Sometimes the non-tourist attractions, 

the ones that go unnamed and unnoticed, 

can be more entertaining than the ones people flock to see. 

Here's a sampling from the other side of town:

 Sun's Laundry Expo

Model Tobacco

Nice Crockery

Office Politics

that's me on the fortieth floor
second window from the left
peering out at nothing in particular 
I used my personal politcial power
to get a window office
to see the sun, see other buildings
see people scrambling below
people glad to finally see the sun, any sun
locked within a nippy, chilly, over cooled cubicle
worse than the blackest hole of Calcutta
(except for the cold)
worse than The Snake Pit. Remember the movie?
where Olivia de Havilland found herself 
in an insane asylum 
and couldn't remember how she got there
caught up in the bureaucracy of the institution
the regimentation of the staff
some brutal and ignorant
a few kindhearted
most just killing time
cubicle time

The Chase

Words of the Week

Pigadillo: Eating when nobody’s looking. 

Jambled: When traffic calming makes you nervous.

Cobblement: Wondering why you bought those shoes.

Endophasm: The part of the thing where you’re excited the thing might be almost over.

Diglion: The sub-atomic particle that makes the universe fall in love with itself.

Cartogemy: When your sense of direction insists the map is wrong.

Shulquess: Asking for suggestions but hoping there aren’t any. 

Road Trip: Michigan or Bust!

Confederate Breastworks (!?!?!)

The fact that it speaks for itself goes without saying. 

Tagging at Highs Restaurant, Monterey, Virginia

Welcome to West Virginia

Waiting for Session

A brief interlude between sessions at the Reusing Indigenous Clay Modalities Conference at the Fort Pierre National Grasslands Conference Center outside of Pierre, South Dakota allows attendees to network with one another. Conference co-chairperson, Addison Cuthwinning, said this years conference was one of the best ever. Said Cuthwinning: "This year was one of the best ever! Attendees were able to sit and listen to presenters give presentations about various topics related to Reusing Indigenous Clay. Some of the presenters used computers and powerpoint presentations and attendees were thrilled at the lifelike images of things we do with clay and things we would like to do with clay in the future. So exciting! There were so many good ideas!"

News of the Week

Item: French Lick, Indiana man conveys universal truth to world. In response to the unending deluge of cosmic bullshit raining on his freaking midwestern parade every freaking day, Regis Phlunge calved a vision so spontaneously rhythmic and driven by a melody so profound, with lyrics so apt, that small river fauna faced true north and barked soulfully. Driven by instinct, and barely able to comprehend the profundity of the moment, Regis frankly elucidated the most matter-of-fact and comprehensible explication of the eternal mysteries that has yet to be recorded in human civilization. It was really swell.

Item: Live from Brazil, 

in the  most exciting World Cup Soccer Game to date, 

here's what happened:

The guy kicked the ball to the other guy who kicked the ball to another guy who kicked the ball to another guy who kicked the ball back to the first guy. The ball hit the first guy in the head and then it hit another guy in the head and then another guy kicked the ball to another guy who kicked the ball to another guy who picked it up with his hands and kicked the shit out of it. It was all very thrilling, practically unbelieveable in its tension and unremitting athleticism, on and on with guys kicking the ball to other guys for like six hours. The final score turned out to be just as wildly exciting as the entire game: 1 - 1. 

Waking Dream #1


by Calvin Burgamy

The Staging Area

what’s missing in your life

is a good and proper staging area

don’t just take clothes out of the dryer

fold ‘em and put ‘em away

that’s for losers

they belong in a good and proper staging area

an interim area, so to speak, where they lay

waiting for a drawer or closet

sometimes the wait is very long

we, the royal we, wouldn’t be where we are today

without a staging area

to buffer the friction between

a machine and a closet

between the known and the unknown

earth and sky

action and inaction

and those places in between

like inertia, nebraska

torpor, maine

languor, ohio

keg, georgia

now and then

and apathy, texas

buffer yourself, my good man

in a good and proper staging area

it will temper your quills

and hip-ta-phi your Christmas music

Favorite Obscure Wikipedia Articles, Part XVI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehesa_%28pastoral_management%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FewestRevisions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_Cities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium

BlueGreen

The Argument

Wingingit

Whirled at Work

5 Days In Dallas

Incident at 30,000 Feet

Imagine my surprise when flying at 30,000 feet and traveling at or near 500 mph I look out the window and there is this dude's head. The head is screaming but of course I can't hear it because the head is outside and AirTran has inexplicably installed engines right next to the windows as well. So I am trying to mouth to the head that I can't hear a word he is saying. This exchange goes on for about 5 minutes when I decide to call the stewardess and get someone in authority to see what the fuck is going on. So I start to push the button and the head sees what I'm doing and starts shaking itself violently from left to right in the classic "NO!" style.  I "hear" what he is "saying" so I stop myself. I  look  around the plane to see who else is scoping out the floating head situation but no one seems to notice. I look out once more and shrug my shoulders and he nods in silent agreement and slowly disappears into the gray fog that surrounds the plane.

News of the Week

Item: Area man falls deeply and passionately in love with his old sofa. "I don't know what took me so long," gushed Romeo Boggs of Whipville, Tennessee, "She's been waiting quietly for me all this time." The love-struck Romeo spent the entire weekend in intimate collusion with his old sofa, eating, sleeping, snuffling, watching TV, putting off till next weekend what was eminently doable this weekend, and by and large acting like a soon-to-be-embalmed corpsicle, refusing to part from the genuine leatherette caress of his newfound paramour. Unable to summon the energy to entertain even the faintest whiff of self-loathing, Romeo Boggs grinned before he lost his remote "one more time" in the alluring dark spaces between the cushions of the love seat, and noted to himself, "Sometimes a man just doesn't feel like doing what he's gotta do."

From the Whirled HeadQuarters Random Inquiries Department:

1.] 

These words are both homonyms and antonyms:

Balm

&

Bomb

2.]

If some people are named Frances, 

how come some other people are not named 

Spains, Mongolias, Kenyas or Laoses?

3.]

The proper concession to the digital age 

is to quit doing things in real time.

This is a great place to parse Kierkegaard 

while enjoying a sauna.

Mom, Skidaway Island, Georgia

by Calvin Burgamy

In Pursuit of The Word

Pursued by the agents of formalized cliche, and in pursuit of the roots of true language, we ducked into a speakeasy - such places had sprouted like organic slang since the passing of the latest municipal syntax. After knocking twice and correctly identifying the true author of shakespeare's sonnets, the door opened and a boggy irishman ushered us in with a soggy nod of his head. "Say what you will, gennelmen", said he, "but parse not lest ye be parsed. Um's the word, y'know."
 
He beat a peaty retreat towards the bar and we entered, in Finnegan's wake.
 
The heat was off . This was cool. All about us came the hubbub of mother tongues, from sanskrit to gallic to y'all, all rising to a haze of thick glossolalia stirred into meaning by the lone ceiling fan. Verbal gumbo. We looked at each other and smiled wide as our prefrontal lobes ignited in phonetic sympathy. "Ah, the sweet elixir", said one of us, "Neural drool", said the other, laughing. "I think something stout is calling my name", said one more - and we eased into the din of antiquity, heading for the taps. 

 
Edging, shouldering, sidestepping past poets, griots and stern-looking umlauts, we arrived at the bar and asked for pints of the local dialect. The irishman fixed us with a brassy glare and boomed "In the beginning was the Word!" "One word!" came the sudden chorus from from the room. "BUT", roared the son of Erin, "One word cannot be said without a second to give it meaning." "Two words!" shouted back the crowd. "And so", said Finnegan softly, "this one Word, unspoken, breathes life into all you say and hear." All grew silent as the ceiling fan creaked to a stop and the irishman leaned forward expectantly, looking at us each in turn. We drew straws on a napkin and the shortest sketcher frowed his burrow, shrugged and cried, "Yo! What's the Word?!". The room exploded in laughter and high-pitched doggerel and the ceiling fan stirred anew. "Congrats lads", said the barkeep, "Yu'v just recapitulated the ontogeny of yer own vocabulary!" 

 
We didn't know if this was good or bad and a little greek guy with a sticker on his chest that read Hi, my name is Homer leapt onto a table and yelled, "And here's another history lesson: In a land where words were few and stark, no synonyms abounded. Each word described an equal portion of reality, and their relationship to other words was a succinct grammar in itself. This natural tongue, though noble, could not help but grow incestuous to preserve itself. Some words began to have more than one meaning; others survived only in reference to other words. As time went on, this fateful trend continued, from burble to babble to riot. And just when every word seemed to mean anything, everything, nothing, a very strange thing occured..." 

 
The doors to the speakeasy suddenly flew open, dark figures silhouetted in the streetlight pouring in. "Shadduuuuuup!!" screamed a hooded voice, and then menacing, "Stow yer tongues and nobody gets... hurt." The figures began to advance, reciting lines from cheesy gangster flicks in a low liturgical litany. "It's a raid!" yelled Homer, scrambling off the table, and all was bedlam. "Thought police" hissed Finnegan, pulling open a trap door behind the bar, "this way to clarity. Hurry." 

 
We hustled down the chute, recognizing the dark figures as our pursuers, centuries of articulation receding as we sped, chasing the word, and being chased by its constraints...

 

I was OK until you asked me if I was OK.

3-D Luxe

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

 – Emily Dickinson

Paint, Ink

Paint, Ink:

siblings

weirdly worth more

to civilization

than gold

Paint, Ink:

liquid siblings 

hand and brush

touch and breath

attention is physical

the liquid dries

proof remains

Poe

Words of the Week

Commerical: When a business turns into a joke.

Domicidal: Living in a place you hate.

Fleech: A neighbor who drops by whenever you have visitors.

Infantreed: When everyone on your family tree is a baby. 

Car Wash by Calvin Burgamy & Tina Kite

She believed in nothing; 
only her skepticism kept her from 
being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre

by Calvin Burgamy

59th Street Bridge  NY, NY

by Matt Rosenberger

i have a great idea for a movie

opening scene everybody would die except
just two or three would survive, to live
gruesomely scabby yet riveting lives
the survivors would have cleft chins
and perfect breasts that heave on command
or off

and they, the stars, the beautiful stars
would repopulate the earth in 90 minutes
make it a better place for kids and golden retrievers

the movie crests into naked euphoria
in the first two seconds
when bill o’reilly explodes in a deluge of magma
that has surged up from the earth’s core
directly into fox studios

the remaining eighty-eight minutes
with the movie’s perfect pacing
of cliffhanger rescues followed by frenzied fucking
feature nancy grace, the former prosecutor
whose southern accent
with its bitter yet come hither edge
makes me and all other cinematic
dorky ass viewers of cable tv cringe
and lust mightily at the same time
her full lips feverish and shiny
her open thighs ready to receive
the burning priapus of the sub-plot

anyway i digress from my movie idea
of the people who recopulate the world
and for a brief time live happily, so happy
in utah, where the mormons used to practice posture
before my movie sent them all to kingdom come

in the denouement, just before the climax
a really horrible thing happens, finally
after reams of crazy deaths and ecstatic couplings
but strangely, it seems rightly horrible
you might even say – apropos of
all the things, the death, the life
the well-hung dialogue, the rippling tears
the crippling laughter laced in the sacral bone
the very emulsion of the film itself
all melting together – beguilingly
a strange comic relief, a last straw
in the unending beverage that is my movie 

by the boy poets, throwing an eephus pitch

Monticello Detail

By Jonathan Marcus

Thoughts for a Strong Week

May your bricks be

As strong as your mortar

May your jokes be short

And your pants even shorter.

One of Many Internal Conversations

 About the Medical Crisis of 2013

The extreme medical crisis brings me full circle on the brain question, the question about whether our brains are in charge of anything, and if so how much, because in a medical crisis you pretty much have to trust the medical professionals, because, let's face it, they use their brains and the accumulation of medical knowledge, to do things – such as save lives – that you, with your carpentry and plumbing tools and paint brushes and nice way of talking and cool life experience, simply can't do, plus they can prescribe morphine, which you also can't do, but speaking of brains, there's nothing like a medical crisis to engage you and your own brain to ask the bevy of doctors urgent questions and more questions and more questions until you start to notice that their answers don't always fit their other answers nor do they always fit the others guys' answers, so you ask more questions until you are layers deep into the accumulated medical knowledge of the eons, and now your questions are getting pretty good and engaging their brains because your brain has been paying very close to attention to the words they speak and parsing the words and breaking the facts down and stacking the facts up since this is a matter of life and death, and one day in the office of a major doctor dude, you realize that regarding the question you are asking he doesn't know the answer. He's never thought about this before. This is a scary moment. The doctor doesn't want to admit it. Neither do you. He's got his reasons. You've got yours. But none of the reasons are worth a flip compared to life and death, and within the space of one more question you don't care about anything but your hunger for knowledge, because his reasons and your reasons are small and shabby compared to life and death, and because your brain is engaged with your heart because your heart wants to go on beating and your brain wants to keep on breaking through the veil with new questions about the brain question and because of the crazy desperate throbbing exuberance of the immortal dizzy deep mystery of cells and space and the spinal column, and what doesn't belong there.

Some Favorite Obscure Wikipedia Pages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuriger

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Pierce

Photo of Photo of Joel by Calvin Burgamy

Car Wash by Calvin Burgamy/Tina Kite

Dream Diary

 

I'm at an arts center, like the High but smaller. There is a sudden hubbub, people moving around excitedly, almost like a crime scene. Turns out a forgery has been discovered - one of the featured pieces. Patrons, workers, art people, everyone is commenting on it and giving their take. A spontaneous seminar takes place with gallery people talking about the history of "art crime" and individuals, even the waiters who are circulating with finger food and ice water, piping up with anecdotes, jokes and pointed remarks.

The atmosphere is "we're all in this together" in this spontaneous event, very convivial, a brief comersion of rich and poor, patrons and workers. It's hot, and amid the talk, people are guzzling ice water and asking for refills like there's no tomorrow. You can hear the click of ice cubes against glass all over. The waitrons are happy to oblige, whisking around with big pitchers of water, commenting on the forgery and pouring water here and there. At my table the waitron pours water into our glasses and I take a satisfying pull of clear ice cold water. The guy is just about to go away to refill the pitcher when another table nearby waves to him urgently about something. He can't do two things at once so he stands there for a second and in a moment that crosses the usual boundaries he turns to look at me, holds out the empty pitcher and asks if I would do him the favor of refilling the pitcher with water.

This is THE LOOK - our eyes are locked and a lot is going on in that look. He's taking advantage of this spontaneous democratic atmosphere, and I'm wondering why me and why should I and am I obligated. But I am thirsty so.... I say ok. He is greatly relieved and pushes the pitcher into my hands and mutters something about the kitchen being back there before rushing off to the other table.

So I get up and move uncertainly to the back of the big central room. There's no kitchen, just a sink, and I fill the pitcher. I'm just about to go back to join in the fun when I look down and notice there's just a couple of weakass little leftover ice cubes floating on the top of the pitcher. The water's cold, but its not ICE COLD. This won't do. That was the whole thing that made the water so good - the ice. I look back at what is now a party and look around for an ice machine, but there isn't any. I've got a choice to make - go back or look for ice. The ice wins.

There's a couple halls leading out of the room so I walk down one holding the pitcher of water. The sounds of the party fade and it seems the rest of the center is empty. And no ice machines. Everything looks dark, weird and eerie as I proceed. I get to a room and there's a woman there. She turns and asks, "so what should I paint?" Turns out she's here for a class and we chat and I clear up the misunderstanding. "I'm just looking for some ice" I say, hefting the pitcher by way of explanation. I ask her if there's a fridge or ice machine nearby and she gives vague directions to another part of the center, so I head off again, in search of ice for the pitcher of water.

Item: Government mandates wildly expensive study of "schooling" phenomenon. In an effort to rouse its lethargic, dimwitted and hopeless school children, the nation's leaders have determined that fish are the answer. The Department of Education has been renamed the Department of Fish, and every graduate thesis submitted to an accredited institution will be limited to the study of fish and their amazing capacity to "school". Says Jeffard Whitby, obviologist and Phish PhD, "We want to find the genetic markers that make fish want to school and once in "school" stay in school until they die or are eaten by sharks or are made into fishsticks. We can use this to increase children's desire to "school" and then later in life to keep a really cruddy job without killing more than half the people in the local cubicle area."

Monument Avenue

by Jonathan Marcus

View From the Motel Room

behind the beige plastic light-proof curtains
above the whisper quiet
weather control unit

bricks

baked red bricks
in rows
red baked rows

stacked like
bricks
a lotta bricks
a million bricks
stacked up
and across
up
and across
up
and across
in lines
that don’t line up

mortar brick
brick mortar
every where
a sun-baked mortar grid
above the weather control unit

sun creeps ticktock
across the bricks
slow as a brick factory
bakes bricks red in the sun
lots of angles
lots of cubes
lots of mortar
big stack
big view

from the motel room

by the boy poets, reviewing the viewing

Words of the Week

Snoyty: When you use summer as a verb.

Blahdroyd: When your favorite color is beige.

Packhead: Going to a big box store to buy small boxes.

Somnesianity: Praying god will make everyone really sleepy. 

The Obelisk of Kartoon 



The Obelisk of Kartoon 
blasts 
into the outersphere 
a terrific fire 
propelling 
and pushing 
and pulsating 
the high techno, super lightweight, 
superduper ultra alloy, outerspace  metal 
mocalvinium, 
flaming, 
hurtling 
its weightless 
astronauts,  faces 
pressed 
against their visors which are 
pressed 
against the quadruple thickness, 
built to last 
in the vacuum of space portals 
flashing 
terrific grins,  no gravity,  hell bent.

by Calvin Burgamy

News of the Week

Item: Man Gets All His Ducks in Row, Briefly. Joe Schmoxli of West Huffakers, NV, owner/operator of the Family Innocence Petting Zoo, assisted by his trained ferret, Hinky, recently arranged all 47 of his ducks in a row in front of a mesmerized crowd of Cub Scouts, confused emus, wet-cold-blooded-codfish and paying customers. Combining provocative rhetoric, disco hustle dancing and magic fancy swipes with a broom culled from his years as an Olympic curler, Mr. Shmoxli finally squeezed all the ducks into stringent alignment for an official 1.3 seconds, a standard set by the Global Council of Imposing Linearity. Moments later, overwrought by maintaining such a taxing vector, several fowl spontaneously converted to Sufism, broke ranks and waddled recklessly towards Greater Duckness like it was 1999.

231st Street