PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE
FOR THE UNREASONING RECORD
(an underground diary)sunday, 9 a.m.
I slept my sleep entirely on the recliner in the livingroom, covered by a small, square, red, pink, & crocheted blanket from chin to knees. The blanket smells like Charlie, & he's an old, unwashed spaniel; wind-chill at 40-below outside in the streets, any warmth has sacrifices & conditions. This house is not well-insulated, nor is the furnace capable beyond normal environment. I received the first gas-shut-off notice yesterday. Economically, it's a normal winter, I'm broke bad. I'm some hopping silhouette of a serf in a snowy field under January moonlight trying to keep his blood unfroze, trying to break the ice in his veins, trying to retain the flow into his head. Jumping & shivering, alone in Arctic blast, he eventually considers deeply visions of slow death by Winter's elemental scenario; cold, slowed echoes of final breaths as blue dawn spreads across the tundra, iced eyes locked at atmosphere & hallucinations; he jumps higher, tightens his arms around himself. Torture becomes dance, a play-time leap into objective drama. Air cold enough to freeze the molecules of ghosts into present existence, transpositional evidence the dead move thru Life again.
Too many humans make too much money in the Utilities industry. They are demons defending the Devil, they are coldly & exactly logical, need rate-hikes as populations chill & some perish year after year it's modern horror, serious cash. Do I think heat grows on trees? Imagine the infrastructure, the inventions & discoveries, & is one hundred dollars a month unreasonable for the human conquest over extreme weather? Imagine one hundred years ago! Instant, automatic heat is a technological miracle!
I woke on the recliner a little while ago. Peering thru the kitchen window, a sunny, clear morning lights all the snow. I can tell by the car's windows it's very cold out there. Possibly zero. Mankind will never out-maneuver global warming or global cooling unless more money is directed for technology. Humans are survivors? Earth is our home? Science, Eternity?
I am not an optimist.
I feel sheepishly guilty for so many things I have done.
I am innocent.
I don't want the Existentialists to fall into History like thrown stones in a deep lake.
I'm a Situationalist. I am because of so many other people, because of place & environment. I think because of thoughts & constructs & psychologies, because of feelings & emotions. My dreams are partial reality, partial fantasy & brain-juice, because of dreams.
Diane has beautifully softened. She does not realize ramifications of living with a Situationalist, nor is she cognitive of the fact SHE is a Situationalist also. She believes she's psychic. Most of her dreams have meanings, are premonitions as actual events materialize into future days; I tend to see it as logic unraveled, as true brain realization unleashed from irritation in consciousness. Diane's dreams make sense, I frequently see why she dreamed this or that, what it means in immediate psychology, situationally relevant things & people play in the movie of her mind. At the same time, I trust her pre-cognitive energy, her because of soul. I loved Diane's fragility as a younger woman, but by now she's walled it all up pretty much, she's able to toughen like a foundry-worker. I love her when she's open, when she isn't mutating my caring into a perception of control. She slept on the couch beside my recliner under a long, golden, double-folded blanket.
noon
If I believed the weather was so cold this morning, I was probably wrong; snow is melting off the roof, I hear clumps slide & shift over the shingles. I hear occasional drips. The sun thru the sink-window felt hot, closer, no obtrusive clouds but thin blue air. It seems incredible we feel the sun as such an immediate response from its flaring fact, over light-year distances. We really are such Space creatures in a slice, a tiny bit, of Time. We really are human, the species of failure, of lurching, of dreams, suppositions, aggravation; the species of triangularity quadrupled thru quantum multiplications into Spiritual Equations equaling zero & nothing ever equals zero in the Real World of an American, blue-collar, industrial worker in the throes of financial crisis & continuing ruin. There is minus as we sink down into Hell, levels of Poverty Dante prophesied significant metaphorically at the turn of the Millennium according to a feeble excuse for a calender, man's boxes of days & decades & centuries. Squaring of Time from Zen Manifestations weaken American Spirits. The courses of actualization vein thru our dreams, our unlocked, less-bridled dramas. The mind is a woven voice, a speaking construction, a visual echo, the reducer of chaotic sensation & primal, volcanic urges. The mind always tries for balance, for answer, for reduction, for explanation, for better dreams remembered, for tranquility, for the depths that surface thru the onion-layered, tree-ringed events of the mind's experiences in Life, the live mind in a currently-fleshed skull living on the surface of Earth in Space. Astronomical movements, & it snows.
Dealing with Winter in Erie, Pennsylvania is a yearly, grand adventure & challenge. "He braved the cold." Driving thru fender-high blizzard-drift snow in an old Japanese rear-wheel-drive sport's-car, driving up hills of pure ice. Fish-tailing thru a white-out while passing a semi on Interstate 79. Creeping & wagging thru stop-signs, fearing stopping is immediately impossible; that's the way we become driving, dangerous. "It's too dangerous to drive." We drive regardless thru the situation. We transfer ourselves to work, to be there, to work & function. Nothing is a quick, tropical run to the store.
We're slowed, but persevere, trudge, shoulder huge spatial drops in temperature pouring down from the Northern Pole across the Great Lakes of America. Some journeys are worthy of heroics exemplified by a reached destination, & then returning, safely. Bundling up with coffee & television. We subtract movement, & dream more transference.
I've built snowmen. Snow-angels, swoop slow, a gentle fight against gravity.
A required fight with Nature. Confrontation because.
I've shoveled tons of white stuff in my lifetime.
I've worked my way thru icy lies.
Situationalism is pyramidal, is like scaling a snowflake with one's broken teeth.
monday, 3 p.m.
Black dream sleep. I wake like a one-side-burnt, one-side-raw, flipped pancake. There is no mail today. No school, although Doug's next-door playing with Adam, & Rachel is at a movie with Missy & Dan, & Diane won't return from work until 5:30. I prepare a pipe after fixing coffee, smoke while dumping on the toilet.
We were handed our W-2's last night. I teased Judy there was a bonus-check in the envelope.
"Yeah, right, that'll never happen," was her first response. She is unfortunately very correct.
The Company is not happy with me because I refuse to work at their kamikaze pace of production.
"Quit," the Company Doktor told me. "Your wrists & hands are being damaged."
I still resent & despise that creepy Specialist paid-off by the Company like a Nazi.
Management acts in state of constant non-satisfaction. Sour, juicy with job-loss threats, they herd us 4 operators into a conference room, graciously present us with a box of donuts. The Director of Manufacturing is heartless & bristles, demonized, he points at numbers signifying the Company's $193,000 loss last year because of the "manufacturing variable", our inability to attain numbers they deem reasonable.
Psycho Steve cldn't hold back when questioned how "they" cld help us.
Me, & Jim, & Adrian sat quietly like the embittered zombies they've created & probably actually want. I ended up covering my mouth near the end to hide my bullshit smile, grabbed another donut before we were allowed to depart.
The fate of the Company is in our hands. I slowed down last night.
"75% is not ACCEPTABLE!" Barry shouted.
I ran about 65%. There are many steps involved on the 100-ton #1, & carelessness can easily snowball into disaster. I cannot work at break-neck speed any longer, it feels foolish. All the machinery is old & poorly-maintained, & so many people get hurt. It's the Company's process, it's the Company's equipment, it's the Company's hateful game.
It's a militarization in times of crisis. It's a backward Company.
I grunt. I react. I think because I am more than my body. I am more than a Company Employee. Obviously, most of the office-boys feel the same way too; & the strait-jacketed engineers, & some of the supervisors.
I do the best I can in a format of Sanity. Do I sound Sane?
Suddenly, I notice out the picture-window, it's snowing hard.
Looks like Northern wind over the Lake.
tuesday, 6 p.m.
Listening to Vic Chesnutt's "About to Choke" cassette that Hartenbach sent me, & I'm struck by Chesnutt's poetics & melodies. Somebody informed me there is much information on the Internet dealing with him, & I'd love to know things about this fine songwriter.
Information, ultimately, is all periphery.
Poem is always more than Poet, & Song more than Singer.
Art supersedes Situationalism as much as Spirituality hearts God.
It has reached 36 degrees this evening, with temperatures predicted to rise into the 50's tomorrow! Earth is an orbiting Orb spinning, & weather is catch-up, results we're faced with, under space-view clouds; Mars is expected to be examined by a robot-probe this July, a piece of Humankind is shooting for the Red Planet even as I write this. It's more necessary & urgent that it snows at all than it's snowing, or not. Pre-physics. Precognition & apperception. It ain't the knowing, it's the surprise to even realize knowledge. I crave laughing hysterical, insane with exploded futility humor. I want to be nuts with euphoric swooning!
Vic Chesnutt, you be the goddamn man!
wednesday, 6 p.m.
Nothing happening besides continuation: sure, most of the snow has melted away, but the forecast for tomorrow is snow. I've signed up for overtime Friday night because cash is so imperative.
WOODEN HEAD REVIEW #5 has arrived. Hartenbach's literary magazine is one of the best being produced these days in the basic, grass-roots, world; unpretentious, real, vital, following the underground tradition of creation & originality. Few have the required heart for such an endeavor, less & less now with the omnipresence of the Computer & fuck paper & staples & simple type. Mark is a pure man. He knows personal Honor. He is a Poetry Priest.
saturday, 8 a.m.
Every cent I worked last night at time & a half goes to paying debt. As much as there is Constant Change thru Eons, so is there Constant Debt. I am eternally in the hole.
Much more delicious holes to be in.
Speaking of which, I'm hairy again, beginning of my beard past the itch-stage.
3:30
Recliner sleep again. Hoarded little blanket & a package of chocolate grahams watching TERMINATOR 2 video on tv. About 5 hours of black sleep, & I woke disoriented, uneasy, like grumbling from a forgotten dream, like slowly remembering consciousness & situation, my mind's place.
I came to when I saw & heard a newscaster inform the sports-public Mike Ditka will be head-coach of New Orleans. I didn't think Ditka wld return to coaching. Odd surprise.
thursday, 1:30 p.m.
I am planning on calling off work tonight, use a precious vacation day. Two weeks of overtime is enough for my soul to withstand & stay in one piece. A good, restful, 3-day weekend sounds too good to postpone. If only I had money rather than a paid debt. I deserve at least a break, a breather from the shop & all the intensity & futility & madness. Cross-section of Erie County factory-worker citizens, 93 slaves making just enough money for our financial reality to be as fucked as the common man, blatantly fucked by the Company. Everybody is nuts.
Everybody realizes the place is really very fucked up. Feels like a bumpy, jumpy ride in a prop-plane 8 hours every night, & nobody knows where we are, how high, how low, radar fizzling fire out cracked lens, radio out, it's an accelerating nose-dive circus-carousel, all the deathly screaming, hysterical laughter tailed by tone of fear, crashing pianos into mountains, cymbals big as suns reverb hot metal & sand into glowing glass cracking, choking engine choked on combustible fumes, oh fuck we're sure to explode here soon, eventually.
In the meantime, I need a mind-melt.
saturday, 2:35 p.m.
Lenny Bov‚ is going to watch his brand-new video, "Cock-suckers & Butt-fuckers" in Belmont, California this afternoon. It's 11:35 a.m. there now & his wife is gone until evening. "Yeah," he repeats the title to me 2,500 miles away, & he's in the throes of stoned giggling, "as soon as we get off the phone..."
"Ok, Lenny, I'll let ya go," I say.
That was a few moments ago.
sunday, 1:00 p.m.
Chilled, bleak day. Unsure how Diane & I ended up in another verbal heartbreak scene. Same arguments, same shit. I do not want to write about it.