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1. Memories on the Mammaries (though I'm sure I was weaned off a bottle.} The view through flesh shells, amber red light barely tracing vessels of blood through black shadow gentle early months of cognizance or the simplest of simple awareness. But the dress whites or blues or greens around me as I suckle are no memory. Those officer candidates googoogaagaaing at me or something. A true soldier boy/baby?

2. San Francisco Suburban Glass Houses w/nary a stone in sight. Hills rise to hide cow pastures where trees eat fly by kites. Memories play on windy days on a high hill behind the house. Gay neighbors. Life in SF oblivious to me, only views from pre-remembered (prehistoric?) eyes.

3. How about a trip across America, (or the USA to the rest of N and S America) (where disaster awaits from a swaying trailer threatening to topple us kids and only toppling itself, and the toppling of my father retrieving a sandle from high on the trailor roof slipping and cutting open his cheek and being served Metrical on his birthday through the broken jaw) and surprises and thrills and pains. A compression of space to the littlest trailer and time to moments of terror or certain smells or compartmental bedding arrangements.

4. Okay, so we're in bright boy suburbs of DC called Kensington with Wheaton Plaza some bigass mall where you see Beatles flicks. Don't forget adventures in the dodging and textbook drowning creek. Walking on fallen trunk bridges. Mysterious neighborhoods like that other suburban community on the other side of the creek or the shantytown mysterious hidden down a muddy track where those other color people live and where you absolutely do not go. Remember the creek flooding. Remember the big rock by the school you remember walking by and it is associated with the death of JFK. Remember mom actually working to get Agnew to be governor 'cause I guess the other guy was EVEN WORSE.

5. A kid in the big city. Alley way rides on roughrider bikes falling from a rut in the road flying over handlebars. A nearby cinema showing the wonderful sci-fi/horror drek all children with a precocious warped personality flock to and worship at the alter of cheap effects and stupid little stories. But of course you don't get the stupidity. you embrace it with open heads and wide eyes. Basements with ping pong and termite inundation and upstairs swooping down on us a winged thing: a bat. Sweeping from one side to the other of the downstairs rooms: Living room to dining room and back. Dodging the net until caught and tangled. Fear of loose hair home for the hiding and biting bat. Great riots in the street only blocks away. Pooooor neighborhood surrounding Johns Hopkins. Curfew. Walking down to the 7-11 crouching under the menacing weight of curfew...And it's only four o'clock! Got to have my slurpee!! Oh and odd times at Homewood, a place for retarded kids ,I guess, cause I whizzed by them with flying AAAAs. Early, taking a bus, and just not able to get off the damn thing at my stop. Blocks pass before I'm released from the towering crowd. Slipping out the goddamnned door with my book bag swinging.

What are the horrors of your youth? The times not forgortten. What great moments do you remember. What about other times. Memory. Discoveries. Great discoveries. Scary discoveries. Enlightening discoveries. Discouraging discoveries. Disturbing discoveries. Home runs and horrors. One must pick up the stories. Invent a shape. Place a plot on the events, guiding them into drama. Would someone, anyone read a story with no drive? They listen to music with no drive and they love it (new age). And what about Cage? Is it natural. Is it a natural drive. Essence preceeding existence? To lasso the odd little creature of memory, moments available for the plucking. Constrained by a composed order from the future, or the present looking back. The line of shape burned in. penned in, the wild horses are somehow brought to parade rest. Look at the line it makes thru time. This field of wildness. It's not just the australe astrale, but the point being lodged in a narrow field pushing along time. And then the traces remain for later. And when you perceive them again during a new later present, are the lines followed. The music moves from point to point in its order. But if it is purposefully disarrayed and no logical control arranges it, the new motion is the new line the new artifact reinvented from the old. Perception of art. When you see and artist's work are you to see the artist at work. Are you a witness of the steady movement thru time of brush or pen or medium whatever medium is used to create in its moments of creation? No except to see the finished piece as proof of the chronological array of movement. Therefore the current vision is unique in its movement on even a previously designed piece. And yet, it is the struggle of creation in respect to popular culture or people meeting art and digging it to captivate this audience with a lure, a guide to the hook. Are we hoodwinking people by creating a specifically designed text for their lives. But without that lure and hook, how are you going to get the people to buy in to your vision? Why would they? Are you showing them skills like a resume and a good interview to get them to feed the coffers of your own miserable life?

6. From city back to suburb and a step up into the fancy professional residences of Golden Valley MN. High School numbskulls w/a flirting of intelligence within. Finding that clique of sophomoric or moronic intellectuals to call your own. And that other group you danced around as a friend or an acquaintance or some such ritual of fitting in was the outre group without much je ne sais qua social level. No lead from them into the arms of the almighty jocks. More the pocket protectors: an orgy of declasse. And on the other side of town: 1st love! A long standing relationship of petting and fucking and exploring eachother’s passions. And inside materialized out is the words. The beginnings typed out on an old electric typewriter: BANG BANG BANG. A short novel of short people, a sort of midget heroic three musketeer types thwarting the castle walls and saving the princess in distress. A first poem showed to friends: The Ant and Mr. Klant: a silly ryme that fetched a smile from my neighbor at school. AND out of that emerged my obsession. In the face of all battles the wall is not climbed the rope too short to reach the talent. But there is a love there, a sort of kick you can’t get from champagne.

7. A flight to NY actually a car trp in the old dodge dart. Moving into a dorm at Bard. Making friends and studying poetry and film and literature and prisons. Not a lot of it making sense and yet sweet to the senses. Writing all kinds of poems including THEM a sort of treatise and allegory and myth refering back to the first success being about ants and a giant aardvaark being that is death personified as the ultimate deity. Creating film with some success and performance poetry with some success and combining the two with a most beautiful dancer for a dismal failure. Meeting Franz Kamin who after Robert Kelly was the fattest starving artist in the world, though RK, my poetry teacher, was wealthy in his way and Franz was not. And RK a decade later lost a lot of weight so it became official. (I met Franz again through happenstance as he was being treated at Hazelton, living in St. Paul and I worked just down the street. A fine performance of Pictures At an Exhibition at a lovely older ladies house as she and her older socialite friends sat outside with windows open and had tea.)

8. Off to NYC with a dime in my pocket and confusion on my pate. I worked a series of failed jobs, one being a week at Chock Full O’ Nuts wherein I toppled over the register as I banged away at it with that huge line of early morning professionals fueling up for the day and full of watch glances. I copied large texts for the local printing houses: 12 copies each of 300 pages or more. Got fired there for inadequette use of forms. The next job took them two and a half years to get around to fire me. For calling in sick and then coming in to pick up my check. I was a busboy (a familiar job for me) and then a waiter at Max’s Kansas City. It was the late 70s and punk was in its old fart stage and there it stank up poor old Max’s. No it really was some great stuff happening at and around the rock club. I got to meet some spectacular people: Johnny Thunders, Keith Levene, Richard Lloyd, Cheetah Chrome, Frank Zappa, many. Hung out in afterhour clubs till 8am. It was a club scene from 7pm till then. Got a bit strung out there and though I loved NYC (obviously more than I loved writing at the time since I rarely wrote), I had to go.

9. San Francisco was a fiasco. My poor brother had to accomadate my lanky body in a tiny efficiency. Working as dishwasher at P.S. on Polk Street, a gay restaurant, got me sick what with washing garbage cans at 5am so I was wet all day and after having gone out salooning till one or two the same morning, I just couldn’t stand it so it lay me to rest for a week and off I went to…

10. HAWAII!!! Oh man what a time! Just the most beautiful place in the world with the most perfect weather. Being a lover of the night, loving the setting sun and the plethora of stars and the moon in all its articulate gestures, it was the greatest place to wander around outside and have my adventures. Started out doing my busboy fired routine until I was back in school finishing up my degree this time in Theater. There I began writing my plays and performing (though not real well o well) I did a cool performance poetry show there doing Tricksters which was mostly chameleon city a two person play in which many times the actors speak simultaneous monologues. That was a cool play that worked on the senses in interesting ways, splitting consciousness in phases. Did some DJ work for UH’s non-commercial station KTUH. I had several shows including freeform as the Sour Mash Kid, a twentieth century composition show as Allen (I want to be elan (or Alain) and my middle name was the basis of the nom de radio) and some jazz shows as Cliff. I met a few beautiful oriental women, one of which I fell deeply in love and who (probably and fortunately for her not me happily) took my heart with her to her home in Japan. I lived mostly in Waikiki and near campus in Manoa Valley, but my last residence was on the North shore only one house away from the ocean. It was this crazy woman acid head psychology major’s place. I remember one time when I got way too dosed up and off we went to paint an outcropping by a bend in the road at the end of a small town near the Shore. It’s where you passed when you journeyed from her home to Honolulu. That night there was a terrible motorcycle accident in which someone out of control had passed the edge of the road where the outcropping jutted, and had smashed into it. With all the cops around, my crazy house mate still wanted to paint it. We talked her out of it and instead painted circles of different color spray paint around a traffic circle near us. The outcropping had unfortunately already been painted that night.

11. I don’t know if returning to the Twin Cities was the best idea I've had. It became my settling place for the past 15 years. I came to finish schooling and got my MA in theater writing more plays, acting and having some good friends. My play Choice was a one night success there. I did a couple more plays. One acts involved in different yearly festivals. Some were successful. Some less so. Then I entered my endless job: record store clerk. Cheapo Records has been my home away from home for many years now. I met my wife Leah through there. We have a nice little “starter house” in NE Minneapolis with our cat Toad. It is a somewhat comfortable life, though at this point I still feel that edge of oblivion wherein fate takes a hold of me and slaps me silly, as if I’m not silly enough.