puddleisanoceantoanant-blog

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Puddle Is an Ocean to an Ant: The Soundtrack

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Bashed Patella and a Chance Lane For once, I did not want to be smarter than anyone. I did not want to be better or cooler. What I did want was to stand, in a public setting, all 75 inches of me, and declare, proclaim, even exalt, that my chief contribution was that I did not know anything. I was not smart or cool. Not a smart guy, not a cool guy, but a guy. They were new and they were the last pair of shoes Alexander McQueen designed before his suicide. I teetered the margins of Route 9. I trespassed. I admired the stomp of a beast beneath my blood. The shame coupled only a drunken instant. I stepped closer to the bank and pitched myself down. I woke to a gored bulge deforming my right knee. The World threatened decay, wasteful contemplation, eruptions of animal pleasure, and schemes of spiritual sabotage, but it was no condemnation. No permanent sentence of misery. My expectations crumbled. If nothing, nothing. If more, more.

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White Whale Bookstore

Book Launch: "Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant," Cal LaFountain

Wednesday, March 25, 2020   Rescheduled due to COVID-19

7:00 PM  9:00 PM

White Whale Bookstore Pittsburgh, PA

We're excited to be hosting Cal LaFountain for the release of his audiobook, Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant! He'll be reading with local writers miss macross and MIKE GOOD.

Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant is the first and last book of its kind by Cal LaFountain. This scattered journey drifts from Tennessee to North Carolina to Vermont, exploring an aimless American life after college. A series of audio travel stories dissects the tension that results when persona collides with reality, the webs of addiction, and the burden of striving to establish a world of one's own.

Cal LaFountain has created works for the Electronic Literature Organization, Information Today, Legowelt's Shadow Wolf Cyberzine, and other outlets. He is currently at work on a series of audiobook remixes, voice assistant applications, and literary crank calls. His cut of the cloud is callafountain.com. 

Please check out our Facebook event for this book launch and reading for our other poets’ bios!

http://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/2020/3/25/book-launch-puddle-is-an-ocean-to-an-ant-cal-lafountain

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Cal calls a bar to inquire about their IPA selection. 

from Literary Crank Calls Vol. 1: Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant 

Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant is the first and last book of its kind by Cal LaFountain. This scattered journey drifts from Tennessee to North Carolina to Vermont, exploring an aimless American life after college. A series of audio travel stories dissects the tension that results when persona collides with reality, the webs of addiction, and the burden of striving to establish a world of one's own. 

Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant drops on 2/20/2020. Listen to more Literary Crank Calls, sounds, rants, and songs by enabling Cal’s Alexa flash briefing "Language Wave" here: https://amzn.to/2OtfZqr https://callafountain.com https://instagram.com/callafou

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From Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant by Cal LaFountain. 

Part One: Puddle in Tennessee 

Chapter 3: Goats And Grapes And The Greenhouse Cemetery

Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant is the first and last book of its kind by Cal LaFountain. It releases 2/20/2020 on Xocord. 

callafountain.com

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“In the morning sun, the final Sharpie-laden CD-R from the center console finished, then sleepless in delirium, I returned to Meshuggah’s Catch Thirtythree as a last-stand auditory stimulant. Dense layers razed off-kilter rhythmics. The vocalist spewed heady poetics of eternity, superstition, and purgatory. The highways challenged The Teggy’s engine. With each passing mile the pavement confirmed it was desire that propelled us; not gears, a transmission, or wheels.”

from Chapter 20, “Away or Toward” Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant, 2/20/2020

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Every morning we used a soda bottle to mix The Original Baa-Baa Dude’s meals. Once the ratio was right, we capped the bottle with a rubber feeding nipple and held it under hot water until it warmed. We cut up some old socks and wrapped them around the bottle to hold the temperature as we walked the fields to find him. 

The rest of the kids fed with enthusiasm, butting at their mothers’ udders for withheld stores of milk. The Original Baa-Baa Dude had his own way of charging at the bottle whenever we fed him, but his spitfire blitzes always landed him past the rubber nipple. When the milk solution was gone, he would charge the bottle a few more times until we pulled it away. He’d lay a few minutes in one of our laps, a faux milk foam ringing his mouth, cuddling up with snout puffs and a warm steady heartbeat. When we left for other chores, we watched as he trailed the herd alone, awkward and uncanny, in obvious contrast to the consensus bounce of the other kids. A few times he noticed us watching him and turned back, tried to angle a jump through the electric fence, got shocked, and bleated his high squeal out over the property. The fields’ electric fences likened the boundary of my life's direction; so many possible paths and causes in equal weight; it splayed shin-bonkable obstacles and covert damage volts, infinite offerings empty of any proof for their legitimacy as correct, or incorrect courses of action. I had no idea what I should do, and I shared this shortcoming with The Original Baa-Baa Dude.

Among our justifications for the runt’s defects, the powdered milk solution surfaced. We thought it might lack the ruminant nutrient profile that helped bind the herd on a shared social ground. Whatever the explanation, some essential quality of The Original Baa-Baa Dude was Off, something never activated, features not installed, a goat-housed switch not flipped, or one never present with the option of On.

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I wanted to discuss nothing with no one. I wanted to define the world through things I liked by first defining it through those I did not, a stance of reduction, bitter and subtractive, degrading of my space/time peers, my gavel heavy like a looming supercell, rain-gray with the petty wrath of decided agitation.

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Soon I knew I would devolve to a background fixture, an object containing muscles and a mind good for orders. Worse, I knew that I would allow myself to become the object, empty the energies required to establish myself not as an object, but as a person capable of social animation and more.

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Sluggish in the bathroom, we listened to “Illumination” by Broadcast. We listened to “Saccharine Trust” by Holy Sons. We listened to “The Sun Shines Down on Me” by Daniel Johnston. Out of grape soda, a cheap gas station Cabernet concentrated the remaining cough syrup.

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Sluggish in the bathroom, we listened to “Illumination” by Broadcast. We listened to “Saccharine Trust” by Holy Sons. We listened to “The Sun Shines Down on Me” by Daniel Johnston. Out of grape soda, a cheap gas station Cabernet concentrated the remaining cough syrup.

[puddleisanoceantoanant-blog]

Sluggish in the bathroom, we listened to “Illumination” by Broadcast. We listened to “Saccharine Trust” by Holy Sons. We listened to “The Sun Shines Down on Me” by Daniel Johnston. Out of grape soda, a cheap gas station Cabernet concentrated the remaining cough syrup.

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The Teggy

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Hickory Stream Homestead

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Bashed Mailbox and a Chance Lane