I'm Back

No time to write. I just wanted to let you know I'm back.

Enjoy Your Stay

Holy shit-sticks. I just finished A Farewell to Arms. It's easily one of the most well written novels I've ever read. Somehow, and I blame the public school system for this, I managed to live 29 years without reading it. Hemingway, by contrast, was 29 when he wrote it. Go figure. I've been told his short stories are even better. He writes simply, and this discouraged me while reading The Old Man and the Sea. It was boring, almost infantile. This story though, was something else. After I finished it I read through the 30+ alternate endings he left on the floor. The one he settled on is good, and I enjoyed it enough, but there were others just as good:

"In the end it is better not even to remember things but I know that.

That was all gone now, the sunlight and the spring and

Nothing was gone."

Listing the others could potentially spoil the details of the ending for you, so I won't. But god damn is he good.

All day long I was terribly depressed. My only desire was to leave work and go home. I imagined lying in bed and staring at my ceiling, at its subtleties and irregular texture. I would look at it so long it would become meaningless. Until the sun set I would remain still and stare. All I wanted was to do nothing. To be driftwood on a motionless ocean of apathy. I thought maybe it was the drugs, but maybe it was something else. Someone asked me how I was doing.

Aching, I told her.

If you're sick you should go home, she said.

No, I said, it's a different kind of aching. She doesn't say anything. She just looks at me, sad.

It's okay, I say, it'll pass, though it feels like it won't.

We are hotels where wandering feelings come in to spend the night. With wet feet they walk through carpeted halls, following a bellboy past locked door after locked door, until, finally, arriving at an empty suite at the end of a long corridor, they take up temporary residence in our hearts. They watch television late into the night and shower too early. The door slams noisily whenever they are coming or going and their voices are always too loud. No matter what, we always have vacancies and the concierge is terrifically accommodating. I don't know what's worse, the rooms that are empty, or the ones that are full.

An Open Window

An open window. A torn out page from a old newspaper sits on a pile of papers on a desk. An old Avant-garde paperweight holds the page down as it flutters in the breeze. On the floor, under a chair, a bald cat licks itself, stops, and then stares. Insect wings buzz. A large fly glides drunkenly on the air, skirting past the furniture, settling on the wall. A single green eye peers out from behind the corner of the desk and looks up at the intruder. In one motion the naked cat leaps up and lands, placing its paws between the stray books and pages smeared across the top of the desk with deadly precision. As it steps toward the edge of the table, towards the fly, its rear foot crinkles the old newspaper article which reads:

AKRON, OH -- With the need for evidence high and time for deliberation running out, sources confirmed yesterday that the grandjury set to indict local butcher James Killgore was still hung this afternoon. Killgore, who was alleged to have sexually molested three chickens last fall, if convicted, will face a life sentence without parole. "I just don't understand what there is to think about here," remarked a disgruntled Steven Scholtz, the local courtroom sketch artist, who, having spent the last of his ninety days rendering countless sketches, had finally tired of drawing the same faces over and over again. "He's a chicken fucker," he added. Feeling exhausted and overworked, Scholtz noted that even old Evelyn Harris, the court stenographer, was granted two days leave to soak her hands in salt baths on account of her arthritis. "The only good thing was two weeks ago; there was that blonde character witness, she had a little cat," Scholtz told reporters as he slowly scratched a lingering itch at his left nipple, "she was fun to draw."

Martha Grahm, Scholtz's friend and former lover, told news correspondents that the whole case had been hard on everyone involved, especially her. "Just last week Steven called me and asked me to drive him to Michael's, for more art supplies. He told me he'd run out of yellow paint," she added.

Presiding judge for the case, Judge Larry Bido, delivered a statement earlier today that the deliberation proceedings were taking longer than usual, but that a decision was expected sometime within the next 69 hours.

----

With a crunch, and then a tear, the paper rips and the cat is in the air. Its hairless tail smacks the paperweight over and sends it crashing to the floor. No longer held in place, the torn paper floats up off the desk before the cat can even land. Drifting on the draft, the thin sheet of paper flutters into the next room through the open doors. Embarrassed, the cat trots in after it. So does the fly. The fly spits at the cat, buzzing just above its head and laughing. "You missed me," it says, "you missed me real bad." The cat hisses and swats fiercely at the fly. But the fly is too fast. Sitting on the old arm of a couch, the fly rubs its little black hands together and cackles. "Cock a doodle doo," it says, and spits again. Clucks rain down on the cat, calling it, antagonizing it. The cat pounces once more but the fly too easily evades it. This time the fly speaks to the cat from atop a ceiling fan. "You know why I am here, don't you?"

I'm here to do to you what you did to me, the fly said without saying.

Oh K

I'd been drinking all day yesterday, starting at brunch. There was gospel and unlimited alcohol. I drank so many flutes of champagne that I lost count. Before I knew it the game was on and I was eating a burger. Two giant, cold glasses of double-IPA down the hatch. An old fashioned for good measure. Then the Warriors had won. Two of us went back to my place. It was a mess but we were drunk. Alcohol has a way, in some people, of inciting trouble; the sort of trouble that makes you a danger, mostly to yourself. Suddenly I was reaching for a bag of ketamine. For the next few hours I was awake, though I could be convinced I was dreaming. It was like coming out of general anesthesia; soft, silly, weightless, wobbly. Sound seemed more malleable, and heavier, fuller. Narrowing and widening, it coursed through my inner ear like stormwater through a metal gutter, gurgling. Entire realities seemed to exist in a single song. Time dilated. We grooved under a shimmering, sedate psychedelia. In the bathroom, looking out through the open window, over the burning candle, I realized I was estranged from myself. Disassociated. I, or whatever was left of me, giggled with maddened delight. Everything was amplified and dulled. Contradiction and dichotomy seemed just another shape of synesthesia. I became more of an observer than a participant. Whatever motions I found myself performing seemed to me predetermined, as movements do in a dream. Somewhere volition had been lost. I felt demented, manic, liberated.

All around me reality was made of many ripples, stretching out and expanding, colliding, collapsing, combining, fracturing, and all the while remaining one inestimably vast, amorphous whole. Above me tall shapeless peaks climbed like ivy against black nothingness. Things seemed gaseous and galactic. Parts of me, familiar and not yet known, near but far, watched and ascended as I expanded into expanding. I was always drowning and at the same time coming up for air. My identity corresponded directly to how much of it I'd lost. There can be peace in disintegration; power in taking another form. My body did not end at its physical boundaries. It seemed to change shape dynamically, assuming whatever configuration was necessary to better feel the music. It was as though I had every size I ever was and ever would be at my disposal, from the single cell to infancy to brief adolescence to hobbled old age, to dust. The worms of time's passing gnawed at me, gently feeding like a litter of newborn puppies drinking in their mother's milk. It felt intoxicating to sustain them. All around me I had tentacles. My balls looked like hairy little squids.

I suddenly want calamari.

Moment

I meant to write a post yesterday about an encounter I had last night inside a taqueria, but I had one too many beers and one too many hits of the old vaporizer pen. I'm half kidding; it was laziness mostly, and the discovery of new music. I've been obsessing over a local band called Sonny and the Sunsets, and I got carried off to sleep listening to their unique tunes. More on that later.

So, I get out from work after a long day of rushing to meet deadlines so that I could see a couple of friends for a drink and watch the game. Something came up last minute and my friends had to bail. I decided to walk home; the weather was nice enough. There's a sports bar near my house with a lot of oversized TV's, the perfect venue to behold Steph Curry's glory. Upon entering I was greeted by a crowded bar. All of the community tables were full, save for one, and there was no room to sit at the bar. I moved toward an empty seat at the edge of the one nearly empty community table and motioned to a thickly spectacled looking douchebag, asking him if I could take the seat. He was sitting with two ugly women, one of whom was wearing an outfit way too showy and attention seeking for her frame. It somehow augmented her unattractiveness. "Is this seat taken?" I asked.

"I think so," he said, wrenching out a halfhearted smile from his boyish, feminine face.

The glasses he wore were so thick that I wondered if on a bright day, if he were to stare at the sun for too long, whether his eyeballs would burst into flames. The rest of his body, thin and meticulously groomed, appeared frail, almost insecurely neat.

"You think?" I asked, puzzled, turning my palms face up in search of a clearer answer. He looked to the women with a gentle sigh of impatience, as though he were asking for their help in dismissing me. "Are you waiting for people," I asked them. They told me they were. "Are you waiting for enough people to fill this entire table, or can I take this seat at the end?" I could feel the New Yorker in me about to take over. As I waited for them to deliberate and perform complex calculations about the attendance of their party, I considered just taking the open chair and explaining that because it was not currently occupied, and because I was a patron in search of a seat, that I was going to sit in it and there wasn't anything they could do to stop me, especially given the tables are first come first serve and my inquiry with them was merely one of courtesy, nothing more. Instead I opted to go upstairs and check for an open table.

There were none, so I left and went next door to watch the game at the taqueria. My intestines craved the warm cheesiness of a chicken quesadilla. This plan was perfect. I ordered one and paired it with a cold Corona. I felt like a Mexican sommelier, a lunchadora. The game was nearing the end of the second quarter and I had just finished my meal. I was watching with satisfaction as the Warriors laid waste to the Cavaliers when suddenly, after having missed an ugly shot thrown from behind the backboard, LeBron James went stumbling off court, exaggeratedly collapsing into a crew of camera men. Appearing out of nowhere, an older woman, probably in her mid 40's, with the testosterone levels of Rocky Balboa, came screeching into my left ear.

"Oh my God," she shrieked, "is that Lebron?!"

Her degree of animation amused me.

"What happened?" she demanded to know.

I turned to her, and saw she was incredulous, almost shaking. I couldn't tell if she was shocked by his exaggerated head holding, his dramatic rolling all over the floor, his wide-eyed pleas to God, or the fact that he'd flashed his penis on live television. I replied: he's flopping.

"What," she screamed, drawing the attention of the entire taqueria, "he's not flopping, he's hurt! Look at him, his head is bleeding!"

One of her friends, a younger woman who might have been her daughter, laughed and said that they were from Cleveland, that they needed to calm down because they were in enemy territory. Unfortunately, her mother's testosterone would not be stopped and she proceeded to rebuke me.

"Flopping?!" she repeated again, "yeah right! He bashed his head right off that camera!"

It was true, it was all there in the slow-motion replay. He ran his big head straight into the camera and gashed it open. "This is outrageous, he was pushed," she carried on. I laughed at her and saw she was deeply irritated with me. People who take sports seriously enough to feel profound vexation, or those who take offense at a light-hearted, offhand joke disturb me.

So, I replied in kind: "Yea, ya know, I don't think he was pushed. No, no, he wasn't pushed, you can see it right there in the replay, see? To me this looks like a pretty clear cut case: he suffered from a really severe leg cramp."

I wish I could adequately convey the look she gave me. I have never seen a grown woman of her age so openly communicate violence with her eyes. I feared that if her daughters hadn't pulled her away that she might have tried to bite my ear off, or worse, she might have flashed me her penis right there in the middle of the taqueria.

"You idiot," she said through clenched teeth, foam bubbling at the edges of her lips, "his head is pouring blood! Leg cramps!?"

Seeing as she wasn't going to take my remarks as the jokes they were, I tried to align her with and engage her on an emotional level. "Yeah, you know what, you're right; that is a lot of blood. Do you think he's gonna make it?"

She began trembling apoplectically. Fearing she was about to have a stroke, and because I needed to return a call to a friend who'd rang me while the interaction was unfolding, I excused myself. I went home, watched the rest of the game, saw the Warriors embarrass the Cavaliers, smoked some pot, and went to sleep. Before my head completely sunk into the pillow, I felt the need to write. Here's some bedtime gibberish:

Our reality is a tangle of dusty electrons swirling through a vast emptiness. We are the nothing, and the thing.

Everything only appears to have an apparent order, because with our limited capacity for understanding we can only see things on an infinitesimally small scale. To see the totality of the incredible immensity around us would require a truly tremendous reservoir of foresight and existential indifference. Because to really care deeply, one must be completely detached from the object of affection. The object must become meaningless. In its meaninglessness it will achieve union with the perennial, omnipresent sense of loneliness swelling inside our dying hearts. There is a sense of unity, a primordial communion shared in the ignominy of our mutual obscurities. 

Here we realize that our worries and our woes, our victories and triumphs, all of them, are the same; they only vary in their momentary meanining. Life, morality and consciousness are just patterns of recurring motifs in momentary meaning. We see and feel things because they are perpetuated through us, and by us. We are feeling machines. We exist only to feel. We cultivate realities rich with feeling. The capitalist economy is one of feeling is it not? Cosumerism is its embodiment. It is the curation of an illusion; the so often exploited delusion of the self. The idea of individualism is a distraction from the intense, dizzying feeling of oneness. 

To feel the infinite expanse of time and space rationing your breath, stretching through gravity the muscles in your chest as your lungs expand, then, warming your lips while you surrender that breath to the universe once more, is to realize that it is the opening and closing of your eyes that brings birth and death to all that is. To be is to touch at something deeply temporal. In this way we continue battling the present as it is destroyed and resurrected, born and killed, murdered and murderous. 

When does it end though, and why? When does the moment come in which it is no longer necessary for more to follow? Why does life end? For Meaning, I guess. Without a beginning and an end can you have a story? 

Survival, and more importantly, life, love, and living, is the transcendence, from one moment to the next, of impossibility over adversity. 

All Day I Dream

My beard is getting too long. I noticed it yesterday at the All Day I Dream festival. Dancing with the blissful abandon of a man on a proper dose of pure, unadulterated MDMA, I had unwittingly installed myself amongst a group of dirty hippies. I hadn't realized it at first of course, due to the golden sun shining straight into my super-sized pupils, the powerful buzzing of the bass, the magic magnetism of the moment, but soon I saw that I was in leagues with a bustling bunch of happy hippies. One of them, an angelic looking blond with mesmerizing green eyes, turned and looked at me and told me how happy I looked before giving me a long and heartfelt hug. I'd found the promised land. Purple and yellow fabric flags fluttered in the breeze. Gulls glided overhead, then hovered, as though suspended by an animal curiosity more elementally powerful than the air. The music was beautifully serene, relaxingly ecstatic. Everyone smiled. I danced with them for a time, then wandered toward the setting sun and the orange shadows it cast across the San Francisco skyline. Clouds had started to roll in, spilling across the bay like melted creamsicles and lemon sherbet, lending the city lights a hazy, watercolor kind of softness. The music had an affectionate resonance, one that kept the night warm. It picked the locks of all the doors fear and misfortune force us to hide our hearts behind. Like a cuddlesome cat, gently brushing against our skin and purring, it nestled against something deep and cold and sat with it. It's been some time since I felt that much love at a show.

Anew

I went out with a beautiful girl last night. We met at a bar a few blocks away from my job. She was tall and delicately dressed, in a way which highlighted the thinness of her legs. Her tight black tank top brought attention to the smooth, youthful vibrance of her skin. Her eyes were calm and bright. She was younger than me, not yet claimed by the accumulations of failure time tends to inflict.

As I spoke I saw in her eyes that she was charmed by my words, at times almost breathless. She asked me if my role at work involved a lot of public speaking. No, I told her, it's the cocaine, and I thanked her for the compliment. I am generally quite reserved. I couldn't help but talk at length about a variety of topics, and I caught myself riding waves of self-generated excitement. Luckily, for me, my passion was contagious, practically infectious. Beautifully poetic sentences wet with meaning fell from my lips and washed over her, enveloping her in a prismatic mist. There are moments in speech when one can see in the face of another the mark of impact, lines of dominoes falling in elaborate patterns behind the listener's eyes. My words spilled over her and she steeped herself in them. Some insightful observations were made on her part. She said things to me that showed she'd given me all of her attention. It felt nice to feel felt.

When she got cold I put my arms around her, over her light frame, her long black coat. We walked toward her place and, with night having fallen and the temperature having dropped, she looked up at me through the glow of her cigarette. "You're not like anyone I've met before," she said, "you're interesting." I told her I was offended, that I only ever wanted to be normal. She said she wanted us to go to the bus stop where we'd first met, because there was poetry in that.

I thought so, too.

Future's Foreplay

Birds and sunshine woke me up earlier than usual. Nature's alarm clock has no snooze button. The day looks to be glorious. If only there were a way to escape work. Just knowing the sun is shining is enough to brighten the day, literally. Later I'll see a show, one of my favorite local artists. The anticipation will sustain me until tonight. Anticipation and excitement for things to come are important ingredients for happiness; future's foreplay. To cultivate contentment people should practice looking forward to things. We spend far too much time looking back.

I think I hear a frog outside. Either that or a bird performing a spot on frog impression. I wonder if I've ever told the story here of my first introduction to death and murder, and frogs. Well, it was more like a wrongful death resulting from gross negligence than it was a murder. I'd, quite literally, shattered the fragile glass jar containing all my youthful innocence. Through the sloppy poked air-holes in the jar's lid, I'd lost the ignorance allotted to me by inexperience.

Next time. This way you have something to look forward to.