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.

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.

Tomorrow's Parties

All of tomorrow's parties, christened with youthful bloodshed, shall serve established order, entrenched power, and connected oligarchies. People may change, but the Beast stays the same, just as voracious, carnivorous, rapacious, and pleasantly oblivious to human suffering. The Grand Inquisitor penetrates and destroys with a cursory glance, a simulated instant of omniscience. The Grand Inquisitor displaced God. Kirilov believes his own divinity, no more fallacious than believing in improbable God.

Aspergillus Cunnilingus

I stepped on the mouldy substance festering on my basement floor doing laundry last Friday. Since then, my motor skills have malfunctioned, my eyesight has dimmed, my sex drive has waned, and my mental faculties have slowly dissipated to a critical point. I barely recall habitual pieces of knowledge - for example, the square root of 9, my mother's maiden name, and the thirteen emperors of the Ching Dynasty - and soon, I suspect, the reaper will call and that will be that. Before I am tossed unceremoniously by these microscopic invaders over the edge into a vegetative state or death or both, I need to satiate a pressing desire to write.

Any unsuspecting fool who waltzes through my front door would find my living quarters repulsive, decrepit, and a literal cesspool. And if such a fool happened to work for the city, he or she - I do not discriminate, even with fools - surely would condemn my humble abode and send me to more hospitable living quarters, or, if he or she were highly observant and remotely competent, to quarantine. But, alas, a clipboard toting hero never materialized and here I am, whittled away by microscopic pieces of shit.

My diet consists of pizza pops - a freezer full of them - and canned soup - a pantry piled on high - and canned sardines. Sure, I have cravings for other foods. But most, except for the occasional pizza or order of Chinese Food delivered to my door (Debit-at-the-Door is an absolute must), necessitate that I leave my home. That is something I just do not do. Leaving the home, seeing the world, meeting "new people" - sure, some people find pleasure in such things and I do not discriminate against this idiosyncrasy, but I do not share their view nor partake in such quirky behaviour.

My companions at home are as follows: my television set - her name is Betsy, by the way; my radio - a family heirloom passed down from my grandpa to my pa to me; it's named Jed, by and by; my fern, whom I never got around naming; but I guess if I were to give it a name, it would be Frederick; and my cactus plant, Maximilian Vicissitude Jones XVI. XVI is one cool cacti. Also, I had a wife-partner-girlfriend-sister-mother-daughter too. She had a name which I cannot recall. She went out for supplies one day, long or not-so long ago, and never returned. I don't think I missed her too much. From what I recall, she got far too loose for my liking.

Books are piled on high in what used to be her room - she was the reading type, I think. Her favourite was a fellow named Beckett, who, from one of the backcover photos, appeared to be a wrinkly pasty bastard. According to the short tidbit included with the unflattering photo, this sonuvabitch was quite the attractive git in his youth, a veritable pussy magnet. Meaning no disrespect to Mr. Beckett, that tidbit must surely be a work of fiction. Then again, an estranged feminine voice echoes in my head, "Isn't it all fiction?" - her echoing bitch voice. Forgetting her philosophic psycho-babble was a simple matter: a swift smack of her golden head. I thought, no I knew, she masturbated while gazing longingly at that wrinkly prune. Sam! Sammy! While sitting on the crapper, I would overhear her self-induced moans. God knows if she actually managed to cram the hardback version of Malone Dies up her snatch. "Isn't it all fiction?" - fucking reductive artsy-fartsy crap. I'd like to see her say that about the bible - accompanied with an anal insertion.

Wasted youth leaves a lingering bitter aftertaste. I wasted my youth awaiting death. I read my bible, went to church, took my vitamins, and awaited salvation. But with age and mounting disappointments, I realized that the Good Book is indeed fictional - stories told and re-told in order to pacify and neuter man. Men who believe in an unjust, cruel, vindicative God, who are convinced killing heathens pleases their Lord, who hold steadfastly to vacuous dreams of a glorious afterworld - a warrior's paradise populated with naked virgins, golden harpsichords, and free-flowing sinless wine - are simply rats running haphazardly through a maze in pursuit of a mouldy block of cheese. God is dead - that implies he 'was' at one point. I don't even think he 'was'. God ain't dead; he never was - just the mysterious enduring fabrication of infantile minds.

I have lived in a era of boundless immaturity glossed over as informed dilettantism. Dilettantism, in fact, was the norm. Schooling was no longer about searching, for oneself, a philosophy of life. No, it was about becoming financially viable, respectable, and to take weekends to read the newest Mailer tome or the Foucault Reader in order to spout sanctimonious pseudo-scholarly prescriptions about the state of this miserable world. Everybody conceives themselves as a weekend scholar, regurgitating half-digested, half-baked ideas: masters of judgment and prejudgment - rendered from the comforts of a coffee shop, a book shop discussion salon, or the wondrous and boundless space of the World Wide Web. My schooling, from what little that I do recall, was defined by cutthroat tactics, sycophantic gestures assuaging the insecure egos of authority - accompanied, in some instances, by fellatio and or ribald acts with middle aged megalomaniacs. The blinding glow of the 'real world', laying beyond the ivory walls of the Academy, forced rational people into doing morbid things. Beautiful women were most adept in these games of careerism - for they possess gifts for duplicity unknown even to the most calculating sociopath. Schooling was about picking up obscure pieces of information for a specific occasion: sitting in a bourgeois lounge sipping cocktails with a obscenely gracious power suit wearing whore.

I remember being late for my political theory class every time I cared to show up. Sometimes I was late by minutes, but most on most occasions, more than half of the lecture passed before I appeared. One day, the professor - an old Platonist - finally asked, "why so late young man?". I replied in cliche, "better late than...". "Than never?" he mused. "Hmm..." He went on for a while. After an meaningless repartee - which I shall not subject you to - I finally connected the dots for Dr. Wilson. "To show up, whether tardy or not, expresses our fundamental relationship with the world. By showing up, I am free, having exercised my choice to be here." "What about the days you do not show up?" he asked. "I'm either hung over or getting laid," I replied tersely. "So on days you are absent, do you remain in your cave?" he continued. "Who's to say this classroom isn't a cave?" I smiled. He laughed and told me to take a seat and continued with his overheads.

The point of this recollection - if there is one - lies somewhere behind that projector. Do you see it? Yes, the busty brunette named Alana. She sat upright - showcasing her immaculate posture and untrammeled poise as her ample breasts threatened to spill out of her low cut t-shirt - eyes straight ahead, scribbling an occasional note. Alana was flat out a genius - a genius with a huge rack. But somewhere below those luminous globes lay a charcoal heart oozing disdain for lesser kinds. I was assuredly one of those lesser kinds. Oddly enough, she did not turn her nose to me, as she did to the others. Maybe it was my proud displays of nihilism - complacency mistaken for rebellion. Maybe it was because I did not constantly stare at her chest, like the rest, when talking to her. Even though she turned out to be an unscrupulous careerist, I have only fond memories of Alana; she was an impossible hope, a brilliant creature dulled and extinguished, like all impossible hopes, by vanity.

visions of luscious beat dreams

visions of luscious beat dreams
recalling my repulsive beauty -
a goddess drunk on bitter chocolate milk

her cool sweaty breasts
soar above purple death
heave towards smooth delirious eternity

Old Man Winter capped my ass

There he laid in a bloody pile of snow - life escaping from a grape-sized hole in his head. He was just minding his business, brushing snow and chiseling frost off of his car windows. And in an instant, he felt a unfamiliar tinge at the back of his skull and collapsed into the snow.

You're cold. You're alone. God abandoned you to your illimitable suffering. It has been speculated that a decapitated head is capable of sight for eight seconds. Eight seconds of rolling from the guillotine. Eight seconds of seeing the faceless masses roar with delight and horror. But is the head still conscious? Does anything register? Is eight seconds a zombie eternity - perched beyond ephemeral bonds, but not yet everlasting? Or does the rolling head peel away its illusions to reveal a natural darkness freed at last from luminous interlopers?

A number of things passed through his wounded skull.

"So you're smart and shit" (XIII)

Jeffrey and I ended up at Lucky's one night. We strolled through a throng of scantily clad women - in various states of inebriation, grinding on beefy testosterone cases - searching for M. The description Donald gave us was utterly useless: blond, voluptuous, tall (but not too tall), extremely sociable, soulful, a true Bodhisattva. Well, the Bodhisattva part would've been enlightening if one could tell from the size and shape of a girl's posterior whether they were a truly daemonic beauty. Although there is much to be learned from the feminine backside, this is not one of them. So we waded anonymously through the throng, picking up disposable number after disposable number, and ticking criteria off of our list. Our candidates fit most of the items - save the last two.

Soulful? Most women think they're soulful - that is until their uncoordinated drunken gyrations prove otherwise. This inescapable fact whittled the field down to three women - a petite blond - a former beauty queen turned exotic dancer - who went by the name of Margaret, a tall slender blond Indian contortionist called Medusa, and a Japanese blond who responded only to the name Moon. These names only have a minor nominal value as placeholders - employed to minimize any confusion that may ensue in their absence.

Empty

Emptied, with no road to travel, without horizons to explore,
the weary wanderer sits down on a tree trunk,
ready to freelance wisdom to any sympathetic ear.

"Happy are those who neglect vanity,
for they shall be freed from extraneous desire."

"Ebullient are those who embrace tragedy,
for they shall be able to forget."

"Elated are those who shun flattery,
for they shall understand the importance of limits."

"Empty are those who believe in the impossible,
for they shall not be spared leaden disappointment."

On the verge of madness (XII)

Dear Diary,

I woke up with a familiar sense of dread. I dreaded waking up to an empty bed. And of course my thoughts turned to her. But it hurts too much to even write her name - hence I won't. When I close my eyes, I see dark infinity backgrounding an incandescent trace of her lovely face. I then take deep languorous breaths - trying like hell to capture moribund desires and expel them in a cleansing sigh. It never works. I continue to think those impossible thoughts - those recollections anchored to my dreams of her.

I'm out of her life and that is my bottomless reservoir of torment. I love her. I love her and only her. One cannot control who they fall for, even though sometimes they try mightily to resist.

I'm done. I can't continue on. I've tried to "move on" - oh how I have! But does "moving on" - and all that trifling ubiquitous platitude encompasses - require such an exhaustive, almost Herculean, effort? Bounding from one empty encounter to the next, I have emptied myself of lust. I cannot fathom waking up to another ersatz lover wishing it was her instead. I want only love. But no more. I can't have it. She's gone.

Ah, I wish I could move on. I wish I wasn't haunted with these accursed thoughts. But I am. I am still anchored to the past. The past refuses to let me go. It shall surely lead me, despondent and morose, into the depths of madness...

On the verge of madness, I cannot return.

On the verge of madness, thoughts of my darling torments me.

On the verge of madness, what shall I do? Shall I chase after a specter? Shall I sit here and slide into the depths of insanity. What can I do? Can I do anything at all?

On the verge of madness, I dream of her. I dream of fulfillment. I dream of meaning.

On the verge of madness, I am nothing. I am empty. I am incomplete.

On the verge of madness, she will push me over. She, an elusive wondrous apparition, shall lead me hand-in-hand...into our abyss.

Broke Boy must perish. Broke Boy must die. J.

As a boy, I dreamed of going into space one day and collecting stars with the Little Prince. I dreamed of swimming along outer arms of the Milky Way. I dreamed of wading through infinities after infinities to find God and Buddha playing Bohemian Rhapsody on violas. I dreamed of vast eternal darkness and what mysteries it would yield to an inquisitive mind. I dreamed of weightlessness most of all - to be freed from earthly bounds. I dreamed of floating away.

Jorge reminded me of that would-be celestial traveler. There was an obstinate optimism hidden below his despondent brown eyes. That repressed ebullience would periodically percolate to the surface. But in general, something bothered him incessantly. Although he was a solid human being - generous, candid, and honorable - a melancholic mood followed him. I suspected he was grappling with a problem - not unlike my own - that refused to yield any solutions, difficult or otherwise.

In Victoria, one can find a rather eclectic shop in a hole-in-the-wall located at the heart of Fan Tan Alley. Fan Tan Alley doubles as a kitschy tourist site and an enduring reminder of racial segregation - the Alley, a narrow strip of an avenue in the heart of modern Chinatown, was at one point in the city's history the only place where Chinese could freely interact, which often was either gambling or the occasional puff in a clandestine opium den. But in modern Victoria, one can weave past the incense shop, the Antiques emporium. the insurance place, and find themselves inside a record store. Located in the very back corner of the record store is Irrelevant Questions Inc. It's run by a guy named Jeffrey Lee. You see, Jeffrey was trained as a software engineer at MIT and graduated with honors and the whole nine. He decided to start up a business alongside a few of his MIT chums; it was called, appropriately and pompously enough, Brilliant Solutions Ltd. Whether it was the luminosity of their MIT degrees or their attractive moniker, the business took off almost instantly, all the while, doing what is expected of those knee deep in the solutions racket.

All was well until one afternoon, Jeffrey, in the midst of a mesculin trip, stated in a business meeting, "Solutions aren't important. Fuck the solutions! What we need are questions. Lots of them! Ask them all the time and damn the solutions! Solutions only lead to shit and more shit. Just ask Dubya." Needless to say, his business partners - now leaders of industry, reputable businessmen, upstanding philanthropists and - hush hush - frequent patrons of Thailand's child brothels - were appalled by their colleagues suggestion. They quickly voted him off the board, bought out his shares, and went on their merry capitalist way. Jeffrey - never one to be discouraged - took his sizable buy-out, moved to Victoria, birthplace of his great great grandfather William, and was determined to get into the questions racket. He soon realized that people in the "real" and ostensibly practical world had no use for questions, i.e. they did not help the bottom line; therefore, they could not help one find a bigger house or a faster car or tighter whores. After a few months of sitting in an empty office at the corner of Wharf and Fort waiting for clients who never would come, Jeffrey decided to move to Fan Tan - which according to his father was where William found his fortune as a bootlegger.

Earlier, when I said hole-in-the-wall, it was not said jocularly or for the sake of metaphor. If one walks into the record store and goes in search of Jeffrey, you can find him in a hole in the wall, cut six by eight and six feet deep, sitting on a stool, arms rested on a foldable TV dinner table, with a pen and pad of paper prepared for anyone in search of questions. One day when I was looking for a Donna Summer vinyl - which was to go into a fire on an upcoming camping trip - I stumbled upon Jeffrey. I asked him a question, ironically enough, "What's your method for this gig?" He noted that since I gave him a freebie, he would respond in kind.

[blank]

Wherever he was, he continued to ask questions. But questions go unappreciated. The majority want to be left alone, undisturbed, jogging with an iPod around a beautiful lake, enjoying nature as a blur to be recorded by a mediocre photographic device, turned into slides, and shown to a pack of equally middling bores. While the dogwalkers and crosstrainers zipped by us, we sat on a bench overlooking Thetis Lake, waiting for an etiolated tree to die.

“A question, in most circumstances, disturbs. It challenges widely accepted and already established ideas and assumptions.” A solitary leaf fluttered slowly down towards us.

“But,” he continues, “we are trained to find answers, to purchase them if need be. This training and ostensible attainment of expertise is expected to produce solutions for everything.”

He continued to stare at the decaying spruce tree. We continued to wait for it to fall.

“We can’t solve anything. We can’t solve anything. We can’t save anything. It will all perish in the end.” He took out a yellowed piece of paper from his pant pocket. He opened his hand to show me it. It was a ticket to the 1900 World’s Fair.

“The twentieth century commenced with unlimited promise and boundless optimism. Enlightened industry and mechanized ideals aroused visions of a world that should be. Utopia, once thought inconceivable, was seemingly at arm’s length. Great Ideas, appropriated to achieve a final paradise - an end to struggle, to humiliation, to difference, and an end to history, provided final absolute solutions and demanded that fervently faithful disciples carry them to the finish. Questions that were posed without answer since the beginning of human civilization apparently were solved, once and for all, and ceaseless bloodshed was the price of this bargain.”

Branches began to crumble from the decaying spruce.

“They killed ambiguity for the sake of an Answer. They dissolved contradiction in human incinerators. They exalted then sacrificed Idea atop a pyre of bones and rotting sinew.” The tree was about to topple into the lake as he continued with his thought.

“It was an Answer, not a question, that justified genocide and collective suicide. In a world without questions, men topple tyranny to install tyranny, displacing one erroneous answer with another.” The spruce fell and sank into a watery grave, deteriorated roots still exposed. Unfazed by the majestic demise of the tree, he finished with a question.

“What’s a question worth if it cannot be sold?”

[blank]

When I hopped onto the last train before his shift ended, I saw him once again staring at the yellowed C-Train advertisement. This time around he was methodically stroking his gun, which had been removed from its holster.

Heartbreak a million times over (XI)

Most everything must be done many times over until its done right. Somebody told me that, possibly when I was very young, I really can't recall. Many times over, yep, a lazy man fears that saying. He wants it done, over with, to hell with whether its done right. The phrase many times over was probably first uttered in a Greek gymnasium, where men in the nude repeated exercises every morning. Labor Omnia Vincit - labour conquers all things, Virgil wrote. The joy of an activity came from repetition, from an artistic dedication towards crafting a better motion or artifice. Repetition was done for the sake of qualitative considerations. But somewhere along the way, probably on an assembly line, the phrase many times over became synonymous with the drudgery of modern life. Somewhere along the line, many times over became a program and lost any attachment to human joy. Many times over became, in the vernacular of the Occidental, a program, dedicated to quantitative considerations such as efficiency and profit. In a very real sense, repetition became a curse upon being appropriated by Taylor. In order to have a basic human existence - living, breathing, eating and etc., one was expected to block off more than half of their day to function as machines, simple and obedient parts of larger mechanisms. "This is my life," my uncle told me after outlining a day of work at the automobile factory; his voice, I remember, was tinged with a sad resignation, as if it could not be otherwise. When people ask me, "why did you study politics?", I recount the story of my uncle. And after I conclude, most nod and say they understood what I meant. I suspect most of them miss the point.

In modern life, the sources of human anxiety can be narrowed down to two things: labour and love. "To love and lost is better to have never loved at all" - the oft quoted line from Shakespeare - is the epigraph for loss in the world. Love is inextricably tied to the death we labour towards.

Heartbreak ceases with death - but so does joy, pleasure, and affection. Here's a platitude for you: love is meaningless absent of heartbreak; as is pleasure without pain; joy without agony, and so on and so forth.

Looking into Elizabeth's vibrant blue eyes, I pieced together our first encounter, on a playground - as I said before, much like the one that night. While playing during recess, she walked up to me, grabbed my hand, kissed me on my cheek, and said, "You're my boyfriend now." Since you, the reader, do not need to envision my decrepit adult self, be assured that I started my life as a beautiful child. It was a combination of complacency, an inexplicable addiction to boredom, and a general nihilism about the world - which evolved during my teenage years - that facilitated a slow stagnation and allowed abnormality to flourish.

Proper Scotsman

A proper Scotsman, I've been told, is a drunk one. But drunken Scotsmen are not unpleasant people. They are boisterous, festive, adventurous, and gregarious. They generously offer friendship and conversation until sobriety sets in. A proper Scotsman is one who loves people, especially those who flood in from all corners for drink and merriment. A proper Scotsman understands life and embraces it unconditionally. He welcomes challenge and conflict alongside more sensual pleasures. He shies away from no obstacle. He refuses to capitulate to petty and parochial conventions. He makes his own way. He seizes the day (carpe diem) and lives moment to moment - until sobriety sets in. A proper Scotsman is no stereotype. A proper Scotsman may the closest thing to an overman as we'll ever see.

Oolong and Vodka (X)

Dear Diary,

I am a dishonest man. I attempted an impossible transference in order to exorcise past demons. It worked, to an extent. I knew Alana. I knew what she would say. I also knew who I could attach her response to as well, that insufferable demon. I have done a magnificent job alienating those who I have encountered over my quarter-century on this planet. I yearned for an ever-elusive closure. Rather than continuing to struggle towards it, I constructed the end. First, I displaced my past with a hopeful future with Alana, a contemporary of past demons. I knew the deal. I saw the writing on the wall. I had to deceive myself; to construct an illusion that would leave some hope for an impossible dream - as I had in the past. I thought of her constantly, performing an odd alchemy: melding the dream of Vancouver Island to her, and displacing a lost fantasy with a 'resurrected' one. It worked to an extent. For a month, Alana displaced her place in those saccharine dripped illusions. I love Alana for that. I love her unwittingly flirtatious manner; how she unconsciously strung me along. But I'm a dupe that way. Part of me really wanted her; that part was the dupe. The other part wanted the scars and the eventual recovery; that was the schemer. The schemer won out, hopefully doing away with the dupe once and for all. Am I sad? A bit. Am I suicidal? Far from it. This is freedom. I am free again. I had to take that position of the jerk; the guy who goes after another guy's girl. I had to. The schemer needed a certain set of circumstances, and that September night laid it out quite precisely. Well, of course, the course of events was initiated far earlier, in 20--. I had mistaken the two fantasies long ago, the idyllic one and the alternate. Sorry to say, I even needed to drag Henry into it. The players of a past game had to return for its long awaited conclusion. Vince made a brief appearance as the soothsayer: he knew it was all going to end badly, even on that wretched night of oolong and vodka. That's all I needed. It was, if nothing else, a matter of repetition. I revisited the loathsome event, through a circuitous set of machinations. I could not stand its recollection; it had to be done away with. That email, ironically enough, is the new adaptation of THE letter. It was honest, and, well, better written. It laid out the things I wanted to say to her, and addressed them to Alana. Alana, good old reliable upstanding rationalist Alana, noted my apparent insanity; and the deed was done, the alchemy complete. The fact that she suspected that some sort of machination was happening was beautiful. She is smart as a tack sometimes. Alana is always enchanting, but I don't think I could ever stand her for more than a night. She craves normalcy, at least the appearance of being a very moral person – but underneath it she is a back scratching whore. Yes, there's something subtly superficial about her. But that applies to me as well. My superficiality is a matter of nerves and an irreparably damaged self-esteem. She wants normalcy a little too much. She embraces the stereotypes, but act as if there's something more to it. I can never understand my brief attraction. It may be that I reached the bottom of my rope and had to just cut the damn thing. The bottom of the barrel, the end, would have been to settle for an even more barren land than Alana. I love her nonetheless. I would have loved her real well, like I said, for one night. I stand here to confess that. If I were to proposition her for a night of unchained guilt-free passion, she would be repulsed, offended, but I suspect there is some part of her – however deeply repressed it may be – that would be intrigued if not oddly aroused. And I love that too. Maybe one day in a mutually vulnerable moment, it will happen and all demons will be exorcised. Hence, it has come back to the beginning. Alone and without prospects – I begin again. I feel nothing now - only the necessary emptiness to begin again. J.

Dear Diary,

A hundred and one failures before you find what you're looking for. A simple path to self-annihilation snakes to and fro. Self-esteem and self-confidence are terribly irrelevant at this juncture; they have perished long ago. You are a man without direction - failure your only telos. Go in search with a smile on your face for inevitable rejection. "No, you are not qualified. No, you're an ugly man. No, you're just not my type." Everybody has his or her excuses. Every sanctimonious word shrouds righteous narcissism with layer after layer of egalitarian airs. Everybody fucking lies; and worse of all, they lie indiscriminately, they lie constantly, they, masters of self-deception, convince themselves of a lie. They don't want to deal with me. I'm a fucking mongoloid, a degenerate, and a loser according their unctuous estimations.

I awake to nightmarish visions of her - those impossible images of us together again. Those images that never will be. I can't take it anymore. I want the scars to numb the pain. But the anesthesia has no affect. I'll tear out the sutures and let blood erupt from the wound. Bloodletting either allows an organism to heal or die silently. Those are the stakes; to die or to live again. I can't do either with her churning in my mind. Torment ravages me, the weak man in love with lovely impossibilities.

Fuck it. Forget everything I said. I love you. I love you still, -----. It’s always been you. This impossible love that shall go perpetually unrequited, this is what I feel for you. I want you. I want you in my lap, in my arms, in my bed. I want your lovely voice in my ear. I want your hand entwined with mine. I want you, body and soul. These impossibilities torment me. They ravage me. They threaten to destroy me. Time and again, I repress rather than express sanguine desire. I love you -----. I always will, as much as I have tried to convince myself otherwise. I love you, darling, now and forever - regardless of cruel circumstances that conspire to separate us. I can't deny it anymore. I am doomed without you.

This bland colourlessness is what passes for life, this wretched life without you. I'm stuck. I'm stuck to the memory of you. I'm stuck to an imagined and impossible us. I'm withering away. Freedom? Careless...I'm a moron...I can't do this...I can't act macho...I want you.

The transference was impossible; it failed miserably. The demon's grip is strong as ever.

I can't sleep. I know she will be there as I slip into slumber. Stay awake, stay away. Stay awake, stay away. Stay awake, stay away...

"Isn't it obvious? It's turtles all the way down."

Jorge

Just a thought...

Just a thought...

Goethe's Werther and Shakespeare's Hamlet are the two foremost comic characters in all of literature.

Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the most tragic pair in all of letters?

What is tragedy? A man waits passively for the gatekeeper to open a door that shall remain forever closed.

Werther surely is not tragic. Werther is a fool - all men in love are fools. But a tragedy he is not. In the end, he shoots himself - unable to live without his Lotte. High comedy! Lotte is a mere daemon, no goddess. To kill oneself for a daemon, how absurd! Young Werther's letters to Wilhelm were merely gestural, a vain showcase of the heightened melodrama stirring within his intoxicated mind. A bumbling intoxicated fool can be nothing else but an amusing comedic spectacle. So to call Goethe's thinly veiled autobiographical work a great tragic novel does him a great disservice - he does go on to write his Faust and does not end up with a hole in his head. Goethe mocks his own moribund unrequited love - purportedly for a Charlotte Buff - through the comical confessions of Werther. Goethe confessed he felt a sense of freedom and deliverance upon completing Werther. Only a work of great comic resonance like Werther provides catharsis, while tragedy reinforces the obstinacy of melodrama. Werther is a most ingenious and subtle satire. So much so, that those who misread it as an endorsement of suicide and committed their own also misread it as a tragedy. So my friends, the next time you pick up Goethe's Werther, laugh along with the poet at an impossibly absurd and comic character - a man of unrequited love; for humourlessness is the height of blunt and uninteresting tragedy.

It's all academic (IX)

Academic. I despise that word and all its connotations. For three years, I mishaped myself in a misguided attempt at prostrating before exalted academic expectations. In order to fit an ideal-type of the academe, one attempts to fulfill criteria - most of which are matters of vain appearance, i.e. showcasing the front cover of a book nestled under one's arm to affirm one's "exceptional" academic tastes. In order to get laid, one suffers a similar vain neurosis.

As I sat on the swing looking at Elizabeth saunter back to me, I wondered if human attraction was simply academic. Tits. Asses. Thighs. Maybe even eyes. If a girl fits that criteria, most guys - once again, if you ask them honestly - would say she's worth a fuck. Yes, these ribald reflections are misogynist and mildly misanthropic; but alas, that's how the male mind thinks about sex. Sex ain't love and vice versa. Conversely, female thoughts about men, I suspect, are probably equally ribald. But speaking as a man, I can't confirm nor deny this suspicion.

The truth is a dark pallor looms over my observations of the world. I only see lack. Her absence forces me see the world without illusions. This "reality" yields morbid insights into the machination affectionately labeled human affection. From my voyeuristic observations of male-female interaction, women "love" men for the following reasons: 1) money; 2) status; 3) normalcy-security; 4) an undying belief that she can change him; 5) his body, dick included; 6) narcissism - any woman who reads In Style and GQ secretly desire homosexual men and end up together with metro sexual closet cases; 7) sheer desperation as they hear the biological clock tick towards its ultimate conclusion.

From what I can gather by sitting in a Starbucks or on a shopping mall bench; if the youth are the future, we are severely boned. Teenage girls are vain, self-absorbed, vindicative, spoiled, and vacuous creatures. Teenage boys are no better - preoccupied with, first, trying to fuck teenage girls, and, second, trying to preen and pose as tough suburban ghetto youth to massage their insecure egos as well as a means of furthering their hormonal pursuits. If these youth are the future, we are severely fucked. If these youth are the future, I'm pretty much ready to find a sturdy tree - unlike Gogo and Didi - tighten the noose and kick away the fucking chair.

Hell, maybe some nosy passerby with a camera phone could capture the sight of my dangling corpse and circulate it around the virtual universe to entertain the masses bored with repeats of their favorite TV show. Maybe some would catch a glimpse of my massive erection and would try like hell to repress necrophiliac desires for my cold dead schlong. Maybe some would recognize the tattoo on my left buttock of the Iron Lady with puckered luscious lips - if you didn't catch on, I would be stark naked (I mean what's the use of clothes when you're killing yourself) - and comment on the artistry of my buddy Pete's handiwork. Maybe a man of the cloth would say tsk tsk and tut tut, open the good book to say a prayer for a wretched soul, before telling little Timmy to drop his pants because the Lord has said he has been a naughty little boy. Maybe a woman somewhere, preparing for her wedding, sees the dangling corpse of her ex-lover, who killed himself because he could not bear a world without her. Maybe, just maybe, she might shed a tear. Maybe, just maybe, everything would rush back to her and she could feel something for the poor forgotten wretched soul. Maybe...

But, I don't think I have the gumption to hang myself. I've always been partial to the old Roman method - opened veins in a tub - or leave it to old reliable atrophy, accelerated by conscious complacency. But you can't have an awesome 15 second clip for either of those. A self-inflicted gunshot? Too messy. Plunging from a high rise? Too anonymous, too insignificant. A toaster in the bathtub? Might not work. Self-immolation? Far too melodramatic. Yes, the noose, baby, the noose. Nothing like it. Well, apart from a witch burning. There is nothing quite like a witch-burning. But a witch-burning can hardly be classified as suicide. Driving a car off the side of a cliff? Well, we have seen how ineffective that really is.

Well, you get the point. I see the world without illusions. A world without any illusions is a dark place, but surprisingly not humourless. Plus, I'm no longer interested in doing away with myself. My murderous intentions have become externalized - directed at a more worthy target.

Anyways, there was a unique way about how Elizabeth walks. She had a sensuous bounce that was accentuated with every step. But there was a definite softness to her steps, as if they belonged to a little girl. It was an odd combination. To be frank, I found her soft bouncy steps highly arousing. By the time she reached the swings again, I was ready to go. Of course, there was a lengthy exposition before the inevitable encounter.

Love you, Love you not (VIII)

We think we fall in love countless times in a day. In a lifetime, we, at least the honest few, fall in love only once and thats it. I fell in love with my beloved when I was seventeen. I fell in love with her just as she began to depart from my life. She moved on, but my heart refused me that luxury. I was in love - irrational, passionate, inexpressible, tormenting, ecstatic love. I fell in love once in my life and shall forever suffer it. I was a coward. I let an immature and pathetically saccharine love letter act as an inefficient surrogate. I should've acted. I should've poured myself out. I should've bared myself to her. I should've been honest. I should've told her. I should've shown her how much I loved her. That's all I have now: recollections, regret, and an infinitesimal impossibilities. What did not come to pass can only be expressed by those miserable lamentations: should've, could've, would've. These are the measureless sources of torment and their imagined fruition the sole source of joy.

Now, as I continue on with the sibboleth of unrequited love pressing on me, I am capable only of lust. Love lies in an interminable realm, a parallel universe, where the moon waltzes ceaslessly with the sun and I hold her in my arms while day blends seamlessly into night.

I was attracted to Elizabeth. She was a buxom blonde - statuteseque proportions blessed with a playful innocent energy. But I still loved my beloved. True, I wanted Elizabeth, but I knew - from that first (second) instant - I would never love her. You fall in love only once. Its the enduring greatness and ineluctable tragedy of human life.

Howling at a Starless Sky (VII)

As Jorge departed for another night of hopping C-Trains, I wandered to the playground near his apartment. It reminded me of the playgrounds of my youth - complete with rickety see-saws, old rusty slides, a fireman's pole, and a trio of swings dangling in wait of youthful ebullient bums. On this particular night, it was I - an old melancholic bum - who sat in the swing and gazed enviously at the night sky. Accursed stars. Damnable moonlight. All celestial voyeurs stealing glimpses of my beloved, while I'm left with mere thoughts and dreams and empty recollections.

I swung back and forth. With every rusted creak and squeak, the entire contraption sounded like it was on the verge of collapse. This cacophony depressed me; even the sounds of veritable collapse reminded me of her.

First image: a creaky bed.
Second image: squeaky clean kitchen floor.
Third image: muddy, dirty spot behind secluded bushes.

Random empty images was the only tie I had with her. And that deflating revelation filled me with melancholy. Staring above, I closed my eyes, and howled at the starless sky. My eyes opened to see the stars, the moon, and the wispy residue of clouds still hovering above. A sound then piqued my ears. It was a barely perceptible laughter, growing louder with every heartbeat. I looked around to search for a source, none to be found. So I craned my neck skywards once again and saw the moon cackle uncontrollably.

"Are you cracking up?" a voice asked.

"Maybe," I replied without seeing who asked. As the word left my lips, I tried to pull it back. Maybe was a reflex. Maybe was an instinctive reply. Maybe was indefinite. Maybe opened up interesting possibilities. Maybe was an honest answer, maybe.

From my periphery, I saw the girl walk to the swings. She twirled a few strands of her golden locks on her right index finger while contemplating which swing she wanted. She of course plopped into the one immediately adjacent to mine and leaned closer to whisper something into my ear.

"Maybe...maybe a kiss will patch you up." She kissed my earlobe with languorous affection and nestled closer. I was still fixed on the mocking moon and had yet to get a good look at her. The moon grew bored with me - as I was with it - and I turned to see her.

"You remember me, hun?" Her cadence was hopeful, yet self-assured, confident that a lost moment could recaptured. But I could not recall it and my blank glare caused her face to pale. Hope gave way to resignation and she got up to walk out of my life. She was no more than a few paces away when I remembered.

"Elizabeth?" She halted her retreat and turned around. Her face light back up - ebullient, radiant, and inconsolably ecstatic as I noticed, for the first time, how stunningly beautiful this creature was.

Infinite Beauty (VI)

I awoke later that afternoon sprawled supine on my new friend's couch. I stared at the specks of the cracking ceiling for the longest time. In the grander scheme, were we as insignificant as those specks - mere cosmic superfluity? Open eyes see all that this world has to offer; closed, they see dark infinity - simple, boundless, primordial emptiness. And, on top of that, closed eyes are left alone without distractions or illusions or crude bemusements. I closed my eyes and obsessed about the fragility of everything. I obsessed about abandonment. I obsessed about solitude. I obsessed about absurd cages and parochial universals. I obsessed about time, destiny, and infinite space. And I obsessed about her.

Dream: blank? No, no, her shimmering white dress is gently blown by a favonian breeze. The gust grows and lifts her dress to reveal her clean shorn vagina. My blinding enduring beauty - Agony and Ecstacy rush to her. Every detail, muscle, vessel, artery, gland, and every organ flashes onto my memory. "Explore me," she giggles with mischevious delight. Upon catching my furtive glance, she flees. I take off after her. She moves faster like a jet ready to take flight. I dig hard and continue the absurd exertion in spite of losing ground with every stride. She takes off and rises into the clouds. I soar in pursuit. Her laughter, a siren jet-stream, lures me and dares me to come closer. But I find myself at an ineluctable distance. And just as all appears lost and my love merely a fading dot in imagined sightlines, she halts abruptly. Absorbed in desperate pursuit, I fail to stop. I plunge headlong into her precious orifice. I am consumed; orgasmic spasms devour me. Her desperate cries - oh, my agonized beauty - echo in my ear as I awaken to colourless reality: a chipped white ceiling.

"What are you staring at?" Jorge asked quizzically.

"Nothing...and Everything." I replied.