Situation Life

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 15:51

The following are some email excerpts I wrote last night that I am trying to assemble here into an essay of sorts. It's a long read so sit down and take some time to get a glimpse into our lives here within our three meter/nine foot wide narrow five storey house. Put on the kettle for a cup of tea and while you wait light one up for me, tobacco free, please. Read this like you would the memory of a strange sequence of dreams within dreams - Or in this case emails within emails.

One important reference from the cast of Characters...
Michael Cleveland – beautiful, long haired, big blue eyed, always smiling, happy, hippy, celibate, 33yo boy (Christ references real and intended), vegan-vegetarian, eco-activist tree hugging but with a dog (husky part wolf) named Timber – who I used to work with, shot dead (Michael not the dog) for sport by high schoolers behind his home near Hudson and High two months ago.... When I worked with him a few years back he didn't have a car or healthcare and made just over minimum wage. You are here and there Michael. You knew so much more about the astral planes of other side to be the Guide for us than we all around you ever understood.

The Cast of Characters:


Bart: you know him, Belgian this story's hero

Bill: curator of film and video central Ohio, Irish-American-Catholic-gay man hales from Chicago
Dave: Bill STR8 northern Mid-westerner colleague no relation to the character below called Covey (also a Dave)

Sherri: Bill's fab boss from LA

Oskar: blind old black dog who lives out of a small café two doors away not unlike a manifestation of a Churchillian kind of black dog

Covey (Dave): left leaning gay plague widow, dancer, professor, former Ohio 4-H farm boy, mad quilter, crazy knitter, happy gardener with a big heart for the homeless

Robert: Artist and book collector, gay plague victim, partner of Covey, dead for many years, now his ashes sit in a box in Covey's wooden house near Hudson and High in a quartier I call Appalachian Village

Ma and Pa Kettle: Paul and Louise (RiP mom)

The Neighbor: two doors down the street from Ma and Pa Kettle

Shannon Maloney: daughter of the Neighbor

Roy Cohn: corrupt US attorney got Ethel Rosenberg the death sentence for Un-American Activities after WWII. Homophobic homosexual died from AIDs

Ethel Rosenberg: see above

Ron Vawter: Hollywood movie star, regular player in the Wooster Group (NYC) productions on stage, Played Roy Cohn in his own stage production contrasting Roy Cohn with Jack Smith

Jack Smith: 1960's hippie bohemian stage artist in experimental NYC theater productions downtown in "the village"

Bernays, Edward L.: relation of Sigmund Freud (nephew) who went from Marketing and Advertising to shaping the psychological mental health of the twentieth century to focus on the "me" rather than the "we". His work was best used for political manipulation for the Military Industrial Complex that emerged from the WWII battle industries

Meryl Streep: Hollywood Actor

Charles Dickens: English author from a previous all but forgotten era that shaped the consciousness of the future humanitarian movement for social reform

Screaming Mimi's: hysterical Heroin addicts from the 1960s

Ekhart Tolle: German Author of the book the Power of Now - lives in west coast Canada

Kerry: the lesser of two possible future evils

W: has various names most notably idiot, asshole, son of a bush, brother of Florida Jeb, calls himself Texan but really from Maine, corporatist, puppet of his fathers administration, presiding over an Empire in a steep ongoing fifty year decline

Poetic and musical references of note and credit:

The Howl, Allen Ginsberg

Horse Latitudes, Jim Morrison and the Doors

Tallis Scholars, a cappella medieval chorus, chants and masses

Send Me an Angel: song redcently remade by Zeromancer but the version of the song these lines refer to was made by Real Life back in the mid 1980s. A dance song that made a good if not inadvertant backdrop to coming of age gay during the AIDs/Political crisis of the Reagan years

Angels In America: Tony Kushner play write

Synchronicity: Police song

HBO: American cable TV channel (needs no further explanation)

Six Feet Under: TV series detailing the Americans coming of age regarding death and dying (see Elisabeth Kubler Ross for more help info)

West Wing: TV series fantasizing the “what if” scenario if democracy actually occurred in the White House

Subdivisions: song by Rush rock band lamenting the suburbanization of life

Blink 182: Band with the song from the Future Soundtrack of America: I Miss You

The Future Soundtrack for America: Compilation CD accompanying the small book The Future Dictionary of America

Tom Spanbauer: author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon and The City of Shy Hunters chronicling the anonymous dramas of everyday peoples lives from the East Village circa the 1980's

Trieste: and the Meaning of Nowhere – book by Jan Morris

Transmission: Album and song title by Joy Division

The Majestic Qur’an and English Rendering

The Holy Bible: The book of the Revelations

Khidr: Arabic - meaning the Green One like the Anglo’s GREEN MAN. He dwells between – in the realm between the seen and unseen. See Qur’an 18:64 (Surah numerical from Arberry Translation).

Duran Duran: early song "This is Planet Earth"

Jelalludin Rumi 13th century Muslim mystic, poet and Sufi from Persia




Hey Bart,

It’s 12.42 am. I just went upstairs to go to bed but when I got there I realized I had forgot my medicine downstairs in the kitchen… on my way to the kitchen I stopped here from a ghosts trap huis* suggestion for this email to you: A love letter to you – a future blogette perhaps - inshAllah. Earlier - after we watched Angels in America - I wrote a letter to Bill – I always focus my writing to him as he is the only person reading me and offering a response with any regularity. It’s like Dear Diary but rather hey Bill… after Angles in America I wrote a lot of abstract free associative - disassociative writing to chart the course of my persistent streams of unconciousness… wanting to awaken to enlightenment except reality has cracked open and we now find ourselves in the dawn of the new Millennium of Islam. And we’ve all neglected the Qur’an as a significant source/font since the persistent to present day crusades…. By the way Angels in Islam are always Masculine/male but never female or so I have been told.



I had a dream last night where you and I and other people we did not know were standing on an old wooden painted gray porch, not unlike the wrap around one on Dave Coveys house in Appalachian Village*. We were speaking of David in past tense like we would Robert. Bill had a similar dream which now disturbs both of us… The following is the letter that was in response to that but then went off into the ice box* of my imaginations.



What follows is modified (corrected) for an essay from the last letter to Bill… another letter from Belgium…



Hey Bill,

Hearing of your similar dream (or as Michael would say in these situations “synchronicity”) kind of – regarding the dreams - almost breaks my heart. I daresay it is a prophetic warning - Either health wise or crime wise or more probably, hopefully, Robert is throwing fits for the attention he is lacking from those still among the living. And knowing this sucks. It seems too psychic to be ignored just to be polite and proper. It must be a message from Robert from beyond his ashen grave.

We just watched another installment of HBO’s version of Angels in America – which delights me. It is the first time I actually like Meryl Streep in film.

What I like in film/TV best is when fantasy mingles with reality – ceilings cracking open to reveal angels or ghosts etc. It’s what I like about Dickens Christmas Carole. Six feet under is this way – but West Wing generally is not because it can’t be since it’s really only politics and preaching.

Bart wants to buy Angels in America HBO version on DVD and read the play again… But he thought we had the book for that and I thought we did too but we can’t find it and what’s worse is Bart swears you gave it to us. (Which you probably forget if you did – so now we will never know)… Bart and I did see the play in the grand Ohio Theater once upon a time in Dollville.

When you write about complications with staff at work regarding Sherri and Dave and the laying of carpet in the offices and the frustration and the mess and the boxes and the necessary staff placations – sometimes it seems bill you aren’t a cinema curator at a major Midwestern arts institution but rather a kindergarten teacher with a flock of genXer screaming mimi’s….

Seeing Angels in America reminded me about the eighties which I have tried hard to forget ever since, like I have tried to forget Ohio. I remember the Eighties only too well from my faraway Midwestern vantage point of meaningless suburban isolation. The torn down or forgotten bars there with odd names like Crazy Mama’s, Mean Mister Mustards next door to Nice Missus Ketchups, Trends, The Garage once called Imaginations. The fragments of the gay urban scene that found its way to High Street in such places in central Ohio mixed with punk and new wavers, progressive anti rock music, anti republican sentiment seething from cracks in the social structure everywhere; horrid stories from the living and dying across the states. Smug republicans mocking death: complacent, racist, sexist, homophobic, pseudo religious, ostentatious, conservative suburban types with chrome, glass and leather furnishing in cardboard like houses with attached two car garages, nursing babies who will be hooked on MTV and heroin and nicotine and sugar in less than two decades.

Seeing Angels in America on TV here brings it all back. How many guys died back then to a mysterious and terrifying disease wrought with fear and guilt which anyone dying doesn’t need added on to their exponentially increasing suffering. Before Doctors knew what was wrong and how to help. Purifications of the flesh within and without; shit sprays while being on look out for the arrival of dementia before death; the terrible loneliness without the comfort of a healing touch from another human; Starving while nauseous; wanting a meal that cannot be taken. These sad stories from the City of Shy Hunters, but not the city confined to Spanbauers East Village Manhattan of the early 1980’s. Sad stories of lives from within that vast City of Nowhere not bound to any one place or one politic that so many are unwittingly proud inhabitants of.

I still firmly believe the Military Industrial Complex manufactured this disease – I still firmly believe science holds the cure to this while capitalist compelled pharmaceuticals prefer to profit off of expensive endless chemical therapy. Plus it is good for destabilizing vast regions of the world population for the economic colonialism of the American empire. It is a brilliant scheme because you only have to blame the moral values of the by only chance guilty members of the masses. Bernays himself (the real first horseman from the book of the Apocalypse) couldn’t have marketed it better…

The neighbor woman who visited from Ma and Pa Kettles old street/rue/straat… Good old Irish American, Catholic, seventy-something divorcee, remarried, well, her daughter, Shannon Maloney, died at home last week alone a few days after falling into a diabetic coma.

Planet Earth is the last stop on the Cosmic Metro before arriving at the platform for Hell the last stop on the life line is all that I can figure.

May God have mercy on this Shannon Maloney of Ohio’s soul and show her into a better place than her life here on Planet Earth.

God save her from Hell which for the rest of us infidels will be nothing more than an eternal cold and lonesome sleep - Cold Hell without a stalwart lover in the torment to warm each other from the chilling damp with our bodily heat. Or sex to take our minds off of our entombment. For some Hell is not full of fire and brimstone but cold, damp and noise.

Are you still with me reading of my life from a dark room with no windows. Cold, Dark and Damp my only companions. The clincher is enlightenment lies on the other side of only thirty centimeters thick brick and mortared walls.

On the bright side of things I voted for Kerry with my mail in Absentee ballot - but we all know Bush II will win because idiots prevail – after all the conservatives have ravaged education for the last four decades precisely to gain power from a self made modern dark age. Ohio – ravaged the most by Bush II’s regime while stupidly identifying with the idiotic antics and failures of the W. Won’t Kerry be just another face bringing only superficial change to the Empire of only two far right winged parties? Ach the voices inside my head wasting my time broadcasting around globe from the offices of the Ministry of Lies and Misinformation from the likes of CNN.

At least there are the Palestrina Masses of the Missea Papae from the Tallis Scholars – medieval aca pella chants – to comfort those of us trapped in the waiting room of time before the inevitable future realization of the return of a New Dark Age post American "Democracy" or rather Corporate-ocracy*.


Bush II isn’t even good enough to be one of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse to usher in things like Famine and Pestilence from the book of Revelations… He comes from the same church of greed as Roy - fucking - Ethel Rosenberg - Cohn – except this time without Ron Vawter as the adorable beaded and sequined, bathed in cannabis smoking bliss under stage light - Jack Smith.

End of transatlantic transmission… now it’s a trans four floors of old house transmission… we do live like Jack and Sally in our halloweening nightmare.

Meanwhile it is now ten past one am early Wednesday morning on our Bru-town* street Vlaamsesteenweg. Oskar the black dog trapped in a nicotined room with eyes burning yelps not so much to be let out to make his promenades but for a companion either four footed or two – just anything but the solitude of cold, dark, tobacco smoke smelling brown café enclosure.

Sometimes life is bearable mostly though it is many levels of souls trapped like Oskar the old blind dog.

It is only you Bart I long to hold throughout the wintery lengths of our sodium orange lit night in these here southern lowlands of northern Europe. But the damp and the far above the roofline sky (the always foreign to me angle of the suns ray from this latitude – horse latitudes) - is hard to endure with this mind of mine. Make me fuck you – take us into oblivion together – to that place we pass through only for the orgasms fleeting moments – the only place of peace I know the place of no-being: That place of no-being where we existed before we were ever conceived – where you and I were inseparably one immaterial cosmic ether of contentment.

I crave nothingness with you and as you; why can we only remerge after we die.

Take me back to before… before we were condemned to be human. I am a failure. I am either an anchor holding you to the surface of life Bart or there is not enough rope between us and I am pulling you under the surface of success to beneath where I dwell in submerged failure of living.

Take me back to wherever we were before we arrived on Duran Duran’s (this is) Planet Earth.

Before we entered into what Ekhart Tolle miserably calls:

Life situation.

I want to read this to you in our crumbling salon with its graceful all too high with paint pealing ceiling. Within the flattering proportions of another age before interior proportion began its parking garage limitation of low ceiling, low budget, proportion. If only we could take the time to listen in gentle cultured ways from the days before electronic amusements and sitting in traffic stole all our free time. Picture me standing, leaning against the non-warming former fire place, broken marble mantle – these scripts on paper in hand: My wavering dry voice filling the room. Me standing there like an apparition returned from the dead to haunt you. Hallowe’en after all approacheth, reproacheth. Gut churning my only pulse of life to remind me I am bound to this here mortal coil for still awhile longer. Me reading. You gentle and observant to the silent spaces between my words, hearing every gasp of the fleeting moment as the moment passes farting from ‘future’ into ‘past’. You always remaining between the two, holding on to the silence to navigate staying in the moment. You, Bart, listening to my troubled writing from my addled, depressive brain, being launched verbally from my tongue. How you are always turning that mental anguish dross magically into something worthwhile by your kind act of listening?

God Bart do you believe and know and feel how much only you, not even life, is all that matter in this universe to me. Without you I am nothing. With out you, I do not want, to… be*.

Meanwhile conservative types back home in poor Ohio meddle with various laws to legislate against same-sexer citizens from living out lives of equality with their opposite-sexer citizen-consumers as they choose with the Freedom America once guaranteed to all Americans. The hypocrisy of these conservative types who say they believe in small government legislating for a big and meddlesome government contrary to the Nations constitution and Bill of Rights. No one reads much less understands those two documents.

1.37 am. Oskar howls a pitiful moan.

I am reminded that Rumi speaks of the Love Dogs in that 13th century poem of his because I hear Oskar only two doors away howling for his master unheard in the dead of a Brussels la Villette* night.

And Rumi wrote so long ago:

Listen to moan of the dog for its master.

The return message you crave from Allah is in this longing.

That is my attempt at a paraphrase: From Chapter 10 the Howling Necessity (like Ginsberg’s the Howl) - Coleman Barks book THE ESSENTIAL RUMI.
In this poem Rumi refers to Khidr the Guide.

Khidr appears to solitaires that are cut off from the normal channels of spiritual instruction. I was born into a family keeping dogs; my childhood friend was named Kidder. I am seeking the Guide of souls called Khidr.

I miss you. I miss you always Bart even in every moment I am with you. I can’t help it my heart and mind are pathetique this way. My coming of age disco chants were to the song Send Me An Angel (Right Now). I have never stopped believing you Bart are that Angel.



Further explanations:

Trap Huis: Dutch word meaning literally stairs house

Appalachian Village: Small Quartier in Central Columbus northside its boundaries roughly falling between four streets: South of Arcadia Ave., North of Thompkins St., East of Neil Ave. and West of Indianola Ave.

Straatje: Dutch word for a little street (straat in diminutive with je added at the end of the word)

Rue: French word for Straat

Ice Box: pre electrically based refrigeration kitchen appliance

Corporate-ocracy: Dictatorship based on fear and capital run by executives like Rumsfeld

BE: abbreviation for the land of the Belgians - Belgium - in the new Union of old Europa

Bru-town: Present day Brussels/Brussel/Bruxelles capitol of the Union

La Villette: Novel set in a thinly disguised Brussels/Brussel/Bruxelles by Charlotte Bronte