Wednesday, February 9, 2011

CIDED in AMERICA









crazed illusions and dog-eared dreams in america
-gatsby's green-light zeitgeist revisited-
                                                                                                                                                             -peter charles tews-

"And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out Daisy's light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
                                                                    -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
      These words, forever burned in reckless effigy, resonated with deafening residue when I first read them my junior year of highschool. I was at that point in life where one struggles fiercely from innocence in disambiguation of the American Dream.. That age we stand with cigarette in hand against the academia-crazed threshold of the room exuding stories of early American Manifest Destiny and other roundabout tales of white man's skewed entitlement… That age at which we value to criticize a skewed self image so incommensurate to the ironic detachment propagated by the sadness of sophistication...
      Yet, we're afraid to name it- bound by hope and an infallible youth fused with a forlorn sense that whatever corner of time in this world residing, brings meaning and truth, no matter how platonic and misleading our facades.
      Little did I know what my green light zeitgeist would be, until I started reading Kerouac and dropped out of college to placate my own restlessness and dare a tightened mainsheet reach into those enigmatic headwinds and waves of the West that run from from Mazatlan, MX to Chico, CA.
      Like a mirage over the long road to the middle, you find yourself in San Francisco, drained of those pieces of yourself willed to friends met and left in your wake; inspired by those fragments of former lovers' hearts lent you for the journey ahead... Because the Beats ruined you for the ordinary and you would never fight in the army.
   And there you're found, with the silhouette of yourself sitting in City Lights Bookstore and Ginsberg’s love letters to all those who would follow suit.. those of us rendered westward in that ineluctable continuum of the weird and rare in celebration of reckless abandonment- to derive our own sentience from Gatsby's Green Light Flash over the horizon of the Pacific's copacetic sunset and erudition be damned..
     Any serendipitous journey is really just one born from the maw of truthfulness in the art of travel- to deviate from plan. Not to say that I had lived a life by regimen in the Midwest, but there is something to be appraised from ditching a prospective triple major, waving a king-hell middle-fingered salute to the bastards of one's past, and flying off on whatever wild-ass auspices one has in stock for a righteous ride into the unknown. After all, when you get caught up in the rat-race of life, sometimes the best answer is to dress up like a human peacock and run wild, waving the colors of your freedom like a freak flag flown in honor of something pure and guileless. In honor of sentiment and for a raw appraisal of things; it was time to pretend in spite of everything.
And so it started, but first I had to go to Elkhart Lake for a short tenure. Something that had to do with a Wisconsin Rockwellian Walden of sorts in bland pursuit of winter platitudes… Four months was all it took. But, within that four months came travesty heaped upon travesty... thus brought to catalystic proportions by a death in the family and a requiem of bar tabs that would make Hunter Thompson shit. It was then I knew for sure and for certain that it was time for my festering curiosity for Western America to meet its orgastic dharma.
Sayonara to the Midwest, Mahalo to the gods. After all, a spherical world is the dilemma of  how a journey prescribes.

You have yet to learn the parable, but the first thing one notices in moving to the mountains is the recondite solace that comes without having yet the chance to condescend into the environment.
The day was for work while evenings well into the sunrise were wasted getting high and drinking cowboys with some redneck named Sean; sitting on a promontory overlooking the valley below in debate over the various mantras of life. But after awhile, your senses enthrall to the prescience of the woods and you realize that you are the closest to life as you have ever been. After all, the further we detach ourselves from the mainstreams of society, the closer we come to the beatitudes of the world. Life at its epitome is found only in the wilderness, and you realize how estranged man’s monuments carved of mirrored glass are.
But the summer campers come soon enough and quite inundatingly so, while the rest of the summer is spent in one of those intense raised-hell reminders of your reckless seven-year-old self, taking care of six or seven over-stoked rascals all strung-out on caffeine and candy compliments the “rents”. Come autumn rain, you seem to sit inside yourself.
Standing at the promontory over the valley before you leave, promises are made that you'll return sometime during the long road to the middle. And smoking pall malls and drinking tall boys in atavistic rumination; you realize its time for another chapter. 
   
mazatlan [viejo], sinaloa, mexico
2 months hiatus from form and something to do with kairos for a keyhole, there’s a girl in the world, in Mexico. She’s 18 crazy. cake batter and muffin mix. weird. rare. riot. A photographer at heart drenched in the ethos of art. "You're in love with a girl whose in love with the world, and you can't help but follow.." You never thought you would find her in Mazatlan.. especially so working as a missionary and building homes for the poor. How you just about gave your mom a hemmorrage after explaining that plans for marriage were already underway and yes, she was as perfectly crazy as they thought I was neurotic. Your father said “that just about sounds right.” Imagine if it had actually worked out... as she fled from decision, you fled back to the mountains of SoCal.

san luis obispo, california
Highlight of one hell of a life. After moving in on some craigslist ad, you met your roomates after the fact. The closest to a family as you've had outside of your own. Green lights in limbo and a picaresque verdance.

san francisco, california
bird's eye vertigo; Mason and Geary; a German tourist's life takes stage-left to consumate a creeping inquietude shed on the stray bullet of her wedding anniversary. Where & When? Who shot and why? Jealousy placates angst and together run astray; while the rigmarole of life enshrouds bystanders on the sidewalks; staring in short-term neurosis. Darkness and depravity in the Tenderloin while other burroughs whisper peace.
Power to the Peaceful, Golden Gate Park. Atavistic hippies powered by piano, poetry and prose tell tales of "this day and age" toward some token of Utopia, while Charley Murphy squanders joints of grass and squares of hash. A woman lays naked on the grass, getting painted iridescent, as the jackals of the moon howl at San Francisco, championing the disheveled.

Life in acceleration and a prognosticating quotient of those lurking shadows over the horizon you never imagined would arrive so quickly. It was only yesterday you were reading "clifford the big red dog" books, in forts you fabricated of whatever disparate materials found in the house. Drum solos in the kitchen on pots and pans, using a television remote and Tiffany-silver serving spoon as sticks.. It still seems common sense that a colander and bedsheet are all one needs to dress like superman, careening around the front yard as in effigy of the village idiot in some early irish novel (and to the abasement of your parents)... on any tuesday afternoon-requiem of way-too-much-energy.. Yes, your mother was right, you were neurotic for the moon as a child, but that’s what's made you an indelible one, and that indelibility has made it a king-hell, high-life riot, yes? Yes. 

Friday, February 19, 2010

for Molly Baugh


How do you tell that one girl..
.. she's the cats meow..
how it would be a king-hell, high life fuckaround
from start to finis
.. if only we went to Mexico..
to become nothing but the moment of our mutual kairos..
to turn ourselves into the wind..
embracing the fortitude of spontaneity
with a humbling scrutiny of the mundane,
which is perfectly conjured from a curious mind..
and a passion for rebellion..
yikes!