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…
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.
Pause from a sip of Belhaven on this hot September night in Brooklyn while the ghost party rages next door…
For three days they’ve been at it; Latino pop, an unfortunate backside selection of lesser known Motown hits, shoddy R&B and cheap reggae covers of even worse songs and now — for some entirely unholy reason — they’ve jammed the dial on “dance music of the late 90s” and abandoned responsibility for the jukebox entirely. A giant treble clef in white rope lights adorns the chain link fence at the back of a yard filled with tables, a tent and a hit squad of ubiquitous white plastic chairs, probably hot stamped into existence by some vapor damaged 12-year-old in a far away factory where clean water is a fairy tale and Zouzou always needs more medicine. But until tonight, there were no guests!
Suddenly this end of the block has become a swirling stew of double-parked cars and unusual food smells. People are eating potato chips and laughing at jokes. Here and there, a sibilant ”s” slips out from behind a hand, denoting a polite aside or perhaps some private concern. Crackling murders of teenage crows hop and cock on the steps, arguing listlessly about nothing essential, puncturing the dead night with shrill howls of o-shaped disbelief and “No, you didn’t!” Staccato bursts of “um-hm” and “I was like…” dominate the front stoop. Whiffs of this harmless patter force their way through the dusty grid of my windscreen and stain the floorboards below; layer upon layer of audio memories forever trapped in the varnish like insects in the amber, to be later extracted by an avuncular but well-meaning scientist figure and turned first into a theme park, then into a movie and perhaps, Hollywood willing, a sequel.
My previous apartment, the Fortress of Solitude, was surgically clean and hermetically sealed against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It was a great granite haven, a solid silent place to make a stand, a posh pillbox in which to bivouac myself away during my initial year in New York City. It was the ultimate shelter, designed to keep zombies out and my paranoia in. It could even sustain a direct hit should the pigs ever lose their grip on the wheel of the nation.
The air conditioning always worked, the counters were pristine and easy to clean. My landlord held all my packages. My grocery store was just around the corner. My local bar was one block over and five blocks down. My favorite coffee hole was two blocks over and four blocks down. The L, two blocks over and five blocks down, would take me anywhere I wanted to go and there was always eye candy on the train.
I was the first person to live in that apartment since the building was remodeled and I found it reassuring; no matter what happened, no matter where I roamed, I could count on coming home to immaculate granite surfaces, freshly laundered towels and thick walls designed to keep out the peals of wicked laughter and unexplained shrieks of the city until I eventually learned what was what and allowed them to drown in the background of the sea. I don’t do so good with crowds.
Entering my incense-laden sanctuary at the end of any long day, I could drop my bags to the floor and breathe deeply of my governed space. The clothes in my closet were always pressed, hanging on identical IKEA hangars and spaced exactly one finger apart. The towels were folded boot camp style on a gleaming metal rack in a spotless bathroom complete with heated floors. The kitchen sink was devoid of both dirty dishes and water spots. The desk was exactly black. The books were arranged first according to subject and then by alphabetical order.
I could hide here from the filth and noise. I could do my laundry in peace. I could do chin-ups while my dinner bubbled away in various pots and pans on a five-burner range. I had room to pace. The middle of the living floor was completely bare; I could swing a cat without hitting a wall and stretch my long-limbed frame in all cardinal directions. My altar, a stack of military ordinance crates layered in incense ash and dried flowers, was adorned with candle stubs, sentimental rocks, statues of obscure deities, dog tags, spent rounds of ammunition and assorted skulls. It held a place of honor at the center of the room beneath the main window.
Clearly, I had the freedom to express myself. And I should’ve been churning out volumes of new material, but oddly there was nothing forthcoming.
I was too safe.
A ship isn’t designed to stay in the harbor and the Fortress wasn’t meant to last. The rent was costing me an entire check each month. I was hemorrhaging money and plugging the holes with sticky rice and red beans. Poor is only sexy when you’re young.
I knew couldn’t stay there forever.
So I decided to move. Moreover, I decided to get a roommate, someone with whom I could split the bills and the groceries and spend some time being human. I genuinely love being alone but to tell the truth I was maybe getting kinda weird…
I weighed the pros against the cons and I tried hard to find a fault with my plan but it was just too good of an idea to fail.
First came the apartment hunt, then the logistical scramble followed by twelve hours of slave labor which took place on one of the hottest days of the year. My new roommate and I first emptied her tiny fourth-floor Flatbush apartment before tackling the Fortress. (Thankfully we were assisted part of the way by my boss and his always-smiling girlfriend.) We finished the move, returned the piece of shit, graffiti-covered meat wagon at around eleven that night and ached like zombies for the next three days.
My new apartment is on one end of a shady street just three long, loping blocks from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The interior of this 1901 railroad-style Huxtable hideaway has been painted over so many times it’s probably lost an inch of actual real estate from the doors and walls. The outlets, when and where they exist, are all two prong. There are no outlets in the bathroom. The honey-colored floors warp and creak like a fat man’s belt when you walk on them. I need a road flare to navigate my tiny all-black closet. There’s a three-foot patched-and-painted depression on one wall of the back room, as though something large from another dimension stopped by for tea one Sunday and left a crater-shaped ripple in its wake. I drop my laundry off at an establishment on the corner; it comes back folded. I’d need to clone myself and stand on my own shoulders in order to change the light bulbs in the living room, the double doors of which stick and drag against the friction caused by decades of paint and varnish. There are bars on all the windows (though I’m not sure whom they’re meant to protect.) The books are on the shelf with no particular care to their order…
But I like it. There is life here. This apartment requires me to relax. I cannot control it.
Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer on this hot September night in Brooklyn while the ghost party rages next door… New York is practically built for writers and artists too (and I suppose even that poor, miserable, disgusting wretched subspecies of worm human, the fashion photographer). All you have to do is close your eyes and listen.
What one might first dismiss as the mindless chatter of ignorant gossip or uneducated bleating is actually the complex interpretation of the new battlefield translated by the secret medium that cannot and will not go away. At every second, we stand on the gentle arc of the present tense and we talk about what Is. As much as I hate gossip, it’s a fucking necessity.
In order to write about people, you have to put yourself out there in the biomass. Find the words, capture the No Thing. Get involved. Stick your dick in the mashed potatoes.
William S. Burroughs referred to something called the restless word, a silent power that ebbed and ached and yearned to be described. “Close your eyes for ten seconds and try to think of nothing,” he said. “The word will still be there.”
Scott Adams wrote, [SIC] “We are the slowly reforming nervous system of a suicidal god.” When we speak we convey information in rough tree shapes that, properly diagrammed, resemble a map of the human nervous system. This is an offshoot of this, which relates to this, which is part of this larger branch… We build roads and rail systems that branch like the human nervous system. We should know better than to build mega weapons and super gases and ultra guns, but we do it anyway. We give in to fear. We cannot leave well enough alone. It’s as though we were programmed to do these things. As if we were not only marching determinedly toward the destruction of our species, but through it. Beyond it, even.
We want to believe we were designed for something. We’d like to think we happened for a purpose. We can spend our lives guessing at why we’re really here, but I don’t think those answers will come for a long, long time and when they do we may not even recognize them for what they are. We come, we do, we go.
Please refrain from A) the use of a phantom fetus-conjuring blunderbuss B) the levitation of more than three novelty-themed Rubik’s cubes during a single séance, and C) the piloting of a square-wheeled tank boasting ineffective armaments in public places.
We’ll have more news of this at eleven. And now, tonight’s top story:
There’s something living behind the walls of this Brooklyn-time summer moment that paws, sniffs and stamps restlessly at the scattered ground, sifting through the raped and littered soil with a decidedly pointed hoof for telltale signs of a missing future. And as it just so happens, this creature and I are hunting the same mouse; a secret stashed safely below the surface of the immediate past and cleverly camouflaged by the present tense.
Imagine if the universe worked differently; suppose every minute in history is essentially a separate world which must be built, maintained and torn down once the world finishes with it. And further contemplate that somewhere, someone decided that this particular instance, one containing a living photograph of alien world, needed to archived and viewed again for whatever reason. Okay, but why? What was so important about that moment, that planet and that dimension? Was it worth saving because it wasn’t ours? Was the archivist hoping to somehow rescue this civilization and provide a how-to or an example of how different life could be if it were DIY’d in another part of the universe? Was this about “art”? Perhaps it was the archivist’s job to catalog civilizations and somehow this fragment was inappropriately absorbed by the bandwidth of my dreams. I have no fucking clue.
What I do know is this: I’m attempting to reverse-engineer a fragment of a memory using the mnemonic equivalent of a gasoline-scented scratch-n-sniff sticker, an oft-folded illustration torn from a science-fiction magazine and a die-cast metal toy. And someone off-camera is demanding that I use these items to return a forgotten city to its former glory. The simplified instruction manual provided to me was downloaded as a zip file and stored somewhere in my skull but the link is 404’d, and now I’ve got this… thing bumping around in my not-so-big upstairs with a case of amnesia, creating unwanted bulges in my reality.
Anything I attempt to do while in this state becomes ten times more difficult; everything gets sped up and pinched, as though one were fishing for a shell fragment in a bowl of yolk. Time (yolk) is distorted, flowing faster between the outer shell of this 404′d object (thumb) and the walls of my perceived reality (bowl); images of some mysterious and misplaced Martian market become momentarily visible, projected against the ghostly flicker of heat waves of this New York Minute, brought to you in part by Friday, June 10, 2011, the letter thirteen, and viewers like you.
The good news is that I can almost feel what it was like to live in this place, but I can’t put the experience into words. Not yet. The bad news is that it has to come out.
The key to unlocking this thing’s got something to do with the way that Kanji seems at once ancient and futuristic (likewise Arabic, likewise the art of Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest), so I try to focus on that. It also smacks roundly of the early issues of Heavy Metal magazine I devoured as a teen, the art of Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), selected writings of William Gibson and the feel of films like Fifth Element and Blade Runner, where the overt alien undertones are just part of the experience:
- a Bodega cat seeks relief from the summer heat on the lid of an ice-cream freezer.
- a matronly Ugnaught of a woman, with cast-iron breasts like matching Civil War cannons, stomps and sneers and stabs at her sequined-pink cellphone with the gold-painted nails of a velociraptor, talkin’ ‘bout how she gonna “fuck that dumb bitch up!”
- a hovering trade ship from some dusty distant world waits patiently above the East River for permission to land.
… and it’s all part of the Mise-en-scène.
Primarily, it’s got something to do with that fucking sticker.
I scratch at it furiously and press my nose against it, breathing deep. It works, albeit feebly. Something churns in my stomach and my field of vision becomes momentarily faded and narrow. Encouraged, I scratch and huff at it some more. This goes on for about ten minutes. Beads of sweat begin to form along my arms and a rising sense of vertigo develops in my stomach. Now I’ve got the half-summoned memory of a lost alien world caught like a cat hair at the back of my throat and I’m desperate to cough it loose.
I cram my fingers down my throat and after a moment’s salivation I begin spewing forth watery chunks of buildings and backgrounds which slap at the pavement like horse piss on a flat rock before standing up slowly on their own, like a prizefighter ready to talk serious business at the end of the seventh round. Slumped against a wall with one hand on my knee, the sensation rises up again, coursing through me like a tidal wave as a half-completed grid of city streets soaked in stomach acid snakes forth like umbilical ropes from the enraged space between my lips, anchoring themselves to the soil like plant tendrils and immediately taking root, unfolding like ugly flowers. My jaws are pried open against miles of sewer lines and buried electrical cables and in a brief reprieve I take a few breaths in through my nose. Soon, my abdominal muscles are convulsing and contracting again as the five o’clock skyline of a world I’ve only imagined rockets the wrong way up my esophagus and my mouth gives birth to an alien sunset. It splatters first on the sidewalk before instinct drives it to its feet on doddering legs and it takes its place at the top of the page.
I gasp air for few minutes, wiping the puke from my lips and spitting out the taste of concrete and anodized metal, surveying the half-formed thing that I’ve made.
I wanted to be an astronaut until I realized that I sucked at math. That was the fourth grade. I’d failed the same stupid test for the third time in a row, consequently developing a deep, psychological hated for red ink pens…
My next “when-I-grow-up moment” didn’t really come until high school, when I decided I was either gonna be the guy who made monster suits and spaceships on movie sets, or I was gonna be a writer. I’d been writing since I could hold a Crayon and figured it was as good a destiny as any.
I was still a freshman in high school when I typed up a nine page short story about a guy who drove around the country hunting down the losers of a state-sanctioned lottery as an alternative to global thermonuclear warfare. I sent the story to my parents, who unbeknownst to me sent it to a publisher, who in turn called me up and told me that if I finished the story before the end of the summer, I’d have myself a book deal. I panicked, blindly polishing every spark of creativity out of the story, missed the deadline and shelved it forever.
But the experience gave me a real push toward words. From that point on, I became obsessed with writing. Maybe this was a doable destiny! I started forming the idea in my head that if I just focused on this lone and immaculate objective, I’d someday perform a great and magnificent feat: I envisioned doing something amazing, something that could change the course of history and unite the world in a common emotion, like an athlete who trains their whole life for one shining moment while overcoming great obstacles along the way.
I decided that I wanted to be able to express human emotion in a way that no one had ever done before.
Still in high school, I looked into haiku on the advice of a much-respected English teacher, quickly becoming a fan of the medium’s prison shiv beauty — short, sharp and, inserted just beneath the ribcage, designed to take your breath away.
In just seventeen
syllables, I swore I could
smell cherry blossoms.
As you can imagine, I was crap at writing haiku. Everything I wrote looked suspiciously like something someone else had already written a long time ago and I felt ashamed. Plus, I’d made the mistake of telling the wrong people my dreams. Presently I gave up on haiku. Why not? I was nowhere near a temple, and there were no monks to guide me. Sweeping the floor was just sweeping the floor, and a glass of water was just a stupid fucking goddamn glass of water.
Still obsessed with words, I then had the notion that a person could somehow open their mouth and let brand new sounds tumble forth — words and phrases never before spoken by a human mouth, in any language, by any race, anywhere on the face of the Earth. Beyond dead languages, beyond glossololia. I thought that maybe the key to expression was locked inside this new box…
Except I had no database or monthly scientific journals to base my findings upon. So I made a lot of retarded noises and jotted them down, hoping one of them might be even slightly virginal in nature.
(It’s no wonder that I remained in a similar physical state until I was in my early 20s.)
After that, I wanted to come up with an answer for the question of why we find some people more attractive than others. I thought that maybe it had something to do with the measurements of the human face — the height, width or angle of the nose, the spacing of the features, the length of the jawline, the width of the mouth, or the specific color of the eyes. What if all these factors added up to some sacred number, one that doomed a small group destined to succumb as prey to holy integers? Years later, I would find this on the internet:
It’s nice to know that as an adolescent, I wasn’t completely off the mark; just off my rocker. And understandably horny.
Following high school, I gave up on my dream of being a special effects artist. It seemed the only way to achieve this was to move to Los Angeles and hang around on movie sets until I found someone to teach me. Instead, I applied and was accepted to a prestigious Midwest art college. I was hopeful — until they told me how much it would cost. So I revisited my writing dream and, after reading too much Hunter S. Thompson, decided I wanted to be a war correspondent.
And Uncle Sam was gonna fund it, because I sure as fuck couldn’t.
At first I considered a stint in the army, or maybe the Marines. I’d need to learn some very valuable survival skills before setting out into the wild. I had a vision of myself in four or five years time; a half-smoked cigarette permanently attached to my bottom lip, a gaggle of battered cameras slung around my neck, an ancient carbine across my back, dust-caked goggles pushed high on my forehead, and an ancient Underwood under one arm. Once I finished my enlistment, I’d take any assignment, no matter how dangerous. And wandering to some of Earth’s far-flung shit holes, I’d explore the last remaining exotic lands still hidden from the light of Western progress. I would write stories about the things I saw there, and take photographs of the fascinating people I met.
And one day I would simply miss my deadline, never be heard from again. That was my retirement plan.
I was not yet 21.
So I approached several recruiters and attempted to make an intelligent decision based on the horrible lies they were paid to tell me. I tested well, and applied for jobs in photography, journalism and for some reason, cryptology. But the recruiters all told me those fields were closed, and that I should pick something else. We went round and round in this manner until finally, disgusted and hopeless, I stormed into an office and spoke thusly to a Navy recruiter:
“I want the most far-flung, whacked-out job you have, something that will take me to the far side of the globe, without threatening to bring me one inch closer to the chair I’m sitting in.” And that’s the story of how I never became an astronaut, or a war correspondent, or the guy who makes monster suits or spaceships for movies.
Had I known that recruiters are instructed to ‘guide’ people into certain job fields where their respective service was experiencing shortages, or had I only been willing to wait. Well, the outcome might have been different.
Instead, I went to Europe and built bombs for four years.
I’m pleased to say that the desire to write came with me. I started keeping a journal just after high school, and I took it with me where ever I roamed.
Journal writing frustrated the fuck out of me at first. I lacked skill, and I was impatient. I was in a big damn hurry to write perfect things and powerful sentiments. I didn’t know the first fucking thing about real writing but I still wanted to do something amazing, something so insightful that it could lift the veil of reality, and part the curtain to another world. I wanted to write modern spells and conjure new truths.
I wanted to surpass all previously written works for their ability to inspire and split foreheads with the lightning of the profound. I didn’t even know what the fuck I was gonna write about, but I figured that once people read these holy words the message would spread like wildfire…
The world would lay down arms. Millions of people would wake from a terrible dream, weeping and gnashing their teeth. The leaders of the world would turn to one another and exclaim, “Goddamn, but we’ve been going about this all wrong! The last book has been written, all words can rest! We must now aspire to fuck one another with the cock of peace and harvest grain together under the same sun, washing our clothes together in the great river and turning our swords back to plowshares yet again. God won’t save the world. Science won’t save the world. The earth plain-ass wasn’t meant to be saved. This book has said everything we’ve been trying to say, everything we ever thought about saying, and everything we probably would have said in the next ten thousand years, but didn’t know it yet!”
Sure, I was a pretentious ass. I wanted to write magic holes through mountains, and weave spells, blah, blah, blah. But I also genuinely wanted to understand beauty, and lust, and savagery. I secretly hoped I’d go crazy when I got old so I could map my experience in a journal, holding on clarity like a fading lamplight as I ventured down that last and darkest of tunnels. I was convinced that there was so much more to the world, but I didn’t know how to express it beyond my diet of tabloid headlines, song lyrics and science fiction movies. Sometimes the words were right there on the tip of my tongue. I wanted to be able to communicate anything to anyone, and make the whole world understand everything.
But how could I? I didn’t understand myself, and I couldn’t separate myself from what I wanted to write about. I didn’t know where to begin, or where I ended. I didn’t know jack shit.
So I kept writing.
I continued to write through my early twenties, but without success. Journals came and journals went. I wrote letters about this, that and the other thing. My friends were full of praise, and they let me live in the world I’d created. I was The Writer.
I devoted years of attention to the recommended greats – the Beats, those who’d come before me and who by measure of their poverty and fearlessness were far more devoted to the craft than I knew how to be, each of them a pioneer in some regard. They explored and exploited their own wormhole, staking their claim to a particular voice or style one step ahead of the gold rush.
The voices that called loudest to me were: drugs, music, sex, and road trips – oh, my! And the strangest of those voices? Assassins. (Giant fucking millipedes?? Really??)
I wasn’t prepared to give up on writing, but I also realized I wasn’t very good. Still, I promised myself one drunken night in a land very far away that if I ever became homeless I’d still carry a pen and a piece of paper. “You can abandon your work, but your work will never abandon you.”
Years passed, and I thought that perhaps stronger measures were called for. Suppose I made a Robert Johnson deal with You-Know-Who, and waited my turn at the midnight crossroads, armed with the wing of a bat and the eyes of a newt. Would the Horned One grant me my deepest desire based on the strength of a pinkie swear, or was I going to have to slit my palm with a crude dagger carved from the jaw bone of a murdered stag? Headless hooves stomping in the bloodied winter grass, the end result of my quest to harness above as the below…
But I didn’t believe in the Devil, and I didn’t actually think I could murder a stag. So that plan was out.
Time passed. Journals were purchased and filled. The majority were dog-eared, covered in duct tape and existed pretty much as ad space for my ego, their pages weighted with stapled concert stubs, proclamations, one-liners written on airliners, photographs of models, quotes torn from magazines, strange things and coffee rings, but mostly drunken heartache. Twenty years, nine countries, five states, three islands, one Indian reservation, and one snow globe later, and still I have no idea of what I was trying to say.
My apartment is pitch black tonight, and my hands look so much older by the glow of this laptop screen. Time is out there, snorting and stomping the snow, exhaling demons from its nostrils, waiting… sometimes I think I can almost feel it at my elbow.
Like right now.
I’ll be 40 in a few months, and no closer to writing anything more powerful than a good one-liner. In the absence of my all-powerful epic, I’ve managed one novel, sixty short stories and thanks to a second enlistment in the other nautical-sounding of our Armed Forces, a stack of official-sounding press releases — none of which has ever escaped being disemboweled by a red pen.
There is the known, which we sometimes tire of. And then there’s the rest of it.
All I’ve learned about life is that I don’t know much. And from what I can tell, neither does anyone else. Everything we think we know takes place on this planet, and in this dimension. We are born here, and we die here. We are bound to this rock. The stories we tell are of this world, for this world, and by this world. They describe our experiences in this dimension, and how we live this life. And we know only these stories and their endless spin-offs. We’ve described our home to death, and pretty much worn out our tongues. I don’t think there are any virginal sounds left.
I recently deleted The Doors from my music collection, but I’ll give Jim Morrison one last nod: “No one gets out of here alive.”
There’s no such thing as magic, only science we haven’t figured out yet. Emotions are not facts, and love – as much as you wish it wasn’t true – is purely chemical. Relationships are all about timing, security and chemistry. And one man’s words aren’t gonna change the world, so long as there are people around to disagree with them.
Being successful in this life only means that your physical needs and comforts will be taken care of while you’re alive; inhabiting your body, existing in this dimension and playing your role in this traveling production.
The pawn and the bishop go back in the same box when the game is over.
But there has to be more! Something just beyond, something left behind, maybe something we’ve forgotten? I feel as though we’re living in a collective dream, standing tall on the edge of a trance: All the while you thought you were having a lengthy conversation with Iggy Pop in a half empty bar late one summer night in 1993, in reality you’ve been standing in the checkout line of a Memphis convenience store for the past ten minutes, transfixed by the mutated face staring back at you from a Pringles can on the conveyor belt, and frankly people are beginning to notice…
In the end, maybe Words have failed me. Maybe I failed the Words. Maybe there was nothing to fail. George Washington Carver once said that if you love something long enough, it would give up its secrets. Was I deemed not worthy to peek behind the curtain? Did I perform the wrong spells? Whatever the reason, whenever the moment, when it came time to select my Holy Path, I chose the soft option.
And so my reward was a different life. Instead of leaving this world on a pillar of fire to walk among the stars; instead of traveling to distant lands and capturing beauty reserved for only the bravest; instead of a day-to-day fight for survival and a life lived on the edge of a fast-moving knife; instead of summoning sentences both sage and surreal, crafting tales with the power of the Old Gods like the Jackie Chan of Juxtaposition, or the Wolverine of the Who, What, Where, Why and When…
Instead, I’m writing this blog.
Thanks for reading.
(There may be secrets left, but I’ll be damned if I know where to look for them.)
I spent four years on the Moon, thinking that life would be better when I returned to Earth. When are you gonna learn? The sun has been out for three days now and I can’t reach the bulb. When are you gonna learn? Doogie Howser is a sex symbol, David Hasselhoff lives on, but I stopped watching television years ago. When are you gonna learn? Every time I call, your answering machine picks up and while I always enjoy the message I hate to leave my own. I don’t know what to do anymore, and sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to have a relationship. When are you gonna learn? It’s never wise to date anyone below your age (divided by two plus seven.) When are you gonna learn? Something in the wall behind my bathroom door is ticking, I keep telling myself it’s the towel, it’s good to have mystery in one’s life. When are you gonna learn? My lovers have all moved on, but I am frozen in amber. When are you gonna learn? I’m supposed to be taking St John’s everyday, but I always forget. When are you gonna learn? My best friend in this town is a picture of lethargy and is slowly sitting his way into history. When are you gonna learn? I have reached the moment where I can’t remember ever being anywhere other than here; it happens when I move to a new place and spend enough time there. When are you gonna learn? I’m tired of being told how clever, how polite, how sweet, how charming I am. When are you gonna learn? I wrap my arms around a pillow at night, trying not to remember the smell of her hair. When are you gonna learn? I can only read the first twenty pages of any given book before I get bored and I’m sure the good parts are always at the end. Nothing seems to hold my attention for very long. When are you gonna learn? I don’t remember what my favorite movie is, I’ve seen too many. When are you gonna learn? It’s been cold for too long, I’m starting not to care anymore. When are you gonna learn? I can’t wait for Spring and Summer, the feel of fire on my skin, the sight of women in shorts. When are you gonna learn? I fail to follow my own advice, forgetting that there is no such thing as the ‘you’ in there and the ‘me’ out here. When are you gonna learn? I spend too much time in my head. When are you gonna learn? I’ll never get those blackberry stains out of the carpet – I can rearrange the furniture all I want but they still remind me of her. When are you gonna learn? My job has gotten smaller and smaller. Luckily there’s a new one on the way. (You only have eight years left!) When are you gonna learn? I’m not as smart as I think I am. When are you gonna learn? I used to write until my hands went numb and dropped the pen, but I seem to have run out of words. I come home in the evening intending to write, having found myself with an unlimited number of ideas on the train, but I can’t seem to get them down. Whole plots evade me. When are you gonna learn? After years of deliberation, I think the most useful super power would be knowing what women think. When are you gonna learn? I have dirty dishes in my head and my brain is in the sink. When are you gonna learn?
In the fall of 1989 I escaped from a penal colony, which orbits a distant and uncharted sun on the far side of the galaxy. I’d been imprisoned there for the past eight years. At least that’s what I told everyone. Anyway, I crash-landed on an alien world called Earth, and that’s how I met Mark O’Neil.
He was a lean, wiry kid about my age, who ran track in his high school days and ate less than a bird. He had a Roman nose and crystal blue eyes, a mop of curly blond hair and an understated laugh. And he didn’t treat me like the alien I felt I was.
His interests lie primarily in music, of which we shared a common taste for Black Sabbath and Metallica, and muscle cars. He’d breathe new life into tired old street rods which he’d buy for pennies on the dollar before selling them for three times what he’d paid, often to the original owners who were too lazy or just didn’t know how to do the work themselves. I never saw him drive the same car twice. There’d be a Nova one week, a GTO the following week, a Charger after that, and maybe an El Camino or a ’57 Chevy the week after that. He went through cars like cartons of milk.
Mark’s stepmother Nadine, however, was the proud owner of The Singularity. That’s what I called her 1979 Chevy Camaro Z-28 with two speeds — Mach 5, and dead stop. It was a slick black nightmare parked with impunity in the driveway of broad daylight. Aside from the year I spent in deep space on my way to Earth, it was easily the darkest thing I’d ever laid eyes on.
The exterior of this magnificent machine was so smooth, so unbelievably perfect, that I couldn’t seem to actually touch it with my bare hands. The first time I squatted down at eye-level to examine my reflection, I swore my hand was going right through the surface and I yanked it back, shaking the sensation of frostbite from my fingers. After that, I didn’t dare sit on the hood or lean against it for fear of falling through the car’s exterior and freezing to death in the depths of some lightless parallel universe. (After all, I just got here, and was in no hurry to leave.)
When The Singularity passed you by, it shook the sunshine from the trees. It ripped the whites from your eyes, tore the air from your lungs, and darkened your white blood cells without missing a single bore stroke. That’s how utterly goddamn black this car was. As it vanished into the distance, you could almost hear the high-pitched screams of doomed spirits and tortured souls, trapped for all eternity within the confines of the gleaming engine.
The black leather interior, meticulously cleaned, polished, and vacuumed each and every Saturday morning, was so completely devoid of light that you couldn’t be sure if you were actually sitting inside the car at all. Maybe it was just a trick of the light; some strange, roaming void where nothing could exist in the instant it took this high-velocity instrument to roar past you on fattened racing slicks that crackled and sang like lightning on the pavement. The windows were frozen polyhedrons carved from the heart of violent storm clouds so perfectly opaque they could shield your eyes from the blinding flash of a nuclear bomb.
“The bulb in the dome light has to be replaced every few days,” Mark told me once with a straight face. ”They all die from acute depression.”
The slightest pressure on the gas pedal resulted in your body being shoved deep into the 5-G bucket seats, as cool night air was being force-fed into your hungry lungs through the half-rolled windows like an adjustable ramjet; an experience which left you gasping partially in fear, and partially in extreme pleasure. The numerous glowing red dials and tachometers of the dashboard lights provided the only light in the car’s interior, lending a Satanic glow to the cockpit as it visually converted the output of the engine’s massive power into pure mathematical value. According to the crimson crescent of Arabic numbers mounted on the dash, there was enough power under the hood to fire a slaughtered goat into the heart of the sun, but you’d never hear more than a menacing rumble when you were buckled in with the doors shut tight.
And one didn’t put mere gas in the tank of The Singularity. Oh, no. Instead you offered a sacrifice and poured in the blood, as the pink slip was rumored to bear the Devil’s mark on the dotted line. I’m telling you, this car was fucking amazing.
We were hurtling aimlessly down a dark country road at the speed of sound one faceless night, void of schedule or purpose. The heavy purr of the engine was churning my blood into champagne while the thrumming, supernatural tones of “Planet Caravan” crawled like sonic ghosts from the German stereo system. It filled the interior of the car with such perfect clarity that I felt as though Tommy Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and John Osbourne were crammed into the back seat for an impromptu jam session, or maybe we were driving them to a party. The smoky mix of guitar and vocals wafted out of the speakers and, as always, a chill ran down my spine. “We sail… through endless skies… stars shine like eyes….”
On and on and on came the road, unfolding and unwinding from some monstrous black spool mounted on the back of a utility truck somewhere just around the next bend. It seemed to appear from nothing, only to be dissolved again by the wide-mouth cones of the headlights. I imagined each broken white line that vanished under us was a pulse of power from some secret generator, designed to feed The Singularity’s engine like the hydrogen scoop of a deep space reconnaissance ship. The Singularity’s taillight thrusters would propel me toward yet another alien world. What I was supposed to do when we got there I didn’t know, and didn’t care. I just knew I never wanted this stretch of road, or this moment in time to end.
“Wow… so, this is life,” I thought to myself. I was starting to feel human at last. Maybe I could fool myself into remembering I’d been born on Earth after all, given enough time and enough of this. I’ve have been happy to close the door on that instant, just lock the door and throw away the key.
“So what do you think of Heather?” Mark’s nonchalant voice cut through my reverie, and my heart leapt up like a sinner in a Baptist tent at the mention of her name. Meanwhile, Tommy, Geezer, Bill, and John had launched into “Fairies Wear Boots.” The title made strange correlations to the subject matter.
The “Heather” in question was Mark’s older cousin, a walking miracle in my eyes; a 21-year-old body carting around a 40-year-old soul. A hard-edged punk of a girl with deep brown eyes, a chiseled jaw line, and shoulder-length blonde hair. She wore heavy boots, bashed-up jeans, black t-shirts, and an Army jacket two-sizes too big, which hung on her narrow, cold-skinned frame in such a way that drove me up a fucking wall.
There was just something about her. I had such a schoolboy crush on this chick, but knew instinctively that she was somewhere way off my radar. Shit, I didn’t have the wattage even to pick her up! I’d wanted to meet her since the first time I saw her at Mark’s house. I just wanted to be with her, you know? I wanted her to sit down with me, hold my hand and tell me I wasn’t alone on this hostile planet. I wanted her to tell me she felt the same way, and that it was okay to be alone, that I wasn’t an alien after all. I admit, I wanted her to fill me in on some other the things I’d been missing out on as well but I couldn’t think of a way to ask her. The whole thing sounded so fucking stupid and Heather was just so damn cool.
Sitting in the Singularity, I realized I was taking a hell of a long time to answer such an easy question. ”Do I even have a chance?” I stared out the window ahead, straining for a glimpse of the giant truck that carried the spool of night that unfurled the road that supported the car that contained the suspense that stemmed from the question that Mark posed.
“The outcome doesn’t matter,” I thought to myself. If he laughs and says, “No, not really,” then that possibility wasn’t something I’d had in my pocket when I climbed into The Singularity. So when I left without it, I’d be no worse off. There was going to be a slap. I just knew it, and I braced for impact.
“Actually,” he said presently, “I’m just asking ‘cause I like you. You’re pretty cool. You’re not from around here, and I’d rather have her with someone like you than the dick she’s been seeing.”
“Really.” Holy shit! My voice was calm, but my heart did another flip and banged its head on the ceiling of my throat, swearing loudly.
“Yeah.” Mark reached over and turned down the volume on “Paranoid,” which resulted in four puzzled looks from the World’s Greatest Rock Band in the back seat. ”She’s been seeing this weight-lifting douche bag,” he spat, “some… frat boy, thinks he’s Glenn-fucking-Danzig. When Heather came by the house last night, she had a black eye. I wanted to kick his ass, but she defended him, which I don’t really get.”
I winced, partially with sympathy for Heather and partially from picturing my 98-pound friend going toe-to-toe with a beefed-up hair farmer who thought he was God’s gift to an army of brain-damaged, self-mutilating Goth chicks. ”Man, why the fuck do girls do shit like that? They always defend the assholes, while the nice guys wait in line.”
“Exactly!” he laughed, thumping the steering wheel for emphasis. ”My dad hit the roof and chewed her ass about it. He’s taken care of her since she was little, so she’ll listen to him. I’m just saying. Don’t…” He struggled for the right phrase. “Don’t, like… bank on it, but, well, just keep your options open. My dad likes you, too. He was seriously considering co-signing when you wanted to buy that hearse and your step mom wouldn’t help you.”
“Oh, yeah?” I was pleasantly surprised. The hearse was a sore point with me. Some guy down the street had a restored ’66 Miller-Meteor Cadillac Combo Coach for $5,000. A gift from the universe had fallen smack into my lap and my evil step-snake had flat-out refused to sign! ”Get a normal car like everyone elssse,” she hissed at me from the corner of her mouth, because she’s a rotten serpent. “And ssstop wearing ssso much black!” I stared longingly at that car every time I passed in the following weeks, and then one day it was gone.
“Yeah,” Mark said. “He was ready to front you part of the cash and let you work it off cutting grass and helping out around the house.”
“Wow.” I found I couldn’t wipe the shit-eating grin off my face, and the sting of denial faded slightly. There would be other cars, but it was damn hard to make a good impression on Mark’s old man.
Conversation continued, receding into the rear-view mirror as all moments do. Presently, a calloused hand wearing a studded bracelet reached cautiously forward from between the seats, turning the volume up just in time for “War Pigs.”
