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

Welcome to the Now.

28SEP2011 – Advancing the film while I still have a camera. The back of my head feels like freshly mown velour; the inside contains high-speed footage of plant tendrils whipping outward in ever-widening circles and tender leaves unfolding from careful storage with tiny clicks, tracking the sunlight across the mottled sky like ancient satellite arrays hidden deep in the jungle. (Thank you, David Attenborough, but just once I wish you’d swear…)

Magic is dead. That’s just my opinion. That was always the divider for me; the left hand versus right hand trade off in fiction between dragons and death stars. “One was, one will be.”

Welcome to the Now.

Somewhere in the distance a herd of wild motorcycles gallops down some temporary straightaway, tearing the air with a mighty roar, passage granted by a sequence of swaying green orbs, aligned like tumblers in the lock of the night.

There’s a church outside my window. It’s just across the yard, beyond the dead limbs, rasping leaves and sprawling web of ivy that provides this area with soft green silence. And through the doors of that church comes the voice of a kindly man with a winning smile and purple robes, professing his love for strangers from the safety of a TV screen. Syndicated salvation, savior songs and collection plates have paid for his designer eyeglass frames, the lenses of which are barely thick enough to physically restrain his eyes, which appear capable of growing teeth and gnashing hard at your face like a rabid weasel were the laws of physics not there to prevent such a thing. In between songs of praise, jokes are told. I’m too far away to hear them.

Saturday night: Operation “Explore Massive Overgrown Graveyard” was a wash. Razor wire encircles barbed wire which tops wrought iron spikes guarding three sides of the city block it occupies; the black windows of residential living rooms stare back from the full four like a panopticon for the dead. Plenty of gaps in the fence, but not enough opportunity for an unobserved entrance and I can’t say I was properly dressed to wade through brush and bramble.

A good assassin is always pregnant with another version of himself. In the event of fatality or termination, this second self will tear free of its protective shell and finish the mission.

Now on a train to Coney Island, watching the jagged shapes and shadows of the landscape rush past the car window, each tooth ripping another chunk of flesh from the prone form of summer.

Sometimes I can almost feel what Brooklyn must have been like twenty years ago, or thirty, or even forty. Light flashes through the trellis of a bridge and the red brick tenements float past. Flashes of fire escapes, rooftop hideaways and rusted graffiti tags. The moment is a yellowed zoetrope of crumbling memories and faded dreams, like radio signals expanding outward into the blackness of space. That was. This is.

Nothing stands still.

Nothing. Stand still.

Nothing stands. Still.

Welcome to the now.

Control.

It really *is* just out of your grasp.

I Didn’t Know What to Call It, So I Did.

09NOV08 – Pieces of madness from last night’s dream.  Our Hero, locked inside a dusty voodoo mansion crowded with dying candles, unpurposed flowers and empty bottles.  Chalk drawings and macabre masks, scattered alters and borrowed bones.  “Be careful what gets into your heads, Little Ones, for it may never come out again.”

And so I hid my eyes beneath a threadbare blanket while various horrors took place around me.  I didn’t see any of it and don’t remember it, understanding somehow that if I peeked or acknowledged what was happening on the other side of that blanket, I’d be instantly set upon by angry men with long knives and a language barrier incapable of interpreting my cries for mercy.

“You can gaze upon the lords, but looking at the shogun will make you blind, and the emperor cannot be seen at all.” This is important, somehow.

Sitting in a coffee house listening to Also Spake Zarathustra and attempting to write up to that triumphant sound.  (It’s probably gonna take more than a shitty netbook and a $4.95 coffee, but I think we can all agree that it’s good to dream.)

Just a few strands of crystalline fiber sticking out the physical access port.  I pinch one gossamer thread between the thumb and index finger of my left hand and pull it outward, inserting it carefully into my eye, feeling nothing as the mechanism within squirms toward and copulates with my optic nerve…

First there is a mountain,
then there is no mountain,
then there is.

My hands fall limp into my lap, and my thoughts begin walking around on their own:

Quote in memory: “I don’t give a stack of tits what anyone says about rehashed ideas.  If you can scour the graveyard of rock n’ roll and build something new from the rusted hulks you find there you’re onto something good, because it’s harder to create than it is to destroy.”

In-flight moment: “Yeah, like a moist toilette is gonna do it.  As if breathing in that faint antiseptic steam is gonna chase away the bleary eyes, the stiff shoulders, the compacted spine, and the terrible suspicion that someone slathered the dregs of a deep fat fryer across my sleeping face, dabbing the brush in my mouth for good measure.  Still, the Sky Ninja’s got enough shit to worry about; slamming, shuffling, stumbling, sorting and smiling.  Not only does a Sky Ninja have to look their best at all times, but they have to serve you hot coffee in high turbulence, make change for a $50, and still be able to herd your panicking, cattle-stampeding ass off this burning dick in the event that shit suddenly goes sideways.  So thank you, Sky Ninja.  This pre-moistened towelette will do just fine.”

July 21, 2006:  The assassin in freefall, his parachute failed.  Got to make his bones regardless; draws both pistols and does his best to draw a bead while plummeting ever closer to the ground.  Target exits the building, maybe twenty paces to the waiting limo. “If I can’t take him out with a bullet, maybe I can break him with my fall.” Target looks up at the last second.  Look on the target’s face was priceless.  Never saw it comming.

Found in journal: “And in those final moments, when our entire lives flash before our eyes, we will concentrate upon this instant in futility, as though we could lift the needle from the record and pause the song, as though we could skip this unpleasant paragraph and leave the story incomplete.  But when you die, make sure all you gotta do is die, and that Jeff Goldblum is doing tai chi.”

The minutes keep on walking; a colorful and irreplaceable parade of precious cruelties and unspeakable magic broken into short intervals.  And sometimes, people throw candy…

In the park, near a statue:

Robber barons use
their ill-gotten wealth to
create public zen.

Speak all languages: the planet’s personal mediator, sitting at an intersection of life and death, watching armies march in all directions.  Turn your cell phone off, and ignore every text the End Man sends you, as the sky grows dark with circling birds.

The next day was Sunday.  I sat in a cafe watching the snowflakes tumble down fast and fat as the waitress brings me coffee.  A man with a Mohawk cooked my breakfast.

“The rest is easy, because Henry Miller made it look easy.”

I live for the moments when the music and the mood unite, when the planets groan into position like a clock of immeasurable proportion and suddenly I’m walking down the street with my head on fire, trailing tongues of trickling blue.  Suddenly, time grinds to a squeaking halt.  And not just around me, or on this block, or in this city state, but in all places, and at all times: fish frozen in the rivers, birds halted in mid-flight, sunlight with the parking brake on, and the light of distant stars idling like cars at an intersection.

I understood long ago that I will never die.  That’s right.  I… will… never… die… I will grow old, and I will eventually shit my last, but the ‘me’ that makes up ‘me’ will be recycled.  I’ll be back again.  I am not, as the man said, ” a beautiful and unique snowflake.”  My thoughts have been thought before, and will occur to others again.  I get it.  And I’m okay with that.

That’s the lowest form of truth, the baseline.  We are born, we live, and we die.  Everything takes place in this dimension, and on this planet.  Nobody really knows anything, and everything will surprise you if you let it.  Nothing lasts forever, except nothing and forever, and in the end, there are no odds to beat.

Either it will or it won’t,

One Friday Night In The Universe

Doing my best to steer clear of a depressing situation left me standing alone in a convenience store checkout line one Friday night in the universe many years ago, a ham and cheese sandwich in one hand, and a large cup of coffee in the other. The radio behind the counter was playing an old Terrence Trent D’Arby song, one that I was surprised to discover I still knew the words to.

Ten minutes earlier, I’d been sipping beers with my peers; two broadcasters, a journalist, a videographer and a fellow photographer. I’m typically not a fan of the hops, but it was the only game in town. It’d rained earlier that evening, and the mottled ground beneath our feet was littered with the wreckage of cigarette butts and stomped bottle caps. The surface of the scarred aluminum picnic table around which we gathered was populated by three plastic lighters, two cell phones, one canvas cooler brimming with melted ice water, and an army of empty beer bottles. We stood around talking shop and telling jokes, just passing the night any way we could.

“Hey, I’ve got one!” The journalist spoke up. I didn’t know her name, but I’d been eyeing her for some time. She was a tall girl with striking features, short blonde hair and rectangular glasses. I’d felt a slight pang of attraction the first time I’d laid eyes on her, like the mysterious tug between two very small refrigerator magnets. I’ve always been a sucker for her type, but this was definitely not the right place to find Miss Right. Miss Right Now perhaps, but nothing lasting. Besides, she was getting way too drunk, way too fast. I tend to steer clear of those who cannot handle their sauce as a general rule.

“Why don’t they have any Wal-Marts in Iraq?” she asked in a cheerful, high-pitched squeal. (Dear Reader, I could scarce wait for the punch line.) All eyes were upon her, except for two drunken sets making leering lazy eights over the front of her tight t-shirt. One male, it should be noted, and one female.

“Because there’s too many Targets!” This brought forth more laughter than was genuinely deserved.

Perhaps a background explanation is in order.

This is S.I.N.F.U.L. (Stuff I’ll Never Fucking Use Later), a military media proving ground where each branch of the armed forces sends the geekiest of their geeks to learn the deadly craft of mass communication. Students attending the various courses fall in one of three distinct categories: (a) those who’d enlisted in the hopes of doing something altogether different with their lives, but who’d been sent here against their will to fill a shortage elsewhere, and despised their new careers with every fiber of their being; (b) those who’d chosen this field because they thought it a soft option in comparison to the hard-edged life of the infantryman or the bone-jarring drudgery of a supply clerk, and planned to return to the private sector post haste when their tour was up.

And then there was the third crowd, (c) those strange and special souls who spoke a language all their own; those who pray before the alter of twenty-sided die; who relate to cartoon characters better than real people; who wished they’d been born Japanese; who think nothing of spending five-hundred dollars on a realistic Darth Vader costume complete with voice box and working light saber; who own complete seasons of HBO specials, and orange crates full of pirated media; those whose pronounced thumbs, lightning fast hand-to-eye reflexes, and nervous laughs marked them as video game aficionados. These were the proud owners of anachronistically accurate suits of armor, architects of homemade arcade machines, fans of Mexican wrestling, and obsessively compulsive for anything that made a noise, lit up, or plugged into an electrical outlet. Yes, we were those people – too smart to be happy, and doomed to be lonely.

Standing on an isolated patch of land just three feet away from them, I removed the pin from a Conversational Hand Grenade and lobbed it into the crowd: “Doesn’t it seem hopeless, the way we constantly bombard one another with information, yet fail miserably to connect?” The remark was a notch or two above the current conversation shelf, taking them by surprise.

“Look at the way he’s dressed.” I gestured with my bottle toward the videographer, who sported a Nintendo controller across his narrow chest. “We transmit random facts about ourselves like walking radio stations on a non-stop basis. Think of it as ‘KWHO – All Chatter, All The Time.’ We broadcast our likes, dislikes, sexual preferences and pet peeves to everyone in search of anyone, or just someone, who can receive or interpret our signals and tell us that we’re OK. We nail our deepest personal revelations to the door of anonymous electronic churches, and tell ourselves what private people we are. The truth is, we desire to be decoded. We crave a fan base. We yearn for our listeners to call in. We require those pledges to keep us on the air. We dread being misunderstood just as we fear being completely understood, and utterly fail to comprehend that no one will truly ever know or love another.”

The broadcaster slowly nodded her head, grasping my meaning through the haze of alcohol. I winked at her, and continued.

“We’re stuck in this world with no way out but death, knowing so little of life except that it begins and ends. We want to believe that there is something outside of our collective watching over us, because we can’t bear the thought of being alone. We refuse to accept responsibility for our destiny, so we create the idea of an all-powerful Barry Gibb to watch over us, a parlor trick so utterly twisted we can neither prove nor disprove it. We aren’t the first civilization to dream up such a paradox, and we won’t be the last. But some day, the last human being will lay dead or dying on this world or another, victim of some final futuristic atrocity. Once that person exhales, there’ll be no one left to believe in anything and the retarded fucking folly of God shall finally pass.” I paused to sip my beer.

“Personally, I think most people are afraid to admit that they don’t really believe in God anymore. Attending church is just obligatory lip service paid to an outdated concept forced onto children by parents who probably never stopped to consider they’d been duped by their parents as well. Besides, going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to McDonalds makes you a cheeseburger. God has failed to evolve, and that which cannot evolve will perish. That’s just human nature.”

Some people like video games, or music. Others are into hard drugs, sports cars, or pornography. Those are all wonderful hobbies, but personally, I’m into heresy.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

I savored the circle of slack-jawed countenances staring back at me, the tiny red fireflies of their cigarettes marking their positions like navigation beacons. “Oh, wait. You were talking about sex, or fart jokes, weren’t you? Sorry about that. Guess I took you a little off subject. The end.” I finished with a sarcastic salute from my now warm bottle.

Presently, an awed voice spoke from behind the glow of a cigarette. “Wow, I never thought of it that way.”

“Yeah,” agreed another. “That’s PFM, man.” Pure fucking magic. It was meant as a compliment, but I’d kinda killed the mood.

Moments later, the journalist I’d found so appealing was being treated to an in-depth and exploratory backrub from the photographer, his hands disappearing beneath the skintight texture of her cotton t-shirt like some erotic street magician. She’d flashed me twice earlier tonight, each time revealing washboard abs and a decorative, feminine tattoo that peeked out above the waistband of her straight-leg jeans. Stabbing me in the face would have hurt less.

I stood by, casually shifting my weight from one mile-worn Chuck Taylor to the other, peeling the label from my bottle and listening as the conversation again regressed to fart jokes and thinly-disguised racism, at which point I developed a powerful thirst for coffee from the shop just down the road.

Ahead of me now in line, an elderly woman in a floral-print dress laid a withered five dollar bill on the counter to pay for a 40-oz. bottle of Old English, and no one raised an eyebrow. I turned to look behind me.

Yet another beautiful girl wore yet another perfect tan, tight blue jeans, and a t-shirt designed for someone much smaller. Jesus! Do they grow on trees around here? Her acoustic guitar curves did not go unnoticed by the group of twenty-something’s crowding close around her in a desperate knot.

As I looked each of them in the eye, I could almost tell what they were thinking. The stout Asian boy with the spiky hair wore a ‘Don’t Make Me Go Zelda On You’ t-shirt and a resigned look on his face, a four-pack of Red Bull in his hands. His friends had probably dragged him bodily from his room with promise of a good time, but he looked like he’d much rather be gaming. He wielded power there, more so than here. We were simpatico, we two, I knew it at once. We were not the sort of fun Guitar Girl was after. We could offer her nothing in the way of thrills, unless she was the kind of woman who listed ‘stimulating conversation’ and ‘philosophical debate’ among her favorite sexual positions (which, in and of itself, was a different part of the same façade; it has often been said that everything we do is done for sex.)

The remainder of her entourage were decked out in expensive athletic jerseys, flat-brimmed ball caps cocked to strange, purpose-defeating angles, and expensive leather marshmallows, the laces of which barely acknowledged their feet. The way they crowded close to Guitar Girl was evidence of their intent. They would posture, pose, and plot their way across this too-humid night like hip-hop hyenas in hopes of outlasting one another, waiting until such a time when She of Curving Hip and Straining Breast was drunk enough to fall prey to the winner’s fumbling charms, lowering her inhibitions, and permitting him to feed on her flesh like something from Animal Planet. Yes, I felt certain of that.

I paid my bill and walked into a night filled with even smaller, more irritating insects, whistling something slow and mournful by the recently-deceased Johnny Cash. As I pocketed my receipt in the glare of a street lamp, I noticed the cashier hadn’t bothered to ring up my sandwich. I guess he’d been busy watching Guitar Girl, too.

When I returned to the picnic tables, the journalist, her masseuse, and everyone else had gone inside. I sipped my coffee, devoured my sandwich, and submitted to the sleepless embrace of an alien pillow sometime around 3 a.m.

- 30 – ,

TWM