275. The Status of Primary Colors

The red in orange is slightly embarrassed, having consorted with yellow. Whereas the red in purple thinks a lot of itself. The privilege of working with blue, and all of that. As to the red in pink, it will not brook criticism of any kind. White works for it, red-in-pink claims. Pink is beautiful, pink is better than red! it cries. It's this kind of thinly veiled self-loathing which the community of red cannot abide. At the same time, it's this alleged community that red in brown sought to escape when it disappeared into green. It lives there humbly now.


hans ostrom 2020

274. Rude Dream

Well, that dream spat me out like a wheezing cat--leaving me stranded in a tangle of sheets and angst. Something about a packed subway car full of snarling belligerence. Then came a Hollywood-propped drawing room--walls of books, read draperies--full of accusatory ex-lovers I don't/didn't/mustn't recognize (hence the accusations?). Finally a scuffle of worries, a flurry of muffled voices, a storm of squalid fretting misers who form  a sarcastic chorus singing of me and my failures and low-level fuck-ups. Plus as I try to wallow around toward awake, I can't confront my subconscious mind because it takes such pique and invests it, reaps synaptic profits, and spends them on professional plaid-clad sleep-tormentors, talking statues, and loquacious apples blabbing at a cocktail party full of rapidly moving eyeballs, tremulous eyelids, and sweat glands, and now I push myself through the crack between dreaming and not-dreaming, and am exhausted, which is not the aim of sleep, I would argue, if my mind weren't clogged. Fogged.

273. The Borges Hat

Stitched inside the Borges Hat is a series of runes which one Dimitri Ornelas has translated in a limited edition monograph, with notes, in Mainz. Soon thereafter the Borges Hat disappears for 47 years, reappearing on the head of a British spy in Buenos Aires. It is at this point that dimensions of time wrinkle and suddenly you, Mademoiselle Rameau, take position of the hat. You wear it at a party on a yacht in Copenhagen. Late in the evening, your husband Josef, who insisted on wearing a red cumberbund that evening, tries to murder you. He is unsuccessful and arrested. In the disruption of the moment, the Borges Hat fell off your head. Someone picks it up and offers it to you. He is a wizened but fit man who looks like a retired stevedore. He asks if you are all right. Yes, thank you, you say. He says, "This isn't the first time the Borges Hat has provided important protection."

272. Red Shirt

Once I bought a red shirt, and it was a big mistake I wore. People let you know, you know, when you make a shirt mistake. The great thing is no one remembers but me because they quickly go on to assessing other people's wardrobe. The scorn machine never sleeps. Too, I got lucky and no one photo-seized me wearing the red shirt. 

Along with the shirt, I'd purchases stylish shoes. Another mistake. Always is. Stylish means you're trying too hard. The question is, why record such incidents of low-grade shame? Because recording is a triumph over shame, thanks for asking. I bought a red shirt once, and now it doesn't matter. The shoes are walking all by themselves somewhere in the Mojave Desert. Which is a very stylish desert. 

hans ostrom 2019

271. Eccentricity Emergency

There's a point at which one's eccentricities create such a tangle of knotted growth that one must cover them as if they were mutant antlers anchored to wood covered in red velvet. In fact, there are times when one simply must not be oneself. Must behave as a conforming lackluster hologram so as not to startle, offend, alarm, disappoint,  confirm, or disgust. This is called acting or behaving responsibly. One can tell if it's working if people start treating you as if you were behaving conventionally. Agile small-talk, short-lived, may be one indication. Of course, through it all you may be thinking of the antlers in the basement, and the basement, and wanting to be there playing with the wires, carving wood, doing push-ups, perhaps listening to a vinyl long-playing record that hasn't accrued any particular significance in the culture. Of course, you will have your own equivalent of the basement. And the antlers.


hans ostrom 2019

270. What Can Happen When You Begin with Red

If it begins with red, then we're in trouble. Red is notoriously complicated, and do we want a complicated beginning? No. It must start in a way that's easier than red. What's easier than red?

Well, anyway, the second part is about a lake, rain, woods, electronics, and, sure, a bird. Dirt and rocks, but that goes without saying.

"When I meditate," says someone in part three, "I meditate in blue." Other "people" in part three are sick of hearing this kind of thing from that someone.

And finally, let's end with this: Remember that a thing in three parts can resist all efforts to make in a proper three-part thing. Yes the thing can purposely disgust like the yellow on your great aunt's teeth.



hans ostrom 2019

269. Dream Date

I went to sleep in a building on land and woke up on a big wooden ship. So there's that.

I asked a smelly crew member, "Where are we headed?" He took out a a stub of a red pencil and a note card and scribbled. He said, "We keep a tally of the first questions visitors ask."

Just then--well, almost--all the said went up (and down) in flames. The sailor said, "Go back to Sleep.1 and find another ride. It's mutiny time!"

Back in the building in bed still dreaming, I met a woman I'd never seen before, and Lulu was her name. Sing it! And Lulu was her name!

Crisply I told her my sea story. She said, "I believe you, but only because I'm sleeping, too."

"How about we fuse our dreams, Lulu?" I said.

She said, "That's sweet, honey. But no."

268. Ménage à Trois Lunch

I made two sandwiches. Of the same type: wheat bread, lettuce, tomato, red onion, mayonnaise, turkey. If you are a vegetarian or a vegan, I won't stand in your way. Replace the turkey, even the mayonnaise. It doesn't matter.

(Incidentally, for those of you expecting something else from this narrative, don't worry; it will arrive shortly.)

What does matter is I hadn't wanted two sandwiches. Distracted, I made a second one by accident. But now here they were, plated. Two lovely, alluring, and nourishing sandwiches.  What a privilege.  I felt profligate. I began to think of the situation as a ménage  à trois.

How sad is that?

Well, I ate lunch alone--à  un.

I finished one sandwich and gave up.

And that's when the two women wearing bikini bottoms only (I told you to be patient!) came into the apartment from poolside. It wasn't really my apartment. I was house-sitting, to some extent. All right: I was squatting. 

One woman was brown and black hair, and her name was Arli.  the other was white and had red hair, and her name was Cynthia. The former was as well endowed as Harvard, the latter as well as Princeton.

I told them, "I just made two sandwiches by mistake.  I hate that."

Arli said, "And I hate that I just dropped War and Peace into the pool--and it's the Peaver-Volkhonsky translation, too."  I saw that he book was not with her.  Apparently it had drowned. 

"There's no time to waste," said Cynthia.  "Arli, let's split the sandwich." I poured them glasses of white wine that did not belong to me. 

At some point, their remaining bikini parts fell, and eventually we had the kind of sex that's much appreciated, except all three of us were just a little burpy because of the sandwiches.  Red onion, you know. 


hans ostrom 2018

267. Snow and Light in Uppsala

Walking in the dim glow of snow in Uppsala when Winter noon, a miser, let a cup of sunlight through made  my chest fill with oxygen, the huff and puff, but also with something sweeter than sadness, more tart than joy.  Sometimes a band of pink would tinge a building's edge, and sometimes a woman, her hair and her red scarf fluttering sensibly, would pedal by on a bicycle.

I use the old tool memory to access the restrained pleasure of such an interval of some days in Sweden. Sweden keeps occurring to me.  Sometimes I wish it were a book and me a character--that awkward American--so I could live forever there, so snow and light in Uppsala could become a setting for scene including me.

In fact, right now I'm drinking coffee in that novel.  I'm not important enough to advance the plot much. But I can see you peeking through the cafe window, imagining the warmth, the aroma of pastry and delicate perfumes, and the murmuring of conversation.  It's cold out there.  Come in. 

266. As If You Were Different from Them

You're in a forest, so weary you wedge yourself in the hollow of an old-growth red cedar tree. You sleep deeply and wake to black darkness.  You hear raccoons and foxes, coyotes and bobcats--they're all commuting to work.

You climb out of the tree and stand in a city: noise, rain, crowds, stench, neon, fluorescence, larceny, fraud.  You're leaning on a metal light-pole.  And now you remember: it took years but the city finally broke you by revealing how absurd it is.  You saw how you'd betrayed yourself by living, working, there.  You began to suffer spells, every day, so that you might find yourself on a sidewalk when your mind takes off and flees to a forest, sleeps in a tree, and leaves you looking quite mad.  "Disoriented," they call it, although your state has nothing to do with East.

You know none of the people passing by.  They stare at you as if you were different from them. Your struggling scares them momentarily.



hans ostrom 2017

265. Grace and I

I am the bull charging toward me. Grace is the red cape and the sidestep. I am the boulder in the middle of my road. Grace is ways around. I am the iron door locked. Grace is removable hinges. I am the long, bad winter. Grace is April. I am accident. Grace is pattern.  I am pattern. Grace is serendipity. I am full. Grace, empty. I am empty. Grace?



hans ostrom 2017

264. The Placers

I would thank them but I don't know
how to contact them--the ones
who have placed books where I'd
find them at just the right time
over the years. In childhood, the
affordable hardbacks, Westerns,
on the family bookshelf, published
by E.P. Dutton and Doubleday,
red, blue, or green colors, wispy-
light pulpy pages, always an illustration
or two.  The Complete
Sherlock Holmes at age 15,
The Fire Next Time at 17, Snow
Country at 19, and so on. Most
recently, the Collected Stories
of Marquez. Each one adjusted

my perspective, often jolted it.
The secret network of book-placers
is vast, superbly trained, and precise.
Sometimes they enlist parents.
Usually it just seems like serendipity.

Oh, yes, I've tried to place books
myself, as a friend, a parent, a teacher.
Clumsy, amateurish, inconsistently
effective.  I hope one day to visit
the headquarters of the Secret
Book Placers International and
get the proper training.


hans ostrom 2017

263. Tiger in the Light

Tonight a tiger's in the light. A windstorm leaves red rose petals on frozen lakes. An old man finally gives up thinking he's younger than he is and locks up remnants of his lust. Overcome with relief, he weeps as he waits for public transportation. But enough about all that: what I really wanted to tell you is that I've never seen an angel. This is an important fact because I want very much to see one.  To see an angel, there, in reality. 

262. Veldaro the Younger and the Brick Missile

Veldaro (the Younger, since we're making things up) was sitting on the balcony of a run-down hotel one morning writing a poem about palm trees and women when he was struck in the head by a piece of red brick.

It wasn't a direct hit, nor was it an indirect one.  Shock, terror, pain, disorientation, blood, and rage ensued, all in their particular Veldarosque manifestations.

Why, who, and what to do informed his interrogative response.  Veldaro would never find answers to these questions, except that, regarding what to do, he sought first aid.

He would bear a small scar (and a chronic loss of confidence regarding writing outside) for the rest of his life.  He would save the piece of red brick, however, and become fond of it.  He would wonder, too, about the efficacy of writers' deploying the future conditional tense.

Like him, the piece of red brick had been ill used, concluded Veldaro.

Veldaro the Younger's poetry lost much of its exuberance after the incident.  It became saturated with absurdity and gloom, and its epistemology slipped and staggered between melancholy fatalism and morose despair.  He did not associate himself with the truly oppressed; he knew better than that. Yet he also knew that often our defeats spring from circumstances less than tragic but, in the long run, as corrosive in their effects.



hans ostrom 2016

261. Looking for Stephen Crane

"I want to know where Stephen Crane is!" shouted a man in the desert, which was not obliged of course to reply. "Get back in the car--let's go!" cried a sensible woman sitting in a red, courageous Buick on the shoulder of the highway.



hans ostrom 2016

260. Concerning Umberto Slovea

I am in a vast library, one of the few building complexes where activity still occurs in this abandoned city. Sometimes I imagine the river that passes through our wounded metropolis and past the library has had a deep rust-red caste for the past seven years.  It hasn't.

Today I learned that Umberto Slovea, one of our most senior and accomplished librarians, has been demoted because he often goes too far when research a question.  The more minute, oblique, or trivial the question, the more Slovea is compelled to doubt the most current consensus concerning the answer.  In established fact he sees a suspicious facade hiding a more pertinent factual version of the answer, or, more likely (in poor Umberto's mind) an aggressively rival answer.  I shall not give you an example because doing so might spread the contagion of his compulsion.

That Dr. Slovea (the Third) is a gifted researcher and archivist only feeds his mania.  I must visit him next in the basement of Building RQ, where he has been exiled, assigned to overseeing a collection of unimportant postcards from 19th Century Luxembourg. I shall make up a question for him to research and answer. That is something like the least I owe him.

I know that in the long term, he will transform the sad collection into something rare and splendid, and once again he will begin his rise to a position of considerable responsibility in the organizational structure of the library, and he will hold that position for approximately nine and a half weeks before he goes too far and gets mired in maniacal research, unable to extract himself from incessant seeking, even though a sound, acceptable answer has already made itself manifest.




hans ostrom 2016

259. The Hyper-Present

Red Alert: If the hyper-present hasn't already arrived, it is coming  It will be the enclosure of time in which people imagine they live. The irrelevance of the past to any now will become more extreme more quickly.  For example, any movie made within the previous year or so will be an old movie, perhaps even a classic, triggering feigned nostalgia and genuine disgust.

Phones will print new versions of themselves not when their owners want but when they want. People will undergo procedures in which vast numbers of their cells will be replaced, chiefly by synthetic cells. As robots simulate humanity more, humans will agree to become more robotish.

History will become a tired joke like a great grandmother's lingerie. Maintaining the same personal identity for over a year will be considered reactionary and dull.

I'll be stuck back here in some kind of past, invisibly wishing you all the best, and wishing the best will be obsolete.


hans ostrom 2016

258. What Some Rainbows Become

Yellow squash, red peppers, eggplant, green beans, blue potatoes. These are what some rainbows become after they ease their arcs, depart from mist and light, and return to ground. It is an unassuming, necessary pot of gold into which they transform. 

257. How I Like My Blue

I prefer blue to be chilled.  When blue gets too warm, it tends to turn purple, which is less appealing than blue, as you know.

Room-temperature blue? Tepid blue? Please. That kind of thing can make you want to run to red or green.

"What kind of blue"? You'd think that would be the more difficult question, perhaps. But it isn't. (Cerulean.)


hans ostrom 2016

256. Of Veldon Windright; or, Not

No one else seemed to perceive the intersection where I stood in the city. I saw it, and I stood there, waiting for a bus because I saw a bus sign there.

No bus came, at least while I waited. I walked home.

Weary, I climbed musty stairs toward my scuffed apartment. Mrs. Bile came out of her apartment, saw me, and cried, "Veldon Windright, you're a scoundrel!" In response, I merely told her the truth: that I wasn't Veldon Windright.  She used to know that.  At least she used to know I wasn't he. I don't know who he is.

A corner of a red envelope slid under my door protruded. Perceived as V. Windright, I uncoupled myself from the conversation with Mrs. Bile, and I went inside my place, where I picked up the red envelope.

Inside was a note on gray paper. It read, "Sir: We have good and bad news. First, we agree that there is an intersection and a bus stop where you waited recently.  We commend your powers of perception and your independence of mind. That said, and second, a bus will never pick you up there even though it's true you saw a bus sign there. It's all too complicated to explain, so just accept the fact.  In fact, accept all facts! Good luck. Sincerely, Your Friends at the Veldon Windright Foundation."


hans ostrom 2016