Real Enough

I've been staying awake longer, not sleeping. I've been staying away longer as well. Afraid to come back. But from where? And to where? I've been drinking longer and longer stretches of time, never quite drunk. I haven't been sleeping longer, though. That's the one thing that doesn't add up. I feel like something is out of balance. Something feels wrong. Something. Me? The whole fucking world?

The Middle East burns with the heat of a thousand towers falling. Violence. Terror. Fear. Death. Always Death, ever present. The world spinning off its axis-something wrong, out of whack. Am I becoming the same? Is my internal motor off, burning out? I can smell the ozone in the air, the tingling of the fine hairs on my arms, my ears starting to hum. The world is smoldering. I feel like it will soon erupt, pop loudly, and with a sigh, go out. Thousands upon thousands of years, millions upon millions of lives- gone. Gone. Only the dust will remain. The dust. And the wind. The wind blows the dust about in spiraling clouds, almost...like galaxies?

The wind blows cold and hot. Blowing. Blowing. Passing through the eves of an old, creaking house. Around the roof. Trying to find a way in. And you can hear it, clawing at the walls. At the windowpanes with fingers made of lifeless branches. The dead. The undead. Swaying in the wind. The swirling cacophony of wind. I listen to it even though I know it's all in my head, as though I were young again, reading Poe and Lovecraft in the middle of the night, no one else awake but me. Clocks ticking everywhere. And the sound of the wind. Clocks ticking, calling off the minutes and hours, ticking off the seconds into the future with a grave authority speaking from centuries long turned to dust. Counting down the minutes and hours until the end. Forever and a day. And the last night on earth.

Forever and a day. And a night. What will the last day of your life be like? And the last night? What will you do with it? Will you know? Will you sense it coming and prepare yourself? Will you be capable of having a perfect death? The Perfect Death? The one that is just for you? Not too bitter. Not too sweet. Will you cry out into the darkness with rage and fear? Or will you whimper and beg forgiveness from your God? Will you be caught unawares, blindsided by Fate? Will you lose yourself in the contemplation of your death? Or will you claim ignorance, as though you didn't know of Death?

I hate to tell you this, but...Death is real. Your Death is real. It has a name, whether Suicide. Or Cancer. Or Drowning. Or Burning. Maybe it will be a head-on collision with a Ford F100 driven by Larry who is recently divorced because he drank too much because he lost his job at the factory because he dreamt constantly of what his life would have been like had he not left college in the middle of his third year because Sheila Dawson had broken his heart after a year and a half of bliss because it wasn't as blissful after all, as he had thought, because he was drunk half the time, and besides, she'd met someone, Jake, who treated her the way she was meant to be treated, even if he later called her names and beat her until there was nothing left but a cracked shell of a woman who later took sleeping pills in a motel room in Kansas and never woke up, who, even though she had broken his heart, Larry loved with all his soul, and is currently thinking about while driving 68 mph down a two-lane highway, swerving back and forth across the double yellow line that means "Do Not Pass", at 7:30 in the morning, eight beers past the legal allowable limit thinking really hard about that Sheila Dawson and how much he really did love her, even if, even if she had broken his heart and shattered his dreams, while you, O nameless character, are fiddling with the knob on your radio dial trying to get clear reception so you can listen to the weather report to find out if it will rain tomorrow and whether you should bring your umbrella to work because you're afraid the rain will flatten your hair out, thus showing the world the poor comb-over you use to hide your bald head because Sara at the office might not smile at you when you say, "Hello, Sara. You look lovely this morning," all while you are trying hard to be as charming and handsome as possible, even though you're already married, have been for twelve blissful years, even though it doesn't feel like bliss right now because your wife isn't the same person you married, and neither are you, for that matter, but at least you try to act positive, be supportive, even if she won't, and you haven't had sex in the last three months because she doesn't feel like it and because you don't really care either because she's really let herself go in the last few years and she weighs twice as much as she did when you first met and started dating your second year of college, and because, really, you want to taste those beautiful twenty-three year old lips belonging to Sara at the office, and so here you are, moments away from your own death, thinking about fucking her on your desk some night when you're both working late and she suddenly stops working to tell you she's been secretly in love with you since the moment she laid eyes on you, and you are telling her the same thing, and then you're both ripping each other's clothes off and thrusting with the entire weight of your being, your soul, your very heart, and you're moaning so loud and grunting and calling out each other's name, and the name of God, and you're on the verge of the greatest, most satisfying orgasm of your life, when you realize you've missed the weather report, and you'll just have to bring your umbrella along, just in case, and besides you're afraid of your own hair and not the fact that Larry has just come around a bend in the road, has just crossed far over into your lane, is now traveling at 73 mph, trying to open another beer, still thinking of Sheila Dawson, while you are headed towards him at 62 mph, for a combined total of 135 mph, while you grope yourself thinking of the last residual moments of Sara's 23 year old cunt wrapped around your five and a half inch cock, in fact, almost the last thoughts of your boring, safe, pathetic life before you and Larry collide, killing poor, lonesome Larry instantly, the steering column finally completing the job Sheila Dawson had done so long ago by crushing his chest and heart, although you still have a few more painful moments of life before your very own Death.

This is your death. Are you ready for it? As you lay dying on the asphalt, the blood pouring out of your eyes and ears, you blink away red tears and see a tall figure coming towards you. He seems to have no discerning features. He may or may not be dressed in black, as though for a funeral. He seems to have something to tell you. He is now kneeling down and leaning over you. He puts his hands gently on both sides of your broken and bleeding face, and now he leans even closer to you and kisses your forehead. Still holding your head in his hands, he says, "I am sorry for the pain I've caused you. I didn't mean for it to end this way."

"Are you God?" you ask, choking back tears.

"Yes. And no," the stranger answers. "I am your creator, but I am not God."

I see the reaction on your face, and realize my words have hurt you more than the crash, that there is more you want to ask me. So, I lean closer, my ear almost touching your bloody lips, and still I can barely hear you.

"What...is my...name?" you ask with desperately imploring eyes, bright and dull at the same time.

I'm so sorry. You don't have one. I never gave you one. Then you die in my arms and I take your death away from you. A small tear rolls down my cheek. I recoil suddenly. Suddenly aware I have given Life and taken it. I feel like a child who has just killed a bug beneath its foot, though it hadn't meant to step on it. Now the child cries at the sight of the bug, lifeless and crushed on the sidewalk. Have I killed you? Will you, poor nameless character, now haunt me? Will I now wonder whether I am not just the figment of someone's imagination? I tremble at the thought, the warm summer evening growing chill. I feel the skin on my arms go goosey. I'm not the figment of someone's imagination, am I? Am I!? I'm real. I'M REAL! I shout into the bar and everyone grows silent, looking at me.

"You're real enough. Now, pay your tab and get out of here. You're scaring the clientele."

Somewhere between here and there...

He went east across the mountains until there were no trees, only scrub grass and sage all around him, and the infinite blue sky above. He came to the mighty Columbia, cold and dark, roaring with the voice of a thousand years and more, ever moving, ever replenishing itself. He stopped the car and stood looking out over the great river and the dun-colored cliffs draping it's sides. A thin bead of perspiration broke out on his brow. He wiped it away. He remembered Heraclitus then, and his wisdom of waters: "You cannot step into the same river twice, for the waters are ever flowing, ever changing." After a while, he got back in his car and drove on. He passed mile after mile of sagebrush, gnarled and low to the ground, barely a hint of color to their branches. Some had long since given up the ghost, flitting about the earth in search of home; lost souls seeking heaven, tumbling along.

He'd once thought of this place as hell, as a blasted heath upon which no one in their right mind would live. Yet, he had been wrong. There were those who called this place home and made for themselves a life, albeit, one which moved at a different pace than the rest of the world. Here, the days seemed longer, the sun slower in it's arc across the sky. There was something he could not grasp about this place. It's lack of limits, the endless expanse of sky all around him. One could look east and west, north and south, and see the great bowl of the sky meeting the land as though there were nothing beyond those hills but the edge of the earth. He'd often looked off into the distance, trying to see where heaven and earth met and the void began.

He had learned slowly, over many years, that the void began and ended inside, not out. One only had to look into themselves to see where the void began. Perhaps, he was projecting what he saw in himself when he stared into the mirror, saw the intricate swirls of green in his eyes that made him think of far off galaxies and great distances the mind could only comprehend in cold, logical numbers. Somewhere between here and there. He took a quick look in his rear view mirror at his eyes, saw the familiar spark, then he lit a cigarette and stared ahead at the road.

He sighs with the entire weight of his being and wonders whether the never-was-real place in his mind is really as far away as it seems, whether he might not still  be able to find it, touch it even as it fades away into nothing more than a lack of feeling, the absence of something he cannot describe. He sighs again and lights a cigarette. He exhales. He feels a heaviness in his body, something he has felt before and never wanted to again, but here it is, alive again. He wonders if it isn't despair he feels as he swims through the motions of extinguishing his cigarette in the ashtray, absently crushing the smoldering tip and watching the last few whisps of smoke twirl into the air and disappear. 

The Great Morning

The great morning, alive and waking to the world. The mountain casts its silhouette over the city, hulking and mad, a smoking volcano waiting to erupt. Traffic goes back and forth with the frenetic speed of early risers waking late to run off to work and toil in meaningless symmetry with the dead-minded approach of gold and silver to cast their sarcophagi in ornate decoration, the only solace for a lifetime of slavery. I am alive in the morning, rising at seven before my usual hour of ten. I have slept off the night, dreamt strange dreams I no longer remember and am not sad they are gone, forgotten. I have the morning and the traffic and the old man walking by o the street trying to stay younger than death, but Death is old as time and waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs in the early hours of some evening, waiting like a patient, old friend at the bottom of the stairs for him to descend a little too quickly, missing the bottom step and plunging down and to his death. And Death stands there with a warm sardonic grin, saying, “Hello, old friend. I’ve been waiting for you a long time here at the bottom of the stairs.” And off they go, hand in hand towards the eternal dark awaiting us all. But today I am here and alive and watching the morning as though I were the Angel of Death come to take them all away; here I am waiting for the coffee to percolate, not waiting too long and taking my mug and replacing it under the thin spout of coffee shooting out of the machine to fill my mug and not spill too much. Here I am sipping piping hot coffee and smoking a cigarette like a raging volcano waiting to erupt. And that is what I am, a volcano waiting for the perfect moment to erupt my fury upon the unsuspecting crowd gathered below me to see why after centuries of quiet the thunder god should begin his rumblings all over again. The look on their faces as the lava rushes towards them is priceless, or rather worth the waiting and the toiling in mindless oblivion, working my arms and legs into a frenzied froth of sweat and blood for the sake of someone else. But now my arms and legs, my brain and my cock serve me and no one else—I am become the master of my own fate. And how poorly I manage it! How poorly I serve myself when for so long I have served faithfully and mindlessly for others. I must teach myself the honor and joy one finds in working for himself, must remember that I am no longer the slave of wages and hours, but the maker of my own system. I am become the volcano waiting for the right moment to erupt and spew myself over half the sky and all the world, choking the air black as night and thick as wolves. I am awake and alive, the very heart of the volcano come to life, waiting, waiting. And all the while, they come and go on the street in their shiny cars that define the color and contour of their souls traveling towards a destination they would rather not think about except in movies where the hero dies at the end of a long and grueling battle with the forces of evil, triumphant even in defeat. But they do not know that they are simply waiting for the chance to descend the stairs a little too quickly, waiting for the stairs to slip from under them on a quiet night with no pomp and certainly no circumstance. They are waiting for their death even though they rush too quickly into the arms of Death at an awkward hour and forgot to live while they toiled away the hours and spent their blood-stained gold on useless trinkets and fools’ paradises imagined by Mongoloid idiot recluses working hard to sell the world something it never needed and will never need. They rush too quickly into the arms of Death expecting Jesus or the Devil and finding only Death, calm and patient, a warm embrace compared to the cold certainty of oblivion. And I think of all the hours and all the days I spent in this mad rush towards something that did not exist, never existed but in dreams of dead men and fools who were promised something more than an empty grave for a bed and worms for neighbors. I am alive and sitting calmly watching the fools rush to and fro like ants. But ants have a more noble purpose, one they accept without the gold and certainty of religion men need in order to stave off the demons of doubt that descend upon them in the dead of night when the pastor is sleeping soundly like the fool he is in his bed, and the boss is toasting to the backs of his slaves who work for a pittance of what they are worth. It descends upon them from a dead sleep and they suddenly wake with a start and wonder what the loud noise was coming from the bottom of the stairs and so they jump out of bed and rush down to meet the intruder only to find Death lurking at the bottom of the stairs, his smile ever present on his face, a study in the virtue of patience. The great morning rises out of the clouds and warms my skin, blinding me, but I am alive and in love with the world even with all of its faults and fools, in love with the world and ready for the new day like a volcano that has begun to rumble and will soon erupt…

The Name of My Novel is Novel

To say where it all begins is to lessen the fact that it happened. I had been living in an apartment with two of my closest friends and business partners, while running a small used bookstore. We got along quite well the three of us, Sky, Ben and myself. We were always of a mind to get a few bottles of wine, or whatever seemed appropriate for the evening, and drink the night away pounding on one or another typewriters that were always present and always in need of some maintenance. We would pass the machine back and forth across a small card table set up in the middle of the room, which always seemed to be covered in ashtrays and half full wine bottles, a stack of books one or the other of us had taken home from the store. It was a rather small studio apartment and all of us basically lived in a large room along with a psychotic cat and an indifferent, depressed iguana. There was a kitchen with a defective sink with a short basin that would clog up and overflow if you tried to wash dishes in it, as well as a small bathroom with concrete floors and a large, ominous claw-foot bathtub sitting against the wall. The apartment was on the third floor of one of those older buildings that at one time had been a hotel of ill-repute, and had large, open beamed ceilings on the first floor where any number of businesses have come and gone over the years. You find these buildings in all cities from the megalopolis to the small trading burg in the middle of nowhere. The men who built these buildings did so in order to make their cities grow, to make their wallets swell with money and for prestige to lay its’ wreathe upon their necks. In an attempt to make their personal empires grow, these men built their buildings and their cities on the edges of the continent, in port towns along both coasts, on the plains in the juncture of railroad lines, anywhere there was money to be made. The city of Olympia is no different, and is quite small. It is at the ass-end of the Puget Sound, on of the last ports before crossing into Oregon and California. A port town attracts the same type of men and women, the sailors and seamen of bygone days who lived, and still do, amongst the waves rather than on the land, and who would venture only as far on shore as to be able to have a clear view of the harbor and another boat to take them away to distant ports where they again became nameless and faceless, just another sailor with no history, but a long and adventurous, if slightly exaggerated, story trailing behind them where ever they went. Port cities, even Olympia, were inhabited by sailors worthy of Melville and whores not even the old western novels could convince you existed, but they were also inhabited by hard stock, sturdy folk from the upper reaches of the Hudson Valley, from Minnesota and the environs surrounding the bread basket of America, the Dutch and Irish immigrants who had at first, a generation before, stepped in the footsteps of their fathers and mothers, their grandparents, lived and suffered in the great cities of the East Coast, had been slaved into poverty in Boston and New York, broken in the humid heat of North and South Carolina, and finally wanted to escape from the drudgery of a still fresh, if decomposing New World. They sought after richer lands where farms still grew in abundance and life could be lived on a steadier pace without the reminders of the hustle and bustle of large cities that swallow your soul whole and leave you tired and broken at the end of it all. They sought this kind of freedom here on the West Coast, and they found it to a degree, but they also found that the rough edges of a city were as yet honed compared to the scarred coasts of Washington and Oregon and California, and here I think most specifically of Big Sur and its churning, blasted coast line that cuts into your mind and leaves you breathless before the magnificence of this unfinished landscape where God seems to have left off and not returned. And so it is Olympia where these forces and people met in direct opposition to each other, and where I found myself. The studio apartment housed the three of us, the cat and an iguana I had adopted from a close friend who could no longer take care of it, and was going to set it free in the desert. We were a motley bunch, drunks with passion and the sharp clear edge of our tongues to bite at the bit and the hand that fed us. Being young, we often ventured into the bars early in the evening and did not leave until the last call had been made and the bartenders had told us to leave. We would stumble out into the night and walk down the road the stone’s throw away we lived where we would open the last bottle of wine and turn the music up loud enough to hear it from the street down below. There was no end to what we threw out the window on nights like these, usually accompanied by a few friends eager to ingratiate themselves with the wine bottle while we were busy causing trouble.


There are a series of what seem to me endless nights, though they have ended and are long gone, like the memories we have of childhood which are ever-present yet altered by time and age; nights where we ingested one drug or another to stimulate further our deranged minds; nights filled with the swirling colors and melting walls of hallucinogenic mushrooms or LSD, or some powdered substance or another that would make our thoughts race along at dangerous speeds. There was always pot smoke mingling with cigarette smoke, and a cloud of electrons spinning madly through our altered minds. At times, the walls of our studio would seem to vanish, to become translucent, and suddenly we could see out onto the street, and still further beyond towards Seattle and down to Portland. The dimensions of Time and Space seemed brittle before these visions and you would find yourself roaming somewhere over the Pacific, or perhaps standing on the peak of an unnamed mountain on an uncharted continent still filled with magic and mystery mingling with the morning dew. Standing thus upon the edge of an undiscovered country at the end of the world, we failed to realize we stood on the very edges of our childhoods, on the verge of becoming adults. It seems so naïve looking back to not have seen what was coming, not to have heard the bell as it tolled for us, but there we stood looking down on all of creation and not realizing we were so close to the Fall, the final steps out of the Garden.
The night has grown long on me and now, from my vantage point, I see the drunks start to roam their drunken way up the hill and out of downtown, trying to thumb a ride as they have always done and will always do until Time deems it necessary to end and the world and everything we have known are gone and turned to dust. So much has changed and so much will always stay the same. I am still the last one to trail off to sleep at night, pounding away on my typewriter while my friends have moved along in other directions or been forced to by circumstance. It seems I have not changed, am still the person I was then, though a bit older, a bit more cynical. I wonder at times like these whether it is not my defect, rather than theirs, which has kept me in this place and in this way; whether I might not be the broken one who will never change, but become a traveler by necessity and a stranger to all those I have loved and left behind as I stand still. As it always does, spring has brought out in me a sense of desperation and futility that all life is but what you make of it, and I am doing a rather poor job of it. I have always felt I was on the edge of something, moments away from plunging off and out of sight, that something would happen to radically alter my being, but then nothing happens, or I am too dense to notice it until long after the fact. As the air warms and the flowers start to bloom, a seed, a simple thought begins to grow in my mind and I am overcome with a sense of sadness that beckons me into the past to stare at all the works of man and realize my small place amongst them, amidst the past and the future, which are no different, and realize there is no point to history or the universe; that the cosmos simply churns along, a blind gurgling river of truth and not-truth containing the seed to every action and the germ of every thought; that there is no other point to the simple sufferings we make ourselves endure other than the desire to feel something and tell ourselves that we are strong and the world is right; that Heaven and Hell are where they ought to be; that the heavens hold for men what they have always held for men: the possibility of something greater, more meaningful, more true than even the most vivid dream that is remembered long after you have woken, remembered long after you have slept and dreamt a thousand different dreams, becoming the quintessential, absolute state of dreaming ever afterwards.

Thoughts on a Train...

Riding the train to California. I feel apprehension at seeing her again after so long. I wonder if this won't be good-bye and so long, whether this will only lead to more doubts of self and purpose, whether I won't give up everything for her and the promise of something with more flash and excitement. Part of me wants nothing more than to stay gone, never return to Olympia.

But I know well enough there are demons wherever you go- especially when you carry them with you. I want to be free and wandering the back alleys of the world like Miller, although I know he wasn't free from doubt and fear...the same way Kerouac was never free, but hounded by his demons through novel after novel, ultimately drinking himself to death while watching the Galloping Gourmet on his mother's color television.

No, they weren't free from gravity or passions or the bodily urges to piss and shit and vomit their souls out; weren't separate from death and only achieved immortality through the repetion of empty words as invocations of lives and deaths and myths and metaphors and ellipses...

My thoughts trail off and I stare out the window as dirt roads trail off to someplace I wish I could follow. A small creek winds its way down past the railroad tracks, full with the spring's rain. It's gray outside my window, the light diffusing over the trees, casting my thoughts with melancholic hues. In less than a day I will be in San Francisco, home to a girl, rather a woman, I love and fear. I wonder how close we can be? How far apart we have become in these last two months; whether we can rekindle some thing that was in jeapardy of dying before she left.

My Self

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...