Thursday, December 29, 2005

Tony went to England over christmas & new years & I was stuck with all the post-installation work, all the crappy little details of finishing up a project. One of those details was the building of new wood fences for a couple of the neighbors of the PG&E property the bridge had been installed on. Again these were CalTrans specs, so we had to build these out of 6x6s & 2x12s, all pressure-treated. So basically we were building retaining walls. And the whole time it was just pouring rain usually. Here Vic & my carpenters, Rob & Raul are putting up fence boards.


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Thursday, December 15, 2005

Post-Empire

His knees encircled with blood seas. Some days, he says, are troubled, counter to, rather than survival and the continuation. Fighting to keep his lips from quivering.

Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld.


POST-EMPIRE, my prosaic, poetic & visual meditation on the graspings and the whitherings of the tentacles of empire, has just been published by Blue Lion Books (Espoo, Finland & West Hartford, Connecticut) as a print-on-demand book available through CaféPress at:

http://www.cafepress.com/bluelionbooks66

Cover design is by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and text design is by Peter Ganick.

Blue Lion Books publishes experimental poetry, visual poetry, and fiction. They specialize in books over 250 pages long, believing that an idea, if expressed, should be expressed in its fullest manner. Visit http://bluelionbooks.info for catalogue and submission info.

Firestarter I waver in front of l'Hotel-God, between l'ambiance hatched in the clutches of pure physics and the mergez/frites which assembles me. Noise, speech, rumors appear suddenly on the street.

The moment of turbulence is imagination scattered all over the swerve, charging and releasing accumulated energy. Then c'est the hard return towards closed eyes and the rain fall to n'en more.

I am réincarnée thirty thousandths times the bad beer and Blaster Ghetto d'avant war (Gulf. The First.) on the quays of Seine, the crowned whole in the grip of unimaginable shit-crossed discrepancies of scale.


Other recent written work of mine is online at:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/xstream/?skip=8
http://www.20six.co.uk/mdr/archive/2005/09/
http://www.20six.co.uk/mdr/archive/2005/10/

and some older visual work is at:

http://collageworks.blogsome.com/

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Monday, December 05, 2005

Getting the bridge lifted into place over the creek was a big day. Well, it took two days for the riggers to complete the job.

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Sunday, December 04, 2005

Barrister Maxwell Ibrahim Onavakpuri MacLeod
Merchant, Legal Practitioner, Public Notary, and High Court Representative
Intracontinental Hotel
Lagos - NIGERIA
(MATTER OF TOP SECRET)

It is obvious that this proposal will come to you as a surprise.

And I will not fail to state that I am sorry for encroaching in your privacy.

You and I have not met, yet I am happy to say that through constant diligent worldwide-internet researches I have found you to be a person of absolute trustworthyness, and so I am prompted to send this email to you with the help of my private male nurse Kaspar who is typing my request while seated demurely at my bedside, in my two-bedroom suite in a vaguely modernist concrete hotel building with a view of Lagos harbor. Oil-drilling platforms dot the horizon like ravens on a wire. Like pepper on custard.

I am Maxwell Ibrahim Onavakpuri MacLeod. I am 49 years old. I was born in the dank bowels of the Angolan Embassy on the Isle of Man. I am a citizen of Romania by my teenage birth-mother’s heritage, and of South Africa by virtue of the tenacious spermatazoa of my vicious and dissolute father.

I am currently resident of Dubai UAE, where I am a merchant, diplomat, sur-fictionist and member of the boards of several international banking cabals. But because of medical complications during a business visit I am here prisoner of my failing body, trapped without a Zagat-rating in substandard quarters in Lagos, Nigeria - city of the doomed.

I was born an orphan as my mother died in complications of my nativity and my criminal-minded father had already left or been arrested or perhaps murdered in some back-alley saloon by that time. In all other ways and respects I was blessed me abundantly. But I am no a happy man. I have no wife and so I have no children. As a Born-Again-Christian, I have decided not to get a child outside of the matrimonial home, which the Bible is against.

As at now I am seriously sick. I just came out of the understaffed hospital back to my deteriorating hotel rooms. I am suffering from lung cancer, prostate cancer, pneumonia, shingles, and I had partial stroke which has affected my speech. I can no longer talk, and half of my body is paralyzed. I am dictating this message to my private male nurse Kaspar by the means of one-handed sign language. A kind of singular semaphore. The sound of one hand clapping.

The corrupt and abysmal Dutch and Nigerian doctors (Medecins sans Scrupules) who surround me say that I have about three months to live, or maybe I will not even last two months due to the cancerous tumors. Though what disturbs me most is my stroke. It has defiled all forms of medical treatment, and now the attendant and subsequent paralysis has created problems with gangrene and sanitation etc. A paradise for flies.

Well, I am not writing to ask for any sympathy, and perhaps my present corporeal suffering is apt revenge, as I have not particularly lived my life so well, never really caring for anyone (not even myself) but only for my business. Though I am very rich, I was never generous, I was always hostile to people and only focused on my business as that was the only thing I cared for. But now I regret all this as I now know that there is more to life than just wanting to have or make all the money in the world. I believe when God gives me a second chance to come to this world I would live my life a different way from how I have lived it. Now that God has called me, I want to make my best amends by spreading my wealth towards creating a better world for mankind.

In the fetid hospital where I am irradiated, sliced and sutured on a weekly basis, I gave the corrupt management USD $3 million to upgrade their cancer research facility and pre-natal care ward. I have also made some cash donations to orphanage children homes in Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and some in South Africa. I have already cast tens of millions of banknotes out onto the festering seas of human suffering, in hoped that some few might escape the sharks of human greed.

My krugerrands swirl in the currents like krill.

I have also willed and given some of my properties and assets to my private male nurse Kaspar and other members of my disjointed, obtuse and ultimately equally doomed “extended family” members as well as a few close friends whom I have not seen in decades. Ulf. Ulrike. Bob G. Chandra. The busboy at the nightclub Indiscretion. Unfortunately on the 21st of April, the busboy, his mother and his three brothers were involved in a car accident along Shagamu/Lagos Express Road.

Having now been informed my condition to be inescapably fatal, I am decided to donate the larger largest largesse portion of this fund to church or better still a Christian individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct here in. I want a church or individual that will use this to fund churches, orphanages and widows propagating the word of God and to ensure that the house of the lord is enlarged and maintained. The Bible made us to understand that blessed is the hand that gives. That feeds the hand that bites.

I have succeeded in spreading some of my liquid cash towards well deserved means. My soul is happy. What I am doing gives me joy. I am now sharing my properties and valuables. Now that my health has deteriorated so badly, I cannot do this my self any longer. Hence my decision to reach out via this miracle internet technology to you, dear friend, whom my painstaking & secret queries have indicated to be a true, Christian and upright good person who would not betray my wishes for your personal gain, of which in any case there should be sufficient for all your future needs. I don’t know you, but I am contacting you with the hope that you will carry out my wish for the sake of humanity.

I took this decision to approach to you because I don’t have any child of my own that will inherit this money and my distant relatives are not Christians and I don’t want my hard earned money to be misused by unbelievers. I once asked members of my family to close one of my accounts and distribute the money which I have there to charity organization in Bulgaria and Pakistan, they refused and kept the money to them selves. Hence, I do not trust them any more, as they seem not to be contented with what I have left for them.

Firstly, I have 15 million dollars (USD) deposited with a Diplomatic company in Europe. I want you to take custody of the 15 million dollars (USD) and use it to pay for your own expenses as you continue to meet the philanthropic requirements as I set them forth to you. As soon as I receive your positive reply, I shall give you into contact with this diplomatic company. You must follow my wishes in every respect for it will gladden my heart.

I will also issue you a letter of authority that will empower you as the original beneficiary of my other financial funds. I want you and the church to always pray for me because the lord is my shepherd. My happiness is that I will, in the end, have lived a life of a worthy Christian. Whoever that wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and truth. Please always be prayerful all through your life.

The bulk of my money which no one knows of is the huge cash deposit that I have with a finance/Security Company abroad. I seek your consent to present you as my next of kin, so that the proceeds of this account valued at $270 million USDollars can be paid to your account and then you can disburse it generously to the needy according to my wishes and guidelines. I can easily convince the bank with my legal practice that you are my only surviving relation. Otherwise the Estate I leave behind will be confiscated or declared unserviceable by the banks where these huge deposits are lodged.

But you must not delay in your decision, as time is a precious commodity, like gold, and my own life hangs by the slimmest of threads that the celestial tailor may snip at any moment.

Particularly, the Bank where I have an account valued at about $270 million U.S dollars has issued me a notice to provide my next of kin or have the account confiscated within the next ten official working days. I have all necessary legal documents that can be used to back up any claim we may make. All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us to see this deal through.

I don’t want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly manner, for support of drugs or bigamy or non-profit arts, hence the reason for taking this bold decision. I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosom of the Lord.

Exodus 14 VS 14 says that the lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace. I don’t need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health, my situation and because of the presence of doctors and syncophants around me always. I don’t want them to know about this development. With God all things are possible.

I personally guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement
that will protect you from any breach of the law. If you are ready to do this and carry out my wish, please get in touch with me by my email to enable us discuss further. I will want you to send to me on your return email with the following information for the transfer in your favor.

[1] Your full Name or names
[2] Your private phone, Mobile and fax numbers for easy communicating for each others
[3] your residential contact Address
[4] your Mother’s maiden name
[5] your place of birth
[6] the color of your eyes
[7] your Bank Account including routing number
[8] P.I.N. # (for verification only)
I await your kind response, Please if you are interested and capable in handling this deal with me, Due get back to me Asap with the ask-for informations.

Any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing for a church or Christian individual for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I stated herein. Hoping to hear from you.

Yours Faithfully, Hopefully & Gratefully
Barrister Maxwell Ibrahim Onavakpuri MacLeod (Esq.)

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