June 17, 2014

Returned last night while there was still light in the sky. It was the first time 51 seemed like home. I was returning home. The Chinese kid beside me on the flight between Budapest and Munich had apparently pissed himself. Whoever else pissed himself I missed, for I slept, slept, slept, watched two movie I had seen before, slept. Oddly, I was able to go to bed at a decent time, and had amazing dreams. Circe was of course sleeping against me all night, and every time I changed position she did too, and every time she changed position a map of red light lit up in the room, as though she were an organic console you pressed to get an LED display. My bed was a whole city and I was exploring it in sleep. There was even a recorded commentary in Italian, which I understood perfectly well. It was a magical sleep all in all, for all night a mockingbird sang in my holly trees, because of the clear half moon, or maybe the streetlight. I kept thinking of Shakespeare’s “and the bird of dawning singeth all the night.”

Wrote a story in Vienna and eleven poems in Budapest. Wrote three poems in the Budapest airport.

In the waiting area in Charlotte Douglas ran across a man who’d had two lifetime memberships to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Christian amusement park in Charlotte. “I could spend two whole weeks there every year. I did so look forward to that.” Jim Bakker is apparently selling dried food now, against the rigors of the coming Apocalypse. “They say Obama was elected by the New World Order to be the dictator to force the transition. . .  They say the US is going to collapse real soon, because we’re printing too much money. . . .They say that Kennedy was the last president who wasn’t owned by the new World Order. That’s why he had to die.” Finally, not wanting to argue, or even to hear at that point, I can’t stop myself from saying, “Who’s ‘They’?”

“Oh, you know, all them people who write about the New World Order.”

So much for a culture of evidence.

Walked into Starbucks and there was 1) a cop with a gun and 2) a private citizen open carrying, in his jean shorts, t-shirt, pistol in holder at his side. Was I the only one seeing wild wet shoot-out in the making? Yes, of course cops with guns are as dangerous to the citizenry as criminals (these days) but the solution is to disarm everybody so the worst is a few bloody noses, not arm everybody to the teeth so that the first fender bender in the parking lot or an off look becomes a massacre. Hello, America.

Can barely keep my eyes open. Received a call about the emergency message system at UNCA: held the phone in my hand wondering for an instant “what the hell is UNCA?”