We’re born into this without any guide or way of making sense of it. It’s a life full of hopes and longing and desperation. It’s also a labyrinth. But it’s a labyrinth without any center or exit. Every path is a dead end. Seventy or eighty years lost in a tangle of dead ends. No frame of reference. No north, no south, No east, no west. No way back home and no destination in the future either.
There’s just dead ends, one after another while we are so desperately trying to get to… Where?
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
The invisible background of reality
Early morning. I am sitting in the front window of a fashionable café. In front of me there’s an empty espresso cup and a copy of The Decline of the West. I look out the window at a sky full of huge snowflakes and consider the illusion of reality, and the real objective reality we are blind to -the one that lies, theoretically at least, beyond physical form and time.
Time itself, like the colors of the rainbow and the sound of rain, only exists in the human mind. The sense of minutes and hours flowing, the notion of one event coming before or after another, even the idea of individual events in the first place, all belong to the mind, and not to any objective reality. We can theorize an objective reality of energy and mathematics, but we can’t experience it directly.
So let’s theorize now.
Let’s say I have just tossed a brick through a window and the shattered glass went everywhere. You will tend to say that the window was broken because I threw the brick into it. But from a perspective that’s one step more objective, it is equally true that I was caused to throw the brick because the window broke.
I say this because in a determined universe every event and transaction of forces interlocks with every other like a huge long string of mathematical equations, each one implying the next ad infinitum. Everything causes everything, precisely.
But as I have said, the very notion of anything causing anything is a fallacy because everything causes everything. We can now go a step further and say that the airborne brick causes the window to break no more than the broken window causes the brick to be thrown. They cause each other. Or else nothing causes or is caused by anything. Now here is a weird and eerie aspect of reality if I have ever seen one. The real question here is: what, if anything, causes the both of them in their simultaneity. Here we scrape the bottom of what reasoning can apprehend. Here is the base of reality and it’s weirdly invisible structure.
We have here a universe of effects all causing one another, with no visible prime mover. When we look for causes we enter an infinite regress, like standing between two mirrors and seeing the tunnel of reflections.
Hmmm. Best not to think too hard about this. It could drive you to insanity –maybe even Christianity.
City O’ City, Denver
12/08/09
Time itself, like the colors of the rainbow and the sound of rain, only exists in the human mind. The sense of minutes and hours flowing, the notion of one event coming before or after another, even the idea of individual events in the first place, all belong to the mind, and not to any objective reality. We can theorize an objective reality of energy and mathematics, but we can’t experience it directly.
So let’s theorize now.
Let’s say I have just tossed a brick through a window and the shattered glass went everywhere. You will tend to say that the window was broken because I threw the brick into it. But from a perspective that’s one step more objective, it is equally true that I was caused to throw the brick because the window broke.
I say this because in a determined universe every event and transaction of forces interlocks with every other like a huge long string of mathematical equations, each one implying the next ad infinitum. Everything causes everything, precisely.
But as I have said, the very notion of anything causing anything is a fallacy because everything causes everything. We can now go a step further and say that the airborne brick causes the window to break no more than the broken window causes the brick to be thrown. They cause each other. Or else nothing causes or is caused by anything. Now here is a weird and eerie aspect of reality if I have ever seen one. The real question here is: what, if anything, causes the both of them in their simultaneity. Here we scrape the bottom of what reasoning can apprehend. Here is the base of reality and it’s weirdly invisible structure.
We have here a universe of effects all causing one another, with no visible prime mover. When we look for causes we enter an infinite regress, like standing between two mirrors and seeing the tunnel of reflections.
Hmmm. Best not to think too hard about this. It could drive you to insanity –maybe even Christianity.
City O’ City, Denver
12/08/09
I shit on the chest of christmas
IN RE: I shit on the chest of Christmas
Jim & Jane,
Hey! It was nice to receive your holiday card. I see you’ve been to Western Montana. That’s, uh… weird. Are there any people there? I’ve only been around Wyoming, but it was desolate as hell. And cold. It’s a terribly dangerous place to travel with a decent-looking piece of snatch.
It’s been so long since I sold my car that I’m beginning to forget there’s a world outside of downtown Denver. Every so often I catch a glimpse of the mountains on a clear morning and it seems so insane that I don’t drive anymore. They have become a scenic backdrop to the city rather than a reality. It’s a shame. On the other hand, I have none of the typical financial responsibilities that come with owning a car. While my friends who drive are at work busting ass to pay for a new carburetor or something, I’m up the street swilling expensive scotch and browsing the escort pages. Ah, just kidding.
Anyway, Christmas is here with all its lameness. Downtown gets overrun with shit-for-brains tourists from the weird outlying suburbs. They’re all determined to wear those festive Christmas sweaters. These people are like lice. They fuck up everything they come into contact with. They have made it impossible for me to enjoy living downtown for the rest of the month. They descend on the place by the hundreds. In the bakery I go to for coffee they climb all over me in droves and every woman finds a way to hit me in the face with her purse, and then her husband walks by and bumps my with his enormous ass. I think they’re shopping for gingerbread houses or something. Bastards.
I walked by the Salvation Army bell-ringer yesterday and for some unknown reason he lost his composure right in front of me and said, “This SUCKS!” I am not making this up. I guess it’s pretty frustrating to stand outside all day in the freezing cold wearing a Santa hat and ringing a bell that everyone tries to ignore. It’s not that Denver people are heartless, but we are all totally desensitized to panhandling. I have never seen so much panhandling before in my life. Everywhere you go there are old men with enormous beards begging for ten cents, not to mention the aggressive tactics now in use by Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, Denver Rescue Mission, etc. All these organizations heckle and terrorize people on the street corners, so by the time they get to the Salvation Army guy they have effectively quit giving a shit about humanity. Just one block form the bell-ringer I saw a guy actually freezing to death on a bench. He was hunched over and he had a frozen icicle hanging from the tip of his nose. Some paramedics were standing around him looking like they had no idea what to do about it. They might as well have been staring at some broken plumbing. The irony of this is that it happened right in front of the huge glass windows of a starbucks. The warm and cozy people in the café were basically forced to watch this morally distressing scene to a soundtrack of Christmas music while sipping on their hot chocolate. Or maybe they didn’t even bother looking. Do most people avert their gaze, or else curiously eyeball the suffering of the less fortunate? I’d really like to know. I too passed the Salvation Army guy and gave nothing.
Well, I did not intend to go on this depressing invective about Denver. I am planning to have yet another magical Christmas here, as usual, holed up in my apartment with wine and cigarettes and books by Cioran and Dostoevsky. Well, maybe not the cigarettes. I stopped smoking last week. It was all going well until I sat down to type this letter. Now I am suddenly experiencing this nagging desperation to smoke. I have been for the past three paragraphs. It’s because I always chain-smoke when I’m writing. The trouble is that I like smoking and I have no real desire to stop it. I’m just worried that the cigarettes have been affecting my health. It would be great if you could smoke just a little, but inevitably a little becomes a lot. It sneaks up on you. One day everything is in check, and then the next day you find yourself compulsively puffing on unfiltered cigarettes at all hours of the day and night. This is what it came to for me during the summer. I was sitting around every day reading and smoking for hours on end. In July alone, my lungs probably developed a nice thick crust of something similar to scorched bacon.
Well, this letter is becoming as irrelevant as it is long. I’ll wrap it by saying thanks for the card. Let me know how it’s going down south.
Best regards,
Joseph
Jim & Jane,
Hey! It was nice to receive your holiday card. I see you’ve been to Western Montana. That’s, uh… weird. Are there any people there? I’ve only been around Wyoming, but it was desolate as hell. And cold. It’s a terribly dangerous place to travel with a decent-looking piece of snatch.
It’s been so long since I sold my car that I’m beginning to forget there’s a world outside of downtown Denver. Every so often I catch a glimpse of the mountains on a clear morning and it seems so insane that I don’t drive anymore. They have become a scenic backdrop to the city rather than a reality. It’s a shame. On the other hand, I have none of the typical financial responsibilities that come with owning a car. While my friends who drive are at work busting ass to pay for a new carburetor or something, I’m up the street swilling expensive scotch and browsing the escort pages. Ah, just kidding.
Anyway, Christmas is here with all its lameness. Downtown gets overrun with shit-for-brains tourists from the weird outlying suburbs. They’re all determined to wear those festive Christmas sweaters. These people are like lice. They fuck up everything they come into contact with. They have made it impossible for me to enjoy living downtown for the rest of the month. They descend on the place by the hundreds. In the bakery I go to for coffee they climb all over me in droves and every woman finds a way to hit me in the face with her purse, and then her husband walks by and bumps my with his enormous ass. I think they’re shopping for gingerbread houses or something. Bastards.
I walked by the Salvation Army bell-ringer yesterday and for some unknown reason he lost his composure right in front of me and said, “This SUCKS!” I am not making this up. I guess it’s pretty frustrating to stand outside all day in the freezing cold wearing a Santa hat and ringing a bell that everyone tries to ignore. It’s not that Denver people are heartless, but we are all totally desensitized to panhandling. I have never seen so much panhandling before in my life. Everywhere you go there are old men with enormous beards begging for ten cents, not to mention the aggressive tactics now in use by Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, Denver Rescue Mission, etc. All these organizations heckle and terrorize people on the street corners, so by the time they get to the Salvation Army guy they have effectively quit giving a shit about humanity. Just one block form the bell-ringer I saw a guy actually freezing to death on a bench. He was hunched over and he had a frozen icicle hanging from the tip of his nose. Some paramedics were standing around him looking like they had no idea what to do about it. They might as well have been staring at some broken plumbing. The irony of this is that it happened right in front of the huge glass windows of a starbucks. The warm and cozy people in the café were basically forced to watch this morally distressing scene to a soundtrack of Christmas music while sipping on their hot chocolate. Or maybe they didn’t even bother looking. Do most people avert their gaze, or else curiously eyeball the suffering of the less fortunate? I’d really like to know. I too passed the Salvation Army guy and gave nothing.
Well, I did not intend to go on this depressing invective about Denver. I am planning to have yet another magical Christmas here, as usual, holed up in my apartment with wine and cigarettes and books by Cioran and Dostoevsky. Well, maybe not the cigarettes. I stopped smoking last week. It was all going well until I sat down to type this letter. Now I am suddenly experiencing this nagging desperation to smoke. I have been for the past three paragraphs. It’s because I always chain-smoke when I’m writing. The trouble is that I like smoking and I have no real desire to stop it. I’m just worried that the cigarettes have been affecting my health. It would be great if you could smoke just a little, but inevitably a little becomes a lot. It sneaks up on you. One day everything is in check, and then the next day you find yourself compulsively puffing on unfiltered cigarettes at all hours of the day and night. This is what it came to for me during the summer. I was sitting around every day reading and smoking for hours on end. In July alone, my lungs probably developed a nice thick crust of something similar to scorched bacon.
Well, this letter is becoming as irrelevant as it is long. I’ll wrap it by saying thanks for the card. Let me know how it’s going down south.
Best regards,
Joseph
Friday, December 4, 2009
Sanctuary
The friend I love is beside me now. She looks at me in the near-darkness of her room with wonderful eyes, dark but glowing like the stars. They reflect truth, the only truth that doesn’t make me sick with despair. It leads me back to the place that rights all the wrongs. This life, no longer the crime or the cage, becomes a possibility to see those eyes, to be here with her in this sacred reality. And what more could anyone really ask for that to be confronted with that?
My friend is a sanctuary, an armistice in a life that’s been nothing short of total war with no conceivable end. My mind is a war zone. I’m sick. It’s been this way for a long time. I came here, to the south, trying to get off the front lines, out of the trenches. Now I know that in running away I only found another front, another theater of strife. Break and run in another direction and there’s just more of the same. I’m hemmed in on all sides and the circle seems to be tightening. Bombardment rages on every hour of the day and night. But my friend calms it down, even if just for these few days we are here together. Anywhere she is, there’s home.
She’s the best ace up my sleeve. I’d like to think that when it’s all going wrong, desperately wrong, I could go to her. It’s been this way for a couple of years now, back and forth between Tennessee and Colorado.
Once she gave me a book of Emerson’s Essays. I told her it was like medicine for my sickened heart -but she’s better medicine. In looking across a crowded room at her, it’s then I know I am not alone. Not alone at all.
Being beside her here, on the streets of this unlikely town, this town I scorned forever, I catch a glimpse of the life want. There’s an easy perfection in the hours, rest in the company of someone who really is one of us. How could it be that I lived this many years without ever knowing this simple triumph?
Later on, the night turns cold. We sit on a second floor Balcony overlooking one of the more picturesque streets in Memphis. We’re up in the branches of a great old magnolia tree. We drink red wine and smoke cigarettes. Warm light from inside the living room glows on us through an open door. This is one of the best pleasures of the south, the slow nights and magnolias, the fact there’s no place at all to get to.
I have three days with my friend. Three days to find forever.
Memphis
10/30/09
My friend is a sanctuary, an armistice in a life that’s been nothing short of total war with no conceivable end. My mind is a war zone. I’m sick. It’s been this way for a long time. I came here, to the south, trying to get off the front lines, out of the trenches. Now I know that in running away I only found another front, another theater of strife. Break and run in another direction and there’s just more of the same. I’m hemmed in on all sides and the circle seems to be tightening. Bombardment rages on every hour of the day and night. But my friend calms it down, even if just for these few days we are here together. Anywhere she is, there’s home.
She’s the best ace up my sleeve. I’d like to think that when it’s all going wrong, desperately wrong, I could go to her. It’s been this way for a couple of years now, back and forth between Tennessee and Colorado.
Once she gave me a book of Emerson’s Essays. I told her it was like medicine for my sickened heart -but she’s better medicine. In looking across a crowded room at her, it’s then I know I am not alone. Not alone at all.
Being beside her here, on the streets of this unlikely town, this town I scorned forever, I catch a glimpse of the life want. There’s an easy perfection in the hours, rest in the company of someone who really is one of us. How could it be that I lived this many years without ever knowing this simple triumph?
Later on, the night turns cold. We sit on a second floor Balcony overlooking one of the more picturesque streets in Memphis. We’re up in the branches of a great old magnolia tree. We drink red wine and smoke cigarettes. Warm light from inside the living room glows on us through an open door. This is one of the best pleasures of the south, the slow nights and magnolias, the fact there’s no place at all to get to.
I have three days with my friend. Three days to find forever.
Memphis
10/30/09
Monday, November 9, 2009
Another trip to the Lamplighter
Almost as soon as I arrive in Memphis, Leila and I go to the Lamplighter, a favorite tavern from years past. The lamplighter is small and cozy, accommodating maybe twenty people at most. Nothing in there seems to have changed in decades. It’s a time capsule. Miss Shirley, the bartended who seems to have been there forever too, doesn’t look happy. She’s got cancer. She’s bald now. The whole time, she just stares off into space thinking god knows what. She knows it’s finished. No more tomorrows or next years, just that stinking pile of shit -the wasted past. One can only assume it’s tormenting her. All our lives, Miss Shirley’s included, are centered in some conceptual sense of tomorrow. But for those who know they are dying, tomorrow is revealed for what it is: a cheap fuckaround. Tomorrow-ness steals from us an entire lifetime of now-ness. Miss Shirley must be on the cusp of some sort of epiphany, but it’s too late to make anything of it. She must be thinking to her self, “That’s it? That was my life? What the fuck?” Of course Miss Shirley would not think or say the word fuck. There’s no cussing in the Lamplighter, and she’ll throw your ass out for using language like that. She goes on staring at nothing somewhere back toward the toilets.
I’m sitting at the Bar beside Leila and a couple of her friends. I can’t hear what they’re talking about, so I quit bothering to listen. I look at the weird shit behind the bar. There’s a little pyramid of cans of Vienna Sausages. Jesus, what the fuck is that doing there? My grandmother used to eat those God damned things. She liked canned meat smeared on saltines too. Vienna Sausages are a shitty low-grade meat paste that’s pressed into the shape of little sausages and sold in tin cans. They’re barely fit for legal human consumption. Lips and assholes, man. I get the feeling they aren’t for sale, just decoration. Lips and assholes.
You can order hot food here, but I heard someone got sick from it, so I don’t. I used to eat here all the time when I was in college. The menu is posted behind the counter and appears to have been drawn with a set of magic markers. It’s rife with misspellings and incomprehensible artistic flourishes. Hamburgers cost three dollars. Chili costs four-fifty. Leila gets the idea to make some cool T-shirts for the lamplighter. I suggest that the design on the shirt be nothing but a photograph of this fucking menu. It’s hilarious.
I look around the room. The dying alcoholics that used to frequent this place are absent, replaced by smart-looking young people. Dive-bar tourists. The fucks. As though I can talk! I’m probably one of the guilty assholes that popularized this place with the art school set. The Lamplighter has become a museum, a museum of kitsch. It was never like that before. Memphis used to be completely unconscious of it’s own weird stylishness. I guess thing’s have changed. I’ve been gone a long time.
It’s dark in the Lamplighter. I’m listening to the jukebox when despair comes over me, bad fucking despair. I can’t understand where it’s coming from. I feel fatigue as though I’m dying. The conversation keeps moving, but I have fallen out of it. I get this terrible fear that what I’m feeling is true. As always in these moments, I have a hard time convincing myself it’s temporary. I cant help but feel like it’s always going to be this way, that life is over.
I start to wonder if I’m sensing Miss Shirley’s doomed thought waves. It’s so crushing I actually go and hide in the men’s room -but the fucking door has no latch on it! What if I were peeing for god’s sake? I get up and go outside, just to break the spell. It’s nice and cold. I breathe deeply, but it does no good. I am doomed, and although this makes no sense it’s nonetheless an absolute reality. It’s the kind of thing that make praying to god seem reasonable.
I go back in and order more booze, doing my best to conceal what I’m going through.
Leila’s on the phone, so her friends make one more well-meaning yet totally ill-fated attempt to socialize with me. They haven’t got the slightest idea that the person they are dealing with is not even alive, not even human. I’ve been stolen away by the eruption of some sort of mood disorder -a psychic convulsion of hopelessness, tiredness. I’m tired like the grave.
One of them says, “You’re from Colorado, huh? Cool.”
I say, “Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
“I like those towns like… Durango.”
“Yeah, those towns are cool.”
“So uh…”
“Yeah.”
And that’s basically the end of that. I go back outside and a fucking crack addict approaches me making pitiful weird sounds. A white person can’t understand a word these crazy Negroes say when they get on the crack. In response to this unknown query I say something like, “Get the fuck out of here leper! I’m armed! I have no sense of morals and I will get away with what I do!” The leper drags himself on sullenly. Shit, maybe he was just asking what time it is. I go on back inside.
The night ends early.
Later, alone with my friend, I know the worst has passed. I’m normal again and grateful for it. The fit of despair at the Lamplighter was bad enough that it actually frightened me. This place used to make me happy. I was another person then though. It was a different lifetime. Between then and now there is no continuity whatsoever except for the bones in my body and a handful of spoiling memories I don’t even understand or believe anymore.
10/30/09
I’m sitting at the Bar beside Leila and a couple of her friends. I can’t hear what they’re talking about, so I quit bothering to listen. I look at the weird shit behind the bar. There’s a little pyramid of cans of Vienna Sausages. Jesus, what the fuck is that doing there? My grandmother used to eat those God damned things. She liked canned meat smeared on saltines too. Vienna Sausages are a shitty low-grade meat paste that’s pressed into the shape of little sausages and sold in tin cans. They’re barely fit for legal human consumption. Lips and assholes, man. I get the feeling they aren’t for sale, just decoration. Lips and assholes.
You can order hot food here, but I heard someone got sick from it, so I don’t. I used to eat here all the time when I was in college. The menu is posted behind the counter and appears to have been drawn with a set of magic markers. It’s rife with misspellings and incomprehensible artistic flourishes. Hamburgers cost three dollars. Chili costs four-fifty. Leila gets the idea to make some cool T-shirts for the lamplighter. I suggest that the design on the shirt be nothing but a photograph of this fucking menu. It’s hilarious.
I look around the room. The dying alcoholics that used to frequent this place are absent, replaced by smart-looking young people. Dive-bar tourists. The fucks. As though I can talk! I’m probably one of the guilty assholes that popularized this place with the art school set. The Lamplighter has become a museum, a museum of kitsch. It was never like that before. Memphis used to be completely unconscious of it’s own weird stylishness. I guess thing’s have changed. I’ve been gone a long time.
It’s dark in the Lamplighter. I’m listening to the jukebox when despair comes over me, bad fucking despair. I can’t understand where it’s coming from. I feel fatigue as though I’m dying. The conversation keeps moving, but I have fallen out of it. I get this terrible fear that what I’m feeling is true. As always in these moments, I have a hard time convincing myself it’s temporary. I cant help but feel like it’s always going to be this way, that life is over.
I start to wonder if I’m sensing Miss Shirley’s doomed thought waves. It’s so crushing I actually go and hide in the men’s room -but the fucking door has no latch on it! What if I were peeing for god’s sake? I get up and go outside, just to break the spell. It’s nice and cold. I breathe deeply, but it does no good. I am doomed, and although this makes no sense it’s nonetheless an absolute reality. It’s the kind of thing that make praying to god seem reasonable.
I go back in and order more booze, doing my best to conceal what I’m going through.
Leila’s on the phone, so her friends make one more well-meaning yet totally ill-fated attempt to socialize with me. They haven’t got the slightest idea that the person they are dealing with is not even alive, not even human. I’ve been stolen away by the eruption of some sort of mood disorder -a psychic convulsion of hopelessness, tiredness. I’m tired like the grave.
One of them says, “You’re from Colorado, huh? Cool.”
I say, “Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
“I like those towns like… Durango.”
“Yeah, those towns are cool.”
“So uh…”
“Yeah.”
And that’s basically the end of that. I go back outside and a fucking crack addict approaches me making pitiful weird sounds. A white person can’t understand a word these crazy Negroes say when they get on the crack. In response to this unknown query I say something like, “Get the fuck out of here leper! I’m armed! I have no sense of morals and I will get away with what I do!” The leper drags himself on sullenly. Shit, maybe he was just asking what time it is. I go on back inside.
The night ends early.
Later, alone with my friend, I know the worst has passed. I’m normal again and grateful for it. The fit of despair at the Lamplighter was bad enough that it actually frightened me. This place used to make me happy. I was another person then though. It was a different lifetime. Between then and now there is no continuity whatsoever except for the bones in my body and a handful of spoiling memories I don’t even understand or believe anymore.
10/30/09
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
The Sound of Speed
My friends have brought me to see something strange on the riverbank. There’s a houseboat left partially sunk in the water, half of the hull sticking up into the air at a weird diagonal angle, the titanic of white trash. On the riverbank there’s a driveway leading out to the disaster and someone has spray-painted a note to the residents on it. The messy fluorescent green letters say, “JIM, WE STOPPED BY BUT YOU WEREN’T HERE. SEE YOU LATER. –BILL BILL.” I’d like to meet this Bill Bill, ask him just what the fuck it was that happened here.
My friends and I follow a broken boardwalk through what looks like a tacky wedding chapel arch, and then board the hull of the boat. It’s hard to stand up on the steep weird angle of the deck, but we manage to hold onto the rails and the structure. All around the boat there’s rot and pollution and astounding filth. The water looks like toxic sludge with mutant algae on the surface. There are lots of beer cans and household items floating in the muck. I peer inside the boat and see the room that must have been the living room. The air is bad and there’s a refrigerator floating in the middle of the room. I wonder if there might still be some drinkable beer in there. John tells me there was a big painting of Elvis inside, but it’s seems to have been looted by abnormally hip rednecks. All the windows and mirrors are broken. Spiders and spider-webs everywhere. Not an inch of the boat is free of these fucking creatures. There must be hundreds of thousands of them crawling in every nook and cranny. This is the last spider buffet before winter I tell you. It’s going to get cold real soon, and there will be fewer and fewer bugs in the muggy river air for these nasty little fuckers to feast on.
John looks down into a shaft on deck and says, “I think I found the problem. There are bricks in here.”
“Fuck the bricks, man” I say, “What about these god damned spiders! They must have killed all those aboard and eaten a hole in the cabin walls. Maybe we ought to burn the wreck and fry the fucking lot of them. Extermination. I’m talking Dresden tactics. Just siphon some gas from your tank and I’ll toss my cigarette in. Fuck these fucking spiders. Fuck them all. Enemies of mankind.”
Brandi says, “I can’t believe you, of all people, are scared of spiders.”
“Are you yanking my dick or something? Spiders are the most deeply ingrained fear in the human psyche. It’s us against them. God made it that way. Spiders are the enemy!”
The light changes while the three of us perch the deck together. Even the Arkansas River looks good in the evening sun’s brilliance. It makes the scene on this tilted houseboat seem beautiful and surreal. Way up ahead of the bend I can see the Pinnacle Mountain, a pile of rocks I used to like climbing around on years ago.
We leave. Amusingly enough, I notice a sign pointing to the wrecked boat that says “OPEN HOUSE.” It’s an open house alright. We take Brandi’s picture in front of the sign with the boat in the background. The evening sun flares a weirdly serious light on the absurdity of the scene. The road back up from the river turns takes a sharp turn past some woods where I see several dozen little white crosses stuck in the ground. I say, “What are those crosses, some backwoods abortion protest?”
John, who must have missed it, says he thinks it’s probably a memorial to someone who died in a car wreck.
I say, “Well there must have been lots of wrecks right there. I bet they were all drunk drivers leaving that houseboat at four in the morning.”
John says he bets a wild party sank the boat. I concede that this is more likely true than my spider theory.
In the back seat of a car, sitting on top of a pile of loose pages ripped from books, I look out and see the molten gold of the sun setting behind blurred trees that race by. We’re headed toward Little Rock. In the front seat my friends have turned up the music, something French and very intense. It sounds good, one of those compositions that awakens emotion, but doesn’t let you know just what the emotion is about. I doubt I could understand these lyrics even if I did speak French. They blend into the heavy electric roar of the song, juts another instrument. This is the sound of a life in motion, goodbyes and memories soaring into the sky forever. The song tells me tomorrow will be another lifetime and we know it’s going to be charmed.
These are the last hours of my sojourn in the south. It’s good that all the sad weirdness of it ended on a happy note. I get the impression that I’m on the brink of something new and wonderful.
Little Rock
11/02/09
My friends and I follow a broken boardwalk through what looks like a tacky wedding chapel arch, and then board the hull of the boat. It’s hard to stand up on the steep weird angle of the deck, but we manage to hold onto the rails and the structure. All around the boat there’s rot and pollution and astounding filth. The water looks like toxic sludge with mutant algae on the surface. There are lots of beer cans and household items floating in the muck. I peer inside the boat and see the room that must have been the living room. The air is bad and there’s a refrigerator floating in the middle of the room. I wonder if there might still be some drinkable beer in there. John tells me there was a big painting of Elvis inside, but it’s seems to have been looted by abnormally hip rednecks. All the windows and mirrors are broken. Spiders and spider-webs everywhere. Not an inch of the boat is free of these fucking creatures. There must be hundreds of thousands of them crawling in every nook and cranny. This is the last spider buffet before winter I tell you. It’s going to get cold real soon, and there will be fewer and fewer bugs in the muggy river air for these nasty little fuckers to feast on.
John looks down into a shaft on deck and says, “I think I found the problem. There are bricks in here.”
“Fuck the bricks, man” I say, “What about these god damned spiders! They must have killed all those aboard and eaten a hole in the cabin walls. Maybe we ought to burn the wreck and fry the fucking lot of them. Extermination. I’m talking Dresden tactics. Just siphon some gas from your tank and I’ll toss my cigarette in. Fuck these fucking spiders. Fuck them all. Enemies of mankind.”
Brandi says, “I can’t believe you, of all people, are scared of spiders.”
“Are you yanking my dick or something? Spiders are the most deeply ingrained fear in the human psyche. It’s us against them. God made it that way. Spiders are the enemy!”
The light changes while the three of us perch the deck together. Even the Arkansas River looks good in the evening sun’s brilliance. It makes the scene on this tilted houseboat seem beautiful and surreal. Way up ahead of the bend I can see the Pinnacle Mountain, a pile of rocks I used to like climbing around on years ago.
We leave. Amusingly enough, I notice a sign pointing to the wrecked boat that says “OPEN HOUSE.” It’s an open house alright. We take Brandi’s picture in front of the sign with the boat in the background. The evening sun flares a weirdly serious light on the absurdity of the scene. The road back up from the river turns takes a sharp turn past some woods where I see several dozen little white crosses stuck in the ground. I say, “What are those crosses, some backwoods abortion protest?”
John, who must have missed it, says he thinks it’s probably a memorial to someone who died in a car wreck.
I say, “Well there must have been lots of wrecks right there. I bet they were all drunk drivers leaving that houseboat at four in the morning.”
John says he bets a wild party sank the boat. I concede that this is more likely true than my spider theory.
In the back seat of a car, sitting on top of a pile of loose pages ripped from books, I look out and see the molten gold of the sun setting behind blurred trees that race by. We’re headed toward Little Rock. In the front seat my friends have turned up the music, something French and very intense. It sounds good, one of those compositions that awakens emotion, but doesn’t let you know just what the emotion is about. I doubt I could understand these lyrics even if I did speak French. They blend into the heavy electric roar of the song, juts another instrument. This is the sound of a life in motion, goodbyes and memories soaring into the sky forever. The song tells me tomorrow will be another lifetime and we know it’s going to be charmed.
These are the last hours of my sojourn in the south. It’s good that all the sad weirdness of it ended on a happy note. I get the impression that I’m on the brink of something new and wonderful.
Little Rock
11/02/09
Sunday, October 11, 2009
First Snow
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
-Walt Whitman
The winter’s first snow has come down on my city this morning while everyone was sleeping. Well, almost everyone was sleeping. I on the other hand was awake because sometime around four in the morning my friend in Podunk, Arkansas called me on the phone, “totally hammered.” Ordinarily I’m the one making these ridiculous phone calls in the middle of the night, so the fact that I was merely the recipient this time is a good sign I suppose. He said, “Joseph, you are a brilliant writer… But the things you say are just total bullshit!” Fair enough. I got off the phone and walked into the living room and looked out the front window. It was snowing in the courtyard. It was a nice sight, but I was more impressed by the fact that the radiator had come on and the whole apartment was toasty warm. When I went to sleep it was freezing and in spite of my best efforts at turning the knob/valve thing randomly, it just stayed cold and inert. So when it did come on I wondered if this were a coincidence or if I had somehow been successful. Regardless, I went back to sleep.
Now it’s morning and a layer of white snow has transformed the whole city. Even the light streaming through my windows looks different, friendlier to my mind. In winter I really do become brilliant. The snow makes me sentimental about something I can never quite put my finger on, as though something once in a lifetime is about to happen. Inspiration. True love could strike to today. Life becomes ripe with possibilities. It seems like it would require an effort to prevent something amazing from happening.
I bundle up and go out for an espresso. Feeling romantic, I consider all the pretty women in my part of the city who want nothing to do with me. Ah, but there is one I really do like, and my thoughts return to her. Walking down Grant Street I pull my collar up and light a cigarette. I can always think well when I’m smoking. The notion of making this one woman mine gets me high and inspired. I think to myself that if she loved me, life would be complete in spite of everything. I imagine a perfect love that settles all the existential questions once and for all. But that, my friends, is where the “bullshit” is. When I don’t know someone it’s easy to imagine something nice behind their eyes, especially if they happen to be pretty eyes. But the reality of it is just this: No matter how astonishing the romance, after a time, the visionary aspect of it burns away leaving the sober realization that the woman I’m looking at across the table is merely another deceitful unenlightened fool –just like myself. What then? The rapture of perfect love was just a weird trip and now you’re stuck with this uninspiring lover who you wish you could get rid of long enough to stare at the breasts of some other woman across the room. Now that other woman looks like the road to heaven. Guess what though: she’s no better than the one you’ve already got. It just seems that way. It’s a nasty trick the mind plays on a man, eh? A real mean fuckaround.
Love affairs always come and go under the auspices of the perfect love I imagine to be possible, but really isn’t. In the end I’m always disappointed and alone and I keep on moving right into the next intrigue. I go through women like toilet paper. As time passes I become less optimistic, but never really learn my lesson from it. And maybe that is for the best. As soon as one lover is out the door, emotionally speaking, I’m already looking for the next fix. I get high on the fiction that if I just keep on trying, I’ll eventually meet someone worth devoting my life to. This perfect love affair always takes place in that magical undiscovered country called “someday.” I think everyone has a “someday” when things will be different or ideal or whatever. That’s when all this horseshit is supposed to be resolved. It’s the excuse for the fact that the real life here and now is a fucking disaster.
Let me share a crazy theory with you: I’ve come to believe that “someday” does not actually exist. There’s only now and the way things are now. Things have always been the way they are now, and they probably always will be. Nothing will ever improve. This theory has impressive existential implications. If someday-ness is a mirage, then that completely changes the meaning of now. We defer everything until “someday” so that today is at least tolerable. If we cease to defer it, then reality crashes down upon us right this minute. Just imagine that this is all there is: you, right here and now, reading this essay with all your imperfections and dissatisfaction and desire in the room with you. It’s heavy, I know.
There was a time not very long ago when I loved a woman. When I met her I was so amazed by what happened between us that I thought someday-ness had finally dawned on me. I wrote apocalyptic love letters and swore I’d found the happiness that would justify my otherwise pathetic and failed life. I thought all my overblown idealism had finally been vindicated in real life. Now she’s gone (of course) and I realize the whole thing was a fantasy, an especially dangerous kind of fantasy because it gives one the impression that perfection is actually possible “someday.” These types of experiences are proof that someday-ness is not real, but just getting close to the mirage sometimes reinforces that mirage. You could take your interpretation of the facts in one of two directions: optimist or realist. Optimist says, “yes, this love affair was a disaster, but it was at least close, so someday I’ll find the right one. Realist says, “I came this close and true love was still ultimately elusive. The only reasonable conclusion is that it will always be this way.” And in deed, I have been dating for about ten years. It’s always the same god damned thing, a cycle of obsession that leads to nothing. Even in the rare case that I did get the lover I desired, she turned out to be a liar or a freak or a secret bitch or whatever.
The woman I loved is gone for sure. Now I’m back in the same old miserable now-ness that’s always been there, rule rather than exception, like a static background of shit behind the occasional adventure of romantic optimism. But at least the now-ness is real. This is what we’ve got to learn to accept.
So what I have established in this twenty-ninth year of my life is that there is probably no ultimate love that’s going to solve everything “someday.” Perfection simply isn’t coming. Now this is a major revelation. It alters the foundations of my thought process on the most basic possible level. One could think of it as a sort of liberation from illusions, from the painful cycle of trying and failing in search of real love. I’ve seen behind the curtain and now I know the game I have been desperately striving to win was un-winnable. In light of this realization, the only self-respecting thing to do is to stand up and say, “fuck this” and leave the table. And what then? The motive force of daily life has been destroyed. I flashed on the lights and killed the illusion of someday-ness. Illusions can only live in the murky gloom of dim twilights. When knowledge comes they wither. Can a man survive psychologically without his sense of someday-ness? It is possible that illusions are an organic necessity for life. The mind’s ability to undermine illusions with cold rationality is still a rather recent development in our evolutionary history, and might very well be a fluke, an interesting yet lethal mutation. One could very well argue that the hopeful illusion of someday-ness is the only thing that makes it possible to get out of bed in the morning, bathe, eat, work, and talk to people. Without it a person will rot. It would be effectively the same thing as depression. If one were to take this conceptual leap of faith out of someday-ness, then they would have to have a place to land, and the only option is to land in now-ness. So we’ve got to find out if now-ness can ever compete with someday-ness. The tragic flaw here is that now is inherently unsatisfying. We don’t have what we most desire. Our dreams are out of reach. Life feels painfully incomplete. But maybe that is just a mere side effect of our deep-rooted psychological dependence on someday-ness. It is at least possible that if we could give up on someday-ness whole heartedly, now-ness would immediately seem holy, just like the Zen people say it is, just like Walt Whitman says it is.
Of course this is a risky operation. Rewiring our basic consciousness of reality this way is nothing to take lightly. It could lead either to enlightenment or insanity and death. No one really knows because it’s an adventure in completely uncharted territory.
One of the basic premises of Zen is that we can escape the illusions, not in theory, as I just have, but in direct existential experience. That would mean a totally different state of consciousness. Now this seems so daring and dangerous to me that I’m sure I feel about Zen something similar to what my Southern Baptist mom feels about Satan worship. It’s a scary thing to plunge into, like an acid trip you can never expect to come down from. One thing that’s true of mystical insights is that for the most part the dye is cast and there’s no going back once you have stepped through that door. It’s a permanent transgression, a stepping over of some line drawn in the sand of the soul. Who’s to say a man can even survive without the illusions of time and the ego and that someday-ness that haunts life in the now? Who’s to say we want to see reality for what it is? Those who’ve seen it tell us it’s pleasant though, and there’s no reason to doubt it. Of course we don’t have much information on the topic from those who went insane from too much of god’s white light. One ought to step slowly and carefully when dismantling psychic functions that have been in place for eons.
Heading home now I walk down a street where all the trees have just shed their leaves and you can still see them under the snow. I think to myself, now-ness. Suddenly, as though a switch has been flipped, I am alone in the now. And interestingly enough, it really is beautiful.
10/10/09
Nor any more youth than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
-Walt Whitman
The winter’s first snow has come down on my city this morning while everyone was sleeping. Well, almost everyone was sleeping. I on the other hand was awake because sometime around four in the morning my friend in Podunk, Arkansas called me on the phone, “totally hammered.” Ordinarily I’m the one making these ridiculous phone calls in the middle of the night, so the fact that I was merely the recipient this time is a good sign I suppose. He said, “Joseph, you are a brilliant writer… But the things you say are just total bullshit!” Fair enough. I got off the phone and walked into the living room and looked out the front window. It was snowing in the courtyard. It was a nice sight, but I was more impressed by the fact that the radiator had come on and the whole apartment was toasty warm. When I went to sleep it was freezing and in spite of my best efforts at turning the knob/valve thing randomly, it just stayed cold and inert. So when it did come on I wondered if this were a coincidence or if I had somehow been successful. Regardless, I went back to sleep.
Now it’s morning and a layer of white snow has transformed the whole city. Even the light streaming through my windows looks different, friendlier to my mind. In winter I really do become brilliant. The snow makes me sentimental about something I can never quite put my finger on, as though something once in a lifetime is about to happen. Inspiration. True love could strike to today. Life becomes ripe with possibilities. It seems like it would require an effort to prevent something amazing from happening.
I bundle up and go out for an espresso. Feeling romantic, I consider all the pretty women in my part of the city who want nothing to do with me. Ah, but there is one I really do like, and my thoughts return to her. Walking down Grant Street I pull my collar up and light a cigarette. I can always think well when I’m smoking. The notion of making this one woman mine gets me high and inspired. I think to myself that if she loved me, life would be complete in spite of everything. I imagine a perfect love that settles all the existential questions once and for all. But that, my friends, is where the “bullshit” is. When I don’t know someone it’s easy to imagine something nice behind their eyes, especially if they happen to be pretty eyes. But the reality of it is just this: No matter how astonishing the romance, after a time, the visionary aspect of it burns away leaving the sober realization that the woman I’m looking at across the table is merely another deceitful unenlightened fool –just like myself. What then? The rapture of perfect love was just a weird trip and now you’re stuck with this uninspiring lover who you wish you could get rid of long enough to stare at the breasts of some other woman across the room. Now that other woman looks like the road to heaven. Guess what though: she’s no better than the one you’ve already got. It just seems that way. It’s a nasty trick the mind plays on a man, eh? A real mean fuckaround.
Love affairs always come and go under the auspices of the perfect love I imagine to be possible, but really isn’t. In the end I’m always disappointed and alone and I keep on moving right into the next intrigue. I go through women like toilet paper. As time passes I become less optimistic, but never really learn my lesson from it. And maybe that is for the best. As soon as one lover is out the door, emotionally speaking, I’m already looking for the next fix. I get high on the fiction that if I just keep on trying, I’ll eventually meet someone worth devoting my life to. This perfect love affair always takes place in that magical undiscovered country called “someday.” I think everyone has a “someday” when things will be different or ideal or whatever. That’s when all this horseshit is supposed to be resolved. It’s the excuse for the fact that the real life here and now is a fucking disaster.
Let me share a crazy theory with you: I’ve come to believe that “someday” does not actually exist. There’s only now and the way things are now. Things have always been the way they are now, and they probably always will be. Nothing will ever improve. This theory has impressive existential implications. If someday-ness is a mirage, then that completely changes the meaning of now. We defer everything until “someday” so that today is at least tolerable. If we cease to defer it, then reality crashes down upon us right this minute. Just imagine that this is all there is: you, right here and now, reading this essay with all your imperfections and dissatisfaction and desire in the room with you. It’s heavy, I know.
There was a time not very long ago when I loved a woman. When I met her I was so amazed by what happened between us that I thought someday-ness had finally dawned on me. I wrote apocalyptic love letters and swore I’d found the happiness that would justify my otherwise pathetic and failed life. I thought all my overblown idealism had finally been vindicated in real life. Now she’s gone (of course) and I realize the whole thing was a fantasy, an especially dangerous kind of fantasy because it gives one the impression that perfection is actually possible “someday.” These types of experiences are proof that someday-ness is not real, but just getting close to the mirage sometimes reinforces that mirage. You could take your interpretation of the facts in one of two directions: optimist or realist. Optimist says, “yes, this love affair was a disaster, but it was at least close, so someday I’ll find the right one. Realist says, “I came this close and true love was still ultimately elusive. The only reasonable conclusion is that it will always be this way.” And in deed, I have been dating for about ten years. It’s always the same god damned thing, a cycle of obsession that leads to nothing. Even in the rare case that I did get the lover I desired, she turned out to be a liar or a freak or a secret bitch or whatever.
The woman I loved is gone for sure. Now I’m back in the same old miserable now-ness that’s always been there, rule rather than exception, like a static background of shit behind the occasional adventure of romantic optimism. But at least the now-ness is real. This is what we’ve got to learn to accept.
So what I have established in this twenty-ninth year of my life is that there is probably no ultimate love that’s going to solve everything “someday.” Perfection simply isn’t coming. Now this is a major revelation. It alters the foundations of my thought process on the most basic possible level. One could think of it as a sort of liberation from illusions, from the painful cycle of trying and failing in search of real love. I’ve seen behind the curtain and now I know the game I have been desperately striving to win was un-winnable. In light of this realization, the only self-respecting thing to do is to stand up and say, “fuck this” and leave the table. And what then? The motive force of daily life has been destroyed. I flashed on the lights and killed the illusion of someday-ness. Illusions can only live in the murky gloom of dim twilights. When knowledge comes they wither. Can a man survive psychologically without his sense of someday-ness? It is possible that illusions are an organic necessity for life. The mind’s ability to undermine illusions with cold rationality is still a rather recent development in our evolutionary history, and might very well be a fluke, an interesting yet lethal mutation. One could very well argue that the hopeful illusion of someday-ness is the only thing that makes it possible to get out of bed in the morning, bathe, eat, work, and talk to people. Without it a person will rot. It would be effectively the same thing as depression. If one were to take this conceptual leap of faith out of someday-ness, then they would have to have a place to land, and the only option is to land in now-ness. So we’ve got to find out if now-ness can ever compete with someday-ness. The tragic flaw here is that now is inherently unsatisfying. We don’t have what we most desire. Our dreams are out of reach. Life feels painfully incomplete. But maybe that is just a mere side effect of our deep-rooted psychological dependence on someday-ness. It is at least possible that if we could give up on someday-ness whole heartedly, now-ness would immediately seem holy, just like the Zen people say it is, just like Walt Whitman says it is.
Of course this is a risky operation. Rewiring our basic consciousness of reality this way is nothing to take lightly. It could lead either to enlightenment or insanity and death. No one really knows because it’s an adventure in completely uncharted territory.
One of the basic premises of Zen is that we can escape the illusions, not in theory, as I just have, but in direct existential experience. That would mean a totally different state of consciousness. Now this seems so daring and dangerous to me that I’m sure I feel about Zen something similar to what my Southern Baptist mom feels about Satan worship. It’s a scary thing to plunge into, like an acid trip you can never expect to come down from. One thing that’s true of mystical insights is that for the most part the dye is cast and there’s no going back once you have stepped through that door. It’s a permanent transgression, a stepping over of some line drawn in the sand of the soul. Who’s to say a man can even survive without the illusions of time and the ego and that someday-ness that haunts life in the now? Who’s to say we want to see reality for what it is? Those who’ve seen it tell us it’s pleasant though, and there’s no reason to doubt it. Of course we don’t have much information on the topic from those who went insane from too much of god’s white light. One ought to step slowly and carefully when dismantling psychic functions that have been in place for eons.
Heading home now I walk down a street where all the trees have just shed their leaves and you can still see them under the snow. I think to myself, now-ness. Suddenly, as though a switch has been flipped, I am alone in the now. And interestingly enough, it really is beautiful.
10/10/09
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)