From DDT

[To Jan]

1. It's always interesting negotiating meaning with you. 

2. So you are saying that you have bpd?

3. I'd forgotten, maybe out of politeness, to ask you about it. Or a little out of not seeing a reason or a problem to solve. More information is better than less? 

4. Here's a sample of my ignorance on the topic: I really don't see how pd's in general are much different than symbols of the zodiak, numerological principles, or multiple-choice industrial-psych tests for HR departments. 

5. I once took a test that said I had all the disorders. What is my treatment? Maybe I should be locked up.

6. Some multipurpose drug. Of my choosing after months of chemical torture trying out different brands. Or none. What had brought all this on? 

7. Other drugs. Life. People go to shrinks when we have discomfort of mind and/or behavior. Or cops, but that's not us let's face it, not yet. Some of us come home stigmatized and traumatized by the pharmacological drug-testing spree and resulting stresses on normal life which was already fragile which is why we came in to talk about our problems. 

8. That's why I began the Institute for Talk-Therapy Apologists right down here in Chukka-Chank. Our Journal of the Institute for Talk Therapy Apologistics circulates into hundreds of libraries worldwide. We have a BS program that was first in the Lower Chanks to be approved for Common Mirror delivery while operating a motor hooptie. 

9. Another thing I like about us, even though as you say no one can ever know you, I have to grab at some likeness, like a toddler trying to distinguish myself from the wall even? --what I like about us is our tendency to make unsolicited comments. No? 

10. And for parsing out ideas/ sentences, sorting speech as one would if they were being critical in the everyday sense. 

11. The results of all that are, indeed I guess those of a personality. If you see yourself and seek to know yourself better using the template of X set of symptoms in order to better predict and watch out for unwanted tendencies, how might that process apply to my thinking about you going forward or our correspondence? I am ok knowing or not knowing the answer to that question.

12. This is all my grasping, and it's for you darling. 

To the volcano, 

Donna

PS: Oh please just indulge me: fun game. Find at least five signs of personality disorder in the text above. I can do it: 1) #1 could be taken as sarcasm/ irony though it was not meant to be so. 2) #5 Takes a stance like all politicians are corrupt, so I won't vote, you know? An abdication of responsibility disorder. Doesn't have to be all or nothing. But I've read that's a bpd thing. 3) #6 Was it really "torture"? Is that like it was devastating that their grandmother died? Self-pity disorder. Or it was really torture. 4) Same with #7: traumatized-- really? Experiences are relative to other experiences in an average schmuck's life. That's how being yelled at on a patio at a cocktail party or a pig roast can be "traumatizing." Folks show up to Shiv Days fully armed and ready to do damage for.. less? More? No reason-- that's the point. Some signs of the zodiac might be more driven toward heinous crimes. One would always hope it's passion somehow but no, much creepier. Like ignorance. Should they widen the scope of topics children encounter in public schools from an early age? Let's talk. 5) #9 & 10 cross a line into aggression-- there's little doubt now that some suppressed interpersonal issue is percolating. Life is short. Let's not let it boil. And these are not to mention the potential pathology of any number of the other statements made here, including the non-statements and especially this very exercise of picking through it all. What is that about. Ok and have to say, #7: Hopeless Circle disorder. DDT

Mostly, it's my gut that's unrested

in these rooms that once were strewn with decoration

my spirit roams between the broken lavatories

a skeleton but now a template for the future

when you're alive you use the steps and open spaces

 

they encourage exercise as part of living

and now the freshest air is in those very places

those generations haunt me just as i haunt yours

presumably a gentleman could find the door

I commit to dying out this death with meaning

and since i never sleep nor tire for lack of pep

the actions i take now will count as double duty

and doubled once again with hindsight's added wisdom

by Jan

"It's Uncle Jan, kids."

Gritty, dark

There's a basement sure, but it's gutted. To the bricks, he says. 

Soon after we bought the property my wife and I were a little drunk and decided to check out the basement with candles. We saw the ghost of a youth and a phantom locker. 

And there was the shovel. The working end was raw wood but machine sanded, tapered to the hand. 

The youth is pulling up his pants, a joint hanging from his lips, when a very tiny journalist, a friend of the family on furlough, also a ghost, enters the scene. She says she was looking for the locker. All her stuff's in there. Instead of looking down at the locker, the boy's eyes dart up to the handle end of the shovel. He thinks it looks like someone dipped it in a lake. 

And being a journalist, the other ghost follows the boy's unexpected glance up to the tip of the long wooden handle of the shovel, widened slightly for about nine inches at the end, and makes her own conclusions. She then adjusts her concentration towards creating a privacy bubble with her tiny body (although she wore a large military jacket) around and over her army locker while she rustles through it, obviously planning to leave it there in the gutted basement permanently, making that entire gutted room into her own cheap urban pied-a-terre. 

We didn't know what to say. To the ghosts. Could they see us? To each other. It wasn't threatening, but we'd never seen anything like it. 

Jan, I think that was when we started healing. You know?

You're right, it wasn't traumatizing or re-traumatizing at all. More of an affirmation. A cartoon!

To me though it was also disturbing, sad. 

I don't know. It depends on what mood I'm in. It can make me hot sometimes. 

Nope, we've never had sex down there but we know that we could. 

Witness statement (frag.)

Mr./Mrs. Jan Jansdaad

Warmpth

 lady named mary in catholic country

claimed she'd love to make me a bernaise

to compensate for the original burnt fish

sure thing, so first time i call back

restaurant closed but she answers the phone

second time she says she's not mary

by now i'm asking does she have bpd

she eventually confides that yes, it is she

just being worried that i was a salesman

although the restaurant is currently open

and got me to apologize 

for my beautiful voice and convincing manner

 

well will you at least take my card

for a piece of pie and a tip for the driver

oh no, instead i'd have to come down there

i stood in the restaurant's vestibule

watching diners eat normally

no sign of anyone who could have been mary

i get to my ottoman and my remote

and the bernaise is at least a day old

trapped in a plastic condiment cup

the fish is upside down and swollen

but somehow it's all been sanctified,

the hard-earned spoils of a free-market system

Vicky Dekalb

Not God

I defend myself as

foolheartedly as possible

for as a team I am but one

it's not like I can say

shine it, someone understands

alas that someone is still me

i'm in jeopardy

 

every time I must assert myself

it may sound like a lady's plea

but I'm as male white meat as they come

a whale and a seahorse might meet

but in my case never two in one

(two things I am not I am two things)

[from this tangle, vapor slowly rises] 

 

in what we call the orchestrations of a sociopath, 

each stuck participant

does errands in a separate maze

and the passages are everchanging

there's only One who can see all

and it isn't God

who receives our frantic offerings

by Jan

More stomping foragers

they wanted to examine 

queer lives lived loudly

recklessly selfishly

where fear is not abandoned

life comes naturally

in irony and erroneous

roads of tripping over

forward like a breaker

or cowering, ancient

stones grazing a lover

pleasure of solemn

dis-officiality, witness

duly wasted goodness

unterminality of each other

hyper-presence of dogs

dues unpaying and crazy

expending arrows meant

to bend to this universe

font of redundancy

stone won't roll smaller

or kill big here today

tomorrow's history, a

vanity, not a release of

more stomping foragers

onto a world unlearning

only to reappear there

by alternate delivery

Jan Jansdaad

Is It a Lie Type 1

 

After consistently electing states of oblivion over problem solving and positive forward movement throughout a lifetime, the subject asserts that he must not succumb to terminal illness because there's too much to live for.

Is It a Lie Type 3

The kind of exaggeration that reflects emotion attached to the subject more than the subject itself.    

Assigning blame for lost items to supernatural phenomena. 

Decision not to acknowledge intense physical pain during a chatty personal conversation.

 

Disturbances above Chang K. Chang Chank

 

The First Time I Think I Was Insane

Nope, come to think of it, there was a time before that. Ok, let's just say insane for more than a few moments, a sustained insane event. More than say 24 or 48 hours. Anyway, this was one of the times. 

There was an adult bookstore in Silverlake called Circus of Books. First off, L.A. is insane. Everything that happens outside of a building or a car is tawdry, violence, drama, the ugly spectacle of life. Except at the beach, where it's all the ugly spectacle of life, inside and out.

Circus of Books was supposed to be a great place to meet guys, and I was lonesome as hell for a man. You had to go through like these saloon doors. You'd hear them creak, and you get a blast of hot shame sure as the AC effect stepping into a supermarket out in Temecula or Palm Springs. You're supposed to stand there and look at feminine buzzers or paperbacks until there is some verbal but probably just non-verbal cues happening between you and the dream guy. You know how sex works. Even your breathing speaks volumes.

There was a guy, and we did all the steps and somehow knew to just buy some gum and then meet on the sidewalk. Well, all the real estate out there was strewn with really drunk down-and-out sex-worker dudes, so we ended up just going directly to exotic maybe persian-y and cocky hot firm gentleman's hooptie to hang out. We'd both driven there of course, so I had to follow him after we decided to go to his place, and I remember thinking as I was coming up to a bluff above his subdivision and looking out at the endless mud-colored waves of rows of honeycombed townhomes that "I will probably never find my way out of here."

I wasn't crazy yet--that fear was reasonable--except probably I was crazy before even driving on down to the Circus. The insanity was just having a smoke in the back of my head and centering himself. But wow, what a man I'd found. We wilded out on his bed--I guess it was a studio--and then I attempted to pry into his personal life. 

He was hesitant or feigned hesitancy and finally almost like I deserved it for being nosy, he says "I'm a hit man." That was like the first funny he'd made during the whole relationship, so I laughed pretty hard. But then his face turned to an open snarl. "I have a weapon, and I kill people. All over the Americas. South America, Central America, Mexico. I have a uniform. Do you want to see my uniform?" He went to the closet and pulled out a legit camo uniform, and not in a nelly way at all. With the other hand, he produces a military rifle with a sight attached. 

My eye lingers on the ceiling fan's twirling reflection in the cantilevered scope mount's rainbowy glass.

Then we had sex a second time, which I never did even at that randy age. Then the panic started setting in. All I remember is driving away and looking in the rearview mirror at the honey-colored townhomes and knowing that I would never be able to identify the guy or which of those places he lived in if I ever had to call the FBI or whatever. 

Then I called the FBI--from a payphone outside the General Hospital building, which is a hospital. I confessed to an agent--I confirmed that he was an agent--everything that had happened, and we both spoke in our deepest voices. This call ultimately went nowhere, but it seemed like I had at least completed some important action.

When I got home, I felt vulnerable. I was renting a tiny 1920's cottage up in the hills above Angeles Temple and hidden behind a 1930's six-flat and under Victorian bottlebrush trees which camouflaged the roof with furry red strands. Yet I could feel a target on my back. He had shown me the black rifle, the uniform, the telescopic lens. His car his apartment were completely anonymous in color; he himself could have been mistaken for nearly any non-white designation. I didn't even know his name. Perhaps Mario. So many Marios. 

As night fell, garish shadows rose across the 50's B-movie posters in my livingroom. I dared not turn on the lights. I climbed into bed and listened for a long time. There was some rustling, and then a snap. I carefully pulled back the sheet and stepped into the livingroom and stood invisibly still, in my briefs, holding a breath. It was completely quiet now. So I had to be extra careful taking a few more steps backwards and over to situate myself behind my overstuffed chair in the corner. There, I ducked down and waited. 

It felt great. Safe. I started to feel very sleepy. I was surprisingly generous in my lack of judgement towards how I was behaving. I gathered the courage to snap out of it and walk a little bit more confidently back to bed. When I woke up, pinkish sun permeated the same rooms that had been a scene of terror.

EPILOGUE:

For the next couple of days, I was alert and mature. I drove back and forth to work with the warm wind in my hair, accompanied by a new and easy peacefulness. There was the sense that I'd done something for my country, that perhaps I'd even earned my place in paradise. 

I was relaxing on the phone in my little dayroom on a futon chaise and found myself telling a friend about a letter I had received from the famous author Tom Clancy. It was a response to a note I had sent him on which I had drawn a large purple swastika in response to one of his many public antigay comments during those days. 

My grandfather, who'd been on the board of regents of a university, was once accused of nazism in a letter that included a swastika. It hurt his feelings deeply, so I wanted to try it on Tom. Clancy's reply was something like, 

That's not a swastika. You drew it backwards. It's a blah-blah cross representing the blah-blah band of warriors in butt-fuck blah-blah white-people land from Century blah-blah. And all those Nazis were gay. 

It was not signed, and there was no return address, but I wanted to save it anyway. I tucked it into one of the letter holes in my great aunt's desk. No one would believe that he'd written me a letter. That was the idea, I guess. He may have thought he was safe sending it so anonymously although my name and address were written by hand. It might still be valuable someday. Maybe so valuable that Clancy himself would get paranoid and want it back. Those paramilitary guys are crazy.

I was telling my friend ya, I have the letter right here. I stretched the phone cord to make it over to my desk, and there was no letter in the hole. It wasn't anywhere. The letter from Tom Clancy was gone. There had been no guests or cleaning personnel in my home. Only one night when I thought that I was being stalked by a hitman because I knew too much, was so sure that he was lurking outside my windows, but then got tired and drifted off to sleep.

Use mathematics to erase my virtue

It dawned on me that i'm a part of everybody's fantasy but my own.

In one world, the female sex had to wear special shoes.

But as a stud, how can i understand my own space 

so that i can begin to move through it with both dignity and 

self-realization? These are dim flashbacks of youth mania.

 

I can see that some of my neighbors have spent time in 

a place where they wear their caps high on their heads

and the name of that place is this place except

forty years ago. And i know because i too was there

and i'm so happy that we've mostly been replaced

Those ancients then had the good sense to move away

and because there's a college now it's more like

a coastal state populated with strangers who tolerate 

except for the neighborhoods that are full of natives 

and they hate, fight and give their lives for real estate

It's come to my attention that having washed up once

again on these landlocked crags i've swiped up the 

fragrance and taste of a man who got away and was

unaccountable before dragging back to preen and gloat 

among paintings, rugs and strange, non-war-begotten 

 

scars, puzzling visitors, mail, hours, gait, asymetry

of values, when or when not to laugh, unengageability

i judge them on these and so many other oddities

or rather studiously note the details and mix them in 

with mine until it's a snow chamber of unique flakes

Use mathematics to erase my virtue and my gains

and to count the missing tiles in the game

where stories played out before no one better than

dispassionate monitors, clerks and first responders

blinking at the will to carry on from universe to universe.

 

 

by Jan

modal parlance

modal parlance repercusses

to temporal presence

eminence to occupance

to immanence to rubble

 

yet i posit that deliberated

objectification is more probably

emolumental than confabulated

projectiles of catastrophe

 

by Tom

"I pillaged Umgungundlovu and made friends with Oda Nobunaga playing Civ V online!"

Foothills of Karir-Kesh

right after ladies' school she went raging through
the landscape
a trembling paper lampshade pressed with flowers

and came upon a wizened gentleman wearing just

bells

lolling involuntarily across the boards of an oxcart

a wintry spell was giving in to blasts of clover and

farts

he and the hideous dog lurched forward in the turf

she stood looking after them and even in the setting

sun

it seemed they'd never drop below the sharp horizon

[traditional]

Temple of Sass

 

brief testament

war really stimulates my war goddess 

my deep goodness that's feeling sour

fine drop your hemp trousers

someone's got to occupy the borderlands

keep them strong and be the first to 

cry out, or try and blend in secret witness

i mean kill, as many of the enemy as possible. 

to think of that is suddenly a thrill?

No it's the fire for freedom she moves me. 

 

by Reptily

Completion certificate

Aunt Jan has died. 

She had spent around 20 years with her vulva nearly on fire.

According to cousin Jan, there were repeated radiation sessions

and other horrors which she has detailed for us over time. 

For even longer, there was a woman who was not her partner.

For even longer, there has been a woman who had never been her partner.

We don't know if they were together in the final moment. 

Cousin Jan says aunt Jan was in excruciating pain, even while in hospice.

She also says it's a mistake to think that Man is good.

But she was talking about a totalitarian then. 

Today I had to watch another very triggering HR video about what else harassment. 

You couldn't jump to the test. You were forced to answer humiliating questions.

Some people like getting flirted with, but no people like being treated like a perp.

I spewed my filthiest most biased language at the screen as the little situations played out.

But sometimes I'm not in pain.

I'm in a female-dominated workplace where the mantra is just be flexible ok but what

the fuck is my job and how do i bill the hours? Who is my direct-report? I swear 

I will not sexually harass goddamn anyone. 

I can only return to aunt Jan's pink bare vulva.

How would she feel about a mandatory fucking sex-harassment vid? 

In her condition.

Where no man had ever been.

Do hospices require it?

Where was her lover Jan? Would they let her in? 

Like it's on fire. All the time. Even at church. 

Wait who's good who's not good it's triggering me. 

They say your employer will really appreciate your report. 

I know that for a fact to be untrue. 

It's all rigged my employer paid for this video and they are paying me to 

watch it again and again for the purpose of their own legal protection, and 

that's it. 

They don't appreciate anything. 

My employer's not even a person. 

Your god kills innocent people, or you're lying about him. 

That should be the lesson.  

by Jan

there's no we here

i includes all that i am including

aspects you surely cannot think of

when you look up my output or feed

cork, at the ports of local cacophony,

appears to take up words when i 

try and

speak

words

you, for me, includes all that you 

are excluding prospects for knowing

you better which may preclude our

ever getting together the way we 

should i mean assuming what's hidden is

way

more 

good

 

those who are not we are they, grammatically,

and it's cozy being exclusive that way

unless it, to you, means claustrophobia

and they equals the only ones who can free ya

i the parasitic twin enjoying too much of us

you and them, they

and me, I and 

you, not we

[loop]

Jan Jansdaad

All-sinners ground

Keep repeating: Now my ceiling for 

crisis is very high. Now my life is a

cathedral for mental stress-outs and 

physical breakdowns a place where they can

stretch and breath because the ceiling is so high that it creates a

micro-atmosphere, small only in comparison to our planet itself;

rain clouds may even form there, within the cupola, in August.

Now my ceiling for crisis is very high. 

each contender for the moniker will be scrutinized

drolly, with a sneer. or otherwise trod on, in 

everyday shoes.

Now my ceiling for crisis is high. 

approach much more authentically wry

contenders will be scrutinized

while i stretch, while i breathe, while i

sleep and sit and walk and stand and cry, 

but always briefly, not asking why

Now my cathedral for crisis is

filled to the brim with adjectives

with a devastated point

that doesn't even reach the picture line

even the shadow on the clock has broken

off; it colluded with rumors of crazy luck.

Now whatever time it is that's where this

temple can be found, temple of sass and

regret and malice, all-sinners ground.

by Peg

 

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