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”,
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.)
27JUN08 – It’s 3 p.m. on a rainy Friday afternoon in June and they just put Joe in the ground.
The cemetery was hot and still at high noon, and the three of us who’d been tasked with this duty made small talk while we waited for the procession to arrive. The YN1 would stand about twenty yards off and hold an electronic bugle that played a mournfully perfect version of taps at the touch of a button, while the MST2 and I tended to the flag. No gun salute, no fighter jets roaring overhead. Just an administrative specialist, a marine science technician, and a journalist. We were all the send off Joe would get.
The ground was uneven, and the folding metal chairs at the gravesite were covered in sagging green velvet cloths. The tarps covering the mound of earth were ragged and torn, and I saw a clump of fresh chewing gum stuck to the leg of one of the chairs. I can’t believe they put a human being into the ground with so little fanfare. I suppose it’s because it happens so often, but that doesn’t mean it should feel so mass produced. I peeked down into the crypt before the mourners arrived and it gave me the chills. ‘So that’s what it all boils down to,’ I thought. ‘A tiny bedroom in the ground.’
I don’t even know Joe’s last name. I only know that he was a WWII vet, that a lot of people came to see him off, and that some of them cried. Eight strong men carried his coffin downhill from the hearse to the site, and I heard some of them grunt as they struggled to lock it into place on the rollers. That’s a funny thing about guys – we find mechanical devices in the damndest places, and there’s always that impromptu conference of the best way to go about the job.
The heat rained hard as I stood next to the MST2, waiting for him to give the quiet command to salute as the casket passed us by, carried by members of Joe’s family. I brought my hand up slowly, feeling sweat trickle down my arms and back. The thermometer in the car said it was 95 degrees outside. My eyes found a spot about twenty feet ahead of me in the grass and I stared at it while listening to the remarks, which were brief. When the last pre-recorded notes of taps faded away into the trees, I walked slowly toward the coffin and took my place at the foot. I was nervous, but determined to do this right. Joe deserved at least that.
The flag was new and stiff like burlap, and the white ceremonial gloves I wore gave me no sense of touch. Hands up and together, thumb down along the groove. My hands did all the work, keeping the shoulders stiff and unyielding. Flip and repeat, until I was looking at nothing but red candy stripes. Here comes the hard part.
I managed the cheat fold OK, but the first triangle resisted me. I thought for sure I was going to drop it, but I managed a second and a third, pausing to smooth and adjust along the way. Complete a triangle, take one step forward. I had to stop my glasses from sliding off my nose at one point, and I felt bad about that. Things didn’t quite match up with the field of blue the way they should have and we had to work hard to stuff everything in properly, all the while maintaining some sense of military bearing and somber airs. But it looked OK, and according to the laws of military tradition there was no red showing.
I don’t think Joe’s widow cared one way or another. She was a tiny little thing in a purple dress who lacked the strength to look at up the MST2 who presented her with the flag after I’d folded it, offering the thanks of the president, and the gratitude of the nation. I barely heard her murmur her thanks and I was only four feet away. I can’t imagine what was going through her head as her trembling hands accepted that flag. The first time she and Joe met? They last time they kissed? I thought about how her best friend of many decades wouldn’t be there when she got home, and they’d never share a bed again. A lifetime’s worth of inside jokes were now lost. It no longer mattered how he took his coffee, or whose side of the bed belonged to who. Never again would he call her that special name. There would be no more anniversary cards. Maybe she’d follow him soon after as the victim of a broken heart.
Once she’d accepted the flag, we marched slowly off to one side, turned and waited for the ceremony to end. As the crowd broke up, some of the attendees thanked us for doing a good job. Afterwards, the MST2 drove to an old school Italian deli on Pennsylvania Avenue and bought us lunch. Just like that, we were swimming in the river of life again. A pan handlers gave us hard luck stares outside the deli, and we talked about the funeral on the drive back to the office. Soon it began to rain.
But Joe is in the ground now, and that’s where he’s going to stay. I’m in an air conditioned office sipping a bottle of water and listening to music of my choice. In an hour, I’ll catch the train home. Meanwhile, the body of Joe, total stranger, war hero, late husband and dear friend lies in a tiny subterranean bedroom in the earth, waiting for whatever religious or spiritual event he believed would happen next.
I don’t know how else to end this story, so I will.
First off the curb, I left on the Longest Business Trip in History, not knowing I was saying goodbye to one of the great loves of my life. The phone call in April left me a mess for months. Even now, I long to call her up a hundred times a day just to hear her voice, just to say hello to a dear friend. However, I lack the strength to discover exactly how far she’s moved on, and with whom. Torturing myself is useless, and there will never be answers to all my questions. I keep thinking ‘it should have been me,’ but there were just too many strikes against us. We were too far apart, we wanted different things, etc. Dealing with that bomb blast left me isolated and wounded in my apartment for much of the Spring. I have few friends in this area to begin with.
When I poked my nose out late in the summer, I found I’d lost them all.
Early in the fall I met another woman; a bewitching Amazon with her own ghosts. Our first meeting was incendiary, the chemistry pure vertigo. Each time she smiled at me, I forgot how to breathe. When she said ‘hello’, time stopped. She set me on fire, and expanded my horizons. For awhile things were good, but the see-saw of a relationship is seldom level. First she chased me, then we were level, then I chased her. Then I dropped the “L” word. Soon after, she jumped off the see-saw all together and stormed off across the playground, vowing never to contact me again. It had been six weeks. ‘You fell in love with love,’ she insisted dismissively, and berated herself for doing the same. I still had too much sadness about me, and my life was frozen in place. I was going nowhere. I miss her like crazy, but she ain’t coming back.
My longest project to date continues to bear little fruit – the sci-fi novel that has taken me seven years to write received a rejection letter from Tor Publishing. There is still hope, I have other plans.
I start back to college in January, working to finish my Bachelor’s of Science in Communications, and hopefully take it further. Masters degrees are a dime a dozen anymore, and experience alone will not save me in the end.
Transfer season is coming up, and I’m Number One With a Bullet. Word on the street says I’m Florida bound, but nothing has been confirmed. I look forward to leaving my ghosts behind, making a new start of things. Another chance to re-invent myself, keep my mouth shut, and my head held high.
I’ve been working out like a fiend, partially out of boredom, and I look better than I have in ages. I continue to lose weight, and build up my back, chest and arms. I’m also investigating the possibility of Lasik eye surgery. It’s time to come out from behind the glasses. I had to give up Capoeira because they kept slipping off my face. I imagine what it will be like to run without them, go swimming, buy nice sunglasses…
Headed north to see my Padawan soon. He’s growing like a weed!
All in all, this year has been a learning experience. I was forced to ask myself a lot of hard questions, and provide answers to same. I made some new friends, the kind who keep me going on dark days. True fame is measured in happiness, in friends, in health. Money goes up in flames, fine cars get wrapped around trees. Sometimes the voice on the other end of the phone can give you what you need when you don’t know where to look for it in yourself.
I am optimistic; young, healthy, intelligent, energetic, hygienic, debt-free, employed and reasonably attractive. In addition, I have food in the fridge, and a bed to sleep in. That’s more than a lot of people have.
Time for a pot of red beans and rice, and my new copy of ‘The Watchmen‘.
