Everybody has a price

Money. Its all about money, have it, want more, money makes money. You're nothing without money. Duddy Kravitz can have his land; we want money. Instead of focusing on excelling at something one enjoys, you're hassled, harassed, and constantly told to make money - lots of it - for the sake of personal and familial reputation. Actually personal reputation matters little; familial reputation trumps all else. How do you measure up to Mr. X's son or Ms. Y's daughter or X cousin or Y's niece. Man is the measure of all things. No, that is incomplete. Man is measured by money, wealth, cash and what and who he can buy with it. Money is the only measure. Forget art. Forget love. Forget passion and forget fulfillment. Forget social conscience, ethics, environment - hell, fuck the future, money can ensure your own and isn't that the only concern?

Don't sit down and read. Reading can't make you money. Making money makes you money. Don't think. Thinking doesn't make you money. Making money makes you money. Don't speak. Speaking don't make you money. Making money makes you money. All things that makes you money are good. All things that don't, bad. Simple enough eh? This new ethos, these now eternal rules are simple: fuck everyone else, what's in it for me and my people, my crew, my family, and my bitches? Gangsters, oligarchs, tyrants, and corporate superstars are cut from the same cloth - its of vile pale green shade. Money makes the world go round...round and round we go, where will it stop, nobody knows. It will assuredly stop with a whimper and a cry, "Oh my, money so much of it, with nothing to buy, nothing to eat, no one to exploit, and nothing to own."

Finicky Machine

The machine speaks.

0101110111011000010

The machine tells me to forget it.

0111000111010100010111

Imperfect, its needs energy - entropy, dancing entropy encircles him, seated, sedentary, and soothed by mechanical glow. Decayed, sapped, he who is seated knows little else than a familiar radiance.

The machine speaks.

&#)($)#)_@)#)$)#)$#((%)

surrender

Nov 5/07 @;#) AM

Nov 5/07 @;#) AM

Under a grey languorous sky, I looked at the body, specifically, the face with his lecherous smile still in place. He looked ferocious, even in death; evil dripped from every fang. And it dawned on me. One day, he would rise from the tomb and seek retribution. I started digging towards six feet. Six feet is the great equalizer. We may begin from different points - rich or poor, blessed with infinite talent or helplessly incompetent, but end up all the same: staring up at six feet of dirt. Well, six feet of dirt, if you're lucky. You might see it differently: being consumed in an incinerator or sinking to the bottom of the sea or dangling from a sturdy tree or hanging unceremoniously from a crucifix. Six feet, if you're lucky.

Stunted

Stunted, sustained regression, invariable decline, spiral, spiralling away, without flow.

Can’t fire. Synapses lie dormant. Flow is elsewhere. Erroneous thoughts, curse these erroneous thoughts. There’s no string…no connection…without chains in solidarity. Too much rest, I can’t stand sleep, dread of slumber, lumbering through slumber, drowsy, groggy, too well attached to reality, too conscious, that reality fades with each passing wink.

Deprivation, keep slumber from me…no more, to close my eyes no more…open and the world is flat again, the trees speak, the ground rumbles and roars…

Working in darkness, aroused by the cool seductive touch of night, I write…much of it is unmitigated rubbish, unworthy of either paper or ink, much of it simple uninteresting confession, complaints of the most banal kind…

I am or can be only in the act alone, can only become in words, undone by deeds…

Undone…distraction, intrusion, interrupted flow…

Left alone, festering wounds whistle a sonorous tune, an abysmal anthem, a serenade to nothing…a invocation for the grim and inescapable…

To waltz with entropy

To waltz with entropy

Con-jested. Blocked. Blowing. Flow. Frustrated.

Ferocious, ah, fallacy

bloated

off

dis en tangled from cosmos

……………………………………….Neglect

You…where are you here now, standing finicky in discordant ordered chaotic illusion,

reality?

Men crawl majestically amongst cockroaches,

Failures tail, close the heart,

Medicine for fractured being: Oblivion.

Stern humour,

Absurd scripture,

Constriction,

And grey concrete slabs move in,

With vice like malice.

Flow; flow, so foreign at present, so close, intimate; so profound in the unknown moment (to come)

Obsolescence…my fickle desires change on a whim,

and the tides….the tides…

Calcified, congested, trapped in compartments not of my choosing,

Flowing through plastic tubes of ethos;

Being in capitals

B-E-I-N-G

…tiny and forgotten

So where has Karma gone in search of dark primordial breasts and resplendent illuminate thighs…Ah, Karma, my ribald jester…Karma, my back-stabbing wingman…

Here comes trouble and I turn an accusatory digit your way

…”Curse thee, my inscrutable foe!”

We look through each other with stern determined gaze,

We look into ourselves, a hidden menagerie of cruelty and levity…

…moments…eons…divinity and cosmos…expire

We laugh at absurd looping moments,

screeching down the barren fields of eternity…

smile buddy….smile and await your turn

to waltz with eternity.

Storied Girl

There were stories about her. Some tales were simple and straightforward. Others were complex esoteric constructions. Like any gossip, it was descriptive hearsay layered on top of more general hearsay. As a consequence, I rarely subscribe to hearsay. In any event, these stories were rather banal and uninventive lies that ran the usual gamut from chronic promiscuity to, uh, lax grooming.

“It comes with the territory,” she told me. Indeed, from my experience, disarmingly beautiful women – not simply ‘cute’ or ‘pretty’ girls; no, only beauty that would make Helen of Troy seethe with envy – are the subjects of rumours, stories, and innuendo. The reason is quite obvious. The majority of women are highly insecure, neurotic, and unattractive or plain creatures whose under stimulated and often unsatisfying romantic lives compel them to gossip vociferously about statuesque ‘threats’, either to protect an erroneous idea that ‘my man only has eyes for me’ or a self-effacing consolation ‘she’s not that hot’. In the end, the homely girl buys what the celebrities are endorsing – hence, ostensibly using – and wear what the beautiful people wear, use the same makeup they do, date men with similar builds and hair that the beautiful ones do. But, embedded within that mimetic admiration is a virulent hatred and envy of beauty. “If I consume you, do I become you?” they ask silently.

Yvonne was the office beauty first, an accountant second. All the men – from Mike the custodian to Hunter, my boss – were aching with a very primordial pain in her presence. She knew what was up. She would flirt and play with them, however upon being asked out to lunch or dinner or, as Mike did one time, to an Ultimate Fighting event, she would politely decline, citing that she ‘has policy of not dating co-workers’. Fair enough, most of them would eventually say, possibly after several more lame attempts at circumventing her stoic defences – they would forget her maxim in a week or so and make another attempt.

“You really can’t blame them for trying. It’s rather admirable,” I told her, knowing full well half of them were cheating bastards with partners, girlfriends, or spouses who simply wanted to mount her as the mantelpiece of an imaginary trophy room.

“Why haven’t you taken a shot?”

“You’re not my type,” was my dry matter-of-fact reply. Her mischievous glow dissipated and not because she was hurt by my comment. No, I suspect she was deeply offended by it. As much as she tired of all the attention, I knew she needed to be wanted by everybody. How can I not be your type? I’m the very definition of fuckable. If you were to look up fuckable in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of me in a pantsuit and you’ll still blow your wad. A fuckin’ pantsuit would make you cream your khakis, you pathetic little boy!

Appearances, however, eventually returned to homeostasis. She patted me on the shoulder, let out a giggle at my ostensibly humorous comment, and returned to her desk.

It was true that I never asked her out. And she wasn’t my type. Did that mean I didn’t want to fuck her? Hell no. But only a moron would come out and say that in words, deeds, or gestures – consciously or subconsciously. I was biding my time. It’s more fun when she can’t stand it anymore and jumps your bones. I couldn’t imagine a greater ego stroke than becoming, if only for a moment or two, the object of desire for a staggeringly desirable woman. Keep her puzzled, keep her interested, stay an enigma, and let her drive herself crazy with thought and longing, let her descend into a state of confusion and longing and irrational desire.

Having been the only one not actively drooling all over her ample breasts or spreading absurd stories and lies throughout the building, I became by default her confidant. Initially, she found our incomprehensibly chaste repartee a welcome relief to the contrivance lobbed her way during any given day. And I welcomed her presence of course. It made me feel exceptional. As a middleman spending most of everyday facing a grey cubicle wall, any exceptional thing – no matter how big or how small – gave my life some meaning. Sometimes I would peek outside of my cubicle to see her bouncing buttocks shaking like some wondrous jelly, shaking, I like to believe, for my personal edification. Stolen gazes were fine and dandy – until you get caught. Getting caught is often not an option, unless, of course, you consciously want to be found out.

[blank]

I am an enigma

I am an enigma

In a mirror
I see strange baleful eyes
a futile chase

Morning dear,
would you like breakfast in bed

If its not a bother, sweetheart

No bother

No bother...
she's lost as I

Our eyes meet,
spectators again of hidden selves -
misery, boredom, disdain
lay beneath bacon strips and freshly squeezed OJ

No bother, she mutters again

I am an enigma to her.

One morning she will awake next to me -
cold, unmoved
waiting for breakfast and an infernal embrace.

Busin'

I got on the bus, the driver told me it would be an hour plus before getting to town. I was fine with that. I needed the time to sort out things.

A wise man told me that people go to graduate school for one of two reasons. One is utilitarian - how can I upgrade and profit from it? - in short, education as an investment. The other is Kantian - you go because you want to figure out yourself - in short, education as essential, an insatiable need for the restless mind. Then again, he left out a third option, my reason: avoidance. You go to school to avoid both the utilitarian world and high ideals. I went to school to delay the inevitable, to past time, to avert my eyes, to forget, to neglect, to preen and pose, and to wait indefinitely for a most definite - and inescapable - sentence. I went to school, on an island, to move on and purge her from my soul. It never did happen.

Sitting at the very back of an empty bus, I looked out at the modest and beautiful landscape around Swartz Bay. I took in a deep breath of the sea air. Being a dilettante and all, I honestly thought smelling nature is experiencing it. That misconception is borne from my inability to do anything else but smell when in nature. While I 'experienced' the natural beauty of the island, an acrid scent perturbed my reminiscences.

An awful world

In the absence of a singular deity, Man creates his environment. Man, a limited finite being, names, gathers, and develops systems of knowledge to organize and categorize it, i.e. statistics. This capacity for partition - division, ennumeration, and categorization - remakes 'the world' into compartments and a whole. Knowledge describes and limits environment. The world, as understood by Man, is finite. Knowledge, historically constituted, endures and comes to predate man - that mortal, fleeting, limited beast.

Knowledge (logic, numbers, ideas) compose and limits 'the world'. Man is enslaved to systems of knowledge and its techne - its much too large to be mastered. As a consequence, man fears the world - a fear stemming from an inescapable impotency.

"Fear, whether an instinct or an acquisition, is a function of the environment. Man fears because he exists in a fearful, an awful world. The world is precarious and perilous."

- John Dewey, Experience and Nature.

The modern subject is a paradox. It aspires towards autonomy, but is fearful of what it may entail. Descartes is rejected. "I think, therefore I am" is incomplete. To be free, truly free, the modern subject cannot avoid venturing into 'the world', the environment shared with other subjects, who are equally free - a confounding notion for the ostensibly unique and autonomous subject. To be free is to be limited. To be limited is to be exposed to limiting relations with 'others' and the environment - when the world challenges, can one simply retreat?

A setting sun

Sunset - I sat on the rocks beating off to a spectre. Some time passes, darkness descends, climax follows. I clean up and head for home. I felt relaxed, refreshed, invigorated and all that feel-good crap. Some sage advice from a long lost friend: Walking soothes the mind, but irritates bunions. I passed the posh condos along Cook Street and approached my right turn along Fort. Then, she ran me over.

I opened my eyes. I saw the doctors – still in the middle of the procedure. I saw blood. I saw their utensils. I saw my spleen lying in a sterile pan. But, one look at the doctor’s belligerent butcher eyes put me under again.

I awoke, this time to flowers and balloons and the cute eyes of my would-be murderer.

"I got the girl in the end." Uncle Vance said, stifling a drunken chuckle.

"You did?"

"Yeah, I did, in the book."

He closed his eyes and hoped never to open them again. Why? Pain awaited. Consciousness, unbearable consciousness, wore him down. Slumber numbed yearning for scars.

In praise of American thought

America, the vilified, the villain, acts as a whipping boy for the world's indignation. To call the US incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan unpopular would be an understatement. In spite of the grounds - or lack thereof - prefiguring its supposed imperialism, it would be wrong to summarily condemn America, its citizens, and the ideas borne from its turbulent history. It was Tocqueville who first grasped the potential and perils of American democracy. Indeed, after a Civil War, numerous foreign conflicts, slavery - then segregation and ostensibly disenfranchisement, the ideas and ideals girding the very notion of America are constantly under threat - diminished, nearly forgotten, and their demise no longer inconceivable.

A history of pragmatism - stretching from early statesman and revolutionaries like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, through great minds like Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and John Dewey, and leading up to contemporary voices for democracy like Cornel West - has been swept aside. The new destiny, represented as an old, immutable one in the form of a "national calling" - ironically built around the dissemination of freedom and democracy throughout the globe - is implicitly derived from Hegel's philosophy of history and adopts Marxist method - more appropriately, an appropriation of Trotsky's "permanent revolution". For pragmatism, knowledge can be adaptable in pursuit of truth. For the latter, ostensibly operating in our present times, truth is immutable, while the world is malleable, adaptable, and, hence, disposable and superfluous in the service of Truth.

What I propose - and what I would like to investigate - is a form of pragmatism forged by great thinkers confronted by substantial and profoundly difficult problems of American political context. C.S. Peirce - the great logican and thinker - starts us off with the problem: the problem of chaos, a world outside of determinism, a 'chancy' existence. Peirce, by refuting with his requisite zeal any kind of determinism, demonstrates to us that in all things governed by law, there can be no certainty, only probabilities. In a world without certainty, where divine providence is assumed MIA, man is assured of no favourable odds, no longer sheltered from the whimsical hand of risk. He can still reason and analyze, but whatever decision he arrives at may still go terribly array. Faced with such odds, some - often those in positions of power and influence - throw up their hands, succumb to the pressure, and just invoke an otherworldly power of guessing - the great American satirist and humanist Kurt Vonnegut presciently lampooned contemporary decision makers as "guessers", playing rock, paper, scissors with the lives of its citizens at stake. In what way is that democratic? Well, on a semiotic level it is. Of course, Charles Sanders Pierce, ironically, has been called the creator of semiotics. Pierce thought semiotics as any action of affect that involved a sign, its object, and an interpretant. Does this triadic relationship translate into the political context? Is it as simple as a sign, a lie-truth, and citizen-dupes? No, that would be a crude and disjointed account. Peirce, the popularizer of pragmatism, objects, things, and the interaction of people with them over high unseen predetermined ideals. With that began an encounter between a pragmatism unique to the American context and an idealism, as exhibited in the work of emigre thinkers such as (but not limited to) Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss, which derived largely from German philosophy - Kant, Hegel, and even Herder.

The richness of American thought is owed to this unique convergence of continental philosophy and homegrown pragmatic thought, for a lack of a better term. This study does not intend to sanctify one wing in relation to another. It intends to first, draw out the historical and philosophical ties of these two tradition, second, to demonstrate the influence both exerted on major political events, and lastly, to diagnose the current maladies afflicting contemporary politics in America.

[Part I]

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."