can't sleep

Music: Besnard Lakes: Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO (2013)

I cannot sleep and fancy an ear, but there are only screens here.

Over twenty years ago this morning I remember reckoning with deity staring at an unfinished ceiling and exposed pipes and then coming-to with the first coming, on a small television. God was up, at least in the studs with improper nails a-jutting (responsible builders would have used screws), but the cathode housing was down and to the right and perched on plaster bucket. A well-fed Caucasian Jesus with a matted, long-haired wig was bled, humanely, for an audience in pews; some wept, the camera showed. It was a modern remix of a scene described in three ways a long time ago. They do this every year, although the Jesuses, or Jesae or Jesai or however one plurals such an important figure, seem to change (ever nailed, at 33 and one third). The sight then was sobering. The sight now, to the extent I ever see it, seems misdirected. I don't really know, nor do they. But there is conviction.

And conviction is something. It tends to get people killed.

I watched the Monterey Pop Festival film again the night before last, and Ravi Shankar's closing raga seemed more to the point. Or more pointed.

To be more honest but resolutely oblique, I can sleep, but when I close my eyes I'm troubled by the scenes on the inside lid. I worry about the sequels on the Other side. Prophecies are projected in the land of lid; they are akin to murky television talk from the future: true crime dressed up in salacious detail, getting the facts right but the truth all wrong, and then the unstable irony of Keith Morrison's voice. (The truth feels, it doesn't just say.) I can almost see the dialogue in the pink swamp, but the faces are muted or absent or something like—well, exactly like—a daydream of the day's fragments. Except the fragments haven't happened yet. Thinking can be like this in a mode of preparation or anticipation or wanting something not coming (back). And I know that thinking is amplified, somewhere, in the off screen (ob-scene) of sleep. Wed this backstage thinking to worry and disbelief and a glimmer of anger and you'll be in this uncomfortable theater that is so familiar to us when we troubled. Thinking cycles "what if?" "what if?" "what if?" It's the place that Garfunkel took Simon, which is why they split up, I think.

"Existential" is not the "squiggle of mustard" on the hot dog of a day's morning sustenance, although I like the definition-by-dismissal approach to things sometimes. (Maybe the Hokey Pokey is what it's all about, Jimmy Buffet.) But, no. No. The existential is really more of a mood that starts from the base: cold hard earth. There's no meaning until we warm- and break-it up with words. Existentialism is a rhetoricism, really. And it is some small comfort to say there is some-thing "brute," but then when we talk we also "make it so." (Good thing, that; I have devoted my living-making to this idea.) This is to say, constellating my fear of sleeping now with this week's news, I have been thinking about Sartre lately, and the gnarled roots of the tree in Nausea, and then his discussion of looking relations in Nothingness, and the idea that other people are fashioned like fashions. You and I, we are roles to play in someone's "reality television," characters or styles of being-in-such-a-way. That's not a lament. It's basic psychology. And psychology today is television, although we tend to think psychology is Internet. And by "we" I refer to a small slice.

I have not been re-reading Sartre, just thinking about his installments in my past. Reading Sartre is sometimes like watching Six Feet Under. It's smart but makes me sad. The books are there in the office and neglected by years. But like sleeping, I dare not take a crack at them again, not just yet.

I'm waiting for a better translation.

I recently dined with a couple I admire and love very much, and at a ballyhooed eatery that appeals to travelers and homebodies alike. We were seated in a row at a bar and I was, gleefully, the bisection. The waitress was an attractive woman my age (I just turned 40), with tattoos up one arm and down the other and, unlike many sleeves I see in this town, tastefully done in black-and-white (and not in, you know, a flash). Diet be damned, I ordered the popularly praised hamburger. Before I could finish my stack of meat as an excuse for dressing with attention, a bus boy (well, a bus man) took my knife without asking. I clutched my napkin, crumpled in my lap. And then, before my plate was clean, my mouth full of well-done meat that was promised more pink, the waitress set the bill in front of me like she was dancing with the stars. I regarded the check and took my time, finished my meal, and visited with my friends. Upon our departure, I looked the waitress in the eye and asked if it was customary to bring the bill before the meal was finished. She said that it was, because it was a small restaurant and because the cooks needed "order."

Order is sometimes the devil.

"The ball of sight that leads," sings Smith, and " scorned, transfigured child of Cain."