finally goes down, I am actually there to assess the beauty of the clouds’ many-colored coats. Be well and well-read. I am coming home again.

Some Real Brain-Sap* Shit: i

Well there’s some aspect to the plum she bites into with an audible squirch, an almost really glowing aspect to the plum which is bitten into. There are faeries glinting slightly as they flutter about her person. But it is all some hallucination—something to do with the plum. The plum’s skin is ripe-purple: juicy insides a deep yellow dentally penetrated. That the crater she makes in the plum is bordered with the shape of her incisors, great depth a semblance of the jaw’s caution. The caution of the jaw for which the crater of the plum is substantiated: a chaste courtesy: a yielding to the strict morals of gustatory pleasure: a leverage of the willingness to enjoy v. to engorge: a fractal of reasons not to make the fruit a hasty morsel.

* Brain-Sap being a personal neologistic term for stuff I just spill out of my head in one sitting. It’s very easy to get the flow down once you’ve convinced yourself no one is going to read it. If you’re especially deft at deceiving yourslef in this way, it can be a game of sorts you play on a near-subconscious level. I think tennis may be a decent enough analogy, except that the opponent in this context is actually yourself. I’m not sure where I was going with that. Oh well.