The blank page. The bespactled realization of thinknot, of thinklessness, of self-referential immobility, stuck in a self-aggrandizing spiral of writing about not writing, which is the most boring writing of all, the sad back-up default postermodern (and postmortem, for all I care) fallback for the stupid, frustrated and enraged colleagues, dilettantes, amateurs, professionals and dogs; a fallback for morons and geniuses but a sad excuse for the purity of creativity, the real explosion of unfiltered open doorways and real progressive states of intelligence not surpassed by pathetic desperation. How do I askew my platitudinous fallback into the self-reference, the poor meta and onco-metastizing future to which I’m doomed.
I want to write about something funny, something sarcastic. But the trick is it has to be evident right there in the words – I can’t whip the end of my sentence with the over-credulous alto, no sign or punctuation for the fledgling chirp of sarcasm. How do I accomplish this? I can just tell the reader. The following is sarcastic: old people are the sweetest people of all. Or would that sentence stand on its own because of its saccharine little qualifier and mawkish content. It is far from true of course: there is no aging gracefully. Old people are not sweet but some of the ugliest and mentally disturbed (and disturbing) creatures on gods fucked-up blue sphere. I went to shadow a doctor a week ago and got to see a nice span of white demented people. In comes the old lady and the doctor bangs her (knee) and she has a reflex and everything. She puts out her had. She has arthritis, rheumatoid and the other kind – whatever that is. Her pointer finger kinks at the end like a sling-shot twig where one of the bifurcated legs is removed so it is one misaligned stick. I just want to jump up and grab that gnarled phalange and crack it back into place. The woman is demented too. What year is it? Um… 2000 she says. Some people can’t take gore. I can. But what I find most disgusting of all is witnessing the out-of-touch blathering of a demented.
The old judge comes in wearing a tweed jacket stinking of a classical conservatism and telling jokes about it: “Well my friend says, when he talks about Ann Arbor, he calls it ‘The People’s Republic of Ann Arbor’ because it is so left wing.” The doctor and I get out the wood boards and hammers and nails and various other appliances and begrudgingly build a little smile so his joke doesn’t go straight down and plunk through the linoleum floor into the neurology clinic directly below us and kill any of the half-dead geriatrics that don’t know who they are. The man is a judge and they demoted him out of the courtroom to just review cases. Why? Because they noticed his memory wasn’t what it used to be. Tap-tap on the patella, walk, push forward and back, follow your eyes with my fingers, what is the date? Remember these three objects: red, soccer, California, count back from 7 starting from 100, draw the pentagon, write a sentence, read this and do what it says – mini-mental complete. He is not demented (>23 on the mini-mental) but he ain’t fit for seeing cases.
Yesterday went to the doctor for sleep disorders. Old red-necked man, burned hard by the sun. Big arms. Midwestern—football build. He was having a dream that some intruder was standing over him and he’d sit-up mumbling or saying “I’m gonna get you” and thrash around like a maniac often smacking his wife. Diagnosis: parasomnia, an REM sleep disorder. He cites the fact that his neighbor, with whom he’d had a dispute, opened up machine gun fire on his house. But that’s not why he was having the bad dreams.
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