Have you ever seen page five?

20MAY2012 – Concept: a human life is fully-realized within five weathered pages of a paperback novel, one pressed between many on a shelf near the back of an old bookstore, just to the left of a hand-lettered cardboard sign: FICTION.

Background characters in a novel are summoned forth from the No Thing and brought to life with such mastery, such clarity and depth of definition that the Reader can’t help but identify with these imaginary beings, understanding and identifying with them in a sudden flash of entirety. The Devil lives in the details. These fictional lives brush up against the Reader’s own with unexpected force, jarred into creation by vivid descriptions of spilled drink, flowing tears, clever plans, the rasp of whiskers or raucous laughter, such that the Reader can’t help but cheer them on.

Don’t get cocky. They used to cheer for lions, too.

But then the thumb is licked and the fourth page is turned and somewhere near the bottom of page five, the character is killed off. Is this cruel? Not particularly, that’s just how the story needed to be told.

“We are stories telling stories.” We have control over our own story right up until the moment when it collides with the storyline of another character. (Either we happen to them, or they happen to us. Depends on your perspective, really.)

These fictional characters live so completely on these yellowed plains, covered from head to toe in every aspect of what makes them real, existing behind and between each and every single letter on the page. The postcards, the tickets stubs, the dryer lint, the bar tabs, the take-out containers, the music collections, the book collections, the love letters, the grocery lists – all of the debris and mementos of their imaginary lives – are just dust trapped in the cracks and crevices of every foot of serif of every word of every sentence of every paragraph of the few pages they’re given, compacted by years of fucking and fighting and fear of failure, French fries and Friday nights, the whole thing rusted over with sweat like the pocketknife of an old man. Every word breathes, every letter hums. The characters aspire to learn everything there is to learn about the pages on which they exist; the height, the width and the location of the strange indentation at the upper edge of the third page where a worm ate its way into their falsified reality…

We can tell ourselves what free and wonderful beings we are and insist that everything is one big gorgeous goddamn pageantry. But you and I both know that we can’t travel beyond our own sixth page, and we can’t escape what’s coming up fast from the bottom of the fifth one.

Our destiny, too, is to be fed feet-first and screaming into the Great Grinder of Storytelling; we are brought to life so that the Reader may identify with us and we are killed off in such a way as to propel the story along and make the survival of the remaining characters that much more dear.

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” – Chuck Palahniuk

We are trapped like dolphins in a round tank, pinging ourselves into madness. (I think, therefore I am/very sad) We burn brightly while we can, but in the end we simply aren’t equipped to make it to the epilogue.

##

The above (crudely) illustrates a nagging sensation I’ve had for many years, that I left the factory incomplete, minus some very important pages from my owner’s manual, that I’m not a fully fleshed-out character in my own right. I don’t mean that I lack experience – hell, no. I’ve been a-many places and I’ve seen a-many things, and I’m just as impressed by life as you are.

But the miles aren’t long enough, and the dreams aren’t bright enough. I feel like a simulation, a placeholder, the storekeeper in an early Nintendo game, a character on the Holodeck — something programmed with a limited number of responses despite being part of a greater complexity. A one-act play in five pages. Trapped on the stage, unable to see past the lights…

(I can’t give you tomorrow.)

TWM

Phantom Limb Syndrome

12FEB2012 – Dutch Boy, Franklin Avenue, Brooklyn. Waiting for coffee and eggs Benedict amidst the sonic swath of: the singing click of washing plates, running water and loud reggae flowing forth from the kitchen; the layers of conversation bolted to the cafe walls by sibilant hooks ejected into fricative fucking existence by the deadlier of the species dominating the room; the silence of couples exchanging a kiss on the sidewalk outside.

On top of the world one minute, lying prostrate in the valley with a face full of frozen pig shit the next. It’s not as complicated as you make it. (In fact, it’s much, much worse…) The clock ticks louder, each second resounding like a rifle shot until the explosions are loud enough to wring water from blood. Each blastwave shakes the table, rattling flatware and clinking the glasses. I am beyond screaming at this point. This goes unnoticed by everyone else.

Everything we do takes place in this world, during this timeline and in this dimension. We are captive court jesters; reciting our lines at the top of our lungs and juggling just as fast as we can, giving our all to a sleepy king who yawns once an hour, resting his fat head on a meaty palm. No escape pod, and no way to hug the beyond from here.

While escorting a friend to Grand Central Station on Saturday, I theorized that our emotions were somehow anchored to the ocean. When we enter this world, we are issued an anonymous measure of the sea which goes about behaving as the sea is meant to behave, all the while manipulating our moods, governing our capacity to give and our eventual tendency to need something in return for ourselves. The throbbing desire to give is proportional to the clawing need to receive. Some of the blocks are subsurface, cold and salty. Some of them crash frequently upon sunny shores and white sand beaches, aerated like blue champagne. When we pass on from this world, our block of ocean is returned. Renew, reduce, recycle. Our emotions are by no means new. Sign and date here, please.

Maybe I’m getting it right but I’m not loud enough. Maybe I’m doing it wrong and thankfully no one has noticed. Or maybe I’m doing it wrong but no one has bothered to tell me, like the elderly deaf uncle who shows up to a funeral with his fly open. I have no choice but to carry on — the desire to write burns as brightly as ever.

On good days, it feels like having lengths of exposed copper hair shoved deep beneath my skin; there is a stink of ozone and tiny sparks are born to die as the wires are scraped across the leads of a battery with a pop, propelling my left hand to spasm and flail for the nearest pen and begin stabbing words into existence across the surface of anything that will carry ink. Those of us afflicted by this terrible disease meet twice weekly in anonymous church basements, sharing our shame over stale donuts and buckets of burnt coffee. It is foolish, embarrassing and wrong but I know I’ll never be able to stop, even if I fail.

Putting way too much thought into the expression “I don’t mind”,

Note To Self, Buy More Bullets

READING: Clock of the Long Now – Time and Responsibility (“When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs in the past.” – Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska)

LISTENING: And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, OSI, Van Halen, Pre-Stevie Fleetwood Mac, The Mars Volta, Puscifer…

The time has come to pare down my possessions in preparation for my upcoming move to the Department of Awesome.  Now, I happen to like black trash bags.  There’s something final about them.  I buy ‘em by the shitload (metric) and I like ‘em strong.  Once I’ve made up my mind that something has to leave my life, it goes in a black bag sealed beneath a sturdy square knot.  There’s no coming back from one of those.

I’m looking forward to purging.  There’ll be black trash bags of old clothes destined for thrift stores in little piles around the floor; bags destined for the recycling bin, or destined for Freecycle.  Still others will be handed off as fast as I can get on the phone.  I’ve got piles of plain black t-shirts to sort through, and hangars holding up dress shirts purchased with good intention, but never worn.  Turns out I’m just not that guy.

I’ve got five or six pairs of shoes, some I never wear.  Well-polished Doc Martens: stay.  Continent-weary Chucks: stay.  Comfortable and practical Keens: to be replaced by a new pair, the old ones discarded.  The rest: go bye-bye.

I’ve got four or five extra sets of sheets, some of them reserved for guests.  I won’t be needing so many of those,  just as I don’t plan to be entertaining ‘guests’ any time soon.

Craigslist isn’t an option.  As an Aries male, when I make a decision, that’s it — time to carry it through.  I don’t want to wait around for someone else to waffle over their decision, thereby impacting mine.  And I don’t want to hear, “Well, what you might want to consider is –”

No.  I don’t want second- or third-fucking-guesses.  I don’t wanna be told to “wait” or “reconsider”, and I certainly don’t want to be told that I should have done it “this way or that way” after the fact.  That serves no purpose.  Indecision drive me to distraction.  If you’re the kind of person who stands in line hemming and hawing about what looks good on the menu, don’t come around for dinner.  If you need twenty minutes at the post office to decide what kind of stamps best accent your eyes; please, state this on a plain cotton t-shirt, bold letters, both sides, so I know to avoid you.

Now the hard part — how do I make the distinction between what stays or goes?  I’ve got a number of bags: one large suitcase for extended trips three weeks and over; a smaller one for overnight jobs when I need to travel light; a Crumpler backpack that holds all my gear for shoots, including a laptop sleeve.  I’ve got a small hiking pack that perfectly holds a first-aid kit, Camelbak, raingear and a change of clothes.  I’ve got another full-size pack that holds my tent, sleeping bag, mess kit and change of clothes.  Finally, I’ve got a courier bag that I use every day whilst traveling around the city, valued for it’s rugged design.  Getting rid of one impacts the rest.

The books are no problem — there’s always a used bookstore willing to take my dog-eared treasures, and I got rid of my DVD collection years ago — Netflix works much better.  The keepers went into books to conserve space, and the jewel cases found their way to the trash after I turned my CD collection into electrons.

Kitchen stuff is easy: I don’t have a lot of it, ditto for large furniture — a desk, a computer, a papasan chair, a table to hold up the television and DVD player and a table and four chairs with which to support dinner.  Those can: stay.

It’s got to be binary, yes or no.  The weight bench: goes. Space considerations.  The 15-pound barbell: goes, the 25-pound barbell: stays.  The hammock: goes, the bed: stays.  The large black carry-all which holds my emergency radio, cold weather survival gear, .45 holster, knife collection and camp light: stays.  All the crap leftover from being a Windows user: gone.  The old cell phones: destroyed.  The meticulously maintained files of paid bills: inferno.

The love letters: go, the gun: stays.

(Note to self, buy more bullets.)

TWM