seems the iraqis were sold $85,000,000 worth of divining rods.

“One of the problems we have is that the machine does look primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.”

time to get moving.

does that street look familiar? the mishka hat/ninja sticker goes to the first correct guess.

CMJ post finally coming up in about three days god knows when.

roughly six hours back i was on the sidewalk fronting the office and heard a bang.

turned to see the finish of a hit-and-run. some cab had nailed a delivery guy on a bike straight across the avenue.  the cab then speedvectored across three lanes to turn right at the light and disappear.  leaving a dark form behind, prone in the street

did my own quick line out to the body. stepped over him and bracketed his waist with my feet, facing neatly up into the incoming traffic that still came on – bike man had chanced to end up in near-perfect vertical alignment with the flow of traffic. looked back across through the building lobby glass to see the desk guy making the 911 call, turned back upavenue again to see myrna out in front taking up interference on all that oncoming traffic – the carfuckers had started to beep at this inconvenience blocking their way – and then i went head down to look at his face while perceptions dail into whatever they do to network the rest of what was happening on site, all of it automatic because analysis hasn’t yet arrived on the scene.

i have no full theory built up about crisis but stuff always happens fast after the fact while the overall aspect of time itself totally flips right about that same moment. the fabric rips open proximally to this stuff and in that gap metaphysics and quantum physics and a mess of other ungraspable fuzzy shit conjure into a collision that takes every aspect of standard perception away in a flash. witnesses become alice gone completely through the looking glass and i’m sure you know what i’m talking about.

so i’m standing there looking into the eyes of this middleaged chinese guy laid out under me on a wet road, laying flat out in the rain with his blue plastic raincoat torqued diagonally, roping across his chest. his old giveaway tan cap and his backbasket bike and one of those  cheap street umbrellas and an orphaned left shoe are all vaguely blown over and across the curb to my right in some blast pattern constellation. somehow the cab had knocked the laces on that shoe completely untied, and i wondered over that.

i finish the perimeter scan and look back down to bike man and he’s looking back with a blank face and then a new cluster of thoughts comes to me in this gifted rare world paid entry to by the guy under me. i’m dead serious when i tell you this is what it will be like when we die; when the complementary world we can’t acknowledge opens all around, when the first and only element we end up piecing together – no matter how well we cleaned up in the precedent of personal maya . . . sorry, talking karma - we’ll encounter  some aggregation of ungraspable fuzzy shit right there  in our face who ends up being the lesser guardian at the threshold. i’m sure you know what i’m talking about.

but now there’s a hipsterish kid wearing one of those vaguely nordic knit caps – the things with the long strings at the side that always flash tzitzit to me and that nobody ever ties – hipster is telling me he saw it happen and will stick around for the cops, because he got hit once . . . and i’m hearing this thinking that even when people do the right thing they still just want to talk about themselves. next there’s a terminally-civilian-looking guy standing just anterior and downstream of hipster. mr lifeofquietdesperation is feeling it for the first time in forever, having blindly stumbled into this pocket of unexpectation,  and he needs no prompt to give us his version – said account adding a silver SUV following on the cab that in following nearly ran straight over bike man once he went down.  SUV has apparently also disappeared without stopping, as true followers seem wont to do. quietdesperation man is rooting to the spot, needs no incentive to stick for the cops and doesn’t even want to give us his life story.

so i’ll have to take back what i just said about everyone needing to talk about themselves and rework my generally dismissive attitude toward normies. maybe.

once quietdesperation finishes i’m struck by how totally calm and still everything suddenly feels. and it dawns on me that somewhere in this i flooded with that incredible sense of purpose that hasn’t been around in a while and i’ve really missed it. the hit-and-run version of lower manhattan is just quietly humming.

bike man is still looking up at me and we’re as connected as anyone gets without genitalia figuring into it. every now and again i gently remind him he shouldn’t move and he stills. you get fixed on some weird details at times like this.  greasywet bangs frame bike man’s eyes and i find myself thinking he really needs to wash his hair when he gets a chance.

bike man asks me what happened and i tell him he got hit by a cab. he takes that in briefly and then wants to know where the cab is and i have to tell him it didn’t stop and it’s gone. bike man takes all this  without any sort of reaction i can see and has no further questions; i realize this fellow has probably gone through some monumental shit on whatever got him from china to this spot on his back in the middle of a rainy avenue in the night, looking up into the blackout sky fringed with vapor lights and neon and centered on the face of a stranger . . .  maybe it might explain why bike man is acting like this is not so much of a big deal.

he lifts his left hand about a foot off his chest and says something; he wants me to see his finger and i nod and say it’s not much blood, i say he’s not hurt too badly and he’ll be okay soon enough.  he brings his hand down and away and there is nothing more.

this is clearly one stoic soul laying down there under me.

the cops and EMTs are getting here now. when the lead ambo guy tacks in from the north and drops into a cradling kneel just above bike man’s head, i do a linked sympathetic shift to my back space without turning away, taking up a new position just below bike man’s feet. i think i’m saying goodbye without speaking.

EMT is asking me about the impact, background he needs for triage, so i wave hipster in from where he’s moved to give witness to the cops.   hipster boy picks up gestalt fast and smoothly goes head-to-head with EMT. the cops are decent enough to not take offense at being preempted and we have real civic symmetry all around. thanks, bike man.

i look over my shoulder to where his bike is still tangled in the parking meter. i look up from this metal sculpture and see bike man’s coworkers in king wok, the chinese place dead straight fronting on all this.  they  still have no idea their man is bloody beaten down in the street ten feet from their door. king wok has been jumping through it all (crazy street shit passes for normal here and food trumps everything so if you’re hungry you go straight on in), his folk haven’t had the luxury of checking out all these ambos and cops and flashers filling the wall of glass straight in front of them for the past thirty minutes or so.

the EMTs are now orchestrating the center and bike man doesn’t need me any longer. sad moves in on me as i cross past the bikemeter and go inside. king wok know me, there’s my counter lady who always puts my order to the cook whenever she sees me come through the door.

but not this time cause it’s too damned busy, which is well because this time i’m putting in something else. i have to near shout it twice before she registers, that her man was hit out front. and when she finally does hear it the place goes like a cantonese beehive blowing up in a flash. they’re going jabbering bigtime at one another and counter lady pulls the wall phone dialing up without dropping her part of the cacaphony. i mean we all know these people socialize in their daily like this generally but you can hear the tones dopplering up even if you don’t know cantonese from portuguese.

there’s a really young girl working point on the counter who i’ve never seen before, and she’s the only one holding business as usual now. girl’s immobile, pad and pencil up in her hands waiting for the guy directly in front of me to finish ordering - but he’s been medusa-ed by the beehive and stone forgotten whatever it was he wanted to eat.

countergirl is looking straight at mr transfixed through all this and girl doesn’t waver. girl’s got the same look  bike man had,  that stare we’d  been working symbiotically outside. i wonder what girl went through to get herself here and how her story would compare to bike man’s and i wonder if they ever talk to one another about these things.

i turn back out to the street. bike man is on the gurney now and he’s so bundled up i flash on mummies at the met. the cops have settled into that thing they do with the seenitallbefore stance, arranged in little dark clusters, they’ve got their faces that say whateveritisyouwantimgonnalookatyoulikeyoureanidiot and they’re generally running the clock and dreaming of overtime while they kill it.

im reminded of the strength of culture, as though bike man hasn’t already given me that lesson in a way these cops are never going to get.  no matter what they get called into, ever.

bike man goes up and into the back of the ambulance and the doors close and now bike man is really gone though the vehicle isn’t yet moving.

and counter lady is at my left elbow in that  moment and asks if i can tell bike man that his wife would like him to call. i nod and drift over to the ambo – and since the cops have reverted the nearest one snaps to into blocking position  in a way that says he wants me the fuck out of here.

 since i’m still locked into purpose i feel none of the usual blue rage and straight tell bike man’s message and nypd drops the posturing and lets me pass to the ambulance cab – which is empty – and when i backtrack to the rear that same cop is there to tell me he passed the message and i believe him.

and now it’s all really a wrap and my last thoughts drift around the marriage of bike man. i imagine his wife somewhere over toward the east river; i see wife of bike man waiting for the phone to ring, i see her in a very small room that is also a very crowded room and everyone there is very still, staring out intently with calm clear eyes.

post-script:  bike man spoke with me on the street today and bike man is simon and simon is fine.  simon says the back of his head was opened up but that he is blessed (looking up).  simon says he is afraid of the street now.  simon is smiling today, and his eyes smile with another bright intensity on an incredibly bright and  clear day.

’nuff said.

the recently discredited poster boy of the republican party has set a back fire – or at least, as they said in his heyday, jumped the shark – in a very diversionary fashion.  rare creative points to the neocons here: it’s a singular style, if lacking aesthetically.

The teabaggers are not motivated in the slightest by racism; we know this because they tell us that some of their best friends are black.  the motherfucker was black before he was president, after all.

stress makes you both stupid and dishonest;  we all know about the stress of any misguided drive for power, since when was the last time you popped out of bed knowing you just can’t wait to get to the office . . . so perhaps it’s not shocking that lying narcissist fundies are still dancing with the stars, or at least reaching for them through avarice and hypocrisy cloaked as empathy and idealism.

you lie!  kidding.  no.

here’s hard news: after suffering through three years of the most monumental drought in the history of the state, georgia is suddenly underwater.  it seems there is a just and vengeful god after all, it’s the war of all against all, whenever the socialists go teabag-for-teabag with the dittoheads it will make for great television and that means there’s money to be made on this so it’s on.

the causal link has not yet been fully explicated by fox news but it will soon become clear that what matters in the end is not power or vengeance but the golden rule.  we’re talking pure batshit street karma, kiddies – and how’s that for a real talking point.

since reunion tours are bad karma and just as misguided as the bush years and we should all be paying more attention to scruffy kids lugging cheap guitars and amps over the interstates, who better to lay out the game plan than these accidental philosophers.  leaving no child behind, they’re hanging from basement pipes coast-to-coast and will appear in some hot stinking unventilated basement club near you.  this is deep diversion cheaper than oxycontin addictions and surreptitious plane trips to argentina, and you never have to explain why you were playing footsie in airport stalls on your layover.  your econoline van – the one that’s older than your parents – has broken down in more states than mccain took in the last election, for chrissakes.  caveat: following this does require a certain physical stamina that may no longer be feasible for the majority of our supersized, screen-dead population.  so consult your physician and get a prescription for provigil to keep up; after all, it’s the new coffee and loads cheaper than starbucks so long as you have a health plan.  har.

but it’s not all about pushing the limits pharmaceutically or pushing anything into a closet and dissembling into a makeover of lies and idiocy under the stress of trying to be somebody you’re not.  jim carroll died for our sins, and if the life of the basketball diaries tells us anything it says be your own best self because of your flaws; live through your own shit and come out cleaner on the other side.  jonesing for the golden rule is pointless until you pay your dues: you can’t help anybody else if you don’t know who the fuck you are in the first place.

we’re spending millions and aggravating china trying to save panda bears.  the segue here is that republicans are charismatic megafauna too. they live in an evolutionary cul-de-sac (i love this phraseology and i stole it, read the link) and will simply chundle along pushing their racism and hatred and ignorance and plutocratic righteousness if the rest of us support that microclimate.  or, god help us all, emulate it.

late add; just can’t pass this up: chumbawamba has the margaret thatcher ep shrink-wrapped and ready to go, they’re selling it on their website, but they aren’t shipping until a certain precondition is met:

I’d just like to point out, to clear up any confusion, that you don’t get sent the EP until she actually dies, so please don’t email and ask why you haven’t received it yet. We’re all impatient for it to happen I know …

karma is still a bitch and that’s it.  my five minutes are long up, but i’m feeling no stress so long as my modafinil is kicking in.

thurston at goodbye mccarren

i want my hard drive back.

i also want my left knee back, but i don’t think that’s under warranty any longer.