I was going to use a series of images from Kween, a Japanese Queen cover band, as the image on the God Save My Queen web site. Decided not to.

posted by Daniel Nester at 10/3/2003 07:19:44 PM

Stray Thought Faux Fantasia
Crossing guards, four of them, playing hopscotch, just after school opens. They smile at me in their yellow raincoats.

"Ring for Psychic" buzzer beside the Tires Repaired sign.

6am: Cheesy Mahler soundfile that comes up clicking to the Staten Island College computer science department home page. I was trying to e-mail a professor who made an automatic poetry-writing program. I was tired, and the Casio music soothed me.

Headlines of Knicks coach in the Post. He's Apologetic! If he was doing a good job. Was doing.

Now there is no tremble. The ether and even Jeff Van Gundy have slowed down. Now the reason for interjections have turned hasty.

Two large women talking on the train, pretty much saying "hmm hmm" to each other. Then one says, out of the blue, "He said he got nine inches.

He took it out, and it wasn't no bigger than a kosher dill pickle."

A taxi with a red siren, running against traffic on 14th Street. This is it, I say to myself, this is my day, and it's all in primary colors, Zappa song-specific.

Observed porno tape title on way to train: That Darn Trannie!

I mean, her definition of irony, for instance, sung from this very chair as I sit typing this, was more like a math equation, some syllogism. [Philosophy student, of course.]

Canadian singer-songwriter name-dropped – not Joni -- before eating 6th Avenue soup. Late evening, and the cut of winter in the air as I walk upstairs.

Power ballads. Everyone knows them. But I always—I always have to fucking explain their merits.

Also: I have to explain the appeal of crank calls—and to other poets!

But when do the trains ever run on time? Why keep complaining?

When would I ever have gotten all of my young ladies Ass to the museum?

What are you doing over there, Nester? He-he.

Reading a John Cage journal entry that I thought was funny to my mother, who moaned in pity at what I thought was the punchline. I always wanted to study botany, she said.

Misheard punchline: She thought she was sacrificing the vomit!

The sun getting brighter. Split peas. Tomorrow's schedule, teaching, tutoring, phone calls. Call my mother, again. Milk. Dash off letter to Massachusetts. Deny I am Jewish, despite old family tales from Germany. Coffee grinds and milk stains. A light bulb burnt out in the closet.

Two things I remember at the same time, 3:12pm, last Thursday: My first communion crucifix, and the wife of a famous poet, hoping that, while looking over her shoulder speaking with her, I am not perceived as flirting by her husband. This was the night before September 11, and I saw Paul McCartney on the street.

I thought I remembered a joke haiku just then. Then I forgot it. Was it really morning? I'm going to have to question the whole thing.

I can put two and two together, but am I capable of interjecting so much as to eliminate the need to a business letter?

One wonders—or at least I do—whether those elliptical interjecting people, as one person calls them, are capable of doing anything besides that, because they never, ever, worked a day in their lives, and never experienced the sheer linearity of a business letter, let alone typing one.

That dog's breaths are visible this morning. But peoples' aren't.

When I was a little girl, I had my wedding, my husband and my children all planned out.

Funny how you have all those notions when you're young.

As I grew up in southern California, with the massive Barbie-doll complex all around me, I began to believe that I would never have the kind of life that I dreamt of. Those kinds of dreams belonged to the rich and beautiful, not me. I wasn't beautiful, I was ordinary.

I was more than happy to move to Chicago and start anew. There's just something refreshing about moving to a place where no one knows you. It's like getting a second chance.

Oh how I wanted a second chance.

I was 19 and in college. I had a part-time job and a quiet life. I wasn't looking for anything or anybody. I was content. I used to baby-sit for my neighbor and best friend, Kathy.

It was through her that I met Bill.

He was quiet and shy -- I wasn't particularly attracted to him at first, being so used to the "pretty boys" with whom I'd grown up. Kathy and her boyfriend arranged a double-date, and we didn't speak to each other a whole lot that night. But something was there, something unspoken, something familiar. It drew us together again and again.

I had thought I had been in love before, but I began to realize the difference between likes and real loves.

Here I sit, at my desk, looking at pictures of our two beautiful little girls, and I truly know what it means to have a soulmate.

Thank god for second chances.

It seems to me that the extreme one-dimensional politics of the New Left--which had no spiritual or adhesive element or direction but relied on "rising up angry" rage, which was considered by some to be the necessary gasoline or fuel for political action--was a great psychological mistake. Any gesture made in anger is going to create more anger. Any gesture coming from rage and resentment creates more rage and resentment. Any gesture taken in equanimity will create more equanimity. The 1968 Chicago police riot was, after all, to some extent provoked by the attitude, behavior, and propaganda of some of the members of the New Left, who had promised a Festival of Light but delivered an angry protest. The original Yippie idea, as announced, was to have a festival that would be cheerful, affirmative, ecologically sound, and generous emotionally so that it would outshadow the "Death Convention" of Johnson's war.
...

The result of the riot was to knock out Humphrey. And then many Leftists out of their hatred of Humphrey and their parents and their liberal middle-class background refused to vote and dropped out and so Nixon squeaked in by half a million votes. Millions of people didn't vote on the Left, angry at Johnson and his war, angry at Humphrey for going along (although everybody knew that Humphrey wanted to end the war, but it was just this totalitarian insistence on having it your way, the way you wanted to end the war, the method you wanted to end the war, rather than let the war decline in a way that was politically possible). In 1968, the Gallup Poll reported that 52 per cent of the American people thought the war was a mistake. The question is, how come the Left could not lead America out of the war when the middle class was already disillusioned? I think it was because they were threatening the middle class with anger, because one motto was Kill Your Parents or Bring the War Home. They weren't leading the middle class, they weren't providing space for the middle class to change, they were threatening the middle class.

The Left, by not voting, let Nixon in. The Left, by discrediting the Democrats, let Nixon in. And once Nixon got in, the war got much worse--the bombing was escalated beyond the imagination of Johnson and Kennedy, the bankruptcy of the Treasury and the moral bankruptcy was escalated way beyond anyone's imagination.

It doesn't mean that the Left was wrong. The antiwar stance was correct. It's just that the method, which involved aggression and anger, was an unskillful means. The blood of the Vietnamese from 1968 on rests primarily on the right-wing conservatives and the Nixonites, but there is some blood on the Left for their ineptness in politics. That's what I meant by speeches "angrier than war's cannonball noises." It was the mistake of waving a Viet Cong flag--and half the people who did it were FBI agents anyway. In New York City, I remember parades being taken over by extremists, who later turned out to be FBI provocateurs. People don't realize the enormity of the infiltration of the Left by the FBI in the form of extremist provocation, which the neurotics of the Left went along with thinking it was more macho, holier than thou, "more revolutionary than thou."

Mr. Brian May playing card
Off to Rochester and Buffalo, so in the meantime, I'll leave you with an image of the man with the curly hair and curly guitar.