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.