Cusp of Spring – Derek Maine
August 16, 2024
“I would tell you that I loved you if I thought that you would stay, but I know that it’s no use and you’ve already gone away.” – Robert James Smith
I was so busy covering the war I didn’t see it coming.
I am wearing a blazer with elbow patches and my life is falling apart. “Boys Don’t Cry” on the car stereo, top down, speeding down the outer belt line beneath stars and space junk, crumpled up manifesto blowing around in the backseat, next to you there is nothing.
The Museum Director, for one, I cannot get ahold of. He works for the Publicist, of course. Her hands were all over this thing from the beginning. She set me up with Elliot to find Blake. That was two summers ago. How did this all happen so goddamn suddenly? The lawyer for the estate is not answering calls, texts, and hasn’t matched with a single one of my catfish accounts on Hinge. He’s up to something. More than likely…Where is my goddamn ink? The pens in this place are pathetic, plastic chopsticks practically. My notebooks are out of order or missing or in the trunk. I rented a Kia, regrettably. I wasn’t thinking. The shirt tucked in man shiny greasy hair sweating through the undershirt and light to medium starch Van Heusen asked me if I had a preference and like an asshole I said “no.” Now I’m driving a Kia and staying at Hampton Inns. Now I’m losing my shit live on television. Shep once tried to claim I sold Whores of Puerto Plata to Netflix for a sum. I’ve never had more than five hundred readers. My god, can you even imagine wanting more!? What would you even do with all of them? Where would you put them? And what then? No one can agree on anything. You’d let them all down. You would just have to! To be any goddamn good at it, you would just have to disappoint them every time. Break their hearts! Some far-right wing elements have entered the literary arts because it costs less than a large pizza, two toppings delivered with tip to benefact a writer. A poet? My god, they can’t give them away. The most famous poet alive right now is an incredibly boring political tool with the cadence of another century, and a dead one at that. A failed one! There, I said it! A failed century! Building the bomb destroyed us. The anxiety of it could come at any time. The knowledge we’d done it to ourselves. That we built our undoing. And to live with that. We are in the living with that now, and have been for as long as I have been alive. Soon it will be a century since. And we wonder what’s left of us if we make it? It’s late, I’m afraid. I must order club soda from Jerry’s and have it delivered.
At Sewhirt Farm on Abinger Common, in the Surrey Hills, Bertrand Russell took Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot as his lover. It was a brief affair. T.S. Eliot was in the city, working his corporate banking job. It was a brief affair. T.S. Eliot was prone to depression. He worked to give his mind something to do. It alleviated his nervousness. It was good for a man of his nervous disposition. I think that might be exactly how he put it or how I will recall it now anyhow. Ezra Pound had encouraged Vivienne to marry T.S., as a way to keep T.S. in London by all accounts. It was a brief affair.
She was considered vulgar, deemed insane, died in the mental hospital where she spent the last nine years of her life. T.S. Eliot separated from her in February 1933. It was a brief affair. Most of the things I know about T.S. Eliot are from the excellent book The Wasteland, Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis. Most of the things I know I read somewhere. I spend my days reading somewhere. It did keep coming though. The absolute avalanche of pain, jealousy, fury, and loss. It was a brief affair.
March 16, 2024
“Cecilia Ann” by the Pixies, full volume. It was bright, hot, teetering. My man in the statehouse was buried under piles of newspapers from the late 70s in his art dungeon, painting black lips on thousands of clowns’ faces. The courier had a DJ set at Orchid. His girlfriend was smuggling lion’s mane out of Mexico. It was Spring, the war was elsewhere. Our novels were ending unceremoniously. “Velouria” by The Pixies breaks the back right speaker. My fist smashes through this century and back into the last. My knuckle meat mixing with shards and memory. The Publicist was high, probably, in a Lower East Side loft. Blake Lee found another island. I am still here waiting for surrender.
The cicadas are coming soon. The thirteen year and sixteen year cycles are converging. A swarm awaits the mid-Atlantic.
My man in the statehouse shares certain sensitive information with me, specific documents.
Blake Lee has, possibly, reappeared. Except this time there is no beard, no hitchhiking to Las Vegas with a much younger woman, no steel mill or salt flats, no bookshop printer upstairs in Portland, Oregon to pilfer roughly stapled copies of The Whores of Puerto Plata, no Caribbean island hiding out from Netflix or the Publicist or New York and its parties, no hiding from the computers and denying cyberwriting ever existed but, instead, creating multiverses of artificial intelligence art and NFTs, generative enhanced images and sparse text, codes and ciphers à la Cicada 3301 (from which, he claimed once, I might add, he was a graduate).
Russians are pouring dye into ballot boxes and setting small fires. Police are rounding up protestors and sending them to Siberia. A tension is in the air. “He’s back,” whispered at Clando.
March 17, 2024
A stolen car crashes into a vape shop on South Wilmington street in broad daylight.
Headed to DC this week. Avoiding the Museum Director. I can’t think hear of the Publicist, and now that’s all he will discuss, I’m certain. I haven’t even fleshed out their connection yet in my mind. I come to DC to inspect certain documents at an embassy.
I will be meeting my lawyer, a land use attorney and serious pill popper with at least a rate I can afford. He’s married to his third paralegal and has the body and mind of Ignatius Reilly in a modern century’s nightmare of a corporate sweatsuit, standard issue. He loves the Nationals and hot dogs and baseball in general. And beer. He has a kind smile, cool blue eyes, and charges $450 an hour in the capital city of the decaying empire, which is next to nothing, of course.
March 19, 2024
Jared Kushner is looking into waterfront real estate opportunities in Gaza.
March 20, 2024
I zoomed in on Memphis tonight to catch a friend win a pinball tournament. A fellow cyberwriter.
He was elated, out of his mind ecstatic. I felt such joy radiating from him. Like watching a man at the height of his powers.
En route to meet the land use attorney in DC, seeing the sleepy mid-Atlantic go by from the dining car, a whole region waiting on a storm of cicadas, begging for government intervention. I do not have time, this morning or afternoon, to shuffle through their towns and proclaim a vision. The small children fanning their palms, awaiting accession and certain surrender. I do not have the energy to complete certain missions. There is a pall over my mood and those of my fellow passengers, all of us itching with the certainty that we simply must be headed somewhere, anywhere at all, to seek answers. The many private pilgrimages we embark on next to each other.
March 22, 2024
I am in possession of the documents. I laid a flower at the Israeli embassy in honor of Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice. The land use attorney was drunk, belligerent, unhelpful. I think he’s going to be an excellent addition to my team. The cherry blossoms are out. Wild colors sprouting everywhere.
Soldiers training in Rock Creek Park. A self-proclaimed four-star gen