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.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
I woke up subterranean. Bloody eyesight clouded reality. Frustrated useless thoughts raged in place of naivety. Subterranean, I am subterranean man.
Before slumber, I did the expected. I went to school. I drove to work. I ran the treadmill and lifted weights. I loved my wife and fucked my girlfriend. I went to church, confessed, and was absolved. Prayer was faithless and action empty. But it was all expected; life went on as advertised.
My mother was the pitchman. She sold me a dream long ago and was gone - just like that - when hers crumbled, black and blue. "Be courteous and accommodating," she said, "people will like you and you will be happy." Their disingenuous gaze and hollow laudatios were ostensibly paramount to my happiness. My mom, Sally Field on speed.
My duplicitous existence wore me down. I drudged from one uneventful day to the next. I accumulated my profits, consumed more than my share, fucked, and went to bed. I would wake up at 7:45AM every morning, from age 18 to 35, and head off to school, then later on, to work with joyless enthusiasm. "Contentment" would overwhelm me.
One night, sitting at dinner with my wife and her parents, I fell comatose - possibly around the 900th time I heard my father-in-law's recollection about hunting with Merle Haggard's manicurist. I was admitted to hospital and was left hooked up, unresponsive but medically alive. The doctors never found the cause of my coma, yet, fortunately, they couldn't legally unplug me - I insisted on that. Hence I laid in a hospital room, for about two decades, in a state of comatose omniscience.
A deteriorated sunshiny abyss, filled with ribald rantings about divine wickedness, tempt deaf ears, rapt with attention and craving silence, to die for eternity. Cold ashes of an extinguished earth, a Narcissist's project, remain. Creation waned as original enthusiasm etiolated: She grew disinterested. Wilted petals of final flowers amuse the remainders, the naked salivating beasts of vain necessity: dilettantes, polemicists, demagogues, dogmatists. For the beasts, Truth emanates from clinical orifices - "my asshole, mouth of the prophet". It speaks soothing lies, assures comfortable illusions: "we'll surpass reality and be beyond myth." In the antemeridian darkness, a solitary voice repeats: "no more mornings, no more nights. Night is a dead sun; sun, a concealed night."
I was muted, not a word escaped from my lips. But I could hear every word they spoke. I was just unable to respond. At the start, they still held out hope I would come out of it. They played horrid saccharine kitsch music to, ostensibly, uplift my soul and rouse me from my slumber. My daugther rolled her eyes at the entire spectacle, rather preferring silenced paternalism.
-------------
On a bus trip back from the west coast when I was fifteen, an elderly woman passenger, who, from a cursory glance, was in her fifties, frantically coerced the driver to stop the bus as it approached an chain-off area. She departed the bus, leaving behind her worldly possessions and trip home, and chased after a semi pulling out of the stop area, desperately shouting "Daddy! Daddy!".
This recollection, lost, like most memories, to mounting apathy and repression, came to me during a visit from my teenaged daughter, Evelyn. She was nine when I fell into my coma, twelve when she graduated high school, fifteen for her undergraduate convocation, and nineteen when her fiancee came out of the closet. After that last event, Evie came to her blissfully unresponsive daddy, desperately wanting for her father to wake up. She pleaded, like that old woman running after a ghost, for her daddy to make things better. I could only listen passively, unable to wipe my little girl's tears away.
Water remained a distant memory for parched earth. Sunlight, once warm and illuminating, destroyed vociferously. The scorpions and snakes thrived as death claimed all else. Whirlwinds of swirling dead earth blinded the resilient wayward travelers pushing desperately in search of a final hope, a storied boundless spring. Their moans for water grew ever more dire as their canteens neared end. The harsh whistling desert wind sounded almost sonorous to confused ears. "Nur wer mir Toten vom Mohn..." That final syllable echoed for what appeared to be an eternity. Their minds turned from the redemptive waters to insatiable necessities of the flesh.
-------------
I met my wife, Patricia, by chance, while climbing Sulphur Mountain in Banff one summer. I took one misstep and was about to slide unceremoniously down the peak until I tumbled into Tricia and broke her leg. Poor Tricia, she instantly panicked. Believing the reaper was moments from collecting his tribute, she pulled out a ring of beads - just to cover her bases, I suppose - to pray. To whom did she pray? Cobain. And every word of her invocation was passionate and unflinchingly sincere. Her cute, yet utterly cliched, gesture captured my heart and refused to let go. I hailed down of one the descending climbers and he agreed to go for help while I looked after her.
At first, she was understandably pissed at me. I apologized vociferously and resorted to my patented self-effacing groveling. I promised to move the sky above, the peaks below, and trees all around to make her better. That stopped the tears and the screaming. I promised to travel to the farthest regions of the earth to find a mystical cloak of invincibility and present to her - so she would never have to suffer such pain again. That got a smile. And if all else failed, I would kiss her leg for all eternity until it was all better. That got her laughing and off we went. I rummaged through my bag for my extra layers, when she motioned to her stomach. Hunger called. Being the resourceful fellow I was, I cobbled together quite the romantic feast: a couple handful of trail mix and half an apple. After help arrived, I did not renege on my promises. I was at the hospital when she was admitted. I was there when she woke up after the successful surgery. I was there for every step of rehab. I was there when she finally made it to the summit of Sulphur.
On the gondola ride down, she pulled up her pant leg and said the recovery wasn't complete. I kissed her knee and sealed the deal. We were married by the next summer. Hunter, our eldest son, was born three weeks before the ceremony.
An unfamiliar silence interrupted the torrential howls of swirling sandstorms. Our intrepid travelers mistakened the calm for the voice of God. They believed that if God existed, She would speak the transcendent language of silence. Had salvation arrived? Was their suffering finally at an end? A ferocious favonian gust of dust and ash gave a resounding response. It would continue. It appeared God returned to her mausoleum, for good this time, while our travelers forged on, their faces scratched beyond all recognition by the relentless storm.
------------
My great grandfather was in a coma shortly before he passed away at the age of 95. Prior to slipping out of consciousness, he could not recognize himself in a mirror. "This is an impostor," he would mubble. "This isn't me." However, he could remarkably place each and every one of his children and grandchildren by name and age. "But this isn't me," he once again pointing disdainfully at his own reflection. "This isn't me." Hunter never met his great great grandfather. But they would have this one thing in common: conscious self-negation. While great grandpa died silently in a sanitized, all too sanitized, hospital room silently denying himself, Hunter sought an epic abegnation.
Hunter ignored his parent's career advice. "Choose something practical, something stable to build upon," Patricia told him, imbibed with her gentle patience and care. "You're on you own when you're eighteen, it's up to you whether you want to be an educated burger cook," was how I broke it to him. He chose the liberal arts, in spite of my sage advice. Hunter wasn't to be swayed. He knew what he wanted - nothing - and damned if anyone was to tell him different. He studied philosophy and art and all that junk, amounts to a pretentious pile of horseshit if you ask me, and brought home the most homely looking closet lesbians this side of Lesbos. Although he was ardently independent, he yearned for our acceptance. Patricia was easier to please, of course.
Like any doting egomaniac wearning to conquer the world and live obsolescent dreams through his children, I saw great grand epic things when Hunter eeked out of Patty's birth canal. He was going to be Prime Minister or CEO of a big company or, if God willing, both. Power and money go hand in hand, I told my boy, and to make it in this life you need to make money and steal power.
My sixth grade teacher told me the following on our last day of elementary school: "You were all born impressarios in your own minds. It is only when you fail abjectly, yet still find the strength to continue on, when genius is actualized."
No one is born a genius. Genius is a veil, a persona, an ego constructed, and a space that demands habitation. Most importantly, genius is a lie, a noble lie dangling like a guillotine over middling masses.
Before slumber, I did the expected. I went to school. I drove to work. I ran the treadmill and lifted weights. I loved my wife and fucked my girlfriend. I went to church, confessed, and was absolved. Prayer was faithless and action empty. But it was all expected; life went on as advertised.
My mother was the pitchman. She sold me a dream long ago and was gone - just like that - when hers crumbled, black and blue. "Be courteous and accommodating," she said, "people will like you and you will be happy." Their disingenuous gaze and hollow laudatios were ostensibly paramount to my happiness. My mom, Sally Field on speed.
My duplicitous existence wore me down. I drudged from one uneventful day to the next. I accumulated my profits, consumed more than my share, fucked, and went to bed. I would wake up at 7:45AM every morning, from age 18 to 35, and head off to school, then later on, to work with joyless enthusiasm. "Contentment" would overwhelm me.
One night, sitting at dinner with my wife and her parents, I fell comatose - possibly around the 900th time I heard my father-in-law's recollection about hunting with Merle Haggard's manicurist. I was admitted to hospital and was left hooked up, unresponsive but medically alive. The doctors never found the cause of my coma, yet, fortunately, they couldn't legally unplug me - I insisted on that. Hence I laid in a hospital room, for about two decades, in a state of comatose omniscience.
A deteriorated sunshiny abyss, filled with ribald rantings about divine wickedness, tempt deaf ears, rapt with attention and craving silence, to die for eternity. Cold ashes of an extinguished earth, a Narcissist's project, remain. Creation waned as original enthusiasm etiolated: She grew disinterested. Wilted petals of final flowers amuse the remainders, the naked salivating beasts of vain necessity: dilettantes, polemicists, demagogues, dogmatists. For the beasts, Truth emanates from clinical orifices - "my asshole, mouth of the prophet". It speaks soothing lies, assures comfortable illusions: "we'll surpass reality and be beyond myth." In the antemeridian darkness, a solitary voice repeats: "no more mornings, no more nights. Night is a dead sun; sun, a concealed night."
I was muted, not a word escaped from my lips. But I could hear every word they spoke. I was just unable to respond. At the start, they still held out hope I would come out of it. They played horrid saccharine kitsch music to, ostensibly, uplift my soul and rouse me from my slumber. My daugther rolled her eyes at the entire spectacle, rather preferring silenced paternalism.
-------------
On a bus trip back from the west coast when I was fifteen, an elderly woman passenger, who, from a cursory glance, was in her fifties, frantically coerced the driver to stop the bus as it approached an chain-off area. She departed the bus, leaving behind her worldly possessions and trip home, and chased after a semi pulling out of the stop area, desperately shouting "Daddy! Daddy!".
This recollection, lost, like most memories, to mounting apathy and repression, came to me during a visit from my teenaged daughter, Evelyn. She was nine when I fell into my coma, twelve when she graduated high school, fifteen for her undergraduate convocation, and nineteen when her fiancee came out of the closet. After that last event, Evie came to her blissfully unresponsive daddy, desperately wanting for her father to wake up. She pleaded, like that old woman running after a ghost, for her daddy to make things better. I could only listen passively, unable to wipe my little girl's tears away.
Water remained a distant memory for parched earth. Sunlight, once warm and illuminating, destroyed vociferously. The scorpions and snakes thrived as death claimed all else. Whirlwinds of swirling dead earth blinded the resilient wayward travelers pushing desperately in search of a final hope, a storied boundless spring. Their moans for water grew ever more dire as their canteens neared end. The harsh whistling desert wind sounded almost sonorous to confused ears. "Nur wer mir Toten vom Mohn..." That final syllable echoed for what appeared to be an eternity. Their minds turned from the redemptive waters to insatiable necessities of the flesh.
-------------
I met my wife, Patricia, by chance, while climbing Sulphur Mountain in Banff one summer. I took one misstep and was about to slide unceremoniously down the peak until I tumbled into Tricia and broke her leg. Poor Tricia, she instantly panicked. Believing the reaper was moments from collecting his tribute, she pulled out a ring of beads - just to cover her bases, I suppose - to pray. To whom did she pray? Cobain. And every word of her invocation was passionate and unflinchingly sincere. Her cute, yet utterly cliched, gesture captured my heart and refused to let go. I hailed down of one the descending climbers and he agreed to go for help while I looked after her.
At first, she was understandably pissed at me. I apologized vociferously and resorted to my patented self-effacing groveling. I promised to move the sky above, the peaks below, and trees all around to make her better. That stopped the tears and the screaming. I promised to travel to the farthest regions of the earth to find a mystical cloak of invincibility and present to her - so she would never have to suffer such pain again. That got a smile. And if all else failed, I would kiss her leg for all eternity until it was all better. That got her laughing and off we went. I rummaged through my bag for my extra layers, when she motioned to her stomach. Hunger called. Being the resourceful fellow I was, I cobbled together quite the romantic feast: a couple handful of trail mix and half an apple. After help arrived, I did not renege on my promises. I was at the hospital when she was admitted. I was there when she woke up after the successful surgery. I was there for every step of rehab. I was there when she finally made it to the summit of Sulphur.
On the gondola ride down, she pulled up her pant leg and said the recovery wasn't complete. I kissed her knee and sealed the deal. We were married by the next summer. Hunter, our eldest son, was born three weeks before the ceremony.
An unfamiliar silence interrupted the torrential howls of swirling sandstorms. Our intrepid travelers mistakened the calm for the voice of God. They believed that if God existed, She would speak the transcendent language of silence. Had salvation arrived? Was their suffering finally at an end? A ferocious favonian gust of dust and ash gave a resounding response. It would continue. It appeared God returned to her mausoleum, for good this time, while our travelers forged on, their faces scratched beyond all recognition by the relentless storm.
------------
My great grandfather was in a coma shortly before he passed away at the age of 95. Prior to slipping out of consciousness, he could not recognize himself in a mirror. "This is an impostor," he would mubble. "This isn't me." However, he could remarkably place each and every one of his children and grandchildren by name and age. "But this isn't me," he once again pointing disdainfully at his own reflection. "This isn't me." Hunter never met his great great grandfather. But they would have this one thing in common: conscious self-negation. While great grandpa died silently in a sanitized, all too sanitized, hospital room silently denying himself, Hunter sought an epic abegnation.
Hunter ignored his parent's career advice. "Choose something practical, something stable to build upon," Patricia told him, imbibed with her gentle patience and care. "You're on you own when you're eighteen, it's up to you whether you want to be an educated burger cook," was how I broke it to him. He chose the liberal arts, in spite of my sage advice. Hunter wasn't to be swayed. He knew what he wanted - nothing - and damned if anyone was to tell him different. He studied philosophy and art and all that junk, amounts to a pretentious pile of horseshit if you ask me, and brought home the most homely looking closet lesbians this side of Lesbos. Although he was ardently independent, he yearned for our acceptance. Patricia was easier to please, of course.
Like any doting egomaniac wearning to conquer the world and live obsolescent dreams through his children, I saw great grand epic things when Hunter eeked out of Patty's birth canal. He was going to be Prime Minister or CEO of a big company or, if God willing, both. Power and money go hand in hand, I told my boy, and to make it in this life you need to make money and steal power.
My sixth grade teacher told me the following on our last day of elementary school: "You were all born impressarios in your own minds. It is only when you fail abjectly, yet still find the strength to continue on, when genius is actualized."
No one is born a genius. Genius is a veil, a persona, an ego constructed, and a space that demands habitation. Most importantly, genius is a lie, a noble lie dangling like a guillotine over middling masses.
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