Terminal, with Scarves

d 3/16 '86

Aboard a plane the shape of a child's wading pool.

Redundant pilots, comfortable in the undercarriage, their expert switch clicking ability on full display, ease the craft into a gradual descent.



On the speakers, they tell the passengers to 'return to your seats, if you wish… it would be a good idea… it's the safest thing… most likely…

We'll be landing soon, ladies and gentlemans'.



An enormous swimming pool, built into the main deck, and exposed to the passing clouds, disgorges its remnant of care freed slow pokes.

The deck's plastic surface is pleated and regularly punctuated with rubber buttons like dozens of stewardesses (actually absent) had dropped their pillbox hats in game board symmetries.

“Pas...” (passengers?), a never was recommendation or reiteration on the intercom falters, unfinished, leaving a note of menace.


Leaning over the edge of the parapet, the inflated rim, you can't see why anyone would risk a dance along the wing.

A couple turn from the distant door, heading back into the plane's body. A brief reconnoiter?

Some girl splops her leg out of the pool water.





The balloon like craft, without landing gear, touches down on the broad plaza with a nearly imperceptible pat under our feet.

We walk along the set gravel, hardly noticing the girl in the bone bikini.

Someone is failing to spot their native wife, who is holding up a (misapplied?) paper sign saying, RECOIL, instead of the 'here I am' of a proper name, (usually the arriving party's), as if it's a dire stage direction or a recommendation against union, a warning of future (if not currently concealed) repulsiveness.


Passing a row of costumed 'barbarians' in search of a convention. Their heights and widths mismatched, too motley to summon any notions of brute strength or singular heroism.

It is likewise odd how most of them stay together  like a brood of chicken poults gawping at the normal passersby as if the over all broadcast perspiration might whisk their wispy 'feathers'  into the vortex of the humdrum.


Fortunately, there's a sort of magazine shelf jammed into a nearby tiled wall, and you think to avoid them—their talking or their notice—by picking up what is left of an old issue of POSS'M magazine.

As you awkwardly feign interest in photo after photo of opossums, one of the aforesaid group, in a ratty wig and sandals, who fancies himself 'streetwise', interrupts.

“Hey, man! Gimme some money… … … for sandals.”

“You've got sandals.”


From the corner of your eye, (to the left of the now  surly hemi-Hyperborean), the native girl with the RECOIL sign has reappeared.

You look at a wristwatch you don't have. “It's time to go.”

(Half past a monkey's ass. Or ten 'til a chinchilla, it's time to go).

And you take the magazine, just in case you don't have it.



As you turn toward a less trafficked branch of wide hallway, a woeful looking donkey marionette with furrowed brows and baggy eyes staggers wonkily about, piping, 'Oh, my ticket, where's my ticket, my ticket?!?'.

And collapses prone, into a wooden puddle.

Two nasty, delinquent 'kids' looming over a rail above, dropping the strings, laugh at him… at you... at all of us.






Wandering, half searching, down a wider unpopulated hall.

A tall guard with a brimless hat, a small, low nose and bushy eyebrows on a standard face radiates > stop your ticket < without pauses of speech to feel other than that the whole of your right to free travel will cease forever.

“… no...[  native wife  ]...she's...gone...” As if you ever had 'her ticket', (though like with a bus station's, no one's name is on them), you worry you will have to present yours as hers.

Moving as if you won't be or aren't able to find it: “...wasn't expecting you so soon...”.

It would seem the guard could get angrier, but the one nameless ticket satisfies him. And you move on, with relief.


The long line on the escalator is blocked from getting off at the top by a herd of sawhorse barriers.

You imagine going around, up one side of the handrail medians, then down another, realizing they are not real, but rubber; then lost at the bottom, the middle of nowhere.

Roused, you see that the line can move ahead now, the steps meshing as they should, like oversized barber snips.

Ahead of you, an old lady swathed in sheer yellow scarves, is falling asleep standing.

The trailing ends of her excessive garb catch in the disappearing steps, dragging her along under the rim of the escalator, compressing her flesh like a soggy catalog. How can she flatten out so?

“Ooh, she boke a brone...”, that you've misspoken eclipsed by the rending resound of overdue cracking and popping.

As people have to step over, you wonder if she will return on the next go 'round, barring any further unfortunate tangles.

[This one would seem to most obviously present themes of drifting and avoidance, not an uncommon or unfamiliar part of my waking life. Any readers might like to bear in mind that I was asleep when it unfurled, and the same demands for involvement in others as could apply when awake are slowed and muted, if not altogether unnecessary. And you or I could also ask, just what is being avoided, and is it worthwhile in the first place?].

Please close tray tables for infinite regression...

No credits poss-ible.

  

A horse, but it's close. ~ by Bil Baird 

And she comes out here...

See also:
http://phantomologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/phantom-of-escalator.html
http://simpsonstappedout.wikia.com/wiki/Escalator_To_Nowhere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC_se2zrmLM  ('unending')

The Case of the Withering Weatherman

d 7/9 '87

       Various packages come all at once. I spread them on the floor of the den where B. is ironing. One of them isn't mine, a coffee table book, an anthology of artwork. The pages are bumpy white vinyl, but their adhesion doesn't harm the art. Securely slide the book into a vertical cryonic freezer, into the niche meant for someone else's body, hoping it will be safe from the owners.

      Broad yard a ways from some house, at parked car. Man backs out, such that his face cannot be seen, so I may enter the car through the left rear door he holds open. Once entered, the back seat area simulta-neously emerges into a canvas tent set up on the same lot. Our special meeting room. Though light is discernible about the flap, no one exits that way except it's being the same car door. Am relatively early.   
      We'll need at least, or there are only, five chairs. I see and pick up to move Got-out-for-me's dark flippers, blocking one of the seats, just as he enters, but he doesn't mind. The others are leaving the house, on their way here, we can both sense. "It's my turn to get the food."

      Now, heading back to the house, I see it's like a concessions 'shack' at a drive-in. The counter girl gives me half a plastic straw in half a paper wrapper. Finger it as she busies back 'n' fore, wondering how safe it is, how germy. Should I use it anyway, just because it's anomalous? Ask for another, which tho' sealed is wet throo on one end. And did I see teeth marks? Ask her about it. She says her cousin used it, but just played with it. "Guess I'd better not use." Walk away, then remember the food. 'Oh, yeah, I'd like a burger, (and so on ...the others' stuff)'.
      Carrying the takeout amidst a claque of other patrons, diner regulars enthusing about 'the Partch anthology'. I stop myself revealing that I just hid someone's copy of it in their cryonic freezer. A weird old wife interrupts them with irrelevant and obvious comments.

      In the now restaurant foyer, I try to explain how I want to do my art work. "And you'll do it, too," concludes the local weatherman of decades, extending his hand. To try and concur with this strange familiarity, I take it, but his fingers become twisted as we shake. His face contorts, and he dies, his soul departed. As some of the others cover him, I 'return' toward the kitchen, passing a vestibule where a television is already playing comments to the press of the previous old wife, how she 'was there when it happened', et cetera.


      Turn to go back out the same way, but now a wedding is taking place in the large foyer, confusing the way out. However, I can walk between the bride and groom, unnoticed, as a nonvisible alien, five feet tall, bald, dark eyed, uniting with my preincarnate self (says only this dream).

      Exit onto a broad plain bisected by a massive queue of red lit human souls who can only see the backs of those ahead of them, all advancing in the same direction, away from the material world, to they know not what--as yet for some, for others a long wait.
      I wander. Try to call for help from a Burt Young type in front of me, but if you speak it is garbled; if you just think it forth you can be heard to whatever degree.

      Am waking. Know that i could be helped out of here with the right assistance. Am I dead? [4:45 a.m.]

      In my thoughts, aliens say no one here will help me because i was once one of them, an alien, in a previous life so the other humans don't think I need it --- they dully 'sense' I am not serious. I could get out anytime. This interim zone is free to go on occurring without me.
      And of my usual dilemmas? They claim they foresaw such a wide gap would be between me and them, the aliens, in this life. I think, 'don't push it, (fuckers)', but they're more or less smug about foreseeing my hostility, too. Yeah, right.

      My thoughts become lighter and more intelligible. 'Recalling' the opening of this dream, I find today 'The Kinder Kids' by Lionel Feininger in our local library.

 [I never dream these sorts of 'alien connections'. I'm not close minded about people who do, or claim they do. But, in my opinion, 'the Greys' can take a flying fuck at the moon for all I care. None of that crop of stuff has personally involved me in any form or fashion, and it's fine with me if it stays that way forever. To my mind, they're just (generally) unseen and archaic progenitors of suffering, in a somewhat acceptable, bug eyed, 1950ish guise, however photonically or psychologically generated. Like stink on a cracker. This epithet does not constitute a new racism. I speak only of any beings causing pain to others. Not as a collective. If they're materially as real as we are (whatever that is), so much the worse for them].

Burt Young

Lil Tiny Comics #2, (crop) c. 1980 Rick Veitch ~ Heavy Metal, August.

This collection was a long time coming. Fantagraphics (2013)

   

Mr. Patchpaste & Curly Fry

d 9/15 '011 Th

Two 'long neglected' otherworld helpers i am seeing for the first time ---

In the white background to the right, Mr. Patchpaste, dancing, long time dancing, always 'on', straining to attract his due attention. His body is white paste, patched in places like an old pair of pants. He wears black polished leather 'Sunday' shoes which repeatedly toe the floor. He needs to be (on waking, i do so in my mind) taken aside to rest at times.

Almost life size buffalo with golden polyfur & flat plastic, red 'cried out' eyes: he would show us all what he Sees, were he ever 'tended to'. Dub 'Curly Fry', on waking...pet, feed imagined nuggets from my hand.

[These sorts of characters will infrequently appear, usually only once, and fulsomely enough to become drawings at whatever point. Tho I tend to prefer letting them be, as the more loosely bounded figures of my insides. Perhaps, if unrendered, they'll reappear some night, or make their usefulness known beyond the initial morning and subsequent notes as the more open ended representatives of my personality they at first seem.

It's interesting that the one figure straining for attention needs a rest from it, while the other needs more. But both are undernourished].

  Pasty Pup  1964   

'wool' like Denali in 'Gumby'

A belated introduction...

A lot bigger task for someone else to write it all down after he's dead.