Approximately 345,125 days have passed since the Battle of Hastings…
Summer is officially over. Earlier this hour I sat on the back deck of a nearby ice cream and confection shop and enjoyed the last double cone of the season. Thirty-two minutes after the hour smelled like a lit match, and passed through my body like a lingering acid trip, casting echoes of anti-reality across the yard like ripples on a still pond.
As is my habit, I attempted to put the moment into words: a helicopter circles low overhead, fucking the humidity with five swords in a rough approximation of gunfire… Navigation lights keep time with 80s era Depeche Mode leaking from a window above the shop where twin Caribbean accents clink and click away behind the dishes, chatting softly about the washing up… Multicolored pendant lamps hang condemned from the underside of the deck umbrella… Beyond them, rusted iron straps bolt across the back wall, supporting sagging sections of the aged brick structure and –
Yeah. Okay. Great. “I marveled at the complexity of eternity and the invisible quantum orgy, and I reveled in the giddiness of the moment” — whoop-di-freaking-do! — before my euphoria was crushed by an avalanche of sad realization: I didn’t really know how to capture this. I didn’t know how to make it stay.
I could give away my worldly possessions and forward my mail to a high mountain monastery, surrendering the remainder of my days to the relentless pursuit of truthful description and worshipping the holy fucking glory of the written word and still I wouldn’t be able to drive a nail deep enough to make this moment or any other linger longer, despite all my longing.
I sat in a Juneau bar one night many nights ago, teetering on the edge of fall-down-drunkenness and thinking carefully about what makes women beautiful (like you do), struggling to capture an ever-elusive essence in a haiku or some such shorthand measure.
What a fucking load of noise! I might as well have tried to work out why light is bright or why it hurts when I fall down. But I have no academic training, I (still) don’t know what beauty really means, and to make matters worse I suck at haiku. Plus I was blind drunk and getting dumber by the shot.
Notes salvaged from that night: “Something about the eyes, some measurement of the face, some mystical number or secret formula. Sometimes a rock climber’s fingers or the strong jawline like a bow across the strings (and the hips) of a cello, but now and again and again it’s the neck but it’s not always the body and usually the soul but frequently it’s just the way they carry themselves. Is it this way for everyone? Do others see them as I do? Am I crazy or just retarded?”
There are writers, and then there are writers. Me, I’m just a guy who takes notes. I try. I really do. Ultimately, my doctor says I suffer from a curious affliction experienced by a tiny selection of monkeys doomed to live out their brief and answerless lives anchored to a spinning speck at the ass end of an endless universe.
I’ve been given a pen, he says, but there is no ink.
It’s difficult to resist committing each and every mortal monkey moment to paper, documenting them in some electronic manner. I want to show that I lived. I want to demonstrate that I felt, that I saw, and that yes, I bought the ticket. But I realized on that drunken night, and tonight — and probably I’ll discover it again tomorrow — how completely futile it is to try, but how addictive it is to keep going any damn way.
Not only am I shouting into a wind tunnel against the rest of human expression, but memories tend to fit the shape of our hands. We scoop them to our perspective. They are never as we remember them. Flashes of unspeakable beauty happen like a gunshot. They are vivid once and then they begin to heal as a puckered scar, closing the portal behind them. (A captured memory would most likely rot like fruit in that well-intentioned bowl you placed on your kitchen table.)
Where is the proof of yesterday? It survives as a dry cleaning stub in my wallet, right next to the the Metrocard I purchased from an underground kiosk twelve hours ago; close to the rats and upwind from the piss. Yesterday is the delicious meal I recently shat into the sewer.
(Sometimes when a meal is really good, I laugh. At least I used to.)
We inhale these spectral seconds in order to keep them close to us, refusing to let the flame flicker out, straining to hold onto important occurrences just a little while longer before coughing in to the basic need for air. An explosive exhalation precedes an involuntary gasp for fresh O2 and then the moment is lost to the wind and the second hand ticks once like a bomb, never to return. So many such seconds will fade like photographs on the wall, polished mute like the rocks I’ve gathered on walks without remembering why, or when, much less where they began.
(Morale of the story: Stop playing the movie. The ending never changes, and the film gets warped the longer you leave it on the bulb.)
From Wikipedia: “The Finnish have an expression for the will to push forward. Sisu, loosely translated, is defined as strength of will, determination, perseverance and acting rationally in the face of adversity. However, the word is widely considered to lack a proper translation into any language. Sisu has been described as being integral to understanding Finnish culture. The literal meaning is equivalent in English to ‘having guts’, and the word derives from sisus, which means something inner or interior. However sisu is defined by a long-term element in it; it is not momentary courage, but the ability to sustain an action against the odds. Deciding on a course of action and then sticking to that decision against repeated failures is sisu. It is similar to equanimity, except the forbearance of sisu has a grimmer quality of stress management than the latter. The noun sisu is related to the adjective sisukas, one having the quality of sisu.”
…
Hours later in the darkness, sitting in a large orange dish chair near an open window in my living room. Cool air files in and takes a quiet seat. A short glass of chilled apple moonshine rests in my left hand. A man walks down the near side of the street repeatedly muttering something about real estate. As you do.
Tomorrow I will write a letter to a friend and talk about the fire virus in the trees, and how Brooklyn is beginning to burn…
Tonight I am imagining things; a dark spot on the floorboards near my foot has crawled toward me, twice. Each time I pin it down with my eyes, it reverts to being just a dark stain on the floorboard, the 78 of an old conversation trapped beneath the varnish. When I turn my eyes to the laptop screen, it becomes a mouse again, or a roach, or something larger.
I’m not afraid. I just wish it would make up its mind.
I’d just finished a two-year tour at a remote Royal Air Force base in Machrihanish, Scotland, and I was coming home for thirty days leave to see my two best friends.
Once I arrived in town, we then headed south for a day of white water rafting along West Virgina’s New River. I remember car camping that night and drinking a great deal of sticky sweet bourbon. Then there was a long drive through the night in order to reach Tarpon Springs, Fla., by dawn. (I took the night shift at the wheel and nearly got us killed, having grown accustomed to driving on the other side of the road and the other side of the car. I’ve never cared much for driving to begin with. I’ve gotten better at it, but apparently the shit can kill you.)
The windows in the rental were down and NWA was blaring from the speakers as the southern humidity yawned in and my friends caught some much-needed shuteye. My first tattoo, the giant spiderweb on my left elbow courtesy of Terry’s Tattoo’s in Glasgow, Scotland, hung out the driver’s side window. I’ve gotten a lot of looks for that one. I didn’t get it because I’d killed someone or spent time in jail; I just liked the aesthetic. I’m actually a pretty nice guy.
We arrived at our destination in Tarpon Springs later that morning but when we pulled up in the driveway there was no one home, so we drove around town a little while, probably in search of food.
At some point we passed Black Diamond Tattoo. Without even thinking, I shouted, “Hey, stop the car!” This surprised the driver somewhat, but he did. “Great, thank you. Just drop me off here and could you please pick me up in about an hour or so?” I don’t know why I felt so compelled but just like that I walked in and picked out the band of barbed wire that would live around my right forearm for the next million miles. Eight barbs. Fuck knows why I chose eight barbs…
Years passed, life happened. I moved around, held a lot different jobs, fell in and out of love and changed as a person. And over time, the ink gradually faded and things started looking pretty shitty. Then one day I wasn’t even that person anymore. It was time for a change.
Today I walked into Brooklyn’s Fly Rite Tattoo on Metropolitan; after a few painful hours and the darkest ink he had on hand, Jeb Maykut did me up right. We talked about experimental music, pirate radio and the benefits of travel on one’s horizons.
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.)
23AUG2010, 1730 – Riding home on the Brooklyn-bound “L”, midway between Lorimer and Graham, I experienced a sudden and overwhelming sense of deja vu.
The car was slowing down, and I moved toward the door. Looking down to my left, I saw an olive-skinned girl in a black polo shirt, unbuttoned. Black hair pulled back in an end-of-the-day ponytail. Blue jeans, battered Chucks. Eating pretzels from a brown bag. Me, I’m listening to Lamb’s “Lusty”:
When the echoing sound from 1:58 began to chime, everything hit me at once. I had been here before!
When I move to a new place, it is understood that a significant amount of time has to pass before I start to get the feeling that everything prior to that moment was just a dream, and that I’d always been there. Getting it this early isn’t a good sign; it implies burnout. I’ve been in NYC since June 3.
As soon as the car stopped and the doors opened, I did something I’d never done before; I stepped out of the car and walked to the left, knowing full well and good that the exit was to the right. Then I halted, right-faced and without thinking, I walked over and touched the wall. Turned back around and walked toward the exit but stopped short again, sat down on a bench, pulled out my notebook and began to scribble furiously: STAND BY TO BREAK CAUSAL LOOP. Stupid Uni-Ball let me down, threw it at the tracks, dug out a felt-tip, kept going, waiting for something…
Looked up. Checked my watch. Nothing happened. The ragged tunnels were as unapologetic as ever: no back-masked dwarves, no parquet floors, no red curtains. No offers of coffee:
Instead, I was alone on the platform. Just me and my dementia.
I stuffed my notebook back into my bag and capped my pen. The next mechaWorm had arrived, and I joined a fresh wave of tired bipeds as they shuffled toward the turnstile. We climbed the steps to the street. We waited for the light. We crossed Metropolitan, but I headed home alone.
I’ve think I’ve got just the thing for the next communication managers meeting. We may have to do it offsite, though. That shouldn’t be a problem, right?
Performance art: I’m sitting center stage in a walrus costume with a microphone, reciting the following: “Who can take tomorrow, dip it in a dream, separate the sorrow and collect up all the cream? Yeah. Brian Olexy can.” Then I scream out some leftover frustration from the Mondale election and hurl myself across a pile of broken glass and concertina wire before bumming cab fare from the audience.
Seventh floor, somewhere in Chocolate City, just down the street from the Big White Building where all the troubles of the world are born. Wringing an existence from this town means elevator speeches, and learning when to nod your head and just say “Yeah…”
Listening to: Clutch, Killing Joke and Nick Cave, amped off my face on a cup of heavy fuel – Colombian, black, two sugars. Waiting for: assignment feedback.
My task, photograph a roomful sullen adults attending what must be the single most boring event on the planet; a teleconference, in which a wisened figure in enormous glasses drones on about contractual requirements, and the proper formating thereof: “Now when I… started doing this in nineteen seventy… five, we didn’t have… the same template… that you see on the screen. We had something… different.”
I can geek out on most anything. Add this to my ‘except’ list.
I enter quietly and wait against the back wall, waiting, thinking it through. How to shoot this? Low light, and the room looks empty, uninteresting. Lining them up against a wall won’t work, and whatever interest they have in the subject matter must be preserved in order to look real.
The instructor calls for a break and I spring into action, explaining myself and my purpose as I begin rearranging some of the furniture, visually reducing the size of the room. Moving with certainty and speaking authoritatively will take you far in this world.
“Uh, excuse me? Why is this photo being taken?” The demanding voice of dissent belonged to a dumpy, dour-faced thing toward the back, a half-empty bottle of Diet Product Placement on the table before her.
“Just doing my job, ma’am.”
“Well, I don’t want to be in it.” Arms crossed over her chest, disapproval written across her forehead. Good luck, wild horses. “Why can’t you just do a group photo or have us stand in front of the screen?”
“That takes you out of context, ma’am.” We are nothing without our manners. Thumbs are good, too. “I was assigned to capture a certain shot a certain way. Putting you in front of the projector means you get a bright light in your eyes, resulting in an even funnier face.” Oops. I’d taken my mouth off of the ‘safety’ setting again.
“Who do you work for?” The rest of the room were subtly ignoring her, or helping me move furniture. I remained motionless, meeting the glare of her tired eyes. I could have been an ass about it, but I calmly fed her a string of department numbers, and name-dropped my supervisor, who sits pretty far up on the food chain. I ended the sentence with “ma’am.”
“Well…” Her response was non-commital, as she thought this through. I hadn’t really won, and she hadn’t really lost. I got my shots, left. The rest of the day crawled by like a bowl of unhappy oatmeal.
Last night: my train to Maryland smelled like a lion had taken a crap in the air ducts. I tried to picture this taking place.
Later, another coffee house, another page filled, another pen spitting its last. The never-ending quest to capture the blitzkrieg butterfly of the brain. Feel the bright red burn of an idea, the resulting smell of smoke and burning tissue, the urge to capture a concept - seal it in a jar, paste it in a book, put it on display, cup it in the hands, take a picture of it, sketch it in pen: “There is something else in here with me, something staring back from behind the curtain!”
Listening to an older couple discuss the unsexy mechanics of relationships: household chores, bank accounts, wills. Use the following words in a sentence to your loved one: “Well, when you die…”
Watching a new relationship take hold and bloom is like watching two massive spherical computers, each bristling with spikes and amature. At the end of those arms are various ports and devices; plugs, nodes, hardware, software. These represent likes and dislikes, concerns, needs, skills, and must-haves:
“Does your port/need #11,345 mesh with my port/need 12,345? If it’s at least a v.2, we can discuss. If not, it’s a mark against. Conversely, I shall strive to meet your expectation for cleanliness, #556. My own port is a #400 series, but I make up for it with my grandmother’s recipes, represented here by nodes #223 – 470.” The sound of servos whirring, sphere rotating on their X,Y in an effort to be compatible.
“Reptiles. Yeah, now see, they’ve got scales and stuff. They have their babies in eggs. Sure, like birds. Now mammals, they have their babies live, kicking and screaming, already worrying about college, playground heartbreak, and the child’s 21st birthday hangover. Do alien species ever have to sweat this kind of shit? ‘Dragnor supped of the brew of the Lathgor, and suffered from an excess of chuth’lah.’”
They taunt me like little spirits as I walk down the street, as I sit on the train, as I stand patiently by the oven cooking my dinner, as I sit here in front of this fancy fucking machine.
I ‘feel’ and ‘see’ and ‘hear’ words in my head everywhere I go, small compositions of carbon-based clarity turning this way and that, catching the light, giving shape and form to nothingness, bright imperfections summoned from the ground. I try to capture them, sketch them out, speak them into existence, but when I reach for the net of the pen, they slide out from under my thumb like a fragment of eggshell in a bowl. I make a motion toward my notebook and they burn to nothing like fog in the sunlight. I’ve had visions of forever.
I’ve seen the Fourth Dimension. I’ve watched gateways to other worlds spin silently before me, wholly indescribable in their elegance and simplicity. But all that’s left behind as proof sits naked on the page like a bowl of dead shit, flat, wet, smelling something awful. Stupid fucking words. I want something that plugs directly into my skull and translates those images instantaneously.
Walking down the street, observing, struggling to ascertain The Full Meaning. DASH bus in blue glass glides past, empty seats, no passengers. Old black man with a song and dance asks for a dollar, some spare change. Sorry, I have nothing to offer, I only carry plastic. “God bless you!” he shouts at my back, as though this might guilt me into handing over a twenty. I stop, turn around. “If there was a God, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?” That stops him for a moment, giving me time to wander on.
We broadcast our personalities like little radio stations in the endless details of our clothing, our cell phone colors, our accessories, choice in footwear. Then we hide in the little DJ booth of our minds, screening callers, hoping the right listener will pick up the phone and make our half-understood dreams come true. How the fuck is someone else supposed to understand us when we’re not even sure what or who we are? There’s a good chance we’ll blow ourselves to Hell before we get a chance to evolve further. Time spent dealing with issues of racism, religion, sexism and politics are undermining our efforts to turn our focus inward, improve ourselves from within.
We are born, we become aware of ourselves and our surroundings. (Red comes first, I read somewhere, and circles soon after. Toy companies exploit this fact. It is the only feasible explanation for an abomination like Barney.) We begin to live our lives in response to our environments, at first, and later as response to life itself. We run this traveling road show by a wild list of rules which seems to change with the wind. Sometimes we bend it to suit others who may or may not realize the impact they have on our lives, while struggling to impart some sort of permanence or meaning to what feels like an eternal existence, but in reality lasts eight decades at best.
There is no such thing as security, not really. Iron bars can hold back a man’s flesh, but not his spirit. The expensive sports car wraps around a telephone pole just as easily as the Ford Fiesta. Your mobile home glows just as hot and burns just as bright as the palatial estate of some bad boy actor in the Hollywood hills. Your wealth can’t be carried across the River in clay jars, as once believed.
‘There are more goddamned/ cars on this planet than we/ know what to do with.’
It would take an entire lifetime for us to fully understand one person – picture a well equipped facility somewhere; men wearing safety goggles and dressed in white lab coats take apart your childhood one moment at a time, carefully unraveling the timeline of every curious thing that ever happened to you. Hold it up to the light, weigh it on a scale, measure it against some agreed-upon chart, examine how this might have affected you later in life, move on to the next one… Freeze one of these moments: See, the elderly man boarding the morning train at the front of an impatient crowd. You let him go first, out of respect for your elders. More follow in the gap you just created. The old man takes a second too long to find an empty seat, creating a bottleneck in the doorway. This effect ripples, until you find yourself at the back of the slow-moving crowd, and then the doors close. You missed your train. Had you been to work ten minutes earlier, there would have been ample hot water for your coffee. As it was, you were forced to fill your mug with warm water.
If I could give my childhood self one piece of advice, it would have been this: “Skip the toys – and stop worrying about the girls, they’re as lost as you right now. Here’s what I want you to do. Get yourself a cassette player, and then beg, borrow or grovel your way into a word processor. Start massing tapes, different kinds of music. Anything that sounds good to you. Start writing music reviews and submitting them to magazines. I don’t care if they reject the first five, the second ten, the next fifty – keep ‘em coming, striving to get better and better with each attempt. And read this list of books! Get familiar with these concepts! Oh, and be on the lookout for something called a ‘Dot Com.’”
