Medication

"You didn't take you meds, did you?"

He ignored my question, opened up the fridge, unwrapped a day old ham sandwich and took a bite.

"Hey, nephew, you're here on my dime. You're here for amusement and companionship and conversation. You're not my nurse," he said, mouth half-full with sandwich and belligerence. He opened up a cabinet and shoved his head in, ostensibly in search of something.

"Don't just stand there," I heard his doubly muffled voice. "Come help me find the Jaeger." He pulled out the bottle and took a long satisfying gulp before I could be of any assistance.

"Here, have some."

"Its a little too early for that, Uncle Vance."

"Its never too early, never too late, for..." he downed another voluminous swig, and extended the bottle as a wordless invitation. I accepted.

A few dueling swigs later, Vance held an empty bottle.

"You know, son," he looked penetratingly at his vanquished friend-foe. "We all need something to make life bearable. Some prefer expensive cars. Some enjoy cheap women adorned with pricey trinkets. Others prefer the company of a book to anything else. They name their boredom hobbies or interests or sex or a career. In the end, they grow tire of it and buy a better car and find a cheaper whore and go to a movie. More or less, the majority of humanity are intransigents desperately denying an inescapable desire: to be done with it all."

"Something keeps us going. You know what that is?" He asked me.

"Fear."

"Yeah. As much as we want to be waltzing with the Reaper under a starless sky, we are afraid of what follows."

"Nothing follows," I said rather confidently. His eyes turned from the bottle up to meet mine.

"Are you certain of this?"

"Well, no. There is no certainty either way. All there is is belief."

"Speculation. All there is is speculation - desperate attempts at making the ineffable coherent, the uncertain definite, and providing consolation for earthly misery," he took a final bite of his sandwich. He finished chewing and continued.

"Eventually, if you're around long enough, life becomes an extended bout of quiet exasperation." He finally tossed the empty bottle into an almost full bin - I would soon escort them to the nearest liquor store in exchange for another round.

"You're how old now?"

"I'm 25."

[incomplete]

Los Alamos

From Shiv Visvanathan's A Carnival of Science:

"At first sight, the appearance of these towns is deceptive. Their antiseptic affluence hides their totalitarian intent; their suburban comfort, the banalization of evil in modern society. 'Walking through its main street, with artificially watered lawns...in front of standardized houses pained in bright Easter egg colours,' Jungk notices children playing a new variant of hopscotch with squares marked radioactive and uncontaminated. Los Alamos is advertised as a virtuous, high IQ town with no one either idle or unemployed. Jungk remarks:

It would not need all these superlatives to show me that Los Alamos is a quite exceptional place. Actually this walled settlement on a plateau three thousand feet high should not be called a town at all. For any town must have some proportion of freedom in order to be able to develop and live, even to be able to die. But the collection of houses and workshops on the hill above the Rio Grande is an artificial and arbitrary product. It will never be acquired and the whole population is looked upon as transient. If a man gives up his job, if he is discharged or pensioned, he must give up his house which belongs to the government and leaves Los Alamos.

For this reason, one never sees old people here, except a few indispensable scientific pundits. The children will have to leave once they reach working age. They can only remain only if they find a job here after passing security department's personality and aptitude tests. 'There is no staying on in the town where they are born and reared.'

Los Alamos represents the final resolution of liberal science. For liberalism, the private was sacred and the public was open and accessible. In a bizzare inversion, vivisectionist science has opened up the privacy of the body and soul to the public scrutiny of the clinical gaze, while science as public knowledge has become increasingly secret and forced into the most monstrous of total institutions - the research cities of the twentieth century. One is left with a deep suspicion that the transition from the university to the company town was effected not on grounds of efficiency but for reasons of state. The company town facilitated external control of scientific research."

21 again

Pensive, concerned about impending death, he stared into the mirror. He saw the reaper, glistening off his bald spot, smiling back. Vanity elaborates upon that most ultimate of neurosis.

What will they say? How will they remember me? Will they make my corpse look presentable?

He could not help it. It eroded everyday. He began to pity himself.

Ah, pity was easy - and empty. Pity was for the weak. Pity was for those who wanted to be down, lower than down, rolling around in mud, shedding futile tears. Pity helped no one. Self-pity is bad, he thought, the desire for sympathy worse.

To ask for sympathy, to lay prone in wait of compassion or salvation, rarely amounts to much. One is more likely to be kicked while down. One is exposed to ridicule, insults, exploitation, and contrived charity. Nothing hurts like being patronized by a grinning self-satisfied bastard with red-tinted sunglasses trying to sell you on a bonehead idea or product, in the name of a Cause. Reverend Quincy tells him to shove his cologne bottle up his arse. Reverend Quincy turns around and pitches you a book about his misadventures with consumerism, cocaine, coconuts, and cream pies. He's selling it, ya know, for a price, cause ol' Reverend Quincy ain't no charity either. Neither was old JC, Temple tantrum notwithstanding.

He turned on the television. An inventor guy was selling toupee-in-a-can. He sprayed it on a balding old woman. She screeched with joy.

"Oh, thank you, thank you," she began. "I look 21 again!"

If that's what she looked like at 21, he contemplated, she should've stayed in her cave. Although unimpressed by the old woman's contrived reaction, the product itself impressed him nonetheless. He scanned the television screen for more information. Nope, there was no price. Nope, not a phone number in sight. Nope, nothing but the image of an old woman preening in the mirror like a teen queen before prom.

"Want to know more?" the inventor pointed to the folks out in TV land. "Stay tuned for our special celebrity client!"

The clock struck 1:30AM. He stayed tuned, barely riveted, insomnia's reluctant captive.

No guidance. I have no guidance, he thought. I need no guidance; it would only make things worse. Guidance makes you dependent, renders you a child. I have no guidance, will give no guidance. The best advice to provide is silence. Those who ask for advice desire sympathy and pity. Pitiful, absolutely pitiful. O, woe, woe, woe is me. What should I do? What would ol' JC do? He would tell you to shut up and JUST DO IT! Imagine that endorsement deal? What would you pay a supposed messiah to hawk your shit? Six? seven? eight? maybe ten figures? Or your first born? Even better question: what would you pay for divine guidance? Your immortal soul? Damnation, thats steep!

He waited, with less than bated breath, for the special celebrity endorser.

"We're back!" Commercial breaks during an infomercial, brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

'Twas me and Sunday melancholy

'Twas me and Sunday melancholy sitting on the porch, gazing at grazing rabble. They had questions, lots of them.

"Should I hold it or sell it?"

"Grade me, recognize me, am I worthy?"

"Why do I see nothing when I look up?"

"Contestant one is cute, but contestant two can sing - who should I vote for?"

'Twas me and Sunday melancholy sitting on the porch, unmoved, watching them sink.

"Should I hold or sell?"

"What's the best way to ensure financial security in the afterlife?"

"Can I take it with me? All of it?"

"Where can I get my virgins?"

'Twas me and Sunday melancholy, wondering when the plumber will arrive.

Monday, perhaps? Maybe Tuesday?

With water up to the waist, time dissipates. All may be at an end.

"Fiduciary, ya douche!" A majestic voice bellows then sinks into oblivion. Ah, salvation, how bittersweet.

F-I-D-U-C-I-A-R-Y

“Fiduciary, you douche. F-I-D-U-C-I-A-R-Y, you knuckle dragging Neanderthal.” He continued his sanctimonious tirade with his Moleskines tucked majestically under his left arm.

“You must really be a cretin not to understand what fiduciary is.”

Jeffrey, unphased by the torrent of condescension, posed the question again.

“What does fiduciary mean?”

Mr. Moleskine regurgitated his abuse, unable to understand Jeffrey’s intention.

It was time for me to intervene.

“What my associate here means is: money, what is it good for? What is it’s intrinsic value? The question isn’t inquiring about a definition – it desires meaning. What does fiduciary mean beneath the surface?”

He laughed derisively.

“Everything. Money means everything. What stands between us and death is money.”

[being]

[oblivion]

Bestand took my hand

“Werewolf?”

“Yeah, a werewolf.”

“You mean to tell me a werewolf took your hand?”

“Sure looks that way.” His bedraggled face betrayed nary a trace of irony.

“Well, did it or he or she gnaw it off?”

“No, don’t be silly, nephew. He used the machete.” I had suspected the machete was the culprit – never thought a supposed werewolf was the one wielding it. Noticing that the moon had only recently appeared in the night sky, I asked an obvious question.

“Wait, it must have been bright out when the ‘werewolf’ chopped your hand off. How can a werewolf possibly skulk around in broad daylight?”

“That moon and the werewolf is pure superstitious hooey,” once again, no irony to be found. “This fucking son of a bitch is a permanent wolf.”

“Then it was a wolf, who knew how to use a machete that cut off your hand. Not a werewolf.”

“Boy,” Vance would call me boy when he was royally annoyed, “get your head out of your ass. A werewolf differs from a wolf insofar as he possesses marginally human traits, such as the ability to use a fucking machete.” His emphasised expletive made me abandon the fruitless inquiry regarding nomenclature.

“So was there something odd about this werewolf?” I asked. Vance paused, placing his bandage stub to his chin, as if he was about to enter a deep place of meditation.

“Bestand,” he added. “He said ‘Bestand’ over and over again.”

“So it was a German werewolf. This is one screwy werewolf.”

“Bestand…bestand…bestand…it said it three times,” he was an it now apparently. “Then the rat bastard sliced my hand off.”

“Sounds like the werewolf went mad from reading too much Heidegger,” I said rather matter-of-factly.

“Sure could be the case,” Vance replied, slowing exhibiting the effects of blood loss. “She had these oddly rodent features. It kind of looked like Heidegger.”

“Was it wearing a swastika armband?” I asked with utter seriousness.

“Not sure, the blinding pain of losing an appendage kind of muddied that up.”

I thought it appropriate to sum up the details as they stood. “So it was an incomprehensible, proto-Nazi werewolf who knows how to use a machete,” I paused for dramatic effect. “That’s something else, Uncle Vance. You sure it wasn’t bigfoot on a bender?”

“Hey nephew.” His voice started to fade.

“Yeah.”

“Could I interrupt your little anthropological cabinet of wondrous speculations and ask if you can get me to a hospital?”

“Why sure you can, unkie Vance.”

I sat in the helicopter as it ferried Vance to Foothills Hospital. Gazing at the dark landscape below, it struck me: there was some mad wonderfully murderous creature, possibly an anti-Semitic machete-wielding werewolf, somewhere out there. And I was going to find it or him or her.

"Welcome to your hell..."

Free falling from an incredible height, his life flashed by and a realization dawned on him: what a banal normal existence it was.

“Pull the cord,” a distant desperate voice shouted. He pulled, but to no avail. Spiraling towards unforgiving earth below, his thoughts turned to death and the possibility of living beyond the final splatter.

A wading pool flanked by palm trees, a gentle gust run its fingers through the leaves. Soothing surrender – “it’s time to give it up”, the breeze whispers with ominous gentility.

Fruit bowls – filled with grapes, nectarines, bananas, and strawberries – await in an misty acropolis. “How odd,” he thought. “Here I am plummeting, but paradise is supposedly up above.” He did not dare to look up.

Beauties, draped in white silk, feed him grapes - defilement follows decadence. There were no warriors to be found on the downward spiral. Thoughts of defilement pleased the falling man nonetheless.

A sudden vision interrupted. Eternal fires stoked by agony – a logical end for a plummeting buffoon. Barking dogs – woof, woof, woof – greet welcomed newcomers. The master of ceremonies emerges from his molten resting place.

“Welcome to your hell…”

The interminable descent frustrated him. Doom or salvation, but the wait he could not bear. He ran out of fanciful visions and earth came into dreadful focus. He thought about his loves. He contemplated a legacy, wondering whether immortality could be manufactured. He thought about Orpheus, dear Orpheus – his tormented kindred spirit. He dared not to look up. He thought about this final incomplete journey. He closed his eyes and looked up. The inevitable never came.

Shitdisturber

"Why must you be such a shitdisturber?" an acquaintance asked my uncle Vance.

"Because the whole lot of you bore the shit out of me." Vance proceeded to mount the bull and rode him down Centre Street. The cops eventually caught up with the bull, but not after it rampaged through an antiques store and pizzeria. Vance, on the other hand, wasn't seen for a week after being bucked off unceremoniously mere seconds into the ride. Yeah, he made a habit of disappearing on us as well as the cops.

The authorities attempted to level criminal mischief charges on Vance but habeas corpus proved a mighty obstacle. That and they couldn't definitively confirm whether it was indeed Vance riding an ugly old bull down the street or some hobo looking for a good time. The cops, being cops, cleaned up the mess, fed the store owners reasssuring bullcrap - pun unintended, and went back to their two-hour long half an hour break at the Tim Horton's up on 4oth and Centre.

"Fucking Stampede," Vance told me, that is once he resurfaced. "It's full of fucking teenagers hoping to get laid, hoping their GHB works on the hot stacked blonde and not the blimpy brunette. It's full of overgrown adolescents with too much money and way too much time, cruising in their rented sportscars, hoping to pick up some primo Asian ass. They have been using it long enough. They know their GHB works, fo' shizzle - or whatever assinine shit phrase they mimmick these days. It's full of bored cardboard whores, hoping to score free drinks, and some, extremely delusional ones, hoping to be idolized and adored. It's an excuse to party for a city full of bored cliches. It gives them a chance to exploit and feel, to destroy and consume. It's their excuse to live banally - their sole chance to live at all. The manufactured and pre-packaged party, preordained by fluorescent gods waving silicone tits in their face, simulate, stimulate, titillate. But when the ride's coming down, it's just a matter of more dough. How about another whirl? the shot girl coos in their ear."

He paused to take a swig from his bottle of Jim Beam.

"Sometimes you have to let the bull roam free from its cage, just to see if the fuckers really want to live or whether they just want to buy an escape."

Standing at the corner of 16th and Centre, I stared at a dismantled Douglas Drugs sign, thinking about my nearly spectral uncle Vance. He was an episodic creature. When he appears, he's unstoppable - an irrepressible shitdisturbing agon. But - poof! - he's gone, leaving you wonder whether he was there to being with.

"Neal Cassady," he began a contrarian note, " was a colossal waste of human life. He lived simply for himself. He lived to be the centre, the holy fucking primative, a demonstrative messiah on a perpetual high, and a dirty lowdown sensualist dilettente to the bone. Of course, he was fucking brilliant - a bloody fucking genius really - and wasted it all sucking Ginsberg's or whoever's cock."

"He fell for the same bullshit geniuses have been falling for since Zarathustra: to the max, or not at all."

The first

Most often, the simplest and most difficult thing is to say to her, attached and betrothed to someone else, "We should be together." Save disjointing masculinity - "I'm a better man than he is" - and saccharine kitsch - "I need you." - for the unfortunate few who model life decisions after romantic comedies or melodrama. To be direct and concise and, most importantly, genuine is indeed most difficult. It requires of us a rather elusive, therefore precious, indefatigable sense of self. It's not sheer egotism or inflated self-worth. By sense of self, I mean a deep, terrifyingly honest understanding of ourselves - good, bad, and in between.

"We should be together." It can't be delivered like a pickup line or like a line of any sort. Heck, the words themselves become irrelevant upon being uttered. Standing before your beloved - or your supposed beloved - as she prepares for her wedding to another man, who by all incremental accounts - status, appearance, wealth, etc. - is leaps and bounds superior to yourself, it takes an unparalleled, almost otherworldly, courage to finally tell her the truth, consequences be damned. She may appreciate your honesty and let you down easy. She might freak out and call the authorities - cops or rent-a-cops. Or, your words and your deed may touch her profoundly. That even though she will be marrying a near perfect match, marrying into a wealthy respected family and, in the process, come precariously close to their immense fortune, she gives pause to look at your sad hopeful eyes - tearing with melancholic desire. She's touched. But she's conflicted.

"Why did you wait until now, until this day?" she asks through tears, her voice tightropes incredulity and elation.

"Because I almost forgot your birthday." You pull out a ring, a modest almost nondescript ring, and hand it to her. Not yet on bended knee, your eyes refuse to let go of hers.

"The first."

"The first."

You both smile. The organ begins the procession. But all is still, including ever ebullient eyes locked in timeless play. The organ stops, silence takes over, and the crowd clamours with anticipation for an unseen bride. The groom's nervous anticipation grows dark as a dreadful portent returns to mind.

A bridesmaid, searching for the bride, enters an empty room to find a veil laying stolidly on the floor.

"The first." Your lips touch in speechless conversation.

An atheistic argument for the existence of God

How does a Chilean apple tree differ from one standing in Washington?

Am I bad at communicating or is everyone else hard of hearing?

To be young, gifted, destitute, and belligerent - that's the ultimate dream.

Soon we will all be priced out of the life market and forced to peddle death.

My, what inspiration Christians can derive from nothing! It brings a tear to my eye.

An atheistic argument for the existence of God - sure, She exists. She is Mother Goose. She's the tooth fairy. She's the well-stacked multi-breasted goddess of war or peace or sex or something. She's an inaudible whisper traveling along a favonian stream. She's a hurricane - blindingly destructive. She's a tornado and She wants your ruby shoes. She makes the ground move beneath your feet. She's as real as you wish her to be.

The question is: why do so many wish their deity to be some bedraggled chump with roman columns for legs, dressed in a dirty toga, and has a bloody cross for a face? Exist? Sure. But there's no material, no flowing beard or sandals or manly sarong - shit, surely it could be Socrates if I squinted the right way. If deities are dreamed up for amusement, why the fuck would your God resemble an ancient Greek pedophile? But alas, of course existence, in the flat purely material single dimension, eludes deities - beauty too.

Man dreams up perfect forms to fuel necessary neuroses and anxieties. How would he bemuse himself without neurosis? What meaning would there be for an existence less ordinary? A giant predatory Socrates plodding around on Roman column legs, smiting the unbelieving?

But let's face it, God is a neurotic - Socrates be damned. She is everywhere, but constantly craves attention. She's the barstar who attracts all sorts of "unwanted" attention and goes home alone. She exists in your mind - but, poof, gone like that. She's spectral. She's everywhere, but nowhere to be found. There she is, your God, hiking up Her skirt, begging for a hagiographic gaze.

Contacts are condoms of the eye

I'm tired, but can't get to sleep.

'Something' is tired. I need a new fudge word.

Contacts are condoms of the eye.

I've abandoned all things good and turned wholly to atrophy.

Anxiety. Anxiety about age. Anxiety about time - that untimely concept, time. No one thinks about time - time thinks us up.

'We' is an amusing creature. We are free to choose. We are free to burn. 'We' is no more than me. We are free, but everywhere in chains.

Water, water, everywhere, nor a drop to drink - Samuel Calvin Coleridge.

Honorific horrors inhabit a collective psyche posing as zeitgeist.

Information, knowledge, everywhere, nor a drop to drink. Our filters are nominally on high alert, yet utter rubbish - hollow polemics, empty supplications, facile images, excess, verbosity - is hailed as knowledge, currency of enlightenment. Knowledge came to be commodity - owned, marketed, and sold - and ferocious haggling passes as debate. But isn't knowledge always elusive. Is it not ineffable, indissociable from essential ambiguities underlying existence itself?

I close my eyes. Still cannot sleep. I close my eyes to the disaster but something, someone within does not allow me to ignore it. I'm tired but cannot sleep. My drooped head - heavy with silent anxiety - lies still on my pillow, contemplating finality and its prophet, Hegel, cackling with mischievous delight at Jackass. On the screen, Johnny Knoxville holds Geist in his palm, stroking it, teasing it, preparing it for its trip off of the edge of abyss. All the world watches on with glee. Contacts are condoms of the eye.

Unaltered course. Finality. The viewing public no longer needs to read. We watch shit unfold. We watch trials. We watch sex tapes. We watch watches tick down second after arbitrary second. We watch banality, since we tire of living it.

Where the fuck is Johnny Knoxville with the weed? If he brings back a dimebag, Hegel's gonna go apeshit. Oh, wait, is this where she answers her cell in the dark?

Amazon. Rainforest. Save the forest. Save the whore. The world cannot redeem itself I 've been told. Humans are too flawed for the business of salvation. Look, they say, to the big fluorescent glowing sky for salivating salvation - available for the all time low price of ....

Closing eyes. Eyelids heavy. Still awake as silence pounds harder at my exasperated skull. Where the fuck is Hegel with the pizza? I thought he knew how to get there. Damn that nightvision crap is harshing my stiffy.

Moon. Half-moon casted over the land of harvest. The rising tides, the imperfect waves of ephemeral, passing time, stroke the land with sensuous languor. The strokes grow carnivorous and its all gone. There will be no harvest. It was pronounced in stone long ago in a faraway, far gone, today. Finality.

Sunk. We're sunk. All was lost and my chariot cruising without drive or care shattered the face of God. Shards rained down to hopeful rabble. Rubbish. They took the rubbish to be gold and worshiped reified fragments, installing unity and totality. And, of course, finality.

Closed my eyes. Sleep comes. The nightmare is no more.

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.