The truth of the self comes in the form of slights and faints, shadow glimpses caught in the flicker of light by the window, and in the blink of an eye. The self comes, as if out of nowhere, and disappears just as quickly. And how it seems to elude your attempts to study it. And still, it is all around you, at all times, making the motions you use to search and never find your self. I have searched in countless books and studied, if only poorly, hundreds of people, yet can see no comparison between them, as though they were completely different species of men. They come from different realities not unlike the one I inhabit, yet they are different as night and day.
I am coming to realize the fiction of man, that it is men and women who are the shallow, two-dimensional creations of a poor author. Those who inhabit the realm of books, bounded by the margins on the page, and locked away in dusty, unread volumes for years without hope of escaping the black and white contours of their existence, are more real to me than the man who asks me for a cigarette on the street as I walk by, more real than the woman who looks up from her book in the coffee shop to glance in my direction as I pass her table on my way down the street.
Even my own life comes to resemble the architecture of a novel. Set to the bland, often meaningless track of my thoughts, I realize it seems nothing like a good novel at all, and I the poor author who fails to breathe the gift of life into himself and his creations. I fall off the elusive moment into a litany of small sufferings that never end, never allow me a chance to find my balance before plunging off in another erratic direction. I feel the gyroscope of my self falling forwards and backwards and down so many times I imagine the inside of my thoughts to be black and blue; so bruised and bloodied and benumbed by aching spasms my thoughts are nothing more than a weak and unsatisfying wine distilled out of the blood and bones held loosely together by the carapace of my head.
Thus, the weary and encrusted pustule of my mind leaks like a sieve the thoughts I would save for the right moment to marry to words and paper. Even this elusive, narrative jargon of half-thoughts and lost images becomes a canvas of my self, a broken mosaical monstrosity of attempted and aborted undertakings caught for a split second in the blink of the eye; an image out of nowhere, gone again to the mysteries and meanings I neither remember, nor need. The drunken, mad wailings of my thoughts for the underlining structure of my self, the inquisitive eye turned inwards and out, are nothing more than minor quakes of the mind, the gasping for air while in the death throes and last rites long before the end, long before the tectonic shifting of my thoughts, the cataclysmic earth shaker devouring all and sundry.
It is the habit of people to believe themselves a part of a grand and unique (his)story rich in meaning and cause, while secretly fearing the worst; a horrible seed of doubt growing in the mind disclaiming any and all foolish ideas or beliefs, and they are all foolish. The temples and altars we have constructed over the centuries within our minds to reflect the elusive figure in the mirror will fall into dust and disappear beneath the earth, covered over by newer, more alien structures we cannot even imagine...
06 May 2006
22 March 2006
"I do think many writers have what you might call a demonic nature. They are always in trouble, you know, and not only while they're writing or because they're writing, but in every aspect of their lives, with marriage, love, business, money, everything. It's all tied together, all part and parcel of the same thing. It's an aspect of the creative personality. Not all creative personalities are this way, but some are."
-Henry Miller
-Henry Miller
15 March 2006
He Tells Me The Thing To Worry About Isn't Your Thirtieth Birthday
He tells me the thing to worry about “…isn’t your thirtieth birthday, but the thirty-fifth one.” You’re all the way to forty practically and there isn’t much left but the downward slope. You can feel the anguish in his words; sense the weight behind his thoughts. Listen, I say, look at it this way: you’re at the pinnacle of your life. You can live another thirty-five years and this is only the half-way point. Everything after this is easy sailing. What’s the problem with that, I ask.
Nothing doing. He isn’t really listening to me, and, for my part, I’m not supposed to be answering him. Something about a twenty-six year old man-child telling a grown man, almost thirty-five, what to do. Besides, it’s a rhetorical question that has no answer. But for some reason they come to me, all of them, former lovers, friends, family. They all come to me wanting to know what they should do with their lives; their fears palpable, knowing there is no answer that will satisfy them.
My mother, nearly fifty-five and still dreaming for a simple, rich life where worries evaporate and money, while not growing on trees, springs up from a well in the ground, wants to know what to do with her life, why she isn’t happy. They all want the same thing. They want the contentment of our culture to sweep them away and off their feet. They want to know what they are supposed to do next, what steps to take, where to go on vacation.
But I suppose it isn’t that simple. They simply want to know what they’re doing with their lives, what they are going to do with their lives. And so far, no one has told them, no one they trusted. There were adults no one listened to when they were young: “Find something you love is full of shit. The thing to do is find something that will make you rich and then you won’t have to worry about anything for the rest of your life,” they’d say between their third or fifth scotch and water. But there it is, the aw ful, glaring truth of our culture: We believe, in our heart of hearts, money solves everything.
And so here this man is, this close friend of mine who feels the anxious accumulation of years behind him, a gaping hole into which the future falls before him. The prospect of no job, no career, no money are his only comforts. He wants to be able to not worry, not have to think about money or food or sex or any of the thousand little things we distract ourselves from the act of living by abusing. He wasn’t ready for this; this isn’t how it’s supposed to be; it isn’t fair. He doesn’t say these things but they’re there, at the root of what he’s saying.
And how do I comfort him? How do I assuage the fear in his heart? If he hasn’t figured it out by now, the most it seems, I can hope for him is a quick and painless death, no more suffering. But even this he is too afraid to attempt. Oh, he may say he’s thought about it quite a bit; felt the knife on his skin, the cold blade against his warm flesh, but he hasn’t really thought about it. The same way you or I haven’t really thought about it. We joke in our conversations it will be our end, would be preferred over the long, slow crawl towards cancerous vegetism, but even these thoughts are follies we share to alleviate the situation.
“If I could just not worry about what I am going to be doing, whether I’ll be sleeping in a dumpster or under a bridge somewhere in the next three months, if I could just know that it’s all right, then I feel like I could get a hold of my life and do something,” he says. I ask him what it is he doesn’t have that make him so miserable, what is he that he has to change? He can’t tell me these things, just like I can’t describe what it is in my thoughts that recedes when I brush against it, that lurks in the shadows of my dreams and eludes my attempts to lure it out in the open. Perhaps, it’s the Self, hiding because it knows what the stakes are, what would happen were it to come out into the light.
There are no easy solutions, no truthful answers. The future holds for us what it has always held for us: uncertainty. That is the flaw, I think, in my friend and in myself. We are looking for a certain future, one that differs from all the others, one that leads out of the trap of Time and History. We are looking for a future that is endless, that doesn’t include death or pain, or the humiliation of the failures of our past, or the terrible, terrible realization that life isn’t worth it, not this life anyway. We are looking for fame and fortune, while abhorring what we have to become in order to achieve our dreams.
Nothing doing. He isn’t really listening to me, and, for my part, I’m not supposed to be answering him. Something about a twenty-six year old man-child telling a grown man, almost thirty-five, what to do. Besides, it’s a rhetorical question that has no answer. But for some reason they come to me, all of them, former lovers, friends, family. They all come to me wanting to know what they should do with their lives; their fears palpable, knowing there is no answer that will satisfy them.
My mother, nearly fifty-five and still dreaming for a simple, rich life where worries evaporate and money, while not growing on trees, springs up from a well in the ground, wants to know what to do with her life, why she isn’t happy. They all want the same thing. They want the contentment of our culture to sweep them away and off their feet. They want to know what they are supposed to do next, what steps to take, where to go on vacation.
But I suppose it isn’t that simple. They simply want to know what they’re doing with their lives, what they are going to do with their lives. And so far, no one has told them, no one they trusted. There were adults no one listened to when they were young: “Find something you love is full of shit. The thing to do is find something that will make you rich and then you won’t have to worry about anything for the rest of your life,” they’d say between their third or fifth scotch and water. But there it is, the aw ful, glaring truth of our culture: We believe, in our heart of hearts, money solves everything.
And so here this man is, this close friend of mine who feels the anxious accumulation of years behind him, a gaping hole into which the future falls before him. The prospect of no job, no career, no money are his only comforts. He wants to be able to not worry, not have to think about money or food or sex or any of the thousand little things we distract ourselves from the act of living by abusing. He wasn’t ready for this; this isn’t how it’s supposed to be; it isn’t fair. He doesn’t say these things but they’re there, at the root of what he’s saying.
And how do I comfort him? How do I assuage the fear in his heart? If he hasn’t figured it out by now, the most it seems, I can hope for him is a quick and painless death, no more suffering. But even this he is too afraid to attempt. Oh, he may say he’s thought about it quite a bit; felt the knife on his skin, the cold blade against his warm flesh, but he hasn’t really thought about it. The same way you or I haven’t really thought about it. We joke in our conversations it will be our end, would be preferred over the long, slow crawl towards cancerous vegetism, but even these thoughts are follies we share to alleviate the situation.
“If I could just not worry about what I am going to be doing, whether I’ll be sleeping in a dumpster or under a bridge somewhere in the next three months, if I could just know that it’s all right, then I feel like I could get a hold of my life and do something,” he says. I ask him what it is he doesn’t have that make him so miserable, what is he that he has to change? He can’t tell me these things, just like I can’t describe what it is in my thoughts that recedes when I brush against it, that lurks in the shadows of my dreams and eludes my attempts to lure it out in the open. Perhaps, it’s the Self, hiding because it knows what the stakes are, what would happen were it to come out into the light.
There are no easy solutions, no truthful answers. The future holds for us what it has always held for us: uncertainty. That is the flaw, I think, in my friend and in myself. We are looking for a certain future, one that differs from all the others, one that leads out of the trap of Time and History. We are looking for a future that is endless, that doesn’t include death or pain, or the humiliation of the failures of our past, or the terrible, terrible realization that life isn’t worth it, not this life anyway. We are looking for fame and fortune, while abhorring what we have to become in order to achieve our dreams.
10 March 2006
Nine days
It's been nine days. Nine days. My mind will not wrap itself around such a simple concept. Its been nine days since I've had a cigarette and while I remember each and every moment crawling slowly by, I suddenly cannot fathom such a period of time passing without realizing it. But there it was, staring me in the face when I woke up, following me down stairs into the kitchen, holding the door for me when I went to work. Nine days.
The news has just come over the opera house TV, its been nine days of trying. Nine days of dying. I let Bowie out the back door near the base of the skull, just behind the left ear. I here the screen door slam...I drift off into late, summer autumnal memories living in the middle of nowhere, where the opposums hide under the sink at night and the cicadas sing so loudly you forget there's such a thing as silence. But silence comes, at three in the morning as the house settles into itself and all the doors to other rooms slowly leak the dreams of their occupants.
The silence is deafening except for a lone pick-up travelling through from nowhere to nowhere, head lights carving out of the darkness something short-lived and lonely, before disappearing behind a curtain in the night. As the engine fades, a single cricket begins to serenade the night with its song. I drift back from the memory into my room, into my body waiting patiently for my return. It's been nine days.
The news has just come over the opera house TV, its been nine days of trying. Nine days of dying. I let Bowie out the back door near the base of the skull, just behind the left ear. I here the screen door slam...I drift off into late, summer autumnal memories living in the middle of nowhere, where the opposums hide under the sink at night and the cicadas sing so loudly you forget there's such a thing as silence. But silence comes, at three in the morning as the house settles into itself and all the doors to other rooms slowly leak the dreams of their occupants.
The silence is deafening except for a lone pick-up travelling through from nowhere to nowhere, head lights carving out of the darkness something short-lived and lonely, before disappearing behind a curtain in the night. As the engine fades, a single cricket begins to serenade the night with its song. I drift back from the memory into my room, into my body waiting patiently for my return. It's been nine days.
21 February 2006
Written on coasters, drunk at the bar...
The following was discovered written on coasters scattered on the floor amid a pile of broken bottles and dirty socks:
He was constricted to writing on coasters. He'd forgotten his journal, but at least he had his pen and his wits about him. So he wrote while sitting in the bar sipping his whiskey, afraid he would discover himself written down, captured in ink, unable, or unwilling to fight himself free. He could not escape the fetal stirrings of the Novel growing: an abort, fail, retry repeating itself in his head. The Novel would not limit itself to free-verse thought expressions. It went with him wherever he went. As long as he had his trusty writing instrument, which was stolen, and perhaps, beside the point, the finest pen he had ever owned, he wouldn't be able to escape.
And so the Novel continued in vaporous circles, churning in his brain as the smoke from his cigarette commingled with the air, dancing in tandem with laws of physics he could not fathom. His thoughts resembled certain books written in sand and purchased in dreams he desperately desired to own. He saw It swirling into fantastic hedonisms, Grendhalian gardens filled with sin and his greed, along with the Words, floated half-formed, as yet unborn in the sterile hollows of his mind. So, he sat and waited in the dark confines of the bar for a character to walk onto the stage, not needing to create them, but draw them up in the bucket of his pen. He waited. He watched. He listened. He drank.
"Oh, my God!" exclaimed a one-line, bit actor. He realized he could make of their comment what he wanted, choosing whether to foreshadow their declaration, lend it an air of prophetic import. Instead, he let it slide into the general background noise of the bar. Waited for something else. Drank.
It had been here where he had felt the pull of flesh and pen, mixed with alcohol, so many lives expounding the utter emptiness of their being. Here, where Life became nothing more than fetid desires and putrid purchases of souls traded for fleeting, empty rituals; here, he had felt most alive. Yet, it was here also he felt, and beared witness to the secret fear of mediocrity, the drab illusions draping his mind that he could not escape from.
And so, it was here, amid the scattered laughter and drunken conversations of two-dimensional non-entities on the periphery of his consciousness that he felt at home, anonymous. And it was here he returned day after day to witness the same tired visage from which he gazed upon the world. Here, he turned the mirrored eye back upon itself and let it look, for once, on something other than the self.
Another hack actor in his life proclaimed in proud insolence: "I've sucked dick for Jägermeister!" Good for him. I guess it gives meaning to his emptiness, but my own? What gives meaning to the emptiness inside me? How do you translate the utter despair, the nihilism, the wretched horror of the world into words? Your own and no one else's? Not some apt quote from some drunken fool now dead and famous; caught in the glare of envious, empty minds incapable of original thought. Not that.
Suddenly, he realized he was between worlds, between sobriety and the breaking point. He was at the point where the mind, no longer capable of holding itself and the liquor together, became stranded on an island of drunkenness and despair. He felt his mind giving up the ghost. He came to the point where the mind stops expounding the fabulous fictions we make of our lives. He decided he would not fabricate dialogue, never name characters after fruit, or turn the people he knew into truths. He would make of this life, and the next one, a play, a staging ground for his seasonal migration to hell.
He suddenly realized he didn't care any more. The cadence of his thoughts slurred and became a cross-eyed hackneyed drawl. He saw the words pouring out of his pen, knew they digressed from the words in his heart, but had no control over their existence. They existed, as Plato's forms had, in some supra reality, divorced from the truth, which had slowly become fiction.
...
He found himself, after many lost thoughts and actions, after the blurred moments of drunken stumbling, here, wide-eyed and wondering just how it was he had come to this place. Had he..? he wondered momentarily, before asking another question he had no answer for. What had happened? Where had he been? What had he done? sped through his impaired mind like wildfire, catching up snippets and fragments of thoughts and conversations. He couldn't remember whether he had simply thought those things, or quite possibly, done them. What had he done, he asked himself again; knowing, and fearing the answers.
He was constricted to writing on coasters. He'd forgotten his journal, but at least he had his pen and his wits about him. So he wrote while sitting in the bar sipping his whiskey, afraid he would discover himself written down, captured in ink, unable, or unwilling to fight himself free. He could not escape the fetal stirrings of the Novel growing: an abort, fail, retry repeating itself in his head. The Novel would not limit itself to free-verse thought expressions. It went with him wherever he went. As long as he had his trusty writing instrument, which was stolen, and perhaps, beside the point, the finest pen he had ever owned, he wouldn't be able to escape.
And so the Novel continued in vaporous circles, churning in his brain as the smoke from his cigarette commingled with the air, dancing in tandem with laws of physics he could not fathom. His thoughts resembled certain books written in sand and purchased in dreams he desperately desired to own. He saw It swirling into fantastic hedonisms, Grendhalian gardens filled with sin and his greed, along with the Words, floated half-formed, as yet unborn in the sterile hollows of his mind. So, he sat and waited in the dark confines of the bar for a character to walk onto the stage, not needing to create them, but draw them up in the bucket of his pen. He waited. He watched. He listened. He drank.
"Oh, my God!" exclaimed a one-line, bit actor. He realized he could make of their comment what he wanted, choosing whether to foreshadow their declaration, lend it an air of prophetic import. Instead, he let it slide into the general background noise of the bar. Waited for something else. Drank.
It had been here where he had felt the pull of flesh and pen, mixed with alcohol, so many lives expounding the utter emptiness of their being. Here, where Life became nothing more than fetid desires and putrid purchases of souls traded for fleeting, empty rituals; here, he had felt most alive. Yet, it was here also he felt, and beared witness to the secret fear of mediocrity, the drab illusions draping his mind that he could not escape from.
And so, it was here, amid the scattered laughter and drunken conversations of two-dimensional non-entities on the periphery of his consciousness that he felt at home, anonymous. And it was here he returned day after day to witness the same tired visage from which he gazed upon the world. Here, he turned the mirrored eye back upon itself and let it look, for once, on something other than the self.
Another hack actor in his life proclaimed in proud insolence: "I've sucked dick for Jägermeister!" Good for him. I guess it gives meaning to his emptiness, but my own? What gives meaning to the emptiness inside me? How do you translate the utter despair, the nihilism, the wretched horror of the world into words? Your own and no one else's? Not some apt quote from some drunken fool now dead and famous; caught in the glare of envious, empty minds incapable of original thought. Not that.
Suddenly, he realized he was between worlds, between sobriety and the breaking point. He was at the point where the mind, no longer capable of holding itself and the liquor together, became stranded on an island of drunkenness and despair. He felt his mind giving up the ghost. He came to the point where the mind stops expounding the fabulous fictions we make of our lives. He decided he would not fabricate dialogue, never name characters after fruit, or turn the people he knew into truths. He would make of this life, and the next one, a play, a staging ground for his seasonal migration to hell.
He suddenly realized he didn't care any more. The cadence of his thoughts slurred and became a cross-eyed hackneyed drawl. He saw the words pouring out of his pen, knew they digressed from the words in his heart, but had no control over their existence. They existed, as Plato's forms had, in some supra reality, divorced from the truth, which had slowly become fiction.
...
He found himself, after many lost thoughts and actions, after the blurred moments of drunken stumbling, here, wide-eyed and wondering just how it was he had come to this place. Had he..? he wondered momentarily, before asking another question he had no answer for. What had happened? Where had he been? What had he done? sped through his impaired mind like wildfire, catching up snippets and fragments of thoughts and conversations. He couldn't remember whether he had simply thought those things, or quite possibly, done them. What had he done, he asked himself again; knowing, and fearing the answers.
13 February 2006
Brautigans and Beers...
Sometimes,
When I can't bear the weight of my own thoughts I return to the classics. No, not Heminway or Fitzgerald; no Flaubert or Maupassant for these tired times. I mean the classics of pubescent, adle-brained, fourteen bean genes growing staulks out of tres pesos and un pocito lolita meat grinder machines.
Bukowski and Brautigan and even sir Jack, that rat-bastard, immature adult-child bleeding his dharma guts out into mama mia's toilet bowl, while young fool-philosophers sped their way his way to find some inner peace and instead received a fuck off and go to hell from some fat, bloated drunk who couldn't take it any more and just wanted death and drink and got both. Howl for him all you want to; he's dead and immortal now.
No, I come back to Brautigan these days and listen as he mocks reality with such reverence, turning even the mundane into mundane sublimity. Is it sad to think he wasted away like they all do? Like we will? Have we got the right stuff to shoot ourselves to the moon and come back down again? Will we ever find the eternal, golden bliss of a single moment? Who knows. Who cares? We all make it by hook or by crook down the pipes.
In the mean time, as the mean season grows stiff and the sun returns from sunnier climes, listen to these recordings of another immortal, dead to this earthly plane, but flying high anyways.
Wine and wishes.
When I can't bear the weight of my own thoughts I return to the classics. No, not Heminway or Fitzgerald; no Flaubert or Maupassant for these tired times. I mean the classics of pubescent, adle-brained, fourteen bean genes growing staulks out of tres pesos and un pocito lolita meat grinder machines.
Bukowski and Brautigan and even sir Jack, that rat-bastard, immature adult-child bleeding his dharma guts out into mama mia's toilet bowl, while young fool-philosophers sped their way his way to find some inner peace and instead received a fuck off and go to hell from some fat, bloated drunk who couldn't take it any more and just wanted death and drink and got both. Howl for him all you want to; he's dead and immortal now.
No, I come back to Brautigan these days and listen as he mocks reality with such reverence, turning even the mundane into mundane sublimity. Is it sad to think he wasted away like they all do? Like we will? Have we got the right stuff to shoot ourselves to the moon and come back down again? Will we ever find the eternal, golden bliss of a single moment? Who knows. Who cares? We all make it by hook or by crook down the pipes.
In the mean time, as the mean season grows stiff and the sun returns from sunnier climes, listen to these recordings of another immortal, dead to this earthly plane, but flying high anyways.
Wine and wishes.
06 February 2006
Fat Corpulent American Day Hangover
I have now experienced the truly American way. Super Bowl made me do it. It was nothing new for me, though the people and the game made the experience all the better. Its only when you wake up at six in the morning, drunk and shivering that you realize what has happpened. Poor gods of football! The Seahawks blew it, but they made it to the game; that's what's important.
And here I am waiting for the hangover to start. Dear God! Of all the things to do, I get drunk to celebrate Fat Corpulent American Day. What else?
There are pen marks on my fingers,
emptiness leaking out of my soul
and a strong desire to say...
I AM A FAT, CORPULENT AMERICAN AND...
and, and,
stilll drunk, loving it (fuck McDonald's).
And here I am waiting for the hangover to start. Dear God! Of all the things to do, I get drunk to celebrate Fat Corpulent American Day. What else?
There are pen marks on my fingers,
emptiness leaking out of my soul
and a strong desire to say...
I AM A FAT, CORPULENT AMERICAN AND...
and, and,
stilll drunk, loving it (fuck McDonald's).
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