Academe & Intellectualism

In school, the corral of misfits and outsiders I'm leagued with, we seem to share the burden of some chip to carry on our shoulders.  Some are so overt and outright in trying to outdo the others.  There are characters who work in the safest lines, that cite buddies for security in numbers.  I'm not about to go on syphilitic rants with my only ally being Nietzsche and similar intellectually fecund patrons of prostitutes, but I'm not going to hide in what is safe.

It's amazing to be given material that I would dismiss if I were ever to even encounter it, for labels like "Modernism" stink to me of the language in transience.  "What is it we're really talking about?" I can not ask myself.  I have to play by the rules, no matter how offended I am by other players' characters or nature.  In truth, I have to humbly defer to the modes of discourse prescribed, because, honestly, they're foreign to me and I suppose I'll need them to talk like them.

It reminds me of a dinner party I was roped into going to.  The other guests were all older, aspiring middle class suburban urbanites.  They could parrot out the media's memes, and frowned and shooed my discordant challenge to the fact that they're ignoring wholesale the great context outside of what the news anchors serve them.  I have to converse with the table of my peers, and if the rules are we can only use what the news anchors are saying (and truly, these are much more esteemable sources than television newspeople) then until I find a way to cheat, I will play by those rules.

WTF?

I wake up at 4 in the morning.  Probably because I sneak off to sleep at 2 in the afternoon.  It's no way to live, but it's close to rounding out at the right hours.  Soon enough.

What bothers me this morning is that I feel my people, these Americans, and much of the "developed" world, live for movies.  They get their thrills, their kicks, their drama in movies.  Ok, I say, there was theatre before this, and fine.  Am I too old to find persons who want to take on dreams and great adventure?  No, I'm sure.  Boxer and younger men still have that appetite.  I'm just moneyless and have been boxed up in Philadelphia until I meet whatever it is I have to, to learn and achieve whatever it is that life has prescribed to me, before I can take on an adventure.

Boxer, I wish we had crossed Algeria.  I just wished that you didn't have Billy Idol style blonde hair.  Fuck the State Department.

Collected Memories

Pictures in my mind.  Like postcards from the past.  Sitting on a train, riding through bavaria.  Not sick, just reeling.  Trying to find a vein in a toilet in a cafe in Paris.  There were no stalls.  The hole in the ground, with a bucket and a spigot for toiletry in Tangier.  The rooftops of Tangier.  The dark dark night at 2nd and Cambria.  Paris Metro Châtelet Gogol; Skenan and Euro paper.

Hostile Hostels in Edinburgh.  The jukebox with Toto Africa, the SudAfrikaan making threats at me.  The passenger I was through Lincolnshire.  The darkness of Harlem, the 6th floor view North North West.  Collages of porn.

Montages of sex and lips.  The celebration of victories in Action Discount, the mourning of young mortality in Action Discount.  New Jersey Zoe's room and kitchen.  Stealing a bottle of wine and a bottle of valium.  After that, the image fades.  Zoe's on York Ave; where I was left long enough to read all her Welsh books and sweat up her duvet.  The coconut FrozFruit.

Bathrooms, I remember so many bathrooms.  The wet, mossy stones of England.  The boxes in Brixton, the faces and the tobacco.  The sun coming in the window to my cell.  

Empty strip mall lots, and the asphalt.  The inconvenient stretched out spaces in suburbia.  Bottles accumulated on the coffee table in a college town.  Mario's kitchen with the fulgurite.

The great wooden furniture with the drawers under my turntables.  The young provocation of the fates and faithed efforts to cut through the aether with chemicals and the phurba of my dick.  The gate, the turnstyle gate to Mexico.  The hill I climbed in Daly city begging for truth and blessing.  The waves of cement and steel cresting over me in Brooklyn at 4th Ave.  4th Ave.  The bodega outside the window.  

The rooftop on 116th, the rooftop on 2nd, the rooftop on 147th, the rooftops the rooftops and the rooftop where I phoned Zoe up on 83rd.   I was so happy.  Looking at the cover of "Zero:  Biography of a Dangerous Idea" on the subway.  Snow on 135th street.  

Sitting in the back of a windowless white work van with layers of sod, shovels, firewood, and kerosene. Rumbling along blindly and smoking.  The rolling liquid terra of Wyoming, BLM wilderness and wild horses.  These are pictures I still have.

The faces so pleased, generous, antagonistic, defeated and affectionate.  The customs guys.  The rooms in high schools.  The sanctuary on Ocean Drive.  So recent, so vivid.  So much I can't say; the truth could hurt.  The nights before I left the U.S. for the first time.  The map on the wall, and Andy K.  Pencader dorms -- oh that dorm room.  

Bleedin' Kplate.  Boxer's car rides, the Kosciuszko Bridge.  Faded graffiti on NJ geology on the way into NYC.  School bus reading in 4th grade, sitting on the window seat on the driver's side.   Sharing the book with Jon, who insisted on reading faster than me.  I controlled the pages.  The feeling of 100,000 fireflies with Boxer at the helm riding the wave of lights uptown.  Decibel nights.  

Le Mazel.  The long bike ride, so long I thought I may be lost, down 6km of mountain.  The shorter ride back up.  The perfect quiet of the manse.  The nights I had alone.  The shade of blue, like shale, the sky, clean and open.  

London before I met Gemma.  Ryan's K lady, and her little fireplace that seemed like a toy in the bedsit in London.  London, watching television and trying to understand so many foreign words.  London, the sartorial form of the money.  London, the K rosewater bottle, brown like a peroxide bottle.  Whitechapel cafe, sun in the afternoon.  So young, and happy, and horny.  I remember these images.

POtatERskyiltZkin

He was all fucked up.  He looked like a knocked about tuber, and he stole food from everywhere -- half eaten or not, like it was all fruit of some vine grown for him.  POtatER was a nimrod, an iguana baby.  His mother, dying when he was 4, wondered what had she done to deserve such a burden?  His father was other relations, but that would have only mattered in a world of society.  The family were the only they knew.  They'd come to know life as children with no parents, and, even though some of their bodies were sometimes so perfect and elegant, too frequently children died young or were born off.  They just weren't fit for life.  They weren't fucked, and would unlikely reproduce, so the nimrods were given to the lives of a sort of domesticated animal, a dog or pet.

Violence was a custom, though it was rarely so ferocious as to be lethal.  They hadn't the heart to pity some of the children and grant them death.  They weren't entirely aware of death, anyway.  They just knew that sometimes they stopped breathing and when this happened they fell to rot away.  All this was better managed out with the filth in the downwind, downhill area.  It hadn't been convened that this may be their own fate someday.  Their language was mean.  They were given to air drawn symbols and gestures.

tatER was good at heart, in his way, but truthfully -- like a wild animal -- he wasn't capable of drafting up schemes of harm or considering any but his simple appetites and tactile gratifications.  They made him wear a hide of a meat, but he soiled it and if it were raining he refused without being prodded along at a point to do his business downwind, and downhill.  They had no name for it, just a face of disgust.  "Augh" would get the idea across in context, but tonally it could also convey excitement.

 god, what to do with this one...

Te den, xa, te maren, denash or "O xonxano baro"

Even when he was a child, he didn't get it.  He didn't understand other kids, shoes, cartoons, or canned soup.  The only thing that made sense was the magic he found in National Geographic magazines, pages filled with jungles, bare-breasted animal women, painted faced warriors, and articles on the cocaine trade.  At night he would pray that god would take it all back, take existence away, undo it all.  Unusual prayers for a child.

Still, his mother would surely say that he wasn't outwardly unhappy.  He was more quiet and confused than unhappy, though he didn't enjoy the laborious and always ill-timed transfers he endured between wherever was home and either of his grandparents or daytime caretakers, he was a child and could cope with the transience as it was the only life he'd known.

Later though,  at 19, he'd find himself in a single room occupancy, sharing a shower that may or may not have been cleaned - ever, staring out the accordian style metal grate protecting the 4th floor bathroom window from intruders and thieves.  It was an old New York Harlem building, and there he became a man.  He laid in his squeaky, uncomfortable bed, with sheets he'd kept clean but couldn't remember the source of, and realized that this was his life.

He was poorer than poor, living in Harlem, working a mind-numbing job 40 hours a week for 5 dollars under the table giving him 200 dollars less 140 for rent, less 17 for subway fare so about 43 dollars to eat, do laundry, and pay for the telephone line that provided his only hope, his only link to the greater world through a PPP connection on a slow laptop.

He'd come to NYC chasing love, following a girl who had the advantages of a well established and sound family.  She was on a hiatus from Brown, and she was a love he found greater pleasure in her than he would later ever find in heroin.  Still, he courageously threw himself at the fates, appealed to Giuseppe Garibaldi in Washington Sq., and kept his hope afloat.

Boiler rooms on 6th Ave, subway trains railing, screeching, lurching, and lit brightly with eyes of disgust and contempt kept the wicked from any real rest.  To ensure that, the cops would beat their clubs on the bars in the traincars and hunt for people to write up in their little printed ticketpads.  Trying a different approach, the staten island ferry gave young Joe an half an hour at a stretch, though the late-night coppers were no more hospitable.  For his life, he would recall the young and rather lesser in stature cop dressed in a uniform that fit no better than a kid in his father's suit.  Still, the humor was lost and he was made to disembark on the Staten Island side.  He found a dry mattress on top of a supply shed in a park near the ferry terminal and made the most of it.  Samuel the Swede made this all somehow make sense, and provided more comfortable respite at moments when it was needed most.

The girl, she mocked and made sure he hurt, she became so loathesome that even well into his thirties he hadn't really been enough of a man to truly let it all pass into a history all of the time.  It would still percolate to the front of his conscience at embarrassing frequencies, even if those were only twice a year.   A true entrepreneur, a friend who saw an opportunity to start a company, to take the world by storm with the vigor of youth, took that opportunity and invited Joe in on it with him.  Jim's ethics were sometimes alien to Joe, but the same could certainly be said of Joe, and though both were dubious altruists, they both sought for the best for all.

Joe rode the rejection from his young love into wholehearted work, if his social ineptitude crossed him from time to time.  He had left the 200 dollar a week job and was making more than anyone he knew.  The first time he was in a parking lot holding 5000 dollars cash he told Jim, "This is the most cash I've ever held."  And it was all his.  The lesson, though, that Joe gained from all this is easy come, easy go, and so he lived.  He worked long and brutal hours, at first, and then became primary consultant for a sort of philanthropy illuminati, founded and fostered by the line of barons of American industry.  The opportunity was amazing but something was missing from his life.

He began to seek the transcendental through massive doses of ketamine, and for a spell and while the money lasted (he was overpaying for convenience) he found a sense of security in the universe among the stars and spirits.  The k wore off, and he would have to suit up for work and satisfy these mundane challenges with professional grace and curteousy.

Pompey, a pugilist, had been around in this era and they'd become a sort of bosom buddies, where Pompey had found an apartment with a female roommate on the pretense that he was gay.  Somehow Joe fell into the role of boyfriend.  Gay times they were, in SpanHarl, and the nights were rife with promise, sex, and magic.  Still, Joe was missing something.

Sooner or later, the K was becoming far too expensive and too synchronously the well packaged glassine of diamorphine was offered to Joe in an open hand.  Joe knew too well the remedy, and though it had claimed Erik's young life, as well as his father's, he was as absorbed and mesmerized with the anticipation of the feelings the powder would provide as he had ever been.  Pompey had the works for intravenous ingestion, and so Joe cooked himself a manteca meal of ethereal epicurean standards and as he rode the wave of parenternal comfort and euphoria he enjoyed it without the slightest contamination of guilt.

That one shot soon led to many more.  He had a salary and was overly generous with his middle-man Russian connection, always taking care of her to arrange the goods for him.  Too soon, though, his income no longer covered his hemorrhaging habit, and he found himself trying to meditate his way into a coma until the next paycheck to pay the man.  The life of an unkempt, uncouth junkie lends itself to the expiry of roomates' invitations to share a space, the distancing of friends, and ultimately, the compromise of the professional reputation.

In that very choreography, his young and auspicious start fell apart.  He was, eventually, when seeking help discreetly, let to a bed in Staten Island where he could see the city out the window.  The methadone they were giving him didn't do much to make that great hunger subside, and young Joe wouldn't accept that he even had an achillean heel of any sort.  Joe prayed for immortality when he was young, and in better moods than when he was asking for it all to be undone, for god to take the universe, space & time back.  He had the direct deposit into his account, so there was no real barrier other than waiting on the man between him and sweet solace.

Joe committed a junkie sin that day.  He looked over at the man in the bed next to him and asked, "you know where to get anything good around here?"  The man, name Tom, apologized, "just Harlem."  "Like 125th street?  They still sell there?"  "Hah!  Sure man, but a lot of it is beat and you gotta watch out or know someone."  The very notion of going up to Lexington and 125th to score was enough of a romance that Joe couldn't turn it down.  "What about if you take me to the man, I'll hook you up with some bags."  "How many are you talking?"  "I don't know.  6?"  "You're serious, you're sure about this. We're not going to get outside and find ourselves in the cold and sick and with no money?"  "Yeah man, I'm not about to fuck myself, but this place isn't for me, this isn't what I need."

For what Joe believed he needed was a new city, a new adventure, a new lover, a new raison d'etre.  All he had at this point was the contrast between sick and well and all the antics and misadventures spun in the process of keeping that sinking ship afloat.  Joe lured a man on the way to the cure back out on the street.  Tom whined and complained and asked a hundred times how much money Joe had.  "Enough for us to get high if it's decent dope.  I'll take care of you."  It's hard to pacify the anticipating junk sick dope fiend.  Eventually they get to 125th, after the Ferry and the train, and cop dope that's well substandard compared to the shit Joe gets through the Russian cunt.

There are worse dope fiend sins, and Joe got over this one fast enough.  The penance was paid quickly though, in that he had explained in a voicemail to his boss that he had to go to the hospital to take care of something non-emergency but serious and would be out of work for a while.  That time, he was given the pardon.  The next time the money ran out, Joe ran to the detox again, this time landing in a bed in Harlem at St. Luke's.  The Psychiatrist was sexy and compassionate, and he was unable to endure the blaring Jerry Springer in the T.V. and smoking room.  He didn't have any cigarettes.  He stayed a night or two, and then checked his bank with the payphone.  His direct deposit had his account.

Meanwhile, his amazingly beautiful and loving boss, the Director of Ops, had called the hospital to check on Joe out of concern.  They would not give the patient's room number, and could not confirm whether or not he was a patient because of HIPPA, but the nurses were totally willing to give the payphone number.  "Hello?!  Whodis?!  Who?!  Thisa DEEtox!  OKay, He Asleep! I'll Tell him IF I seem 'im" -- in the background "JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry! JER-ry!"

Joe didn't know this.  Joe just knew there was no reason for me to be suffering in a hospital bed on too low a dose of methadone for the habit Joe had been keeping, and had the money to promptly leave and get well.  So Joe did.  Joe reported for work on Monday morning and was immediately told to see June, the Director of Ops.  She knew Joe was in a detox, and she could tell Joe was a mess.  Joe's performance had been shitty enough, and Joe grew less and less as concerned about his work as the devilish hunger for relief that diamorphine provided.  Joe'd take 3 hour lunches waiting for the Russian to get the man to come by, never mind that Joe was spending 700.00 a week.  Joe was crying as he fell himself slipping, falling freely from the generous lot he'd been given in spite of those who would celebrate his failure as proof that their own way, their life and their living be proven Righteous and Wise.  Joe saw it all slipping away.  The job, the apartment, the money, the meaning, the purpose, the satisfaction and the success.

She agreed to give Joe unemployment, which came to 405.00 a week.  For a while Joe rode on that, though it could cover a smaller habit than Joe had been accustomed to and worse -- Joe'd become rather homeless.  As all that happened, Joe walked into Port Authority and booked a bus to San Francisco.  Joe hopped on it and three days later, stinking, sweating, sick and his psyche shriveled to the core from desiccation of love and lust, inspiration and hope, faith and strength.  He couldn't even make it to SF.  Joe got off in Sacramento and breathed in California air.  He didn't feel so terribly physically sick, though for so long his body had come to sense entitled to diamorphine and the ritual of the needle it left him in some compulsion of hunt for the local dopeman.

He wouldn't find it until San Francisco, where he met up with Jesus and his very white wife.  They were generous and hospitable to him.  He was still collecting the 405.00 a week, though there had been a gap in the regularity of the deposit for him to be able to access the money.  There were trips to Tijuana, patronage of the suppliers of Ttokkyo, and a levity of life that allowed Joe to remember that the universe was a hysterical thing, that the whole of human affairs was so infinitely as light and beautiful as anything he'd ever perceived.

A ricochet off Delaware, where his passport was held by Erik's mom for reasons surely of warmth and concern, and then he was aboard a flight to France.  When god shuts a door, he opens a window, and he was brimming with love for the great a beautiful paradox he was suffering.  Still, since that girl had mutilated his heart, he felt a part missing, a part that he wanted to share, and a part that he wanted to know of some love's heart.   In the meantime, he would have France.

When he landed in France, he had to take a train to get to Bayonne.  On this train a girl named Sophie Russo had watched with amusement as Joe careened back and forth through the cars to the bar buying and drinking the whole stock of Johnny Walker Red.  Fate has a funny way, sometimes, and Joe, in his transatlantic drunken tightness had disembarked at the stop before the one he was supposed to.  Fate, though, had the same stop for Sophie Russo.  She and two French college students took him to their lair of teen sex, and Joe demanded to stop at the supermarche for a bottle of bubbly.  The students professed their lesbianism, but this wasn't much excitement for Joe, so he gave them the thumbs up and laid his head down.  He was phenomenally tired.

So Ben arrived moments later, through Joe's proxy communiques the girls had made for him and Ben invited them to a party at the rented house.  The ladies came.  Sophie became an angel of sorts, a lover and ambassador to the traveller al bisat al tayer's ways in France.  These were days, good days of sun and fortune, though Sophie parted when her job was through.  He was left alone in Paris.  Elixabeth was a fun and playful hostess, but had her own loyalties romantically.  Samuel the Swede came to visit, and, when he was there, Joe met Jenn.  Samuel didn't like Jenn, considered her vulgar, and perhaps rightfully so.  Joe asked Samuel to disappear while he fucked Jenn, since the room Joe had set up in was a single room occupancy, though much nicer than that which he started out in Harlem.

Time went by and Joe saw something dark and gorgeous, sad and sexy in Jenn.  He set his heart on her. She had been the most perfect mate he had known thus far, and nothing he'd ever have imagined.  Joe always figured he should be with the quiet nice, prim, proper and paradoxically sexually pantherlike girl.  Those were Joes fantasies.  The fates weren't devoted to sating Joe's fantasies.  The fates had their own rules, their own mind for what should be or would be.

This led Joe to England for a few years.  Still, he sought his solace in that poisonous liquor of the plant papaverum, and though Jenn was tolerant, even sometimes sharing the appetite, it was sad and the diamorphine propped the whole affair up; she too was a soul burdened with pain, perhaps more sensitive than he.  He did only wish one thing, that she know that life could be happy that she be happy, that she know a happy day, and more happy days than not.

When the time came, the two of them fled to the U.S. to sort out the challenge of working and living legally in the same state as nationals of two different sovereignties.  Once again, Joe failed at what could have been a perfect and inspiring tale of redemption and success in the face of that which would destroy most lives in a wasteful and sadly common way.  Joe resorted to treatment in Florida, counsel he fought and argued against but proved the most amazing and truely happy time he'd known in his adult life.  Jenn went back to England and explained she would not be returning.  While he was in treatment she suggested he meet her in Belgium.  He was licked and couldn't find it in himself to chase that one.  Maybe he regrets that, perhaps he doesn't.  For whatever he felt, the fates had woven his life as destiny saw fit and he can suffer the pains.

Pains he can suffer.  He's suffered plenty.  He's suffered humiliation.  He's suffered villainization.  He's suffered mockery.  He's suffered broken bones and being stolen from.  He's suffered infidelity and disregard.  He's suffered rejection, vagrancy, imprisonment, lies, solitude, hunger, and poverty.  He's suffered himself.  

What he can not suffer, does not suffer well, is meaninglessness and fear.  He despises the safety of the status quo, and would choose death over predictable events, holidays, and vacations.  It often makes Joe wonder if he's meant to be able to work with all the people he meets in professional capacities.  It often makes Joe uncertain if he's meant to live a life with the people satisfied with their lives in this modern world.

Joe is more and more certain that his happiness lies in an extreme action.  A coup d'Kismet, if you will.  He hates jails.  The United States has made an industry of jailing men.  If he is the only one this strikes as perverse, then he is sad that no one else can feel it.  Whatever he must do, he must avoid jail at all costs, even at the cost of death.

Still, the currency of justice, the common celebration of punishment, the love of the masses to throw their ugly stones first, again, and last, the righteous indignance of jackboots and the working man, watching the news at night bore the most serious threat.  He had to work within a code; but even keeping the desperate swirling nebulous urgency of a plan without physical harm or real psychic harm to a victim, he would, even if he robbed the treasury, be hated as a predator on weak, a beast vulgar, a monster deviant from the collective.  Most Americans were worried they'd have to pay for someone else with their taxes.  Every one of them was, and through economic kudzu they were indeed watering the wells of American military barons, among others.  

He would be happy to never see America again for 500,000 USD.  That wasn't an enormous fortune, but not an easy scoop.  The only victimless crimes he could see were, in fact, very close to businesses.  Still, would he consider even the agricultural plays, the consolidation, like water droplets, of the most earnest and honest of enterprises, farmers, and their masters, the banks and processors, and all complicit in the scheme, fair and Right?

It wasn't hard for him to bend or twist a rationale of propriety around, and, like most men, he quickly grew tired of the thinness of the efforts of thought and reduced it to the fact that he only had half of one lifetime left, at most, and he wanted the satisfaction of life free and clear from the murky filth of the modern world.  Like a desperate and depraved Adamite, he sought redemption and innocence in noble savagery.  The judgements of judges, as he learned in life, were enough as whimsical and subject to drunks and manics in robes as wise men calibrated fulcrums.

He did love the white cottons and Tyrian purples, and, he would have to admit, glazed windows and electricity.  He couldn't get around that it was greedy and piggish to seek through money an escape from the burdens of men born without land, so long as land itself was piggishly owned and greedily guarded by all that he could not understand in his time.  Territory and cash made little sense when considered at real value, other than in defense of one's appetites and security.

A gypsy, he knew, was born a gypsy.  Te zhuvel darane svatura tesh del te merav, li'ha'eer.  "Let me live a magic life or let me die, gods," in a cut up Romany fashion.  He didn't know where he came from, and that phrase was as secret as he could get with the hope of it making sense to someone.  Like he needed a motto to be but never actually be known.

There were not likely to be so many Romany in South America.  He wasn't sure he loved the idea of the continent, that she may be too wet, and vivid, and teeming with poor and mosquitos.  He had time yet, though, and maybe he wasn't sure he should be able to choose just where he absconded to, but truly given to default he would suffer insufferable streets, air, and voices.  Now he had to give himself to the great trick, to finding the play that the others dare not find or face.  He was getting sleepy though, with a conscious resolve and knowledge that there was a reason, and a hope.  With this, he fell to sleep easy.

Âge sombre

I'm fucked up
Because the fonopost
Makes me cacoethesic

Ages ago and sombre
Times when women
Scented exotic

Thighs and eyes
Napes and knees
Were so erotic

Argentina
I wish I were
Envoyant nautic

Folly, too right
It's not a mother
I'm Quixotic

I'm so over
to hold it back,
The lust hypnotic

For a heart that
Percuotere
Like palomillic

Nocturne and
The birds that sing
Ala panegyric.

relief

Another Modest Proposal.

Bruce was the President of our organization, and our organization was the illuminati of Philanthropy.  A small cabal of geniuses, the wealthiest of the wealthy, and well connected, I was an oddball.  Gratefully, the President took interest in me that particular morning and asked me about myself.  I stumbled and mumbled my unimpressive curriculum vitae at 20, a high school dropout, only a year before sleeping in a boiler room on 6^th Ave to survive the cold.  I was mostly quiet about myself.

He talked to me about what the greater minds, those in and interested in the gateway and seats of real power, those with a heart and mind for the love of man and the vision of the wise were all talking about.  If the zeitgeist of our day is Greenness, or better put the very foolish poisoning of ourselves in the interest of profits, the autosabotage economically and politically by the foolhardy reluctance to see and act – to change, in his day the concern he mentioned was population growth.  “How will we support so many people?” he asked rhetorically and to make his point plain. 

A true concern.  Though it feels to me that the limitations of resources has been nothing new,  what is new as a fly in the ointment of progress is the industrialization of agriculture, the uncharted but presumably better living through chemistry.

Like any teenage girl, I have obsessed and found fault in my complexion, my eye color, my teeth, my clothing, my nosehair, my penis size and my hairyness.  Still, I have been reassured that I am a desirable mate.  Rather, I’ve been desired.  The thing is, I could recommend better men to couple with and parent children with.  Not just because of my psychological damage, my hand in my environmental development, but because they are more clever, taller, and more perfect symmetry.

So, I have a proposal to future dictators, fascists with a penchant for eugenics.  I volunteer to sacrifice my own life, as a standard that must be surpassed.  Measure planes of intellect, categorize the traits and strengths of gender and such, make the criterion fair, but I am willing to die for the human race.  For our comfort, for our evolution, for our development.

People?  We’ve got extras.  I’m willing to set an example.

i wish we could sit in warmth

dark

like just talking under the covers in a bed.

in confidence

i could reveal my wings

i could see your halo

Cholos, Trollops, Lotharios, Broken Bones and Letters Os

The television is on, and it's late in the day.  Ted's father fights his way from the reclining chair he's maintained for twenty years, blind to the dust on the surfaces of the furniture in the room and the small floating bits lit by the sun coming in the windows to the south and west.  He's going for the mason jar of mountain dew he keeps under the sink.  It sits there with the cleanser and scrubbers as if forgotten and forgettable -- you know, in case the law comes 'round.

There are chains on the refrigerators to keep his stores safe from bears and thieves.  He's old enough to be over the chronic lust for women but needs his shits and kicks as much as any old kook with limited education.  "Slim pickins" was how he'd phrase it to Ted.  There were a couple of old mountain hermits he got together with to have a laugh, talk shit, and play cards.  That was largely the extent of his social group, not including the keepers of the general store down the road, to whom he was an outsider.

Folks didn't just move to these mountains.  There was no draw but anonymity and insulation from the greater world.  Those who came rather than those who were born to the mountains were crooks, kooks, and criminals; outlaws who had taken a sort of vow and become hermits,  their time for reflection, kookdom, and magical thinking.

If he had some beauty, I'd say that he was so remote in his house, ways, and outlaw life and days that he wasn't exuberant about Americanism, saw no real allegiance but to the god that granted him his peculiar conscience, and was as wary of anything he saw coming from the television as he was strangers coming up the mountain to his house.  There was a rifle on top of the washer & dryer; this was also to handle bears and thieves and "just in case".

While I stood over a pot, stirring canned chili, Ted's dad unscrewed his mason jar and offered me a whiff.  There was an apple slice floating in the just slightly murky brew.  "Firewater!" he kooked, crimping his neck and stamping his foot, laughing through the contortions.  He offered me a sip and then watched greedily for my reaction.  I considered the strength of the drink as it burned my tongue and throat, then the warmth started in my core.  My reaction was a raising of the eyebrows and a nod of the head.

He smiled broadly and turned around as if to show his friends what had transpired.  "That's my injun boy!  Don't get into this stuff," he warned, "injuns can't handle it.  They go off wild."

I sighed silently and smiled at the grinning crew around the kitchen table, nodding my head and feeling like I should perform some sort of asian bow or salute of deference.  They were, after all, the white men with the gun and the liquor.  I could hear the traffic rushing by on the interstate highway through the trees up the mountain.  It had rained and was dark early, the winter wet carrying that hum down the mountain and into my head.  At worst, I could find this highway and thumb it to civilization.

I didn't need to, but I was in the habit of always considering means of disappearing.  I was a paranoid young man.  I had my reasons, though.  Even today, I don't want to give those options up, but 16 years ago it was all I knew.  Jason should be sleeping.  He was the driver.  He had a license, and it was his car.  Even though he's half blind, to the left, I always felt safe riding with him.  There was a drive when I felt I had to hit myself with a dose of diamorphine in the back seat because he was hurtling along a pacific coastal highway, mixing blindness with escarpment features that looked the perfect setting for a hollywood car cliff death.  It culminated in a personal crisis, and the D was all I had.

Out in the mountains, his crazy jewishness was a consolation and so long as he got some rest, we could be on our way soon.  The chili was heated up, so I offered to share the three can split with the three white men in the kitchen, mentioning that there were two more to feed from the pot.  They declined, appropriately, and I asked Ted to eat and find Jason.  Jason slept through the chili, but had his reserves of jerky, really good jerky.

It was a shack, sort of, this small house in the mountains.

Wake Up & Dream

Wake up and dream you wasting fuck.  You capitulate visions of supreme joy before you have them.  You resign to a living death sentenced by circumstance.  Dream, you dumb fuck, and don't doubt yourself.  None will see what you see, and if you are too afraid to want something you'll be in fine company.  Except you loathe them, you can't stand to see the breeders and the entitled colonists, the blind and happy haters, the cluckers, the tsk tsk tskers.

You've dreamt big before and by the mercy of god and your sheer pure innocent need you have found love in life.  You've trapsed borders and been honest to lovers.  You've gained friends and cherished strangers.  Go, and go now or you will find no reason to live this life.  It's never been for you.

Get your shit together and make your music.  It started before at Action Discount and it can go again.  You are a blessed and loved child of an enormous and powerful universe.  Don't stop until you can reste easy.

In Memoriam of Nanu Guerrero

I was surely depressed.  I was laying on the floor on a little mat I'd made -- next to my bed -- with the lights out.  It's not clear to me how long exactly I was just laying there or what my thoughts were, but they were interrupted by an opening of my door and the silhouette of tightly curled half african hair.  She flashed me a white smile and pounced on me.  I was sad and her visit was perfect.  It was a moment I'll maybe always remember.  She was pretty, and she smiled.

I told her one night before in conclusion to some bizarre debate, "What's the worst that could happen to us?  We'd die?  We -can't- die; we're young."  She laughed hysterically at that.  I can't remember if she thought I was on acid or I thought she was on acid or either or both of us were or weren't.  I don't think I remember Nanu doing acid.

Ella em munta i va tirar les calces a un costat. Estava xop. Com va lliscar cap avall sobre mi, em vaig sentir una mica de màgia perfecta, que ella sabia com em sentia i que el plaer mutu era una medicina. Així van ser les respiracions i sons que ella va fer.  Mai ejaculat dins d'ella quan fèiem l'amor, però ella es recargolava i em va acariciar fal.lus amb el cony humit magnífic fins que estava buida. Ella era una noia increïble, un regal per a mi, un amant increïble i sempre vaig a recordar els moments en que em sorprendria.


She died with secrets and beauty, and my understanding was rapidly and without much suffering.

Get What You Want; It's All Here

The circus, the banjo, the rattle of cars and hoofs. These seem like a tidy and goodly folk. There's one born every second. See the man with no adult incisors insistent on proving the dentist wrong.

I've tried to will my being through windows, down drains, into skies and across oceans. Usually I end up in a pack of monkeys. It's a jungle out here. My arms are too weak to swing. My back hurts from standing upright.

I wish I could go hang out with some astronomers / astrophysicists. They'd probably fuck my head all the way up. Just seeing the moon sometimes makes me stop in my tracks.

Maybe I'll just go rub my balls with a salve of Rogaine.

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Lovelost

I'm 31.  No longer a child.  I'm certain though, that I would be miserable with a mortgage and a lawn, children and the march into the meaninglessness of late model cars, office politics, and living like a modern american.  I have to be true to myself.  I can't lie to the girl I love.  I don't want that.  If I'm an old man and I'm alone with memories of so many magical romances, so many transcendental experiences, then I am not scared to die alone an old man.  They give you good drugs when you're dying anyway.

Perhaps when I'm 40 I'll feel that the earth is missing my progeny, my genes, and the torch of my soul.  As it stands, I can't see that or feel that way.  I get a life to live.  For me.  If I live it for someone else, maybe it is richer.  They say you get what you give.  I'm just not ready to give up magical thinking and travelling as an adventurer rather than a tourist.  I've been who I am since the defining moment at 14 when I left home forever.  I came back and stayed for periods of my teens, but I was a guest, a visitor in my mother's house, who was a tyrant of a mother, swayed by notions of special roles and pretenses to keep up.  She, I believe, inherited them from her parents and the 50s / 60s, but I am a product of now.  The world is mine now, and I don't want america or her dreams.

I don't want lawns to cut, neighborhoods to modestly brag about, or play any of that farce.  Women make magic, but only when they keep the girl inside them who trusts the universe and me.  They get rarer and rarer as I get older, but I would not starve for magic.  What the fuck do I know, anyway.  I don't have your diplomas, your mortgages, your children, or even a salary right now.  You know what the fuck I know?  There is nothing, NOTHING, more beautiful than moonlight on naked bodies in love.

Dreams

A constant stream of discomfort, plague.  I had to save snakes, baby ones, capturing them and putting them into containers that would not hold them.  Hands were selling long yellow school bus pills.  Family members mocked me and shamed me and each time I woke up, I drank water and went back for more.  None of that sleep was restful.  I woke up in a panick, with my heart tapping away, adding more urgency and severity to the trouble.  I went through the motions of making coffee, took one sip, and then ran out the door to see the doctors.  The doctors always have something for me.

I gave my number, 7538, but the woman at the desk already knew my number.  She slid my card to me like a table dealer and I took it to the window, repeating my number, which is also written on the card.  I was ignored and then handed a plastic cup of liquid, which I swallowed and was sent on my way.

I'm sweating a depression.

Nourriture

What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? - Matthew 16:26


"This is a ship of fools. There will be no call to port. You, boy, are lucky enough to be alive. If you intend to stay that way, you can expect to struggle with the very essence. You will expect to endure pain. You will find a way to defy the gravity of time and abandon your sense of entitlement. Nothing will come easy but for the appetite to evolve. That much you are granted. You are going to feel what it is to be your right size. You will be humble and you will learn to be teachable." The captain addressed with a speech that had fingerprints and ages of dust upon it.

"The sun will give your rubbery skin a cure. The salt will seal your filthy and mortal hull. You will become seaworthy. This much you are promised in exchange. Nothing more. Your muscles will come to form and your wasted joints will snap to life. You are bipedal, so you will learn to stand and stand tall. You can rely on that." He went on, "Life owes you nothing. You will earn your breath. Your lot will be just that, and in accepting it you will profit. Your hands are for more than reaching for bottles and breasts, wiping your snot and holding cigarettes; they will work to ends you may not see." He closed his ranc with a pause, a stare through glassy red eyes and a thunder, "YOU WILL NOT UNDERSTAND ~WHY~. You will do well to get on with it. You MAY live another day, if you are so fortunate."

Omar felt an overwhelming strength. He was aboard the Echnaton. Her captain, Martis, had taken the small junk 罂粟 and killed her Mandarin crew. They were on the nod and the Echnaton made her with no resistance. Only Omar spoke any lingua franca and only he had given the pirate any salutation. The others were promptly dispatched like raccoon dogs. As they drifted away from their brided ship, their souls rose through the dead air and Omar was moving their cargo across rattling, creaking planks as the sun rose on a day they would not see. If their lives had amounted to anything it was not aboard the Echnaton. Though Omar would mourn the night, it would not be today.

"I have transferred all of her cargo, nourriture, and liquor, sir. We had no weapons or powder, sir." Omar reported. Martis swung a round baton and broke Omars ear open. Omar slowly returned his head, deferentially and with a narcotic calm repeated, "Sir, we had no rifles, sir." This time Martis looked with curious interest at Omar, "Then what if you should encounter a monster like me?" Omar was given an immediate answer, "Then god should show me the way." Martin's lips curled into a smirk. "And whose god? The one that granted this bullet your leg?" The pirate shot Omar in the leg, just above his ankle. Omar could feel his flesh sear with pain, the muscle flayed and a bone splintered. He fell on the deck. "You'll be of little use to me as a lounging boy. Is this your end?" Omar felt a hate rise through his head. His eyes were steady and some strength grew in him.

He raised himself by the rail. Standing with his weight on both legs, "This will not be the end, sir." A blade of resolution honed itself to an infinite point in the blackness of his eyes. The death of this man would be his blessing. "You will wrap your useless limp and prepare yourself to mark and make a course for open waters. Those soggy shits will not bring death aboard the Echnaton. Let your god see to that, boy." Omar had no name on this ship. All of the love and hope he had set out from Bangkok with was drifting with his shipmates towards some sea bottom. He prayed, "Thy will be done. Maktub." At this moment he could not muster to give more to living. As he looked around himself for a banner of sail or a strip of old rope, anything to tie up his throbbing leg he saw nothing but evil in the wood and iron, the grit and tiniest filthy imperfections of the Echnaton.

His faith was tried. He could not feel god through the pain and he could not see god in the brutal dispatch of life. The sun saw the 罂粟 a sterile bleakness, a memory to slide along like frames of projected film. She would find her own end in the horizon, either picked up and salvaged or tangled up and broken on a reef. Her fate was not Omar's charge, he knew, and the business of fortifying his bleeding gunshot wound and broken bone consumed him. He took a strip of small rope tied around the rail and ripped the silk sleeves off of his arms. The fabric undulated in gold and brown, seeping a maroon as he wrapped his leg. He unbraided the rope and wound it around his leg, a coil of support. When he finished, he breathed slow lungfuls of air and interrogated the pain.

As he focused more and more on the sensation it grew less severe. The throbbing reminded him that he could not use the leg but he was sure in his dressing and the blood had dried the silk and rope hard where it needed it most. "This work could not have been done by a man," he thought to himself. "I am not as clever as this; I am guided." The sun had freed itself from the water and the wind was beginning to push. The small crew of the Echnaton had peered at Omar, but none had addressed him. One of them was colored like Omar, a golden brown. He came to Omar with a tin cup filled with water. When Omar drank, he tasted a strong bitterness. The bastard had given him opium in his water. It was indeed the work of a greater master. He knocked the cup back and filled his stomach with the potent tea. "Merci, marin." he showed exhausted gratitude. "Be easy. I am called Argento. You will be sound again soon." the pirate mate showed a fraternal mercy. "Appelez-moi Omar."

Captain Martis came forward and stood above him. "You are a navigator. Are you studied in the stars?" Omar distilled his loathing for this piss of a man and acknowledged, "Aye, sir. I have sharp eyes and know the firmament better than I've known any other home, sir." A silence and shift of the winds slapped the sails. He felt the "Ahh. To be so bold with your tongue. You will never find the chance to eat those words on my ship. You hold what is left of your life in your hands as you hold the Echnaton. You are her helm tonight. Rest now, and be sure that your paws are of use to me." Martis eyed Argento, "Take him below."

Argento waved down the slide for the steerage. Omar felt the opium in his head, like he was bouyed by some salty air. He laughed from his gut at the absurdity of the circumstance. His leg was very fragile, but he was not. The dopy strength he found was matched by sleepiness. Argento knifed a wool blanket in half and gave Omar enough to cover his body. As he laid down on the smashed mat, his arm brushed the polished smoothness of the wood framing the side of the bunk. It felt silky like a woman's leg and he drifted off in his mind to that beauty and comfort. Soon he was breathing heavily through his mouth, his leg propped up on the other, his hands folded into his chest like some eternal repose.

"OI!!! You-are-called-up!" a voice dragged Omar from some safe sleep worlds away from the Echnaton. "aye-AYE!" he reported with no delay. He swung his legs over the bunk and gasped when he felt his bone grind at the break. "It is no thing," he told himself. Before he set foot in the companionway, he prayed. As he emerged from the slide, Argento gave him another tin cup. "You're awake then, boy? Let me see your color!" and Martis grabbed his head from the cup and thumbed Omar's eye open. "Keep them so, or you'll not open them again, hear?" Omar acknowledged and finished the opium coffee. "You'll keep her course in five degrees, boy. Have you a better name?" "Aye sir. My name was Omar, sir."

"Like a father who sailed these seas. Rather pathetic that you're so short of the name, but I'll grant you the one chance to grow into it." he condescended. "Aye, sir," Omar eyed him, "and you will." The captain looked challengingly into Omar's eyes. Omar stood silent and still, meeting Martis. Martis sensed some worth in Omar as an opponent. The heart of the pirate did not love, but showed infinitesimal regard. Omar saw this as well as Martis saw Omar. Some ancient battle would be fought and these two lions of men would perform the rituals. "Don't cry over spilled blood," the captain advised him, "and you may maintain your own."

It was bizarre, Omar felt, that the pirate should want to nurture such adversary. "How could it be reasoned, or even intuited, that an enemy preserved the very contest of life against himself?" he asked himself. Martis dragged him from the luxury of consideration with a cold snap, "At the helm, boy, and keep alive!" "Aye, sir." The sun lit the high clouds from below the horizon. It showed them gold and red, silvery and bright. The colors spoke to his burdened heart. He breathed in fully through his nose and let three ticks of the clock pass before pushing the wind out of his lungs. The night would show him the way. To the Orient, the moon showed herself waxing gibbous. Martis' eyes followed Omar's. "It could be worse, sir," Omar extended an olive brance. Martis clipped, "And you'll know how."

Omar kept his eyes on the moon. She gave him a hope and a courage. No doubt or fear crept in, for Omar was defending aught but his life, the life he was given and the life that was his. Man could make him bleed, but his soul was unbound. He knew the pain but his animal instincts pressed him forward. The leg refused to hold weight. Argento gave him a square length of beam, he rested upon it gratefully. The fraternity relieved his shoulders. The astrolabe was situated so that Polaris marked her. He saw that they were keeping west on the 8th parallel. The sun was strongest here, and the current carried them toward Africa. As he situated himself into her course, the Echnaton became easy and light. Her sail had been fixed and she knew her way. Argento had left him dried fowlmeat. It gave his mouth oil and calories.

Even the most savage of men have a sense of brotherhood. These pirates, though they were given to the rape and ransack of the unguarded, had some code. In no clear way, with the wound of the captain's pistol he had been given an opportunity to make the ultimate his own, to follow the hand of god and to trace the lines in acts and speech. The blood of his mates was not innocent, and neither was his. There was, though, a gold like that of the sun that coursed through it. He knew of magi who knew matter and magic, who had given gifts of gold to kings and whose names pass lips far and wide. They were told to know of ways to make gold, bright and heavy. Omar prayed that god craft his soul so pure, so that he may reflect the brilliance of the heavens. It was selfish, he thought, but in a spirit of honesty. The evil aboard the Echnaton was in the desperation of her captain.


That which Omar saw came to him intuitively, like a birthed sense. As he set into keeping his course and watch and as the opium wore off he was whipped by the cold air. The small and constant infliction on his skin made him resign from defying it. He was still drugged enough so that he wasn't compelled to shiver. Still, he felt very much alone. The comfort and love that woman had shown him was far away, and a small nostalgic fear stole the hope that he would again lie warm and satisfied with a beautiful woman. This night and aboard the Echnaton in a world so different made those memories seem impossible. He tried not to think of love and beauty.

When he left Amsterdam so many years before he was followed to his ship by a young girl who loved him. She made him promise that he would see her again. He could tell by the fear and anguish in her eyes that she needed it, and it was not a bratty or petulant demand. It was clear to him that she needed him to return to her, and she meant what she meant when she said through her tears, "Do you promise I will see you again?" His first response was to observe the truths that he could not control some circumstances, life and death and the whole host of other possibilities only under understandable as god's governance. She would not accept it. She reiterated her demand.

"I promise I will see you again. Wherever you are in the world and wherever I am, I will spend my given life when the time comes to returning to your side. Now though, I have a fortune to seek, and a destiny to meet." She nodded and kissed him and he took the gangway to the Saturn. He chose not to look back, and when he did she was gone. On this forsaken ship, as he leaned with his weight on one aching leg and supported the broken one with the uncomfortable crutch, he thought of that promise and how much he'd wished to have given himself to returning to the Netherlands and seeking out his words.

In times of trouble he was given to rifling through poetry and notions in his memory. Divine comedy sometimes carried him through. Some lines echoed the profane way that destiny has for weaving our lives and the great loom that serves to thread them together. The blood of Martis, as he felt was his right to see spilt, was a small consolation for the humiliation and pain he was enduring. An ancient voice spoke from his own chest and Omar listened. The man would have a chance to redeem himself if he were rendered sightless. It was a nobler determination than a curse for his blood. For the time, though, he would have to heal and diplomacy would grant that time.


There were only two wags that good Omar had met. Surely they were greater than two men. The night was creeping slowly and the bow splashing through the gentle wells was hypnotizing. His leg ached and throbbed, and when the wind rolled the Echnaton he would cringe with searing pain as his weight suddenly shifted. He would appreciate more opium when he was relieved. The firmament was bright and the old characters and constellations, the planets and the streams of stellar milk kept his heavy eyes entertained. Polaris carried the course, and the nature of countless nights like this one steadied him. If he were to find the satisfaction of justice, to see vengeance and to lie comfortable in his body with the warmth of a woman, he knew that when god presented an opportunity he must recognize and make it.

The 罂粟 had failed in her mission to transport cargo of opium from Rangoon to Sydney. It was a small, unperishable, and profitable cargo. The colonials in the south paid handsomely for it. In the morning she was to set out a strange and forboding wind blew strong and fast against them. The clear sky and bright sun betrayed the weather, and so the 罂粟 was ordered by her captain, Shu, to standby at port for her loaded cargo and crew to voyage in delay one day. That call made sense, but hindsight taunted Omar. As a sailor, he was very aware that superstitions, ritual, and customary signs were a necessary and valuable gift from god. When the wind blew the 罂粟 back into port it was clear that the timing wasn't right. Men become defiant with pride, and Shu lost respect for the sea and became deaf to her whispers. She will look after her sons, he thought, "and all children of god," he whispered.

Now the opium was in the steerage of the Echnaton, a stolen ship of mediterranean craft. She was lithe and quiet though, and an admirable vessel. Whatever destiny held for Omar, he resolved that it was of divine orient. He gave in to his weakness and pain and slid a crate for crabbing up to the wheel and sat upon it. While the night slid by, he could rest his leg. At intervals much shorter than necessary, he rose to peer at the astrolabe and align the sprit with her stars. A timepiece would help, but he had none. For his adventures so far and wide he still sought a prosperity to properly conclude his peregrination, to know that he has found his destiny. Even though the bastard pirate captain called him "boy" he was a man. Shu's crew had addressed him "Sir" in a naivete of culture. Merchant and hire mariners tended to be much older or much younger than he was. After this divine lesson he would seek out his promise and maybe give himself to regular work and family. The rewards were simpler but in comparison to where he stood they were so generous and perfect.

Omar looked up at the big sky and smiled from ear to ear. He laughed a calm and self-mocking laugh with the ancient light arriving from the stars. The joke of life was in him and on him. A moment of hilarity, of absurdity settled upon him. He was brimming with a sense of getting the joke and being a conscious player in part. Doctors or philosophers would say that he was losing his mind, but in a world that makes no sense a well preserved mind does little to help. Omar swept his head around and spun a circle on his unbroken leg. With his hands out and up, he welcomed the architect of the ether, the conductor of the orchestra of matter and energy to step forward and come clean with him. There was no such reconciliation and Omar hadn't expected one. The ceremony was instinctive, and the madness felt ancient and familiar. The sun would soon begin to dissolve the black of the sky, and he could see a paling of the sky astern. His pain and psychic weary were nearing his threshold for tolerance. Everything in its time, he felt, would be provided and revealed.



Perhaps the opium was bending him. The bleeding had stopped and the wound turned hard and dry. He felt a throbbing deep in the bone. It did not smell as though it was going green and black. The salt and sea, his desperation and calibration of heart were all fortitude and served to heal him. In the end, he knew, he would be stronger for it. As the sun came across the horizon, the devil and Argento rose from the ship. Argento gave him a ration of crimson opium, a knot of clotted blood, dry and hard. Martis checked the bearings and gave no indication that anything was wrong or was right.

"We will have to settle, young Omar. I am heading to Portuguese Mozambique to off this lot of noddy. Before we get there, the lot of us will be needing a regular dose. You're already well on your way. What lays before me is your fate. Are you of the nature I can depend on; are you a man of our color, our black and bones?" The captain left the response to Omar. "Sir, I am a man, and so I will not lament the loss of my mates aboard the 罂粟. Still, you took sovereignty with brutality and gracelessness and I find in my guts a debt for you to pay." Martis looked fiercely through a sharp brow at Omar's insolence and only the honesty and humility with which Omar presented it gave Martis patience and reason not to kill him summarily. "And what debt has your foul belly got?" Martis challenged Omar. "Rightly, Sir, the balance of that which is fair."

Martis clapped, "HAHA! Argento! Have you heard such stupidity before aboard our Echnaton? Omar, you are a foolish boy, and if you were not you would be dead. If your chest still harbors contempt for being taken, maimed, and commanded then your heart will have to learn a very hard way. What any of us have is the same, a life to live. You have yours now, and those mates of the Orient you've lost are but memories. Should you wish to carry your debt along you'll learn to live and breathe the air you have without worrying about what has been exhaled. In our life, if you were to hold onto breath, you'd drown aboard your ship."

"Right then, Sir." Omar passed. Martis represented his query, "Are you going to give your life to the Echnaton or will she take it from you?" Omar replied after a short hesitation where he breathed two long breaths, "I shall give to the Echnaton that life that I have as I have it." "A very parsed reply, I should say, and one that makes me wisely wary." Martis took Omars words at face value, for he was not alive grey and old as a murderous pirate for his disregard for omens, threats, and meanings.

"We set for Mozambique, twenty degress Austral. When you see that you have the devil to pay it will be all too late, so keep your scope up for the land. If the Echnaton is poorly carried, then you will become a meal." Martis gave wide command, issuing only the objective and enough legitimate fear to crop the best results. Omar confirmed in respectful, "Aye, aye, Sir." and all was set.

==========================================

Argento took the wheel, latched it, and put in Omar's free hand a coffee. As Omar sipped it, he studied Argento. Argento didn't speak much more than was needed.

. Early in the morning, Omar made a strong coffee with a double-dose of opium.  He then set to fishing , with rods.  This was nearly a comical gesture, because these were waters where one would net the catch, not meddle about in a battle of wits and fates with a single mackerel.  If one does not try, though, one does not succeed.  So he rigged a sardine preserved in oil to the line and old rusty hook, making sure that there was a fiber twine lead to protect the bite of any fish worth catching.  His leg allowed him to stand on it, though precariously, and partially because of the opium.  The early hours where Martis was sleeping his rum off, surely with his one eye open, and Argento taking his own rest, gave Omar a time under dark night's stars to fish for food, a rather long, uneventful, and passive process, and reflect and appeal to his g-d for strength, meaning, the knowledge of his will and the power to carry it out. His mind began to unreel with the line that ran out into the waters baited Perhaps Martis was trying to win some loyalty or show his predatory affection, but a breakfast was ordered cooked

Originating in a Meaningless Cipher

Too young, I learned that the world was going to end in my lifetime.  I have to be careful about how I explain this, but it was my interpretation of my mothers' plain language that armageddon was upon us and that the world seemed likely to end in some cataclysmic event such as nuclear war.  A quote I remember is that, "Jesus will come back to earth, likely in your lifetime."  The implications, which I only began to understand later, were that all was pointless aside from keeping on g-d's good side.

Later, my stepfather had a discussion with me about how the sun would eventually "burn out" and that life on earth was a precarious and ultimately pointless indulgence, endeavor, and farce that we all played along with as if there was meaning.

At 14 I read the Stranger.  I had been villainized, mocked, regarded as psychologically disabled and dismissable in my perspectives, complaints, and protests.  The Stranger resonated with me.  Perhaps too much so, but I read it cover to cover three times the night I first read it.  This author knew the life as an exilee from the kingdom of certainty of moral and purpose.  I identified with Meursault.

I never found my way back into society; always I feel the outsider.  Not the outsider as in unpopular but unable to indentify with social standards and conventions.  I've learned to edit my thoughts, but still I find others revulsion at my pessimism when I speak my mind.  No one likes to hear that their lives mean absolutely nothing.  Whether the Apocolypse will come in my lifetime, rendering labor and academics without relevance, subservient to piety and wholeness of heart; or the eventuality of the sun's expiry and the futility and farce that our wars, lust, mastery of medicine and mechinery, along with so much built for the progess of a species condemned by the finite lifetime of the life-sustaining generousity of our solaris -- it all seems without meaning.

"Why?" is a question that parents tire of, professors tire of and eventually mocks the impetuous asker.  In fact, the question eventually mocks myself.  The only absolute answer, and it is not a complete answer but an instinctive animal answer, is to perpetuate the species by space colonization, perhaps in mastering more of our bizarre host of the fabric of space and time -- or better yet meeting other life forms we can communicate with and share notes, learn from or even find a way to present questions and receive answers form the governor of this universe.

Therein lies my rub.

Jaded

At one point I thought that the best a man can do with his life is to help others. Alleviate their burden, their pain, their entrapment or oppression. I guess maybe I still to believe that, but today as I walked up the sidewalk on a street in a city in a country with a culture that disgusts me with her arrogance and ignorance. The arrogance of modernity. I had been riding the bus, going over a conversation I'd had with my psychologist about "anti-depressants" and considering that he called me "noncompliant" with my medications (in refusing increases; explaining that I'm about to stop taking them after 60 days of torment in side effects: trembling, random crying, anxiety, sleeplessness and no improvement in mood or anxiety).

The truth is, no one every measured my seratonin levels, and there was never any other assessment that I should need an SSRI than a doctor wrote among other things "NOS Mood Disorder" when I was perfunctorially ushered through my clinical presentation to suit his American DSM-oriented clinical diagnoses. No one has ever tested my seratonin levels, my norepinephrine levels, dopamine levels because it is not, to my knowledge, a common practice -- if even practical or possible in a non-invasive test.  I speculate that these drugs are prescribed en masse to patients reporting symptoms that are, in my view, a part of human experience common, natural, and a part of modern life even if not pleasant.  The side effects of citalopram are worse than living with the diagnosis.  Don't get me wrong, some tonics and medicines work and work well, but the one-size-fits-most anti-depressant prescription for anxiety, depression, premature ejaculation, and whatever else is not only unscientific but wrong.

I thought to myself that in the future they'll look back and consider the widespread prescription and consumption of compounds to manipulate monoamine (seratonin, norepinephrine, dopamine) levels, endorsed by the FDA, and promoted by the pharmaceutical and parallel medicine industries, as perversely absurd, horrendous and ignorant. Psych hospitals and the military contributed to the formatting and content of the premier DSM in 1952, and "depression" first appeared as a diagnosis as a "mood disorder" in the 1980 DSM-III.  In the future, they will read about us with amazement and a cringe.

When we learned to control electricity (modern man's fire), we tried sending watts through brains.  Hey, it did -something- at least.  "You have an excess of black bile, sir.  Melancholia.  I recommend bleeding, blistering, emesis and diarrheation, and if you don't feel better after any of those treatments we'll look into some trepanation."  The 1940s and 1950s had doctors performing tens of thousands of leukotomies (lobotomies) until Thorazine came around and, in relative terms, was an improvement.  These are extremes, I'm aware, and aren't directly related to treatments for modern DSM mood disorder depression forms.  What is absolutely true, though, is that medicine is a practice, an art, and the trends in medicine are guided by trial and error.

After World War II, millions could have been clinically diagnosed as depressed.  Should they all have been given aripiprazole, citalopram, quetiapine, fluoxetine?  No.  Am I "noncompliant"?  Yes.  Am I wrong?  You can't convince me so without more data.  It isn't a problem to me.  In fact, the medicines aren't providing me with any solution, and I could say they're presenting me with problems instead.

As I walked up the sidewalk I reminded myself that most men think of their lives, their opinions, their values in absolutes.  There isn't a regard for what man is doing as a species, as a collective; what a man is a part of in terms of a country, a political party, an ethos, a culture in the time frame of thousands upon tens of thousands isn't regarded when he reads the newspaper or talks to his fellows.  I am "the consummate outsider" and I just can't manage to feel a part of something here and now.  My oppressor, my adversary, the personification for bad to me is, unlike many of my compatriots, my own people.  If not Americans, because there are much more vile cultures that are more or equally as ignorant and arrogant as Americans, then modern man.

The redux of my internal dialogue on my walk back from the bus was that sadly I should do what will provide me the most comfort.  Success, happiness, can be manufactured perhaps in providing the finest textiles, dining, living quarters, and cultivating spiritual experience for myself to suit myself.  I'm unsure if I need to satisfy some instinct to reproduce, beyond sating a sexual apetitite as it comes and goes.  If that is a necessity, or a necessary compromise, then the same happiness must then be manufactured for my family, those in my care.  I'm unsure about that, and it's not so important.

I remember being 20 and realizing that contrast was real in life.  Being homeless and cold, dirty and hungry made me see that having a modest job, room to rent, shower, soap, and a sandwich a day were beautiful -- more beautiful than seeing the greatest of man's monuments, the most profound novel, the most moving cinematic experience.  Contrast is real.  Coming in from the cold and wet to sit by a fire after a shower and clean, dry, fitting clothing, diving into cool water in oppressive heat, these reliefs are happiness.  If not, then I don't know what happiness is.  It makes life seem rather cheap, and that is scary I guess.  It's problematic for me because I don't see the point in monkeying around for these creature comforts unless I'm subject to living without them.  Why play the game at all?  Sleep or death is not painful, and if the experience of pain outweighs, or exceeds the reliefs -- and it does for me -- life itself seems a losing game.

So, by the time I got to my door I decided that I had to believe that some divinity, some great author will provide the relief again in measure for the pain, that there is a reason beyond the material and monkey, and that I will get up a play even if I don't think there is a way to win.  My greater grief is in feeling alone, being regarded as sick in my thinking because I don't agree or am unsure of the things in life that everyone else speaks so surely of.  They kill for these beliefs, or kill on the belief that others beliefs are true.  It's confusing, and I get confused, and I wish I met someone else who was confused.  Then, perhaps I would feel a little less alone, a little less depressed, a little less anxious.

My Withering Mind in February

As if my mind were in any shape in summer, this winter has left me realizing that I have actually lost my mind.  I am not sane.  I am rambling, ranting, lost and mumbling.  Sometimes I wonder if I'll turn petulant in my frustration and become violent.  Sinister scenery slides through my psyche, and frighteningly easy irreverence for life, lives, living.  The only thing that gives me any comfort is thinking about space, stars, black holes, the beginning of the universe, gravity, magnets, the aether, and that sort of thing.  It makes me feel better about feeling so exiled from the way the television paints life; the way the news presumes a morality that I don't have, and can't even stomach, the assumptions and pretensions of the newspapers that make me realize that I'm no citizen and I have contempt for the lot of it -- only the vastness of space, matter, energy and time seems to make sense, to be for me.  The notion of the enormous scale of time is the only ally I know.  I creep other people out, depress them, or make them angry.  I suppose if I found someone that agreed with my insanity, we'd be left with the age old question:  "Now what?"

So I will collect my images of the role, the empty customs, and try to breathe life into a character that is employable, that does not frighten or disgust, that can hold a conversation.  I feel like I once wished, when young and sentimental, that I would know what exile felt like, and god, the governance of this universe saw fit to meet that prayer in classic irony.  "Exile and the Kingdom" was a Camus book I never finished.  Perhaps now is the time.  I feel like that fucker and I could sit and smoke cigarettes in a tabac, drink little black coffees, and smirk at the drama and clashes of expectations and entitlement and random, meaningless reality as customers came in to buy their cigarettes and newspapers, lighters and porn.  Unfortunately, that indulgent daydream isn't crediting me any money.  Money seems to be a consistent theme to my agonizations.

Wilson's Outsider needs to be finished as well; maybe one page a day.  "Exile" -- what a word.  It makes me think of exodus and refugees, being held at borders and scanned by police for warrants.  They're all just doing their jobs, the police, the managers at starbucks, the judges and the executives at walmart, the social workers and the drug dealers, the doctors and the junkies.  It's just the way it is.  No it's not fair, but life isn't fair.  I don't fool myself into thinking I'm innocent or noble so much, but "I would not feel so all alone -- Everybody must get stoned."  I've spent my outrage, and natural and pure rebellion has given way to nausea.  When I think about the thousands of years of men, women, love and magic, food, drug, sailing, fishing, dreaming and wishing and then try to find an identity in this city and country, on this television station and programme, with these characters, cultures, gold and wars, I am at a loss.  I don't feel right about it.

So, I've realized that I am insane.  This is why I can't make sense of it.  Unfit to reproduce -- a bad egg.  I'm stupid and selfish and that's why I don't love America and the romance of wars and cars.  I'm lazy so I don't like to do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.  I'm depressed, the doctors say, and that's why I'm sad.  I'm a sinner, so god won't even throw me a bone and the devil doesn't even need to bribe me.  I'm an ungrateful son, nephew and so on; I'm a conceited, disloyal zero.  -That- is what's wrong with me.  I'm insane, unclean, dirty, sick.

They don't have insane asylums like I thought they would when I was a child.  I mean, there are dismal, horrible places for the sick and sad, but I can't cope with these places.  If they were nice, surely lazy bastards like myself would have monopolized it long ago, burdened the good citizens of their taxes, and drawn away from spending on national security.  Once I tried to explain to a therapist that if I were a lesser primate, a monkey of sorts, my monkey gang would kill me, maim me, or chase me away.  In my insane mind, it goes on now.  The sick and stupid, poor and untaught fill prisons and hospitals today.  The wise elder citizens don't just kill them because they're civilized.  Well, they kill them sometimes, but not a whole lot, and they're good enough to explain why it's ok.  I'm insane, but until recently I've managed to go uncaptured for the most part.

When I watched a documentary about a man tortured and held in Saudi Arabia who could only defy them by standing naked, smearing himself with shit and refusing to bathe for 2 years I understood him and admired him.  In my insane mind it is more beautiful to defy oppression at the cost of one's comfort and life than to bend and take it to preserve the self, the pieces of hope for a future.  I have been trained to accept life as a captive animal as necessary, when it is as perverse and wrong an experience as any I can imagine.  I participate in the perpetuation of the practice.  I'm insane, though.

I have lost nearly all faith in man.  I've lost the great reverence for life and the implication that life is more valuable than that which a subject assigns to their own.  Still, the idea of killing in war, justice, rage, or greed makes me sick in my stomach.  It is because we need to justify killing that we let ourselves ride swells of righteousness clothing fear, hate, jealousy and greed.  That only some of us stop and feel out the truth, choose to decline the safety of the herd, the security of identity, the consensus when it is wrong, these things sadden me.  When I think of those tens, hundreds of thousands of years, I can't imagine that it has been different when any group of us grows in number and endures generations of a communal notion of self.  I'm insane, but I don't trust men.  I'm insane, and I'm uncertain.  It's not just homicide; that's just the taboo, dogma, and example of my own exile I point at.