I THINK I DREAMT OF SHULLSBURG

302. I THINK I DREAMT OF SHULLSBURG:

When I’m happy I’m sappy and there are no eyes just a series of mouths – either of these statements leads me to the belief that I indeed have reached certain conclusions which are specifically perfect and most generally CORRECT but the problem I have is forgetting all the rest of the little things – things I should be remembering – that would make everything perfect and not merely CORRECT and I want to subsist on nothing but black coffee and endless air and I want to find a series of books and do nothing but read them and I wish for nothing else to ever interfere with things and I certainly don’t wish to mix it up with outside concerns and whoever or whatever controls my water controls me formaldehyde fluoride arsenic entered into water at will but any some series of images BLACK DARK AND HOLLOW like a film-noir kiss secreted somewhere between a wood-paneled wall and a telephone booth in the low semi-dark and the heated slow sound of coffee brewing and liquor flowing and food on plates and all of that together the wild hum of live loud music and the uninterrupted solace of people and things Lara Tara or Dara the new girl hanging around learning to serve learning to talk Margaret Bourke White herself once arrived to this place and started to laugh just laugh with her Speed-Master in her hand and the actor guy Jared Orrish jumping up on the stool and emitting a loud barf sound and declaiming “Oh Jesus I’ve forgotten my lines!! How humiliating can this be?” and falling drunk to the floor flat out clunking his elbow and then his head on the way down and I even I seem to awake right then from some stupor dream-like haze and I begin thinking about the packets of Turkish money in my hands small gold packets with circular tops heavily etched with designs and ancient symbols and the guy walks up to me this fellow named Napoleon and simply staring straight ahead he says “hello” with a lilting effeminate voice the kind which makes you think right
off of queer distant party queens living in a country heartbroken yet cultivated and “EVERYTHING is thought with the testicles” the guy said and I nodded and thought to myself ‘my country ‘tis of thee I sing queer bastard’ but I let it go figuring instead that homotextuals consult Marx like homosexuals cruise parks and their poems start ideologies and their country is a bomb and VOILA ! here we are again at point zero ground zero whatever it is and I remember the guy the other guy walking the street alongside me saying he was from Arizona where “there’s Tucson to every story” and suddenly everybody was laughing and the two old women who were walking very slowly stopped and turned and said quite simply “young man do you know that we are proudly heterosexual?” and seeing as I most certainly did not know that I acted surprised but they laughed it all off as Fourth of July fireworks started blattering away in the hundred degree heat amidst leagues of people and fire and tongues of flame and people alone or in clumps drinking beer along the street holding pizza slices which wilted and they all were leaning slowly on the old rugged bar at Pete’s with everybody talking and nobody saying a word “so that’s what it was like and suddenly Lazarus rose up laughing and as he looked back I could see his cloak was torn but then I realized worse than torn it was simply rotting off his body in the massive stinking sullen heat but he’d only been dead for what a few days ? I couldn’t even remember that and he turned around in place as if his entire body was right then made of jelly but some sickening rotting dripping gel of death RE-RISEN unto life” and then the room got silent but just for a moment and nothing was said in that moment but I could still hear the distant roar of thunder and firecrackers like of old were chopping the air nighttime circles and huge round heads of glistening color things which passed as quickly as they began but no one seemed to notice anyway and I began reading posters on the wall: ‘Peter Adams: a Few of the Legends Portraits of Another Day Tamara Lischka Figuratively Speaking’ and the picture at the top the picture with the brown ink caption said ‘I was visiting some family in North Dakota a few years ago when I discovered an old school house which had been abandoned but was still equipped with the desks and piano and books that were once the center of the lives of so many children…’ it went on but rhapsodies are one thing I hate so even I passed on that semblance of profundity as it was presented with the heavy intention of meaning and depth and I instead rose up to stretch and then noticed the midnight parade of revelers passing me by and going past the window strolling past the doors arm in arm with each other was every imaginable creature and pretension of creature one could ever find but all together as one so sweet and so refined and ‘whir’ slowly the old fan moved about and its blades seemed to break the space between the wall and the portraits of boats and people nearby they all together seemed to be viewed in some miraculous stop-action time of make peace and thatchery William and all that and a voice to the side of me said “you spend a lot of time listening don’t you?” and I whirred about and said “why yes yes I do and what do you make of that my lovely fucking where-you-been stranger for that’s the joy of exploring which is better than the joy of death isn’t it or was that perhaps the joy of depth I can’t recall but even if I did I couldn’t tell between them but hell then this is the place YOU SEE I knew about this place the Odd Fellow Hall and I went to Shullsburg primarily to photograph the hall and I went to talk to the man who was the head of the lodge and he also ran the creamery in town so I went to the creamery and I started to talk to any number of people about where to go in a small town such as that in order to find the non-Wal-Mart things around to photograph and he took me to the lodge but even then you see I felt funny saying Wal-Mart for it made no sense to me thinking instead I should be saying W. T. Grant or Kresge or Woolworth or something but I was suddenly afraid no one would know what I meant and wasn’t that a funny feeling?”