i saw someone i knew in passing. the rule is if you're on your personal device you are not beholden to engage outside, or if you are pretending the dog (unless the dog calls attention to you), or if your peripheral vision is blind, or if you do not pass within a certain distance, or if in this case you are on the other side, and on a mundane mission, you are not obliged. i looked at the dogs. i thought, i'm not really on the map, (though i have sometimes tried). i just cross paths. unless until unless maybe something happens or someone tries, i'm just a passerby.

the ducks are happy as clams today swimming on the midway. you can't see them cuz this was yesterday. it was a wetland, now it's a grass pond, deep enough to paddle in. i'd like to be a duck, or a lilliputian in a lilliputian canoe. 
i was wondering why people make dogs of their own design yet they don't make them to live long. i guess there's no profit in longevity, and in a financial system thinking runs in fiscal cycles of regeneration. boom. there's money in death for the dealers. there's boom even in bust. boom goes the thunder. closer. closer. it's in my chest. light a candle in my heart, lightning. crack my soul with electric light. i guess i'm lucky to be dry for a couple hours writing this rumble rumble before the next inundation. boomcrack. poor comet will be quivering.

it seems the rain will never ever ever end (though once in a while it does). and everything leaks right into our skin. we just have to shake and shake and shake it off...

 and remember how good the sun feels.

feelings may not be facts, but feelings are our facts.

looking at bill berkson's notebook on frank o'hara i saw "that feelings are our facts". i don't know if it's a meme or a line from frank or bill. i look it up and see a lot of psychology saying feelings are not facts, but i can't find the poem. facts often aren't facts either, so i trust feelings in a way that matters more than facts.

fuck it's raining harder, and i got to ride.

it feels empty again here. i'm feeling that emptiness. also hunger, adding feeling.

i came home and saw his small bed by the big bed and his green blanket tumbled in sleep. i rolled up the bed and stuffed it in a carrying bag. i washed his green blanket. i'll keep looking at the place where he lays, his place. his place by my place. down beside where i like to lay he likes to lay. i'll think of him there for a while. i'll be drifting in my mind looking at his place.

i just left him. he's laying under the kitchen table, his head on his paws. it's like any other grey day. i'll be back, i say. on the way it starts to rain. it feels like the whole city is sad and grey. there's a grey blanket over everything. the grey procession under grey sky. 
i'll miss him, but there's missing in me everyday. something is missing, an everyday thing. 

i ony got 3 pix this a.m. very ordinary. my camera, my energy, my battery, my eye fails. some technology you can't buy, and the rest you can buy again. there is a blind photographer who never sees her pictures, but she uses the camera to see in her mind. there's a cyclist who rides blind, clicking sonar like a bat. mister can see some things. you get the feeling of other things he's imagining. he dreams more, and i wonder if he sees clearly, or if he's also going
blind in dreams. there's a world of things he's helped me see.

i kept pressing the snooze button. depressed. i have to return him today. mad about the tissue last night. the tissue wasn't the issue. sometimes i get mad because i'm sad, sad because i'm powerless. to allay that feeling. we are all controlled by economic power. we exist in a system we didn't choose. not a system of nature wherein we might find our place. a system overriding nature where we have to fight to establish what in nature would be natural right. ok i dismissed my alarm. the dog awaits. the dog represents, what, conditioned freedom? freedom with conditions. under control in a system out of control. under the law of the lawless, governed. mister. i'll miss him snoozing next to me. i keep thinking, the last time. in the time of ending, the endless beginning.

an old world is dying. a new one is being born. capitalist civilization, which has dominated the economic, political and cultural life of continents is in the process of decay and is now breeding new and devastating wars. the prevailing economic crisis is placing greater and greater burdens upon the world's population, upon those who work with hand or brain. the present crisis has stripped capitalism naked. it stands more revealed than ever as a system of robbery and fraud, unemployment and terror, starvation and war.

manifesto

mister scarfed a wad of tissue. when i said drop it he refused and went feral. it shocked me how fierce he was over a fucking tissue, and that he would act like that, with me, like we were sudden adversaries fighting in the wild over a scrap. tissue! when i feed him. i know he's just being a dog, but i took it personal, i was upset and hurt, and on our last night together. well i just had to say it. i'm embarrassed i overreacted. i should have just let him eat it. at home he eats tissue all the time. but i was looking out for him! and he snarled at me like a wild thing. makes you realize our civilized selves are just the outer layer, easily ripped aside with the merest provocation or desire.
oh it'll pass, we've had skirmishes before, we let them go. we'll make it up by morning, but it's a hurtful pass nonethless, on our last night together, when i was so worried and relieved after the last thing. the long run.

 hosanna!* he has pooped!

blessed is he who has pooped!



*i just learned that hosanna originally meant a cry for help, deliverance, and later changed into an expression of joy and praise. in the case of mister, it changed just the same, from one minute to the next. raise your hands and shout!

i'm proud of lulu. she used to be scared of ghosts in this corridor. now when i ask her to pose she sits down and looks both ways like a lookout for graffiti artists.

lulu sits where banksy was.

banksy was here?

yeah, lu, banksy was right where you're sitting.

well, i'll be. who is banksy?

i never noticed the back of the girl scout library until today. butterfly books fly up and become the word fruits of the tree of knowledge. genius, girls.

peace of the puddle.

i think about gnome sane how i complain about oh woes me i got to walk the dog in the rain and my clothes leak and i hear myself thinking and i think man what some people have to do day to day gnome sane i've had some evil stinking jobs but what some people have to do just to survive even in this city gnome sane but think about it kid what people have to do to live in a place where america is at war or under american sanctions or occupation i'm just saying i'm not saying i should be ashamed of complaining because i'm a privileged so called white boy which i do but i'm just saying i should hear myself, it really makes me think i don't feel so white gnome sane i feel pretty dark gnome sane but i shoudn't complain because i'm privileged.

i said to her, if i recall correct, don't worry about it, mom! it's my poop. mine! yer drivin' me crazy! and she's like, sorry! forgive me for caring! i'll never ask you again! so i'm like, humiliated and contrite, sorry and log jammed, sick to death of the goddamn american freeway.

still no poop, but he seems good, he's alert, he wants treats, and he's happily humping his bed. all is well, except no poop. mimi on the elevator, voice gruff from cigs, asked if he was ok, out of fear, not concern for his health i realized, and i said he's more than ok, he's just soggy. i expect a high degree of dysfunctional irrationality in humans, but fear of mister is just loopy. anyway mimi came around and saw how sweet he is. cousin shari says i wouldn't worry about the pooping. i just remembered traveling by winnebago with mom and tony as a shy inward kid, and mom asking all the time, did ya poop? did ya poop yet!? i think she put the fear in me: you poop or you die. fear and constipation and death, pshew! what a grim equation. ha ha that's me, inside out.

after the rain.

   it's o.k. if it's raining, the world is turning, we're turning too, we're raining with the world.

it'll be ok. i'm warm and dry now, and mister's wrapped in his green blankie. i'm going for the pointers soon and then i'm going to treat myself to a book, optic nerve. this will be a breather after trump sky alpha. if i could never see nor hear of his magaman ass again. we have to look at evil, and then we have to look deeper, and beyond.

kat says metronidazole doesn't constipate. he probably was emptied out, and the low residue kibble is resting in his colon. i give him some pumpkin and kibble. fascinating, isn't this? because it's mister, and he matters so much, and everything he is and does.

i tried to be happy but it didn't work. freezing rain squalls turned my umbrella inside out and mister hasn't pooped now for 24 hours. he wanted to turn the first corner home and kept stopping and staring after me until finally he started running, one good thing, and he looked beautiful against the lush marshy green grass, saturated now, the streets are riverine and the midway a wetland. if only it was a warm spring rain but it could turn to snow again.
i'm sorry to say kids, it's my last day with mister and i'm in misery. i don't know what to do.
if he can't poop should i not give him food? what a sad last day. it feels like the world's end,
but it'll go on without us.

well i can look back a day when we had sun after the snowstorm day and i can look forward to another day of respite from the storm though i don't know when and today i can take r.'s umbrella and mister is letting me loll about in bed and drink coffee as i whine about the rain and try to be philosophical about the leaks that are inevitable everything leaks no matter how much you wish to spend and sometimes it's good as in government but it just goes on and on more rain and here i am sad and philosophical again.

more rain. if you add all the rain to the winter you must get sad. unless you like it. if only i could stay dry, but the cold wet seeps through my costly waterproof gear, and summer seems the briefest season that recedes and never comes and is gone before you know it. i hate to complain about the rain. i like it sitting here listening to the thunder roll over the trains and the swish of wet tires endlessly crossing the flashing grid. i just want to stay in. it's the last day of mister. it may be the last time we have to actually dwell together. it's grey. it's monday. it's cold and rainy. it's life. off and on, again and again, til it ends. it's rain.

i just saw life off the grid. it was excellent. ironically, the grid kept dropping out while i was watching. the filmmaker is an ethnologist up in british columbia who goes all over canada researching how people live off the grid. some of them live in the islands by vancouver where i once lived.
it always makes me wistful when i think of it, i was there, but i wasn't conscious, i was young, in turmoil (and i was an illegal). i often say proudly i live off the grid, but i don't really. only in a relative sense i do. i live in the grid, but without a lot of the complications. i live as simply as i can, precariously. i don't know if i could live so diligently, i'd have a whole lot to learn, and the grid has made me lazy. one day the grid will fail. that's what trump sky alpha is about, and it's learning to live in a mass disaster, which we are feeling even now, though here in america we're living the illusion still. one day the illusion will fail with the grid, and we'll all fall together. maga will be seen as nothing but a violent illusion that was always doomed. trump will be seen as a mad pathetic demon of disaster capitalism, and we'll consign his flabby orange ass to the trash bin of history, and we'll have to begin to live consciously, and wean ourselves off the grid, to live and learn on the earth.

 when i see him sniffing at the cat box

 i think maybe he was eating litter.

when i ask him his expression is neutral. i turn the box door to the wall and put the lid on. he sniffs it casually. he's good with his expressions, but i can read him pretty good, and he gives up the game by casually sniffing more times now the box is closed.

i think mister is better now. he hasn't barfed or squirted all day. we went to open produce and got some food and snacks for me and he walked along behind me so cutely. one minute i'm worried he's falling apart and the next it's just like it used to be, albeit a little slower. he always did linger though. he just does it more now. but he still follows me and when i add the leash he will stop and protest, is this really necessary? just keep a lookout for me, and i'll keep following.

it's always exciting to read our names in the wooded island bird walk report. i want to echo pat's observation about the terrific waste of the restoration of this environment. they poisoned all the fish and other aquatic life and drained the lagoon and the smell of death loomed, they put plastic mesh all around the shores to protect the water plantings which is still there years on, ugly and fraying, a useless contaminating border inhibiting nature, while the carp have survived, and thrived, as invasive species, as humans, do, while the plantings have died. the irrigation tubes they installed melted in the controlled burn, along with condoms, lighters, and other assorted plastic consumer waste. they spent millions, and the place is degraded and denuded of life. and when nature tries to restore itself, you can be sure the poisoner levy is taking note, blithe smiley death steward lurking in the blue shadows in his blue beamer with his arm-length yellow playtex gloves and his shoulder canister of round-up, keeping the ground clear so the popo can see and no pesky animal life can hide.

i love to watch him browse the green 
and eat what may be
the last snow he'll ever see.
i understand why the religious feel
that heaven is a field, particularly
when it's real.

there's a geography in his head. 

i don't know how that corresponds 
to the geography outside his head.
his head's in the same space as me, but when i bend 
to the tulips he has the idea i went 
to the other side of the train embankment fence.