Up-end the bridges and make with the crampons and carabiners and nylon cord. I’ll hang toward your falling scream and harmonize a bicep-clenched-claw-bellow of “NOOOO!” long past your ability to hear.

Let it ring you into recreational Valhalla, sweet angel of the concrete riverbed.

We came for the fun, but I’ll carry the loss in my gut until I work up the nerve to tell your ghost that I’ve seen the pictures of you on the downtime porn spots of interest, that you look happy in the afterlife, what I can make out of you from behind the strange dicks and despite bad lighting.

We wasted too much fuel on warming fires, left nothing for funerals or rafts.

If anything, I’ll regret that.

Let’s drop the mic at 86 and leave the grandstanding for the left behind. Push and push and push is the new feedback clang, and we push through it to hear the sweet sound that rolls out through the stop.

Let’s let full stops be commas and pull out all stops in favor of downhill grades that never end, the gravel braking-lanes forgotten to long hauls from grandfather times before words were our traffic and traffic was on roads and headlines.

If we burn, let’s do it running and set proper fires along our course.

They’re giving up out there. All of them.

The democratizing virtues of popular explosion have made the merely insurmountable seem insurmountable at last and the explosions are landing us in desks, counting the shrapnel for everyone but ourselves.

Let’s not.

Let’s yes and next and then and leave the rests to music and the rest to our hands and mouths.

If there was ever a time, it’s now, and there’s always a time, has always been.

If it were here for us, available, welcoming, we’d’ve bought it by now, had it basketed and bike-rid home along Folsom, bitten, considered, chewed, eaten, and digested—shit-out by now. Let me tell you a little something about it, the having of it.

You can’t.

I mean we can’t.

Let’s keep it soft if we keep it at all, and when it’s done let’s let the son of a bitch we pay to keep our shit away from our eyes do his fucking job for once.

Not my job.

Not my America.

I can regift a sentiment as quickly as you can wrap it, so wrap it. Picture me on the other side of the net, tendons tensed and sweat cupped in my headband.

I will bounce from toe to toe like a molecule of air while you consider your serve.

Bring.

It.

On.

I eat you for breakfast.

You.

No more metaphor. I mean to fry eggs and eat you with them, talk up the technique with a downcast eye and some “just salt, just pepper” false humility and you better know the smoothie I drink to wash you down will be fiber and protein rich and so full of raw whatever that it’ll be clear that the ass I wipe, my ass, will be wiped with hundred dollar bills because I’ve run out of crap to buy and basket and bike-ride home.

Let stand the one true notion, high. Stand it up on two legs and dress it, the suggestion of legs beneath the fabric somehow more pleasing than the beholding. Move hands along skin and feel warmth.

Here.

Place hands here for greatest effect. These are the spots best known to produce frogs and sour notes. Avoid them with fingers.

Practice embouchure daily and in silence. Breathe into the rests and imagine better tones to accompany the hollows of throats untested with tongues or piano-wires. Let go before the cutting demands gloves, elaborate tales as regards scars at notable dinner gatherings.

If you learn one thing, let it be the tying of a bow tie, but better you should learn two to four and forget one to three. All else is best left to chance, buckled with leather straps and set aside to rot to the wonder of your favorite third grade class.

[This is my script from my performance at the first Write Club SF. My topic was Information, and I lost to Max McCal’s wonderful Knowledge argument. Where I ran out of time will be noted in brackets below. So, if you were there and wanted to know the rest, read on.]

Information. Let’s start with what we know.

If I told you there was a hole at the bottom of the sea, you probably wouldn’t be surprised.

And why should you? There’s all sorts of stuff down there, and what’s not edible may as well be holes.

If I were to go on to tell you that there’s a log in that hole and a bump on that log and a frog on that bump and an eye on that frog and a lash on that eye, you might say you already knew that,

and I’d know it was probably true.

If I said further that there was a flea on that lash, I think I’d be approaching the point by asking what was on the flea.

I don’t know what’s on the flea. Maybe you do. Maybe you know what’s on that and on that and on that and on and on until we’re at the Grand Canyon, already, and you’ve got to be fucking kidding me it costs this much to see a hole in the ground.

What’s on the flea isn’t important here.

What is important is that there’s something on the flea and somebody knows it, and that there’s a limit to what we know about marine life and probability and that no matter how much we know or claim to know, there’s still more, far more, to be known, and that’s information, whether we need it or want it or give one tiny fuck about it.

More information to be missed or forgotten or misunderstood.

More.

It’s there. Lifeless. Pitiless. Devoid of any sense of itself or the evil or good it can do.

Information is the truth and the truth of the lie. The formula, the proof of the formula, the false assumption, the control, and the placebo. Information is the alpha and the omega, and the definitions of both—the definition of itself, the shapes of the letters that form it, and the tones that sound it.

It is old and new and borrowed and blue.

Split a log and information describes the wood so split

the axe and its force

the hand and its grip

the man

the upbringing

the birth

the night of pressing against on a dusty Arizona back road under a full-moon August sky in 1976, all the lights put to bed with nothing but a sea of unknowns laid out before the actors.

What we know or can deduce is that there’s really no argument to be had.

It’s algebraic, if anything. Information is the constant variable. Information, like time, lacks limits worth calculating for general purposes.

If it’s not infinitely reducible, it’s damn close,

close enough to know that there’s not a microscope big enough or enough available light to see down to the bottom. Knowledge can only ever be the output of a function of information. It’s the yield of some minute understanding of a finite slice of raw, clean information, categorized and suspended in the liquid of your perception for as long as there’s a you to hold it.

That’s the bitch of it. Take everything you know, the whole of what you’ve learned, experienced, proven, or accepted as fact

and die.

Really die, none of that deep dark coma with an eleventh hour awakening and seeing the error of your ways crap.

Just die

and quick as that it’s unknown again, at least in the quotes for emphasis “you” sense, just information for some other chump to gather up and smear on the walls of his cave. Write it out in a book and you’ve done no better. It’s just information, again

unknown until read, known, expanded upon, and lost once more.

Repeat ad nauseum.

Information can play this game all Summer long. Watch the days fall away and marvel as information describes the arc of their descent, disinterested as always in how that makes you feel and forever willing to offer itself up to you like a character in a Kundera novel, describing those feelings openly and without passion.

Knowledge is

at best

a phase transition between states of information,

the place between water and ice called freezing or melting. You can’t hold freezing any more than you can hold what you know. Take a picture of freezing and it’s just loose ice.

Let x equal information and y equal knowledge.

The function of x is the output y. It defines what we do as a species, our need to assign order to what we observe and to understand that which we’ve ordered.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Miraculous expression of the motion of the universe in, garbage out.

Sun Tzu said all sorts of stuff about knowledge. Know yourself. Know your enemy. Know them both and you’ll kick all sorts of ass. Know how shitty war is and you’ll know it’s gotta end quickly, like pulling off a band-aid, or people get raw. Knowing is the bread and butter of the warrior philosopher’s path, and it’s nice to think about, to associate our best practices with some wizened part of our collective past.

Sun Tzu had some thoughts on information, too, but they’re in the deeper cuts where his ideas turned from adaptable maxims for daily life to functional evil. Gather information against people. Use said information against people to make them give you more. Use the information that they’re informants to get still more information

Widen the rabbit-hole.

And what do we, we in this room, know about Sun Tzu beyond what’s been quoted in books about closing deals? If it’s a little or a lot, it doesn’t matter.

There’s more.

Far more.

And no amount of knowing makes all of the bodies seem like real bodies or the battles seem less like anecdotes and more like actual swords and screaming children. And even if we know those things, the right things to bring it all home,

really know them,

down to the core and past the people

to the rise of the species and the growth of life

to the formation of a solid crust of earth

to the expansion of a fiery universe from a single, infinitely dense point in empty space,

there’s still more to know that will never be known, despite the presence of the information.

Empty space.

Some information can’t be digested. It’s just that badass. Knowing that solid matter is the result of vibrations of awesomely tiny things in empty space doesn’t really make us know it,

—root level, operating system know it—

It’s just information we have, that we try to shape into something philosophically comprehensible. My aunt hates this kind of information, actually gets angry about it, but it’s there, and knowing it wouldn’t do her much good,

but it’s there, huddled next to the liquor store like a guy worth crossing the street to avoid.

You’ve got cancer is information. Don’t worry, there are books.

But know that it’s cancer, that it’s inoperable, that how you proceed is entirely up to you. Know that what you do won’t actually matter.

Know it. Know it all day long.

It’s still cancer. Still replicating in your system and revealing new information daily about itself that no amount of stored knowledge could ever prepare you for.

Books will fail you here.

And what does a book know? Dictionaries are full of inert information and they don’t “know” a fucking thing.

You could spend the rest of your life memorizing a dictionary and for all the words in your head you’d be no closer to knowing the whole of what made those words sing when first uttered in the presence of their inspiration.

Information, on the other hand, shines and shines in the unknowns, bleeding up from the sidewalk and bouncing off of itself with so much future-so-brightness that we have to wear shades and close blind eyes to keep any sense of sanity in the midst of it.

Information is why we have eyes and ears and hands and throats, and it came long long long before you and I had frontal lobes enough to make knowledge of it.

Information is the guy you want in your corner when it’s crunch time.

[TIME!]

Information is fighting, not knowing about fighting. It’s every vibrating atom of the detail of a fist thrown and received.

Information is fucking, not knowing about fucking.

Information is the sound and the fury which signifies nothing and contains everything, every first through fifth act with all of the bodies of all of the douchebags who set out with a little bit of knowledge and a knife against a sea of undiscovered information, all of them lined up nicely for the counting, glassy-eyed and as knowledgeable as trees.

Maybe information is fleeing, too, but if it is, it’s probably in the sense of making plain the information that on that flea is a goddamn speck, and it’ll tell you a speck of what if you’ll just stop swearing you know for long enough to look and to listen

and if you don’t know

you’ve been informed, and it won’t do you a damn bit of good,

and now you know.

Thank you.

Ten days pass as quickly as seven, these days, and as for months—let’s just say we’ve seen longer weeks. Better yet, let’s leave the clever and sly remarks to times better suited, three-piece and flush. Let’s stick to the new new new, the earnest and clear, the honest and “Hi, how was your day?” Days flying by as quickly as they have, it seems somehow worth asking.

There’s a word: “worth.” How often repeated? The software gives promise of an answer.

The mind rejects.

Focus instead on the grand, the unbegun. If we unbegin the novel, for instance, we’ll have more time to focus on unbeginning the website thing.

There’s another word: “website.”

Seems somehow anachronistic, here—as much so as the phrase “seems somehow” seems somehow contrived, despite its flowing character in the construction.

Flow, then. Construct.

Unlikely, which is doubly so given the laugh I just shared with my breaths-beneath and the shedding of pronouns reserved for royalty and a growing desire to take this car into the second-person lane and risk fines suited to alienated and alienating prose.

Prosaic.

There’s a word.

Sturdy enough to hold every sentiment I’ve ever felt the need to word into existence and just weak enough to allow the smell of shit through its membranous skin.

Sources indicative of subtext—and there is no finer step than a forward step and how—open up wide. The broad, toothy smiles make good on well-mothered hopes, mannered and handsome, and if the wagons mean to drop from the sky between here and Oregon then two for every ox should be the cost in children.

It’s all BASIC. 10, 20, 30, and the rest, reset.

Rest between the raps, then (window-pane or Juicy). Hop higher if the ankle weights are imagined, the televisions tuned to still-higher-hopping and distant days, the blood real. Reel in the biggest of fish and lie and lie often until such time as mornings after can be consumed in pill form and quickly digested in doses too infrequent to merit nights of memory to scale.

Smaller towns, perhaps. Smaller hopes and hands. All that remains to be held is better left in baskets besides, doorstep-leaned, ablaze, sans-notes, and as affected as you please.

This then is the hungry one. You can tell it by the salt on its skin, the wavering eyes. Walk past. The worthy whats of its character are easily lost in its reach. Shrug back. Follow the plays of note and note well the lighted exits along the walls. In the event of an emergency landing, and or no substitutions, and please form an orderly queue.

The heavy one can’t be expected to move.

The light one cannot be located for comment.

If we indulge, prepare for punishment. Watching for widening want—it’s only a matter of time.

“It’s only an matter of time,” you’ll say.

“Doesn’t matter,” says it, and if it flips its hands in the air, drops the other shoe—

If that, then this is the hungry one. You can tell it by its white-knuckle grip on the tattered blanket, the shanty-town drips at the edges of its rheumy eyes.

So, yeah. It’s that scene, always that scene, Alfred Molina bugged out on coke, me setting off firecrackers for no discernible purpose, everybody on edge. Of course it ends well. Of course the result is love.

Eyes get bent in this light. Set them aside. Craftsmen approach from the West to set them arights, besides. You can feel them if you set your jaw and look into the camera just so. Better yet,

you can feel them.

I know. I know. We’ve been here, before. Let’s not do this, then, Words.

Easier said than done. Line up. I know you best by the shapes of your plosives. Line up in order of impact and I’ll fire each of you off in a succession of cadence worthy of men without feet and nights without eyes.

Begging the question of what’s worthy, worth measured in single sides, often monosyllabic.

Sorry, Katydid. No room for you in this onanistic parade. Jump from some other leaf. But if your jump should describe an arc, color me there—where you land.

If you choose to employ the Flesh colored crayon, know that I objected to the word “colored” and that all tests of this sort are biased in one direction or another.

Speaking of which, True North is one I often use. It’s appealing, to say the least, but also rote (as in, “I wrote this for you, and In Example and As Regards).

If I had to boil it down, which it seems I do or seemed I did, leave it at this: if we’re to close down the bars, then let’s close down the bars, and “why stop at bars” is a question I might ask at bank doors if we weren’t observing banker’s hours.

Pay no mind to the barker’s powers.

Windless and warm, it was only ever a matter of time before the buffeting ceased. Little boats on big bad seas were set to rocking gently, dark waters lapping at the wood like baby deer at pond’s edge or Sunday joggers at paved woods. If I pointed, it was only ever to show the distance of my gaze, and if my focus was footward, I was only ever looking through the deck to some simultaneous tomorrow in the backspinning tub drains of down there.

And if I mistook gravity for weight, it was only ever for lack of reference, the libraries closed up tight for the season and the moonbases abandoned in favor of future-phones and isolated connectedness.

And if the light through the window seemed pale, let’s blame my eyes. They’re worthless, after all, only ever as good as what there was to see.

It was agreed by the bats and the walkmen that there were no guarantees when it came to pleasing sounds. The rest of us fell in line—you, with your fainting spells; me, with my coke and eager heart. Claws were another matter, no better for digging than for scratching and most often employed in dragging along schoolhouse cinderblocks, painted white.

Friction could never be counted on to produce a fire, but we rubbed and struck.

“Anywhere” was a song we remembered, the lyrics lost and the placement imagined.

Fetch place-mats. Forget fashion.

If there was a point, it’s that this is the sound of one hand clapping, that this is the sound of two. Mistaking the one for the other is a problem for afterlives and grade-school lessons in math,

and if that was our biggest mistake

how small, how small.

Accepting that there are exceptions, let’s hold fast to rules—golden or slide, in example and for instance. Ergo and likewise, cogito ergo sum. Je ne pense pas, mais—c’est vrais!—je suis. And on and on down this particular rabbit-hole, wholly unrabbitted, lacking in so much as a cotton tail or carrot green.

A hunt with no soup.

No content.

Discontented, continue—let’s.

I’ll happily promise that this tunnel opens onto new and grand chambers, the veins along high-rising walls rich in better things than gnawing teeth and angry farmers. I’ll happily lie, is what I mean, not from a place of deception but of self-deception. All cleverness aside, when was the last time we even saw the sky from down here, let alone the ground?

Only shoes and handmade rugs from what I can tell, and if it takes falling backwise to notice gathering clouds then it serves no end to blame the hands conducting said rugs to finer rooms with deft flicks of powerful wrists, whether warning was given or simply implied. And isn’t it just, anyhow—

Isn’t it just a fine thing for fine days to lay on one’s back, grin through the pain, and count elephants and passing jets among the shapes imagination permits in the silvery bits of the water-supply chain?

There’s a flow chart somewhere in this pile of trash, but who can be bothered to look, and it’s hard to remember how rabbits fit in with estuaries or runoff or steam. It’s hard to put any of it together on rainy days, whether mouths are opened to the sky or eyes are closed in general.

This was meant to be a dinner jacket, but it’s only dinner. It was meant to be myself, drawing myself walking uphill and away, bindle bobbing lightly from stick’s tip, but it’s only me drawing a breath, drawing my hand and coloring in the fingers to look like a turkey. In a word:

dinner.

Best served on an empty stomach and, failing all else, with plates or knives.

Pour wine. Use napkins.

If I mention your eyes, blame the candles. Anything else and you can blame anything you like.