Dear...

Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow will be different. Today was a tomorrow. But today is no different from yesterday...

And on and on it went.

Reading a friend's diary entails a risk: you witness how pathetic and loathsome they are and wonder, with utter seriousness, "why do I hang out with his moron?"

You want to hear more?

Spiraling into the recesses of my broken heart, I wonder if there was space for another. Now that she was gone, I shuffle aimlessly from moment to moment, each less vibrant than the last with her absence...

Alright, alright, that should suffice. Another truism becomes evident: that which has expired makes for an oppressive specter, dressed with sentiment and unfulfilled ideals.

One more before we move on.

I see this accursed stretch of ruinous luck has sown the seeds of my undoing. I'm slowly building up the courage. Soon, I will attain a final cold comfort in the reaper's embrace.

Heard it before. This is why one should never take a peek, no matter how strong the temptation. It spawns a self-righteous 'duty' to intervene. It leads to meddling and undue anxiety for the voyeur reader. It transforms the nature of a relationship, tears down comfortable habits, destabilizes routine, and, sometimes, ends up in an armed showdown at the local roller rink.

The Avatar

Me...and...erring through metaphorical thickets,
cruising along this doom spiral towards elegant, exalted, salvation;
this doom spiral towards queer queries:
where do we go? what's to be done?

Me...and...erring through compassionate subterfuge,
pity these inflated sentiments,
stare down Schopenhauer long enough
and existence shall collapse your skull.

Me...and...erring into emaciated arms,
redemption enters a cave,
hears a distant sonorous voice exalt,
"Here lies our Saviour,
beaten, humiliated,
purple and blue,
human through and through."

Me...and...erring through mnemonic forests,
in search of lost time,
a persistent nostalgia...
and longing for eternal validation.

Me...and...erring into the abyss, I find Him
cold and dead,
human through and through.
He speaks:

"Life most sacred is in the dirt, the air;
our shared obsolescent glances,
and blemished beauty."

"Life cannot be without blood, sinew, and flesh.
Taste my tears, are they not salty?
Feel my wounds, do they not sting you as well?
Witness my pain and know the absurdity of their ways."

"Admirers plotted my ruination,
institutionalized my desecration."

"May they burn for usurping the throne;
their presumption, their falsified faith
sow the seeds of their doom."

Me...and...erring through tomes upon tomes of desecration,
I see crimson tears stream down his cheek.

"They have forgotten you..."

"...the moment I passed."

Despondent words accompanied his melancholy,

"I'm their avatar, their clown
- my death justifies their crimes,
those morbid profiters, those disingenuous crooks,
those pious egoists."

Me...and...erring through fire and brimstone,
I see Him puttering into the distance.

"Terror strikes the heart that cannot bear to be in the presence of beauty...
But fear not, he is mere image, another avatar, a projection against a wall..."

An apparition, an illusion, spectral like an oasis -
he haunted, he soothed, and he tormented;
and then He was gone.

Me...and...erring out of the depths,
anguished cries called out to the Saviour,
hoping for redemption....
silence...deafening silence....echoed from dark eternity to His tomb,
it read:

lasciate ogni speranza

Reluctance.

Reluctance was his ethos. He reluctantly teetered on the edge for a good while and reluctantly went over the edge, against his will. In hesitation he retained a fragile image of self and hence found comfort. He reluctantly finished school, found an office job, a wife, and sired two children. He went in and out of debt, accumulated savings, paid off his home, raised the children, sent them to school, retired, and went reluctantly with his wife on an Alaskan cruise for his sixty-fifth birthday. It was there when he reluctantly succumbed to death - unsure he wanted to go on living, unsure of what laid ahead. He reluctantly struggled against his murderer - but alas, his half-measured resistance proved futile. That was roughly the life of Plato Allen, nearly sixty-five years of reluctance.

Everybody has a price

Money. Its all about money, have it, want more, money makes money. You're nothing without money. Duddy Kravitz can have his land; we want money. Instead of focusing on excelling at something one enjoys, you're hassled, harassed, and constantly told to make money - lots of it - for the sake of personal and familial reputation. Actually personal reputation matters little; familial reputation trumps all else. How do you measure up to Mr. X's son or Ms. Y's daughter or X cousin or Y's niece. Man is the measure of all things. No, that is incomplete. Man is measured by money, wealth, cash and what and who he can buy with it. Money is the only measure. Forget art. Forget love. Forget passion and forget fulfillment. Forget social conscience, ethics, environment - hell, fuck the future, money can ensure your own and isn't that the only concern?

Don't sit down and read. Reading can't make you money. Making money makes you money. Don't think. Thinking doesn't make you money. Making money makes you money. Don't speak. Speaking don't make you money. Making money makes you money. All things that makes you money are good. All things that don't, bad. Simple enough eh? This new ethos, these now eternal rules are simple: fuck everyone else, what's in it for me and my people, my crew, my family, and my bitches? Gangsters, oligarchs, tyrants, and corporate superstars are cut from the same cloth - its of vile pale green shade. Money makes the world go round...round and round we go, where will it stop, nobody knows. It will assuredly stop with a whimper and a cry, "Oh my, money so much of it, with nothing to buy, nothing to eat, no one to exploit, and nothing to own."

Finicky Machine

The machine speaks.

0101110111011000010

The machine tells me to forget it.

0111000111010100010111

Imperfect, its needs energy - entropy, dancing entropy encircles him, seated, sedentary, and soothed by mechanical glow. Decayed, sapped, he who is seated knows little else than a familiar radiance.

The machine speaks.

&#)($)#)_@)#)$)#)$#((%)

surrender

Nov 5/07 @;#) AM

Nov 5/07 @;#) AM

Under a grey languorous sky, I looked at the body, specifically, the face with his lecherous smile still in place. He looked ferocious, even in death; evil dripped from every fang. And it dawned on me. One day, he would rise from the tomb and seek retribution. I started digging towards six feet. Six feet is the great equalizer. We may begin from different points - rich or poor, blessed with infinite talent or helplessly incompetent, but end up all the same: staring up at six feet of dirt. Well, six feet of dirt, if you're lucky. You might see it differently: being consumed in an incinerator or sinking to the bottom of the sea or dangling from a sturdy tree or hanging unceremoniously from a crucifix. Six feet, if you're lucky.

Stunted

Stunted, sustained regression, invariable decline, spiral, spiralling away, without flow.

Can’t fire. Synapses lie dormant. Flow is elsewhere. Erroneous thoughts, curse these erroneous thoughts. There’s no string…no connection…without chains in solidarity. Too much rest, I can’t stand sleep, dread of slumber, lumbering through slumber, drowsy, groggy, too well attached to reality, too conscious, that reality fades with each passing wink.

Deprivation, keep slumber from me…no more, to close my eyes no more…open and the world is flat again, the trees speak, the ground rumbles and roars…

Working in darkness, aroused by the cool seductive touch of night, I write…much of it is unmitigated rubbish, unworthy of either paper or ink, much of it simple uninteresting confession, complaints of the most banal kind…

I am or can be only in the act alone, can only become in words, undone by deeds…

Undone…distraction, intrusion, interrupted flow…

Left alone, festering wounds whistle a sonorous tune, an abysmal anthem, a serenade to nothing…a invocation for the grim and inescapable…

To waltz with entropy

To waltz with entropy

Con-jested. Blocked. Blowing. Flow. Frustrated.

Ferocious, ah, fallacy

bloated

off

dis en tangled from cosmos

……………………………………….Neglect

You…where are you here now, standing finicky in discordant ordered chaotic illusion,

reality?

Men crawl majestically amongst cockroaches,

Failures tail, close the heart,

Medicine for fractured being: Oblivion.

Stern humour,

Absurd scripture,

Constriction,

And grey concrete slabs move in,

With vice like malice.

Flow; flow, so foreign at present, so close, intimate; so profound in the unknown moment (to come)

Obsolescence…my fickle desires change on a whim,

and the tides….the tides…

Calcified, congested, trapped in compartments not of my choosing,

Flowing through plastic tubes of ethos;

Being in capitals

B-E-I-N-G

…tiny and forgotten

So where has Karma gone in search of dark primordial breasts and resplendent illuminate thighs…Ah, Karma, my ribald jester…Karma, my back-stabbing wingman…

Here comes trouble and I turn an accusatory digit your way

…”Curse thee, my inscrutable foe!”

We look through each other with stern determined gaze,

We look into ourselves, a hidden menagerie of cruelty and levity…

…moments…eons…divinity and cosmos…expire

We laugh at absurd looping moments,

screeching down the barren fields of eternity…

smile buddy….smile and await your turn

to waltz with eternity.

Storied Girl

There were stories about her. Some tales were simple and straightforward. Others were complex esoteric constructions. Like any gossip, it was descriptive hearsay layered on top of more general hearsay. As a consequence, I rarely subscribe to hearsay. In any event, these stories were rather banal and uninventive lies that ran the usual gamut from chronic promiscuity to, uh, lax grooming.

“It comes with the territory,” she told me. Indeed, from my experience, disarmingly beautiful women – not simply ‘cute’ or ‘pretty’ girls; no, only beauty that would make Helen of Troy seethe with envy – are the subjects of rumours, stories, and innuendo. The reason is quite obvious. The majority of women are highly insecure, neurotic, and unattractive or plain creatures whose under stimulated and often unsatisfying romantic lives compel them to gossip vociferously about statuesque ‘threats’, either to protect an erroneous idea that ‘my man only has eyes for me’ or a self-effacing consolation ‘she’s not that hot’. In the end, the homely girl buys what the celebrities are endorsing – hence, ostensibly using – and wear what the beautiful people wear, use the same makeup they do, date men with similar builds and hair that the beautiful ones do. But, embedded within that mimetic admiration is a virulent hatred and envy of beauty. “If I consume you, do I become you?” they ask silently.

Yvonne was the office beauty first, an accountant second. All the men – from Mike the custodian to Hunter, my boss – were aching with a very primordial pain in her presence. She knew what was up. She would flirt and play with them, however upon being asked out to lunch or dinner or, as Mike did one time, to an Ultimate Fighting event, she would politely decline, citing that she ‘has policy of not dating co-workers’. Fair enough, most of them would eventually say, possibly after several more lame attempts at circumventing her stoic defences – they would forget her maxim in a week or so and make another attempt.

“You really can’t blame them for trying. It’s rather admirable,” I told her, knowing full well half of them were cheating bastards with partners, girlfriends, or spouses who simply wanted to mount her as the mantelpiece of an imaginary trophy room.

“Why haven’t you taken a shot?”

“You’re not my type,” was my dry matter-of-fact reply. Her mischievous glow dissipated and not because she was hurt by my comment. No, I suspect she was deeply offended by it. As much as she tired of all the attention, I knew she needed to be wanted by everybody. How can I not be your type? I’m the very definition of fuckable. If you were to look up fuckable in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of me in a pantsuit and you’ll still blow your wad. A fuckin’ pantsuit would make you cream your khakis, you pathetic little boy!

Appearances, however, eventually returned to homeostasis. She patted me on the shoulder, let out a giggle at my ostensibly humorous comment, and returned to her desk.

It was true that I never asked her out. And she wasn’t my type. Did that mean I didn’t want to fuck her? Hell no. But only a moron would come out and say that in words, deeds, or gestures – consciously or subconsciously. I was biding my time. It’s more fun when she can’t stand it anymore and jumps your bones. I couldn’t imagine a greater ego stroke than becoming, if only for a moment or two, the object of desire for a staggeringly desirable woman. Keep her puzzled, keep her interested, stay an enigma, and let her drive herself crazy with thought and longing, let her descend into a state of confusion and longing and irrational desire.

Having been the only one not actively drooling all over her ample breasts or spreading absurd stories and lies throughout the building, I became by default her confidant. Initially, she found our incomprehensibly chaste repartee a welcome relief to the contrivance lobbed her way during any given day. And I welcomed her presence of course. It made me feel exceptional. As a middleman spending most of everyday facing a grey cubicle wall, any exceptional thing – no matter how big or how small – gave my life some meaning. Sometimes I would peek outside of my cubicle to see her bouncing buttocks shaking like some wondrous jelly, shaking, I like to believe, for my personal edification. Stolen gazes were fine and dandy – until you get caught. Getting caught is often not an option, unless, of course, you consciously want to be found out.

[blank]

I am an enigma

I am an enigma

In a mirror
I see strange baleful eyes
a futile chase

Morning dear,
would you like breakfast in bed

If its not a bother, sweetheart

No bother

No bother...
she's lost as I

Our eyes meet,
spectators again of hidden selves -
misery, boredom, disdain
lay beneath bacon strips and freshly squeezed OJ

No bother, she mutters again

I am an enigma to her.

One morning she will awake next to me -
cold, unmoved
waiting for breakfast and an infernal embrace.

Busin'

I got on the bus, the driver told me it would be an hour plus before getting to town. I was fine with that. I needed the time to sort out things.

A wise man told me that people go to graduate school for one of two reasons. One is utilitarian - how can I upgrade and profit from it? - in short, education as an investment. The other is Kantian - you go because you want to figure out yourself - in short, education as essential, an insatiable need for the restless mind. Then again, he left out a third option, my reason: avoidance. You go to school to avoid both the utilitarian world and high ideals. I went to school to delay the inevitable, to past time, to avert my eyes, to forget, to neglect, to preen and pose, and to wait indefinitely for a most definite - and inescapable - sentence. I went to school, on an island, to move on and purge her from my soul. It never did happen.

Sitting at the very back of an empty bus, I looked out at the modest and beautiful landscape around Swartz Bay. I took in a deep breath of the sea air. Being a dilettante and all, I honestly thought smelling nature is experiencing it. That misconception is borne from my inability to do anything else but smell when in nature. While I 'experienced' the natural beauty of the island, an acrid scent perturbed my reminiscences.

An awful world

In the absence of a singular deity, Man creates his environment. Man, a limited finite being, names, gathers, and develops systems of knowledge to organize and categorize it, i.e. statistics. This capacity for partition - division, ennumeration, and categorization - remakes 'the world' into compartments and a whole. Knowledge describes and limits environment. The world, as understood by Man, is finite. Knowledge, historically constituted, endures and comes to predate man - that mortal, fleeting, limited beast.

Knowledge (logic, numbers, ideas) compose and limits 'the world'. Man is enslaved to systems of knowledge and its techne - its much too large to be mastered. As a consequence, man fears the world - a fear stemming from an inescapable impotency.

"Fear, whether an instinct or an acquisition, is a function of the environment. Man fears because he exists in a fearful, an awful world. The world is precarious and perilous."

- John Dewey, Experience and Nature.

The modern subject is a paradox. It aspires towards autonomy, but is fearful of what it may entail. Descartes is rejected. "I think, therefore I am" is incomplete. To be free, truly free, the modern subject cannot avoid venturing into 'the world', the environment shared with other subjects, who are equally free - a confounding notion for the ostensibly unique and autonomous subject. To be free is to be limited. To be limited is to be exposed to limiting relations with 'others' and the environment - when the world challenges, can one simply retreat?

A setting sun

Sunset - I sat on the rocks beating off to a spectre. Some time passes, darkness descends, climax follows. I clean up and head for home. I felt relaxed, refreshed, invigorated and all that feel-good crap. Some sage advice from a long lost friend: Walking soothes the mind, but irritates bunions. I passed the posh condos along Cook Street and approached my right turn along Fort. Then, she ran me over.

I opened my eyes. I saw the doctors – still in the middle of the procedure. I saw blood. I saw their utensils. I saw my spleen lying in a sterile pan. But, one look at the doctor’s belligerent butcher eyes put me under again.

I awoke, this time to flowers and balloons and the cute eyes of my would-be murderer.

"I got the girl in the end." Uncle Vance said, stifling a drunken chuckle.

"You did?"

"Yeah, I did, in the book."

He closed his eyes and hoped never to open them again. Why? Pain awaited. Consciousness, unbearable consciousness, wore him down. Slumber numbed yearning for scars.

In praise of American thought

America, the vilified, the villain, acts as a whipping boy for the world's indignation. To call the US incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan unpopular would be an understatement. In spite of the grounds - or lack thereof - prefiguring its supposed imperialism, it would be wrong to summarily condemn America, its citizens, and the ideas borne from its turbulent history. It was Tocqueville who first grasped the potential and perils of American democracy. Indeed, after a Civil War, numerous foreign conflicts, slavery - then segregation and ostensibly disenfranchisement, the ideas and ideals girding the very notion of America are constantly under threat - diminished, nearly forgotten, and their demise no longer inconceivable.

A history of pragmatism - stretching from early statesman and revolutionaries like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, through great minds like Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and John Dewey, and leading up to contemporary voices for democracy like Cornel West - has been swept aside. The new destiny, represented as an old, immutable one in the form of a "national calling" - ironically built around the dissemination of freedom and democracy throughout the globe - is implicitly derived from Hegel's philosophy of history and adopts Marxist method - more appropriately, an appropriation of Trotsky's "permanent revolution". For pragmatism, knowledge can be adaptable in pursuit of truth. For the latter, ostensibly operating in our present times, truth is immutable, while the world is malleable, adaptable, and, hence, disposable and superfluous in the service of Truth.

What I propose - and what I would like to investigate - is a form of pragmatism forged by great thinkers confronted by substantial and profoundly difficult problems of American political context. C.S. Peirce - the great logican and thinker - starts us off with the problem: the problem of chaos, a world outside of determinism, a 'chancy' existence. Peirce, by refuting with his requisite zeal any kind of determinism, demonstrates to us that in all things governed by law, there can be no certainty, only probabilities. In a world without certainty, where divine providence is assumed MIA, man is assured of no favourable odds, no longer sheltered from the whimsical hand of risk. He can still reason and analyze, but whatever decision he arrives at may still go terribly array. Faced with such odds, some - often those in positions of power and influence - throw up their hands, succumb to the pressure, and just invoke an otherworldly power of guessing - the great American satirist and humanist Kurt Vonnegut presciently lampooned contemporary decision makers as "guessers", playing rock, paper, scissors with the lives of its citizens at stake. In what way is that democratic? Well, on a semiotic level it is. Of course, Charles Sanders Pierce, ironically, has been called the creator of semiotics. Pierce thought semiotics as any action of affect that involved a sign, its object, and an interpretant. Does this triadic relationship translate into the political context? Is it as simple as a sign, a lie-truth, and citizen-dupes? No, that would be a crude and disjointed account. Peirce, the popularizer of pragmatism, objects, things, and the interaction of people with them over high unseen predetermined ideals. With that began an encounter between a pragmatism unique to the American context and an idealism, as exhibited in the work of emigre thinkers such as (but not limited to) Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss, which derived largely from German philosophy - Kant, Hegel, and even Herder.

The richness of American thought is owed to this unique convergence of continental philosophy and homegrown pragmatic thought, for a lack of a better term. This study does not intend to sanctify one wing in relation to another. It intends to first, draw out the historical and philosophical ties of these two tradition, second, to demonstrate the influence both exerted on major political events, and lastly, to diagnose the current maladies afflicting contemporary politics in America.

[Part I]

Medication

"You didn't take you meds, did you?"

He ignored my question, opened up the fridge, unwrapped a day old ham sandwich and took a bite.

"Hey, nephew, you're here on my dime. You're here for amusement and companionship and conversation. You're not my nurse," he said, mouth half-full with sandwich and belligerence. He opened up a cabinet and shoved his head in, ostensibly in search of something.

"Don't just stand there," I heard his doubly muffled voice. "Come help me find the Jaeger." He pulled out the bottle and took a long satisfying gulp before I could be of any assistance.

"Here, have some."

"Its a little too early for that, Uncle Vance."

"Its never too early, never too late, for..." he downed another voluminous swig, and extended the bottle as a wordless invitation. I accepted.

A few dueling swigs later, Vance held an empty bottle.

"You know, son," he looked penetratingly at his vanquished friend-foe. "We all need something to make life bearable. Some prefer expensive cars. Some enjoy cheap women adorned with pricey trinkets. Others prefer the company of a book to anything else. They name their boredom hobbies or interests or sex or a career. In the end, they grow tire of it and buy a better car and find a cheaper whore and go to a movie. More or less, the majority of humanity are intransigents desperately denying an inescapable desire: to be done with it all."

"Something keeps us going. You know what that is?" He asked me.

"Fear."

"Yeah. As much as we want to be waltzing with the Reaper under a starless sky, we are afraid of what follows."

"Nothing follows," I said rather confidently. His eyes turned from the bottle up to meet mine.

"Are you certain of this?"

"Well, no. There is no certainty either way. All there is is belief."

"Speculation. All there is is speculation - desperate attempts at making the ineffable coherent, the uncertain definite, and providing consolation for earthly misery," he took a final bite of his sandwich. He finished chewing and continued.

"Eventually, if you're around long enough, life becomes an extended bout of quiet exasperation." He finally tossed the empty bottle into an almost full bin - I would soon escort them to the nearest liquor store in exchange for another round.

"You're how old now?"

"I'm 25."

[incomplete]

Los Alamos

From Shiv Visvanathan's A Carnival of Science:

"At first sight, the appearance of these towns is deceptive. Their antiseptic affluence hides their totalitarian intent; their suburban comfort, the banalization of evil in modern society. 'Walking through its main street, with artificially watered lawns...in front of standardized houses pained in bright Easter egg colours,' Jungk notices children playing a new variant of hopscotch with squares marked radioactive and uncontaminated. Los Alamos is advertised as a virtuous, high IQ town with no one either idle or unemployed. Jungk remarks:

It would not need all these superlatives to show me that Los Alamos is a quite exceptional place. Actually this walled settlement on a plateau three thousand feet high should not be called a town at all. For any town must have some proportion of freedom in order to be able to develop and live, even to be able to die. But the collection of houses and workshops on the hill above the Rio Grande is an artificial and arbitrary product. It will never be acquired and the whole population is looked upon as transient. If a man gives up his job, if he is discharged or pensioned, he must give up his house which belongs to the government and leaves Los Alamos.

For this reason, one never sees old people here, except a few indispensable scientific pundits. The children will have to leave once they reach working age. They can only remain only if they find a job here after passing security department's personality and aptitude tests. 'There is no staying on in the town where they are born and reared.'

Los Alamos represents the final resolution of liberal science. For liberalism, the private was sacred and the public was open and accessible. In a bizzare inversion, vivisectionist science has opened up the privacy of the body and soul to the public scrutiny of the clinical gaze, while science as public knowledge has become increasingly secret and forced into the most monstrous of total institutions - the research cities of the twentieth century. One is left with a deep suspicion that the transition from the university to the company town was effected not on grounds of efficiency but for reasons of state. The company town facilitated external control of scientific research."

21 again

Pensive, concerned about impending death, he stared into the mirror. He saw the reaper, glistening off his bald spot, smiling back. Vanity elaborates upon that most ultimate of neurosis.

What will they say? How will they remember me? Will they make my corpse look presentable?

He could not help it. It eroded everyday. He began to pity himself.

Ah, pity was easy - and empty. Pity was for the weak. Pity was for those who wanted to be down, lower than down, rolling around in mud, shedding futile tears. Pity helped no one. Self-pity is bad, he thought, the desire for sympathy worse.

To ask for sympathy, to lay prone in wait of compassion or salvation, rarely amounts to much. One is more likely to be kicked while down. One is exposed to ridicule, insults, exploitation, and contrived charity. Nothing hurts like being patronized by a grinning self-satisfied bastard with red-tinted sunglasses trying to sell you on a bonehead idea or product, in the name of a Cause. Reverend Quincy tells him to shove his cologne bottle up his arse. Reverend Quincy turns around and pitches you a book about his misadventures with consumerism, cocaine, coconuts, and cream pies. He's selling it, ya know, for a price, cause ol' Reverend Quincy ain't no charity either. Neither was old JC, Temple tantrum notwithstanding.

He turned on the television. An inventor guy was selling toupee-in-a-can. He sprayed it on a balding old woman. She screeched with joy.

"Oh, thank you, thank you," she began. "I look 21 again!"

If that's what she looked like at 21, he contemplated, she should've stayed in her cave. Although unimpressed by the old woman's contrived reaction, the product itself impressed him nonetheless. He scanned the television screen for more information. Nope, there was no price. Nope, not a phone number in sight. Nope, nothing but the image of an old woman preening in the mirror like a teen queen before prom.

"Want to know more?" the inventor pointed to the folks out in TV land. "Stay tuned for our special celebrity client!"

The clock struck 1:30AM. He stayed tuned, barely riveted, insomnia's reluctant captive.

No guidance. I have no guidance, he thought. I need no guidance; it would only make things worse. Guidance makes you dependent, renders you a child. I have no guidance, will give no guidance. The best advice to provide is silence. Those who ask for advice desire sympathy and pity. Pitiful, absolutely pitiful. O, woe, woe, woe is me. What should I do? What would ol' JC do? He would tell you to shut up and JUST DO IT! Imagine that endorsement deal? What would you pay a supposed messiah to hawk your shit? Six? seven? eight? maybe ten figures? Or your first born? Even better question: what would you pay for divine guidance? Your immortal soul? Damnation, thats steep!

He waited, with less than bated breath, for the special celebrity endorser.

"We're back!" Commercial breaks during an infomercial, brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

'Twas me and Sunday melancholy

'Twas me and Sunday melancholy sitting on the porch, gazing at grazing rabble. They had questions, lots of them.

"Should I hold it or sell it?"

"Grade me, recognize me, am I worthy?"

"Why do I see nothing when I look up?"

"Contestant one is cute, but contestant two can sing - who should I vote for?"

'Twas me and Sunday melancholy sitting on the porch, unmoved, watching them sink.

"Should I hold or sell?"

"What's the best way to ensure financial security in the afterlife?"

"Can I take it with me? All of it?"

"Where can I get my virgins?"

'Twas me and Sunday melancholy, wondering when the plumber will arrive.

Monday, perhaps? Maybe Tuesday?

With water up to the waist, time dissipates. All may be at an end.

"Fiduciary, ya douche!" A majestic voice bellows then sinks into oblivion. Ah, salvation, how bittersweet.

F-I-D-U-C-I-A-R-Y

“Fiduciary, you douche. F-I-D-U-C-I-A-R-Y, you knuckle dragging Neanderthal.” He continued his sanctimonious tirade with his Moleskines tucked majestically under his left arm.

“You must really be a cretin not to understand what fiduciary is.”

Jeffrey, unphased by the torrent of condescension, posed the question again.

“What does fiduciary mean?”

Mr. Moleskine regurgitated his abuse, unable to understand Jeffrey’s intention.

It was time for me to intervene.

“What my associate here means is: money, what is it good for? What is it’s intrinsic value? The question isn’t inquiring about a definition – it desires meaning. What does fiduciary mean beneath the surface?”

He laughed derisively.

“Everything. Money means everything. What stands between us and death is money.”

[being]

[oblivion]

Bestand took my hand

“Werewolf?”

“Yeah, a werewolf.”

“You mean to tell me a werewolf took your hand?”

“Sure looks that way.” His bedraggled face betrayed nary a trace of irony.

“Well, did it or he or she gnaw it off?”

“No, don’t be silly, nephew. He used the machete.” I had suspected the machete was the culprit – never thought a supposed werewolf was the one wielding it. Noticing that the moon had only recently appeared in the night sky, I asked an obvious question.

“Wait, it must have been bright out when the ‘werewolf’ chopped your hand off. How can a werewolf possibly skulk around in broad daylight?”

“That moon and the werewolf is pure superstitious hooey,” once again, no irony to be found. “This fucking son of a bitch is a permanent wolf.”

“Then it was a wolf, who knew how to use a machete that cut off your hand. Not a werewolf.”

“Boy,” Vance would call me boy when he was royally annoyed, “get your head out of your ass. A werewolf differs from a wolf insofar as he possesses marginally human traits, such as the ability to use a fucking machete.” His emphasised expletive made me abandon the fruitless inquiry regarding nomenclature.

“So was there something odd about this werewolf?” I asked. Vance paused, placing his bandage stub to his chin, as if he was about to enter a deep place of meditation.

“Bestand,” he added. “He said ‘Bestand’ over and over again.”

“So it was a German werewolf. This is one screwy werewolf.”

“Bestand…bestand…bestand…it said it three times,” he was an it now apparently. “Then the rat bastard sliced my hand off.”

“Sounds like the werewolf went mad from reading too much Heidegger,” I said rather matter-of-factly.

“Sure could be the case,” Vance replied, slowing exhibiting the effects of blood loss. “She had these oddly rodent features. It kind of looked like Heidegger.”

“Was it wearing a swastika armband?” I asked with utter seriousness.

“Not sure, the blinding pain of losing an appendage kind of muddied that up.”

I thought it appropriate to sum up the details as they stood. “So it was an incomprehensible, proto-Nazi werewolf who knows how to use a machete,” I paused for dramatic effect. “That’s something else, Uncle Vance. You sure it wasn’t bigfoot on a bender?”

“Hey nephew.” His voice started to fade.

“Yeah.”

“Could I interrupt your little anthropological cabinet of wondrous speculations and ask if you can get me to a hospital?”

“Why sure you can, unkie Vance.”

I sat in the helicopter as it ferried Vance to Foothills Hospital. Gazing at the dark landscape below, it struck me: there was some mad wonderfully murderous creature, possibly an anti-Semitic machete-wielding werewolf, somewhere out there. And I was going to find it or him or her.

"Welcome to your hell..."

Free falling from an incredible height, his life flashed by and a realization dawned on him: what a banal normal existence it was.

“Pull the cord,” a distant desperate voice shouted. He pulled, but to no avail. Spiraling towards unforgiving earth below, his thoughts turned to death and the possibility of living beyond the final splatter.

A wading pool flanked by palm trees, a gentle gust run its fingers through the leaves. Soothing surrender – “it’s time to give it up”, the breeze whispers with ominous gentility.

Fruit bowls – filled with grapes, nectarines, bananas, and strawberries – await in an misty acropolis. “How odd,” he thought. “Here I am plummeting, but paradise is supposedly up above.” He did not dare to look up.

Beauties, draped in white silk, feed him grapes - defilement follows decadence. There were no warriors to be found on the downward spiral. Thoughts of defilement pleased the falling man nonetheless.

A sudden vision interrupted. Eternal fires stoked by agony – a logical end for a plummeting buffoon. Barking dogs – woof, woof, woof – greet welcomed newcomers. The master of ceremonies emerges from his molten resting place.

“Welcome to your hell…”

The interminable descent frustrated him. Doom or salvation, but the wait he could not bear. He ran out of fanciful visions and earth came into dreadful focus. He thought about his loves. He contemplated a legacy, wondering whether immortality could be manufactured. He thought about Orpheus, dear Orpheus – his tormented kindred spirit. He dared not to look up. He thought about this final incomplete journey. He closed his eyes and looked up. The inevitable never came.

Shitdisturber

"Why must you be such a shitdisturber?" an acquaintance asked my uncle Vance.

"Because the whole lot of you bore the shit out of me." Vance proceeded to mount the bull and rode him down Centre Street. The cops eventually caught up with the bull, but not after it rampaged through an antiques store and pizzeria. Vance, on the other hand, wasn't seen for a week after being bucked off unceremoniously mere seconds into the ride. Yeah, he made a habit of disappearing on us as well as the cops.

The authorities attempted to level criminal mischief charges on Vance but habeas corpus proved a mighty obstacle. That and they couldn't definitively confirm whether it was indeed Vance riding an ugly old bull down the street or some hobo looking for a good time. The cops, being cops, cleaned up the mess, fed the store owners reasssuring bullcrap - pun unintended, and went back to their two-hour long half an hour break at the Tim Horton's up on 4oth and Centre.

"Fucking Stampede," Vance told me, that is once he resurfaced. "It's full of fucking teenagers hoping to get laid, hoping their GHB works on the hot stacked blonde and not the blimpy brunette. It's full of overgrown adolescents with too much money and way too much time, cruising in their rented sportscars, hoping to pick up some primo Asian ass. They have been using it long enough. They know their GHB works, fo' shizzle - or whatever assinine shit phrase they mimmick these days. It's full of bored cardboard whores, hoping to score free drinks, and some, extremely delusional ones, hoping to be idolized and adored. It's an excuse to party for a city full of bored cliches. It gives them a chance to exploit and feel, to destroy and consume. It's their excuse to live banally - their sole chance to live at all. The manufactured and pre-packaged party, preordained by fluorescent gods waving silicone tits in their face, simulate, stimulate, titillate. But when the ride's coming down, it's just a matter of more dough. How about another whirl? the shot girl coos in their ear."

He paused to take a swig from his bottle of Jim Beam.

"Sometimes you have to let the bull roam free from its cage, just to see if the fuckers really want to live or whether they just want to buy an escape."

Standing at the corner of 16th and Centre, I stared at a dismantled Douglas Drugs sign, thinking about my nearly spectral uncle Vance. He was an episodic creature. When he appears, he's unstoppable - an irrepressible shitdisturbing agon. But - poof! - he's gone, leaving you wonder whether he was there to being with.

"Neal Cassady," he began a contrarian note, " was a colossal waste of human life. He lived simply for himself. He lived to be the centre, the holy fucking primative, a demonstrative messiah on a perpetual high, and a dirty lowdown sensualist dilettente to the bone. Of course, he was fucking brilliant - a bloody fucking genius really - and wasted it all sucking Ginsberg's or whoever's cock."

"He fell for the same bullshit geniuses have been falling for since Zarathustra: to the max, or not at all."

The first

Most often, the simplest and most difficult thing is to say to her, attached and betrothed to someone else, "We should be together." Save disjointing masculinity - "I'm a better man than he is" - and saccharine kitsch - "I need you." - for the unfortunate few who model life decisions after romantic comedies or melodrama. To be direct and concise and, most importantly, genuine is indeed most difficult. It requires of us a rather elusive, therefore precious, indefatigable sense of self. It's not sheer egotism or inflated self-worth. By sense of self, I mean a deep, terrifyingly honest understanding of ourselves - good, bad, and in between.

"We should be together." It can't be delivered like a pickup line or like a line of any sort. Heck, the words themselves become irrelevant upon being uttered. Standing before your beloved - or your supposed beloved - as she prepares for her wedding to another man, who by all incremental accounts - status, appearance, wealth, etc. - is leaps and bounds superior to yourself, it takes an unparalleled, almost otherworldly, courage to finally tell her the truth, consequences be damned. She may appreciate your honesty and let you down easy. She might freak out and call the authorities - cops or rent-a-cops. Or, your words and your deed may touch her profoundly. That even though she will be marrying a near perfect match, marrying into a wealthy respected family and, in the process, come precariously close to their immense fortune, she gives pause to look at your sad hopeful eyes - tearing with melancholic desire. She's touched. But she's conflicted.

"Why did you wait until now, until this day?" she asks through tears, her voice tightropes incredulity and elation.

"Because I almost forgot your birthday." You pull out a ring, a modest almost nondescript ring, and hand it to her. Not yet on bended knee, your eyes refuse to let go of hers.

"The first."

"The first."

You both smile. The organ begins the procession. But all is still, including ever ebullient eyes locked in timeless play. The organ stops, silence takes over, and the crowd clamours with anticipation for an unseen bride. The groom's nervous anticipation grows dark as a dreadful portent returns to mind.

A bridesmaid, searching for the bride, enters an empty room to find a veil laying stolidly on the floor.

"The first." Your lips touch in speechless conversation.

An atheistic argument for the existence of God

How does a Chilean apple tree differ from one standing in Washington?

Am I bad at communicating or is everyone else hard of hearing?

To be young, gifted, destitute, and belligerent - that's the ultimate dream.

Soon we will all be priced out of the life market and forced to peddle death.

My, what inspiration Christians can derive from nothing! It brings a tear to my eye.

An atheistic argument for the existence of God - sure, She exists. She is Mother Goose. She's the tooth fairy. She's the well-stacked multi-breasted goddess of war or peace or sex or something. She's an inaudible whisper traveling along a favonian stream. She's a hurricane - blindingly destructive. She's a tornado and She wants your ruby shoes. She makes the ground move beneath your feet. She's as real as you wish her to be.

The question is: why do so many wish their deity to be some bedraggled chump with roman columns for legs, dressed in a dirty toga, and has a bloody cross for a face? Exist? Sure. But there's no material, no flowing beard or sandals or manly sarong - shit, surely it could be Socrates if I squinted the right way. If deities are dreamed up for amusement, why the fuck would your God resemble an ancient Greek pedophile? But alas, of course existence, in the flat purely material single dimension, eludes deities - beauty too.

Man dreams up perfect forms to fuel necessary neuroses and anxieties. How would he bemuse himself without neurosis? What meaning would there be for an existence less ordinary? A giant predatory Socrates plodding around on Roman column legs, smiting the unbelieving?

But let's face it, God is a neurotic - Socrates be damned. She is everywhere, but constantly craves attention. She's the barstar who attracts all sorts of "unwanted" attention and goes home alone. She exists in your mind - but, poof, gone like that. She's spectral. She's everywhere, but nowhere to be found. There she is, your God, hiking up Her skirt, begging for a hagiographic gaze.

Contacts are condoms of the eye

I'm tired, but can't get to sleep.

'Something' is tired. I need a new fudge word.

Contacts are condoms of the eye.

I've abandoned all things good and turned wholly to atrophy.

Anxiety. Anxiety about age. Anxiety about time - that untimely concept, time. No one thinks about time - time thinks us up.

'We' is an amusing creature. We are free to choose. We are free to burn. 'We' is no more than me. We are free, but everywhere in chains.

Water, water, everywhere, nor a drop to drink - Samuel Calvin Coleridge.

Honorific horrors inhabit a collective psyche posing as zeitgeist.

Information, knowledge, everywhere, nor a drop to drink. Our filters are nominally on high alert, yet utter rubbish - hollow polemics, empty supplications, facile images, excess, verbosity - is hailed as knowledge, currency of enlightenment. Knowledge came to be commodity - owned, marketed, and sold - and ferocious haggling passes as debate. But isn't knowledge always elusive. Is it not ineffable, indissociable from essential ambiguities underlying existence itself?

I close my eyes. Still cannot sleep. I close my eyes to the disaster but something, someone within does not allow me to ignore it. I'm tired but cannot sleep. My drooped head - heavy with silent anxiety - lies still on my pillow, contemplating finality and its prophet, Hegel, cackling with mischievous delight at Jackass. On the screen, Johnny Knoxville holds Geist in his palm, stroking it, teasing it, preparing it for its trip off of the edge of abyss. All the world watches on with glee. Contacts are condoms of the eye.

Unaltered course. Finality. The viewing public no longer needs to read. We watch shit unfold. We watch trials. We watch sex tapes. We watch watches tick down second after arbitrary second. We watch banality, since we tire of living it.

Where the fuck is Johnny Knoxville with the weed? If he brings back a dimebag, Hegel's gonna go apeshit. Oh, wait, is this where she answers her cell in the dark?

Amazon. Rainforest. Save the forest. Save the whore. The world cannot redeem itself I 've been told. Humans are too flawed for the business of salvation. Look, they say, to the big fluorescent glowing sky for salivating salvation - available for the all time low price of ....

Closing eyes. Eyelids heavy. Still awake as silence pounds harder at my exasperated skull. Where the fuck is Hegel with the pizza? I thought he knew how to get there. Damn that nightvision crap is harshing my stiffy.

Moon. Half-moon casted over the land of harvest. The rising tides, the imperfect waves of ephemeral, passing time, stroke the land with sensuous languor. The strokes grow carnivorous and its all gone. There will be no harvest. It was pronounced in stone long ago in a faraway, far gone, today. Finality.

Sunk. We're sunk. All was lost and my chariot cruising without drive or care shattered the face of God. Shards rained down to hopeful rabble. Rubbish. They took the rubbish to be gold and worshiped reified fragments, installing unity and totality. And, of course, finality.

Closed my eyes. Sleep comes. The nightmare is no more.

Masks

Masks. We all wear masks in order to live in an unbearable world. If each and every one of us had a choice, we would kill everyone else so as to live in perfect, still, undisturbed quietude. Kirilov found that impulse to be excessively arduous. He chose to kill himself, affirming One’s divinity. But, alas, so many yearn to be with others. The reason? Because they think they should. They think they should find flesh to defile, find labour to exploit, find love…because we should all find love. But what solves the perpetual boredom of should? Fucking, lots of it, preferably finding as many victims as possible. Misery loves company – so the cliché goes.

Beneath the excuses we concoct for being with others lays the raw, purely instinctual and primal, desire to copulate and procreate. Vanity dresses it as something less temporal, and, gasp, eternal. Vanity justifies craving for hot bodies as perfection or Destiny – the ultimate should.

While I wandered around the bunker-shelter, images of apocalypse adorned the walls: black and white photos of mushroom clouds, a grey kitsch painting of four men on horses, an ominous group of dog conspirators playing poker, and a poster featuring a woman performing oral sex on another woman. Somewhere in my old uncle’s mind was this fear: if women ever figured out how god-damned incompetent men were as lovers and found comfort with each other, the world would cease to be. I assume, of course, women would somehow master parthenogenesis and produce a peaceful, productive, and vibrant society freed from the tyranny of testosterone. But I digress.

[digress]

He gazed at the lesbians in the poster. A dim smile appeared on his face. He was aroused. It had been five months, two weeks, three days, eight hours, and forty minutes since his penis – six and a half inches in length, two and a half in diameter – entered a vagina. The drought caused the king of desolation a great deal of physical discomfort.

[digest]

The art of conversation runs parallel to sex. A person who rushes through conversation, ostensibly to get it over with – coitus being the aim in most cases – makes for a careless, selfish lover. He or she who listens, who approaches interaction with patient care, likely displays a similar demeanour in the bedroom. The impatient individual plunges headlong into unseen doom. He who is careful and meticulous lets action bear fruit. But, then again, neologisms and platitudes remain theoretical until put into practice.

Can boldness be taught? Or are you just born bold or not? Assert oneself in all you can do, capitalism teaches its automaton acolytes? Tragically, one must have a decision, for better or for worse, and accept whatever affective consequence follows.

“He thinks on the page and is choked by encounter,” my mom said about her brother, my uncle Vance. Uncle Vance was a middling academic. He graduated with honours in Anthropology and embarked on a PhD in English. Seven years later, he failed to complete it. “Vance just overthought it,” mom said, “He actually is a really bright guy.” And he was. He published his memoirs, ­Seven Ivory Years, to rave reviews and over two million copies sold. The true appeal of his memoir? All of it was fictional. The now legendary mesculin trip, the psychedelic out-of-body love affair with Queen Elizabeth I, and even his daily trips to a local pub in Cambridge, all of it was made up. How did nobody ever find out? The subtitle for the book was an unfortunate, yet opportune, cliché: Stranger than Fiction. His supposed mesculin buddies mistook reality for fiction and confirmed the story. Queen Elizabeth I, ostensibly dead since the seventeenth century, was unavailable for comment. As for the patrons at the local pub, they were convinced all those improbable stories happened some forlorn yesteryear and myth became reality.

Actually, my uncle rarely commented about the first two stories – leading me to believe there was some truth to them. But he certainly debunked the last one. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that mausoleum nominally called a pub,” he told me and my brother, Wyatt, as children. “The place to find primo ass,” he continued, “is any university library. Those women are desperate, neurotic, severely self-conscious creatures, who would, despite appearance, polish your pole just like that.” I was nine, Wyatt seven.

In hindsight, I appreciated how candid Uncle Vance was, how he effaced the demarcation between childhood and adulthood. “If you gotta find out sometime, better know it now than be caught with your pants down.”

Fortress of Solitude

Bountiful. Abundant. Excess. He lived without excess - an exemplary ascetic. Austerity was his agonistic response to what he referred to as "a ubiquitous and grotesque preoccupation with status'. "I'm as lowdown as you can go," Vance said. "But I'm no fool, in spite of what you might hear."

He scoffed at those normal lives of moderate excess and inferior luxuries - the short skirt waiting for a suit driving a BMW, the severely insecure car enthusiast, who invests in tail pipes and decals as a way of displaying taste, bored pastel suburbanite IKEA addicts, so on and so forth. While other renowned authors were doing moonlight readings at the Guggenheim prior to another blockbuster release, Vance lived in a shack, somewhere between Jasper and Radium, masturbating to a Traci Lords cooking show when his second book debuted.

"I wanted to be in Belize," he later confessed to me. "But I have no idea where it is on the map..."

Uncle Vance's most intimate desire was to chase hurricanes in Belize.

"You gotta have brass ones for that," he grabbed his balls. "Staring a hurricane right in the eye...saying to that chicken-shit old fart of a watchmaker, 'Hey here I am, you ain't got shit on me, ya old decaying decrepit crank!' - that's fucking life."

Vance did not fear hurricanes or lightning strikes or the wrath of God. What he did fear was publicity and accolades - and by extension, criticism and scorn. So when his followup work was set for release, he shored up supplies at his obscure and undisclosed hideout and planned for a very long stay. When I say undisclosed, I am dead serious. No one knew. Not my mom, not his literary agent, not even his publisher knew where he would disappear to for weeks and months on end. They chalked it up to the eccentricity of an ingenious writer and left the issue at that. I would doubt that military satellites - capable of literally finding a needle in a haystack - could find Vance's hideout. For the longest time, I thought it was a psychosomatic construction. I was wrong. When I did find him, it was a matter of utter serendipity.

Drunk and without my pants, I wandered away from my campsite while spending a weekend in Kananaskis. It had been approximately five months since Vance's second novel, It's all @%&*#@# because of the Turret's, and I was wasted. Stumbling through the trees, smiling lecherously at the owls looking on, I heard a booming shrill voice shout, "Fucking cocksucking mother...", or so it went. It was a loud virile voice. Having nary an idea where my campsite was and still monumentally hammered, I gravitated to the forceful profane sound.

"God, good God, good goddamned sodomized faggot God." As the voice became progressively louder, I knew that I was getting warmer. As my arms hacked through the brush, I notice another foreign sound: the bloodthirsty breath of a pack of hungry wolves.

Needless to say, once I was aware of their appearance, I bolted towards the humane profanities. Slashing through brush and trees - cutting up my arms mighty badly - I burst through to see my dear bedraggled Uncle Vance. He laid on the ground, semi-conscious, still cursing, as his severed hand laid on the chopping block. Before I could get to him, the wolves dragged the hand away.

"Shit, crap, fucking Hemingway in his petite ass..." his ribald grievances continued. I could understand why.

"Where the fuck is my hand?" The wolves were out of sight by then.

The sight of that bloody stub where his hand used to be sent a surge of sobriety through me. I grabbed my cantine-flask and poured its contents over a towel, wrapping it around my uncle's wrist. I told him there was no time to waste, grabbed the bloody machete, and bolted in pursuit of the wolves.

All told, I had little idea on how to subdue a pack of wolves and retrieve a severed hand - much less coming out of it unscathed and in one piece.

Beauty is truth?

Isn’t life simply philosophical or literary or magnificent artifice? Although there is truth in beauty, life frustrates beauty. Beauty is truth, ain’t it? Beauty is truth.

I beseeched divine forces and heard an emptied silence. Thundering upon my Neanderthal skull was a desire for love, a need for acceptance, and an insatiable craving for belonging. But I was left alone, neglected, left to rot by accursed misfortune.

Ennui. Ennui. Boredom, heavy, gentle, pulsating boredom, inspires conformity. The herd follows; the crowd acquiesces. She opened herself to hurt and tried vainly to disentangle from regret.

A series of encounters, entanglements, and estrangements – that’s life. By dodging encounter, a solitary individual pursues imperfect desolation. Fragility, delusion, distended egotism, cruel whim and unfortunate circumstances encircle the broken-hearted.

Her heart was shattered long before their love was affirmed. Heartbreak – a ubiquitous tableau – lingered, casting an indelible shadow over her numerous entanglements. As indistinguishable existence rushes by, she stares at a shadow.

She’s heartbroken – left without palliatives. Untreated scars provide stolid comfort. Victimhood, that simple and readily accessible indulgence, grabs hold, mesmerizes, and engorges her being. The chasm between the world and her is left at an irredeemable distance. All the while, she stares at her scars, awaiting propitious pus.

Absorbed in denial, neither beauty nor truth can be grasped.

Manifestos

Manifestos dissipate upon being expressed. One cannot depend on singular statements of truth for change and progress. One-off pronouncements of belief are structurally dogmatic – parochial in scope. Change and repetition, hence, are inseparable. In order to produce change, routine is requisite. To triumph in an argument, absolutely displacing an adversary, is not disagreement. In such a case, brute force dominates by manipulating logos. Dis-agreement involves continuous contention, without clear distinction between winner or loser. Manifestos - ubiquitous doctrines of revolt - die the moment of their birth - erroneously staking claim to metaphysical triumph.

Lychee

Brave. Courageous. Too stupid to know any better. He knew better. My great-grandfather, born a Canadian citizen in 1896, fled the country upon being conscripted for the Great War. Back in a foreign homeland, everything - the bugs, the heat, the toothless farmers, the rancid rice wine - exasperated his better sensibilities. It was 1917 and a twenty three year old Robert, stuck in a tiny village that modernity forgot, harboured a single thought, a singular dream - a nurse named Betty Ng.

Betty looked at the distant explosions, the vertiginous front was tantalizingly close. Death was now commonplace. She could not recall normalcy. Another group of causalities arrived at the tent, she finished her smoke and returned to work - forgetting for a second the hellish reality unfolding in the distance.

Robert sat in the middle of the Lychee Orchard and stared at the tallest tree. An unripened lychee nut teetered and plummeted from its branch. It bounced off the earth and rolled to rest at his feet. He picked up the nut and peeled it. He gazed at its glistening flesh for a while, lost, and awash in wonderment. A soothing southerly breeze caused the branches to rustle, knocking ajar more lychees. He wondered if the tree was already dead.

All or Nothing

My journey began with an all or nothing: she loves me; she loves me not. She gave me no response. Her answer was clear. She loved me not. I grin at it now, if only in denial. But her non-response gave me an invaluable gift: an acute awareness about my death.

Death, my ubiquitous companion, floats along from catastrophic failure to modest triumph – waiting to collect. I’ve thought about surrendering willingly without an epic struggle or an interminable delay.

“Damnation,” my father shouted, “the boy’s trying to hang himself.”

He walked in mere moments before my neck reached the noose. I panicked and hurried the job with calamitous results. My head slipped unceremoniously from the noose and plummeted towards the floor. My jaw smashed into the chair, losing several teeth in the process.

That night, after a quick trip to the hospital, I overheard my father’s voice. He was disappointed with my screw-up.

“That boy ain’t the brightest. He couldn’t even kill himself without mucking it up.”

Proper. Apropos. Fitting. It was fitting the way my father passed on. He smoked three packs a day since he was ten, but died from the bird flu that was so en vogue those days.

“God damned chickens,” he cursed the bucket of fried chicken, brought to his deathbed by his doting son. “Avenge me, son.” While I’m, admittedly, not the brightest guy, I was understandably perplexed about how to avenge my father’s death. His eyelids fluttered slowly and shut for the last time. He passed on – invariably worried his son was a homo. I wasn’t. Indeed, I planted the family seed in three different ladies of the night.

There was Destiny – who moonlighted (or is that daylighted?) as a waitress; Monique, a tall ex-contortionist; and Bea, a former accountant turned heroin fiend. Bea died during a back alley abortion. Monique had her kid - he grew up to be an incredible athlete – All-American in everything – and turned out to be a promiscuous prick like his daddy. But that’s an entirely different story. Destiny, well, Destiny was a different breed.

She wanted the suburban home, the white picket fence, the mini-van, and the two and a third brats. Think about that. All of that for a whore? I think not. I strung her along for a while – going house hunting, leafing through bridal-wedding magazines, and even keeping a steady job – and left her just as her water broke. But that’s me - all or nothing. Destiny was nothing to me.

Thorough. Disciplined. Organized. I organized a protest and nobody showed up. I planned to protest a most hideous plight on human life: vaccination. Most thought it was absurd and neglected to show. Others, bored and uncreative cretins, took to heckling the lone protestor. Some threatened me. Others simply laughed. A handful of them bypassed both threats and ridicule and lobbed stones. Who knew vaccination was such a sacred and inviolable institution?

Night brings anger. I am desireless without it. Only anger drives me. But it does not endure and I return to nothing.

Staring out of the enclosure, my mind paints a nauseating canvas: a boy and a girl sitting along library shelves, sharing a bag of starburst while ostensibly studying. It was my portrait: a portrait of young love and innocent ideals. A portrait of my past painted with equal strokes of kitsch and pastiche. It was my accursed Eden, my unforgivable original transgression.

FINI

{...}

I drove frenetically to the edge of the church lawn. I stood there, agape at the sight of the steeple. The bells rang, I neglected to move, and forgot to act. Nothing changed. Out they bounded, bride and her adoring groom. I stared despondently at my elusive beloved hand-in-hand in matrimony with me.

{fini}

Where have all the cowboys gone?

Harrowing - that was how he described marriage and prison. "They're both harrowing experiences," were his precise words.

He had been locked up for the past five years for the murder of his wife and daughter.

"I didn't do it."

Odds were he did. DNA cast a large shadow over his assertion of innocence. It was his DNA, afterall, that investigators found all over the crime scene - his home.

He provided an obvious alibi, but one that nonetheless did not hold up in a court of law.

"It's...it was my home, so my DNA is naturally going to be there."

But what about his prints being on the murder weapon - the infamous bloody steak knife buried in his wife's chest - and a bull rope from which sixteen-year old daughter hung from when the authorities arrived, not before, according to investigators, she was strangled while being raped?

He could not answer without being choked up.

"I used that steak knife on many of occasion, only to enjoy a juicy 8 ounce. That bullrope..." he paused. "That bullrope was once my pride and joy. It was a gift from my brother, a true cowboy, after he won the steer competition at the Calgary Stampede, before he passed on in an auto accident."

"But that's not an alibi," I said with unexpected coldness. In the end, it was all hearsay. He said he didn't. The prosecutors said he did; the jury was swayed. And that was the endgame.

"Endgame, he whispered, as if to himself. "Endgame."

A slight quiver in his voice revealed the unspoken incidences of sexual assault that was visited upon him on a daily basis. He was now soft-spoken, lacking the grand, bold, gruff inflection of a cowboy. His downset despondent eyes told of sustained punishment and unparalleled desolation.

"Where have all the cowboys gone?" he asked.

"Heaven I suppose."

A smile lit up his dark face.

"I sure hope you're right son."

That instant told his innocence. He walked back down the hall, escorted by a massive prison guard, wrists and ankles shackled. Before he walked through the threshold, he turned back and looked at me through the plexiglass enclosure.

"Bless you, son," I read his lips. He dropped his head and made way towards his cell.

What use are ya?

He strolled down historic Gastown. On the way to the Lamplighter, he met a bedraggled transient named Shane. Shane asked him for a few bucks - ostensibly for a sandwich. He enthusiastically agreed, with one condition: "I'll get you the sandwich." Shane, unimpressed by the absence of cash, reluctantly consented.

As he walked down to the nearest late night sandwich shop, he asked Shane where he was from.
"Saskatoon."

"I'm from Calgary, Shane. How did you end up in Vancouver?"

"My pa left us real early on. My mom barely made enough cleaning hotel rooms and I had to drop out of school at 15 to keep us afloat. I worked on my uncle's farm for a long while, until we had a falling out. I was seventeen when I left home and headed out West to find work."

He interrupted. "We're here."

They walked into the shop.

Git

He tired of it. The neighbours once again shouted futilely at their disobedient dog.

"Git down here, you fucking mutt."

It didn't respond.

"Git, git, git, you lousy piece of shit."

They got increasingly drunk and gratingly loud.

"Git."

They ducked under the patio table when the shot went off. The dog laid motionless. They scurried out to catch him walking back into the house and took another swig of Colt.

Pained admiration

With exaltation and despair, he looked longingly at the wreckage. Startled eyes reify minute, banal, routine events. The past demands pained admiration.

The image of his unborn brother tumbling down a set of stairs remained unseen, a repressed unreality, never to be invoked. He never was, nor would've been. When he asked mother about him, she grew quiet and retreated inward. Her answer would be uniform. "I don't know what you're talking about."

His hero, Van Gogh, experienced a similar exulted pain. Van Gogh saw a reality undeniably foreign to others. In a mad Absinthe induced fit, he sliced off his ear, possibly to test 'reality'. There was no true being, no singular reality, only the sight of his bloody dismembered ear lying in a crimson pool. Reality is not merely a particular or a universal. It is the violent incommensurable interstice of the two. He stared at the portrait of the single-eared genius on the wall and laughed uncontrollably. It was the absurd and he understood it now.

Wretch

A caged animal, they fed me banalities. Middling luxuries decorated my enclosure. They first installed a bookshelf system. It played monotony - the bland sound of a strummed acoustic guitar spliced in with grating psuedomasculine vocals unenthusiastically reciting 'Layla'.


I wretched.

Myopic Dystopia

A dreadful thought shook me from my slumber: humanity has perished and, in concealed solitude, I gaze disinterestedly at robots making love in an airport handicap washroom. I tapped my right temple twice before I massage it lugubriously - sadly still flesh.

I stumbled out of the washroom stall, my nap complete, and went in search of supplies. A headless torso, projected onto stadium screens, read the morning decrees.

"Praise for obedience; death to the belligerent."

"Abandon flaccid flesh."

"Pro-D requires the exceptional to report to the Waltemple at 1500."

"Mass purge at 1600."

"Thank you and have a productive day."



[incomplete]

My eagle and my serpent

"When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his house and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he had the enjoyment of his spirit and his solitude and he did not weary of it for ten years. But at last his heart turned - and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus:

Great Star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine!
You have come up here to my cave for ten years: you would have grown weary of your light and of this journey, without me, my eagle and my serpent.
But we waited for you every morning, took from you your superfluity and blessed you for it.
Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it.
I should like to give it away and distribute it, until the wise among men have again become happy in their folly and the poor happy in their wealth.
To that end, I must descend into the depths: as you do at evening, when you go behind the sea and bring light to the underworld too, superabundant star!
Like you, I must go down - as men, to whom I want to descend, call it.
So bless me then, tranquil eye, that can behold without envy even an excessive happiness!
Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the waters may flow golden from him and bear the reflection of your joy over all the world!
Behold! This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to be man again.

Thus began Zarathustra's down-going."

Powder Blue Tux

"Forever is a long time," Marcus confessed before arriving for the ceremony.

"It won't last forever," I replied. "Death will snuff you both out eventually. That or divorce - whichever comes first."

A lapse in judgment compelled Marcus to name me best man. I was far from an ideal choice.

As the wedding congregation buzzed in anticipation of that beautiful, ostensibly transcendent, moment, the groom's face grew green with uneasy about his upcoming nuptials.

Marcus shifted back and forth in his seat, looking like a five-year old who needed to piss but was afraid to ask teacher for permission.

"Forever," his mortified expression expounded upon the two syllable utterance. "Forever," he repeated.

At one point, I considered pulling over to let my pale-faced friend vomit out his apprehension. But the sight of a jittery Marcus amused me to no end. I couldn't possibly sacrifice my personal amusement, no sir.

My imagination took things a step further: an image of him wretching onto his bride just prior to their kiss. Alas, he would hold it in for another thirty years.

As we pulled into the Church parking lot, he asked me the obligatory question, "Am I crazy for doing this?"

"No, the powder blue tux - that was crazy. This, this is just marriage. Nothing to fret about."

He calmed down decidedly - heart rate, breathing rate returning to normal levels. "Yeah, I mean, what's the worse can happen," he said, trying to manufacture confidence.

"Well, she could turn out to be a cheating whore who takes half of your stuff in a messy divorce."

He froze, grew a couple shades paler, more horrified than before.

"That's the worse thing that can happen?!?" He was incredulous. The five-year old shuffle returned.

"Well, either that or she's actually a dude."

"No, she's not a dude," he said rather bluntly. "I know that for sure."

"Well, what if she was a dude - same difference?"

Silently amused by his reaction or lack thereof, I watched intently as he recollected the rare moments of intimacy they shared, trying to locate any clue - obvious, insignificantly minute, or otherwise obscure - that may confirm or disprove my whimsical proposition. He turned an even paler shade. I suspect he found something disconcerting in his mnemonic perusal.

"Man, don't worry. I was just joking." I wasn't. "She's 100% woman, right? You know better than anyone." Apart from her cosmetic surgeon. "You tapped that, excuse my frankness, fine ass many of nights. You know for sure."

Ah, male bonding cures all that ails a frozen groom.

"Yeah, you're right, she's all woman. And she's all mine," he laughed, looking for a high-five. I reciprocated, out of obligation if nothing else.

"Now go in there and marry that girl." The best man cliches were out in full force. Now I felt like hurling.

"Here I come, girl." He placed an elongated emphasis on girl. He bounded into the cathedral, on an emotional high, unaware of the chasms ahead for him and his blushing 'bride'.

"Can a free man be a slave?"

Neurosis deepens as we retract into ourselves. Selfishness compounds parochialism, inspires boredom, and entrenches guilt. The majority of us are born innocent, raised to believe guilt is both ubiquitous and innate, and approach death filled with fear and self-loathing. Neurotic, guilt ridden individuals - eager to obey, yearning to be accepted - are easier to govern and, possibly, to manipulate. Inquiring minds, set to challenge and contend, are naturally more difficult to deal with. However, as Kant implies, an enlightened person is occupied with problems beyond the individual by requisite. Enlightenment permits a perspective outside of the self. Slavish guilt constrains the individual within the confines of a psychic enclosure.

Kant lucidly expressed an ambiguity between political stability and enlightenment. Even the enlightened despot - and luminous figure in Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" - Frederick the Great lamented, on his deathbed, that he was "tired of ruling slaves". The vibrancy of a society, driven by the discourse among its citizens, cannot be seen as being mutually exclusive from its viability. Slaves, as it were, are only as efficacious as their leader allows them to be. Thoughtful and "enlightened" citizens, however, remain unconstrained - to a certain extent.

But what constitutes a slave? This, of course, poses an important yet oft-avoided question in political thought, "Can a free man be a slave?" In a kingdom of unsaid depravity, a free man cannot recognize his chains.

[incomplete]

Sketching an end to meaninglessness

Sketching an end for a meaningless world. When the Creator departs, is there anything left?

He dreamt unconscionable dreams. He slid into forbidden spaces, escaped just as easily. He flew, soaring impossibly. He ran with perpetual speed. The Creator was gone. He now ruled all.

Night. I turned to meet my wife’s trembling eyes, elated and afraid. The covers lift, revealing lost glory. Home, gone again. “Are you gone?” she asked. “I’m gone.”

He sat at the bottom of his darkened domicile, brooding about his ineluctable fate. Atop his throne of soda pop cans, he fumed silently like a child – inwardly frustrated by ordained limits. His eyes scanned an abandoned kingdom, his kingdom of one. The key was hidden away; escape remained impossible.

The plastic owl hooted thirteen o’clock: feeding time. He climbed into the den to mete out the lion’s share. The beast mustered a weak growl and crawled towards his “master”. He poured a box of dry grain into the troft and turned on the water. The lion ate like swine, approaching, with every half-hearted bite, a forcible satisfaction. “Be happy with what you are given,” the king of desolation told his pet, “you will never know when it’ll be gone.”

He made his way out of the den, haunted by obsolete visions of colour. Colour. Colour perplexed. It caused undue ambiguity, puzzling complexity. Colour, sacrificed for the possibility of happiness, was phenomenon foreign to his desolate kingdom. Imagined variegated hues and vibrant shades aroused painful visions of his absent Queen. Colour, hence, was banished.

The king’s routine stroll ended at his greenhouse. The wide variety of plant life did not interest him – they merely fed caged husbandry and provided satiation for his infrequent cravings of vegetations. At the centre of the greenhouse stood a towering tree, stretching to the unseen top of his kingdom. Even though it grew voraciously, day after day – threatening to imperceptibly puncture the celestial barrier of this kingdom of one - neither foliage nor fruit was bourn from its barren branches.

Concluding another stroll through artificial darkness, the king retired to his familiar desolate quarters. It was there, on this occasion, when he spotted the bottle of Absinthe out of the labyrinth of wreckage and woe.

[blank]

Canadian Natural

Wow. Wow. They collapsed. The illusions peeled away. We're left with the wreckage. My love, we're a lost cause. We wonder how things could've been different. Alas, we live resigned, in our muted complicity, to the destitute state of this reality.

Everything collapsed and the unfortunate few hang on, linger passively, and wait for things to change and maybe, just maybe, for a miraculous redemption. I made love to manequins and cutouts, with melodic memories of lost love swirling in my ribald mind. My beloved bathes in that thick rich crude now; its sweet nectar casts a familiar spell. "Its like going to school," she said. "I do what is expected of me." Oh, my beautiful one, even your plaintive capitulations are sonorous to this fool's ears. But, in an instant, the fool is no more, crushed under the rubble of crumbling subterfuge. I refuse your pronoucements. I refuse your kind, sweet, condescending voice. I refuse idyllic recollections and absurd fantasies. I refuse our poisioned love. And I refuse that torch that has scorched my battered, neglected, heart. Freed from illusion I say, "In my heart, you are no more."

Eight years. These eight years have blinded me. Eight years chained me to adolescent fantasy and immature desire. You are no more to me. I live for a single mission: to dismantle the horrid edifice that has deformed my beloved and destroyed our love.

Cold Cold Heart

Abandoned. The empty sky confirmed my suspicions. I was abandoned. She left me on the boardwalk that afternoon in front of the cotton candy stand. It was brilliantly cruel touch; she knew I loved cotton candy. I was justifiably convinced she set out to ruin all that was good in my life. As I picked away at a 3.50 bag, every passing morsel tasted increasingly bitter, driving me to a hitherto unthinkable act: tossing a half eaten bag of cotton candy away. My insatiable wanderlust lead me up and down the boardwalk. The bittersweet sight of teenaged lovers was commonplace. At every foodstand or carnival game or on every bench, boys and girls were clumsily plunging into unchartered waters, their youthful idealism and boundless optimism yet to be torn apart.

After several purely observatory trips up and down the boardwalk and as the setting sun neared its routine oblivion, I stopped at the old skee-ball stand. It all began there. Our first date was at first an awkward affair. For starters, it took me a long while to muster the requisite courage to ask her out. She replied with a sigh of relief accompanied with an insouciant cliche, "what took you so long?" We had a bite at the burger stand and walked silently down the boardwalk. It was all rather disjointed until skee-ball.

Some believe in God. Others believe in Elvis or Steve McQueen. And others believe in nothing. I believe in skee-ball. There's nothing quite like the hopeful sound of a fresh set of skee-balls - an elative wooden clink-clink. These serene spheres whirl up a worn slope, inspiring meditations on cosmic and ephemeral interstices.