At the Dog Tower

I have begun to understand German language TV commercials and now find them almost as annoying as English language ones. Ka has the TV on in the bedroom now. We are lying in bed and she is looking for something to watch. On this channel, someone is in nature, surrounded by green. It is Peer Gynt. "Nach einem Theaterstück von Henrik Ibsen."

At the moment I'm particularly fond of Gnarls Barkley and have been watching their videos on the web about twice a day.

Today is Wednesday. Tomorrow will probably be Thursday. After that, unless something unusual happens, Friday will come, unstoppable, a pile driver, a juggernaut, like death, like birth.

Peer Gynt just left his mom sitting on top of the house. This is beautifully photographed in windy summer with grain and flowers waving in the wind. The sky was momentarily green: Peer squinting up at it having mystical experiences. Some other young people are teasing Peer from the other side of a chain link fence. Now they are beating up on him. A bald man appears that only he can see.

I was reading about Thomas Calloway today on the web, the singer of Gnarls Barkley. His songs make a lot of sense in light of his personal history. I haven't written anything as good as his songs "Crazy" or "Smiley faces." Which is OK.

Peer Gynt seems to have stolen a boat and a bride. In the next scene, she's topless and they're drinking champagne. She has lovely red hair. He has a tattoo on his shoulder. She's saying he's crazy because he keeps talking about the devil. Suddenly he plunges into the tall grass and gets back into the boat. He whoops with the feigned joy of a talented actor. The sun shines through the trees, not acting. The sky is white and blue. Geese fly and honk. Lying on the grass next to her, the redhead says to Peer's mom: "Tell me about him. Everything."

I was thinking this morning as I was riding to work that I would write something if I were not riding to work. I was buzzed by the first rush of caffeine, one and a half cups of coffee, the mind riding atop the body like a monkey riding atop the head of a mountain sheep. I was wanting to write about something that I only think about as I ride to work. Certainly tomorrow morning I will remember what it is again. But I will not write it down because I will be riding on the 12A bus.

OK, I remember it now. It was about one of the bus stops. I get off at the bus stop called Siebenbrunnengasse, Seven Springs Avenue, but the one that perplexes me is the bus stop called Am Hundsturm, which I think means "At the Dog Tower." There is no tower visible there, only apartment buildings and shops. I wonder why the place is called At the Dog Tower. It wasn't even that I really wanted to write anything about it. I'm not sure what I would say about it. What would one say about something like that? I'm not sure why I write. I rarely do it anymore. I'm not sure if that's true or not. The other night I was thinking about writing as throwing a dust of words over the landscape. Now I think it's also a way to tame things; to get a kind of control over things. If I can describe them, if I can pin them down, they can't hurt me. Of course that is an illusion. But it probably helps to think things through.

Ka is asleep now and Peer is being tormented by some possibly supernatural people inside a barge. Now he's hearing a disembodied voice and screaming back at it. Ka just woke up from the noise and turned the TV off with the remote. The screen is blue, I have to get up and turn off the set myself.

Back in the captain's chair, from which I pilot this universe into ever more complex uncharted waters. Sometimes I dream of a settlement built on the water, always a little different, I ride across it on boats. Now, deep in the night, cars are driving by on the Gürtel, the beltway road around downtown Vienna. Perhaps the drivers are thinking of other things, living in their own worlds while driving in this one, remembering riding on their fathers' shoulders while driving at night in a present whose complexities mount up in tangled layers, one humming cable at a time.

The letters I'm writing don't look like anything else, or, to put it another way, they do; but they keep on being deployed, disposed, inlaid and outlaid across the green sky of a new mind; or, to put it differently, each bird sings its own tune, unstoppable for as long as it continues, and when you put them all together, they are the tuning up of a great orchestra, too beautiful for the mind to see.