Jesus, Rajiv, what the hell did we smoke? I put too much vodka in the ghetto blasters, the whole tapering cone-part of two Gatorade bottles apiece. Before the show even starts I wander heedlessly into the ladies’ room—hey, where’d all the urinals go? “The elsewhere is the region of space-time that does not lie in the future or the past light cones of P,” wrote Hawking, way back in ‘88. Where P is the poem. Poetry is not a project, but every poem is a pastiche or commentary, a hustle or con. Bolaño thought poets shaded over into cops and pimps. For Tom Cruise, acting flirts with preaching, where the preacher is the one who has lost—lost mightily—and lived to tell the tale. He lost Goose, and he lost the egg. He lost the Rain Man. But is he himself crazy-gone? He laughs his maniacal laugh at the notion that we’d consult a movie to find out.
Frisson of someone acting inappropriate on a plane. Super-spy Cruise rolls up on beautiful trannie Cameron Diaz. Her tropical fantasy involves Cape Horn, he keeps repeating the place-name and what do we hear? Say it five times fast. “I should’ve been a fireman.” Her cherry GTO. He’s after a hand-held perpetual energy source—apparently to save the American auto industry it will be necessary to violate the laws of thermodynamics. Diaz memorizes the version of events he gives her, before she’s knocked out, to prepare for the lies—“disinformation protocols”—her captors will be sure to try. I’m like her in that, even though I don’t remember the movie, it’s inside me, it breeds in the shadows with that poem projected throughout my consciousness that for convenience’s sake I’ll call Tom Cruise. Eyes wide shut. I want the truth/You can’t handle the truth! The outpost of ambiguity, even then, was Guantanamo Bay.
Sarsgaard, I love that your wife told Us how Gorilla Coffee once refused to lend you a sleeve of cups. In my drunken notes: “The battery is modernism”—huh? Aging, we get serious. Show me the money. The squibs fire before anyone touches a gun. Windmill high-fives all around. Could one use a person as a time machine? Would one?
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