.

The weather tiptoes a sterile path

From dusty chalk to blinding sheen

But you would not know it

Trespassing

.

On the plastic grass

So professionally smattered in

Perfect emulation of

What’s come before like an

Ant farm terrarium,

.

The sun paralyzed and

Spat back on the windows 700

Feet off the field and

The stands are empty while we

Postulate on improvements.

This isn’t something I’m going to make too emphatic of a case about because with me being a guy it’s not REALLY any of my business, but I thought a word or two on the issue might be appropriate toward providing a sociological perspective on our current time and also alleviating what I see as some unnecessary psychological strain and tension.

So as many of you know along with the “Me Too” movement, which I guess was like making the outrageous claim that you shouldn’t rape people, or something along those lines, there’s also been a “Body Positive” movement, which, I guess you could call a feminist movement although it’s presumably meant to apply to all women regardless of political stance. And we’ve seen naked fat people. And we’ve seen endless Facebook posts which seem to be like setting up a straw man that condemned women for their bodies, when probably 999 times out of 1,000 men want attractive women to be wearing less clothing than they are.

I mean, I just feel like women indiscriminately liking their own bodies in this day and age and acting like they can do no naked wrong might be more trouble than it’s worth. I’ve made the point, I know, numerous times, on at least my music Dolby Disaster, that, basically, since the sociological demolition of abstract expressionism, the female body basically IS the sum total of “visual art” in our society, from MTV and Madonna in the coned bra, to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, etc. And I don’t think this is really anyone’s fault in particular — if anything, men are probably more to blame than women for this being the case.

But I think this “body positive” movement confuses freedom with just the fear that we’re human. Being human, it’s actually likelier than you might think that people manifest instincts to cover their bodies, so that they can assimilate to society and not be a distraction. It could actually be an intrinsic motive that women wield psychologically. Billie Eilish, for one, made the hilarious comment that she always covers her “big a** boobs,” adding that “I was born with boobs, bro.” Certainly, I think, we can all agree that she’s got a pretty heady view of the world, in terms of art and fashion, and where she fits into it. I had this other women who was a boss of mine at this restaurant who was highly attractive but would always wear loose clothing, hence, I think, maintaining a successful professional relationship with her employees. She was an individual who was busty and I’ve heard other girls say “they have a love/hate relationship with their boobs” (Facebook can be incredibly informative sometimes), but it might be as simple as knowing when to flaunt and when to conceal. If feminism is truly to work toward equality and “blur the gender lines,” as it’s advertised, then maybe an impetus to hide one’s female bodily distinctions could just be part of the natural progression of our basic motives as a society.

To develop and wield an ego

Is to rationalize,

To

.

Make rational your current situation

Of life on earth as a human being.

.

Without this rationalized explanation

Of your predicament,

Your thoughts, your feelings and your

Conceptions of this vituperative reality,

.

You would be

Crushed under the constant malady of

Your conception of your own

Mortality and futility.

I’ve become obsessed with process. I think it just comes from creating so many things over the years — from poems, to blog posts, to what ever the everyday things might be that men create.

The pinnacle of the feeling comes at the beginning of the creation process, when I get an idea. From there, I have an internal, unhindered view of what seems like the potential for an explosion of progress — I’m existing on an entirely different plane entirely from the rest of the world and what manifests is bound to be an ingenuous, original plaint of some sort.

And just think about this phenomenon as it pertains to football. I’m a Michigan fan, so you might say I’m doing a little “soul searching” right now, with our team being 1-2, and having fallen for one to Michigan St., a group of especially loose-tongued Michigan haters.

But think about how football began. Was it with a win? Was it with a championship? Was it with Paul Finebaum cajoling your favorite team on ESPN?

No — it was an idea. The idea, by scraps, grew into a concept. The concept, then, rested on practice, the process of perfecting, or rather manifesting in physical form, the idea. In this way, the “process” behind the end result is in a sense a purer facet of the enterprise than an inevitable result — a championship, award or what have you.

After all, if one team is winning, who’s to decide that it’s time to end the game? The length of the game is completely arbitrary.

We get caught up in results. We want a promotion. But what of the guy who wanted that same promotion and missed it by a hair? We want our son or daughter to be valedictorian. But what of all the other parents wanting the same thing and the limited number of spots on the ceremony floor?

And we want our football teams to win conference championship, to defeat their rivals (all three of them, if you’re like Michigan and tend to be in the spotlight quite often), but who defines when the game ends? And when you look at the Mona Lisa, is that the last moment of your life, for her to sovereignly allot where and in what moral stature you’ll rest for all of eternity? No — looking at the Mona Lisa makes you more alive than you were before. This is exactly why it affects as art.

Look, results are great. We all love rings and trophies — the championship game is usually the most exciting game of the season and it’s the champions that make the most noise in the realm of history.

But you play because you love the game. The championship is the goal but the exact motive driving you into this way of life, this grueling schedule of repetitions, workouts and playbook-memorizing, is the process. It’s the feeling of putting those cleats on and gathering speed like a freight train, it’s gripping that leather ball against your gloves like it’s your last possession, it’s looking to the side of you and seeing 10 guys with the same jersey on as you, the lights and cameras even, themselves, more alive already, as a result of your presence.

Herman Edwards once said that, “You play to win the game.” That may be true, but that result of winning, sitting there with the trophy, the accolades and your name in the newspaper in huge print, looks back in astonishment down a mighty big hill, at the process that got it there.

Art is the systematic manifestation

Of internally conversing, cerebrally sequenced

Mimeses which

Together

.

Act as

Replacements for the

Nurturing secretions from the

World or the mind

.

Which would harbor an environment

For transcendence or

Procreation.

There are times in life

When I’m literally loath

Before the idea of

Doing the right thing

.

And though that might seem a little extreme

And perhaps misanthropic,

It’s an inkling I have nonetheless because

.

A being which always does the right thing

Is essentially dead — it bespeaks automation

And a robotic mentality

To never explore the decadent realm

Of fu**ing up and especially,

.

What a malady it would be

If we were all immortal, if

We were wedged eternally

In this life, doing right and

Hugging the median

On the railroad tracks.

We’re inundated with so many stories of heartbreak,

Of girls doing guys wrong and

The world just being an unfair place

For reasons along these lines,

.

So it’s funny to sometimes see the

Reverse side of this phenomenon,

A guy so draped over, gawking over a

Girl, so self-centered in his commentary and so

Bland with his

.

Vulgar “love” and ardor,

That a “heartbreak” coming along

Seems like something rendered more like a

“Correction,” as it to kick him in the butt and say,

“Hey sport, you’re alone like the rest of us,

Learn how to live, and make it snappy.”

The writings on all of the buildings had even started to seem like lies. It was to the point where everybody wanted change. You always want change. You just don’t want results from it, like that feeling of euphoria in looking down and seeing that your leg has just got hacked off by a chainsaw.

The floods had dissipated, the polar vortexes receded, and we’d had a fairly pleasant if slightly uneventful summer. Men had sat in bars on the south side as basketball season traipsed through August, armed to the teeth with knowledge on who the best player from every town in Indiana was. Football season started a month later like an underdog thud, like a dog barking from down inside a well, and with glazed eyes we avoided sight of each other and went about our business.

Eventually, the yellow leaves started popping up, and my friend Chloe asked me if I wanted to go to the restaurant that was haunted — like go to the top floor and play it off like we were just getting a beer but actually go into the bathroom where they said were ghosts flying around and sh**. I said sure, kind of reluctantly. It hadn’t exactly been the most eventful year and staring at bartender’s bodies sure gets boring when they’re all wearing masks.

I met Chloe there after work, then, one Friday night, which seemed to be the instinctive night we both sought the supernatural, having grown up on Nickelodeon, which seemed to always unleash its most eccentric, Dionysian viewing material on this particular night of the week. I was in my clothes from work, a Dismemberment Plan t shirt and some chef pants, and Chloe was in this big, ugly, pink and frilly shirt, a leather jacket and a white top hat, with jeans. We certainly looked like a couple of… well… losers. We looked like two people who’d just fallen out of the sky and landed in someone’s attic, to there select all our clothing.

The bartender, male, kept asking if we wanted a food menu. We kept cheerfully declining. I had a tall Sam Adams in front of me so I wasn’t getting too antsy. Some nights I didn’t get hungry until like 1 am and Wendy’s was always still open, so I wasn’t worried about anything, I was just checking some football scores and stuff.

“When do you wanna do this?” Chloe asked.

“What?” I answered. “Get married?”

“Yeah,” she replied sarcastically. “I meant go see the ghosts, dummy.”

“How do you know I’m not already seeing ghosts everywhere?” I retorted, in fine, robust and competitive form. She punched me in the side.

“Ahh,” I said.

“Baby.”

“We should have gone to the haunted house,” I said.

“They’re too busy.”

“Yeah, Hacienda certainly doesn’t have that problem.”

The restaurant we were at was situated in this 100-year-old building, in downtown of the suburban town. It was made of brick and had this giant tower on it that somebody had apparently just built for the sake of erecting something phallic and awe-inspiring in a superficial sort of way. More and more, deluges of corporate restaurants were materializing, everywhere, offering quicker service and lower prices, and stealing any amount of business from the local places, which tended to be situated closer within town. The only identity these new places seemed to have is that everybody was really nice and well dressed and the women’s clothing seemed to be skimpier and skimpier. Men seemed more lonely than ever. More well dressed, too. None of the clothing stores were going out of business. I wiped some nondescript crust off of my seven-year-old Dismemberment Plan shirt and checked my Facebook app on my phone.

“Facebook,” barked Chloe at me. “We’re on a ghoulish vision quest in October and you’re checking your FACEBOOK.”

“You know what?” I snapped back at her. “You go check your ghosts. I’m having a fine time just sitting here being a hopelessly median 2020 male.”

She rolled her eyes at me, especially probably since she didn’t want to go in the men’s bathroom alone.

“You REALLY don’t want to come?” she pled.

“I don’t have an opinion on it one way or another. I mean I know what it’ll be. It’s just spirits. You and I already have spirits, sitting here, though we might not always show it. That bartender in the slender, customary black t shirt, he’s got a spirit. Those ghosts in there have spirits but they’re trapped — they don’t have bodies with which to walk around. You and I have bodies with spirits IN them. And that’s pretty fu**ing cool. We have bodies we can move around with intelligent control but we can FEEL.”

Chloe was just sort of smirking at me so I went on. None of the other patrons could hear me.

“And it’s just like when I ask you to marry me. You’re so obsessed with your FREEDOM. You know, I bet you’ll be the type to haunt this planet long after your life is over, too, but you might find that that very ‘freedom’ you’re after is really a trap you set for yourself. I mean, think about when you get your leg chainsawed off. You know that brief feeling of euphoria you get when you’re looking down at it, blood squirting out like Mount Vesuvius?”

Chloe spit out her Long Island onto the bar and then hastily reached for a napkin to wipe it off.

“That’s what you’re missing,” I proceeded. “That’s what marrying me would be like. It would be like having your leg chainsawed off, but in a good way.”

“I believe that,” she dryly replied.

“Hear me out. All those buildings out there. All those signs that say ‘Got Love?,’ that say, ‘Forgiveness is paramount’… they’re all just lies, aren’t they? But they were conceived with the best intentions. That’s what your ‘freedom’ is like. And you’ll end up like one of those old, weird ghosts, with the pointy hat, flying around in the Hacienda bathroom and turning the lights on and off, over and over. I mean how many times can you turn the lights on and off, anyway? It’s like a stale acid trip.”

I grinned at Chloe. I kinda liked her. I could tell she was thinking. She must have been close to my zodiac sign, or something.

Upon a brand of thought

Which may have been somewhat tenacious

In certain potentiated ways,

I’ve realized that

.

The thought of failure

Is necessary for the support of happiness

Within the mind.

.

That is,

Without the conception of what defines

The shameful, the inadequate,

The disposable or the fetid,

.

It’s impossible to define one’s own

Situation, position or disposition

As successful.

.

A smile knows nil

If not the frown

It skirts and smiles at.

Deep down,

Women know when you are in pain,

Tortured, looking at them and

At an impasse,

And they like you for that —

.

They feel good in an holistic sort of way and if

They don’t acknowledge this,

Don’t appreciate you for the light you shine on them,

If they’re cloaked in ambition, rigid,

Scowling and thinking of

$1000 bed sheets and

General misuse of and disdain for any number of others,

.

From there may spawn the homicidal

Impetus but really,

Something else has already killed them anyway.