Imperiled [rubbished]

Trapped between serenity and tumult, a thought came to mind. It was a thought of my own. I thought it to be superior, for it came from me...

Imperiled between waking and slumber, a series of images flash onto your mind('s eye). They cannot be deciphered. They're slippery instances, racing through a beguiled imaginary space.

Imperiled between waking and rebirth, a series of images flash onto a mind. They're foreign, novel, and implacable. They're from a forgotten past. They're about a non-existent future. Trapped between reality and higher reality, the non-existent future emboldens a most vile affectation: hope, eternal hope.

Imperiled between slumber and ecstatic artifice, a series of images rush past him. They melt and give way to forms - abstract and unknowable lines and obstructions. The flash of images appear as imagined pasts, deprived of material, floating in fanciful ether. Suspended, they project fatal futures - fatal inescapable futures - in timespace undone.

Imperiled between a calm river and raging rapids, a series of images slowly roll by. He feels oppressed by them. They're images he cannot recall, but which are no less haunting. There's an old man slouched, seated on a rocking chair. An infant comes into view, partly obscured by darkness, cackling uncontrollably. The old man slumps off his throne and onto dry cracked earth. The infant's laughter ascends from innocence to mania with every rising decibel. The infant turns to meet his eyes. He averts his gaze, aware, without having to gaze into them, the eyes of true evil are now upon him.

He turns and walks away - the distant laughter grows with every step. An expansive meadow comes into view. In the distance stands two malformed trees, standing far apart. He walks toward them. As he approaches, he notices a tiny river running between the two. The deafening laughter goes silent upon his arrival to the river. It is narrow and immature. He sees the purple tributaries, five in all, scattered along it. On the furthermost tributaries sit flutists playing identical wooden instruments. On the most immediate tributary sits a young girl. The girl sings. Her soaring voice rises from the tributary up to the deformed branches hanging above the river. They sway to her voice, straighten up, and stretch toward the sky. The branches point sharply upward. He looks up to see the eyes he tried to avoid. Loud ever present cackling silences the flutes and the girl. A torrent of crimson pour down. The river widens. It devours its tributaries and the musicians. He takes flight. But it is of no use, the relentless downpour gains strength. Knee-deep, he struggles to move. The liquid rises past his waist, above his neck...

Submerged, he remembers something someone told him, "Evil lurks beneath innocuous surfaces." Sinking, a wide, anxious, stretch of uncertainty separates him from sanity. Sanity, lucid reality, spirals from sight, fades beyond earshot, and he enters the waiting dark depths. "Concentrate, concentrate, old friend...concentrate," a voice from his past echoes inside his skull, which begins to succumb to unbearable bodily forces. "Concentrate, concentrate, old chap..."

Not yet, it wasn't time quite yet. Not yet. Time stopped, went in and out. It was out of joint and then not. The spiraling figure, suspended in darkness, dared to look up at a sliver of blinding brightness. The torrent halted. The surrounding liquid began to solidify and excreted him skyward. From his peripheral view, he caught a glimpse of the sky. The eyes were still there. But something changed; everything was silent. The laughter was gone. In place of the boundless mania that he had imagined overflowed from the eyes, he thought they may now be calm and a tad perturbed. He was nevertheless unwilling to gaze upwards. The time was not right; it was out of joint and, just as quickly, not. Gravity, forgotten gravity, tugged on him and he returned. He landed and tumbled on dry dusty earth. The tumultuous torrent, the trees, the river and its tributaries, the girl and the flutists; they vanished.

He sat there for a moment, looking at the large inexplicable orange shadows casted onto the ground. There was nothing around and he stared shadows, which shifted according to winds. He concentrated and focused, but the shapes and forms made no sense to his eyes. They were without origin or logic and were mere distractions for his weary state of mind. Soon he grew bored and got on his feet.

He watched the dry soil shift below his feet. With steely and resolute eyes, he was determined to will a lush virgin sprout from the parched ground. He wanted to create. "Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate, my dear friend..." The soil just continued to blow away and swirl in an aimless fashion - but no sprout, no virgin birth. Gazing with loathsome, resentful eyes at the increasingly cracked soil, he could still sense they were still looking at him and his impotent desolation. The very thought of eyes, cackling in silent delight, stoked his anger. But, not yet, he couldn't yet. He couldn't look up, not quite yet. "Don't look up. Don't look up." Resolute and unflinching, he continued to futilely will life from dead dirt. "Concentrate, concentrate...you bastard..."

Fixated, he fixated on a murky remembrance, a wispy outline, suspended in space. It may have been a bloodied infant, enveloped in fire. He heard nothing but laughter, his own.

Projected onto the back of his muddied mind was a single image. It was an image of his inevitable death: a figure slouched, almost supine, onto a divan. Trapped between an irretrievable past and unattainable future lies an ineluctable fate. In order to be, in order to exist, one evolves both as body and mind. But natural fragility dictates that eventual decay is both unavoidable and cruelly abrupt. Insufferable are the chambers of the mind that house intimate, tender, memories. They house pleasant remembrances - those comfortable instants that anesthetize the decline. They also house regrets about an incomplete life. They house silent disaffection.

At the end, a life appears incomplete, leaves one longing for now impossible fates. At the end, all - including death - remains unalterable and the person, the body and mind, feels a most profound, if not primordial, impotence.

He awakens to the infant child's plaintive cry. It wants mother. But mother's gone. Mother dangles lifelessly in the backyard. He holds it in his arms. He looks into its tearful eyes. "Swear," he heard an inopportune whisper. "Swear..."


He holds the child. The crying stops and the child is placed back into its crib. He looks out into the yard, spends a ponderous moment focused on the dangling body. Soon, he no longer can bear the sight and shifts his gaze upwards toward the empty starless night sky. Alone, alone again with accursed thoughts. Alone, alone to concentrate, concentrate, concentrate...

Over the Edge, Up your ledge

So I'm sitting here, over there, unable to sleep - maybe, unwilling to sleep - musing, musing about all sorts of dismal things. Life is short, unbearable, and interminably long. What to do? What you so-and-so do? Why the fuck do we care what so-and-so would do? What the fuck will we do?

I'm sitting here, over where?, crippled by this waken state of slumber, wondering how far over the edge is too far? This botched experiment most certainly will overshoot the ledge and touch that point of no return; terminal, time to bail and cut your losses and count your ill gotten gains. Fuck, the spiral's too soft, too seductive, too goddamned comfortable to get off of. The spiral will get you off for a cheap, illusory, release.

Sitting here, in here, contemplative, alone, fading back into plastic consciousness. Sadistic, cruel, vindictive reality lays it on thick. I'm fading, the next blink may be my last. But its a silly concern, I'll open my eyes, once again, to reality enhanced, reality in bright flashing fucking lights, reality in HD. I'll be there. I will have finally arrived at rock bottom of the fucking abyss.

Slouched over this rickety three legged piece of shit, all those nightmarish bogeys those murderous merchants of hyperreality peddled conspire against me. Sleep and be free, be free to do as you're told. You're free to do as you're told. Sleep and consent, sleep and we'll take care of the rest, sleep and be happy; happy with a yellow fucking smiley face. Sleep now, dear, leave the rest to us. Dear? Dear? Dear chump, you're here; you might as well be dead.

Laying on the cold floor, staring at a chipped ceiling, my face betrays the slightest trace of a smile. Enhanced reality wears down. Errors and deformities blot the fucked up smooth slick skin of plastic eternities. I can see home; I can see, with heavy eyelids, clearly again.

Perfect, my ass

He hung his head. The very thought of digging through his papers for a single lost immaculate idea repulsed him. What a hassle! Couldn't he just fail the project and move on to a easy comfortable unexceptional existence eating chezzies and watching Seinfeld reruns. The 90s man, the 90s were the life.

He tore through a pile in a closet with a sort of frantic indifference; he always managed to feign a slight bit of concern in case somebody was catching a voyeuristic glimpse somewhere, somehow. He found empty condom boxes - a few of which had seven digits scrawled on them, a loose cornucopia of candy, chocolate bar, and gum wrappings, various mid-terms with marks scrawled in bright red across the front: B, D, F, C+, A- and etc. But there the immaculate idea, neigh the perfect idea, the now forgotten thought that was his salvation, was nowhere to be found. Digging deeper into the recesses of his badly neglected closet, he started singing a few lines,

"I'm a bad boy for breakin' her heart,
and I'm FREEEE....FREE-FALLING,
yeah, I'm Free-falling...."

Losing that perfect idea was like losing that titular chick. You start to spiral into unknown, repressed, hideous shit. You start singing Tom Petty at the top of your lungs, while taking in copious amounts of the noxious olfactory cocktail of old gym shorts, dirty socks, half eaten sandwiches, cigarette butts, and the faintest hint of lavender.

"Perfection is a bitch, reserved for the vainglorious and inhuman degenerates that frequent Pottery Barn and Sharper Image," he thought to himself. He decided to wing it. Boy would that be a mistake.

The last thing he remembered when waking up in the drunk tank was being beaten down by a big black dude named Eli - the proceedings flanked by a pair of strippers. He couldn't remember their names. He assumed they were named Destiny and Mystique. Their names mattered little; they were ornamental to the proceedings.

The dude was named Eli, but he had a couple pasty midgets with him. One went by the name of Bipolar Bill and the other was Tommy Tit. They were kicking and punching away, at least he thinks they were kicking and punching away. But they were ineffectual, hence irrelevant. It was the big black dude supposedly called Eli who did the damage.

The bad motherfucker was death with knuckles, he recalled.

"You think you're pretty college boy," he recalled Eli saying. "You and your perfect teeth, perfect hair, and perfect glasses piss off ol' Eli. You think you're better than ol' Eli."

He tried to beg off and placate the behemoth, but Eli kept up his verbal and physical barrage. He prayed for the end and everything grew dimmer until it faded to black.

He sat on the edge of the cot. "I never said I was perfect," he mumbled to himself.

Kant revisited?

Fire was Prometheus' gift to those poor hapless incompetent humans. Prometheus may have took pity on wretched creatures huddled together - united in a common hope for another day. He may have loathed the sight of those brutes who killed each other out of panic - fearing that at any moment their fellows would betray them all the same. For these brutes, this common fear divided them. Fire allowed the timid to gather with greater comfort and permitted the brutes to cut a larger swath of destruction. Prometheus, having deified the gods, was condemned to eternity bound to a rock, having his insides pecked away again and again by scavenging fowl. From that rock he saw what man did with his gift.

[...]

Kant's What is Enlightenment - fire = enlightenment; a tenuous gift, renewed through practice, regenerated by error, changing, flux?