I Like Looking at Brooklyn Copeland, and I Am a "Man of a Certain Age," But I Look with Moral Probity....

Brooklyn Copeland is a charming person and a readworthy poet and blogger.

I love her beautiful candor and I love looking at photos of her, because I find her lineaments (there, I went thoroughly faggily Elizabethan) classically photogenic...the sort of model a great painter would fall into a puppy dog mortal infatuation with, and never really recover from.

But that's just the chassis (going from Elizabethan cant to cavalier carshop hetero talk here)...the soul is just as twistily transfixing...

Here's Brooklyn on her blog today (or yestreen?)....

I have always liked the expression "Heads will roll."

It has a surreal, undead-finality sorta ring to it.

I wonder if I can say it today, with all the conviction and fierceness of Charles Laughton as Henry VIII, without anyone realizing the expression has been on my mind lately, and I've been dying to say it out loud to someone other than Loki.

"Heads will roll!"

I didn't sleep very well last night. I think I finally drifted off at 4 am, and then I had a dream about Siberia and Siberian huskies. Before I fell asleep, I was reading Lorine Niedecker and Plato. I almost named Loki Plato, before I met him and knew he wasn't the most intellectual dog, but definitely the most mischievous. I always want to read stuff that I know is good, when I can't sleep. My mind doesn't like to be challenged by new things after midnight. I am definitely not a night owl. I am an early bird. When I can't sleep, I read, or watch forensics shows on cable, or delete friends from my Facebook account. Bill Keckler's (semi-ironic, I think) public request for more friends on Facebook made me giggle a little bit: I've given the axe to more than 600 people now. Basically, everyone who hasn't made it a point to have some personal connection with me. I don't think anyone will take it personally: I certainly don't mean to offend. I opened up my "Add as a friend" button, so if someone really misses me, they can try to add me again. When I woke up this morning, I already had 4 requests from brand new people whose names I didn't recognize. I didn't honor any of them.

I was too tired to feel bad about unloading 160 more people last night. A disproportionate number of these people are men of a certain age. Not that I have anything against men of a certain age. Quite the contrary. Men get better with age. But I don't understand how they ended up on my Facebook friendlist. I am thisclose to shutting down my account, but there are friends on there I've met while living abroad that I want to keep contactable.

Also. Every once in a while, a poet hauls off and says something funny, and it makes my day.

I am given to fits of paranoia, and I was deeply into a dimenhydrinate state one time and thought Brooklyn was mocking me in a cruel way on her blog. I thought a lot of crazy things that night. I think the night ended with me lying on my bed and calculating every truly mean thing I had said or done from the age of four to maybe sixteen, and trying to figure out why I had done them, and if I had seriously injured another person by doing them. I was happy to see I had fingers left over when I counted these, but was deeply troubled by some of my actions. I was in a St. Augustine mood, I suppose. Some of the questions were unanswerable, but all of the people are alive and I knew I could approach any one of them if I could find them (some I had made amends with already.) None of these were crimes, but just cruel things that one does when one feels unloved or replaced, mostly.

Oh, beware the revenge fucks of the six year old! They can be nasty. You don't need sex to break a heart, you know.

In fact, when the fuck up is between adults, sex can be used to rationalize. If that's not in the equation, if it's a child with a broken heart, then somebody probably just fucked up in the good old-fashioned way.

This made me act strange. And Brooklyn realized then, no doubt, that I am a bit crazy. My apologies, Brooklyn, but I am happy to be in blog-empathy with you...

Brooklyn, you are very brave. Deleting, I mean. I think we do that when we feel we are part of a process that might not be real, that friendship might be a Grail that doesn't exist in literature (although of course we know it does, because we all have real flesh and blood friends who write with whom we have that "real thing").

But literature (online or otherwise) can try to shunt you towards the facile and the glib. The temptation is there every day. Just come with me, the voice says, you'll be so much lighter...you're worrying about inessential components...it's just connecting lines....see, you're drawing a picture....time will sort it all out later...don't worry about this sort of lying...it's not true lying..."

I suppose 600 friends on Facebook that never acknowledge your existence can be nothing, not even mental bric-a-bric, this clutter of cyber "connections" could be just the driftwood of contemporaneity, really, everybody just everybody else's flotsam and jetsam. We were there at the same time. At the beach. Rah.

But surely the sea is real?

I guess, but some are in tempest and some are in the quietest harbors. We might be on the same sea, but some are going under and some are parasailing drunk, yelling fucking-A!! while they crush a beer can against their forehead.

(Oh, who am I kidding, some are going under while parasailing drunk and crushing a beer can against their forehead! Duh. Maybe those people have the right idea.)

That's funny, isn't it? That it's one sea.

Or at least in the Oprah-universe it is.

I don't know. We're all vulnerable I guess. Isn't it funny when you realize the invulnerable people have learned to feign being vulnerable to get on in the few instances where they cannot? Those people really scare me.

Brooklyn, thanks for your entry today. It made me feel better. Not that I was feeling bad, but you probably know what I mean.

And I'm sorry I was a dick to you that time. I really am crazy sometimes.

It passes, but so does people's patience.

I would say six hundred people will never know what they're missing out on, but I won't, because they will know....with your poems, with time...

Now I am going into Hallmark terrain, so I'll shut up.

I always get the most perverse urges to write the strangest poems in the most florid Hallmark cards.

So I'll throttle my Loki now and go eat some potato chips.

xo B.