Well-adjusted

"I'm more well-adjusted than the whole lot of you! I'm in touch with my psychosis!"

-anonymous

What is Courage?

What is Courage? Facing and forgetting an impossible past with unsentimental stoicism.

What is Love? Let go, but never forget. Smile, beautiful - gimme an image to remember you by.

What is Heartbreak? "As life wounds us, so art must wound us. We are tormented by the delicate, indefinite pain in art; the heart cry of the lover, the failure of realization of the desire, the finite mind stretching to comprehend infinity - these are our sorrows. We pleasure in the perfection of our self-torture; we love to mock and sneer at ourselves; we flagellate ourselves with our own failures. Masochists all we love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again; we sit staring at the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities." (Allen Ginsberg, July 28, 1944)

What is Sadness? Goodbye.

What is Hope? See you later.

She said goodbye.

Passion implies suffering - not in the Messianic context - but in the very real embodied experience of human affection. I never understood what, "It's better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all" really meant. It's often regurgitated - which explains why I equated its common usage to a lack of profundity. My prejudgment is not true of course. One must experience lost - irredeemable lost - to appreciate the Bard's words. I loved her. I lost her. And I - now years removed - can honestly say I have no regrets. Darling, I wish you nothing but the best. We will always have our moment - one that you've most likely forgotten and will live on with me - sharing a pack of Starburst sitting along library bookshelves. I love you, darling; I always will.

Jorge (V)

His hands trembled. He was inexperienced in the matters of shooting a man - it was all hypothetical during training.

"Put the gun down, man." I said. "You ain't got no beef against me." He put the gun back into the holster but continued to tremble. "I'm not goin' to be trouble, dude. I'm like you - human, flawed, and in need of a smiling face."

His eyes welled up with tears - he was clearly shaken. I motioned to the kid to sit down beside me. He complied.

Through teary eyes, he asked if I had validated my pass. I told him I had a monthly. He nodded timorously - betraying a glimmer of a smile - and prepared to get off at the next stop, but I grabbed his arm before he could rise out of his seat.

"Hey, c'mon man, there's no hurry. Tell me your story and I'll lend you my ears."

He lipped - with introverted amusement - the words "Julius Caesar" and sat back down.

“You have a name?” the young man asked.

“I am who I am,” I answered with a smile. He understood what I meant.

“How did you get that gun?” I asked in a rather sardonic tone.

“Standard issue.”

[In a registry office, a man holds a non-descript license application. He encounters an old friend, they chitchat. He asks his old friend a series of questions, each as banal as the last. His friend listens to each, without reply, before saying "She's in Airdrie with Broke Boy."

The man, somewhat incensed by this information, begins a fiery tantrum in the registry office - but does not physically disturb anything. His old friend walks out.

At a closer inspection of the sheet, the previous owners of the gun are present - Tweedle Dum (of East Lansing, Mich.) and Tweedle Dee (Fort Collins, Colo.) ...he strokes the pistol concealed under his overcoat.

Another person, eavesdropping on the previous conversation, walks in and says, "Broke Boy's a myth. Broke Boy ain't real."

"How so?” the man asks.

"Because you're looking at him." ]

"Standard issue - what do you think of that?" I asked.

"Of what?"

"That they let transit cops carry guns around."

"You gotta do what you gotta do." The perfunctory tone of his colloquialism - delivered in a trained, controlled voice - took me aback. Maybe he was more comfortable with a gun than I first imagined.

"By and by, I never caught your name, dude."

"Jorge." I shook his outstretched hand.

"So how did you find yourself in the business of fascism?" I asked.

"Necessity," a hearty laugh accompanied his one-word answer. "I dropped out of college and this was one of the only jobs I was qualified for."

"College dropout? That's a title that comes with a lot of weight," I started. "It takes a lot to get into college and be smart enough to bail before being buried nose deep in loans."

"Amen to that." Although I nodded in agreement to his sentiment, his high-five went unreciprocated.

"So tell me your story...no, no, wait, I'll tell you mine first." He grew attentive and nodded along.

"I spent my best years wallowing in self-pity over a girl who was never mine. I got two degrees in areas relating to politics - which apparently is no use to anyone. And now, I sit here on this train jobless, homeless, and with the last hundred dollars I'll ever need in my pocket." I hesitated during the last part, cautious about disclosing my financial situation since he had a gun in tow. It's an instinctive distrust, I suppose - one that applies to situations involving cash and strangers toting firearms. He continued to nod, telling to me continue.

"I'm back in town - this wretched bourgeois town populated by vain parochial philistines - to do one thing: to kill a man." He nodded once again, unaffected by my supposed revelation.

"And if you want to know, it's that dude." I said, pointing to another one of those accursed billboards. He stared at it rather distinterestedly for a long while; although I assume it wasn't a novel sight for him.

"I agree," he broke the silence. "He does deserve to die. But what is your reason for wanting him dead?"

"I have my reason - which is no reason at all."

He smiled. My obtuse response amused him.

"So how are you planning on getting to him?"

"Haven't thought that far ahead yet."

"I understand." His cadence infused an otherwise prefunctory reply with an incisive signficance. It affirmed our unspoken solidarity. But there was something else to it.

"So, since you seem to be handy with a pistol - have you ever thought of killing a man?" My question failed to register initially. His eyes remained fixed on a faded C-Train advertisement.

He turned to me after a lengthy silence and with cold hard eyes gave me his reply, "We've all thought about it."

His eyes returned to the yellowing advertisment. "Broke Boy Realty - The Best Doggone Brokers in the West," it read. The ad featured an airbrushed image of a smiling, rather handsome, young man wearing a white two-gallon - who, from the looks of things, was not much older than Jorge.

The morning horizon illuminated.

“So are you getting off your shift soon?” I asked.

“Yeah, in about twenty minutes,” he said with a prescient brow. “You wanna crash at my place?”

“That’s mighty neighbourly of you neighbour.” There was laughter and then a prolonged silence. He stared at his advertisement. I gazed fixedly at the piece secured in its holster.

Petty Perversions (IV)

Rationale #1: Never give an inch - in love or in war.

When I grew up in Calgary, it was a city of philistines, deodorized career sycophants, evangelists, "westerners" - with their faux-cowboy regalia and all, oblivious nihilists, and conservative closet-cases. Upon my return, not much changed - apart from the fact that most of these people got rather rich, thanks to the luxuriant petrol that flowed so freely from Alberta soil, and suddenly they had a stake in the homeless problem. "The homeless question?" was a fashionable headline plastered over the papers - as if the problem was akin to that of an infestation, i.e. requiring quarantine or extermination (what's the number to the offices of Himmler, Eichmann, and Mengele again?).

A common compliant of Calgarians was the sight of transients and panhandlers in the downtown sector, most notably on the city's C-Trains. "How can I feel safe seeing bums on the train?" asked one respondent to a newspaper poll. Ah, safety, Hobbes' elusive telos, how can it be simulated? One answer: the Old Man's roof.

The groom must have felt so very secure under the dome of St. Mary's cathedral - preparing for a clean and dignified ceremony before a night of repeatedly sodomizing his blushing bride. But, hey, excuse the cliché - shit happens. For all his wealth and respectability, the groom was a petty, petty little man. You see - this is something that was not widely reported by the papers - he paid for a hymen restoration for his young bride, so he could lay claim to that particular conquest thanks to the wonders of cosmetic simulacra. Who lays claim to the original original cherry? Yours truly, of course.

Rationale #2: Tyranny must be resisted at all costs.

Affluent Calgarians believed they were entitled to sanitize and monitor all "public space" in their fair city; the groom felt entitled to the space between his bride's fine thighs. Petty perversions, such petty perversions - that is the source of tyranny, isn't it? Vanity, vanity, vanity - the whole way down.

Unfortunately for the groom, my unsuccessful - and spectacular - attempt at suicide had only emboldened my efforts to annihilate him. For days after the initial crash in the mountains, an aura of invincibility cloaked my every move. I heard the cosmos hailing me to crush my romantic rival and restore the universe to a salubrious state. Cosmic supplications, oh how they echoed within! As I sat on the C-Train and slipped into syncope, her spectre - dressed in a white satin gown - whispered, "Green Vert, Blue Bleu, Spilt Blood, Crimson Rouge." Floating through the dreamscape, I saw the fragments of a perfect murder. I awoke - staring out the window - to the perfect smiling image of my soon-to-be vanquished rival plastered on a billboard and the reflection of a transit cop - a pimply kid no older than nineteen - pointing a gun at me.

Fun, Fun, Murderous Fun (III)

An antemeridian glow warmed my face and shook me from my slumber. I rose from my make shift cot of branches, leafs and a winter coat. The fading embers told me that the fire burned through most of the night. At once relieved and annoyed that natural forces could not finish off what a car wreck failed to do, I walked on towards the vibrant horizon, eastwards and homeward bound – all the while, slowly plotting my rival’s doom.

When you want someone dead, there is no rational reason why. Sources for murderous intentions can be narrowed to a few general categories: revenge, envy, and war - none of which are remotely rational; unless, of course, you put the proper spin on them. The fun of murderous machinations – of course it’s fun! – comes from concocting sanctimony in order to conceal, to justify, and to exult it as an almost honourable act. Convince yourself, convince the world.

“Yes, we’re sure the world is better off without so-and-so, but did you have to saw off his limbs, ground them in an industrial meat-grinder, and serve him as Hor' Oeuvres to his colleagues at a Fortune 500 luncheon?”

“Well, you see, your Honour, he was a lying cheating captialist pig who rogered all of his associates' daughters and a few of their sons. He sold poisoned candied apples to schoolchildren and lured the pretty ones with bags of candy. He shot the sheriff and sodomized the deputy. He kicked my dog and chased my cat away. He killed Jimmy Hoffa; he ordered the hit on JFK; he greenlighted Gigli.”

“Good God! Gigli! I certainly cannot convict you for having removed such unrepentant cruel-hearted scum from the face of the earth. Case dismissed!”

Ah, only if such a defence would suffice – I would get away with things worse than murder. So, back in the forest, I wandered eastwards until I came across the road, about ten kilometres from the spot where the car had careened off the highway. I pulled out my right hand, stuck out the thumb, and was ready to hitchhike the rest of my way back to Calgary.

Where was I? (II)

I shed a tear. She was getting married to someone else and I was blinded by some weird indefinable emotion. Angersorrowresignation would be an adequate appropriation. In sum, it was a feeling of losing something already lost. As far as I was concerned, she melded to the immortal forms of my contorted imagination the moment she tore up my letter. She was a ghostly apparition telling me to go kill myself - this most finite of losses marked the end of a miserable road.

I locked it in at 140, released my hands from the wheel, and the vehicle roared off into the vast wilderness below. Dear reader, you must think I’m writing this from beyond the grave – a ghostwriter…but I’ll save you the moronic pun. I survived and inexplicably without a scratch.

“It’s a miracle,” would be the conventional response – followed by the whole litany of born-again-ism, accompanied with a righteous pursuit of the great White Picket Fence in the sky. When I got out of the crumpled piece of metal formerly my car, I cussed up a storm. My first thought, but certainly not the ‘best’, was that I couldn’t even kill myself properly. Second, the rental company was going to fuck my ass until it was green. And third, a geographical and metaphysical question: where was I?

Contrary to what cinema postulates, a car does not instantaneously explode upon wrecking. It takes some time – about twelve to fifteen disoriented paces. The flaming pile of crap metal put a smile on my face. My goodness, I thought, people pay handsomely for this type of shit. As I mulled a career as a stuntman, I whiled away the remaining sunlight wandering aimlessly through boreal city blocks. There was Mr. Owl’s home and his neighbour’s, the distinguished Dr. Hoo, and there was Tony Hawk, working on a new aerial routine. My palpitating heart - heavy with sad surrender - demanded levity, even if it was absurd and patently lame.

Your Old Man (I)

An idea percolated into my mind as I drove home from graduate school. Why don’t I go off this mountain road, headlong into the chasm? I imagined I did, since my car was no more than scrap metal when they found it. But I don’t think I was driving. Jesus, was that you in the driver seat? Jesus, did you want me dead? It can’t be you. Jesus loves me. The Old Man is the cadaver junkie; you’re the mellow Dude. Did the Old Man drive? Did he run me off into an abyss? Can the old blind-as-a-bat Motherfucker still drive? Forget the Old Man, Jesus, you better believe in me.

My Fight for Survival

Kafka - July 31, 1914:

"I have no time. General mobilization. K. and P. have been called up. Now I receive the salary of solitude. But it is hardly a salary; solitude only brings punishments. It doesn't matter, I am not much affected by this misery, and more determined than ever...I will write despite everything, at any price: it is my fight for survival."

Ken Kesey

"One of these days you're going to have a visitation. You're going to be walking down the street and across the street you're going to see God standing over there on the corner motioning to you saying, "Come here, come to me." And you will know it's God, there will be no doubt in your mind - he has slitty little eyes like Buddha, and he's got a long nice beard and blood on his hands. He's got a big Charlton Heston jaw like Moses, he's stacked like Venus, and he has a great jeweled scimitar like Mohammed. And God will tell you to come to him and sing his praises. And he will promise that if you do, all the muses that ever visited Shakespeare will fly in your ear and out of your mouth like golden pennies. It's the job of the writer in America to say, "Fuck you, God, fuck you and the Old Testament you rode in on, fuck you." The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful. Anytime anybody says come to me and says, "Write my advertisement, be my ad manager," tell him, "Fuck you." The job is always to be exposing God as the crook, as the sleaze ball."

-Ken Kesey

Statute of Limitations

I exceeded the statute of limitations. Eight years passed; it was too late to get on my knees and grovel. Before I begin describing in disparate detail the last encounter with my beloved, readers should be aware of the writer's background. His prose is amateurish because he's an autodidactic - a self-taught "writer". But please do not let his philistine ways dissuade you from reading on. The tale itself is worthy of attention, in spite of cardboard compositions. For that my sincerest apologies. But please do bear with me as I slither through my sinfully stale scenes of unrequited love.

She’s married to a globetrotting forty-something international banker who is home two months out of the year. Her sun-kissed towering Tahitian gardener - an archetype of muscular virility, twenty-one, and only slightly past the zenith of his sexual potency – provides horticultural advice, carnal exercise, and ersatz apotheosis on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Most of her afternoons, much like the one to be described, are an opalescent collection of clichés: a picturesque woman - still young, no longer fresh - standing upright, milky white forearms resting on a staircase banister, a Vermouth sentry flanking her, a sparkling crystal tumbler in hand, and her large hazy orgulous eyes fixed disinterestedly on the vast palatial space below. I imagined that was how my darling looked, a languid Lucite queen, before I knocked on her door.

A desultory path lead me there. The expanse of eight years, two months, thirteen days, twelve hours, thirty four minutes, and fifty two seconds was like a dog dragging its haunches along brown shag carpet - a series of ephemeral sensual pleasures leaving an indelible yet imperceptible stain. Empty copulation, vanished before breakfast, out to lunch, back at it again – anaesthesic effect diminishes with every pleasure; the pain cannot be ignored for long. Look: there he is pining for his darling, asleep beside his anonymous ersatz lover. His nightmarish visions come as prepackaged clichés: a deluge of white lotus blossoms blanket a blushing bride and her glamourous groom; in shadows, a ghoulish slave of lassitude tucked in a foetal posture sheds tremulous tears; on a whole, incondite images redden with murderous aspirations – a perfunctory murder lead nightmares into fantasy – shift to end scene: the vanquished bloody groom; the redeemed coward carries his scarlet bride towards a rosy-coloured sky set ablaze by sanguinary osculations; the rudiments of action left frozen in the frigid stream of flattish fantasies.

Poised on the doorbell, my extended forefinger quivered. An urgent desire for detour emerged. My palised digit, at the edge of a precipice, awaited authorization from higher faculties. Alas, my inebriated mind was trapped in binary: love her, love her not, love her, love her not. And there I stood for a very, very long time, a hairy bedraggled transient hopelessly in love with a teenaged apparition.

Twenty-five. Eight years gone.

The same ailments, afflictions, and apparitions haunted me.

Twenty-five. Eight years gone.

Too old to lie to myself and call it honour (Fitzgerald).

Eight years gone without significance, without meaning, unsanctified.

And there I stood, a palsied finger unable to move.

Like eight years prior, she acted before I could. The door swung open and there she stood – ostensibly in search of an unread morning paper or the milk and the milkman or a gardener's Wednesday surprise. But it was only me, standing there – an unsteady forefinger, a pair of wobbly legs, a beating heart on the verge of disaster - my eyes fixed onto hers. She blinked blankly, gave me the one over, and looked right through me. No effect. Not a ping - much less a ding-ding-ding. I did not register with the vast mnemonic forest stored in that lovely head of hers. It was then that a timeless, insoluble existential question flowed effortlessly from my darling's lascivious lips: Who are you?

Without you, darling, what am I? That was what danced on the tip of my tongue. But I didn’t say it. I should've said it - it was a cool, ambiguous, and, if delivered with the proper slant, somewhat romantic response. Instead, the palsy afflicting my index finger shot up my arm, across my shoulder, up the collarbone, snaked up my jugular, past my saliva glands, and caught hold of my rusted tongue.

"Uh...uh...uh..." And I stood there for a long, long time - stuttering and unsure of how to begin. She was unimpressed by the banal spectacle - most likely disappointed that I wasn't a hulking mass of blond bestial power employed to service her dairy needs, or an exotic man-child ready to trim her hedges. But after several hapless attempts at my carefully plotted address - mind you, an address drafted and edited over the course of eight years - she discovered my etiolated sapling in the shadows of prodigious oaks.

"I remember you. You're the geek who wanted to bone me at prom." My sweetheart, bless her, was never one to mince words. "But you were too shy to even ask." A breathless giggle accompanied her addendum. Oh, dear reader, how I wish you could hear her seraphic voice through my ears - a sonorous seduction that shatters stubborn inhibitions. Great Apollo would be found in some wine-soaked bordello cavorting with profane hermaphrodites – committing acts that would repulse Dionysus – upon hearing my darling's siren laughter. I melted and weakly mustered an aw-shucks smile that recaptured a lost boyish charm and she provided an incandescent reciprocation.

"I remember that big smile," she said. "It's still kind of cute." Oh, kill me now darling, I wanted to blurt aloud. Kill me now; for that was the moment I wanted to warm my wretched soul, as it writhed in the cold torment of eternity. "But...what's your name again?" A footnote. An extraneous detail. What's in a name anyways? I told her out of an inviolable sense of duty to my queen.

"Oh," she said with cautious reservation. She looked down at her red Manolo Blahniks, as if suspended in mediative silence, and something inexplicable happened. She wept uncontrollably. I entered the house and tried to comfort her. She pushed me away and ran frantically up the staircase - knocking over the securely capped Vermouth bottle in the process - ostensibly in search of something.

Hell is alliteration (incomplete experiment in Poshlost)

Up along the emerald road I move towards an inauspicious end.


Acrosonic rosy-orange spheres sing an enchanting melody...
La Lo Lu La Lo Lu.

Blissful bubbly bumbling beauties break up...
La Lo Lu La Lo Lu.

Candy-stripped chiaroscuros conceal crumbling tomorrows...
La Lo Lu La ---

Detached, delayed, determined - ending in destitute disillusion...
La Lo Lu ---

Everything eternal ends expectedly...
La Lo ---

Fiery fervent faithful fools fry forever...
La ---

Og God Og! Go Dog Go!
Human hunters howl homilies,
In honor of the Divine most Deceased;

Jove jibes jubliantly about
Kinaesthetic kenosis:
"Long live the King
May he lay securely supine in his tomb."

Noxious noetic naugahyde emits
the Odour of orgulous optimism;

Petrified pretties peel away,
Quieted quickly,
Runs from ramshackle ruins, and
Slithers stridently in search for sham salvation.

Throwing things 'til the tumult thunders to a thud
Undines utter usurious uncertainties
Voluminous vulva vassicillate violently
With white winter whirling, wound - waiting for Wilde,
Xenophon's Xanadu,
Yellow Yucatan youth,
Zig-zagging zaniness.

Beethoven

I don't need a psychiatrist. Gimme a clean sheet, a pen, quiet solitude, and time.

"You're psychotic!" they scream.

I've no need for a padded room. There's no windows, no adequate light, no means to write.

"You're abnormal!" they yell.

We've all the time, until it ends suddenly - when the solitary walker misteps and stumbles into an uncharted chasm.

"You're morbid!" they decide.

"No, you're morbid. You, with the crucifix. You, with the wooden beads. You, clinging foetally to manufactured miracles. You, with unquestioned knowledge. You, swinging your Truth cudgel. You, with your prelapsarian dreams, awaiting your zombie Redeemer. You, with your righteousness and your righteous indignation and your righteous condemnation. You, with your eternal Forms. You, who stumbled out of the cave. You, facing a setting sun and hoping it does not rise again," I whisper inaudiably - a pipsqueak noise emanating from a body exhausted by the senuous tortures of saccharine Sadists.

"You're free!" their voices boom.

"But everywhere I was in chains," I finally fall onto the cold sterile pavement-earth but , sadly, my maggot friends are no more. Alone. Alone. The chalky goodness of progress seeps into my flesh.

"You're finished!" they deafen me. Silence, sweet silence; now I can create.

The Eclipse of the Family MacHines

Dean MacHines owned and operated a successful gardening and landscaping business. He loved his work. He inherited his passion for horticulture from his father, Donald MacHines. Even though the elder MacHines worked long hours at the local automotive factory, his weekends were spent tending to a modest yet inspired home garden with his eldest son. Dean cherished those rare moments spent holding a watering can following his father’s every move. On the day Dean quit a lucrative job at a corporate law firm, an apparition of his father visited him - reportedly, with a hoe in hand.

When Donald died of brain cancer – developed from extended exposure to asbestos at the factory, Dean was overwhelmed with grief. His mother, Doreen MacHines, would recall, in a May 2006 profile of her son in Horticulture Illustrated Quarterly, that her the fifteen year old son slept with the tomatoes for three days and three nights before he was able to express his grief. “Those poor tomatoes,” he reportedly vailed. “They lost their father.” In spite of the grave circumstances surrounding his father's passing, he shed not a tear; a fact Doreen proudly noted. To punctuate his time with the tomatoes, they were harvested and brought to his father’s gravesite. And, as was reported, he lovingly projected each and every one of them at the tombstone out of a sense of respect and reverence. “He wouldn’t have had it any other way,” he told journalist James J. Kutsch. James would write in his May 2006 article that even though the son’s tribute was unorthodox, unconventional, and would probably be considered blasphemous as well as immoral by most of his readers, it was a tribute offered with simple sincerity and heart, the best kind of salute. The tomato stains remain visible at Donald MacHines’ resting place today, nearly two decades later, a constant reminder about the unique relationship between son, father, and the spirit of the soil. It was a relationship that inspired Dean to pursue a passion he was born for.

Misery

Misery is bourne from an encounter between neurosis and revelation. If revelation does indeed peel away illusions, the neurotic individual, ill-equipped to deal with the "truth", comes to grief, submits to emotional extortion, and indulges in misery. Misery functions as an omnipresent and easily accessible excuse; an infinite postponement of the essential confrontation between man and his inadequecies. Therefore, a disjointed indulgence of misery rationalizes the rejection of human frailty and facilitates unrequited longing for the impossible dream of human perfection. Persistent lamentations about loss and failure distracts from the challenges and contingencies of life and, hence, sustain the image of the impossible - an image that comforts the weak irresolute conscience of the chronic procrastinator, who awaits for an absolute absolution of imperfect, ephemeral existence.

Buy now...

Buy now, you should know that cash talks and principle starves.

Buy now, you have learned that succulent lips planted on pasty white behinds is the formula to "success".

Buy now, you know that God is Dead, unless his zombie corpse can move units and spike profits, then...

Buy now, you know we can sell Him, barrel upon barrel, box after box, to willing dupes.

Buy now, pay later. Buy now, sell when you're high. Buy now, it's bargain you can't afford to miss.

Buy now, you should know that everything is not as it appears.

Buy now, it's a done-diddly-done-dang deal.

Buy now, buy more, it's your duty,
it's expected of you and of me and of everybody;
for we are nothing but investments to be sold
for the right price at the right time to dealers most dishonest.

What time is it?

What time is it?
-No one knows.

What time is it?
-No one cares.
-Perfect, perfect answer, so says the Enlightened One.

What time is it?
-We don't care.

What time is it?
-You don't want to know.

What time is it?
-Time to...get high and sober, get fucked and fuck, wait for tomorrow, burn yesterday, act like you matter, sit still like the good little boys, look for kicks, throw away shit, loot the machine, riot, burn, pillage, rest for a journey, climb the highest peak, freefall and visit dark depths, turn shit into gold and gold into shit, turn us on...time to finally live.

What time is it?
-Form space illustrated darkness illuminates reverie, come passionless ecstatic arousal...stilled, stilled, silent autumn fall(s) winter scene.

What time is it?
-Time to lose your watch. Time forgets, time passes by, it is, it fades; life in time holding off timeless death.

What time is it?
-It's time to say goodbye.

Meet my attorney, Allen Ginsberg

Meet my attorney, Allen Ginsberg,
his grocer, Mr. Whitman,
his gardener, Mr. Cassady,
his confessor, Father Ti-Jean,
and, last but not least, his beautiful mistress, Diotima.

Shudder

Death by pleasure,
death by stillness,
dead serenity;
my heart crapped out,
refusing to BEAT on.

Where's my head at?
UP some dark crevice,
or so I have been told.

A primal force drives beyond,
defected from an OTHER side,
to my doorstep.
I open the door to a spectacular sight.

Catastrophy, my BEAUTIFUL bride,
gloriously nude,
writhing and grinding in
the lap of my brother-twin, atrophy.

Finality is mere beginning, she moans.
The bed collapses,
the players vanish,
and a child appears, with a necklace that reads:
Behold! Her name is HOPE.

My Alba

Now that I've wasted
five years in Manhattan
life decaying
talent a blank

talking disconnected
patient and mental
silderule and number
machine on a desk

autographed triplicate
synopsis and taxes
obedient prompt
poorly paid

stayed on the market
youth of my twenties
fainted in offices
wept on typewriters

deceived multitudes
in vast conspiracies
deodorant battleships
serious business industry

every six weeks whoever
drank my blood bank
innocent evil now
part of my system

five years unhappy labor
22 to 27 working
not a dime in the bank
to show for it anyway

down breaks it's only the sun
the East smokes O my bedroom
I am damned to Hell what
alarmclock is ringing

- Allen Ginsberg
New York, 1953

Fragment

Flavour is bought, taste acquired;
moments unfold without register,
awaiting a judgment rendered,
manufactured for intended reactions.

Long dark locks flow from a petite statuette;
her vibrant smile absolves me of my failings,
as man and beast.

Her obsessively modest appearance,
hidden behind thunderous girlish giggles,
tempts the beast to capture, to devour,
and never release its enraptured hold.

Struggling...no voice...no strength...drained...
going through the motions...
passing time...passing presence...burning absence...
repetition...reiteration...ampersand....movement unsure...
passing....burning extinguished;
massive crush followed by a stupendous disappointment:
the rumour of love and longing linger on the lips of a jilted lover,
forever unrequited.

Dashed dreams are left in a wreckage heap some place behind appearance,
and beyond imagination -
inside and outside;
love unrequited is sustained by hopeful teary eyes turned to another day,
recollected forever.

They strive to merge the margin with the core,
to leave the periphery annihilated,
fused to the absolute.

The corpulent, unshaven fool scribbles away,
trying to exorcise ancient demons,
and conjure novel hauntings.

Beginnings grope into the dark for adversity;
for the chance to end, to halt, and start again.

Beginnings are most difficult for the old dog,
unable to learn and unwilling to the turn the new trick;
he sees the portent of something great,
yet it remains agonizingly beyond his grasp,
she slips from his embrace,
she pushes him away,
she chooses another,
and brings with her
Fortuna's cruel whim;
and he, he is left in solitude,
left alone with blackened lips
dripped with abysmal longing.

Ah, the transient poet sighs,
I'm outmoded,
I'm outdated,
I'm walking antiquity,
with eyes set upon a distant destiny,
doomed to repeat onto infinity.

The prophet-poet recovers
and reiterates lost wisdom,
pronouncing it to deaf ears,
and slips back into oblivion.

One night

My deep sleep fantasies are slayed by inhuman noise.
My eyes open to see my ersatz lover, wearing a cardboard grin;
one night went a morning too long.

A note about editing

Not every word inscribed or uttered shall be left in its place. No word, no sentence, no turn of phrase comes to being without retreating at the instance of its inception back into absence. What is most essential may be left unsaid, unexpressed, without a "creator", because attempts at expression often end up falling on deaf ears and crumpled by parochial minds, driving the creator to destroy with absolute impunity his tie to society, and, hence, facilitating a mutation of an essential solitude into an abysmal disengagement from the world of man.

Sweetheart

Flowering,
up in the morning,
my sweetheart's eyes open,
filled with wonder,
and poised on today.

Yesterday,
the wreckage of yesterday,
doesn't affect my baby now;
"What was was;
What is is,"she says,
as her stocking snakes up
her fine thigh;
she jumps into her skirt
with make up applied -
readied for another day.

She strolls down to the bus stop,
basking in anonymity,
making play with mascara'd eyes,
searching for another yesterday.

Preface to Perpetual Failings

The material housed in this notebook is largely rubbish. Alas, that is the condition of the mediocre mind - churning out scraps of stupidity interspersed with plagiarized bits of genius authored by far more brilliant artists. Seductive images dominate the trifling intellect. It cannot be disjoined or detached from the image, facile and transparent. So, it's full of rubbish, nothing but rubbish; at times, cutesy rubbish, but mostly jaded and bitter rubbish, frustrated with a world patronizing at every turn. These failing hands scribbles incoherence onto paper, resembling haphazardly smeared primate feces, and some poor deluded soul shall mistaken it for art. Even though nothing profound can be discovered in vain pathetic meanderings, someone somewhere shall misunderstand, misinterpret, and mistaken rubbish for lost treasure. Meander, meander, wander young one - you never will amount to much, but do continue to pursue the green cheese hovering overhead. A cardboard imagination creaks on, seeking the next dimension. A failed artist - a weak artist, master producer of kitsch - creates hideousness to affirm the spirit of art. The failed artist, demonstrative of the highest nobility of man - fully aware of his own weaknesses yet ignores them, and strives for greatness nonetheless - is an absurd hero. So, friends, raise a glass to this stagnant mind and these failing hands in tribute to all that you are and all that you could be.

Postponed fantasy

Postponed dreams, present in absence,
stalked by slithering necessity, lives simply
for a never to be timelessness.

With stubborn insolence and forgetful impatience,
the destitute wanderer stumbles into a tavern,
looking for a drink,
looking for a hit,
looking for a brawl,
looking to be numbed,
so unconscious imagining can begin.

Passing the day, writing away,
fabricating truth to conceal a natural lie;
moan, groan, complain;
dead ears of the divine will hear none of it,
moan, groan, complain;
Daddy doesn't give a shit,
moan, groan, complain;
justice is blind, beauty plastic.

Production levels, consumption spikes;
supply and demand, the Word of God,
foundational truth for the falsified believer,
fed illusion until satisfied,
shuffling off the mortal coil,
to await heights unknown to man.

Corpses grounded into dust;
dispensed with by the sweet kiss
of the summer wind,
transporting powdery misery,
from west to east, north to south;
good people suffer from
precarious truths
and sustainable deceptions.

Emotional, devestated, weak,
and miserable,
you tuck your tail and run;
awaiting their measured response,
their calculated action;
my goodness we're rational,
at least you're trying,
as I tail off...

...a voice echoes, heard by no one....

...heard by nothing.

Nothing is heard. Nothing is said.

God is dead, long live the king,
the king is dead, long live the Word,
the Word is dead, long live the spectre,
the spectre lives...greetings my Lord.

With blatant cruelty,
death declares sovereignty over
the bubbly illusions of plastic existence;
the pronouncement is denied
by the shape-shifting chameleon,
modern champion, most limited of specialists,
who manipulates light and shade,
to project an image of God,
against a cave wall.

Light, let there be light...
rant on deluded meanderer,
for the knave can stumble upon courage,
provided the right strings are pulled.

Rant on!
Rant on about highest things!
Rant on about sacred things!
Rant on about vain and stupid things!
Rant on until a loud night descends;
listen, listen, for a gentle thud,
a silent demise;
the shadows disappear,
and you are sheparded into darkness.

Merely insignificant,
wiped away without consequence,
merely part of frescos of blood,
bone and sinew,
held together by a common suffering:

"Life is but a series of errors,
repeated again and again,
frustrating desires
for paradise most pure."

Darkness gives way to darkness,
obscuring a bestilled, quiet, inexpressible,
heart filled with anguish,
turned away from an extinguished light;
an infinite postponement ceases,
a fantasy cancelled.

The Story of Cephalus

He left the others to their endless questions,
and retreated home.

He wrote incomprehenisbly,
scroll upon scroll,
positing interminably obsolete answers to
inexistent queries.

He then set them ablaze,
he set himself on fire,
he offered sacrifice most insignificant
to hollow gods of vanity.

Tomato

Tomato

A tomato slice lying on a dirty floor,
reminds me of my beloved;

the buzz of a timed microwave,
harkens back to an orgastic moment,
stretched across infinities;

the slurpee machine stirs,
over and over,
the gentle, harmonic, melodic
rhythm of my heart,
beating to an image,
elegantly elusive.

Dwelling

He remained, unwaveringly indolent,
fixed in familiarity.

Along the bannister crawled his arachnid friend;
he called him Peter.

Peter emerged every day, every night,
reliable like a rock.

One afternoon, betrayal tore into his skin,
and released its venom;
he collapsed, asking Peter why.

"It's my nature; its our fate," Peter replied.
"Betrayal completes loyalty, my friend."

He smiled at the stained ceiling,
awaited eternity,
delayed indefinitely.

Depression in Negatory Story

On most mornings, the day begins with the image of my own death. Its an image that is far too serene, far too bloodless, and agonizingly colourless. I imagine that I don't really wake up - only an image of waking up - when I'm really still laying there concocting the rest of it in my wretched skull; constantly bored by the stillness of eternal slumber. That's how my day begins. It begins without oddness, without variance, without significance - just like how it ends.

This morning I woke up, hoping that I wouldn't. But I was still there, the same living breathing abomination that I've always been. I put something stench-free and went out for another day of not working to pass another day.

I sat behind the counter of the restaurant, awaiting the first soul brave enough to take on my saliva-pube burger. She walked in. She asked for it and I complied. I paid close attention to her gluttony. Her tits heaved with every chomp and never did a burger meeting its demise turn me on as much. Her left breast popped out to greet the virgin world and my yellowed lecherous gaze. She reset her breast and caught my voyeur eye. She flashed a glowing grin and egged me on. I said fuck it, meet me out back. She blew me beside the dumpster, happy ending, and back to monotony I went.

I sat behind the counter and saw him saunter in with an unconcealed sawed off. Robbing a fifth-rate fast food joint? Dude didn't think that through. Gimme all your cash, he said. I handed him 5 bucks. He said he wasn't fucking around. I tried to stiffle my laughter, but failed miserably. A purposeless rage burned in his eyes as he pulled the trigger - it backfired and blew a hole the size of a silicone Double-D through his head. Darwin would've been proud.

After the cops and company finished scouring the scene, I mopped up the miscellany the authorities didn't bother with. The chick with the titties walked back in. She told me she was in love with me. She wanted to have my babies and eternity and all that shit. I half-assed the mopjob and plowed her on the floor. She got up, brushed a piece of bloody grey matter from her skirt, and walked out. I went back to the mop.

I sat behind the counter and saw him walk in with a bat. He told me to stay away from his daughter. I shrugged. Sure, whatever you say, man. How about a burger? I offered it as a goodwill gesture. He smiled. Sure, he replied. I gave him the burger. He munched away, although it was no where near as pleasing of a sight as his daughter. After a final bite, he grabbed his chest and keeled over. I went back for the mop - the cops would be back again and they don't wipe their shoes.

More questions from 5-0, the ambulance swung by for another cadaver, and they left me to an empty store. She walked in again, giggling uncontrollably. Ding dong the dick is dead, she screeched. I looked down at my ragging hard on, shook my head, and replied in the negative. This time she was sprawled on the counter top as I plunged in. She clung on. She hung on, clinging to my apron as I tore into her. Don't leave me, she said. I silently went back to the mop and she left.

I sat behind the counter awaiting an order that wouldn't come and a car plowed into the store and wiped out the dining room. A bloodied motionless figure, unencumbered by seatbelt or rational faculties, was projected through the windshield onto the countertop. She came back. The clock read 9, my shift was over, and I headed to the bus stop.

I sat in bed, reading Rilke, when it struck me: I forgot to put the mop back. That always annoys my boss. I fell asleep to the stir of sweet sugarplum death fantasies spinning around in my head.

I wake up lonely

I wake up lonely. I wake up cold, wondering about life.

In dreams, I fly. In dreams, I walk. Awake, I merely talk. I yammer, I stammer, I nod, I agree, I blab, I blah blah. In dreams, I speak words that can't be spoken, understand everything imperfectibly. Awake, I know everything without understanding. With every falsified passing thrill, I am no longer sacred; just an unwitting fool.

The educated fool spins poetic; his noise thuds against cool satisfied skulls. Deaf ears plugged into the wires hear what they please - my playlist, my identity, my world. Private adolescence dancing in beautiful couplet with public obedience. Nod, concede, this is reality baby, snouts buried in a weathered golden troft, as gold lead paint drips off to the beat of raindrops. Don't worry, he's assured, salvation is freedom; and the golden gruel releases its poison.

From every hell arises the promise of greater heights. Another level down, another level down, endless spiral of rings, it's only a dream. Its only a dream. Another level up, another level up, endless spiral of rings stretching to infinity, it's only a nightmare. Its only a nightmare.

Something has gotta be there, they promised. Nothing. Nothing and more nothing. Silence and more silence. Ham and more ham. Swine all the way down, swine all the way up. Beat your skull with hollow promises, there's nothing more to it; keep pounding away until you're pushing up daisies.

Speak softly, speak low, speak when you're spoken to, they warn. My piercing scream seperates body from soul, scattering their fragments throughout the cosmos; exiling the Old Man from eternity; blurring slumber into awakening.

Awakening to nothing, dreaming about everything, no intersection can be grapsed.

From every hell arises the heathen who grants the believer plastic salvation; from every paradise descends the dishonest believer bored with banality, banished for raising a voice. Everything interesting lies between.

I wake up lonely. I wake up cold, wondering about life.

Adam Smith on Natural Justice

"All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be expose to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society."

-Adam Smith

(The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter IX, p. 620)

On the Road

"In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Cafe on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentinent debouchments on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? - anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind." (223, On the Road)

"Dean took out other pictures. I realized that these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance." (231, On the Road)

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all the road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening that must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and fold the final shore in, and nobody, nobody know what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty." (281, On the Road)

It doesn't matter how the damn thing begins, or the failings you suffer in between; you better know how to end it off. This is the advice Kerouac imparts to me. On the Road took me to a place now lost, possibly for all time. It is a land unchained; fresh, raw, and still unsure of its own capacities. It was the land of possibility, the land of opportunity, the land where life resided, wild and uncouth, laying barechested on the steel top of a 1937 Ford, the land of eternal youth, if only eternal for a moment. Now, as I approach my twenty-fifth year, I am burdened with lamentations about lost opportunities and squandered youth. I stare despondently at the distance to come, well aware that every day may be as colourless as the last. But I can go on, as long as the possibility of life still exists. With possibilities somewhere out there for me to woo, I must go on.

Maurice Blanchot - The Instant of My Death

Maurice Blanchot - The Instant of My Death

I remember a young man - a man still young - prevented from dying by death itself - and perhaps the error of injustice.

The Allies had succeeded in getting a foothold on French soil. The Germans, already vanquished, were struggling in vain with useless ferocity.

In a large house (the Chateau, it was called), someone knocked at the door rather timidly. I know that the young man came to open the door to guests who were presumably asking for help.

This time, a howl: "Everyone outside."

A Nazi lieutenant, in shamefully normal French, made the oldest people exit first, and then two young women.

"Outside, outside." This time, he was howling. The young man, however, did not try to flee but advanced slowly, in an almost priestly manner. The lieutenant shook him, showed him the casings, bullets; there had obviously been fighting; the soil was a war soil.

The lieutenant choked in a bizzare language. And putting the casings, the bullets, a grenade under the nose of the man already less young (one ages quickly), he distinctly shouted: "This is what you have come to."

`The Nazi placed his men in a row in order to hit, according to the rules, the human target. The young man said, "At least have my family go inside." So it was: the aunt (ninety-four years old); his mother, younger; his sister and his sister-in-law; a long, slow procession, silent, as if everything had already been done.

I know - do I know it - that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experienced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however) - sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death?

In his place, I will not try to analyze. He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead -- immortal. Perhaps ecstacy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.
At that instant, an abrupt return to the world, the considerable noise of a nearby battle exploded. Comrades from the maquis wanted to bring help to one they knew to be in danger. The lieutenant moved away to assess the situation. The Germans stayed in order, prepared to reamin thus in an immobility that arrested time.

Then one of them approached and said in a firm voice, "We're not Germans, Russians," and, with a sort of laugh, "Vlassov army," and made a sign for him to disappear.

I think he moved away, still with the feeling of lightness, until he found himself in a distant forest, named the "Bois des bruyeres," where he remained sheltered by trees he knew well. In the dense forest suddenly, after how much time, he discovered a sense of the real. Everywhere fires, a continuous succession of fires; all the farms were burning. A little later, he learned that three young men, sons of farmers - truly strangers to all combat, whose only fault was their youth - had been slaughtered.

Even the bloated horses, on the road, in the fields, attested to a war that had gone on. In reality, how much time had elapsed? When the lieutenant returned and became aware the young chatelaine had disappeared, why did anger, rage, not prompt him to burn down the Chateau (immobile and majestic)? Because it was the Chateau. On the facade was inscribed, like an indestructible reminder, the date 1807. Was he cultivated enough to know this was the famous year of Jena, when Napoleon, on his small gray horse, passed under the windows of Hegel, who recognized in him the "spirit of the world," as he wrote to a friend? Lie and truth: for as Hegel wrote to another friend, the French pillaged and ransacked his home. But Hegel knew how to distinguish the empirical and the essential. Everything was searched, however. Some money was taken; in a separate room, "the high chamber," the lieutenant found papers and a sort of thick manuscript - which perhaps contained war plans. Finally he left. Everything was burning, except the Chateau. The Seigneurs had been spared.

No doubt what then began for the young man was the torment of injustice. No more ecstacy; the feeling that he was only living because, even in the eyes of the Russians, he belonged to a noble class.

This was war: life for some, for others, the cruelty of assassination.

There remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer but to come, the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? the infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond. I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if death outside of him could only henceforth collide with death in him. "I am alive. No, you are dead."

---------------

Later, having returned to Paris, he met Malraux, who said that he had been taken prisoner (without being recognized) and that he had succeeded in escaping, losing a manuscript in the process. "It was only reflections on art, easy to reconstitute, whereas a manuscript would not be." With Paulhan, he made inquiries which could only remain in vain.

What does it matter. All that remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance.

From:

Blanchot, Maurice. Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. (Palo Alto, CA, USA: Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 2-11

The voice of authority

"If you want me to talk to you, please be quiet."

The voice of authority demands quiet and passive adherence. It wants to talk to you; it has no interest in listening to what you have to say.

"Listen and listen well, this is the way its gonna be...
Be quiet, be still, don't step out of line; we know what's good for you..."

Critical thought, it is assumed, subverts order, leading invariably to anarchy. The voice demands quiet passivity. The voice sermonizes, for what emanates from its lips is assumed to be true. Why resist what is true? O, great Rationality rears its head.

To challenge the voice of authority does not, as it likes to believe, spawn anarchy. The challenge requires a quality other than silent adherence or tacit consent. It involves someone standing before fellow citizens and courageously speaking out against injustice and inequity, arrogance and vanity, and against ignorance in general. "I rebel, therefore we exist."

What's it to me?

I'm still here. I'm as shocked as you. I thought I would be dead now. The scars were there as it had been for as long as I remembered. The coughing became more severe. My eyes yellowed day after day. No use to struggle now, I thought, it was only a matter of waiting. But I'm still here. And I'm not sure why.

One early morning, after a night of binge drinking, I passed out and woke up in an open grave smelling like death. The scent of embalming fluid would follow me for several days. I couldn't reconstruct memories that had passed into oblivion. So I left it alone. And there it stood - a ragged nihilist waking up in an open grave. Like I said, I'm still here somehow without reason or purpose. For me, life is a cruel joke taken too far.

When I venture downtown, the locals are, without fail, absolutely appalled by my appearance. How can this be? they must ask. How can such a promising young man descend into utter squalor? The answer is rather simple: I chose it. I'm a nihilist and, as I often inform would-be employers, I believe in nothing. They rarely take well to my revelatory statement - with at least one notable exception. It was during an interview for a political job, a position with the local conservative party. Nothing, the politician noted with great interest. I was hired on the spot to work on the campaign. The job wasn't too unagreeable. I was quite content going door to door preaching the virtues of crime control, homeland security, and denouncing the evils of abortion, gays, and such. As a nihilist, what's it to me? All was well until I walked into the Congressman's office to find him shagging his pet poodle. I had no objections to his behaviour, being a nihilist and all, and shut the door to continue with whatever task. The Congressman, though, had his concerns. He and his campaign manager invited me for drinks, two nights after the supposed incident. They told me I had a future in the party. They cited my dedication and passion for the cause had separated me from the others. And so on and so forth. Their deluge of ingratiations stopped short of complimenting the size of my male anatomy. I was kind of disappointed. Its always nice to have someone compliment my cock. On a related note, neither of them offered me fellatio, which would have been far less transparent than what they did offer. They promised me a consulting position in exchange for my signature on a piece of paper. The note, in spite of its technical language, could not have been any vaguer.

I, the nihilist, hereby promise never to disclose details regarding the events occurring between 2:30pm - 2:45pm on September 27 19-- that took place at 2345 Parker Blvd, Room 12.

I signed it. What's it to me? I was fired the next day. So much for keeping your friends close but your enemies closer. I never disclosed the details of that specific event in September. Never. I may be nihilist. I'm not a narc. But, these things tend to end badly, loose lips or not. The studious go-getters who flittered around the office found out that the Congressman favored those who offered to take Fluffy on her afternoon walk. They all came out of the woodwork at 2:30pm to bang down his door only to find the Congressman plowing poor Fluffy on his desk. Alas, most go-getters aren't nihilists, at least they don't readily admit to it; but they're narcs-in-waiting and word got out. The Congressman, seeking his tenth consecutive stint in Washington, had to step aside and rode Fluffy off into the sunset.

As I crawl towards the reaper's hand, I look back fondly at that image of the Congressman and Fluffy. It explains a lot. To try to explain it here would only diminish the significance it has for me. Let's leave it at that. That was the first of a long string of failed careers, each less interesting than the last. But failure in general isn't all that intriguing. Neither is death.

I saw a ghost the other day. Not a poltergeist or one of the walking undead. The ghost, in this case, was my walking, living, breathing, fleshy past. She had a kid in a stroller, another dangling from her body, and - from the looks of things - another on the way. Her youthful innocence and beauty had been snuffed out by spermatozoa and zygotes and all the stress that follows. Staring at her faded haggard features and worn down body from across the street, I felt nothing. Not an inkling of sadness or pity or yearning. I stared blankly, occupied with the absent years that laid between us. She eventually noticed me and reciprocated with an equally vacant glare. I knew she didn't recognize me. She didn't want to recognize me. She didn't want to remember what once was. It was merely an absent gaze shared by estranged lovers, no words, no gestures, and no use for recollection. The little ones stirred and she broke away. I continued with my day, per usual, without another thought of her. Its funny that one does not recognize that alienation is the natural state of man until one is struck by a vacant glare authored by moribund eyes. It was only a few days later, reading her obituary in the paper, did I reflect on the encounter. If you want, I can tell you I mourned her violent passing - struck down by a drunk driver - remembered our past fondly and felt compassion for her children. But if you want an honest answer, I was satisfied with the fate the cosmos had rendered. It was just to extinguish a body absent of its soul. It was a ghost I saw that day. It wasn't confirmed until I read her name in the paper.

I jotted down the appropriate details - ceremony open to the public, St. Mark's Church, 3:00pm, October 28, 20--, and prepared for the service. I didn't know why I went. Well, I actually I do. The freshly minted widower was instinctively a subject of interest. I never met the man who ripped her from my insecure and petty grip. He was a mystery to me, that is until I saw him: tall, lanky, non-descript Caucasian male in his mid-thirties, whose once boyish features had been dulled by the drudgery of work and the ephemeral joys of alcohol, tobacco, and whatever else. I looked vacantly at the guy, unable to choose an emotion to feign. He appeared to have recognized me. He thought I was her cousin George and extended his hand. I let him believe he was right and shook his waiting hand. What's it to me? Being a nihilist and all, I humored him. I gave him my formal condolences as her "cousin", extended the ubiquitous "if you need anything..." spiel, and even hugged him. He was genuinely touched by my charade and began to open up. He confessed that although things never unfolded as they had planned - financially or romantically - he loved her deeply. He was genuine, tears welled up with every passing word. I felt nothing and tried my best to feign empathy. I sensed he began to feel a real bond with this supposed cousin-in-law - who in reality couldn't be troubled to attend his cousin's funeral - and I saw the dupe standing before me.

I raised the stakes and began regaling him with childhood stories about times "George" shared with his dear departed cousin - like the time she saw a fairy fly around the ravine near her parent's home and we spent a day with butterfly nets in pursuit. Oh how he laughed and laughed! And then he cried. I felt nothing and continued with my stories - careful to conceal the time I played doctor with his deceased wife. Then, he made a crucial mistake. He was seduced and asked if I would say a few words during the ceremony. He was asking for it really. When the fool asks to be embarassed, the asshole is obliged to deliver in spades.

"She was mine before she was yours!" That was how I concluded my address. He thought about it for a second; it takes the fool a little while to process the obvious. His face contorted like a Picasso at the thought of his wife enjoying some cousin lovin' with the louse standing at the podium and charged the stage, with bullheaded aggressions, to accost me. I intuitively tried to extricate myself from the proceedings and his chase quickly short-circuited, as he tumbled over the casket in a mad dash after "George". At a safe distance and peering from behind a curtain, I saw a pathetic sight. He cried and cried over the meticulously made up cadaver and pulled out a mickey of Jim Beam to drown his sorrows. You don't really understand that love is illusion until it all falls apart and leaves even the most contented simpleton a blubbering mass of confusion.

I was about to walk out of St. Mark's until her sister intercepted me. She blocked the exit with her mischievous grin. She remembered me. She remembered my lecherous gaze and my repressed desire for her nubile body. At an intimate distance, I looked into her eyes and knew what she wanted. I wrapped my arms around her waist, swung open the door to the confessional, and we tore savagely into each other. Her voracious appetite was unlike her sister's submissiveness. She was in full control and I was a mere passenger. What's it to me? I let her handle me like a toy. I rather enjoy being a toy sometimes.

Anyways, the imminent possibility that the widower would ingest enough Jim Beam to continue his hunt drove us deeper into the throes of ecstasy. "He would surely cut your dick off", she whispered and knelt down, "and what a shame that would be." She slurped lustily away at her toy, as I felt nothing as the mechanisms churned. After the t's were crossed and i's were dotted, we left the confessional. She walked back into the service and I walked out of the church. I never saw her again. Once was more than enough.

Between lust and love, lust has reality and substance, while love is fluff. It is reserved for those who are both perpetually vain and eternally bored. I love you. I luv you. I wuv you. I muv you. Love is an escape from boredom through self-deception. Love merely justifies one's shallow narcissistic vanities. "I love him for who he is," she says. When in reality, she means she loves him because he's a tall, well-hung, rich white guy like any other guy her girlfriends goes with. She feels included and satisfied with her apparent normalcy. Love is a smoke screen justifying masturbatory desires. Lust is honest. Lust is direct. Lust is instinct acting out fantasies repressed by rational morality or moral rationality. Lust is all we need. Rather than wasting away longing for impossibilities and concocting soap operas to pass the time...he loves me, he loves me not, lust launches one into a moment and passes through it without regret. One does not dwell on the moment; it merely passes. I prefer lust over love and there's no sense to belie that point.

I once had a friend who was consumed by unrequited love and set himself on fire. He was, by most accounts, a brilliant and studious student, in addition to being a very outgoing and engaged person - very social with both boys and girls, but strictly on a platonic level for the first sixteen years of his life. That was until he met her. She was a beautiful petite blonde with a set of beautiful ample breasts yearning to bust out of her dress at any instant, and blue eyes that turned even the most hardened delinquent into passive obedient mush. She was our Food Studies teacher, Ms. Morrison. Of course, all of the boys were smitten with her and wanted to do all sorts of unholy things to her, but most could only muster enough courage to jerk off to her in the comfort of their bedroom, flanked by their trusty tissue box and lotion bottle. My friend, however, was, what should I say, very gung-ho about everything; he was never half-ass; there was always an utmost seriousness to his actions. His tragic end remains an eternal source of inspiration for my nihilism.

The details remain murky, but I think he did have a tryst with Ms. Morrison. It was after one parent-teacher night. He stayed behind to help clean up. As the story went, she was unusually despondent throughout the night - lacking her requisite zeal, apparently because she found out her boyfriend was cheating on her with an older woman - which, depending on the account, was with a slightly older or a much older woman. My friend was much too perceptive to allow a golden opportunity to go unnoticed or fulfilled.

The encounter itself is, to this day, the stuff of mythic folklore, recounted even twenty years later by bathroom graffiti. An anthropological analysis of adolescent cave-scribblings would lead one to think that the bathroom stall where fifteen year old freshmen came to jack off to Brad Pitt photos was the site of the encounter. Catatonic. He was catatonic for the longest time after his unfortunate encounter. He dropped out of school, wandered for a decade, and stabbed a hooker four thousand three hundred and twenty-three times. Love destroys even the most gifted. Four thousand three hundred and twenty-three times, he told me over the prison phone, was the number of times he thrusted inside of Ms. Morrison that night. Sufficiently impressive, I told him.

Kitsch

"Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."

We will all be turned into kitsch, shit turned into gold. We accumulate. We consume. We discard. We do these things habitually; life means churning out a lot of shit. Productivity is correlated to consumption, supply and demand, the good capitalist preaches. And then a time comes when our capacity for accumulation is exhausted, we are discarded, leaving a malleable object: an archetype, a stereotype, an idyllic remembrance. The desperate need for the fallen soldier is kitsch; the memorial immortalizes resentment, entrenches the impossible dreams of purity and perpetual peace - rows and rows of headstones stretching to as far as the eye can see - and alchemizes revanche with the spirit of a people, "lest we forget...let us kill in their honor and join their blessed ranks." Headstones - rows and rows of kitsch, sweet images of immortality for those who have passed into the void.

But don't get me wrong, kitsch is not absolutely malformed or "evil" nor should it be demonized. It is how it is employed, manipulating the most abysmal human emotions - blind faith in hope - for power ambition, that makes it the enemy of life. Kitsch often is an imperfect expression of an inarticulate human voice reaching out for affirmation. But the one enamoured with kitsch does not wait for response from life or from above, he seeks to construct meaning through saccharine remembrance. Recollection searches a shrapnel-filled, fragmented, and fractured world for objects of kitsch: the possibly tragic, yet invariably sweet, face of an orphaned child mourning his father's death; the son shall carry on the work of the father. Humanity longs for inspiration, for hope, however detached from reality. Without the possibility of kitsch, man would only see the blood and gore, fragments and fissures, and stare aimlessly at the dark expanse. The possibility of kitsch keeps him from offing himself and ending the meaningless suffering. But it isn't kitsch that keeps humanity from plunging off the ledge into an abyss. We are therefore we live. I rebel therefore we are, Camus once wrote. Kitsch is the ass-god providing fleeting comfort; resentment invariably returns to animate revanche.

Taut, proud, and erect, the proud solider stand frozen for all time. He is peddled to believers by dishonest brokers of power. Freedom is irrelevant for he who worships illusion.

Grey matter, white matter

Grey matter and white matter fading into an infinite expanse. Tell me the truth that conceals the lie. Remember me, my friend...no forget it. With perfection beyond me and failure ever imminent, I concede and walk voluntarily to the gallows, and the floor goes out from under me. Languorous death comforts through idle meditation. What has been done? What was to be done? Should've...could've...would've...as around and around I go, dangling from the ephemeral worth of regret.

Thunderous roars from the peanut gallery cheer me on. "Loser!" Indifferent reality ripped from the insecure arms of sanity - one last breath, one more tear left to be shed. My friend, forget me, and remember who I would've been. Here's the addendum: burn the recollection once you construct it. Save nothing, let it all slip away. Grey matter and white matter embraces sweet oblivion; here I go, go, go...to paradise I go.

Artificial paradise erodes, unable to withstand a vociferous knock on its fluffy door, and implodes. Spiraling all the way down to reunite with my brother-twin; Hades, you old dog, how do you do? Where's the booze at?

Democracy...

Democracy... as a word; empty and hallow, lip-service paid...
Democracy... as ideal; groundless, dangerous tool employed by ambition...
Democracy... as practice; freedoms given, not practiced...
Democracy... as rule; the rule of the people over the people?
Democracy... as beginnings; origin of solidarity, of communcal bonds, of failure, of hope, of war, of peace and of the end?
Democracy... as ethos; the trap of moralism?
Democracy... as challenge; contend and subordinate...hierarchy? structure? metaphysics? vanity?
Democracy... as networks of recalcitrance; stagnant order crushes freedom - unfettered freedom is vanity all the way down?

"Humanity Tied..."

L’Humanité chaussit le vaste enfant Progrès.

Humanity tied the shoes of Progress, that enormous child.

-Louis-Xavier de Ricard
A. Rimbaud
from the Album Zutique 1871-1872

The Asshole Agon

He stood there naked as the day the midwife torn him, kicking and screaming, from his mother's womb. The unexceptional man made a vow to never, never again be subjected to condescension. "Here I stand..." he cut off the remark, disgusted on how the thought would inevitably conclude. "Here I stand." His edit made the remark definitive and consequently more ambiguous. A lecture filled with his peers, set abuzz, gaped incomprehensibly at the spectacle. There stood the aspiring agon, having already exhausted all possible veneers, no longer able to conceal anything. "Here I stand."

The voice of authority, the one who held his academic future in her hands, pointed out the obvious contradiction.

"If you let it all hang out, does that not destroy the realm of the public? Does that not destroy the veil of mystery necessary for the function of play in civilization? Does this not lead to disenchantment?"

"Was Eden disenchanted?" he rebuted.

"They ate the apple to escape boredom," a female student blurted out. "That was beyond disenchantment."

"The temptation was never external. It gave completion to free will. Yes, Eden was disenchanted, lame, and boring," another shouted.

He looked down at his member dangling passionlessly, as if the object of clinical observation. He scanned the room to check out their eyes. He saw insecurity; some were secretly measuring and comparing. He saw curiousity and repressed lust; there was intrigue. He saw revulsion; the uninitiated suffering an insoluble clash between impulse and proper morality. He saw his professor's eyes; they were bored.

The spectacle did not impress nor shock her. She had seen it countless times before in a bedroom or a restroom or an elevator or in a kitchen. She had seen more impressive displays, as well as inferior ones. She knew who his intended audience was, as well as his readily transparent motive. She wasn't buying it.

"Put your clothes, Mr. Stevens, unless you can provide a compelling reason why you should not."

"In the agora..." he stared dispassionately into her eyes as his right hand readied itself to demonstrate his point. He performed the task, as he done countless times in private, in the public realm, in his own agora.

Some cheered. Most were aghast. A few were outraged. A couple walked out. But she sat there unfazed, unchanged, and unimpressed, as he neared climax. She stood up, calm and collected as ever before, to provide her critique.

"The true agon does not bring attention to himself. The agonistic act is done through both act and deed, prefigured by thought. Pull your pants back on and clean up after your mess."

The unexceptional man stood there and broke into tears.

Blanchot on Writing

"To write is to enter into the affirmation of the solitude in which fascination threatens. It is to surrender to the risk of time's absence, where eternal starting over reigns. It is to pass from the first to the third person, so that what happens to me happens to no one, is anynonymous insofar as it concerns me, repeats itself in an infinite dispersal. To write is to let fascination rule language. It is to stay in touch, through language, in language, with the absolute milieu where the thing becomes image again, where the image, instead of alluding to some particular feature, becomes an allusion to the featureless, and instead of a form drawn upon absence, becomes the formless presence of this absence, the opaque, empty opening onto that which is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet." (32, The Space of Literature)

"When will I be blown up?"

"There are no problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up?"

- William Faulkner, 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech

I'll save you the rehashed image of mushroom clouds lingering over Nagasaki and Hiroshima and direct your attention to an everyday, albeit less iconic, image: the plastic watering can. I know, I know, I'm ripping off a Radiohead track, but stay with me. The plastic watering can may represent the repressed anxiety and apparent peace of suburban life, i.e., a retiree watering the flower bed. As the retiree waters his or her flower bed, thoughts are not about atomic war or the state of the world in general; the garden alone is worthy of attention. The garden is something to tend to, to pass the time, until death visits silently on a fated day or night. The plastic watering can, tranquil in its place, would find Faulkner's quote quite foreign to its own nature. The plastic watering can is that vaunted escape from violent death, trading a bayonet blade to the heart for blissful atrophy. "When will I be blown up?" The fear of violent death stays with us, even in the iron bosom of the state.

What Hobbes promised his readers was a diminishment, not an abolition, of the possibility of violent death. We should recall that Hobbes' Leviathan resembles a liberal state; charges of totalitarianism lobbed at Hobbes do not hold water. Any regime that strives for the absolute abolition of the possibility of violent death is by definition totalitarian. It must simulate the omnipotence previously presumed to lie in the hands of God to re-create the world more perfectly than He could ever have. The fatal flaw of creation, naturally, is free will; the possibility of evil. It is free will that leads the world astray from divine form and it is freedom that must be curbed, controlled, or ultimately annihiliated for the sake of an evermore perfect world. Hobbes believes the Leviathan to be a construct enabling individuals to exercise freedom. Hence, he values freedom as much as he does order. But, let us not make an amateurish error and contend that Hobbes believes freedom can exist without order. It is his nominalism, oddly enough, that absolves him from charges of totalitarianism. To put it simply, he in some ways shares Pope's contention that "whatever is, is right". The state, imperfect as it is, constructed through a sort of social agreement is right at least for the time being. The form of the state, i.e. the consolidation of both malevolent and benevolent power (where there is no difference between the two), is not the aim of Hobbes' project; curiously enough, it is human freedom. The general form of the state, as well as its accompanying narrative about the state of nature to civilization, are merely instruments in service of human liberty. Hobbes, far from advocating totalitarianism, would most likely ridicule it for its lack of scientific rigour and naturalism - mechanisms, we must remember, function causally, without the intervention of Providence or such, even though it may be modeled after divine forms.

The totalitarian approach effaces freedom at every turn in order to pursue a 'grand scheme'. This was true of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the United States, specifically but not exclusively during the era of McCarthyism. Some choose to throw this accusation at the current situation in the United States, but let us refrain from subscribing to that view, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The atomic bomb may have "punctuated" a struggle against fascism and totalitarianism, but it opened up, for a lack of a better term, a pandora's box. Faulkner's quote bares the wound that the six decades following his address has tried to conceal, bandage, and eventually forget. The possibility of violent death is not only isolated to myself, my family, my clan, or even my country. It has extended to include the extermination of the entire species; the radical cessation of life, human or otherwise. The atomic bomb humbles us. But the stakes it presents are far too large to be adequately confronted. Alienated, afraid, and alone, people often seek salvation in the plastic watering can or the television (tuned neatly away from the news) or whatever else that leads to death by boredom and atrophy rather than death from above or below. I am not here to judge or prescribe. The prescription, as we can learn from Marx, is not as interesting or useful as the diagnosis. An age of fear is certainly one where threats are amongst us, invisible and clandestine, and 'beyond us', where one wrong move dooms the entirety of mankind. It is mindboggling for politicians, philosophers, journalists, scholars, and the rest to ponder, much less the common man. "When will I be blown up?" may be the question asked by modern man who has reached the limits of existence, who peers over the ridge and sees nothing but an abyss. Can he turn back, as Rousseau likes to think? Or will he plunge into the great primordial unity and fulfil Hegel's prophecy? Or maybe he will sit there looking at the abyss waiting for the photo slide to change? He waits in vain; Providence does not exist. He stares at nothing for eternity, until the very act of spectating melds him with the object of his observation. Modern man thinks of himself as collateral damage of an epic game of chicken between good and evil; when it is his actions that creates and proliferates both throughout the world, with no clear distinction where one starts and the other ends.

THE

The. The Bible. The Rock. The Game. The Sky. The Earth. The connotes universalism; The Law, for example. The Castle. The Lord. The Abyss. So is The effectively an expression of form, immutable and unquestioned? Maybe. The, however, may express an odd uniqueness. The One is a popular example of this. The One, as a vaunted romantic other, entails a completion of a predestined primordial unity, through finding the One. The One, as idol, exemplar, and hero, represents something else. I don't quite know what it is. The One is an imperfect vessel that provides a glimpse into divine form. By implying that God himself was beholden to divine forms - that the form is the house of all divine Power, Bayle prefigures the death of a god, who is left merely an administrative agent of higher forms. So what is The? Is it a Platonic aspiration for definitive forms. So wait, is Hobbes doing this, while understanding the irony inherent in the terms "The State" or "The Leviathan" or "The Sovereign"? These terms are true by definition, derived from geometical forms. What is then the epistemological relation between name and form?

Head Trauma

1

Where is my mind? Where is your mind? Echoes ring. Ping, ping, ping, nothing. Drip, drip, drip, away. Dipstick love for fantasy fuel. Ding, ding, ding, let us begin.

There is something common to us all: head trauma. A baby dropped headfirst; a cyclist crashes without helmet; a boxer answers the bell for one too many rounds; a child is smacked with a chair; drugs frying eggs, deep-fried brains; and some merely breathe, exhale, and wither obliviously away.

Now, where should I start? My recollections are rather unreliable, what with the head trauma and all. I remembered being born to a crash and boom. I think it was a car crash or bus crash. No, no, it was a bus crashing into a car; so I guess it was both. Ma was riding the bus. The boom and crash induced labour. The bus driver delivered me, slapped me on the butt, and told Ma not to let her boy to grow up to be a bus driver. Days later, Ma saw the bus driver in the paper accompanied with the caption, "Bus Driver, 49, dies; brain damaged." Ma would never permit me to ride the bus again. I often suspected that I was also conceived on a bus. But that is neither here nor there. I rode my bike 10 miles every morning to school. That took a while. Rushing to arrive at school at a reasonably tardy hour, I often forgot my helmet. I rode 10 miles to school, nonetheless. And honestly, I recall little about those trips. Although one time, I smashed into the side of a bus when I took my off the road to look at Julie Newmar bend over at the bus stop to pick up a penny. I can't recall much after or before that. As a young boy, I adored the scent of paste, jiffy markers, and gas at the gasoline pump. Oh, what pleasure I got from simple scents! My penchant for sniffing and producing odours inexplicably did not endear me to my peers. I was an unpopular kid. I frequently ended up dangling flaccidly from the top of a flagpole in my underwear. And I would usually fall head first into the pavement, get up, brush myself off, and went search of my clothes. There was absolutely no pleasure in that. That was a rather redundant remark I suppose; but then so is this entire asinine exercise. I remember there was a time I could fly for a brief while. I would ride hard and fast towards the gorge by Ma's farm, get air and soar. The landing was rough, but that does not need to be said.

Head trauma, right? This is why I am here talking to you all. I don't know anything about head trauma. I don't have a spike protruding out of my skull like Wyatt over there. I mean no disrespect bud when I say this, but thank Ma I don't have a spike sticking out of my ugly face. Let's start by musing about destruction, the assumed consequence of head trauma. It is assumed that trauma is irreversible, what with the destruction of grey and white matter. It withers eternal; at least we like to believe it does.

Destruction is an innate human instinct, equal standing to survival. I love destruction. But that's probably the head trauma talking. The destructive instinct makes saccharine illusion untenable. What is on the other side? Nothing. Heaven is fluff; and fire and brimstone doesn't keep us from butchering each other. Why? First, there is no fluff or hellfire. Only abyss, some would contend. Second, destruction is necessity. Without it, there is only stagnation. We love destruction for a reason. And lastly, we destroy "reality" for the sake of reality. Scare quotes are arbitrary, but so is reality. If a singular account is accepted, infinity less one is excluded, dismissed, and voided by faith or ignorance - one can never tell the difference between faith and ignorance. Exclusion for the sake of parsimony, it is understandable. I cannot claim to understand eternity, regardless of my head trauma. Fleeting apertures appear to us - inspired flashes or fleeting glimpses; just to exhaust the clichés. If reality is glimpses and apertures of the infinite, there is no structure apart from what imperfect constructs provide. Head trauma, huh?

What do college kids do on most every night? Yes, they kill brain cells. For what reason do they do this? To destroy withered cells for the sake of renewal; imbalanced equilibrium, as some would put it. That and to get laid. From my personal experience, once cells go, they're gone pretty much forever. Only destruction stays. That is an oddly liberating thought, so on and so forth. A few brain cells is a small price to pay for, what, five or ten minutes of sloppy sex, and yada yada yada. Head trauma, huh?

Hey Wyatt, does that giant spike get in the way of sex? I could see it causing problems. Anyways, head trauma is stigmatized. "You just ain't right." I know that you all have heard that. I know I get it a lot, even though I have no sort of head trauma. Stigmas are tough to shake, aren't they? Take for example two people, Wyatt and myself. He clearly has some sort of head trauma; it's clear to even a groping blind man. Me? Well, I look fairly distinguished. You guys like the elbow patches and tweed jacket? Pretty snazzy eh? But I get the same inquiries and comments that my spikey headed friend does. Why? Because everyone has head trauma to an extent. Some acknowledge it. Others repress it. Those who repress think they are normal; it's too late for them, the trauma is far too advanced for treatment. They shall publicly pity Wyatt, sympathize with his condition, and ridicule him in private. They ridicule and dismiss me publicly and privately wonder what game or con, if any, am I running. Is he for real? Or simply sick, abnormal, demented, or whatever? Head trauma, huh?

Ma. Yeah, Ma always said I was never right. She was right. Whatever right is. Frustrated by the cold winter nights, I slept out in the snow. It cooled my frenzied skull. Well, I did until Dr. Stevens told me I had chronic hypothermia or something and told me to move to Florida. I circled Jacksonville on the map, and slipped it under my pillow. My skull became increasingly restless. Dr. Stevens was a quack. I was quite sure of it. I circled Winnipeg, slipped it under my pillow, and the frenzy subsided. He was quack. I slept in the same bed for thirty years, until Ma took a header into a concrete mixer on one of her morning walks. She sits in the living room. Damn, it was heavy hauling her home. I still butt heads with Ma. She always wins. Brain trauma, huh?

Pa? When Ma took the header in to the cement, Pa showed up. Never knew him. He was, as I had suspected, a bus driver. "Head trauma, huh?", I asked him. "Who are you and what are you doing in Ma's house!" he snapped back. Head trauma. I knew it from the arrow sticking through his head. "Who are you....who are you..." he went on. I let him ask. I wasn't going to answer. How could I? I really didn't know the answer. Head trauma, huh?

Pa went home unsure why he came in the first place. The carnal encounter between dear Ma and Pa runs through my head, a vivid tableau concocted by a perverse imagination. Ma fell asleep on the bus. Pa drove his routes unaware of Ma and settled into the depot to punch out for the day. He sees Ma sleeping and goes over to wake her up. She opens her eyes and he is at a lost for words at the sight of her blue eyes. Extraneous words went unwasted. Simple strangers became one; no name, no details, and no clunky or clumsy subterfuge. Brain trauma? Trauma can be inflicted by love. Love blinds reason, renders it helpless and pointless. I would like to think Ma is responsible for Pa's head trauma; cupid pulled back on his bow and struck him that fateful day on the bus. But Ma never could stand affection. One cannot punish or rectify affection. Love gazes longingly with puppydog eyes, gently demanding reciprocation and response. Ma was never good with reciprocating affection. When I tried the puppydog approach, she would beat me over the head with the kettle. "Wake up boy, don't whine with your eyes," she said. Ma was right. She always was right. Head trauma, huh?

Pa died shortly after Ma's passing. I went to the funeral and met Pa's kids. Darlene, 34, ran a Kinko's and loved to watch General Hospital. Henry, 32, was a janitor for an elementary school and was a Tom Clancy fan. Terry, 31, was a bus driver and whom I thought exhibited the mannerisms of a pedophile. They asked what I did and who I was. I answered simply for the sake of courtesy: Luke, 30, unemployed with no prospects. Mathematical skill does not depart from the traumatized brain. I wasn't stupid. I knew that Pa was married with children when he met Ma. The funeral confirmed what I long had suspected. I am a bastard; the product of taboo. Head trauma, what?

I often dream about a mountain of cocaine sitting in the middle of my living room. I never know how it got there. And I didn't care about how it got there. It just was there. I then proceed to shovel a bunch of it into Ma's concrete nose. It disappears into her snooz and the Blessed Virgin appears spontaneously. The Blessed Virgin walks towards me, peels off her panties, pulls on my pants, gets on her knees, and prays. I wake up fully erect, aroused by blasphemy. Brain trauma, eh?

When I moved Ma back home, I knocked over the statuette of the Blessed Virgin. From what Ma told me, it was a family heirloom stretching back to Great Grandma. When I stooped down to pick up the shattered remnants of the heirloom, I saw the blood, puddles of it collecting around the statue. Was it a hallucination, reality, or just self-deception on the verge of psychosis? I couldn't tell. It's the head trauma, you know. The entire scene caused me to stiffen up. I was scared as I was aroused. Head trauma, who?

When I was a child, I attended a Catholic school, if that was not already evident. I was fascinated with miracles. They made no sense, nor were they meant to make sense. They happened by grace alone, ostensibly proving the Lord’s omnipotence. Miracles are built up by skeptics as much as by believers. Without the person to deny it, there is no 'evil' to defend, I don't know, the miracle at Fatima against. Of course, this is blatantly obvious. The believer does not and cannot exist without its lack, its anti-thesis, the evil heathen. Once upon a time I was a believer. That was until the Blessed Virgin raped me.

I heard you all. WHAT?!? I know. I know. It sounds rather far-fetched, and, if nothing else, confirms the advanced state of my head trauma. What is more absurd? That she would appear in a burrito to inspire an impoverished Mexican labourer or that she wanted the young flesh of an innocent young boy. It happened after seeing a movie about the miracle at Fatima in Grade 5. The ensuing discussion encompassed the assortment of banalities, such as why it happened, will it happen again, what does it mean, and is the end of the world coming. Blah blah. That was until Katherine Kintar, the sexy nerdy girl - or at least she would become the sexy nerdy girl - asked the severely interesting question: what if it was Satan masquerading as the Virgin Mary who appeared at Fatima? Loved that question. Loved that girl, but that's an entirely different story. Her question left Mrs. Thomas, our religion teacher, quite uncomfortable. Who knew? Is Satan not the prince of tricks and illusions? Isn't Lucifer the great hinderer of pious reality, who leads men and women astray from the righteous way to the Lord? Mrs. Thomas, quite expectedly, recovered from the shock of the question and sent the inquisitive Katherine to the principal's office, evidently for no legitimate reason, apart from her own inability to answer the question. A revolt, it has been said, begins with a single thrown stone. Well, a revolt or a stoning. I don't really know which category the following belongs. All sorts of "unsavory" questions were asked. Actually, to put it more appropriately, a single free-spirit, an unwitting agonist, roused the rabble from its dogmatic slumber to question conventions. Ironically, miracles can fall into convention, just like trauma or tragedy. The boys began asking the rather obvious question, "what's a virgin?". Mrs. Thomas began to dance around that one and tried to shift the conversation back to miracles in general. But the girls jumped in as well. "My mom says my aunt is a virgin and a spinster-hag. Was Mary a spinster-hag?" "My mom says virgins are frigid. Was Mary frigid?" And on and on, they amassed. The boys and girls took turns bombarding an increasingly frustrated Mrs. Thomas with inquiries. She grabbed her head, as if suffering from a headache. The questions proved overwhelming and forced Mrs. Thomas to suddenly leave the classroom, never to return. It was only later on did we learn that it was brain tumor. She was terminal and decided, rather wisely, to spend her dying days away from the classroom. Poor Mrs. Thomas. Brain trauma is a bitch.

Animals experience head trauma differently than us. Animal instinct is not bogged down by neurosis or self-doubt, regardless of what Disney purports. For an animal, survival is the paramount goal. There is no higher goal. When they asked Mrs. Thomas whether she wanted to undergo an experimental procedure that could extend her six months into two or three years, she chose six months. In hindsight, I can only speculate why she did that. Maybe it was the tumor talking. Maybe she didn't want to suffer the indignity of being a lab rat. Or maybe she finally wanted desipere in loco.

Somewhere between Kat's question and her death, reality struck Mrs. Thomas. Life diminishes everyday like a fading beach eroded by the tides. For her, the end was too close simply to ignore. She passed away, or at least we assumed she did, possibly under a pseudonym, and was never heard from again. But her passing was a source for endless speculation. At times, it appeared that she vanished off the face of the planet, without a trace, and disjoined from the history of Maureen Thomas. An assortment of stories were concocted by students and their gossiping parents. There was the story that she tried to climb Mount Everest, only to end up violated by a couple sherpas and left for dead. I rather not subscribe to that account, because, first, it is rather far fetched; how could a sherpa get an erection in those conditions? Second, sherpas do have a code, or at least I think they do; goats, no women. And lastly, I personally like to believe Mrs. Thomas chose more dignified pursuits than climbing a giant phallus. But I guess that last one has no bearing on whether the story is true or not; that's the head trauma talking I suppose. Other accounts were more conventional. She moved in with her ex-husband and lived out her final days at peace with their childless relationship. That story is too banal, too flat. Another purported that she became a world traveler, exploring places ranging from Prague to Rio de Janeiro, before expiring in Venice. That account is too romantic and independent, quite contrary to the Mrs. Thomas we knew. When I laid in bed with Kat eight years later, she, naturally, had the most interesting account. She simply said it was divine ascension. Mrs. Thomas, she added, would have not had it any other way.

But I should cease with this digression. After Mrs. Thomas' last day at school, I returned home and decided to shower. While lathering up my soon-to-be pubic area, I felt a pinch. I thought nothing more of it and continued to shower, until the touching became increasingly invasive - a pinch became a vice grip on my helpless would-be manhood. Immaterial forces, obviously, have power only in material forms. "Do you feel the Lord in your heart...your mind...?", Father Gunn used to ask us at our monthly services. If I felt the Lord in my foot or my tumor or my armpit, would that not invalidate the eros implicit in Father Gunn's words. Immaterial forces, hence, are assumed to have dominion over the material world and, hence, must be revered with the utmost sacredness. Well, I could go on to describe in vivid and rather graphic detail my ostensible defoliation. All I know and all that I can recall is a revelatory discovery; a minor detail that bridges the aporia between the material and immaterial aspects of the Immaculate Conception. Mary was a hermaphrodite. But that is neither here nor there. This revelation came to me only in hindsight. Back then, I felt a novel rush in areas of my body previously thought used simply for going to the bathroom. Head trauma, how?

My young body, overwhelmed by the confluence of bizarre sensations, weakened and spontaneously failed me. All my firsts came in succession; erection, orgasm, ejaculation, collapse, and concussion. I passed on and smashed my head violently onto the towel rack when trying to exit the shower. According to Dr. Stevens, I was legally dead for 3 minutes laying on the stretcher being wheeled into the ER until Ma revived me with a series of heavy slaps; I think I felt them while dead. The medical staff examined me up and down, inside and out, left and right, through and through. They could only conclude that I was a narcoleptic chronic masturbator. And there it stood. For most of my adolescence I was prescribed a variety of pills, in an effort to suppress my abnormal and supposedly destructive disorder. Truth be told I have never taken any of those pills; the supposed symptoms were never there in the first place. Guess it's the head trauma or something that keeps me from yanking my ding dong, huh?

Mary the Merciless would return on occasion to grope, but ceased with the violent entries. I think She realized that taking a game beyond its boundaries only leads to its demise. She didn't want her pet dead. As I pan the lecture hall, I see skeptics shaking their heads, doing what skeptics do, and the faithful outraged and appalled, doing what dogmatists do. All I can tell you is this: head trauma is the source of both skepticism and faith. Skepticism, in its most radical form, assumes that everybody is a moron except for the skeptic, him or herself. That's the advanced stage of trauma I referred to earlier on. There's nothing anyone can do for that. Those of faith think the whole of human reality is moronic, impure, corrupted, and look to the sky for the redemption; the big empty and silent sky. No response. No one there. The Old Man went to bed and never woke up, while his virgin mother-whore haunts a sensual world taken from her in exchange for empty promises.

Go ahead! Shake your head, shake your fist, but remember to grab a hold of your nuts, tits, or whatever else, because that's all that matters once head trauma reaches its terminal stage. The head is the source of all stupidity, as much as we like to believe otherwise. Only those who are deluded believe in their own absolute righteousness as a sovereign individual. They have severe and irreversible trauma. Believer and skeptic, twined progeny of an ugly modernity! You shall destroy yourself to prove yourself right. Head trauma, head trauma; to hell with you all...

2

He slammed down his microphone and exited stage right, leaving his address unfinished and his audience in an uproar. I had heard a great deal about patient #23451, also known as Luke. He had been admitted to the clinic three years ago after being rescued from the Bow River. For three years, he suffered from severe amnesia. Since rescue workers found no identification on him, he had no name or history. Luke, evidently, was the name sewed on the inside of his jacket. He assumed that name, independent of suggestion or coercion, and it stuck. Luke, as can be observed from his address, likes to express himself through anecdotes, usually of a personal nature. Most doctors, at least in this clinic, have concluded that these tales, usually inconsistent and contradictory, are symptomatic of schizophrenic behaviour. The aforementioned Dr. Stevens, contrary to Luke's account, did not treat him until after his arrival to this clinic. But we suspect that Dr. Stevens bears a striking resemblance to a figure in Luke's past.

3

Dear ----,

Lies. Its nothing but lies. The truth is simply a lie that stuck. The truth is a deception the majority of dupes buy. Dupes believe whatever they're told. Skeptics hold lies to be self-evident truth; the great accomplishment of the dupe who doesn't know he's a rube. They fucked me. They told me I could speak freely about the topic. They told me I had free reign to speak on whatever I needed to speak on. They fucked me. The Man without Quantity is disposable for them. I have no volume. I can not move inventory or spike profits. I am their clown. I am amusing. Raving, spittle-spraying, degenerate, and inveterate; thats them, not me. Soon they will have no need for me. They will get to the vivisection soon enough. But before then, they want play. They want amusement. They want me to shuffle and dance for the sake of shuffling and dancing. Tell the world, my friend. Tell the world. No one is safe under the watchful eye of the Apple in the sky. It has come back for its venegence. Resist its pull. Until we meet in the darkness, I beseech you to resist.

Luke

4

The letter never reached its destination. Luke would be pronounced dead a short time following his outburst. The official report said it was a stroke. The official report isn't worth the paper its printed on. The real story behind the death of Luke is much more complex than a stroke.

5

Dear Kat,

I suspect that when you read this letter, you will be married, happily I hope. I am somewhere in the middle of nowhere, thinking about my dear departed Kat, now lost to the comforts of domestication. Kat, darling, my love for you shall never wane or consummated; 'we' is an abstraction frozen for eternity, inaccessible to the living or conscious. I write to you now without reason or purpose. I felt a strange and irresistible passion to write this letter, much like those of the past, those immature and now obsolescent meanderings of frenzied lovestruck youth. I could no longer satiate my yearnings by masturbating to an old precious and worn yearbook photograph. I needed to engage you in the abstract, in the only realm I have truly understood you, through word and idea rather than deed. I am far more honest on the page, my darling, and you know that.