It's a small world after all...

I recall feeling inexplicably unhappy on a visit to Disneyland as a child. My childhood was not an unhappy one - my parents loved and cared for me, provided most things a child would need or should want, and they took me to places that they thought were integral to youth, such as Disneyland. They loved me and always wanted the best for me. Yet, as a child walking around in 'the happiest place on earth', I felt quite despondent.

One of my most vivid memories of that day was of walking out of the "It's a small world..." attraction in an unhappy mood. My mother could not understand the behaviour of her eldest son, and scolded me, "You're in Disneyland, what else could you want? Now don't be throwing a tantrum". She chalked it up to the periodic bratiness of a child and did what any mother would do, put her foot down to snuff out any misbehaviour. But it wasn't my bratty nature coming out. Sometimes I wish it was that simple. In fact, it was a "revelation" that was to blame for my melancholy. As the boat-cart carried my family through the attraction, I realized that the majority of children around the world were not singing and dancing to a silly ear-worm inducing song - most were starving, unclothed, without a roof over their heads, or without parents at all. And most were lucky to live beyond their twelfth year, much less be visiting Disneyland. I knew then that I couldn't be happy with sugar-coated illusion so stilted and parochial that it made a young boy utterly depressed while in the "happiest place on earth". It was then, at that instant, did the world start to come into bold clarity for this relatively sheltered child.

Alot of mistakes made in my childhood, my adolescence, and even my early adult life can be attributed to an inclination towards bratiness. But that moment of depression at Disneyland was not. It was an awakening that I would embrace and push away - one that stayed regardless of the ebb and flow of its intensity. Years later, that clarity has been lost, regained, and hopefully strengthened. Any worthwhile truth is elusive, because any worthy truth cannot be possessed or grasped absolutely. We can only live truthfully with ourselves, with friends and family, and with those whom we have yet to encounter. We must face the world with honesty and conviction and never afraid to be unhappy, because life is at times a tragic affair.

He was a Crook

HUNTER S. THOMPSON
'He was a crook'
Jun 16, 1994

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

DATE: MAY 1, 1994

FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER....HE WAS A LIAR ND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA. ...BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."--REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know Iwill go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive--and he was, all theway to the end--we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instinctsof a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by thehead with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style--and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable--some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers--but they knew there was nothing they could do about it--not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments--most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise--a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.) It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director--who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says--and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. he was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that--but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure, Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancée's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization ... involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation?"

The empty wanderer

He ran away from his problems and ended up on an island. But soon he discovered that even an island could not detach him from his troubles. The disturbance within would ebb and flow. He often sat on the shore enthralled by waves crashing onto the sandy beach but ineluctably disappointed by the receding tide. Soon he grew bored with the beach and its fickle waves. He would find new distractions, always ending up worse than before. He searched for peace in the seclusion of wilderness and sat for years in pure stillness. Alas, he could not stand repressive serenity. Three years passed and he was ill-equipped to cope with himself. He abandoned nature and returned to sensuality.

They told him not to fritter his time away, not to idolize the pondering wanderer. But he did. He loved to wander - not to know where he was going, or when he would get there. He loved the distractions of the island, its slow deliberate pace. He loved the cabana boys who slaved for his enjoyment. But they did not love him. They loathed how his meaningless decadence. They loathed his lecherous gaze and despised his overt predation. One day, he was found strangled, with a half-full pina colada in his right hand.

The Coming War

The Coming War is between forces on each side of a vast emptiness. Once markets collapse, illusions lose their strength. When money and contracts no longer can constrain antagonism, the first salvo will be launched. First, it will be a battle of vitriol, then sabre-rattling. And ultimately, each will be raised as THE Great Evil. The Great Evil is no longer one that threatens the soul. The Great Evil threatens hegemony. The Great Evil threatens to dominate, threatens to repress…threathening to displace the current machine of repression and domination. Where shall you stand in the Great War? I am at the margins. I have no home. On one side, I face patronization. I am still immature in their eyes, and always will be. On the other, I am corrupted; impure, I am infected by foreign values. I was born at the margins, and raised to aspire for the norm. What norm can exist in a time of war? But when the war comes, where can I stand? Will I be tore to shreds being pulled in infinitesimal directions? Or will I stand alone as passive observer, chronicler of the End? Here I stand …at the margin between worlds lost to each other…at the edge of a universe on the verge of annihilation.

Armageddon of Banality

Frank was born and raised in line. After his parents passed on, he talked to the girl before him in line. They traded significantly irrelevant information: name, age, number in line. He then asked the question he desperately wanted an answer to. He unzipped his pants and asked her what the fleshy appendage was. She answered with her lips and the line moved. Having received an answer he asked another.

“Why are we in line, girl?” She confessed that her father might have once knew but he was now gone, neglecting to leave her with that knowledge. The line extended to the ends of the earth - origin and end as if one in the same. East and West, left and right were untenable categories.

“Let’s go this way, girl”, he said pointed in one direction.

“No, let’s go this way”, she pointed in the other. The question of direction consumed them, for neither knew where the End was. Others in line started to debate as well; the End is there, here, up over where? Unquestionably puzzled by the futility of the chatter, they stepped out of line, walked in a random direction, and in search of futile answers to a question already forgotten.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

“A line to Armageddon?”

“Yes, you have stepped out of line and Armageddon will elude you.” They looked out over at the window past the drab curtains and saw the meadow.

“But if Armageddon is the End, who processes these applications?”

“The Fire.”

The Officer continued, “The Fire purifies; vessel to Eternity.”

Dennis and the Reverend

“God is Dead. The flames of hell have gone out!” blared from a public announce system. Dennis walked into the church, ignoring the noise. However, his fellow parishioners reacted adversely to the chant, shouting and shaking their fists in a futile pantomime. He suspected that neither side listened to the other and proceeded quietly to his pew. After the reverend cursed his agitators to hell, he composed himself and led the congregation inside. The reverend began his sermon and Dennis settled into a peaceful slumber. Rather than ignore his napping parishioner, the already agitated good reverend lashed out.

“How dare you! How dare you sleep through God’s word?!?” Dennis was shaken from his slumber by sanctimonious bellowing, looked at the reverend, and shifted back into a more comfortable sleeping position. The reverend was now inconsolably outraged and rocketed out of his pulpit to confront the sleeping parishioner. Dennis slept through more admonishments until the reverend led him forcefully to the front of the congregation; it was his intention to give him a dressing down.

“Dennis, God loves you as he does all his children. But why? Why do you persist in disrespecting the House of God on the Sabbath?” Dennis was unhappy that the reverend thoughtlessly wrecked his day of rest.

“Reverend, you say this is the Sabbath. What did God do on the Sabbath? Yes reverend, God rested on the seventh day. I sleep to honour...”

“God is Dead. The flames of hell have gone out!” The pronouncement drowned out Dennis' last words. As the reverend once again shouted futilely at the agitator. Dennis yawned at the whole affair, only to face the wrath of the congregation. “Blasphemer!” they bellowed and converged on him, tearing him limb from limb.

The reverend stepped over the remains and continued his sermon.

I walked while they talked

I walked while they talked.

I hopped in and was off.
They could keep all of it.
I had no need for those things.

Where would I end up?

I had no clue. I just wanted to go.

I saw the stop sign. I went through.
Not in rebellion,
or indifference;
I didn’t want to stop so soon.

I rolled and rolled and rolled,
grey blurred into green.

Soon it stalled.
I dumped it and walked.

I was nowhere, but it seemed like somewhere.

I took in a breath. A long whiff; inhale exhale.
I hadn’t breathed in sometime. It was fresh and almost free.

The light grew fainter…

dimmed…

faded…

and…

was gone.

I walked and wandered, followed the sky.
The Dipper, the Cowboy, the North Star,
soon gave way to morning.

I took a breath of the morning air and hacked.

It claimed to be somewhere, but was nowhere.

The monsters were there,
grunting like the ones I had abandoned.
Waste all around.
Joy nowhere to be found.

I am nowhere, yearning to be somewhere;
dying with every breath.
Withering beauty,
my beloved is lost.

We learn too well to think

Depression, alienation, and isolation; these meld to form the norm. I despise. I loathe. I hate. And I disdain. I am quick to judgment, incapable of thought or attentiveness. I am modern man – the most bungled of perfect creatures. Crudely sophisticated distractions numb the pain, repress my destructive fury, and allow me to put on that glorious smile dripping saccharine; the image makes it all okay. We learn too well, are too easy to train, and malleable for all sorts of tasks. We learn well and forget to think.

Man loathes his mortality and envious of the eternal cosmos. He desires a grand reduction, to bring eternity into individual mortality. Those who pursue greatness unto death brings the world into the self and refuses humanity. He wants to walk among gods by annihilating the imperfection known as man. The universe is no larger than his enclosure. He grins as he stares through the screen door, watching the bugs slam into each other and plummet to earth. All is well. All is mine, as lord of minutia. But, the bars of the cage are still there in spite of particular delusions of grandeur. The universe brought into the self is no larger than two bugs colliding into each other. The world will go on without him, as it will go on without the bugs. As individual, man is no god, simply a deluded bug. In togetherness, he stands in fellowship with life and the universe.

Rainmaker man

As he stood on the edge of the bridge, the voice on the megaphone read cue cards and the voice in his head told him to do it. He contemplated the fate that laid below, above, and in between; all the while with voices talking at him. It was a rather calm scene for him, in spite of the surrounding commotion. Vertigo. Blissful vertigo. The megaphone echoed incomphrensibly; the voice told him to jump.

Paying no attention to the voices, he gazed below at the afternoon sun glistening off the distant water. He found it unbearable and tilted his head upwards towards the cloudless sky. Sunshine had always depressed him and it was no different on this particular day. He wanted it to rain, in the worst of ways. But he didn't control the heavens, regardless of what the voice told him.

Jump and you'll make rain! the voice said, now changing its tact. Rainmaker man, that's what you are - plunge in and make it fucking rain! He looked despondently at the helicopters. Why do they have helicopters for this, he thought. Somewhere there must be murder, rape, robbery, and of all sorts of stuff going down. Why were they so concerned about him standing on the edge of a bridge?

They can't let you die, the voice returned. Why? Jump. Jump and you'll make a mockery of them. Jump, take the plunge and erase everything they have over you. Their power, their repression, their authority vanishes like that. Free! Released! You'll be free, don't you see? Free! Why don't you just do it, you rebel! Make your mark!

Vertigo. Blissful vertigo; baring weakness for all to see. Help me! Jump! Please get off the bridge! Help me! Jump! Plunge! Over the edge, you go. Vertiginous sounds, each emptier than the next. Hollow noise, constant clamour. Jump! Don't do it, there are other ways, poison; noose; bathtub gore; sliced piece by piece; bullets; immolation; electric, fried body; and JUMP! Spin. Spin. Take the Leap. Vertigo. Blissful vertigo stretching to the depths.

He looked towards the bridge; the negotiator was approaching, a heavy-set guy with a bald dome and a couple whiskers sprouting above his upper lip. A contemptibly cardboard cop, he thought. Instant deja vu.

"Now, son, you've got the rest of your life ahead of you. Whatever is troubling you now, we can work through it together. We promise you..." the negotiator paused momentarily, as if trying to muster a little more. But it was too late. The boy was on his way.

He ended up in the water. Spining the whole way down. The bliss of vertigo was there to the bitter end. On the way down, he saw the officer's face; the face of a vanished father, tears raining down for a forgotten son.

"...I promise you."

----------

...
.........
..............
......................
.................................
.........................................
.....................................................
...............................................................

............................................................................

What will you most regret? Never having teenage love between the sheets.

Really? Yeah, prom night happened in the back alley of a Denny's.

Oh. Okay.

What will you miss the most? The rain.

Figures.

Who will you miss the most? My dog Skip.

Alrighty.

Last question: Do you believe in God? Hell no.

Alright, we are done here. It will take about 6-8 weeks for processing. At that time you will enter our re-training program and we'll get you started on your new assignment ASAP. Just sign here and here - and please feel free to visit the sites while here.

What is there to see? It kind of looks like a void.

Well, there is where you are wrong. A void is anything you'd like. So please explore.

What if I wanted to be in a brothel?

Think it and it will be.

Um, how about a brothel full of chicks without dicks?

It is the product of your thoughts. We can do nothing to change it.

What are you insinuating?

Nothing at all. It is what you imagine it to be, only you can control it.

I wasn't thinking about trannies!

It is what it is.

Um, okay. And what is 6-8 weeks in a void anyway?

About 2-3 days earth time.

Why didn't you just say that?

Can't. Company policy.

The fucking voice lied to me.

Shall we become intimate?

Another cloud mushrooms somewhere in the distant sky.

"Is that it?"

"Let's hope so"

Another cloud rises.

"Is that it?"

"Probably not."

Several clouds erupt, growing less and less distant.

"They're closing in."

"It doesn't matter anymore. All is lost."

They sit down; eyes fixed on the horizon.

"Shall we become intimate?"

A hand reaches out to no response.

"Intimacy is of no use."

And as the clouds choke the sky above, they accept their fate.

"Ashes to ashes..."

"...dust to dust."

They nod and vanish.

Damien?

I was riding the bus the other day, listening to Modest Mouse on my IPod shuffle and reading my copy of Kafka On The Shore, when a small child, about six years old, walked up to me to say hi. I waved politely - acknowledging his presence and reassuring his mother, sitting a few rolls back, that her wandering boy was okay. But the little boy anxiously tried to tell me something, motioning for me to take out my ear plugs. I played along and took out the earphones and motioned for him to sit down in the seat beside me. I asked him how his day was going. And like any precoious young boy, he recounted his day in detail. He informed me that his mom had taken him to Gyro Beach for most of the afternoon. He went on the swing, the slide, and the monkey bars - he was quite adept at the monkey bars, a fact that he was proud to share. I smiled and commended his proficiency on the bars; confessing that I was no good at them when I was his age. Then I asked him whether he got good at the monkey bars while playing with his friends. But he responded by shaking his head.

"I have no friends," he said, erupting into a laughing fit. I smiled and pressed that surely he had shared time on the playground with other kids and they could be considered friends - even in the broadest of terms.

"No friends," he said again, as his face took on a bleaker pallor. I tried to reassure him that his superb ability on the monkey bars would surely impress in the future and win him friends.

"I won't ever have any friends," he said, but this time with a wry smile that seemed out of place on the face of a six-year old. "Damien tells me that friendship is not for me."

"Who's Damien?" I asked him, now slightly perturbed by his responses.

"Damien's in my head...he tells me things."

"Oh, I guess Damien could be an invisible friend." I said, unsure of whether I wanted to know what Damien was telling this boy.

"He tells me you are a...kind red spirit..." he paused, as if waiting to relay the last of Damien's message, "...and that you will not burn...when the time comes."

Once again, I smiled. I couldn't help but smile. And of course, I didn't know how quite to respond, apart from posing the obvious question.

"When what time comes?"

"When it is time for all to sleep," he replied with a slightly less innocuous giggle and ran off to join his mother, as the bus pulled up to their stop. I waved bye to them and put my earphones back into place. As I watched the boy and his mom walk away from the bus stop, I noticed a couple preoccupied with a gaggle of shopping bags walk past a man sleeping on a bus bench and wondered if we weren't already all asleep.

Kitsch

Kitsch, invariably, makes life bearable. Kitsch turns shit into gold. Kitsch is rapid obsolescence; a fad fades away before it launches. Without kitsch, all we would see would be shit. Without the possibility of irony, all would be serious and without play. We all end up kitsch; epiphets on would-be headstones attest to that (Kundera). The world free of kitsch would be unlivable, because we would see the shit. Everything is shit without kitsch. Kitsch is a placeholder, a necessary illusion, until we can find meaning in silence, find comfort in nothing, and discover reality apart from image.

Clam up boy

Clam up boy,
there's much to fear,
abandon hope,
cry to mommy,
cry to daddy,
soak them,
with your snivelling tears;
failure is man's everyday destiny,
without mommy-daddy.

Freshman

Once upon a time,
in an office space,
a freshman left breathless,
by mundane complexity;
life in a textbook,
stuck on repeat -
a disc projects,
images as images,
and nothing more.

Images of a fight,
a desperate flight,
from a broken home,
and the image of a lonely road -
returning,
to start again;
all images return,
stuck on repeat.

Alas,
monotony reigns supreme,
dulled sensations,
turning circles,
craving for response,
and only getting dictates;
there is no silence or rest,
for the programme in full effect.

Then there is touch,
most immediate of sensations,
reduced to mere mechanics,
enslaved by proximity;
discordant intimacy -
ah, there's the rush,
the endless meander, trifling saunter,
towards catharsis.

G-A or A-G

G: This photographic memory, what a curse! What a pain! I wish I could forget and live today.

A: But you can't live without recollection. Man cannot be without recollection.

G: How so?

A: Without recollection, there's no ground for our being here now.

G: On the shoulders of giants?

A: No, no...more like, uh, the origin we don't know.

G: Who cares about an unknown and incomprehensible origin?

A: You're here, right?

G: Yeah.

A: I'm here, right?

G: Sure.

A: We're here, right?

G: Yes, so?

A: That's all there is to origins. Besides, it beats obssessing about the end.

G: What about numerology and Nostradamus? He knew the end...

A: But could do nothing to escape his own demise. Plus, Nostradamus couldn't prophesize his erection while masturbating. You can't know the end. Nobody can.

G: What if I hung myself? Would I not be able to will the end?

A: No, you could will your own end, but not the end. The world will go on without you or without me.

G: What if I were to take a whole lot of you with me?

A: The world would still go on.

G: What if I were to wipe out everything, every living thing?

A: Man's destruction cannot be total, even if he likes to think he has that power. The world would recover and go on.

G: But in what sense would there be a world without man to confirm that it exists?

A: On the other hand, what is man without his being in the world?

G: Nothing, I guess.

Hamstrung

Hamstrung, testing, testing,
one, two, three,
thunderbolt,
doubled in succession;
why, why, why,
isn't thunder just flatulence?

Hamstrung, whimper and cry,
where, where, where,
is all the time?
Blue and green,
dribbling, dripping,
and expiring;
never to be seen.

Hamstrung, tender snore;
tardy, tardy, forevermore,
what, what, what,
will come of the day,
not yet imagined,
in an image-Way.

Hamstrung, tried and true;
heads roll and stain the streets,
red, white, and blue,
the king's head on a pike,
the emperor's in the nude,
so who, who, who,
is next in line;
for throne and gallows,
is mere difference in kind.

Locked on repeat

Locked on repeat,
the seconds, the minutes,
the hours, the days,
and on, and on,
the weeks, the months,
the years, the decades,
and on, and on,
centuries and epochs,
and on,
and on,
and on,
strains along,
ending at the beginning;
the absurd category,
of the formless,
elusive, ether-like, substance of life,
known as time.

Dream machines,
conceal the nightmares,
of time out of joint;
straining to inspire, to bemuse,
to arouse and abuse,
the disenchanted and bored;
happy to pass time,
and wait for the end.

Melodies spin hypnosis,
to a familiar beat -
chewing bubblegummed synapses,
on the elevator,
in the mall,
and on the street.
You know,
it's still on repeat.
Out of element, out of place,
skip,
shuffle,
switch,
repeat.

Come here,
and touch the sky,
go on and plummet,
plunge, freefall, and spiral,
towards great heights.


Study the text,
register the surface,
for the title says all,
and the pages say nothing.

The Word unquestioned,
remains absolute;
peddling facility,
posing as redemption -
for the one and only.

Hope is the dawg,
who gets into heaven anyways.

The doomed believer,
soaked in saccharine,
clutches onto dogma,
and searches skyward,
for the Fatherly corpse -
beset by rigormortis.

Still it is nothing,
if not everything,
for what possibilities lie Beyond?

Possibilities, possibilities,
infinitismal in hand;
yet abysmally incomplete.

Time is not paused,
it passes and returns,
here and again.

Locked on repeat,
sputtering along,
yearning for end;
only to begin again,
to unconscious return,
onwards anew;
a virgin instant restored?

Restless

Restless in a constant way,
occupied with boundless thoughts,
about what was,
about what might be,
and about time --
where did it go,
what does it do?

Time has passed,
or was squandered?
Does it hang above all,
beyond reach and comprehension,
fated to crush us into submission?
If this is true,
then inevitablity will scar me,
branding my flesh:
doomed.

Pathetic resignation leads to the pit;
just you and me,
the dark lord,
and your saviour
- with no way out,
unsure of why we are there.
Yet the admonishments continue:
"Time is at an end;
accept eternity or be banished."

With refusal comes tribulation;
adversity presses against me,
against you,
against you and I?
You and I,
together in the world of the inane,
forever confronted by the absurd.

Soon, we realize that time has no destiny,
for there is no abysmal fate;
because it is nothing
without presence,
here and now.

Look up and listen,
what do you hear?
Silence, boundless silence.
No sacred words,
or edicts from on high,
still just you and I.

Between you and I --
silence mustn't rule.

Restless in a boundless way,
with constant thoughts,
about what was,
about what will be,
and about now --
what shall be done,
in response to here and now,
in response to an incommensurable present?

Let go

Let go. You have to let go.
Holding on compounds pain.
Holding on compounds frustration.
Let go. You must let go.
Lingering stagnation.
Lingering on will destroy you.
Let go. You can let go.
Sentiment is irrelevant,
attachment futile.
Let go. You have to let go.

Sweet paradise?

Trapped for escape,
it bursts through the crust.

What emerges?

A dark pus,
tasting ever so sweet.

Tasty?
Then do continue to lap it up.

What is seen now?

The bright...brightest of light...
illumination upon illumination;
blinding iridescence calling to unbearable rapture.

Yes, soon it will cease to matter,
whether it is nothing
or everything!

Lap it up, the voluminous treat
- continue as you are.

What do you feel?

A comforting rage against this bile;
I have consented to...servitude.

Yes,
ecstatic servtiude gives birth,
embrace rebirth,
embrace the poison.


No! No! I see through now;
it gives birth to the Reaper...
as saccharine seductress.




There is no use in resisting;
want is now need,
triumphant atop your crumbled will.

Is there no escape?

None at all.
The poison is within you
you will succumb;
your fate is sealed.





I will fight even an ill-fated fight;
for no demise is worse than one suffered on my knees.

It circulates even now,
and it was you,
you who ingested it,
allowing it to flow so freely within.

Don't you feel guilt?
This is the fate you have chosen.
To fight now is foolish;
a foolish fight against oneself.









I see clearly now.
The poison has no affect.
It is nothing
- mere illusion.

I fight not for purity,
not for myself,
not for the eternal.
I fight on,
I must fight on,
because I still am,
here and now,
naked and flawed;
in no need of vestment,
in no need of nectar,
and in no need for paradise
- vacuous and hollow.

Doom is assured,
for the one who submits;
I refuse.