WE ARE HERE TO MAKE WORDS.

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.)

State of No-State

You’ve probably noticed I haven’t posted anything in awhile. Far from implying an empty mind! Present topics of interest include: glossololia, modern manners, Gemini herbalists, near-Earth asteroid strikes and, of course, the Pale Blue Dot.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is high time for an upheaval. I’ve been 27 for nearly a decade now, and next month I’ll turn 38. For all my experiences, travels, adventures and headstrong attempts to achieve an altered state or even come close to understanding sensory overload, I’m still trapped in the same animated meatbag I was born in, allowing for cellular regeneration and growth. (The concept of our body as a fixed, frozen sculpture in time is fictitious, for what we think of as our solid body is really just patterns of intelligence briefly precipitating into tangible sensations. Furthermore, the reduction of reality to material properties is a myth. We are not physical creatures having intelligent thought; we are, in truth, the very intelligence which generates this physical experience. We now return you to ‘The A-Team, already in progress.)

(Effort involved in that paragraph: 8 minutes, 4 versions, 3 sips of Red Bull.)

Truth is I’ve been busier than a (insert clever analogy here) balancing school, work, and a social life. At present, there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t already think you know.

(Effort: 15 minutes, 2 versions, finished 16.9 Oz can of Red Bull)

Possibly I’m finished with writing, or maybe writing is finished with me, one. Nothing lasts forever, except nothing and forever. Don’t kid yourself. You’re just as stuck as me.

See you soon,

30NOV07 in the City

With a tremendous rush, the 5 o’clock yellow line comes thrusting out of the tunnel near the platform where I’m standing, driving before it the musty and mysterious smells of a dozen subterranean concrete wombs that it’s penetrated along the way. Headphones in, hat pushed back on my head, squinting into the wave of grit and wind, I wait till it stops before boarding the last car and sliding into a seat. Never cheat children, women, the elderly, or the infirm of a place to sit. These are rules to keep you honest, rules to live by. Remember them. A pair of gushing teenage girls take a seat to my left, giggling about something on their camera. I think for a moment about how much power and kinetic energy they hold. In their young lives, they will gain access to places I only read about in magazines based solely on their looks and implied access to their sexual favors. Spending this currency too readily means they’ll have the hardest time being taken seriously when they get older. I can’t remember being that excited about anything when I was their age, and that’s probably a damn shame. I’m sitting in a rail car moving backwards at X speed telling you first hand that the distance between Crystal City and DCA is remarkably short.

It’s Friday. Don’t believe me? Look it up.

TWM

01DEC07 – Sitting in Chipotle on King Street on a Saturday afternoon nearly paralyzed with pleasure, my legs tingling from the cold bite of the wind, my lips basked in flames from the heat of the salsa. The girl who assembled my burrito asked me twice if I was sure I wanted it this hot. I’ve been indoors for most of the day (the internet is evil!) but I got some work done as well. I have a camera, a notebook, coffee, and food. My Maslow’s are met for the moment.

The brown paper wrapping used to cushion my burrito is covered with the names of musicians. I read through them, and wonder at the tastes of someone who might own all of these albums. The selection is so bland! Who the fuck was the marketing department hoping to reach? Thirty-something’s in pressed jeans and color coordinated wardrobes, the relaxed faces of people you see in advertisements. Every race and gender represented, all with perfect teeth. They have a lot to laugh about. Their sparsely decorated homes feature the latest in labor saving devices, check their bank balances at the beach, and they drove there in a brand new Acura, maybe a Saab. These are decent people who live in respectable neighborhoods, vote responsibly, engage in vanilla sex, and spend lots of time shopping. They genuinely like Jack Johnson, and invite their college friends over for taco night.

Who the fuck has taco night? Men with perfect feet, lean physiques and six-figure incomes, that’s who. Women who own their own businesses and never get periods, that’s who. Couples with picture perfect weddings who name their daughters McKenzie and their sons Blake. People who shop at Eddie Bauer, wear their alma mater on sweatshirts, talk down to their children, and refer to themselves in the third person as mommy and daddy, that’s who. I don’t know what fucking planet these aliens came from. I only hope they come in peace.

Later, walking down King Street as I often do, immersed in observations and remote participation, exercising caution on the wet cobblestones. DASH buses entombed in a soft blue glow glide past on glass wheels, carrying no passengers. Everyone gives a stink eye to the poor around here, and no one wants to be reminded of the Facts this close to the Season of Giving, or how unpleasant things can get just beyond the walls of their personal Empire. A dollar won’t do shit. Anyone who knows anything knows that. That’s almost as good as taking the money and flinging it into the street. People only give to make themselves feel better.

Passers-by emit clean wi-fi, broadcasting their likes and dislikes in the clothes they wear, the products they sip, the shoes on their feet, and still we fail to understand one another. Someone once told me that ninety-five percent of the people you meet in your entire life are sound asleep, but that the remaining five live in a state of panicked awe, doomed to stomp the high ground alone, misunderstood and feared.

Everyone has issues, no one is exempt, all of us serving time here on the Pale Blue Dot. We are born, we become aware of ourselves, our surroundings, but seldom do we grasp the length and breadth of our lives until somewhere close to the end of the film, looking back over our shoulders one night with a glass of Scotch and seeing at last that our wild adventures took place within the narrow confines of a dog run, understanding for once and all that we lived each day according to a set of rules we didn’t vote for, experiencing a sense of guilt when we sought to please only ourselves. Then one day, we’re introduced to the concept of our own mortality, and it becomes the only name and face we remember, despite having met literally thousands of interesting and attractive people at parties throughout the years. Nothing lasts forever except nothing and forever, and there is no such thing as security. Our lives are over in the blink of an eye, like the shadow of a great bird crossing the surface of a lake by the light of the moon. There are no rollover minutes, and nothing is carried over, because none of us believe in the same version of today, tomorrow, forever, Heaven, or Hell. It’s just that simple, and just that complicated.

People in their cars
scatter like sparks from a fire.
Who knows where they go?

TWM

11JAN08 – I have difficulty with time; an ailment if you will. Things that happened to me years ago feel like yesterday, and vice versa. I think most physicians would refer to it as a Billy Pilgrim moment. Walking to the Metro, I suddenly find myself slinging ‘Pink Panty Pull Downs’ split three ways and bottles of Bud Lite served ice cold at that crappy little dive in Hilton Head, making hundred dollar bills hand over fist and spending all my free time inebriated pool side. When I opened my eyes again, I was on a Metro train twenty minutes late for work in the year 2008, older, wiser, and just as uncertain about tomorrow. How did my predecessors manage to live in this world, and create the great works that made the world sit up and take notice? I’m barely able to keep my head above water, spending much of my day finding new ways to stay interested in my job, with little success. My roaring 20s are just a memory, and I’m nearing the end of my depression-era 30s. Time just keeps marching. Most of the greats died young, unheralded.

Burroughs managed to hang on for the long haul with only his guns and his cats for company in the end. Kerouac drank himself into regressive stupidity, mummified in his mother’s apron strings and denying all that he’d accomplished. Thompson far exceeded his own predetermined finish line, and put his wife on hold while he ate the business end of a shotgun. Kesey went quietly, Casssady died counting railroad ties. These Junkies, drunks, malcontents, wandering madmen, Zen poets, and acid-suckling Pranksters were heroes to me, and yet I spend my days slumped in an ergonomic chair, manipulating electrons and shuffling file folders for Big Brother, living a life straddling both sides of the fence. I feel spikes of pride when I read about the lives we’ve saved, but this false sense of security, this wet blanket I live under is sapping me dry, and every day I’m that much closer to breathing my unhappy last.

“Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, but it’s a fact of life,” chides a co-worker. “We all have to work!” says this stupid son of a bitch with a pair of dog’s balls sitting in the pan where their brains were meant to go. Is this your call to arms? Is this the trumpet call that spurs you to battle every morning? Maybe you’re in worse shape than me.

Enough of this talk. It’s Friday, and for once it’s not freezing.

Two days later, making observations in Murphy’s (God Hell, I swore I’d never come back here again.) Some relationships go on much longer than they’re meant to, like a Christmas sweater from your grandmother you’re told to keep wearing long after you’ve outgrown it. You get sick of the role you forced yourself into when you were lonely and you’d rather be anywhere else, but here but Here is the only game in town. Don’t think I’m alone in this. Someday you’ll get to a point where you can’t call the shots anymore. They’ll call you, and you’ll have to wait by the phone.

Still, these precious hours are the apex of the weekend, the part we all wish could go on forever. It’s as though we were in a carnival ride, swinging high out over the cornfields, closer to the stars in this moment that we have been all week. In this time and place we can see forever, and in a few more hours we will have begun our re-entry into the atmosphere of Sunday morning. Right now everything is clean and holy, and all we need is a few dollars in our pocket, a place to sit, and a strong drink with which to wet our lips. We can ignore the slappers, the bad Irish music, and the constant sports feed (on not one but two big screens!) Our ancient home continues its orbit around a prolonged nuclear explosion. All we ask is a few more precious seconds of this warmth, this innocence, this endless stretch of hassle-free nothingness. Monday morning is coming up like a sunrise on the horizon, but right now the Earthbound tedium of our workaday existence is a million miles away…

CUT TO: Monday morning. The hustle and bustle on the road to Doom, people racing each other out of the Metro station, up the escalators, fighting for a seat on the shuttle – just headed to work. The faster they travel up the ramp to that daily abattoir, the better they like it. The girl with the violin legs is back, in her tall brown leather boots and a skirt like theater curtains…I’m listening to the Rolling Stones, watching it all happen, as I always have, as I always will.

(“Tell me, Sister Morphine / when are you… coming ‘round again?”)

TWM