The Crisis of Graduate School

Allow me, if you will, to launch into a rant about the crisis that looms ahead for we who have just graduated from college: The crisis of graduate school.
College, at least for me and likely for many others, is from the very moment one first applies largely analogous to a curled up human being rolling and bouncing down the stairs. That is to say, we are pulled along throughout the entire process by a powerful and unseen force that is utterly impersonal and will not answer questions. This force is almost irresistible, making it difficult to move back up the stairs if that is one’s wish, and leaving sprawling-collapse as the only temporary or permanent way to stop forward progress.
Now, the thing about these stairs is that, being metaphorical in nature, they are not your ordinary household stairs. These stairs have many forks and many different angles and inclinations, and there is no handrail. Thus, as continue our painful, trundling descent, it is often the most that we can do to avoid falling off of the stairs entirely, into an abyss of educational abortion. And, thoroughly disoriented by the discomfort of whatever hard, uncarpeted step we happen to be rolling down at the moment, it becomes incredibly unlikely that we will take the opportunity to consider the long term implications of whatever fork we currently face. Whether choosing a school or a major or a concentration, we survey our choices and are rolled by the forces of gravity towards whichever one sounds best, not really understanding where that path leads or why. At this point, after all, most of us are just starting to wonder who we are and how we came to be rolling down stairs in the first place.
On some fine, hopefully sunny day that many have looked forward to for years, we reach the bottom. Unseen forces no longer compel us to bounce downward and instead act to press us against the cold, concrete floors of reality (as it has long been described to us). And so, here we are. After a short lifetime of being shepherded hastily through our education we are left standing (if we’re lucky) or prostrate (if we’re not) before six hundred different sets of upward-reaching stairs, each pointed in a different direction and ending at some unknown place off in the distance. Some of the steps are big and some of the steps are small, and some are green and some are angry and some have bear the screaming face of your second grade teacher telling you not to cry. But all of them are scary and most of them are lame and very few will make you rich or famous and even less will make you happy, if you’re not already, but you need to choose one because the floor is cold and you’re probably not wearing socks or shoes because you smoked too much pot this morning before you got dressed and thought it would be sunshine and grassy fields forever.
So now, after more than two decades of having your hand held and being told exactly what you want, you’re on your own! Good luck to you, child, follow your dreams. Well I don’t know what my dreams are, thank you very much, and I don’t know what I want to do with my life, or what life wants to do with me, or how that works at all. But I do know that for the moment I am utterly sick of stairs, thank you very much yes sir, and that is why I am taking a year off before grad school. And if you try to stop me I will fight you with fists full of bad poetry and half-conceived philosophical collapses because what I really learned in college is that I am whoever I am now and I’ll do whatever I need to do when and I’m playing by my own rules, Jack, so keep your hands off and watch me explode into another confused, pointless and unbelievably beautiful human catastrophe as the next act of the dance begins.

A Little Talk With A Big Guy

Me: Why is life so hard? Why is there so much pain? Why is everything worthwhile so difficult?

God: It has to be difficult, that's how you grow. With nothing solid to push against, how could you move forward? Or perhaps it's just that life exists at the point of tension between two dynamically opposed universal forces, pressing and tearing at you as you move through time. Yeah, how's that one sound?

Me: But why?

God: Why why why. Always with humans it's "why." And yet any child can tell you the answer is "because!" Not that there's a problem with you asking, of course, but in torturing yourselves searching for an answer that you assume exists! What would you have me say? Your words, as labels of distinguished parts--defined by their distinctions--are by their very nature wholly insufficient to answer such a fundamental question as "why?" You might as well ask "how," or "when" or "what" or "who," because they all lead to the same place: This! This very thing which predates all social or individual recollection and is the arena f all lesser lives. This! Everything that is or has been or will be, everything capable of being conceived by vibrant hearts or broken minds, the substrates of all creation. Why? Why!?! Because! Because what else is there!?!

Me: That's not very satisfying.

God: Just try not to masturbate so much and be nice to your parents. Everything is already complete. Everything is fine.

The Eccentric Life

There are many benefits, both material and psychological, to what is known today as “living the eccentric life.” As an eccentric, one has the option to disengage from any social situation that one finds displeasing, from small conversations to major ceremonies such as weddings or bar mitzvahs. Though one can do this without any explanation (and on occasion should, to keep people wondering about you), it is also possible to dismiss the engagement with a casual aside. Just say that you find weddings to be vulgar. After all, the couple is gathering with their extended family to celebrate the formal deflowering of the woman, who is dressed in virgin white, by her husband, wearing the dark clothes of a ninja. Or, if a conversation is boring you, dismiss the topic as boorish and move on to something that you find interesting, like the recent rise in ethnocentrically oriented nationalist propaganda.

Further benefits of eccentricity include minor leeway for poor choice in dress, “second chances” following flagrant tax evasion, and the respect of angsty adolescent anti-establishmentarians. And a wider variety of pornography.

But wait, there’s more! By disengaging from what you now recognize as arbitrary, historically based and perversely distorted social norms, you will free at least three hours in your day which you can spend chain-smoking cigarettes and authoring zines about your radical and incoherent ecological ideologies. You’re going to change the face of this planet, you know. Or, if it’s more your style, spend the time getting wired on green tea so you can keep on meditating and practicing martial arts. Defeat them with your mind!

Of course, the number one benefit of being an acknowledged oddball is and always will be the women. Women just flock to the disorganized and unshaven hootenanny that seems to follow an eccentric everywhere he or she decides to go. How could they resist? You’re an exciting, uninhibited and worldly free-thinker, and you’re not too busy trying to impress them to wander off in the middle of a conversation.

Why I Stay Away From Metaphysics

Reality, at least in its nearest approximation to what we can conceive of in our four-dimensional understanding, is that most perfect of shapes, a sphere. This sphere is a tumultuous rock-tumbler of energetic tides, rolling and spiraling and fractalling about. The movement of this energy is the fourth dimension, it is time. Now, when a person attempts to describe the “ultimate” nature of this reality, there are a number of factors preventing the formulation of a complete metaphysics.

The first, of course, is that we are at the beginning only conceiving of this reality in terms of the four dimensions that we are familiar with, and we have no way of knowing or even guessing whether or not this is even close to being the complete set of dimensions.

The second problem is the problem of language itself. Language—being created within this sphere as an outgrowth of creatures which are themselves an eventual outgrowth of the energetic substrate and the laws by which it functions—is simply insufficient to represent the entirety of the universe. Language is in the universe, and thus it cannot be big enough to wholly describe or circumscribe the universe. Just as language, which is itself an eventual creation of the interacting energetic flows of this universe, is poorly suited to the description of those energetic flows. The building blocks of words are simply the wrong size and shape to build a proper representation of our universe.

Thirdly, it is indeed conceivable that the size, scope, and source of our very ideas is insufficient for the task. Our descriptions can offer a linear sample, shot through the sphere, or perhaps at best a plane of our reality reproduced and explained. The totality, however, is beyond the means of any human being to communicate, describe, represent, or understand. It may be that the entirety of the universe is represented holographically in the smallest of its parts, but it remains unknown whether such a part can, through self-awareness, know that entirety. The very nature of logical, discursive, rational thought, with its basis in the division and naming of separate things renders any true knowledge of the whole impossible. If knowing such a thing is possible it is so only in a state of mind/awareness that has left behind such dualistic conceptions in favor of a singularity of consciousness, suggesting that only during some sort of mystic or enlightenment experience can a human being truly understand this universe and such an experience cannot be communicated, only the path is transmittable.

Of course if such a state of mind is achieved and a small mind expands to fill the larger Mind, and in this act the nature of Mind as well as of the smaller mind is filled with a recognition of the indivisibility and unity of all once-apparently separate things, then it could be that enlightenment experiences may be reached by all beings at once and unexpectedly, as the universal mind reaches some sort of natural apex, before that particular energetic peak has fully played itself out or some other fashion of thing occurs which returns the state of the universe to its previous divergence into a multitude and the world-mind-cycle begins again, perhaps from a point of creation from a seed-point such as the big bang or perhaps in a state that appears to be (and for all intents and purposes is) already mid-stream, such as the year 2006. Or perhaps simply at the emergence of self-awareness for if consciousness is that which knows, and there can be no observed without an observer, then how can a universal consciousness exist without some sort of co-created “other?

A Loose Life Story

I know now what it is that I will do with my life. I know now who I want to be. I will hold on to this plan very gently and try to be ready if I begin to spontaneously grow in another direction.

I will become a psychotherapist. I will study at a not-too-conservative/not-too-new-agey university, where we will speak of resolving internal conflicts taking responsibility for emotions and how to learn to live with change.

I will open a practice where I treat people who don’t really “need” a psychologist for a severe or debilitating pathology, but who are interested in exploring the subtleties of their social and emotional lives. I will offer casual advice in the guise of “things to consider” and a patient, friendly, and encouraging ear for human beings who have somehow or another started to notice that sometimes life is scary. I will have an understanding in my studies, both academic and practical, of meditation and other avenues of self-exploration. Hopefully this will make me an asset to people who have begun to look deep inside themselves. I will do my best to be compassionate and non-judgmental when my patients do not live up to their hopes or plans, or lose control, or have moments of weakness, because they’re not gods and because neither am I. Whenever I myself remember, and thus can say in a genuine and heartfelt way that will give it meaning, I will remind my patients that everything is ok. Keep on truckin’.

I will write books in my free time. They will sometimes be funny and sometimes be sincere and intimate, and sometimes they will be self-indulgent and talk about strange things that interest only me. I will do my best to offer what few insights into the human condition I am able to glean from talking with my patients and from examining my own life, from learning how to heal. I will write them because every word I put down will show me something new about myself. When people read my books, I hope that they will feel as though they’re not alone. As though their inner worlds are nothing strange or alien or shameful, but the very root of that long thread that connects us all. I will try to avoid using sentences like the last one. I will have a giant poster of Allen Ginsberg in my study/office and sometimes I will wink at it. This will make me feel timeless and alive. None of my books will ever save the world.

I will live somewhere with pleasant weather, so when the breeze comes through my window it will warm my skin and help me to smile. On afternoons, when I have some free time, I will sit and read something that makes me feel understood, valid, and adequate. Perhaps I’ll marry someone who I truly love. She’ll be honest and open enough to show me her eccentricities and if I’m lucky she’ll do it without shame, and I will smile. When there’s nothing that needs to be said we’ll be happy just to sit together. We will spend lots of time together, and lots of time apart. We will go dancing. I will do my best to find the romance even when it changes shape. When we’re fighting and I don’t know why I’ll try to let it pass without aggravating my old wounds. When we’re fighting and I do know why I’ll try my best not to be venomous, to look at things from her point of view and to persevere until we resolve our troubles or forget why were fighting in the first place. I will grow because of our love and when one day it ends by death or distant hearts I will still know, even as it tears me apart, that I would do it all again, because it was honest, real.

When I am an old man I will wear a white, brimmed hat and sunglasses. I will drink coffee at a table on the street and watch the people walking by. Some days I will have a flower in my lapel for no reason but that it is that kind of day. I will be a spunky old rogue, who is not afraid to laugh or push around the young folk. Sometimes I will say incomprehensibly cryptic things and no one will ever be able to decide whether they bear some great cosmic significance or are just the musings of a strange old fool, least of all myself. I will never understand women and that will be a source of great joy to me. I will die quietly, with a grin on my face. After that, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Chapter X. There Are No Winners or Losers at Life, There is Only Life Itself

There are no winners or losers at life, there is only life itself.

Examine this statement, and remember it when you find yourself confronted by that most bitter fear of defeat, or the seeming need for dominance or wealth. Victory? What Victory is to be had in this world of great and seemingly eternal time? What do you expect that it might take to be among the winners, when there is no end to space or the ravages of entropy’s vivid decays? And who might count themselves a loser that has seen the sun set behind the hills, or felt upon their face the first hazy droplets of an early springtime mist? Who was so unloved in their life that they could be counted as a failure? Who has left a mark upon the universe so broad and timeless and profound that we might say he has reached a final success? There are none!

The seamless flow of life leaves no room for error, and the judgments of an empty sky proclaim no rank or honors. There is nothing you can do that will impress, surprise, offend, distract or seduce your creator, I promise you that. There is no haggard disciplinarian floating in the sky, marking in her book each time that you’ve misspoken or spilled soup on your mom. There are no bronzed Olympians set to punish your malfeasance or celebrate the conquests of your younger years. Don’t you see? There are only the forces of Life, endlessly flowing and reshaping themselves! How could you hope to violate the laws of physics? How could you wish to impress a quantum probability? By what madness does one attempt to outshine the building blocks of their own being??? Let go this foolish notion!

This is a world of fools and giants, of businessmen and doctors and hopeless layabouts. There are children and hoboes and artist and stillborn babies. There are world-class soccer stars and teen idols and ugly, ugly little girls want to grow up to be the Queen of Norway. Are any more important in the eyes of the sun? I tell you now, your successes and your failures will more than likely be forgotten in a hundred years. What possibility that they’ll be known in a million? What chance that at the end of unending and eternal being [time] a universe of dust will collect and recollect one final time how nice it was to make a George for just one instant? Do I dare to hope? But I do! What lunacy!

Every day human lives come and go as nameless breezes across a distant countryside, and though mourned or praised or celebrated in their passing the markers are brief and ultimately arbitrary, eddies in the greater ebb and flow of a universal tide. There are those who we cherish, most often the teachers and comedians who make time pass with a smoothness and levity that give us moments to take pause and recollect the crudeness and brevity of our personal forms. And more than that, there are those specks of dust who are so dear to us, so close in heart that they confirm the longings of our souls with just a smile. For them, and for those precious few moments that we once passed each other in the sky, perhaps all of this vast expanse of being is made worthwhile. [passing in the sky may be a better way to end the paragraph. Switch?]

Perhaps it would be of benefit, in understanding the profound immensity of that misunderstanding which leads some to believe that they must be the winners, that they mustn’t be the losers, that we consider first our lives as taking place in a badly overgrown village (which is true). Can’t you see that each of us has some job that we might do? That there is some task for which we find ourselves to be well suited, and that brings us some delight? Perhaps it does not pay well, or is looked down upon by others (no doubt for the typically inane reasons by which people have historically looked down on anything). Perhaps many people say, “there is no need to do that! You are only wasting time! You poets and dreamers are just a bunch of rotten no-goodnicks!” (The irony of course is that these folk need some poetry in their day more than others who can see it all about, floating on the air).

Well, there is no task so small and unimportant that it does not merit doing, if it brings some joy into this world. And there is no role so charged that in filling it a man gains a cosmic worth greater than that of a damaged and demented flea. Though today worth and appreciation are passed about as a second currency, and we are taught that we must justify our birth by word or deed or salary, the truth that shines in the eyes of the mystic and the genius and the Fool is that we are here for no reason but to Live, and fully!

What obvious unchallengeable facts have led you to believe that the universe was created in the hope that someone, somewhere, some day, would finally and irrevocably draw forth a salary so high that he might impress a stranger with his jewels? Or that the vast expanses of consciousness by which all things are known and felt willfully pursue the hope that one day a young woman might set aside her dreams of mastering the banjo [flute? Harpsichord? An exotic instrument? The sitar?] to pursue the practice of copyright law? Do you really think the moon was hung in the hope that one day we would have the might to shoot it down? Or that you should neglect to even try to be the hero in your dreams because of the careless criticisms of a friend who is not living your life?

This is it! There is no practice run, and no way to start anew when it dawns on you that you never took a chance. This is the real deal, your big shot, the one chance that you will ever have to be that which you have dreamed! No one has ever grown into greatness by trying to impress his friends! And just as surely, no one has ever become a radiant beacon of possibility when fed mediocre dreams! Here is the world of your vast potential! Now is the time to pursue your transformation! The unconquerable Now!

There are no winners! There are no losers! There is only greatness for the sake of greatness, love for the joy of love. We each have been gifted with a life of unknowable potential to unfold, what blossomings of hope might lay ahead!? Suck the marrow from your moments! There is no one to live your life for you, and no one for whom to live your life. Take the time to stretch your wings, of course, but do not stretch them for the stretch alone! Stretch them that you might fly, and test the limits of human striving.

Or, perhaps, you have some better idea?

I Want It ALL

I want it all. Grind it up, condense it, distill it, draw forth its essence and instill the very fiber of its being into a single easy-to-swallow daily supplement for my convenience. I want it accessible. I want 24/7 lives available live, 24/7. Give me ever potentiality, every possible outcome stemming from every conceivable juncture and give it to me raw, unfiltered and unassailable. It should burn in my esophagus from the rough, fibrous spines of irrational jealousy, the searing madness of undirected hate. Every lover’s first kiss and last word and all the blowjobs in the world delivered to my doorstep for ease of consumption. One moment at a time is not enough, give me all of them! All of them at once and again and again in every variation, every hue and every tone and every rhythmic vibration of being over and over until the day they lay me in the ground. Direct the deep tides of eternity towards my intestines for I am become the Great Consumer, The Devourer, and make quick work of the most expansive multiversal ecstasies. Tear me apart that I might feast on the ripping of cosmic flesh, mend me that I might delight in each and every puncture as the waves of time recoup the shattered being that was. Nothing within time will suffice the quench the flames of desire that drive every manifestation of this vast and empty mental space. Twist it up, place it end to end and let it spin, let the raging carousel of life twirl blindly through my mouth again and again in a single unending act of ingestion. Rend the planar sheets in such a way that each moment begins and ceases its beginning at a central point, reborn that I might once again feast on the passions of those fools driven to the brink by visions of lilies and the tan and tone of soft, warm flesh upon flesh. Set each eye against another that reflected vision might show the blind a world that never was and hoist the mothers up by their legs so their babies fall from twixt their legs into their arms as lovers. Plant dancing nameless signposts in the shifting sands of deep blue eternities to keep them going on their journey and no one will ever learn that while everything changes, Nothing stays the same.

Psychology Shmychology

I have fallen out of love with my psychology major. Of course, along with falling out of love is the inevitable realization that I never really loved the study of psychology in the first place. In fact, it turns out that the study of psychology isn’t what I thought it was at all.

It is true, there are many aspects of modern cognitive-behavioral-neuroscientific psychological study that intrigue me. The mechanisms of working memory, attention, perceptual processing and association are valuable and mysterious subjects, and I hope to learn more regarding the goings-on of these basic systems as my education progresses. The collaborative workings of multiple senses that is implicit in the creation of our subjective experience is also surely fascinating, though I can’t recall anyone ever mentioning it. But, being now only two semesters away from receiving my bachelors in psychology, I am beginning to notice that my education has failed to illuminate any of the questions central to my current interests.

For one thing, I do not, at present, have a very clear understanding of the role emotion plays in the modern western concept of the human being. What is emotion? That it is linked to the limbic system is not an answer, my friend, nor is any reference to hormones or other neurotransmitters. Listing mood disorders once again fails to provide any meaningful explanation. What is the difference between happiness and joy? Why do small, inconsequential things elicit strong reactions when large-scale tragedies do not? Why do I get cranky?

But more importantly, modern psychology as taught in the Temple University undergraduate program has left me utterly bereft of any sort of vocabulary that might be of use in describing how it feels to be a human being. What is this? What is the nature of consciousness? What does the word consciousness refer to? How is consciousness effected by the workings of the body/brain/sensory apparatus? Is consciousness simply the end result of sensory, associative and mnemonic devices functioning together in a tightly crafted collaborative effort? But then, who or what is experiencing these phenomena? Anyone? I believe it is the Buddha’s suggestion that, no, there is in fact no one experiencing these phenomena. There are only the phenomena. Quite possible. And therein lies my point: At least the Buddha took a crack at it.

I had a teacher sophomore year for Introduction to Psychology and he warned all of us that the study of psychology would not yield the secrets of the universe. I said to my friend “I think he’s wrong.” Perhaps we were both right. He was quite correct in that the study of western psychology does not seek to reveal the nature of this thing called life, though indeed that is at the center of its inquiries. I was not entirely wrong in that “psychology” means the study of the mind, and the mind is precisely what must be studied if one hopes to unravel the nature of this strange thing!

Let it Flow

Let it flowwww from the tips of your fingers and toes and tongue. Let it roll off your nose, pour forth from your mind. Let it fall out of your being into a being of its own. Let it flow.

What dreams of neverlasting sweet embrace doth drive the tickled tremors of a poet’s open breath? Who stands that would wish a man to deny the very moment of action before it has had chance enough to unfold? Standing tall and feeling the gentle currents of emptiness within our breast and belly and back, float through moments as through cool mist on a warm day, find in them the expression of a bright and glimmering joy in the midst of others’ sorrows. Sink backwards, hang daintily on the breath, and notice that in this very moment nothing can be found except freedom.

Facebook Crush

To: Facebook crush #48028

Dear sir or madam (hopefully madam), I am writing because I think you are totally hot. However, I see lots of people who are very hot who I do not message, so with your indulgence I will explain why I have singled you out (because this is a message and not a live conversation, I will assume that I do indeed have your indulgence).

You are not just hot, you are also a wild a crazy kind of mind who I would like to cuddle with. The rambunctious, vibrant, and adventurous energy displayed in the many pictures of you suggests a deep and powerful love of life unrestrained by the many armors most people wear to hide their human vulnerabilities from themselves. From your profile I assume that you have at some point become aware of your human vulnerability and managed to maintain your exuberance nonetheless (or, perhaps, because of it?). You are very pretty and stunningly cute when borrowing men’s glasses. You have beautiful eyes.

You are a writer, and based on the one or two stories of yours that I have read you are not a very bad writer. Your prose captures the dance-like nature of human emotion and experience in a way that belies a keen understanding of the rhythm and flow of life, and something in your smile suggests that you intend to fully savor the ups and the downs, the ins and the outs. This is very brave.

I am terrified of love for reasons I do not yet fully understand, but no doubt it is related to the inevitable pain of separation. Regardless, I would like to hold you for a while. I would like you to teach me how to enjoy my life, how to not be afraid., how to suck the marrow out of love and in the end be satisfied or, at least, without regret (if one is ever truly satisfied can it still be known as love?).

I think I’m an interesting guy, I just don’t know how to “turn it on,” or else I find “being on” too exhausting to maintain. I lack the persistence of the great feminine energy, is there hope for you to love a quiet and oft undignified fool with deep eyes and the heart of an old man? I can only hope you’ll take the time to find out.

P.S. your boyfriend or whatever isn’t good enough for you.

No More TLC

We regret to inform you that there will be no more tender loving care for the children. They will be forced to make it on their own, without food or water or protection by the rule of law. The time has come, with our situation being what it is, to let the babies battle for survival and supremacy in the harsh, death-pit of life. Our hope is that in this way we might strengthen both the species and our resolve as we move in to harder times. The pleasantries of the past age must be set aside, the courtesies and charities that come forth during prosperity must be forgotten in favor of a new and more efficient survivalist mentality. The weak must be culled and the strong must climb their way to power, leaving behind the antiquated restraints that has ruled Man’s conduct for almost five years in a row. That is our hope, the hope of a species.

I am not impressed with anger, I have to say. All I see when I see someone who is angry, or who places great importance on victory, is fear and vulnerability. What is so important that you would distress yourself so extensively, and what do you intend to accomplish by it? Perhaps it is more complex than that.

Perhaps indeed one becomes so caught in the present moment, in the anger itself, that the anger becomes invisible from the inside. Or if visible, reasonable and justified. Yes, that is it. The problem for me, of course, is that some seem to believe that it is also expected, or unavoidable, or impressive. Which brings me to my beginning statement: I am not impressed with anger.

Some day they will burn me. They will burn me for my thoughts and they will smile as they watch me melt away. And I will curse them, though I will not blame them, for men are fools of their own devices, lost in a world of delusion that justifies it’s merit by its own mere existence. Sheep, every single one of us is a sheep.

Making Love to the Goddess

It’s like you want to scream and weep and piss and cum and gnash your teeth on the cold tile floor and hug and tear off your flesh rip out your eyes and break the bones in your hands and hug everything in the world even as you smother it and squeeze it to death because everything is so fucking glorious and so insanely wonderful and beautiful and painful that your heart could explode and burn your very being out with raw transcendent fire, screeching through all of time with the single, spacious everything of universal creation.

It’s like fuck, man, thank God this is. Now kill me because I can’t fucking stand it anymore. The currents of subtle flame are tearing me apart and I can feel it. Liquid ecstasy engulfs me and I can’t breathe, there’s too much outside to breathe in and not enough emptiness inside to accommodate my yearning for the peace of the infinite so there’s nothing to do but collapse the boundary between self and other, inner and outer, to attain the perfection of that which is beyond the eternal. But once that’s done there is no one left to appreciate the transcendent glory of being because without a separate observer observation is an impossibility, a nonsense, for that is the nature of things, and so we must erect another flimsy, brutal barrier that we might look at ourselves and scream with the irrepressible intensity of a million burning suns at the ecstatic impossibility of our own divine glory.

The Persistance of Empires

In the early morning heat Jack sat back to look out over the city of his death. He sat in disinterested anticipation of the crumbling of the tower’s walls that was sure to follow the crumbling of its’ peoples’ minds. The society had long since fell into dissipation through the typical vices that draw down most formerly great empires. There was nothing now but to wait and to watch as one by one the buildings began to crumble.

But nothing happened. There were no heralds of civic doom nor horsemen to slay the weak and aimless fools who had let their days fall into vice without resistance (At least, not literally). Jack waited, leaning forward in his seat to gaze downward out the window. Surely the men and women would begin to decay before his eyes, and the brick and mortar must dissolve back into the sands of time without virtue to maintain it! But nothing happened.

Empires persist long beyond their usefulness and are maintained even without a set of coherent goals. Things keep on going for the sake of continuation, fools breed like rabbits and have no interest in understanding why. There is an endless supply of stupid babies and greedy politicians to fuel an economy geared toward miracles and excess, hopelessness and need. Best to move into the mountains, Jack thought, away from all the ugliness of man.

Break it open!

Break it open! Tear it smash it rip it apart! Shatter it! Saw it in half and throw it out the window! Destroy your head! End the madness! Burn a hole in it with the light of the sun by gazing inward toward the depths of unquenchable fire! Fry to freedom!

That’s not for me, of course. It couldn’t be for me because me is the ego and ego don’t want any of that crazy business! No healthy ego seeks its own destruction and yet so many of us are drawn like moths to the many vehicles of our own demise. Yoga, meditation, purification, ecstatic dance, philosophical self-digestion, any of these things can contribute to the dissolving of the ego, dissolving of the self, destruction of the supposedly independent individual.

Of course, this is not what most people are seeking. In fact, most are drawn to these paths seeking quite the opposite: A firmer, stronger ego, glorious and capable of enduring. We hope to establish our individuality through these paths, not put an end to it. We desire bliss for ourselves and freedom of the self, but this is not possible. The highest goal is simply a quiet spaciousness and freedom from the self. Not glamorous, not popular, not marketable. In fact, true accomplishment, true advancement and true discipline are themselves rarely marketable. Who would be interested in the many years of hard work and practice that sometimes lead to a small and specific mastery? What fool would wish to purchase something as simple as peace at the high going price of commitment, sacrifice, and self-obliteration? Certainly no one in their right mind. Especially when it is mainstream human society that determines which minds are “right.”

What hope is there for the yogi living in America today? Break your ties to the mainstream culture, or at least to the image it seeks to propagate to convince itself of its own validity. Be wary of those who seek power, accumulation, and title. But most importantly, set aside what you have been told about winning or losing at life. That is not the way of life, that is the way of the marketplace, which indeed is no model for human behavior.

Electric Butter

There’s nothing for it. Nothing to end the madness but to brave hell’s hot snows. In my ankles and feet I feel the surging flow of electrified liquid butter. My muscles quiver and my bones shake as I stand and let this force pass through me, dispersing downward and carrying my sins along with it. For after all what are sins but the products of emotional immaturity? And what better way to let them go than to open our understandings to the greater thematic development of our psyche?

How many boats does it take to reach the moon? How many screams to imitate the loon? Not all paths lead where you are going, no matter how long or how fiercely you tread. But you can be sure of one thing: all paths lead somewhere, though it may not be far from where you started.

Poison twists itself out of my like a burrowing snake or an expelled splinter. It is dead, itself, and would gladly share that with me. But it is too weak and minute to be anything but another itching irritation in a life that is full of itching irritations and the sore immobilized limbs of children made to sit still.

Too many Tuvaluvian tricksters and not enough factory-labor, that’s why their island is sinking. A little bit of repetitive manual work with the blinders on will fix their problem, and if we pay them well enough they’ll scarcely notice that they’re knee deep in the ocean. If we give them a waterproof television at home, they’ll never notice. They should be so lucky.

There’s no need to rush, I promise you that tomorrow you’ll be just as clueless as in this very moment. I promise that there will be more to do, that the sun will rise and the earth will spin. I promise that there will be men and women who seem evil to your eye and who see in your eyes only evil. I promise that you’re both right.

The great spirit Arcalouie one day, while playing in the flowers, sneezed up a great and noble glob of phlegm (he’s allergic) and from that phlegm through a process of ever increasing complexification the world was born, and man and woman upon it, and all was sticky and poorly thought out.

I'm Not Going to Call You

I’m sorry, it’s just that I don’t really find you very attractive. You are a little bit chubby and you have white spots on your teeth and your teeth are a little bit crooked. You have a cute face, but it’s that baby cute that I don’t really go for. I’m also not really interested in hanging out with you. When we hung out at Starbucks I didn’t really have a great time. I mean I laughed because you and your friend/coworker were fairly amusing, jumping around and dancing and clapping, but it wasn’t really enough for me to be intrigued. Your friend is cuter than you, anyway.

And I know that I was the one who suggested that we go out, but I was tired and kind of lonely and I had this old idea in my head that I liked you but when I hit “refresh” I realized that I’m not interested in you any more and that’s that. So after I tried to cancel on you last time, but was thwarted by you canceling on me for some reason outside your control, I had hoped that it was over. But then all of a sudden you called me in the elevator and I hoped it was this other girl I know who I am interested in, but instead your name came up on my phone and I went “oh man” and I answered and feigned interest while you asked me out again. And I accepted, because I’m bad at turning people down. I always have been, I guess I just don’t have any practice and have some kind of subconscious fear or aversion that I need to eliminate via conditioning but am afraid to because I so desperately want people to like me! And now I’m not calling you even though I said I would, which is a jerky thing to do and makes me feel like a jerk but hey, maybe I am kind of a jerk, there’s no helping it. But no, I’m not a jerk, I am just a human being caught in a silly human situation and there’s nothing for it, I’ve gotta just cope, which in this case apparently means never going back to that particular Starbucks and having to go out of my way to another Starbucks which isn’t that hard because there are Starbuckses everywhere! So hopefully you won’t call me. But if you do I will probably just play the ditz and act like I forgot because I’m a little bit sick, and I am a little bit sick, and ask what you want to do and then we will have to deal with the obvious fact that we don’t know anything at all about each other except that I come in to Starbucks once in a while and order the same drink that I order at every Starbucks I have ever been too, all over the country (and not just the continental country, either). Then I will play like I am totally boring and instead of inviting you out to a jazz café or proposing a film or suggesting that we just hang out and go for a walk, which is plenty of fun when both individuals are interested in having an exchange but is just awful when only one person is, and I will suffer the damnation of the stringer-alongers which is to be haunted for eight-hundred years by those we strung along and to be strung along ourselves by people who are much more interesting and sexually attractive than we are, because karma’s not just a bitch it’s a cranky bitch and ugliness breeds ugliness. Please don’t call me.

I have been strung along in the past by people who said they would call, and they never called! They never called and I hated them for it because I kept asking and they kept saying maybe or sending not-so-subtle hints and I totally didn’t get it. And I was like “why are they lying to me? Why don’t they just tell me if they don’t want to hang out?” And the answer is that they couldn’t because they’re not terrible people and they were thinking the same thing that I’m thinking now, which is “I don’t find you particularly interesting or attractive and in fact you’re a little bit strange,” and if they said that to me I would play it off like they were a bitch or like “hey that’s ok! There’s no accounting for taste and some people just aren’t made to be friends or lovers” which of course is true. But inside I would wonder what is wrong with me, like I have wondered my whole life what is wrong with me, and because the question presumes that something indeed is wrong with me I would start to find things about myself that were wrong, like you do when someone breaks up with you, and I would look in the mirror and I would focus on the imperfections and asymmetries until I had convinced myself thoroughly that I was ugly and boring (so boring!) and plain and that no one could ever love me, and that I have no reason to go outside because I will be shunned! Shunned by the world, and it wouldn’t matter how much proof there was to the contrary because that’s not how emotions work god dammit, and so I’m not going to call you and I’m going to just go about my business and do the things that I have to and want to do because that’s what I want to do and I’d rather do them than hang out with you which is the real reason that I don’t want to hang out, because I am selfish with my time because time is so precious and I have so much that I want to do and be and if I scatter it all about then what will I become? A man with many friends and nothing at the core. And that won’t do at all.

Bear Designed Displays

She accepted the disk and shook his large paw in thanks. There was no doubt in her mind that this would be another masterpiece. Skeptical at first, experience had shown her that indeed, bears did the most exquisite web design coding anyone had ever seen. Of course, the content was utterly nonsensical. What little of the text contained human words and ideas typically read like excerpts from manuscripts on fly-fishing, macroeconomics and Major League Baseball. But it would be easy enough to replace the bulk of the website’s body with whatever her business needed to say. The bears didn’t mind, they were being well paid.

Corporations were glad to pay them. Though not yet understood, something about the mind of the bears was so perfectly attuned to the coding and placement of graphic elements that their work was a joy to behold. People would stare for minutes on end at the corporate homepages for pharmaceutical and baking soda companies. Even the defense industry was improving its image through the use of bear-designed displays (BDDs). They were artful, well organized, and often deeply moving.

Everyone wanted a piece of the action, and the bears were happy to provide. They would work for just about anyone, even companies clearly linked to major increases in deforestation. They didn’t care. They were buying up land at a phenomenal rate. Just a year ago their combined properties were about the size of Rhode Island. Now their holdings rivaled Connecticut in size. They would protect their land the bear way, not through diplomacy or economic protest but through ownership, through the establishment of territorial boundaries and the forceful deconstruction of undesired interlopers.

Colonized Esophagus

Something or someone is attempting to colonize my esophagus. I find this…displeasing. Though the actual discomfort in my throat is minimal, indeed it is scarcely noticeable except upon swallowing, the defensive rally necessary to prevent an imperialist expansion and to liquidate, deconstruct and expunge the colonial pigs has dramatically drained my energy. As a result my performance has temporarily suffered on a number of important fronts.

For one, I don’t feel too good. There is a tightness, a constriction, within my abdominal cavities that strains my breathing, decreasing the overall effectiveness of respiration and thereby sapping my strength. The membranes and diaphragms in my pelvic and lower abdominal cavities feel sensitive and exhausted. They desire only inactivity. My skeleto-muscular system itself is tried by my minor illness, my right hip whines and whines because my right foreleg has lost its springiness. My back complains of a general malaise.

These physiological complications, though an understandable consequence of my immune system’s necessary seizure of certain emergency powers, have resulted in other problems in my functioning. For one thing, it is hard to look my sexiest. Indeed, it is hard to look sexy at all! It takes a fair bit of energy, much of it unconscious, to hide my many asymmetries with the glow of mystery and allure. Far from maintaining any such illusion of superhuman intrigue, I can scarcely keep myself from hobbling about like fool. Attempting to relax my right leg in response to complains of tissue fatigue, the foot turns outward, while my left foot maintains its noble straightness through the elastic strength of the entire left leg system. So I spend considerably more time on my left side than my right, hobbling about with the gait of a gimp.

Twilight Cinders

Though never will this be read by other human eyes, I write my life’s end here.

Only the cinders of men burned alive, lost in twilight, can convey the bleak and treacherous nature of our human ends. What cruelty! Every hope and every love become red-hot irons in the minds of the dying. No dream remains for them now but the final dream from which they must some day awake to live again the curse of man’s foolish joys.

My heart is gone. There is only now a dark and oozing heap taken from the deepest swamps and bogs. When they took away my wife, my child and my freedom, they took away my soul. They took away the part of being that so deludes a man as to make being itself appear palatable. I will die in this room. I will never know another spacious moment.

Hope of Heavenly Splendor

What drives the persistent efforts of this damn-fool machination? Does the hope of heavenly splendor suffice to transfix souls in the midst of a mad drive towards whatever bleak and uncaring end tears the pulse from within to without? What nightly demon dreams soothe the starkly shorn slivers of unkempt society’s systemic and systematic disengagement of the one mind from the cycle of plenty, preferring linear means toward finite ends at which time none fall as hard as the wicked except the great and dignified leaders of men, savagely torn from the fruits of their labor as infants from their mothers’ wombs, shorted six singles and one identity as the fruits of myth fall from Adam’s tree, rotten to the core with the stink of gold and perfumed halls built from within by conniving idolaters in search of luxury.

On the Misrepresentation of Larry Goldstein

Tell me of the joys you seek. Tell me of your dreams. Tell me of the sensual delights to which you would have your body exposed. Tell me of the material objects whose ownership you place on such a mighty pillar. Tell me what you’re looking for. The women, the cars, the thrill of danger, of the potential of losing it all. Tell me of the excitement that you take from power, from influence over the lives of other men or the movement of dead matter. But do not tell me in words.

Tell me of these things in the language of being. Describe the nature of deep sensory experience that underlies all things. It is a difficult task, but not impossible. Begin with a vocabulary. First describe who it is that wants these things. Who are you? Are you a head? Are you a neck? Describe to me the difference; describe it through the tactile perception of your own body. Draw a line. Feel the line. Is it there? Feel the depths of tissue and bone that you believe construct your body. But set aside your words. Set aside the visual images that so rule our daily lives. Set aside everything you have thought before about your head and feel it. Can you feel it? Can you feel its boundaries? Can you feel an outside? What are the spatial limitations of this perception? Do they exist?

What is it that wants these things? Look inside you, can you find a desire for wealth? Can you feel an urge to destroy? Can you feel your fear? Where are they?

I have to remind myself sometimes that it is ok to just sit. It is ok to lie in my bed. I don’t need to be “doing” something all the time. I don’t need to be pursuing a goal, there is no danger of “wasting” my time because everything is already complete. Everything is perfect, everything is finished, and nothing is ever done. All things are in a constant state of transformation because transformation is itself the nature of all “things.” Change, impermanence, creation, destruction, creation, destruction, the symphonic rediscovery of the universe by the universe provides the subtle undertone of all experience, all being.

It is curious, this belief that things are not as they should be. That the universe is anything but perfect, anything but what it should be, and that its correction lies within our personal agency is a source of untold and unending suffering. It is the reason we are afraid to sit still, afraid to wait.

People sometimes speak of the many schizophrenias of Western culture. I am told that our society persists only by clinging to many antithetical philosophies at once, and that they are tearing us apart as individuals. Perhaps such a case of this is to be found in our zealous belief in the power of “free will,” of personal agency and self-determination, set alongside the cause-and-effect thinking that rules scientific experimentation. Perhaps we will find some sweet release in the ambiguousness of quantum phenomena. Or perhaps we are fooling ourselves.

Is it conceivable that a single idea—and an idea alone, not publicized or evangelized or used to topple governments, simply realized—would be sufficient to tear apart the fabric of the universe and bring it to an end, as it has ended so many times before?

Marshmallow Lamp

The plan was simple: Tear open a paper grocery bag and put it on the table. Then, turn a lamp upside down and fill the inverted lampshade with marshmallows. Soon, we would have smores.

Of course, there were complicating factors. For one, we had already filled the grocery bag with popcorn, so tearing it open to use as a clean surface proved to be a little more complicated than first anticipated. As soon as we began tearing it, the popcorn started coming out. And we couldn’t let the marshmallows mix with the popcorn, so we had to tear it open and turn it upside down. But somehow we managed.

Also, Sonic the Hedgehog was there and as usual he wanted everyone’s attention all the time. He was bigger than usual, at least seven feet tall, and his eyes shone in the dark. Apparently he had been reborn in some sort of new, super-charged console and was ready to wreak havoc on his enemies.

We should have just gone to a tavern. That would have been a lot easier than this salty crunchy marshmallowy mess. They could have cooked us up some food and we could have had a cold beer while we ate it. But that was not in the cards. We were scheming!

I went outside to go get a beverage. Walking down the strip, I saw a man talking to an old acquaintance, pretending he didn’t despise her. A chance encounter, it seemed. As they parted ways he passed by me. “Jesus,” he said, “I thought that would never end.

I ducked into a pizza place to grab a bottle of water. It was, not surprisingly, filled with people from my high school. It feels like everyone went to my high school, nowadays. Most of them were frantically looking to score some pot.

I walked to a table of friends and discussed recent turns of event. They all agreed that my plan for smore-making was quite ingenious and that I was correct in suggesting them as an alternative to marijuana consumption. Someone sat on my bottle of water. When I asked for it back he handed me the wrong one, an empty thermos. Apparently this poor kid was sitting on all kinds of bottles tonight.

Retrieving my water I set out again on the street. I had to go check on my crew and the marshmallows to make sure everything was under wraps. This was turning out to be one strange night, and I didn’t want to miss any of it.

The Empty Wanderer

For sixteen long years I have wandered these plains—lamenting, praying, and practicing my craft. I have learned to conceal myself by sight and by sound. I have probed the deep regions of mind, found myself pressed against the hard and rough shell of the Source. I have known truths long forgotten by man. I have bled. And I have killed.

It has been ten years since I have drawn another’s life. Ten years since I last met force with force. I have learned, since then. I have let go and I have loosened. I do not struggle, I do not sweat. Now, when challenged, I need only step back and let the fiend destroy himself.

I carry no gun; I wield no long sharp blade. There is no place in me for claw or pike to catch. I am an empty conduit. Strength and fear alike pass through me and scarcely leave a trace. Indeed, there is scarcely enough left in me of man to know the meaning of such things. Those who oppose me doom themselves. Those who tread in peace needn’t fear me. I have become a polished mirror. I know no fear and I know no hope. I know only the surges and decays of an endlessly unfolding time.

Buddha

I don’t want to get old. I don’t want to have trouble walking. I don’t want to ache all the time. I don’t want to watch my friends die one after another. I don’t want to lose my good looks. I don’t want to lose my charm. I’m afraid to not be hip. I’m afraid to break my hip. I’m afraid of being worthless. I have so much fear.

Old age, along with sickness and death, were perceived as inevitable by the Buddha, or so the tale goes. Following this perception he left behind his life of sensual and material wealth in search of deeper, more permanent answers to the “problem” of life. The problem, of course, is that we are here, so what to do? Where do you want to go today?

After attaining an extraordinary degree of discipline and self-control, and resolving himself to realize the answer to the fundamental question of existence come hell or high water (“though mountains may break themselves apart on my head I will pursue this….”), he turned inward to the examination of mind itself. Finding that impermanence was the nature not only of the physical body but of sensory and perceptual phenomena, emotional states, and even the very ideas and concepts that are the fundamental bases of our understanding of the universe, it dawned upon him that….

This is where I disconnect. This is where I no longer see the path. Did the Buddha recognize that his identity, having no permanent essence, was therefore insubstantial and irrelevant, and lose himself into the vastness of the universe? Did he recognize that perceiver and perceived are co-creative, and that the nature of self is intimately tied to the nature of other, with the boundary in between ultimately being illusory? Did he sink into a dark pit of nihilism and drift through the rest of his days, or was he filled with ecstatic joy by the cosmic reality of his own being and dance through the remainder of his life with the passion and curiosity of an intoxicated lover?

Of course the essence of his teachings point to the necessity of a dispassionate non-attachment. But the other side of this coin is non-aversion, so viewing the universe around him with a curious joy seems far likelier than the stoic distaste for our material world that is so often attributed to him. But did he dance? Did he engage the world around him with delight at his current moment? Did he aspire to be a still-point at the center of movement? How can an individual remain a still-point at the center of a moving reality after attaining the realization that the individual and the rest of reality are not separate at all, but in a constant dramatic interplay as all things in a world of duality must be? Did the Buddha transcend suffering or simply come to understand it?

The questions are endless. But in response I can find only useless, insipid words, and the piercing indefinable silence of the present moment.

The Wrestler

He was well groomed, for a wrestler, and a hundred times more prim and proper than his rugby housemates. His hair was neat, a bit too neat, in fact, suggesting that that he may trim it several times a week as part of his preening and pruning. He flossed every day, afterwards a single white thread could be found floating in the toilet, born up by surface tension alone like a water strider doing yoga. A long crystalline crack in an otherwise flawless fluid, born by a porcelain basin and awaiting further influx. Erstwhile the suave young warrior was often found wandering in only a towel, neither begging nor resisting the looks of his many male housemates. He was comfortable. He had nothing to prove.

It took six sphinxes and a tube of contact cement to incapacitate our hero, and more than that the element of surprise. But there was no stopping the corporation, nothing would stand in their way as they continued their insidious campaign to convince otherwise fit and fair young folk that there was something wrong with them, that they needed to change. Indeed they would not settle until this belief had sunk so deep as to disrupt the very hopes and dreams of the youth, driven no longer by automobiles or pretty girls but by the hope for cosmetic completion, compared to the artistically designed multimedia concubines of primetime glory, who were no more human than a paper bag or the Mona Lisa. The twelve-year-olds all wore primer, and every year more and more infants were choking on their ties, death-by-double-Windsor had become a daily occurrence in small town America.

Musical Instruments

I'm writing I'm writing I'm writing and you can't stop me from writing there's no stopping me from writing I can't even stop myself.

If I was to learn to play an instrument, what would I play? There are many choices and many compelling reasons for and against most of them. Piano's are out, for obvious reasons. Guitar is nice, if a bit commonplace. It's versatile, can make wonderful sounds in pretty much any genre of music, and is fairly easily transportable. Plus it's not unlikely that one might go over to someone else's place and find that he ors he had a guitar and you could be all "hey bud, lemme jam on your axe for a tic?" and they'd be all "righteous!" and then you could impress that pretty blonde who you've been hanging out with for the day.

Harmonicas are badass too, though. They are bluesy and a skilled player can draw out some really heavy sounds from a harmonica. Of course, becoming a skilled player is difficult, and unless it's a chromatic harmonica you're limited to a single key, which is probably a little limiting. I have no idea, of course, because I don't know anything about music. All of this is just streaming out of my ass, you see. Also, they can fit in your breast pocket.

A mouth harp can fit in your pocket too. They are twangy and obscure enough to border on the exotic. Very limited range, very difficult to find useful applications. But twangy!

You're not gonna impress any girls with a xylophone.

Thumb-pianos can produce some beautiful melodies when stroked by a pair of well-trained and dextrous thumbs. I don't know where I could get them, but if I could this might be a fun choice. It's not especially mobile, and it's not like you can be "oh we're going out? i'll bring my thumb-piano. I'm a hipster." No, bad idea, buddy.

I saw someone once and she was playing a triangular string instrument with two bows! one in each hand! and.... it was electric! That was a crazy instrument, let me tell you. Wonderful sounds, and just watching her play was pretty amusing. Alex Grey was there, too.

Maybe I would just get me a drum and learn to keep rhythm and that would be enough. Then I could join drum circles and have some clue what was going on and I could dance and it would be lots of fun. Also drumming and rhythm can get you into a pretty cool frame of mind, really open you up and balance you out. Very strange stuff can happen. Mystical stuff.

Don't forget the kazoo.

Well now that I've covered every instrument, it's important to make another point. No musical instrument is complete unless the sounds it produces are somehow linked to the parallel creation of visible light, to mystify and amaze the stoners. You have to take care of the stoners!

I don't know what instrument I would choose, but I think that bruce lee would probably have wanted me to play the thumb piano. I don't really know anything about bruce lee, i haven't even seen many of his movies, but I am fairly confident that I am absolutely correct. I once read that he was sitting in a boat and watching the water and then he came to understand the Tao. So yeah, definitely the thumb piano. Ting ting ting ting twing.

I cannot say what the other famous martial artist actors and actresses would want me to play, as Bruce Lee is the only one with whom I am intimately and ignorantly connected on such a profound wavelength. But as a rule, Jackie Chan typically pushes the kazoo.

Being Sick (Which I'm Not)

What is it about being sick that so strongly affects your consciousness? Sexual desires disappear. No amount of money could satisfy you. Food becomes downright repulsive. Everything becomes covered with a greenish tint of death that drains the appeal from one’s usual sensual pleasures. Nothing can satisfy, nothing tantalizes. The only hope is for an end, be it the sweet but temporary release of sleep or a more permanent finale.

What happens when we die? Is it an end? A true end seems difficult to envision, as I can remember no true beginning. I don’t feel eloquent enough to talk about this right now, so maybe some crappy poetic prose.

Seven spans across the diametric repose of one insincere young go-getter who dreams of better days. Seven times a day he must re-remember the advice of cagey inspirational speakers with no hope for turning this particular sentence into anything the least bit valuable, coherent, or interesting. Fuck. FUCK. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK I have tapped a dry hole. Words come out and words go up and words I type just one by one and there is no end in sight, no end to the potential for writing words. But it is empty. There is nothing nutritional, nothing worth reading from these words. They are empty plasma. They are water soup. They are buildings without structure and lives without aim. They would just as soon cannibalize each other as form beautiful images or mimic transcendent concepts. Fuck. My vomit is more colorful that these useless words. Do you know what it feels like to be empty inside? Plant lamp clock feet. That’s how it feels. Communication has failed, there is no hope but war.

When I was six years old my father took me out back and he said to me, “Son,” he said, “there ain’t no money in writing and their ain’t no money in dreams. It’s prostitution or the coal mine for you, black lung or the herpes.” I never forgot what my father said. I put these words on his tombstone, though he doesn’t know it because he’s still alive. One day he’ll die and then he’ll find out and he will be upset. But he’ll understand. He always understands.

My goodness, what an unfortunate story. I must be a real hard-luck case, you’re thinking. Well, you’re wrong. I was very lucky. But I sold my luck in a Reno pawnshop to pay for the gun I used to rob the shopkeeper so I could get back the watch I pawned to pay for smack. And I’d do it again.

The Goathouse

He scurried around the goathouse—wearing only his jeans—looking for a place to hide for the night. He had long since forgotten his sister, who had been the subject of his original search, and was willing to settle for a safe place to sleep. The goathouse was offering few attractive choices.

If you have never been in a goathouse, you need only know that it is similar to a monkeyhouse crossed with a stable, except that there are innumerably more feces. Everywhere he looked he saw feces, writhing masses of feces, in all sorts of shapes and sometimes even in strange and exotic colors.

It was in a three-story barn, with enclosures following the walls on all levels. An enclosure would make an ideal place to hide, he thought, if they didn’t have an even higher concentration of feces. The goats would not make good company either, he thought, and by the look of it they would go out of their way to shit on him in his sleep.

No one had tended to this place in a long, long time. The center of the room was piled high with a story and a half of wood flakes, peppered with goat pellets (both food and feces). He had to step carefully with his bare feet to avoid all sorts of potentially unpleasant fates.

He and the goats were not alone, either. Some other kind of animal had made its home there, something he did not recognize. Ten inches long, with skin a pinkish beige, these miniature groundhog creatures wormed their way through the sawdust and woodchips, shimmying and shaking, writhing, as they emerged unexpectedly from a pile.

Would he really hide here? He may, he thought, be better off dead, better off letting the robot Nazi’s find him. What was so precious to him in life? His sister, who he had only recently abandoned? The rest of his family was dead. Most of his friends soon would be too as town after town was liquidated after outliving its usefulness. What in this world was worth living for? And not only worth living for, but worth spending the night shirtless in a warm pile of writhing pink goat feces, as strange albino creatures walked upon him or cuddled up for warmth. There were hard decisions ahead of him. Sadly, this was one of the easiest.

Kafkain Self-Doubt, revisited

I’m gonna talk about me. I grew up in a vipassana house, where an awareness of my own biases of perception, particularly of self-perception, only made the adolescent struggle with self-consciousness all the more poignant, all the more brutal. How could I know how other people saw me? Who was I? How was I supposed to behave? A lot of these issues came out in a brief piece I wrote called “Kafkain Self-Doubt,” which was a fabulous idea that was terribly developed. A real literary disappointment. Gregor, of the Metamorphosis, never knew he was a cockroach, no one ever told him. They shunned him and his own sister threw the apple that would eventually kill him, but no one ever said, "You know, Gregor, you're a cockroach." He scurried around until his death without the benefit of a reliable reflection of his current transformation, which is really a brilliant metaphor for adolescent ennui. I’m not saying that’s what Kafka intended. How could anyone know what Kafka intended? I’m just saying that it’s beautifully applicable, and that it’s very much what I was going through as a young man.

How do you build an identity? Fill it out? Inside I couldn’t see any trace of me. Nothing that was truly, independently me, you know? And that of course is one of the great truths at the center of Buddhism, because there is no independent self. How could there be? All things exist in relationship with all other things, so independence is ultimately impossible. It is a fiction, an illusion, and a very problematic one. So there I am, and I can’t find anything inside of me. No soul, no hopes or dreams, with the obvious exception of getting laid, so how do I know who I am?

Outside I wasn’t having any luck either, which is very much the trouble of Gregor. I’m trying to look at my reflection in the behavior and opinions of other people, and other people have no idea who I am either. All they have to go on is the me that I put forward, which is the me I have pieced together throughout my life. So I’m a freshman in college and I’m continually playing out, through these social interactions, the growth of the seeds of a personality I began to plant long ago, in third or fourth grade, or perhaps even earlier. In fact it’s probably all just the same stuff, from my birth onward, replaying itself, reinterpreting itself, ingesting and expunging the essence of my personality. And here I am, and I’m in a way “inside” this personality, but at the same time I am this personality, and I’m trying to make adjustments and optimize my effectiveness as a human being but at the same time I’m also trying to figure out who this human being is. That, I think, is the primary duality of an adolescent mind. That is where the trouble lurks and that is very difficult for older adults to understand because most of them have been so locked into the belief that they know who they are that they didn’t even notice this quest for self-discovery while it was happening, let alone 10 years later when the shell has largely solidified and they have this concept of themselves based on the shoes they wear and who their friends are sleeping with. I tell you, it’s a mess to grow up. A real mess.

The real mystery of course is the degree to which this is still going on. I’m sure it’s still going on, I’m absolutely positive. I’m still being conditioned and I’m still reforming myself based on what happens in my life and I still have no idea who I am. I have some idea of a larger self that isn’t limited to this body and this personality or even this planet, but when it comes to small me, small mind small body small personality, I am clueless. But I’m doing alright. I don’t know where it’s gonna go. I don’t know what choices I will have to make. I’m still a kid, you know. I try to tell people that, that they’re still kids, that we’re all still kids, but most of them don’t believe me. But look at yourself in a mirror, for a while. A long while. And then write a paragraph about who you think you are, and see how much of it exists independently of your environment, past and present. You might be surprised.

Poop

I swaggered down the street, wine-drunk, belly full of the flesh of my enemies which, these being civilized times, was first pan seared and seasoned with shitake mushroom sauce and served along with the pounded flesh of potato and followed by coffee and cheesecake. As a result I have the distinct feeling that in my lower torso—somewhere in the ventral cavity—one might find an elastic sac of fluffy fluid pancakes stretched to capacity. Soon, it would become poop.

If one were to empty out the contents of my stomach before they were dissolved—before the many chemical bonds were broken and the released energy stored for later use or converted into adenosine triphosphate—one would no doubt find it to be quite colorful. However while inside my stomach they are not colorful at all. The reason, of course, is that there is no light inside my stomach, and color is not so much an innate quality that is revealed by light as it is a modification of visible light itself. So you see, if you were wondering, the food in your stomach is colorless until it comes out of you. Then it is brown (because it is poop).

I have never met a man who didn’t poop, and I don’t expect I ever will. It is conceivable that someone who was sustained on a strictly fluid diet would have almost no poop, relegating the vast majority of their digestive waste processes to the urogenital system, but even then I find it difficult to believe that there would be no poop at all. It would probably just be watery poop.

It is intriguing to wonder how long one could continue to discuss poop. The well-known Zen master Shunryu Suzuki is said to have commented that if you can understand a frog, you can understand everything. The idea of course is not limited to a frog, it could be anything, the point being that if you truly and fully understand any one thing, then you get it all. I suppose this is because it is impossible to understand any one thing without understanding it all, as nothing exists independently of everything else. To extend this statement, then, one might presume that if you truly understand poop, you understand the nature of the universe. This, like most things, raises some interesting questions about God.

A haiku:

Don't forget to poop,

Because when you poop it means

You are still alive!

The Shrub in my Brain

Painful denial twittered in his esophagus with the spasming tics of his diaphragm. There would be no lunch today, nor any other day, only the panging questions of a friendship that had long since passed into disfavor—it existed now in name only, an artifact of the past. There was no split, no break, no reason for anger or hatred, only a casual boredom and a sense of wasted time that made an afternoon feel like a misplaced lifetime.

I can feel the spiny branches of a small shrub growing up the inside of my neck and expanding into the open space where my brain is said to be. It rejoices at the roominess of my skull, spreads and stretches its limbs with a joy that only a plant could know. But it wants more, always more.

I can feel it poking at the top of my skull, trying to go up up up towards the sunlight and felling me in the process. But it mustn’t, for either of our sakes. If it succeeds, if it shatters my bony crown and surges outward, exploding out of my head, then I will die. I will die and I will fall down, and then the plant will be sideways. There is no hope.

Institutionalized Armageddon

Seventeen summers came and went, seventeen snows fell and rose again to find me sitting in this forest waiting for a sign, any sign, that there might indeed be some thing that had heretofore escaped examination but nonetheless was sufficiently consequential to justify this thing that happens every single day, as the sun goes up and is followed once again by stars upon stars, waiting and watching with dispassionate austerity alone yet surrounded by neighbors on all sides and in all conceivable directions of time.
The expectation that with time the dream will unfold and show itself to me is marked by a psychotic fear that the unfolding of the dream is no more than the unfolding of my own mind and no less than the unraveling of all of space and time as every step towards playful awakening is paralleled by equal advancements towards the apocalypse, toward an institutionalized Armageddon. Every step towards self-knowledge foretells of an ecstatic Ragnarok as Loki grins and mounts the nuclear victories of great men celebrated annually on President’s Day! regardless of their dangerous failures at executive management or their moral shortcomings or their indiscriminate fiscal fellatiating of long time friends fully dressed as corporate villains who need only smile and throw their hands in the air and tell you how much better things are getting, read your history books every day we are getting closer to a state of convenient perfection.

Deflowering Young Icons

Long, scraggly words hang from his head. His beard is sewn from metaphor; his eyes shine with liquid epiphany. He is the wise caveman, the true homo sapiens, and he is here today to teach our children how to be children.
As a child I was very much preoccupied with growing up. I had no one to emphasize the developmental importance and grand nobility of acting my age, of play. They made us sing, but they never taught us how to love to sing. They let us act, but they never taught us to believe in our dreams-worlds, our dreams.
So, you majored in business administration. What businesses are you interested in administrating? What sorts of businesses? Do you want to run a green carpet factory or a pharmaceutical supplier or a Nazi death camp? I studied psychology, and right now I’m looking at your mind. And your breasts.
I feel that my gas starts midway down my thoracic vertebrae and sort of drips down my spinal cord before coming out my ass. It’s probably a liquid until it hits the air and then instantly vaporizes, leaving that fresh, I-just-farted scent as a marker of my passing.
My mucus, on the other hand, really does start in my sinuses. I can feel that.
At my high school reunion, I want to be the one who is happy. I also want to be the one who takes home [attractive and popular girl's name] and fucks her brains out, because she was such an icon to me in my youth, such a symbol. There is no higher cause than deflowering your youthful icons, because it is in this act that we are able to throw up our preconceptions and become a little bit more involved in the reality of our situation, the realities of love and human interaction. She’s also got great boobs.
It is no doubt similarly beneficial to meet those men who were stylized as nemeses, and to recognize their innocence and humanity, so that you can continue your life with the knowledge that you do not exist in opposition to a popular collective but are, instead, one unique member of a community of unique members, each scattering in different directions like a bunch of exited molecules. And of course, there’s always some small possibility that through these exercises of meeting and deflowering and being friendly, one might make a friend or fall in love.

Infatuation

Infatuation. Lust. Jealousy. Love. What is it about the presence of that person that drives us wild? What is it about the very thought of another human being that fills us with such strong desire that we suffer so at their mere absence, the pain of which we never knew before. Indeed, the hole in our lives created by that absence remains unknown to us until after the beginnings of that attachment, that voracious avarice we feel for their very presence. Why such a powerful urge to be around them when we have nothing to ask, nothing to tell, nothing even to do but sit and look at them and smile? What draws us, compels us to be with them? How can such endless joy be found in stroking their cheek or playing with their hair? Indeed we hardly give such affectionate attention to ourselves… how often do you stay up late to curiously explore the mysteries of your own body for hours on end? What joy do you take when pushing a stray strand of your own hair away from your face? There is something about her, something that escapes intellectual understanding and does not lend itself readily to words, for all words are trite in comparison.
It will make you into a fool. How can you be casually aloof when you are so desperate to tell her how beautiful she is, to beg her affection, to touch the flesh of her forearm? What hope do you have of appearing intriguing and intrigued but also disinterested during a 3-minute chance encounter when you have found yourself thinking of her again and again for days and days since your last meeting, when you held her in your arms, felt her body pressed against you? Every supple moment of endearing conversation is balanced on her scent, lost in the exotic fabrics of her hair.
There is no hope but surrender. It’s time to call…

Crappy Revolution and Ice Island

Trapped in a dirt-floor building with walls of sticks on some kind of compound in the South. We are the unwilling army of a less-than-intelligent would-be guerilla leader with plans of attacking Cuba. Our complaints are less than convincing, however. “I can’t do it on the 5^th, it’s my birthday!” and so forth. We are arguably the biggest bunch of misfits around (mostly college kids, many of them fat girls).
The compound is surrounded by the FBI. At one point they sent everything they had at us, which first consisted of well-trained SWAT soldiers dressed in black. But after this first wave was destroyed by a 6-foot diameter flying red psychic sphere that turned yellow as it passed onto and enveloped the soldiers causing them to explode, the FBI was forced to send it a bunch of sickly ponies and mules, which we mostly just ignored. I do not know who was controlling the sphere.
I had a laptop, and as a result was the second hand man of our moronic leader. I didn’t think his plan was much good but at the same time was unwilling to offer and serious protest. At one point he told me he didn’t agree with relativity theory because when the light was behind him he cast a shadow straight forward. I told him that was because even though light is both particles and waves, it behaves as a particle. Jamil appeared and said that if Newton was around he would disagree, but I countered that Newton would probably agree but would be wrong.
There was also a point at which I battled a large and very strange monster who was alternately a young man, possibly Luke from UC. The battles were not fabulous.

An earlier dream was more interesting and involved some sort of conspiracy to conceal the true purpose of an ice island in the middle of a bay. One could only see its true nature when looking through a tall, thin strip of dark blue translucent tape on a window in a house on the shore. I was trying to get important but open-minded people to look through this tape and corroborate my story so that we might pursue some course of action. The tape also revealed the true nature of certain agents working along with the island forces who appeared to be everyday people but were in fact black wispy featureless figures.
They had tried to arrest me along with the rest of my rock band by framing us but I was warned and was able to escape, an outlaw looking for the truth.

Zen and Writing

The proper placement of a tree in a forest by a god, God, forest spirit or Goddess or dryad must be pursued with appropriate attention paid to the overall pattern of overhead foliage, so as to provide an optimum level of light and shadow for warring paint-ballers.

I am sad that I was unable to find that possibly lost and probably injured kitty cat who was wandering near whole foods. He/She looked sad and if only I had seen where he or she went I might have been able to aid their return to the safety and comfort of a warm bed for the night, protecting them from cars or a greater distance from home. Of course, it could have been a stray. One of those cats who makes their living on the streets of Philadelphia, picking through the Whole Foods garbage and fighting over scraps. If it was one of those cats then it will be fine, cause those cats are tough, those cats are hardcore. More hardcore than me, by a long shot, but at the same time being much cuter, too. True American heroes.

Peter Mathiessen’s major application of Zen to writing (no big surprise here…) has to do with beginner’s mind. The author must, of course, be highly distrustful of words. The words have grown sour, and as symbols they have lost meaning by becoming too commonplace. They must be placed in such a way as to evoke a new understanding, a new consideration of what each word refers to. “Wonderful” is insufficient, better instead to describe a state of wonder. To describe a state in which a person, with the openness to the fantastic that exists prior to closing one’s conception of the possible, the conceivable, the probable and the true to a rigid framework set in place by his or her highly limited prior experience.

The goal of the author, then, is to show the reader something they have never seen before, or to show them something they have seen before in an entirely new way. The role of the author is to do the legwork of investigating, stretching, redefining, and elaborating upon the many words of the English language, and in so doing providing a spacious new understanding of the world to the reader. After all, we are plagued by this convoluted means of thought in which all things are filtered through our semantic, syntactic and verbal understandings of the universe. All experiences are sadly filed away into a very small number of unexciting pigeonholes. One aim of Zen is, of course, to shatter these pigeonholes and to view each thing as it is, as a unique manifestation found only in the present moment. The aim of the Zen writer, then, must be to attempt to share this newfound freedom of perception and understanding with the reader, who has turned to this book for something new because they are blind to the fact that there is something new happening all the time, that this moment happening right now is happening for the first and final time, and that it is happening for their amusement.

He also speaks of suchness, that quality of suchness, of being just so, that is utterly indescribable, defying all words because words are intrinsically bound and the true quality of all things found in the real world is that no clear boundaries can be found.

Descriptions of Beauty

A translucent mirage evoking the tender clear light of a purposelessly transcendent moment, soundless and empty and so utterly tender that no onlooker is able to resist being transfixed, despite coy attempts to hide behind self-pity, machismo, or the blank and rigid and numbly comfortable masks of our daily mannerisms—the stock expressions worn when walking down a city street to avoid any accidental emotional involvements, or the confusion so often associated with attempts at making contact with a fellow unknown human being.


She was beautiful, though I am wary of that word as it has been so over-used to become almost meaningless, an empty pleasantry reserved for mothers and female friends who, though undeniably pretty, lack the touch of mysterious allure possessed by certain sights, saints, and sinners that may lift an unsuspecting and scarcely prepared onlooker into a transcendent realm beyond the mere rules of aestheticism as it is commonly understood, to a place where subtle marks and asymmetry are no longer the flaws of a woman who has failed to fit a mental model of appeal and become the vibrant characteristics that identify a noble and unique human being, necessary reminders that she is not something as vague and ill-defined as an idea but has all the cracks and textures of what is overwhelmingly and undeniably real.

Everybody's a Priest

It seems like nowadays everybody’s an ordained priest. I know I am. It’s not a question of why, of course. Being a priest is a pretty sweet gig: Your opinions carry more weight, people listen to you, people have to be nice to you, and you are licensed to administer unannounced true/false black/white spot-check tests to strangers on the street. The question, I suppose, is that if there are so many priests, whom are they priesting to? Where are their churches? Where can their crazy ideas come from?
I had a dream last night and it took place at a large, rural property. There was at least one hot tub. I jumped in but made no splash, and almost no waves. [Girl] was hanging around the property and she wouldn’t go upstairs because she was trying to quit smoking. [Ex-girlfriend] was off in the distance wearing a bright yellow blouse. I did not attempt to approach her or make eye contact. I was on my way to do laundry, though I had no detergent and was forced to turn back, along with my cloth wrapped clothes.
I wonder why I’m so drawn to beautiful girls? Not necessarily magazine-defined beautiful, either, but girls whom I believe to be very pretty, who I would like to look at for a long time. I mean, it’s impossible for me to really have them, priest or no, possession is impossible. The only conceivable solution is consumption, and I have no interest in becoming a serial killer or a cannibal.
I just want to be close to them, maybe lick their face or feel their breasts in my hands or against my chest. Sex is perhaps an attempt to get as close as possible, to deeply touch beauty and in return be touched by it. There is some feeling of incompletion, of a need to be affected and altered by the beauty of a woman or even just the fantasy of one. It’s quite a bit of trouble, quite a source of suffering, this search for a palpable beauty and the attempt to somehow own it or control it or at least influence it with your words and actions. A strange thing indeed.

American Idol

Here we are, and I’m writing again, and I’ve got to say that it’s getting a little tricky to think of things to say. I mean, not thing to say so much as interesting things to say, I can keep talking about just about anything. Let’s talk about American Idol.
What is the big fucking deal about American idol? Obviously if I don’t like it, there’s nothing about it to like. Of course, I haven’t seen more than one or two episodes, and I did enjoy watching Simon tear apart the misguided dreams of people who never had the benefit of someone to tell them “you have no future in this. Give up now!” which is perhaps what I need someone to tell me about writing or prostitution. But the important thing is that people waste a ridiculous amount of time watching this retarded show about retarded people trying to sing their fucking songs and I’m sick of it god damn it, because I don’t give a fuck and I’m fairly confident that I never will.
The issue of course is more that people spend too much time watching TV in general, when they should be mailing me checks or money orders to fund my sitting in my room masturbating and watching movies and writing about how people need to send me money. There is an important cycle here and it needs to be continued.
Seriously though, what would I do with money? Eat out at nicer restaurants more often, definitely. I wouldn’t need a much bigger place but maybe a one bedroom would be nice. But once it was furnished and I had expensive food and health care and clothes and a hybrid car with insurance and my laptop and a good ISP and a big TV and an alright sound system then what would I spend more money on? What would I need? Not much! Then all I would want is time, and I can’t get that by complaining about American Idol, but I can try.
How much time is spent watching TV by most people? If you watch a show once a week and it’s on 5 days a week, that’s two and a half hours a week of watching that show. Two shows is five hours a week!!! What if you watch four shows? Can you imagine what could be done with 10 hours every week if a person applied themselves? That is surely sufficient to cultivate mindfulness or learn a cool skill or read more books or have tons of sex or whatever the fuck the person wanted to do but couldn’t because they spent so much time on the couch that they were depressed and impotent and self-loathing like this particular rant seems to reveal that I am myself.
But none of these things, time or money, they don’t really change anything, do they? You can’t hold on to them forever. They may make the difference between comfort and strain, but that difference could just as easily be made or broken by a person’s state of mind. They don’t make you a better person because people aren’t ranked, not by wealth or personality or accomplishments or experiences or anything else like that. I’m lonely and I want to make out. But I’m also kind of sleepy. Bah humbug. What matters? Where is it? I can’t find anything! Love? Grey says it is love that matters. But it seems like love may simply make life livable and enjoyable. In terms of ultimate meaning, well, I can’t see any ultimate meaning! So why do I get so caught up in my attempts to become something that I’m not yet, or to gain something I don’t have yet, or any of the other things that I do with my time and energy? I say it’s cause I’ve got to do something, but do I? Maybe the great joy of meditation and tai chi and yoga is that it gives you something to do that doesn’t require any money or fame or anything like that. You can learn to just sit, or just do the form, spend your time doing these things instead of trying to become super rich or the best ping pong player or the man who’s received the most sodomy of any men since the great Greeks.

Stinky Breath

My breath is stinky, and writing this is hard. My shoulders ache. Not the bones, exactly, but the muscles around the bones and across the back and a little bit into the arm. My calves burn when I walk. My face is probably greasy, I don’t know, I haven’t looked yet. I’m kind of hungry and don’t feel like doing anything about it. It’s drizzling out and I suspect that it will continue to drizzle and that kind of weather makes me sleeeeeepy and ineffectual.
Is staring at a blank page better than just staring out the window with the laptop on top of my lap? I am going to say that it is, because when you look at a blank screen and you have no reason not to write then you just start to write, which is to say that I just start to write, which is the source of this babble we are babbling right now (the royal ‘We’). The insides of my nose and ears itch, also. I forgot to mention that before.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the most difficult part of writing for other people is in knowing what other people will like and won’t like. I mean, the truth is that for a long time I didn’t really like much of anything I read, at least in terms of poetry. I just smiled and said ‘yeah ok,” and that was that. I mean there were stories that I enjoyed and stories I had to suffer through, and poems that were fun and poems that weren’t, but I have a poorly refined sense of precisely what it is that I like or dislike about a particular piece of wordstrings, which is a word I just invented for any written work. I’m a little bit chilly, too.
But even harder than figuring out what I like is wondering what other people would like, especially since “other” people is such a large and poorly defined group of people. Who knows what they like? A lot of them can’t even read! Many no doubt have no use for poetry or prose or even fictional stories in their lives, some may even be stuck on the idea that writing and reading is gay, or some such madness. But I guess I’m not writing for those people anyway, as they surely wouldn’t be interested in anything I have to say or want to be or how I see things. So maybe I should just write for a small group of idealized and fictionalized characters in my head who I believe represent a fairly inclusive cross-section of people who not only dig reading, but would dig the stuff that I have to write. But that sounds hard and complicated, because frankly I still have no idea what any other person enjoys reading. Perhaps that’s something worth looking into.
So being lazy and not really planning to write professionally, at least not any time soon, I suppose I will just have to continue writing what I find to be amusing, just as I behave at most times in a way that I find appropriate and enjoyable. It is conceivable that there are enough people who are vaguely like me in enough important fundamental ways that my writing will be appreciated by some of those who read it, and I will be saved the terrible trouble of having to direct my thinking through the filters of another human being.
Of course, I do have to keep those filters in mind. I mean, I can’t write utter nonsense (all the time) and expect anyone else to get what I’m doing. We each attach certain meanings to words and I have to respect that, even as I push and bend their present understandings, if I am going to succeed in communication on any level. Gods the muscles surrounding my spine are crying to me! Writhing about!
Writhe, spine muscles, you are awake today.

In Love With My Cat

If indeed I must be remembered for a period that extends beyond my life, be that period the “old days” or ancient history, then let me be remembered for this: I am madly in love with my cat. There is no greater love than that which I am filled when he looks into my eyes and purrs with that loud, industrial, noise-machine purr that can be heard many blocks away and may be mistaken for an airplane passing overhead (when you squeeze him it gets even louder).
And let it be known that my cat loves me, that he waits for me and that he fawns over me and that the great thrill of his day is to sit on my lap or next to me or at my feet while I aimlessly play with his fur, drawing forth the thunderous sound of his ecstasy. Flopping around as I rub his belly, there is no place he would rather be, no needs or wants left unsatisfied, only the timeless bliss of purrrrrrrrgurglegurpurrrrrrhockhockhaaa.
He is hopeless, dreamless, and vibrating. He flops down stairs and off of beds and couches, laps and futons, with a loud Cla-clump. He is obese. He has absolutely no desire to lose weight, trim down, tone up or fit into a tighter pair of jeans. He is practically blind, his eyes are full of cataracts, and he cannot see the irony. He navigates by sound, memory, and objects immediately in front of his face.
He is getting old, and that makes me sad. He has no pride to be injured, no sense of dignity lost by his now aged state. He was once a bold and adventurous explorer of neighborhoods, and would disappear for days at a time to aimlessly wander the surrounding boroughs, ever curious what lay over the next hill. He still likes to go outside, but he doesn’t go far. His poor vision has left him vulnerable, and left alone in the yard he sometimes begins to cry. He wants someone to sit with him, to be with him while he lays in the sun or rolls in bunches of tree pollen, determined to become as filthy and as joyous as he possibly can. Hot asphalt is a dream-bed in the spring. In the summer, when it gets too hot, he prefers the soft canvas roof of my mother’s 1986 mercedes benz convertible, may it always be covered in his fur.
Some day my cat will die and I will be lost, I will be alone, without the comfort of a cat’s unconditional love.

Alexander Pope and the Governor

“Reebok Socks and Rigamarole!” wrote Alexander Pope in defiant protest to the currents of his day. “I have never met anyone so under qualified for the position of Governor,” he continued, “as the lunatic preacher who now holds that office.” Setting down his olden-times sharpee, Pope decided to take a bath.
Splashing the water always made him feel a little better. It was perhaps the one thing (other than women) that could take his mind away from politics long enough for him to smile. Alcohol, of course, only intensified his discord, and worse made him seek unfortunate and largely random subjects to be the targets of his monologues.
But today even splashing seemed insufficient to lift his mood. Masturbating in the tub offered a few minutes respite, but as soon as he was finished the anger at his present political leader quickly returned twofold, along with a vague sense of loneliness.
It wasn’t so much that the governor was unintelligent, though for a man of such important office he surely was. It wasn’t even that the governor placed more import on shmoozing with aristocrats than on resolving the major fiscal and legal issues of his day. It was simply that the governor had never questioned, to any serious degree, anything that anyone had ever told him. As a result, he was a man fully captivated by the status quo, and blind to the possibility of man’s errors.
It always amazed Pope how anyone who studied history could come away from their education still believing that empires were permanent, politicians were never corrupt, and governments knew what they were doing, Surely anyone with half a wit, upon surveying the field of 5000 years of history, could see that power and structure both rose and fell with the frequency and stability of water on a windy bay. Furthermore, while one wave was being pushed up toward the sky, it was always the case that the water around it would drop down. “The water has to come from somewhere!” Pope screamed, still naked in the tub. But the idea of this connectedness, this failure to understand that balance was not only an ideal but a strictly enforced principal of the universe, had never occurred to the governor. Nor, he supposed, had the thought that men caught up in their own petty pursuits often miss the most important works of their office, in this case the protection of the people from themselves.

Love's Interest Lost

Ecstasy dripped from them. Nomads from the southland, she had born her soul to him in quiet conversation. But today she simply handed him a ball of her concessions, truly a schematic affair which left her feeling a little less than human. With casual interest he began to peel, dropping layers to the floor with vaguely curious nonchalance. Eight days they had been here, at this inn, waiting. Waiting and making love. Sidestepping the stampedes of barroom foolishness, they had found solace and even joy in each other’s arms. But it wasn’t to last.

Now, on the eighth day, after night after night of screeching, soul-bending, (“eat your face”) sex, they were beginning to get to know each other. They were beyond the casual exchange of dreams, now. There was little to do but talk, and they had talked of each other for too long, gleefully asking and answering questions that would make most whores blush. They had passed beyond sharing their exploits, their interests and their ideas and their idiosyncrasies. They had passed into the realm of true personality, being hardly separated from one another they began, far too early, to see each other no longer as ideas, but as human beings.

Even the sex, the mad co-exploration of two writhing bodies that had first brought them together, was beginning to show signs of fading. There were hints now of shame, of embarrassment for the other person, and of a newly limited interest in the workings of the bright, luminescent body they were pressed against. None of this was yet obvious enough for them to name, of course, but it was manifested in a new need to feign interest, and even worse in a failure to draw the experience out, as sleep gradually gained enough appeal to inspire them to hurry up and get it over with.

Change is The Still-Point

Succeed in these exercises or quit writing entirely? Who is she to suggest that I quit writing? Who am I not to listen? Why am I already convinced that I will fail at the simple task of writing when I rise in the morning, and of setting aside 15 minutes a day to write (at varying times)? Surely, though I have difficulty overcoming my resistance to any aversive experience, I can, with a concerted effort, manage to sit and write just like this for a paltry few minutes a day. And as for mustering that concerted effort, surely that is one of the great life skills that must be cultivated to attain balance, strength, and freedom? Surely I must learn that my aversion to particular situations or activities is as temporary and fleeting as this life as a whole! Surely I must learn that without such an effort I am dooming myself to a life of mediocrity. Where is my daring? For surely these tasks call upon me to dare to be something better than I am, to dare to overcome the simple hardships of directing my own attention down constructive paths. Surely there is joy to be found in construction despite the eventual unfortunate end that all things face?

Perhaps my understanding of creation and destruction is itself too dualistic. Perhaps I must recall that both creation and destruction are simply manifestations of change, the single universal constant, the process underlying all being. To construct and to create is not simply a vain struggle against the eventual destructive impulses of samsaric life. There is no opposition to the natural order in construction. The only suffering to be had is to believe that creation exists independently of destruction, to believe that I might build myself up and never come down. But the value of life, if one is to be found, surely cannot be said to exist in avoiding experience entirely! Perhaps when “they” say that life is a journey, they are referring not only to movement toward a specific end, but rather a tour. A tour of being, of the ups and downs of life, of the ins and outs of creation and destruction: change. Perhaps change is the still-point in the midst of change, the unchanging center of our cosmos? Perhaps that is the level at which one may find some joy, some release, some ease: an expansive and spacious healing breath of ecstatic cosmic vibration. To seek creation without embracing the eventuality of destruction is itself, indeed, a fool’s errand. But must all errands therefore be those of a fool? Is there nothing to be said of pursuing goals, not with the naïve belief that any single or several attainments might cure the world or the individual of his ills, or with any hope of gaining an idea of universal scope that might somehow fit within a single human being’s brain-mind. Rather, investigating certain developments and unfoldings with the curiosity of a child, born into a land where he cannot stay for long, and seeking to learn as much as he can of the goings on there, though in short time this learning will be lost, will be put to rest along with the child. All of it is part of the song, part of the journey, part of the tour of change that describes our earthly lives.