A Celebration of Flames

There's a book, an essay, that's come my way. It was purchased for me so I feel obligated to read it. The translation is terrible, full of spelling errors and typos. Some passages are so poorly translated that they are unreadable. To overcome this I constantly have to reinvent the text as I read it, adding or removing words, trying to imagine what the author meant in his native language without the appropriate historical or cultural contextual clues. It is a challenge. Still, it's an interesting read. Citing the absurdity of life and of living, it tries to interrogate the question of suicide. We all know we are to die, right, a truth as clear as water, so why do we endure the anguish, uncertainty and waiting? Because I'm only at the beginning of the piece I am still unsure whether this is a literal suicide or a philosophical one. All will be revealed I suppose. In the meantime I'll have to endure these dense pages full of sticky sentences and amorphous references.

Tomorrow a friend arrives from Canada. I will need to pick her up at the airport at midnight, after I've turned into a pumpkin. We'll need to run last minute errands on Saturday, get the gang back together and make our way to Black Rock City. It's that time again. Tens of thousands of us will descend upon the desert like swarming scarabs, to debase ourselves for a week. Dancing, drinking, drugging, hugging; searching, finding, losing, loving; burning. The profound symbolism of the flame needn't be remarked upon by me. Everything I could say about the thing has already been said, and by men more learned and more eloquent than I am. It is fun though, to travel to that place and stand at the crossroads between eternity and ephemerality, where the distinction between the sacred and the profane dissolves and we are all absolved by fire. Flames don't discriminate. To fire, everything is fuel just waiting to be burned.

Itsy Bitsy Spider

The sky is grey, full of fast moving clouds. On the ground there are dead leaves. They rustle the air, a skittering static discharge. Pressed against a window is a black cardboard cat, wearing a witch's hat, sat beside a perfect pumpkin. Wrapped around the door a flattened Frankenstein holds a sign that says danger, beware. Telephone lines whip in the wind and it howls as it moves between them. For hours it's looked like rain. The sidewalks are littered with evidence of adolescent mischief; broken eggs, splattered shaving cream, silly string.

Excitement and quick, hurried words. A small thumb gnashes a button. Panting, hushed laughter, exhilaration. The pair thunder down the stairs and race toward tall hedges opposite the house. They duck behind a rusted car and peer out over the bumper.

Across the street a doorknob turns. The door opens. An old, haggard looking man stands in the doorway, staring down at the flaming bag. His eyes dart from the bag to the street and slide from side to side as they scan for whoever is responsible. A disgusted sigh and he disappears inside to find something to put the fire out with. Giddy, the laughing children cackle and hold their hands to their mouths while they watch for the old man's next move. Out of sight, on the roof of the car is a toy spider, inching toward the children every time the wind blows. The man is back with a pot of water which he pours onto the fire. The bag sizzles and stinks as the water hits it, leaving a brown muddy puddle on the man's doorstep. He curses and grumbles, muttering as he looks out into the evening, knowing somewhere they are watching him.

"You think this is funny, don't you," the man asks the wind.

From behind the car they laugh to themselves in disbelief, proud of their havoc. The wind edges the spider closer.

"If I find you rotten kids, I'll kill you, I swear!" He throws the pan against the stairs.

A bus stops at the end of the road and a middle aged woman gets off. She's dressed professionally, in a beige skirt and blazer. She looks tired, like she's put in a full days work. She roots through her pocketbook looking for her cigarettes. The bus takes off down the street. The wind gusts over the roof of the car, sending the toy spider onto the nearest boy's shoulder. He cries out in shock and leaps into the air as he slaps the spider away, onto the other boy. The old man hears the commotion and spots the boys across the street and begins to yell. The abruptness of the first boy's movement, and the sudden sight of the spider send the other boy recoiling from behind the car out into the street, into the bus, under its wheels.

The woman screams. The bus stops. The old man stares.

Newman's O Face

A found an old post that I never published. There are nearly a dozen of them, actually. This one even had a photo already selected, and a title. I remember where I took this photo. It was north of San Francisco, in Sonoma. I was dating an Asian girl then, and we had driven out of the city to get away for the weekend. At a small winery we'd had a tasting. They had a bunch of chickens and a rooster. Or maybe this was taken at the small ranch where we were staying. They also had chickens and a rooster. The post below doesn't seem to be related at all to the weekend where the photo was taken. But, here's the post anyway:

There are a lot of words that mean two things. Take truffles for example. It can mean chocolate or mushrooms. I prefer it when it means both. Bat is another one. It can mean a club-like piece of wood used for hitting, or a winged creature of the night. Don't even get me started on cock. Not only is it a noun but it's also a verb. This kind of double meaning becomes more problematic once we start talking about verbs. Duck and roll. Does that refer to a nice poultry sandwich? It is lunch time.

I started reading Grapes of Wrath; just a few chapters while eating. I never read it in school. It's probably better this way, because I can enjoy the book now. It's unpleasant to read under duress, for a grade. In school what I enjoyed most about assigned reading was the discussion, listening to other people espouse their nonsense opinions in front of a large classroom. I'd love challenging them, gently, to see how firmly they held their beliefs, to see whether they were full of shit or not. I especially enjoyed challenging the teacher, even when I knew I was wrong. Because the teacher had to respond to even the silliest interpretations of a text, I saw it as a type of training in creative expression. A worthless courage and cheap exhilaration would thrill me when taking a stance against the class. I'd hope to slowly convert the room, one by one, to my point of view. In my younger days I was a compelling speaker, convincing, at times charming; a young Charlie Manson. Once I convinced a friend to lick a strange beetle that had crawled out from a fresh pile of shit, another to eat half a dozen moths, someone else to climb out of a sunroof naked, and another to commit grand larceny. Those were the days.

Now I can't even convince myself to write something interesting.

It shouldn’t be hard, writing. All it is is taking the voice in your head, relaying it on paper, and hoping you've communicated some kind of truth. But it is unbelievably hard. When all is said and done, we’re just sacks of meat walking around being slow-cooked by stress and fear, waiting to be eaten up by time. We’re all so easily ruined; a slip in the shower, a fall from a ladder, a blown stop sign, a random act of violence, a sudden stroke, an embolism, an absent-minded anesthesiologist, an allergic reaction, a terrorist attack, a crashed plane, a wild animal, a cat scratch, a change in the weather, a loose rock, uneven footing. Those are just to name a few. Most of us will be spared these, hopefully, but we’ll still suffer all sorts of psychic distress and trauma, accumulating cracks and fissures along the circumference of our fragile psyches. Our minds wind up spoiled long before our bodies do.

Have I ever told you that I find Oreos completely irresistible? I passed by the supermarket on the way home, to pick up some yogurt, and I only narrowly avoided purchasing a package of America's favorite cookies. Instead I bought a pack of Newman’s O’s. The name is misleading - they are cookies, I swear. A healthier alternative to Nabisco’s gloriously chocolatey, classic cream cookies. I’d thought that the bland taste of the Newman O’s would curb my appetite, but I ate an appalling, morally reprehensible number of them. I was like an obese, pudgy faced Cool Hand Luke gluttonously gobbling cookies, glistening in a sweaty sheen of shame and self-indulgence. Shoveling the cookies into my mouth, moaning, showing the whites of my eyes, I lost all control. Desire took me under its arm and ran for the 30 yard line. The only thing that saved me was satisfaction itself: the death of desire. My happiness was short lived, though, and it ended promptly, once I caught a glimpse of my swollen stomach. I'd impregnated myself. I was going to have a little food baby.

Silent as a Stone

I haven't written recently. The fact has been brought to my attention by a small fellowship of dwindling readers. Why don't you write, they ask me. Because I've been too busying wronging. My desire to write is as weak and insubstantial as my molted libido. It lay on the floor beside me, lifeless and inert, gathering dust. I've been reading more lately, perhaps that is why; a collection of stories by Hemingway, a novel by Murakami, useless internet articles, the backs of shampoo bottles, filthy poetry and crude rhymes scrawled on the dirty walls of dive bar bathroom stalls.

Every sign suggests I'm uninspired. There's an unseen silence between the lines. The small space at the start of each sentence is a mendacious misrepresentation of time. Any suggestion of brevity is a bald-faced lie. Stilted stops and awkward starts, and I'm not sure why. Why does this rhyme?

I haven't written because I have nothing to say.