Rimbaud: First Blood

How do you pronounce his name?

What?  Really?  Like the fucking action hero!  Imagine that shit will you...

A chain smoking Frenchman, trekking around the fucking jungle with only a book of poems and an AK-47.  He fucks up the enemies and serenades their corpses in verse.  He breaks out in song and dance to seduce the natives into joining his genocidal cause.  Its an action musical spectacular.

What's pastiche?  What do you mean by pastiche?

Pitch that shit and they'll throw money and pussy your way.

Unrejected

Initiating is the cruelest of tasks. The would be actor meditates deeply on how to proceed. Anxieties awash his thoughts. Failure, that perpetual inevitability, hangs perilously over every action. He normally freezes and abstains, allowing others to initiate. He was swept along by the decision of another. One day the young man awoke to revelation: his life, if afforded any meaning, must actively pursue rejection, persecution, solitude, and exile.

The young man sat at his unused desk and began to write. He would not leave it until he finished that perpetually deferred work. A week later, after a diet of only bread and water, he completed the task. He did not give the text another look. It was good. It was bad. Most importantly, it was done. He sent it out and awaited the vertiginous recognition he had evaded all his life.

Criticism, especially that of acrid kind, affirms. Dismissal confirms. He craved confirmation. In the past, their eyes unmade him. Their words tore him with voracious malice. Just words, he was told. They're just words. No. Whether kind or offending, all words directed his way were shrapnel. Now, he wanted to lay bare. He expected neither exaltation or infamy. He wanted the recriminations. He wanted their words now.

But, silence, he did not expect silence. No response. The portfolio of rejection letters he had crafted laid barren. Weeks and weeks passed, silence grew unbearable. He sent out another round, this time with a note attached.

"To whom it may concern, this manuscript is utter tripe. I neither want it read, much less published. If you may attach a consolatory letter - "Thank you for your submission, but we're sorry to inform you..." - I would be forever grateful."

Months passed. The note helped very little. Still silence. The young man realized the delivery itself was flawed. The lines of communication were exclusively spectral. He needed to return reality to its material past. He left his home, text in tow, and ventured to an office he had sent two copies of the text to. He entered the iridescent halls of a life forever beyond his reach and saw the betrayal on the wall. It was the cover of a publication. It was his title, his work, with another's name. His head sunk into his chest. He searched for rage but found a only familiarly loathsome feeling. He threw the text into the trash and headed home to begin anew.

Prefrontal cortex is the executive part of your brain.

- Focus
-Forethought
-Judgment
-Impulse control
-Empathy
-Learning from mistakes

What do you want? Fashion your behaviour to get it.
====

Self-help isn't all that, um, helpful, is it?

Christina Hendricks in then out of a form fitting dress. That's something I want.

Sipping from the Stanley Cup. That's something I want.

I want to create something meaningful. That's something I want.

I want someone to share a life with.

I want peace. I want serenity. I want to hold off death for a little while longer.

I want to be. I want to become, to evolve. I want to stay. I want to transcend here and now.

I want the girl behind the circulation desk.

So, how would you accomplish that?

I would ask her for a name.

What's in a name?

I can stop calling her, hey...you, or refer to her as "girl behind circulation desk"
and call her Danielle. She looks like a Danielle.

Then what?

I would ask her to coffee or lunch or maybe to just hang out.

Good. Good. And then? What are your intentions precisely?

I don't know, not quite yet. She's lovely. She enchants me. She's a mystery begging me to explore.

Okay. But what do you want?

I want her. I mean I want to know her. I want to see more of her, to reveal something more than a periodic giggle, a smile, a beaming lovely pair of eyes, and just a kind voice.

Where do you see yourself in ten years?

I can't see tomorrow, much less a decade. Whatever comes to pass, I'll find a way to deal. Life is this endurance, survivial, and persistence.

Relax, in my mind, you are not the most screwed up person I know.

Thanks, I needed that.

Fight Club on Blu Ray

The irony of it was lost on him.  He searched and searched for Fight Club on Blu Ray.  It was the only thing that could complete him.  It was a futile pursuit.  There was no such thing.  He felt sad, downtrodden, and devoid of all hope.  His life remained incomplete.  He could not sleep.  All was not well.

He began a petition.  He searched for others, others like him.  He found them, one by one, at different times, different places, all of them spectral.  People, places, and time, all of them virtual and so very ghostlike.  No matter how immaterial these voices were, he felt something akin to solidarity.  This was his purpose, his vocation, to get a Blu Ray release of that movie, that movie which left his collection incomplete and, hence, utterly meaningless.  Meaning was this movie, a movie that he was rather indifferent to.  It began with F.  He needed this F movie.  It was simple as that.

The calls grew louder, the voices many.  The emails were sent, hundreds upon hundreds.  Still, there was no response.  Not enough.  Not enough for profit and cost considerations.  He was not cowed.  He needed it.  The campaign grew epic and the cohort he developed needed to evolve and elevate the spectacle.  They began to brawl in front of the closest Best Buy and picked fights with random costumers - most trying to get their new LCD television home without many problems.  There was some local coverage, although the message was lost.  "Antisocial miscreants," the whole lot of them were called.  He was not cowed.

He knew the group could no longer exist immaterially.  They had to meet at the studio's doors. 

Only a half dozen showed.  So much for solidarity.  But, he had that covered.  There was enough C4 to go around.  The crowd thinned down to one.  Him.  Alone again.  He snuck in.  He found the boardroom.  He made his ultimatum.  The suits found it too absurd.  They laughed, tears streaming and all.  What a jokester, they thought.  Who put you up to this?  He was cowed.  It was over.   He pressed the button and nothing happened.  The laughter roared even louder.  

"It was Brad, wasn't it?" one of them mustered between guffaws.  The second attempt was more successful.  In the moments, eight seconds or so, his flew through the window and landed on the pavement below, it glanced over at the discarded issue of Variety and caught the ad: "Fight Club - available only on DVD."  Hell would be a welcome reprieve.  

The Trauma to Come

Upon his release, he forgot what brought him there.  He could only recall life draining from another.  It was probably by his hand.  They were there, he was there, suspended in the elapsed time.  How long had it been?  The answer remained a mystery.  He was released and that was all.  That was all he needed to know.  There was no need to know the trauma or traumas scattered in the past.  Only one thing mattered: the traumas to come.

Sprint on a prayer

On Saturday, August 16, 2008, Usain Bolt ran the 100m final at the Beijing Olympics in a mind-boggling 9.69 seconds, a new Olympic and World Record. The then 21-year-old Jamaican stopped accelerating with about 30m left to engage the thousands of fans in the stadium and the billions watching on TV and over the Internet with an exultant display of chest-pounding bravado. The race ends in less than ten seconds. The intrigue begins. Did he or didn’t he? Is he clean or is he, like the majority of the “champions” before him, pharmaceutically enhanced?

In Seoul, South Korea, 1988, Ben Johnson blew away the field in a similar fashion, clocking in at a brisk 9.79. The world sat amazed. They would heap praise and exultation on the new Olympic champion. Ben Johnson was on the verge of becoming a global celebrity and sporting icon. However, only days later, after Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids, reality set in; cynicism and sport were to be forever entwined. After Johnson, anyone and everyone who performed like an exceptional sprinter would be assumed guilty until proven otherwise.

Usain Bolt and Ben Johnson both are Jamaican born sprinters. Both set extraordinary marks in arguably the biggest event at any Olympic Games. While Usain Bolt’s effortless performance that draws snickers and accusatory whispers mere seconds after he crossed the finish line, Johnson’s revelation in 1988 came as a shock to the world. It was shocking that a top Olympian - who ostensibly embodied many of the ennobling virtues of sport - could ever do such a thing as utilize steroids to gain an unfair advantage over the field. Johnson became a running punch-line after Seoul. He did indeed become the standard those who followed would be measured against - but for all the wrong reasons.

The events in Seoul once and for all ushered the sporting world into an era of limitless and pitiless cynicism, where sport was no longer about the camaraderie of play or the inspiration of being witness to great feats. Rather, sport was an object of suspicion, a site for the cynical to render extemporaneous judgment on those who strove to transgress existing physical limitations. After Seoul, spectators embraced schadenfreude and attempted to tear down supposedly extraordinary athletes to the level of criminals and charlatans. In short, the ubiquitous suspicion - nigh, assumption - of misdeed is one sporting “fans” share with the twisted logic of totalitarian Nazi Germany: all are suspect of ambiguously defined “sins” and all may be destroyed.

What I propose in this paper is to examine this situation through three accounts of three ideas in relation to modernity: cynicism, judgment, and disenchantment. Gilles Deleuze’s brief essay “To Have Done With Judgment”, Jane Bennett’s book The Enchantment of Modern Life, and William Chaloupka’s Everybody Knows will be texts to supplement my ideas. In what way is spectator / fanatic suspicions about athletic accomplishments a symptom of larger social, cultural, and political problems in modern life? I attempt to posit an answer through an examination of one term and its lack: trust-mistrust. The proliferation of this complacent attitude of resentment, unfounded skepticism, and insatiable suspicion has conditioned “moderns” into creatures of ressentiment. The joy of a player sublimely interacting with spectator has been displaced. The player comes to resent the prejudicial and commodifying eye of the crowd. The crowd resents the player for having aspirations of transcending the terrestrial bounds chaining down ordinary men. The consuming eye partakes in schadenfreude, accusation, and denigration.

The judging eye is, first, a policing gaze: enforcing obsolescent morals. Deleuze illustrates this point well. Second, the judging eye sees its task as being serious, in spite of the medium it expresses itself. Deleuze provides a difference between combat and war that provides a starting point to this discussion. And lastly, the judging eye is the eye of the consumer. Man no longer encounters man. Man buys and sells man.

We need expression in our lives. We need to create and to destroy. We need to feel something, anything, when faced with the inhuman forces of global capitalism, rationalized survivalist paradigms, and the parochial inflexible roles we are jammed into. When the blunt leaden weight of ostensibly pointless routine presses upon our already weakened spirits, we either express ourselves through letters or music or art or our energies find what are regarded as uncouth outlets. Violence and sex are sides of the same coin; that is flat generalization of Freud. What is on that coin? It is Overman – equal parts beast and human. Rules are there for order. An overabundance of rules, some arcane and others flatly draconian, combined with a lack of compelling reasons to obey arouses disobedience. However, disobedience is frowned upon and actively discouraged by those ostensibly entrusted to maintain order in society. Disobedience and dissent are inefficient, unprofitable, and requires far too much independent thought and concerted action – what a hassle! Scared of spectral consequences, we become ready and willing to obey, even when those rules that are explicitly contradictory and absurd. Obey, that is the rational thing to do. For all the beautiful eloquent words celebrating the highest faculties of man, we have progressed to a point where deference and rationality are one in the same. Of course, I do jest. Independent thought itself has been shunted completely out of the picture. There’s only two things to do, if you are to thrive in the real world, obey and become resigned to the fact that this is the way things must be. But as I’ve been reminded on far too many occasions, scholars do not affect the ‘real world’, The ‘people’ do not affect it. Ideas and thoughts have no influence. The ‘street’ does.

The first street, the one most close and dear to people, is not the one in front of church or synagogue or a mosque; it is Wall Street that holds a most dear place in the individual’s heart. Sure, there are no pop songs serenading Alan Greenspan and his fiscal regime. And most individuals of North American culture would fake their way through a conversation about economic fundamentals and fiscal policy, lest they appear to be out of the loop. But Wall Street, bar none, is the definitive street for most in our backward, Neanderthal filled, excuse for a society. How much am I worth? How can I make more money? What can I buy with it? All are justifiable queries if your purpose in life is to accumulate wealth, enriching oneself, and in the process, measuring oneself against others – those more affluent, as well as the impoverished. Wall Street, home of the most virulent insecurities, neuroses, is where sociopaths and psychopaths come to have lunch and IM their mistresses, while ignoring their mother-whores. Schumpater’s idea of “creative destruction” applies to the material produced and rubbished as quickly, to the ideas that are brilliant one instant and irrelevant the very next, and certainly applies to the nature of romance and lust. It is accepted as a fact of life –natural and utterly primal, an inevitable consequence of being a competitive beast. This is the ‘street’ for the battle over wealth, thus also the battlefield for power.

Parched Metaphysics [incomplete]

He entered a room. It looked like a meat locker with slabs of hanging frozen meat. Some of the dangling pieces made noise. They were not incomprehensible noises. Closer, he heard a female voice, speaking English with a nordic accent he could not place.

She pointed to her chest with both her free arms.

"Nice, very nice," she said, caressing her chest.

"They're tightly bound," a distant, shadowy voice tells him. Everything but her arms and head appeared to be tightly bound in what he assumed to be gauze.

"Tight," she responded to the voice. "Yah, tight, tight yah, yah." Her hands moved upward to her crotch; her right hand forcefully cupped the area. "Tight again, yah."

He gazed disinterestedly. She tried to smile. She tried to put him at ease. She tried to please.

"You like?" she giggled. "You like tight?"

Her voice resonated a sweet, erotic innocence; her wide untamed eyes betrayed an ingenuous mania concealed by skin and gauze. He ignored her and forged ahead through the series of dangling parcels. At close quarters, from a cursory glance, he could tell that some were asleep, hands defiantly crossed onto their chests. Others were completely immobile, their cold blue lips gave off not the slightest hint of life. A few, like the girl, brimmed with exuberance, overcome with energy - or maybe simply desire and hunger - threatening to burst the constraints that contained it.

"Come here," the shadowy voice commanded. It took him a moment to grasp where the voice came from. He waded through the misty, cool, nearly ubiquitous, fog filling the room. After traveling ten paces toward the presumable source of the voice - he made a habit of counting paces while exploring strange spaces, he saw the outline of a figure, dangling - perhaps floating - from a chain attached to the floor. It dangled - or floated - by its neck, feet facing skyward. The body was straight, perfectly perpendicular to the ground. Unlike the others, its arms, if it had arms, were not free.

"Come closer, I won't bite, unlike Helga there," the voice, now produced a cleaner, crisper sound. At closer proximity, the voice sounded familiar.

"Helga?" he asked, although he knew full well whom the voice referred to.

"Yes, she is tight, as she claim. But all who have dared to venture to that terrain have yet to return," the voice faded with every passing word into silence. It remained silent.

--

Misdirected passion led him to this room. His initial impression was as follows: there must be a reason these figures are here. He presumed these were domesticated brutes: sociopaths, accountants, retired pitchmen, lawyers, politicians, and debutantes. If freed, each would inflict untold horror on others. Collectively, they would annihilate humanity en masse. This was the reason, he believed. This was the reason why Helga, blessed with the elegant, flawless visage of a beauty queen dangled like a piece of butchered flesh. Justice cannot be without reason, nor reason without justice. He continually tried to convince himself of this.

He stared at the still shadowy figure, ostensible source of the enigmatic voice. He peered back and could see only a distant outline of Helga. He imagined she was licking her lips with a perverse formality, cupping her bounded breasts, letting out tiny, polite, lascivious moans.

"Words are truth," the voice continued. "Action, in its truest sense, is merely a series of accidents - haphazard, stupid, and without direction."

He knew the voice. He was certain now.

"Then again, isn't that how you have reached this point, Franz?"

He stood motionless, petrified by the sudden revelation. The voice, however, continued prodigiously.

"Impatience permits an inquisitive eye no more than a cursory glance at life. A reality of images, of supposed beauty and boundless enthusiasm, vibrant and unbounded, overwhelms the senses. The sensual transcends the senses. Physical, empirical, sensual beauty - this is what is fixated upon. Smooth, unblemished, perfect, abundant: an image is invested with all improbable aspirations - absolute unity cobbled from the infinitesimal fragments of salvation, immortality, and acclaim."

"Images, inviting images, erect icons, titans, and gods before the unseeing eyes of mere mortals. Alas, images lie; icons are mirages, distracting from the parched desertscape of sensory reality. Accursed recognition, hollow shallow glory - these manufactures of our natural egotism and shared insecurity."

The voice went silent, again. He walked five paces closer for a clearer look. But as he approached, the figure became increasingly pixellated.

"The image lies. Stand down, its useless to proceed any further." He heeded its reproach and retreated five paces. Helga's tiny moans grew louder in his mind. He imagined her tightness was a distraction by design. He cleared his mind, recalling a mantra the familiar voice once taught him, "Concentrate, concentrate, my dear old friend, concentrate..."

---

In prior times and a past life, he filled his days with activity. He was at a lost when idle; felt incomplete and profane. Every morning he would read the paper cover to cover, have a bagel - plain, no cheese, and mull over the current events on an early jog. Recurring sights blurred by as he ran his nine minute mile, three times, twenty seven minutes and he would be home; three minutes to strip and he'll be in the shower - under thirty minutes all told. The morning shower gave rise to mediative thoughts; profound musings, dripped in languor and which demanded patient attention, ended abruptly when the water ceased and he stepped in front of the mirror.

In and out in under five - a motto he rarely contravened, except on those lonesome occasions of involuntary arousal, which took some time to alleviate. Onanism provided occasion for prolonged thought. The mind emptied as his motor activity proceeded according to instinct and automatism. He would close his eyes to seek a complete image of existence. A random draw of ephemera streamed through him and into oblivion. As he approached alleviation, the images attained a startling clarity, intensifying a fear stirring beneath a well regimented life: an awareness that time is death unfolding without direction, without purpose, and without end. On occasion, when the fear struck him most potently, he would kneel down and watch the water, spiraling near the drain, carry off his spilled seed towards the sewer. The sight solidified a paradoxical neurosis. It made him feel at once a profound power and a miserable impotence. The spiraling stream of squandered sugars and proteins served as reminder of his power over life - its creation and cessation. But the sight of an infinitesimal series of possibilities now rendered impossible laid bare the fragility and insignificance of his own being - life, the most unlikely of impossibilities. These two paradoxical thoughts would often visit him, taking a brief, intense sojourn from the unconscious into waking life.

These thoughts passed away and quickly as they came and the activities of routine continued unabated with the precision of a metronome. But they would recur, coincidentally when primal desires overflowing its bounds and demanding, at least in his case, a most routine conclusion. After his morning shower followed brushing his teeth, shaving, and applying deodorant...

Poetry of the Damned

An inscription, scratched onto a bathroom stall of an unnameable place on a long forgotten island,

"The world's ending, let's go out fucking."

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?

Dirty, he felt dirty when he sat down at work. All those eyes were judging him. Those eyes, whether he saw them or not, were tearing him down with burgeoning piece of wispy hearsay. His affair with the recently fired receptionist, the one with the fetching blue eyes, was popular water-cooler gossip. The two were caught in a supply room, after hours, by an eighty year old custodian named Art. Art, who, in his younger days, had similar indiscretions, thoroughly sympathized with their predicament and promised to keep their secret on one condition: he got to watch. He escorted Art outside and left the door open a crack, enough for a curious prying eye to catch a glimpse. The two were utterly absorbed with the task they shared, so much so that they were oblivious to the sound of Art collapsing - dead, and lecherous grin frozen for all time.

inept gratification

[...]

His eyes became fixated on the snowy landscape, passed and forgotten by the bus. He let out a sigh and looked down at his blank notebook. He scribbled the following:

"inept gratification...ceaseless desiring...the end, the end, the end?"

The sheet was crumpled, torn up, and deposited into the 'trash' compartment of his bag. He turned to the snowy July landscape, his head heavy with nostalgia. He remembered taking in the crisp cold air into his lungs. He remembered the acrid scent of snow brewing in the clouds above. The autumn palette of infinite shades of red and brown soon would be overwhelmed by the multitudinous luminosity of snow - which left nothing untouched.

Snow in July was an inept gratification, a cheap substitute, and untimely, albeit cleverly crafted, insult to persistent, slowly fading, memories. Soon, even the remembrances would pass and be forgotten - as obsolescent as the world that inspired them.

He looked at his watch again to check on its condition. It read: 7:45AM. It was accurate. The bus approached the terminal in front of the building where he worked. The bus ran like clockwork as usual. He left the terminal at 7:47AM and the conveyor floor moved him towards the office, arriving at 7:53AM - on time, always on time.

Quarter past seven

Sunrise,

infinite sadness awakened him.

He glared at the alarm. It failed to go off, again.

Evolved,

humanity evolved involved three strips of bacon, egg whites, instant oatmeal, and a cup of generic coffee. Humanity devolved, well, was all over the morning paper's front page.

"Work,

you work to get paid,

get paid to get laid" -

He silently recited his mantra in front of the mirror while brushing his teeth. He grabbed at the floss to finish, but, oddly, there was no more. Since he had never flossed until then, its absence struck him as odd. He reached for the mouthwash - it would make due.

Getting dressed, getting ready, he checked his timepiece - quarter past seven; the bus would arrive in seven minutes. He rechecked his lunch, deemed it to be rather scarce and dropped an apple into the nylon bag. Satisfied with his planned midday nutritional intake, he headed for the bus stop and checked his watch - a force of habit. It read: quarter past seven. He panicked. Did it malfunction??? Did he miss his bus??? More importantly, was he going to be late??? He paced frantically, until he saw an elderly lady walk towards the stop.

"Hello madam, would you happen to have the time?"

"Quarter past seven," she replied, showing him the face of her wristwatch.

[...]

Control...

Control, concentration, calm, care;

Get control...concentrate, old friend...sputter away with courage...let the stream carry you to oblivion, concentrate with concern...control is futile, fortuna has your balls in a vice....stream to oblivion...sweet sexy stream of oblivion....without care to soothe, where mice moo, and cows gnaws on giant blocks of gouda - SACRILEGE!

Control...control control...concentrate on careful concentrations...dig in, set up, its a long way til the bottom, babe....careful, careful, now calmly, slip out of it, slink them to your heels, there you go, careful, careful, caress - concentrate, concentrate, concentrate....CONCENTRATE!

Care, with crack. Care with cruelty - cruel, criminal, care. Meticulous, inexorably so. The tiniest fleck opens a conscious stream into nullitude. Cruel, cruel, care...

Calm....calm....calm....control is gone....calm, cool cowering calm, croons a diddy - "CONCENTRATE! CONCENTRATE! CONCENTRATE!"

Concentrate, old friend; concentrate.

Dear...

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

And on and on it went.

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

You want to hear more?

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

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

One more before we move on.

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

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

The Avatar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Admirers plotted my ruination,
institutionalized my desecration."

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

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

"They have forgotten you..."

"...the moment I passed."

Despondent words accompanied his melancholy,

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

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

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

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

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

lasciate ogni speranza

Reluctance.

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