Humilidad

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  25 February 2009

  Mark Domino

  • gisoue
    where the hell are you? the world would have missed a lot of my genius if you'd sent me out that window.
    
    can't believe you'd stoop to facebook! still using lynx?
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  01 March 2009

  Mihi Nomenest Joshua

  • i know about that window. it's not that far down.
    
    ALpine.
    
    just tried to watch Lexx consecutively through to make some sense of it and decided that #4 just needed to get laid. then i stopped taking the drugs.
    
    don't panic.

Some Letter

Yes, I had a company with J- A- called A- & W-, Inc. We were technology consultants and we had perversely thorough contracts, the templates and other legalities propelled by W- V- and others at P-.com. Our first client was Reader's Digest in Chappaqua, NY (or really close, I can't remember the mailing city). I, as you know, did not finish high school, but none of my clients ever asked me for a diploma. They just assumed I knew what I was talking about because most of the time I did. S-.org was one client that I was the primary consultant for and my duty, as I felt, subscribing to the McKinsey & Co. ethos (see mckinsey.com) was to tell them to hire someone to handle all of the in-house stuff like printer jams, connection issues and the like. I was more about policy and planning. I represented their IT interests on the board as a liaison, not a boardmember.

My business partner, J-, and I were in David Rockefeller Jr's office in Rockefeller Plaza. There was a photo of him hanging out with a pensive looking Bill Clinton on a wooden porch. They had their own in-house IT team, as you can imagine, but I was the primary consultant for s-.org. (if you google my name, look at the third hit). They were hosting S- because S- is Peggy's child (I think, I can't speak for her). J- became really brash and rude on the telephone in an office HOSTING as a guest one of our clients. I hung the phone up for him, called the other man back and explained that I would speak to him to resolve whatever challenges we shared and that I was most surely at his service to accomplish this. I was, believe it or not, the people man. At least that's what my clients said. It was then that I understood that Emily was doing what was best for her and that was not me. My roommate decided she was moving in with her boyfriend and J- was breaking my heart with the antics. I decided to sell my half for some nominal amount to J-, endorse all the clients to him, and then go backpacking. So I did.

When I was in Prague, the HR lady at S-.org wrote to me saying they were going with my plan and hiring someone. They trusted me and asked if I would do it. I was running out of money so I was very grateful. I asked why they weren't staying with A- & W-, Inc. (I'm the second father, she was my baby, I wanted her to thrive). They said that A- "didn't ingratiate himself with the staff". I said OK. I relayed this to J- to make sure I wasn't crossing any lines (see, I do follow rules when they matter). La la la.

Life became amazing. I had money, benefits I doubt I will ever find again, and 4 weeks paid vacation to start. I had an office with a window and I ordered Kandinsky prints. Soon enough, though, I threw all this away. You know I'm a wildcard but not everyone does. When I'm good I'm the best. When I'm not, I'm pretty fucking bad. So, because we had a USAID grant and I had selfishly violated one of the terms of the grant, I was given unemployment. That was 405 dollars a week. When 9.11 happened, GWB extended it for a year. Then a friend in NYC invited me to a birthday party in Biarritz. I told him I would go. Z- told him I wouldn't be able to make it. I can't tolerate when people who love me speak for me. That made me all the more sure I was going. It was insane. I was nearly homeless in San Francisco and somehow richocheted from NYC to CGD to the train to Biarritz. On the train, I met Sophie Russo. She became my lover. She was the daughter of a doctor and his mistress in Paris, and had her own separate house on their estate in the good banlieu. St. Cloud or somewhere near, as I recall, was where they lived.

I worked it out so an old friend would deposit my unemployment checks, which were getting mailed to a Brooklyn address, and looked for a job in Paris. I didn't speak a word more than Bonjour when I landed. I suppose I also knew "maman" because it's in the first line of The Stranger, and other words that English has appropriated. Still, it was rough. I was taking morphine sulphate and drinking a lot. I met G- at a party at kilometerzero.org. She and I knew each other from as soon as we met. It was pretty beautiful. My friend Samuel was staying with me from Stockholm, and I made him take a walk. There you have it.

I came back to the US to try to round up some more money, and then left again for Paris with no intention of returning. The movie Bowling for Columbine and a comment that my friend Ch- made sort of led me to understand that I was nauseated by a lot of Americana. G- & I paid the security and all that but couldn't move in until the beginning of the month. We went to the UK to wait at her parents' house in Lincolnshire. When we were there, her father sort of talked to her and it did become clear that France was a big challenge and even though I'd be illegal if I stayed on my course (which I did), I would be better off finding work in a country that spoke English. So we moved to London, then Nottingham. I worked in kitchens and also did independent consulting where I would send and invoice and the client would send me a check. No UK Customs & Excise was necessary. I did, though, go to them and explain my predicament, the element of true love, and they gave me an official looking paper that explained to prospective employers that it wasn't on them to provide a National Insurance number (the UK equiv of an SS number), and used TN01061978M for a temporary number. It was all pretty beautiful.

Later, though, G- looked at me one night and said, "why don't we go to the U.S. and get married, live there for a while, and you can make a living easier?" I asked, "can we get married in Vegas?" She replied, "that's what I wanted to do!" So you see, there's a screw for every nut!

We did so, I got hired on the phone on a Thursday and the job wanted me to start that Monday. I took everything I could on the plane, told G- it was underway and to bring everything she could in two weeks. She did. I worked at Pep Boys HQ during their rollout of a new Point-Of-Sale system sort of covering what was not covered. Ever since I saw Pulp Fiction and heard the lines,

Jules: "You're sendin' The Wolf?"
Marsellus: "Feel better, Motherfucker?"
Jules: "Sheeeit, Negro! That's all you had to say!"

I've wanted to be "The Wolf". When I'm good, I'm almost that reassuring. Usually, I'm more of a liability. As the Wolf, I did the Pep Boys' project and got hired at H--I.com as the Network Manager. G- was living with me in South Philly. We were doing what we wanted to do, living the dream and all of that. There are three reasons why she went back to England:

1. She had a plane ticket to go visit
2. She was very lonely and I worked all the time
3. A more personal one that I'm not comfortable disclosing really

So, she went to England. I went to South Florida. She told me she wasn't coming back. I stayed in Miami. I lived there at 820 Ocean Drive for a year. Then I came back to Philadelphia and stayed in a 5 bedroom my friend owned that was empty to keep it "lived in" sort of and clean and secure. I was working as a waiter in Miami. In Philadelphia I caught up with an old friend, R-, and G- had been in England for a year and we agreed that it wasn't really working the way it was. She had a boyfriend that looks so much like me others have told me, "I guess G- has a 'type'!" and so I approved. He must be devilishly handsome, I thought.

R- had just passed the bar exam, became an attorney to practice in PA & NJ, and we lived together for the past two years until about 2 weeks ago today.

So there you have it. Warts and all, it's been the quick snapshot of what I've been up to. I've been other places and had other drama, but mostly I've found that so long as my heart is pure and my mind is clear life works out for me. When my head isn't clear and I'm up to no good it doesn't. As such, I'd say that so long as your motives are good and you use counsel, strategy and perserverance coupled with faith, your own situation is bound to work out. No matter what, "there's always a hole somewhere" (a sort of IT phrase regarding security). I do feel for you and do not believe it is in your own, your man's, or your childrens' interests to be paying to have the US interfere with something much older and more natural than federal governance, but I'm deviating from the sentence I want to give you:

It'll work out; be sure of that.

Dreams June 11, 2011

Dreams of St. Albans:

On an airplane to Indiana. Near Alabama (Baton Rouge I say). The pilot asks me questions. A beautiful girl is being abused, harrassed by some fuck. I tell him to chill, he takes offense. It escalates. I ask him if he reads USA Today. He says, “He's an asshole, not an idiot”.

...Walking through a bizarre, like somewhere in Morocco with Jason Charles. He talks about money; investment stuff, not real money.

Finally we get to his ride: a silver motorcycle. He rides us on absurd dangerous trails, highways in the sky, icy, covered in ice past wreckage and bodies.

I ask him to cut the threads from my teeth. He does at two separate places. One is a public bathroom.

We park and descend through a scaffold of paths fraught with danger. Two or three pairs of pants fall from guys who dissolve. Some sort of reagent or acid.

In NYC he says he lives at the end of the #2 train. We end up in an imaginary place I dream of. St. Alban's park area. This is a place that appears in many of my dreams. I look for alprazolam in my coat. There are russians in a NYC apartment. It feels so familiar. The St. Albans park is familiar. Just outside Manhattan, in Queens.

Somniculosa

A long time ago, or maybe not so long ago, there was a sad boy. He grew up into a sad man. No one ever wants this. No one but sad people ever want it for the people they like the least. He spent his days without talking to people, his nights without looking at stars. The only thing that he looked forwards to was sleep. Sleep was as close to happiness as he could find. The world went away, and he went away with it.

It wasn't so simple, though. For he would dream. The dreams he had made his sleep broken and uneasy. Mornings came and he couldn't hide in sleep. By the time mornings came, he'd usually been shaken from the dark hideaway that the sleep was by the dreams which haunted that sleep. He dreamt of everything from falling into autumn valleys from high places, even being so small that he was tossed from a car on a bridge to being imprisoned in strange facilities of his psyche where he was kept by inabilities. Dreams where he did wrong and wasn't found out and dreams where he had done no wrong but was prosecuted were equally effective in upsetting him.

When he woke though, the regularity of the sadness was perhaps more cruel. He felt the life slipping from him, moment by moment, hour by hour. While the idea of killing himself, finding that ultimate sleep had crossed his mind, he never fully engaged it. It would come just as quickly as a morning on the scales of time he framed it all in. There was no need to rush something so permanent. What he knew was that something would give. Something had to give. If it was he that was to break, his mind to fissure and crumble, or his body to die a slow and wretched cancerous death or a fast and merciful heart attack or fatal stroke, then so be it. Otherwise, the universe would make room for him and he would be free.

What made him sick was the feeling of inability that plagued him. He was, in all likelihood, more than able, but he felt unable to extricate himself from his misery and death. Sometimes he read a story, a play, or watched a film that lit a light inside, that moved him to want more. He looked around him when he was forced to go outside and saw not much more than zombies of the modern age. Sure, he was a pessimist, but there was a reason. He couldn't rightly see that the status quo was anything but tragic. Even the games he played and the projects he took on for the sake of feeling like he was doing something were empty. He did it for someone else. It wasn't what he wanted, and it scared him.

Maybe he was losing the ability to want. Not in some enlightened buddhist way, but in a very sick way. To not want, never to be excited, never to feel alive were the characteristics of this loss. Even when he lived on heroin in England, his skin was pale, but there was something ghostly about him now. Like the scene in Back to the Future when Marty McFly is disappearing. That half-wayness of it all added to the unbearable weight of it all. He did retain a desire, though. One desire he knew, that he kept, that he would not be stripped of was to return to the light and levity that he once lived.

All that seriousness and certainty with which nearly everyone he knew ordered their lives would make him smirk. He knew, maybe all he knew, was that the universe was a joke, a blag, and that whatever was going to happen would or wouldn't and there wasn't much point in worrying about it. Thinking this way, he found himself starting a company that was presented as an offer to him. Knowing these things he found love and the beauty of New York when one is young and June comes. He loved planes. He loved the idea that one could buy tickets to other realities.

Sure, it was the same planet and the same people, but it was all different and, truthfully, at least to him, the priorities with which the people lived, while generally oriented the same, were different when it mattered. It mattered most when it came to relating. The way men & women looked at, spoke to, and handled each other. The way strangers did. The way that friends and the ways that colleagues regarded each other. They were different than in America. That was real.

The thought that any given telephone wire was there for as long as he was, give or take, and would be along after he was, give or take, was profound to him. It made him realize that the world, life, reality didn't need him. Extending this to the cosmos led directly to a more fundamental redux, but no one ever wanted to talk about that because there didn't seem to be much to talk about to them. Not to him. That was what was worth talking about more than anything else. It was all a comedy. Or a tragedy. Or both or fuck all.

This is what he missed. Men had all sorts of advice they were prone to give. He tolerated a lot of it, and had learned to entertain it. Maybe he didn't understand life. Maybe he did. Maybe that can't be absolutely determined.

There was a limit to how much he could sleep. One day he would feel so rested, he would not be able to stand still. Maybe on that day greater things would come to pass.

As June Ends, & Primavera Passes, the Summer Baiser is Laid Upon Us

Voyage au Delaware pour l'achat de cigarettes

Waking Up Early

Those witching hours before dawn, from around 3:30 to 5:30 are the ones made for me.  I go to sleep when I can, but naturally, without sedative or weights of depression, I awake from wicked dreams to the quiet hour when I can own the time. Last night's dreams were of being somehow stranded on some South Pacific island named “Christmas” Island, where the people were all perversely rich and had a way of speaking, not just the accent but the dialect was so polite that it was impossible to be sincere. I broke some precariously set advert for something or other, an ad that was paper placed in a glass platform on my table.

The service was like bad service in France, or in a cafe in Italy where you have to pay for things you don't expect to persons you don't expect in methods you don't intuit. After I threw this glass thing on the floor, smashing it, I walked out, a direction I felt was East, but it's an island and you can only go so far.

I found myself at a squat inhabited by rough fucks, and my girlfriend who shifted between the longer relationships in my life, was worried because I had disappeared for days. I felt bad for leaving her in the rough, but any of my girlfriends would have been able to take care of themselves well enough. The one that maybe wouldn't, though I can't tell, then appears. The lesser imp daemon Evile walked me up a street on this island where things were beautiful. There was something I meant to mail her but she wouldn't give me an address. So I figured I would mail it to the general area and if it got there, great.

I'd done this before. When I was in prison in Brixton, I mailed University of Edinburgh, the Russian dept. I think and they pinned my letter up on a bulletin board. The recipient found it. That was a good bit of luck. There's something special about throwing a message into a bottle and tossing it in the water.

So I'm still stuck on this island until I hear “Shhh!” and I wake up. I can't tell if my girlfriend woke me up because I was snoring and bothering her or if I dreamt that part. At least I wasn't angry. There have been instances where I dreamt something and woke up and was so angry because the in the dream the girl did something horrible and I didn't separate the dream from reality. It was unfair, and I later felt bad, but it takes some doing to get from being angry to feeling bad. It's a natural progression, perhaps, but not without some work when you wake up and have to separate your suspicions, your dream, and reality in bed at the time.

I try to go back to sleep, but it doesn't work. I pull myself together and press the coffee button. Then, my time to set my mind is go. These hours are so dark and beautiful. So eerie and quiet. My favorite time of day.