Stephen C. Rose's Blog, page 2

Half of everything is chance

From Some Stones Don't Roll
Ficmem at Kindle

Yes it goes on. For a day passed and my heart remains unbroken unless you count that one break so mysterious and weird that it cannot, nah will not, count even as a memory. I could not put the words together to evoke a shred of empathy from you. Whoever you are. It's Saturday. I hear the rustle of papers. She is here my angel my light. Death hangs over our home. Each week some news arrives. He went. She went. We're of that age. A bell is toling, The bell in Herald Square. 1943. I wait on a corner in the rain. The cold East River wind lashes my cheek. I am seven. I do not know what I am waiting for. We have moved. My world is over. I am lost. Nothing beyond this is anything, The lashing wind,

Life. I could live forever. I am a fool. My life has not begun. I am still living backwards and forwards. Now I live now. Harrumph. Get a grip. No Camus Sisyphean angst today. Albert could have made a seraphim out on that beach.

I took a shower this morning. I extended my left leg and lifted it gently over the raised tubside and let the water fall down over me careful to touch the bases and then replace the soap in the dish and exit with similar gentleness. Mindful wondering if my heart was going to break. I do not like to think of such things, Of sad things,. Of the forthcoming gratuitous violence broadcast on Netflix movies. Of the abyss that panic brings. I imagine the edge of the cosmos where the abyss is, the point of no return. A mind is a terrible thing to contemplate when panic is in view. I cannot speak this morning. I cannot speak without complete solitude. I shall go back to playing games. Easy ones that I can win. Quickly. I hate games that I can win slowly, where I must be patient for victory to come. I counsel patience and the freedom of not judging. I tell my followers to love life. I hide nothing. Finally it makes no difference. Half of everything is chance. But chance is always observed.

Some Stones Don't Roll (FicMemOne by Stephen C. Rose) Kindle Edition

Now a slow siren. Life goes on.

From Some Stones Don't Roll
Ficmem at Kindle

There we have it. Combine the remnants of the Sweet and Low with a miniscule squeeze from the inverted Trader John's honey container with the clever plastic, opening, squeezable, dispenser more spare in size than the aperture of a penis. The thinnest stream on earth. It is twenty feet to the little kitchen from here in the front room where I sit. Back and forth I go. This is my life. I travel from this chair. I converse with my followers. I am set to Eastern US -5 GMT my country is worldwide as it always has been. I will see photos or video even if they contain sensitive content. 2008-2014. 4x my time online. Hiding in plain sight. The voices here are from the street. This is the old McAlpin Hotel, thick walls and silence in the building proper.The drip is internal to the apartment. The street is external to the windows, eight floors down. A girl flew down from the top a few years back. No one knows if she was pushed. It was not her idea. She is gone. Now a slow siren. Life goes on.

I scratch my head. Ah yes, the coffee.

From Some Stones Don't Roll
A Kindle Novella

I reach for my tweet writings. I read the New York Times in bed about how the Communists of China were attacking a commune where communism was actually practiced and harmony appeared to reign. Gray Communism Chinese Style is all government coming down on this breath of fresh air. And I think my own polity within my mind is just as fatuous as that. "Keep fewer things for a longer time." I look at my recent tweets. Two of them have minor errors. I am a fallible law giver. Do not trust me. The drip is faster now. I have lost $40K on paper in the last four days. I tell my man relax. Where are the pigeons? I will have some more coffee. Funny. Coffee was my nemesis when I was in my late 20s and going mad in Geneva. They said it was the coffee that was making me crazy. I believed them. I had no will. I was the captive of others all the time. I was without a center. I was a ripping success. I had friends who spoke truth. I hit walls and cried they will not move. Whew. I will have that coffee now.

I have a judge's chair whose skin has peeled and given way to duct tape and then to a denim covering it has lasted longer than most of these chairs I have had for decades now as I have spent all my days at this and other keyboards writing away, rolling away and pushing myself up ambulatory to go and get coffee. It has been five years of iced coffee poured into me and stowed in plastic highball sized screw top containers. Between sips I screw the top back on so I will not inadvertently cause mayhem with an involuntary movement which cannot be explained. There. Did I see a pigeon? Something went by outside. Outside I see my building reflected on the black glass side of the building across the street. I see two duplicates of the little lamp by my keyboard. I look over the obsolete music things on the sill and beneath the blind and nothing moves. The radiator that once functioned is mute. The floor is snaked with cords. I scratch my head. Ah yes, the coffee.

I am harnessed by lyrics.

Excerpt from Some Stones Don't Roll
A Kindle Novella

We are discussing feeling and logic and psychologism and I am silenced. I cannot participate any more. I am a wanderer in the outer space of reverie. I am slumped in a fix of my own making. I am caught in a self-referential bind fishing for iambs amid the still-resonating traffic noises, the low rumble of the earth's breath. "I'll be All Smiles Tonight" though my heart may break tomorrow. Prescience. I woke with that song nudging my reality. But I could not remember the title. I ran it through mnemonic slats and it came clear and so I brought up the lyric because a song was prescient in the past with such crystal clarity that I have since credited the experience with authority, It actually only happened that once. Speak the truth. The truth of that song back in the seventies. "Is Anybody Going to San Antone?" I heard it in my head. And I told myself: if I can get to the end of that lyric. I will know what is happening. I was in my VW. Or was it a Subaru? I do not remember. I think it was spring. No. it was fall. Because the body was discovered in the spring. The end of the chorus was "everything will be OK as long as I can for get I've ever known you." Something like that. And I looked at my paranoid-schizophrenic passenger and gulped and silently aimed the car down the street and crossed the bridge and rode the mile into town and dropped him off and returned home and did not know until the next day that he had gone missing after staying up all night talking to a boy named George about freedom and then stabbed him in the early, early morning with a serrated knife and then disappeared knife and all period end of story.

I hear the sirens again. And the drip is more insistent, faster. I need to shave. My bags are packed almost. I need a bag that can carry a cane which I may need if my knee gives out. I never know if it will give out. I am in intimate contact with my body. I am my body. My fingers do the talking. Swish. Where are the pigeons? You see. I knew that I would avoid the blade that I knew was incipient. If I could forget I had ever known him. But no! The lyric cannot be LITERAL. Excruciating. I am no stranger to excruciation. There was a siege of craziness in the north west area of Las Vegas where you are almost free of the town and speeding toward Carson City and Reno. I was still writing songs. Just as I did with Bill, before I forgot I ever knew him The Vegas boy was named Charlie.He was TALENT. In a dysfunctional suburb populated by crazies. There must be some way out, I thought. I was. I am harnessed by lyrics.

Abba tell me where am I now

Excerpt from Some Stones Don't Roll
A Kindle Novella

Abba tell me where am I now. I am in New York City do I go with that? Outside the bus sounds. Are they buses? I do not know the sounds anymore. The drip drip drip into the tub. Must hydrate the atmosphere to keep legs from itching all night long. What's a drip a small price to pay for freedom from self inflicted nail pain. She is gone now. How many shes have gone. If I could line them in a row would they go out the door into the dingy hall? Where would I be without this keyboard. Oh in New York. Why not in Bangladesh. Or at UNICEF listening to the other Stephen hold forth. I remember him cowering for no reason when all I wanted to do was tell him there was such a thing as benign genocide nothing about whatever affair he was or was not having there comes a time when you could care less about the thrills you no longer know. I miss Ernesto. I miss the woman in Capri who was going to get me started. I miss nothing and everything. Drip drip drip drip.

Everything is always better. Palmiers broken in two and the new plastic, top always in place, iced-coffee thingy. I will take it with me on my journey. I have a viaticum in waiting. I have Kenneth Burke on my floor ledge. Now there's a siren, fire no doubt. And buildings collapsed and three dead six miles north and east. Now a hammering upstairs. As if we used stairs anymore. Two plastic containers of supplements I do not use anymore. They stand like sentries between me and the dirty window where a record player also obsolete sits next to cassette holders also empty and yes I know a change in view would be just the thing to change everything to make pigeons more visible to make the window cleanable. The dripping has not stopped.

I make people think, they say.

Excerpt from
Some Stones Don't Roll
Available on Kindle exclusively

I make people think, they say. Words are my elixir. I put them together as simply as that. Short sweet. Sweet short. I get it. Do you? Values power progress. Tolerance is humility, Life is art. My stock man is on Hollow Possum Road, or somewhere, up in the land of genial obfuscation, reachable by Metro North on days when it does not strike people dead. I wonder if, at the moment of impact, the victim does not have a seraphic flash, a moment of sacrificial clarity? "I lay down my life for ..." I say this to balance myself as the arbiter of right and wrong. This is the task I have taken on in my efforts to rule the world from my dingy tower. I want to make things better so that the downtrodden, who will be downtrodden forever, are not condemned to that predictable fate. Because there is no way that what I do is worth anything by contemporary standards. Besides, I am forced to consider that I belong to a dying breed of those who have inherited the products of past generations of money-grubbing. It is an enviable fate. I get to sit at this keyboard day and night sending out my Tweets to all the world, but mainly to the Millennials that I seek like a parched nomad seeks crystal fountains. I want to lead them like a Pied Piper to overthrow the salacious generals who serve the Engine of Doom's owners. How one gets to be an owner has escaped me. My impression is you learn to borrow. You borrow until you go bankrupt and then you borrow some more until the world cannot bear to see you as anything but a man whose wealth has been created by incurring massive debts that somebody must one day pay. But not the borrower. I don't know what I am talking about. If I were to look at my holdings as we speak and found only a large zero, my heart would sink but I would figure that my sweetheart would save me since that is what she does on a daily basis. Selah. Saved daily. I make people think? Quel joke.

And I looked at my paranoid-schizophrenic passenger

Excerpt from
Some Stones Don't Roll


And I looked at my paranoid-schizophrenic passenger and gulped and silently aimed the car down the street and crossed the bridge and rode the mile into town and dropped him off and returned home and did not know until the next day that he had gone missing after staying up all night talking to a boy named George about freedom and then stabbed him in the early, early morning with a serrated knife and then disappeared knife and all period end of story.

Why I Use MAINLY the same cover on my Kindle Books

My Reasons are as follows:

1. Online books profit by having a brand, particularly if the author is not widely known.

2. Images can serve as a brand.

3. I like the background I have gotten free on Kindle.

4. The background shows up the title and author name whereas many snappy covers are less clear in that department.

5. I do not like spending money on anything I do online.

6. I feel Kindle Books are a world of their own, a world I like, a world I am trying to learn, and my cover is part of that world.

7. I am contrarian and do not believe I would succeed any other way.

Images tell.

Images tell.

Images activate imagination.

Images and stories are not opposed.

Images tell stories.

Telling is an act.

To tell is to reveal.

To reveal is to unveil.

What is revealed is always already there.

We are all realist idealists.

Realism and idealism are not opposed.

Images evoke the real.

Images are signs.

Words are signs.

Words and images are linked.

Telling is everything.

Do tell.

Never be afraid to tell your story.

"Like" as virtually every other word is image-based speech.

Images and icons are objects.

What an image evokes is reality.

Reality is beyond our capacity to encompass.

We exalt reality and accept mystery.

Images and thanks are not opposed.

Triadic Philosophy 100 Aphorisms

The day was hardly lost.

He lay upon a black rock long worn down by the winds so that it seemed almost soft. His eyes were shut. He had left the big screen. He has lost big time. It made no difference. It was a virtual game. He was chasing someone he did not know. A name. It was all in his head. He lay there and let his mind move to a process he learned long ago. Some words that rose from his reality. He had lost big time. Real or not, it seemed real enough to him. The first word came. Tolerance. He would tolerate himself. He would let it go. He would not weight it down with remembrance of endless failures going back to the Ending. The next word - help. He could manage that. He could help all day. He had been helped by living, by loving life, by seeing art everywhere, some shabby some serene. Another word - democracy. Democracy needed some more words, he thought. Some tough modifiers. Like fairness. Like justice. He would get that said. He shifted on the stone. He would get up soon. The fourth and last word - non-idolatry. There was nothing anywhere that he could honor more than the one he relied on here and with his eyes closed. He honored the reality he knew. He got up off the smooth, black stone. He walked back to the screen.

He would play again. But before that, he would create some things, compose some things, maybe make someone happy by something said or done.

The wind blew gently around him. He knew what it was. From nothing had come everything. Then everything went back again. The day was hardly lost.