Soulard's Online Notebook 2003
january 2, 2003
8:27 p.m.
portland public library downtown
portland, oregon
the new year begins for me in uncertainty on the other side of the continent from where i was born...faith atop uncertainty and beneath, but within where hard to root out...but still i stumble on...
added section v, "veil," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...nocturnes go on and on...job uncertainties, everything uncertainties...things will get worse before they get better, an intuition told me beginning of year...yes, ok...here goes...
january 7, 2003
12:59 p.m.
northeast one stop job center
martin luther king, jr. blvd
portland, oregon
well, yes...hmm...this week so far jobhunting and worrying, and more of each...feeling like i'm so close to some kind of breakthrough, intuition having at the limits of knowledge and insisting there's more going on than apparent, and my task is to keep on the beam, ride on, believe, motherfucker, believe...
added section vi, "lovers," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...and for internal consistency reorganized and streamlined my files at geocities website where they are stored...so the mysteries come down to how do i crawl from this murk of money uncertainty, and what does it mean when someone loves you but you can't really figure out more than that...keep on the beam? ride on? believe? what choice? restrain but don't withdraw? yah i think so...stop asking questions? my mother once told me that advice...hold a little back is the way my friend julie sullivan put it oh about a decade ago...
january 14, 2003
12:19 p.m.
northeast one stop job center
martin luther king, jr. blvd
portland, oregon
so today i'm applying for unemployment, and food stamps, and then going to fill out a job application, and all the while thinking about leaving this whole mess for a little while, but not sure, life not sure, always fucking not sure...
added section vii, "reverence," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...yah, and what does it mean anymore, i don't know...i hear her voice cry out to me from somewhere in sleepless dark hours, saying i'm trapped, help me, don't leave me...eighteen months today ago i met her, and will she even respond to me before i leave if i do...and i dream nearly nightly of family not as they are now, but young, years and years and years ago...picking up shards of glass off the carpeted floor, my dad insistently watching sesame street...last night before sleep finished a philip k dick novel, three stigmata of palmer eldritch, about what would happen if one could breach the future and then find out that one should not have...mindtripping enough to keep my attention...i don't know how to do this anymore but here i am still doing it...my friend sean says that i can change the location of the chessboard upon which i play out my life, but i cannot ever get off the board...where to make my stand, and how...be true, i vow: how?
january 15, 2003
7:13 p.m.
portland public library-downtown branch
portland, oregon
added "carlos castaneda's don juan teachings" to psychedelic links page...i like this writer a lot, and this sampling of his work is a good one...i was reading his books around '99 especially, when i was getting into phish as well...first time i saw them, in worcester, massachusetts, november '99, i was having a great trippy rocking time, and some friends i made gave me one of castaneda's books that i spoke longingly of getting...that cold night, happy memories :)
things get more mysterious, i don't know what is going to happen next on any front, all manner of options, well a few, beckon, and i don't know what will go down, hopeful still strangely enough...who can explain the lights and shades running through the human heart?
january 23, 2003
1:58 p.m.
northeast one stop job center
martin luther king, jr. blvd
portland, oregon
added section viii, "drift," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...i'm working again, telephone surveying again, doing it well even as i get lectured nightly for lack of...lockstep mentality...fuck it, the money accumulates in dribbles, rent shall be paid, so it seems...
what else, i think mostly that when i am working in some way, i'm ok, when i slow down enough to think at leisure, walls cave in within my head...it's worst late at night, when i realize that for all the connections i'm in this room and nobody's eyes to study...yah...like that, i don't even feel i should be writing all this...loneliness is too common and difficult and who doesn't know it?
january 24, 2003
1:15 p.m.
northeast one stop job center
martin luther king, jr. blvd
portland, oregon
added section ix, "guerrilla," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...this poem began at the 30,000+ people peace demonstration in portland last saturday...the placards, the songs, the anti-war cheerleaders and marching band...and that night at coffeetime coffeehouse, deep into my entheogenic journey, it came together...later a guy told me the title word can be spelled with two r's or one but the two r version is the more radical, so i chose that one of course...
i work well at a job that sucks, biding my time for the better to happen...reading, writing, smoking late night tv dope when things get dimmest...hope chants choicelessly within, so i carry on thusly with someone's hazel eyes still my guide and wish...
february 14, 2003
11:53 a.m.
northeast one stop job center
martin luther king, jr. blvd
portland, oregon
added section x, "agape," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...it's been a long three weeks since last work on this site...muse has written twice without me gaining her feelings or intentions really, just some sort of continuance...
and this weekend, no job, out of money to continue paying rent, i have to leave portland for now...first to seattle for a few days, then las vegas...i can't explain any of this right now...tomorrow my last meaningful gesture here will be to march in peace demonstration happening in portland and worldwide against our stupid boy king's unwanted war...i don't know where next or when next this site will be updated...i just hope it remains functional...as of the 20th my email will be cenacle2k@yahoo.com...for awhile...money yikes--
february 16, 2003
4:25 p.m.
portland public library-downtown
portland, oregon
added section xi, "home," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...leaving portland, no answers...none...
nothing makes sense...nothing is truthful...goodbye portland, for now, and whatever it meant to be here...
february 27, 2003
1:23 p.m.
aurifice internet and coffeehouse
seattle, washington
added section xii, "insurrection," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...in seattle now leaving for connecticut next monday and arriving a week from now...
no more answers than last entry or ones before that for that matter...but some weird lingering hope rises up of late...and i suppose following it across the continent and back here again soon is the path to follow for now...
march 2, 2003
4:09 p.m.
aurifice internet and coffeehouse
seattle, washington
added section xiii, "nada," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...less than 24 hours left on west coast...what does one say about such a thing? i dont know...
travel on...
march 10, 2003
7:17 a.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xiv, "high," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...4 day trip across country and now settled awhile, again befre my lovely macintosh, in a friend's place...cleaning, cohering...
no idea what next but slowly, slowly...
march 11, 2003
6:08 a.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xv, "lateral," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...spent yesterday in cyberspace but what was miracle was last night when my friend i'm staying with, gerry, came home, we did some housecleaning, ate dinner, watched tv...yah, miracle, been too long lacking some simple things...
in a few days i try and more fully walk from something that's been hurting a long time...i guess i'm just readying now, living in yet another new situation...well...
march 17, 2003
1:46 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
some site cleanup today...guestbook had some stupid fake posts, got rid of them...and, sadly, de-activated the link on main page to poems by lisa marie...at this point, it seemed inappropriate to have them online here...
also on alternative links page added the united for peace & justice site...
the king's war seems about to commence, and nobody in the whole world knows what is going to happen...i'm sitting here at my friend's house in an equal sense of mystery about my own life...but new things bright and young always seem to show up at most unexpected times...
march 19, 2003
6:21 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
did some website promotion work using tools at addme.com and posted their banner to EL's main page...
also wrote to rapid axcess asking for daily visitor statistics again
eve of war...words abandon feelings at the moment...
march 24, 2003
10:24 a.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xvi, "kneel," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...a poem took a week or better to get right...i wonder about the poem's dedication & given the seeming ending of the thing how i can keep adding new poems under it...hope the answer reveals in time, soon...
the king's war proceeds more slowly than his minions in the military & sychophants in the press would have had us believe it would...and the opposition to the war, far from dissipating as many forecast, is growing in scope...the feeling is that the king is just begun in his intent to bloat his empire, and letting up now on the resistance would be sanction to his rotten-hearted goals...so we keep at it, beneath a banner of faith & fury...
march 24, 2003
10:24 a.m.
plainville, connecticut
added ZNet to alternative newslinks page, a site for peace rallying and resistance, a very good one as a matter of fact...wondering if i should be adding anti-war pieces found online to this site in addition to spiritplants.com world forum...hmm...
need a job, going ot get dressed in a few and go for one nearby, hopeful for some much-needed luck...new presences in my life, so new i'm hesitant to speak of this too much, but i think i will soon... going to include here something i posted online and elsewhere today...
******
(someone yelled at me online this morning the old saw "america, love it or leave it" and this fucking bothered me a whole lot, and led to the following thoughts...)
why is that if everyone in iraq hates saddam that the armies are fighting with all they have to defend against the americans and brits? are all of them terrified of saddam and his terror apparatus for their lives? why dont more desert or surrender? i find this odd...i've been reading about how organized and tenacious american generals say the iraqis are...there is even a tone of admiration...that slips out...good soldiers even on opposing sides are like this, acknowledge a formidable opponent...
man, this is really making me wonder if they are not so much defending saddam hussein as the autonomy of iraq...that they feel down deep that once the americans take over it is fucking done, the whole indepedent iraq thing...i dont know...these are not certain views of motives, just my observations...they are outnumbered, outgunned, and still they fight on...something is going on here, something that bastard fascist bush isnt talking about in his simplistic statements about the world...
and where is colin powell? opening shopping marts in guam? repenting his soul for all the rotten shit he did on behalf of the king? the powell doctrine of war as last means, & when used a quick-hard-in-and-out, is not happening here...i would not be surprised if powell does not in the next year or sooner resign...i can't imagine that his military sensibilities and geopolitical intelligence can abide much more of bush's sandbox view of the world....
american opinion is shifting as the war becomes...a war...as the iraqis fight on, as the flowers and welcome for american troops fail to materialize...as american soldiers are captured, as blood spills, as iraqi mothers and fathers have everything destroyed...and...for what again?
i'm just wondering if the iraqis feel, like the old saying: better the devil you know...no doubt many of them hate saddam hussein, but does george bush look like great liberator or the ol' white christian devil come to learn the infidels some bible? and maybe trade a few beads for oil?
czar w, i think you are in trouble...i think so...you've got people like me wondering what it means to be an american and concluding that it does not mean you or your policies toward US civilians or the world...thinking how things here in some ways are pretty good, and you are taking that away in the name of a war on terrorism...a war that has done no good, and makes people like me rest uneasily at night, and worry for my rights if i speak out, or go to a peace demonstration, or in any way voice my opposition to you and your policies...
you've got me thinking about how there is some good in this nation i did not see before and your rotten powermongering ways, tool-for-the-corporate-state proposals, these things are not american...you've got me feeling patriotic not because of you, but despite you...it's a weird feeling i've not had, this sense of fondness if not love for the USA, and a further one that i wish to take it back from you, and your kind...
me? proud to be an american? in many many ways, no...but i live here, and i cannot abide the vision of the nation that you and your thugs and criminal posse put forth...
i am not an enemy of this nation...and am tired of feeling like one because i oppose you...i think many are starting to feel this...as your quagmire in our nation's name drags embarrassingly on and on, i think more will...
******
april 1, 2003
1:11 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
this morning added democratic underground and buzzflash to alternative news links, thanks to my friend nitroburn up in canadia for those sites, excellent progressive unbiased news and rowdy forums...also added cognitive liberty to psychedelic links...another good site working on behalf of the resistance...
The ElectroLounge is five years old today...i've been making it while changing jobs, lovers, coasts...five years, baby...it began because of a TV ad on the sci-fi network...for a site called theglobe.com, now defunct...i don't know what doing this site does for others but for me...it gives me some sense of continuance...there are many things it is not, but i'm proud of what it is, and that though small it has and does and will keep growing...it matters somehow...
a month passed, march 2003, and the girl i loved for so long did not contact me in any way, no email, no phone calls, nothing...another bit more letting go...silence, indifference...sad more than angry...some people just do not seek happiness...i can't wish you many things, lisa marie, but i can say that i loved you as best i could, and i wish things could have been different...i don't know if you will see these words or any others of mine again, but even as i live my life, do what i must, something of me stays with you...it's yours to use or discard...now i look elsewhere, to others i am meeting and deepening with...but time in the heart does not exist...i still love many i've not seen in much longer times than you...choose life, it's never to late to do so...
april 8, 2003
2:10 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xvii, "sorrowful," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...a couple weeks in the making, the nocturnes are challenging me: what do they mean now? who are they for now? who is the soulard who writes them now in contrast to the one who's been writing them all along?
jobhunting, ha...haven't found one & befuddled what the fuck can make it work...a gas station, one of those gasmart things with soda & candy, cigarettes, a boombox blasting, stocking the cooler, many years ago did that, it appeals again...um...
new poem is riven with new presence, someone shielded from much of the rest of my life, someone for me for now, giving away a little bit in typing this, but that's all for now...
april 20, 2003
12:22 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xviii, "crippled," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...now halfway through this last, and in some ways most difficult of all, poem...this section written at constitution plaza in hartford near 4-sided stone clock tower...
just writing is enough, & the struggles to get work in a drowning economy...yet i am starting to see help wanted signs at stores...maybe it's just the warmer weather , dunno...the war goes on...different guises, different propaganda...same old shit...resist resist resist...
oh, getting my puter bitched up to Macintosh OS X...hehehe...perty perty ;)...
april 29, 2003
11:19 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xix, "careen," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting (for lisa marie)...i suppose you could call this my 39th birthday poem, or another mourning/healing poem in an unknown line of them begun...i don't know whether or not this series is still viable, still matters, is uncertain right now...
been doing online ebay record-selling with my friend burke, and some copyediting for my friend bruce at island.org...and bringing back beer bottles for nickels each with my roomie last few weeks...none of this adds to a real income...
i don't know said over and over does not begin to comprise a meaningful life...what will do so? i don't know, but i really wish to find out soon...fucking soon...
may 4, 2003
2:37 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
added franz kafka's story "the metamorphosis" to the online library, first addition in a long time and courtesy of the html program dreamweaver 4, not too hard to use...
still a struggle and then an unexpected communication...well, well...
in 1974, i began writing my journal on this day, and so today is my 29th anniversary of writing...i want it to be meaningful, and am going to in the next 9 1/2 hours figure out how...nobody good or bad can take today's significance away from me...
may 8, 2003
12:39 a.m.
plainville, connecticut
added aldous huxley's "doors of perception" and nathaniel hawthorne's "artist of the beautiful"...huxley's essay was a major 20th century statement about mescaline and culture and reality and perception, and it's lovely gorgeous prose...hawthorne's story is a fairly famous one, rightly brilliant and moving...dreamweaver program has been very helpful in posting these pieces...
near i think to getting a part-time job at a gas station, what a song and dance to get it though, unbelievable...i hope it's resolved tomorrow but who knows...all for 20 hours a week dispensing coffee and lottery tickets for the most part...eesh...
no further with someone i am adoring of but need distance from til a time if it comes at all that i can believe in it as i have and wish to again...but don't know...to believe again...don't know...well today got a bank account, my friend's borrowed bike fixed up, job interview, and helped my friend with his eBay store...and website built...it was not a lost day...o and finished tom robbins' novel still life with woodpecker...quite good...step up and on...
may 10, 2003
12:35 a.m.
plainville, connecticut
took off the dedication of 6 x 36 nocturnes, VI, #36, Lasting...it started without one, had one, now doesn't...can't seem to make art right now because of it, a block...have to be free to do my will, and to take it off, put it back, such reflect me wanting a fucking life again not beholden to yesterday's wish...can't account for tomorrow, just how it has been lately...it's been lame, suckass, and if it doesn't get better gonna go nuts...and I choose to try not to go nuts...
may 12, 2003
6:35 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xx, "bound," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting...it was a poem that like many lately came together in fragments originally, then a hard try at making it whole, nearly almost, fall back, brood, then even the hard jelly of dreams cannot obscure the dissatisfaction, and it bursts through upon waking, and finally there it is...
there was a gas station job i shot my load trying to get last week, a part-time job selling coffee and lotto for the most part...and in the end didn't get because the assholes at this little store decided they needed to finish upgrading their computers more than hiring someone...from their point of view probably reasonable...from anyone else's, wild incompetence...that disappointment, and hearing from someone i seem unable to leave behind or not, just seems to have crushed my spirit and hope...and chasing after my favorite pen, black sanford expresso medium point, and no luck...fuck it, man...i hurt lately, and i know i'm not alone in this...
i read a lot, i download music from cyberspace a lot...i write too rarely...i sleep with vicious hardness...i don't cry...sometimes near it, but there seems no point...i'm trapped by things within and without...soul's sadness, economic depression...no answers yet carrying on as though maybe they are due...yesterday i visited my friend mark, wheelchair-bound at a medical facility, victim of a stroke, and a life of misplaced hope, and i made him laugh, and he was so grateful he could hardly talk straight, and it was me, dirty and poor and pathetic, who did it...made him laugh...saved his life a little...i hadn't wanted to go see him, feeling i have nothing to offer anyone anymore, yet i did, and he laughed, and in some small way i was as healed as he for a few minutes...i need a job, universe, a way back in to the world, please help me...
may 20, 2003
4:48 a.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xxi, "yearned," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting...i suppose at some other point in my life these poems may come to mean more than spiralling confessions of sadness...i hope so, i hope i outlive the musical dirges these last nocturnes have become...
she hurt me again, her demons, the harsh thing she has become...and her aid is a new boy, a foolish one who leads with his unlearned ego and his fear's bluster...and there is no point in saying this much because it does not explain and no elaboration follows...just this: fuck those who, harmed, harm anew...really...fuck that all...
its near 5 a.m. and i have no hope save another day lurches into me when my eyes open and a piss insists i rise and stagger forth...i miss what you were, love, who you were, and she who i will never stop loving or protecting whatever has or will become of her...if this is pathetic sentiment, so be it...
may 28, 2003
12:29 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
added Information Clearing House to alternative news links...this one is a pretty good one...if 80% of Americans didn't rely only on TV for their news, sites like this would be informing them the blunt lies they are being told by a government supposed to be serving their will and interets...
this morning a dream, described as follows in an email to a friend: i was on board an airplane...it was parked on a city street...a small plane, like 10 passengers, 4 rows...or so...the pilot left us there for some reason...i found myself in the co pilot seat and a man next to me..named larry i think, familiar, a guy i knew awhile ago in appearance...he was a pilot too, or had been, kept talking about American Airlines (a real airline or used to be) and he started backing the plane up, saying it was in a bad place to take off...we backed up for miles, through woods and areas with stores...finally i and others told him to take it back to where it was...he did partway...i got worried about what real pilot would do...so i sat in the back, next to a guy wearing a short skirt, redneck rough beard...and the pilot found us, and asked what happened, but nobody talked...a cop or somebody attached a rope to the plane's nose and towed it to logan airport, we were now in boston...and we all had to get out...and the cops were everywhere...and i was deciding when i got brought in to be interrogated i would give up that guy...strangely i needed now to get back to boston from where i was, across the country...i was just worried bout my suitcases, one with me on plane, one had been checked in, one was in a parking space...i was ready to say, truthfully, i'd told the guy to not do what he was doing...and not done anything to help him...and that i'd been scared...then the phone rang...i tried to get back to dream but couldn't...
i feel chased by poverty and despair...and i am not running away so well or willingly anymore...what made life worth the effort has diminished...no muse, mostly quiet pen, and they surely go together...i'm tired, too tired, and i suppose in the end i will be caught...so soon? i don't know...
june 1, 2003
8:51 p.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xxii, "crush," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting...a pretty amazing day led into the writing of this poem...i took my weekly entheogenic journey which led me to see "matrix reloaded" at showcase cinemas in east hartford...long time loved place, recently visited again...the swamps nearby and obscure path and stream through them are very cool...somewhere during this amazing movie i let go of a ton of harsh death-aimed baggage...felt it go, and later in the restroom whatever was left, left...the poem came later, on the many buses to get back to plainville...came from notes, and the movie i saw, and tripping, and music on my cd player by Astral Projection, an Israeli goa trance band...
today has been tentative, tired, but still good, spent a couple of hours writing at nearby donutshop, long time not done that kind of thing...my journal has been going several days in a row...
she hurt me, when she turned down my love, and worse when she punished me for not simply blindly and pointlessly loving her anyway...there's more to come, i'm sure, but i told her the things i needed to say, and frankly her sheen has finally worn through...she's too much for too long now the little hustler/victim...i've had it, i don't want to be either of those...i want to live, and do the work i'm supposed to do...i'm here to help...lead, share, contribute...i want again to live a life that matters...this will come about slowly...
june 19, 2003
3:36 a.m.
plainville, connecticut
added section xxiii, "rave," of 6 x 36 nocturnes, #36, lasting...written on porch here on a moony night, israeli goa trance splitting me wider, just saw "matrix reloaded" again to rock it up more..it came deep in a journey, the rabbit hole providing and comforting and itching variously...hehe...
scriptor press, of which this site is a part, is ratcheting up...new issue of cenacle is in making, as are six new burning man 2003 books...and scriptor press sampler #2, 2000, long overdue...and my second book of poems, called resurrection, now...looking hopeful after two years in a long dimness...
two years i'm climbing out of...in a way...one never leaves anything...but i'm trying to work again, for real, and make some kind of life again...well, yah...i'm trying...
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