Total War

The only satisfying life is one spent in a state of total war for some overriding ideal.

Thirty

We carry on, I guess until we can’t carry on any longer. The spark of youth has vanished and we’ve grown tired. The only thing to do now is to get into as lock step and march until we drop dead in whatever frozen Siberia we’re to find in the minds most advanced reaches. We’ll carry on, either west until the end, or east until we rediscover the beginning. And really is there any difference? The question remains if there will be any sort of sun rising or setting there.

0

God does not accord to perfection. On the contrary, whatever god is, is by definition perfect. God is the original standard, the first frame of reference.

<>

Faces Comprising a crowd: Ugly, Horrible, mean-spirited, crude, dumb, repulsive. Half-conscious pigs at the trough. One’s got to wonder where God is in all of this.

But the Grotesque does not exist objectively. Only my perception of the world exists. That is where the Shit and rabble finds itself. The world is just what it is, no more and no less –without value judgments. The grotesque belongs to me, to my own mind.

You were wrong

The crusade has been in motion for years. Blown out speakers and loud tires on the highway. No map, no compass. Every minute is stressed to the breaking point with super-conscious anxiety. You have been trying to find the ultimate reality. You threw a hateful ultimatum at the gods and demanded an answer.

In search of the ultimate reality you wore yourself out on weird trips, misguided efforts. slept in graveyards, chased sunsets over distant hills, etc. You dragged the muck up out of the unconscious depth and then you gasped with horror and vomited when you looked at it. You did strange things even you can’t explain. You did morally questionable things. You told me you would take this as far as possible, as far as the human mind can grasp. But there was one danger you refused to consider: that your entire quest was completely and totally misguided.

So you suffered appropriately and for a long time.

But tonight something is going change. Tonight you will walk into a bedroom and find her there, having fallen asleep with her clothes on. You will pause for a moment and appreciate the scene. Standing there in the middle of the room in total silence, it will become very clear that she is the meaning. The meaning was not to be found in sacred or philosophical texts, not in temples or in an ambitious future, or in a dramatic confrontation with the void. It will be there with you in her room tonight. And it will seem impossibly simple.

In the morning you will begin to suspect that the meaning of existence is not a thing to be intellectually discovered, or sought out at all. It is not to be forced out from behind the curtain at gunpoint. Instead, you find that it was with you all along, inherent to the experience of being alive. It was sitting quietly with you while you were racking you brains for the answers to these riddles.

The meaning of existence cannot be forced out of hiding. But in time it will gently reveal itself to you.

With Saturn in Hell

I want to tell you about yesterday morning’s dream. It was an especially bad one. In the dream I am with several people. They are members of the mystery religion of Saturn. They are making batches of a drug and they claim it will make the person who takes it “See with the eyes of Saturn.” I understand that it is a mind-altering drug that changes reality. I have come to take the drug, but after seeing it made I am not sure if I ought to. They mix the gritty paste in filthy shallow tin basins. It’s made out of some sort of dusty coarse grit mixed with human urine, then left to ferment until it forms a lumpy soggy mush of rotten piss. Now I am trying to decide if I can really go through with it. I want to but I’m afraid of eating the nasty drug substance. I ask someone what the experience of seeing with the eyes of Saturn is like, and he tells me, “Actually, I find it to be very unpleasant. The time I did it I wished I could get out of it.” This increases my worries. I am also aware that there is a doctor present. I ask him if there are any health risks to eating this filthy rotten paste, but he won’t give me a straight answer about it. He does not seem to know.

I notice that Saturn is actually here with us. He appears as an enormous roach with long brittle paper-thin wings. He sits perched upright on a rail, almost like an owl or large bird on a perch. He is black and slimy. The most remarkable thing about him is his antenna. They squirm and writhe all over themselves like greasy snakes. I look into Saturn’s ancient insect face. It sounds ridiculous, even Kafkaesque, but the emotion of the dream was one of deep horror –not a damn bit funny. Even when I am awake the image is so deeply upsetting that I can’t shake the feeling that hell is a reality and that I have seen some part of it.

[]

Live, not just without a country, but without a generation.

...

The Christ and I are face to face in a room filled with incredible flowers, tiger lilies and great orchids. The room breathes with hallucinogenic intensity. Every object glows from within like paper lanterns. Jesus has El Greco eyes. We are outside time.

Before the kingdom of heaven, there deepens an abyss of anguish and death. There is no way around it. You will have to pass through it. Once you have seen it, there can be no going back, no hesitation. The door is slammed shut behind you, barring any retreat. You have swallowed the poison and the clock is ticking. The only way out then is through.

2009

nine spades

When it’s four in the morning and you are alone in the darkness of your room praying to god to show you some kind of grace that will calm the fire raging in your mind like a pile of burning cinders, like a fever of anguish… right then something new is possible –but not until then.

9/27/09

yours for the taking

I confess hope and faith. I tell you beautiful things. I bring you out into the cold night air beside a cemetery. In the town I see Christmas lights and hear thunder from distant train yards. If you come close I’ll set fire to your heart, touch you with a realization that puts the ages to shame. I’ll awaken you from the nightmares you mistook for reality. You’ll be burning cinders under my touch, blissful free innocence and wise old age at once. I offer you honor forever. I carry a gift that will stop your world turning and collapse its heavens. I know one thing that will brush away everything. Tonight will be a blood oath to comrades, a wedding, a mystery sweetened by the sadness of what was but is no more.


9/25/09

-

The truth of today has come to me. Reality itself is drowning, choking on mouthfuls of it’s own blood, suppressing frantic sobs in every waking moment.

8/20/09

when the bad trip turns out to be reality

Literature available on the subject of higher consciousness and mystic states tends to describe a pleasant experience of peace, light, revelation, etc. I can’t help but think this is suspect. We have every reason to believe that whatever step we take toward objective truth leads us farther into the wilderness and up into the inhospitable climates of ice and rocks and thin air. Realizations of higher consciousness, in all likelihood would cause a man to choke and vomit. His mind would collapse in horror. He would wet the bed. Sleep is the only thing that allows us to be sane. If awakened from sleep, one would be paralyzed with existential horror. The simplest task would become impossible. This exalted state described in the books is no revelation, no mystic consciousness. A revelation is truth –and truth is pain.

social equality is a warm gun

Let’s face it: Natural competition, that is honest competition for survival, has been done away with by our safe civilization. The safety of civilization is unprecedented in the history of life on earth. While there may be poverty, practically no one is starving to death and there are few predators threatening us. If we’re ever thrust back into a survival situation, the only way to compete will be to outsmart the necessity to compete. That means owning a gun and knowing how to use it. This will at least put you on a level playing field with every other redneck and thug. Then, if you’re lucky you can slip by when worse comes to worse.
God forbid it should ever come to that though. Civilization would have had to come apart at the seams for us to find ourselves faced with that level of reality. As it stands today, survival and prosperity depends largely on intelligence. There’s a healthy mixture of intellectual fitness and accident that accounts for whether people are rich or poor, whether they live or die. I much prefer this to the totally accidental rule of modern violence. The gun makes us all equal. If one man’s edge over another is ever reduced to something as simple as a pistol, equality will finally be achieved on earth. If that ever happens, then god help us all. Equality should truly be feared.
But maybe if there is someday a meltdown like I’ve described here, those who survive will start over on the progressive path when the smoke clears, and reinvigorate the life of our species, this ascent that is presently stalled out in the warm comfort of civilized life. Man may return to the vicious brilliance of nature.

June 11, 2009
Market Café, Denver

a southern gentleman goes west

The cherry of a cigarette burns hot red in the neon blue dawn over the high plains of Wyoming. No one speaks. There’s a cold mist and heavy dark clouds hanging low, occasionally obscuring the top of a distant hill. We’ve been driving all night through a storm and the rain made the highway look like a long black mirror, vanishing into the night. We’ve both been awake too long, stabbing into the beginning of a third day now. The storm’s cleared enough that I can actually look at the landscape, fading out of sight in the blue mist, into the hypnotic distance of snow fences and buttes, hills littered with boulders. There’s emptiness in every direction. The darkness is punctuated every hundred miles or so by the glow of a gas station, like some sort of beacon in the cold expanses of Wyoming.

For maybe the fourth time tonight we stop for hot coffee. Day is breaking and other people are beginning to appear. Sara pulls the car into an open space between several huge pickup trucks. The drivers match the trucks, all hulking working class barbarians living the cowboy dream. These guys are the northern equivalent of the roughnecks I remember from the oil fields down south: a violent and stupid breed of man with simple needs and simple ways of meeting those needs. The roughnecks may be miscreants and fuckups, but all they really want is to get nice and drunk. These fuckers on the other hand would be all too ready and willing to beat the living shit out of anything they don’t understand. I sit in the car when Sara goes inside, and while watching her through the front windows I see something that worries me. Every man in the place turns his head to stare at her when she walks past. A beautiful sophisticated woman from the city is not a common sight in this outpost at six in the morning. It must contrast pretty sharply against the trashy tubs of lard these men are used to loving. In a less civilized world I’d probably have to defend my property.
I like to talk about respecting the laws of nature, letting the weak die and vanish, and often describe civilization itself as sort of a disastrous cop-out. At this moment however, the hypocrisy of my attitude becomes evident. I’m a frail intellectual, even sporting a fucking ponytail, and traveling with a very attention-getting woman. In a less civilized and more “natural” world, any one of these ogres could kill me with his bare hands and rape my woman. Life went on that way for a long time before the straightjacket of civilization was fastened… and in some places it still goes on like that today. I know at the bottom of it that “might is right.” Inside the safety of civilization, intelligence is might… but I dread what would happen if we should ever loose our grip on the reigns of these brutes. These people are another plunge into the dark ages just waiting to happen, and they’re doing what they can to take us there. These guys and their massive pickup trucks are a perfect example of the demographic that’s most responsible for the national debacles of recent years. They love god and guns and exemplify the brutish stupidity of the lord’s most worthless creatures. To put it simply: they’re very patriotic.
Fucking Wyoming. It’s not the land that bums me out; just the people. It’s one of those places with indescribable poetic beauty, ruined by the crude graffiti of human culture. The land has an identity all it’s own, and its got nothing to do with America or Americans. It’s harsh and barren, elevating and imposing like an enemy that one admires. I love the beauty of a threatening landscape. If one could just tune in to the personality, not of the nation, but the land it’s on. The land definitely has it’s own spirit, and in Wyoming that spirit is hard to ignore. Cities and towns fail to blot it out. One feels it in the rocky landscape, the bitter cold wind, and the impressive open distances. It was here before we were, and I hope it will still be when we’re long gone.


June 3, 2009

rites of spring

Springtime. Long shadows fall over the neighborhood at the end of a warm day, the first of many to come. The sun has cooled to a sweet yellow that gives life a sentimental quality, reminds me of childhood. I’m sitting at a patio table under the low limb of a tree, fresh with new green leaves, still soft like the wings of an insect that’s just been born. The light glows through them beautifully and they rustle in the breeze. Tinny fluorescent green bugs are everywhere. I constantly have to brush them off my shirt, noticing I’m feeling slightly unhappy about hurting them. All the people around the front of this café are friendly looking, very civil. All seem to be in their late twenties, over-educated, casually toting books, -like me, but markedly less weird. A couple of attractive young women cut glances at me. One of them looks familiar, but I’m not sure. I came here wanting to sit peacefully in the dusk, enjoy espresso and cigarettes, to read Dostoevsky, to be with people but not have to talk to them.
I’m alone here, and that pleases me. No one I used to know is with me anymore. I’ve outgrown all my friends year by year until I find myself far out and all by myself, all my mistakes far behind. I left everyone behind at various stopping points on the way. 2004, 2005, 2006… each year I know fewer people. I’m not trying to loose friends; they seem to loose me. And that’s fine. Everyone who thought they knew me hasn’t the slightest idea what’s become of me -or who I’ve become. I don’t stand still. I look with a special recognition at the words I just wrote: DON’T STAND STILL. There’s a good motto.
I couldn’t be happier with the pleasant scene all around me right now. And yet I feel that something’s very wrong. I’m paralyzed with fear. Why? I don’t have any idea what I’m afraid of. It’s all I can do just to open my satchel, take out a notebook, and write these words. But why do I write these words? Why do I write anything? Shit, I don’t know. No one’s going to read it. No one’s going to tell me how superb a writer I am or that I’m a deep and insightful guy.
Are other people freaking out in the apparent safety of clean civilized lives? Are there worms in their brains, squirming through the gray matter while the person tries to keep a straight face in public? I do think so.
A little time passes. I sip my coffee. I want a glass of water, but I can’t manage to stand up and go get it. I glance across the street and something’s wrong.
A blind spot appears (or I should say disappears) in my field if vision. Just left of center, there’s a spot where I can’t see anything at all, but there’s no gap there either –just an absence like invisible static. Not a black hole; a white shadow. The blind spot grows very slowly, originating somewhere in the optic nerve, maybe from constricted blood vessels. I don’t know. This is what’s called an “aura” in migraine lingo. I suffer from optical migraines.
Numbers and letters in print become abstract arrangements of lines, totally meaningless. My eyes can’t understand them. They vanish into the white shadow. It eats them. It’s a rising tide swallowing landforms.
There’s a strange taste in my mouth. I loose comprehension of faces. The shapes of facial features become like words I can’t read, no longer recognizable human touchstones but abstractions. Soon enough though, this aura devours the faces too. Even if someone I knew were to arrive I probably wouldn’t recognize them. Wherever I look there’s just a hole full of white noise, no faces. I close my eyes and see a field of neon zigzags in the darkness behind my eyelids, static crackling in a color that doesn’t exist. These storm clouds always precede a migraine.
The migraine, the melt-down, the freak-out, are all rites of spring. Insanity comes with the brilliant flowers and pollen and warmth and rain.

May 12, 2009

an evening with mike, talk of zombies in our midst...

What’s Mike been thinking? How long has it been since he had a job? Over several pitchers of PBR in a dive we’ve always liked, he tells me he doesn’t leave his apartment much anymore. I asked him what he does all day. He answers, “Nothing, really.” He said he sleeps until the afternoon, then usually wakes up for a few minutes and falls asleep again. He said he’d become so bored that he was considering locking himself in the completely empty spare room of his apartment for twenty-four hours just to see what it would be like. I said, “You’re going to need a chamber pot. I have one you can borrow.”
“I thought you kicked it and it skidded off the roof.”
“Yeah, but it landed on a fire escape and it’s still there.”
When the bar purged us onto Ogden Street I went over to his place with him. He occupies what can only really be called a dungeon under an old apartment house on Capitol Hill. It’s the kind of place fitting for a suicide. No light could penetrate in there at any time of day.
In the kitchen I saw what Mike’s living on: a huge industrial-size box of frozen burritos large enough to nurse an entire Mexican family through a famine. He popped a couple of them in the microwave oven for me. Not bad.
He pitched an idea to me. He told me he thought we should publish a coffee table book. He’s sure we could do it because there are worthless books like this on every conceivable topic. I had to agree. I once saw a coffee table book about nothing but manhole covers. There was another one that was just a catalogue of thousands of “Boring Postcards.” While the irony of publish a book of the most boring postcards ever printed is amusing, I can’t imagine anyone throwing down twenty dollars for it.
Mike’s idea for a coffee table book topic was zombies. He said zombies are a gold mine just waiting to be tapped. I for one don’t care about zombies or zombie movies, but there’s a good possibility that you could use the zombie as a symbol of the common man. Actual zombies surround us every day. People who work in cubicles are zombies. People who kiss ass and pay on mortgages are often zombies. Hell, most of the people working downtown are walking dead who’ve had their brains sucked out by a life without any form of spiritual stimulation. The sense of individuality is terminally atrophied. They don’t gorge themselves on human flesh in public, but the subtlety of their deformed and stunted existence is terrifying enough.
I proposed we shoot a lot of photographs of Zombies wearing cheap suits and sitting at computer screens or flipping burgers or washing their cars or whatever. There could be a bank teller Zombie, and even zombies at church. Zombies in the midst of normality. Maybe even scenes of Zombies watching episodes of Melrose Place.
We’d be making a very heavy existential statement. It would be like spitting in the face of complacency. All the non-zombies would love it. I doubt this sort of socially offensive onslaught was Mike’s purpose, but he seemed open to it at least.
The rest of the conversation is lost to me, thus is the effect of alcohol on the brain’s fragile chemistry.

Baracuda's / Denver
4/21/09

the last sight

What’s this terrifying emptiness that dawns on me like a deadly sunrise? Ultimate in it’s absolute truth, this final truth, the limit of what a man can know.
I look around the room and my fear has permeated everything. A black cat blinks his huge green eyes at me. He’s nothing but a pattern, just a natural machine. The world is empty; a ghost ship. Someone walks in and sits down. Her mind is in motion and she speaks, but no one’s there. I’m still alone.
I have looked for knowledge, and when in brief surprising flashes it has come to me I recoil, desperate to escape it.

May 1, 2009

nothing is a place

When one gets heavily immersed in thoughts of emptiness, nothingness, when one sees that all meaning structures are empty, that we must die, and that nothing means anything… There’s still one more step. What comes next is the realization that even seeing the truth for what it is means nothing, leads nowhere. This blow is the most crushing of all. It’s that final discovery that even knowing there’s no exit is not an exit. Maybe the psyche needs a sense of meaning to work properly. Contemplating emptiness is like throwing oil into some water. It can’t ever be digested by the human mind. It is hopeless.

There comes a time when you’ll know that you’ve finally gone to far. You’ll have crossed the line into a realm so terrifying and depressing that it no longer seems interesting or spiritually adventurous. You’ll have gone into a zone where there’s just death and doom, ultimate and real. It’s a place of fear. You’ll have gone beyond the end and you’ll have to return to the beginning, full circle.

From this point beyond the end of the line, The only thing left is to try to salvage your sanity and go back to sleep. You’ll beg to go back to the life you once knew when you were young, when you had not yet seen behind the curtain. But can you ever go back? Can you get back into Eden once you’ve transgressed in search of knowledge? No.

4/25/09

gray morning on easter sunday

I step out onto the street. It’s clear that Jesus hasn’t risen and isn’t coming back. There’s desolation in the crowd. Everywhere I look there’s only poverty, uninspiring concrete, the smell of piss, silent people dying patiently. There’s a sense of boredom worse than panic. In the middle of the city, there’s not an interesting person in sight. I’m alone. Everyone’s asleep. Sometimes I wish I were a firebomb that could wake up the whole world.

Denver 4/12/09

fearful twilight

“Would a day of death and ashes not come, a day in the long string of other days which would give the nod to madness, a day when the gas chamber would reopen?”
-Pauline Reage, from Story of O

Night comes down. The world has left you alone. Your friend is gone. Your lover is asleep in someone else’s bed. Nothing now but thousands of empty hours. You’ll tear yourself apart inside, incapable of letting go of a past that’s already forgotten you. It will always be this way. You’ll go down into and vanish in isolation. The end is not beautiful. It’s slow and pathetic. You’ll die for years, decades even.
Your youth will decline, replaced by the ugliness of decay’s age. No one will ever touch you with loving hands again. No caring eyes will look at you. People will look away. Your hours will be filled with impossible desperation and loneliness. There will be no witnesses to your end. Incapable of pulling the trigger, you’ll suffer a longer, more terrible death instead, alone in your room with the door locked.

March 30, 2009

the unknown archetype

Buried somewhere in the collective unconscious of our species, there’s an immense greasy centipede squirming through the deepest recessed organs of sensation and being. It’s black as crude oil, has no beginning or end, and gnaws eternally through the psycho-intestinal passageways of the midbrain with slimy cold mandibles and a train of unconscious mechanical legs. The centipede’s body is an underground river of black tar and primal memory. Prehistoric organisms live in the slow currents. Trilobites. Centipedes. Roaches as big as cats. The first elements of body-consciousness begin to coalesce in the silent dead space of millennia. Five hundred million years pass like snowfall. Nothing happens, but their imprint remains forever, buried in man’s mind. The fathomless depth of life’s history on earth is his heirloom. Centuries wash over a stone when he touches it with his hands. Millennia fall from the eyes as tears. If called upon, the centipede will rearrange continents, work back through the eons, reverse-engineer the planet’s topography until everything clicks back into place. Pangaea.

March 11, 2009

ethics of a beating

In a dream Raskolnikov is a little boy again. He watches a group of drunken peasants whip an old horse to death because it can’t move a heavy load. The story shows you something, reminds you of the terrible undercurrents disguised by our civilized and so-called Christian ways. What the story suggests is true. It’s been proven thoroughly enough.
Everyone's either got to whip or be whipped by someone else. As long as we're still on earth, cruelty is the rule of the land. You may try to choose which side of the whipping you’ll be on, but the decision is ultimately hopeless. You loose either way. In the end everyone's a slave being beaten to death, however gradually. There’s got to be a better way. I’m sure there is but it would require a wide agreement, a mass moratorium on beatings and humiliations, and I’m quite sure that will never happen on this earth. Even if you lived a life of perfect innocence, you’d merely be an interesting exception, and memorable victim like Jesus, a whipping post for those who don’t care and have never thought it over. I don’t want a nigger and I don’t want to be anyone else’s nigger. I just want to live.


City O’ City
Denver
March 30, 2009

girl rotting in plain view

In a dimly lit room I see a face I like. Everything else vanishes. She’s youthful beauty in motion, the perfect balance of awkwardness and grace. Her loveliness, although perhaps still unknown to her, is quite clear to me. Long brown hair graces a thin swan-like neck. Her eyes are expressive. The curves of her body steal attention without being too obvious.
Sensing my attention, she turns her head towards me. The features are lovely beyond description, although strange and imperfect. What would that throat look like if her head were thrown back in pleasure? The eyes are large and full of life. Her weak chin accentuates a large nose. Her upper lip is very full, while the lower one diminishes, the whole mouth unforgettably young and soft, made first and foremost to express pleasure. I want to feel that mouth on my own.
What does she see over here? I’m ugly inside and out. A leper. A nigger. The energy of my life, my love, is trapped in a shell that’s incapable of expressing grace, a crippled horse, a bird with crushed wings. Beautiful insights are imprisoned behind an awkward crooked face and the truth tries hopelessly to escape through a breaking voice that chokes and coughs. The wind’s been knocked out of the lungs. The words can’t be found!
She looks happy; one last spark of something innocent in a world where even the sky itself is bleeding with a million knife-holes. She moves on, probably never to be seen again.
Soon enough she too will be corrupted, the lovely mouth soured with hatred, the eyes turned away with tears and resentment. The body then will no longer be a vehicle of life and pleasure, but an animate corpse playing out the empty functions of the earth, of gravity, of the worms. Beauty is a spark, a glimpse of something at once fleeting and eternal.

City O’ City / Denver
March 25, 2009

but can we be alone together?

When I’m lonely I go crazy. Days drag on and on forever. Time dilates to compliment my emptiness. I get obsessed. I long for the love of a woman I may have seen on the street or in the café, and actually loose sleep over it. I devour myself. It’s a slow prolonged existential convulsion. I’m inundated with feelings of certain doom, and have nothing but time to think about them. I obsess over the idea that love will somehow save me. I look for a woman I can crawl into and go to sleep. I imagine the ultimate revelry of love and project it onto the face of every woman in the crowd, looking for a match. If I could only be in love everything would be fine, right?
Of course not.
When I am in a relationship I pine over the days when I was lonely. Everything goes smoothly and I’m content, but something’s missing. Love takes the edge off. There’s always someone to talk to, and the hours vanish into thin air. I sleep well and forget myself. I’m happy but nothing gets done. Take these words for instance. I wouldn’t be writing them if I hadn’t told my woman I needed to be alone for a while. If I hadn’t done that I would have even thought about all this. The way reality just vanishes into thin air disturbs me. I start missing myself. It’s as though love has a sedative effect on me. The frightening intensity of life subsides, but the doomed reality is still there, just under the surface. Even in my bedroom, when we’re making love, there’s a subtle taste of death.
Lovers annihilate one another. In the flash of their embrace they blot one another out like opposite currents, male and female. They find pleasure in their mutual escape from being. They escape being through one another. Each is the door to the other’s nothingness.
Togetherness is a pleasant way of life, but it’s an opiate. You vanish in the mist of lazy sex and happiness. Only sorrow really exists. Happiness on the other hand is the escape from existence. Let’s face it: Existence is pain.
Loneliness opens a void in your life that forces you into existence. Misery is the price of that heightened level of being.
Those of us who know ourselves, who know what it is to truly be, will never be content with any pleasant slumber. When a woman comes to me, to love me, I’ll know that ultimately she’s a thief. She’s come to steal my life, and hopefully to get rid of her own in the process.

February 28, 2009
City O’ City / Denver

scorn and contempt for existence at 7:00 am

Ah yes, another day on earth, trapped in this hideous rotting case of flesh and bone, doomed to eat and shit and die. It’s a raw deal, but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt. It’s the only way it ever could have been. There are no possibilities, only realities. What might have been is all in the mind. This abrasive reality of ours is all there is. Mine’s a fucking pigsty. How’s yours?
I woke up this morning to a terrifying din of activity, a cyclone. My girlfriend had overslept and was in the middle of a freak-out, trying to leave the house with her clothes only half-on. I could only assume she was destroying everything in the front room, turning over ashtrays, spilling pills on the floor, breaking glass, frightening the cats, etc. I went back to sleep. It was just too fucking early. Although she’s a beautiful vision in the evening, she’s a human train wreck in the morning, a dangerous walking disaster zone like Chernobyl. Better not to see it at all. Better for both of us really.
The noise didn’t leave with her either. Yesterday she brought my cat, Otto, a toy filled with catnip. It drove him apeshit all night, causing him to run back and forth through the house, rip up a paper bag with his teeth, hump his little girlfriend cat’s face, scratch all the sand out of his litter pan, and even hang himself in the blinds. This last scene was especially pathetic. I found him tangled up with the cord all around his neck, struggling frantically to get loose. Sometimes I think Otto’s just not fit to exist.
We’ve decided Sara’s cat, on the other hand, must be suffering from terminal depression. She stares at us with extreme disdain. Sometimes she just falls asleep looking at the wall. She tolerates Otto, but I bet her favorite thing about him is that he can’t actually find her vagina.
Waking up in the morning is a trauma regardless. I can barely cope with it. It’s the nadir of the entire day, a hell of a rough thing to start with. I drag myself out of bed and look at myself in the mirror. I look like shit. I see an unshaved mess with a miserable expression and wild mass of nappy hair. I mumble something like, “God damn my face.” I feel even worse than I look, if that’s possible. It would be fine if I could just pull myself together and get dressed, but there’s no motivation. I just want to wallow in it like a slob. Even putting on my shoes can take thirty minutes. I get one sock on and then just stare off into space for a while, completely absent. Everything is daunting, completely impossible. In the morning life itself seems impossible.


March 10, 2009
Denver

the comedic slaughterhouse

Slaughterhouses fascinate me. That’s where you can see human nature stripped of all nicety, naked and as it truly is. Imagine the predatory animal elevated to industrial proportions, hundreds of millions of victims run through the death machine every year without any trace of mercy or sympathy. I often fantasize about working on the floor at a slaughterhouse, just for that ultimate reality-check about the mysterious faceless meat substances I like to eat every day. But it wouldn’t be worth the price. Working there would be a miserable and perhaps even dehumanizing experience. It might cause me the sort of terminal brain-rot the other workers have. I used to live next to a poultry plant, and let me tell you: the half-human cretins that worked there should have been sterilized and strictly bared from entering the city limits.
If you look into the procedures of slaughterhouses you’ll find a picture so depressing and horrible that it’s hard to understand how anyone can work there and maintain any sort of basic human decency. There’s no shortage of video evidence of workers doing the strangest things to animals on the way to slaughter. I’ve seen film of people using live chickens as footballs, a baby pig stomped to death on a concrete floor, and perhaps weirdest of all, a worker using turkey’s as living punching bags as they filed past on a conveyor belt just before being stunned and killed. I’m sure that in this dehumanized piece of shit’s mind it was funny, but to my naive eyes it looked pretty god damned depraved. Here’s this guy dishing out the final fucking insult to some pathetic helpless animals just before they’re shocked unconscious and run over the edge of a saw blade. The animal’s entire existence from birth to death in a tiny wire cage involves more suffering than any normal person can fully understand, and then there’s this guy boxing with them while they hanging upside down. I’d like to see him thrown in the meat grinder. And he’s only one of many. I’m sure that a lot of people that work in these conditions are basically numb to the sight of suffering. They would have to be. Their desensitization reduces a real living thing to a crude material commodity, and they treat it accordingly. There are dozens of videos like this one and no one really seems to care about it. You can look and see. All the horrors are documented. Cows are cut up alive, pigs are drowned in boiling water, things are dragged to slaughter when they can’t walk, dying animals get the shit kicked out of them for being in the way, etc. It’s a bad trip. The most disturbing thing about all this though is the people doing it. To them it’s a joke. The fact that people can get used to that sort of action suggests something pretty damning about our ilk, those clever human monsters that subjugated the other species and confined them to short and terrible lives in what’s really just a meat factory.
Is it acceptable? I can’t come to a conclusion on that. But one thing’s certain: even human beings are not exempt form this sort of fate. In this universe everything’s got to eat… and ultimately be eaten.

February 25, 2009 / Denver CO

the events of wednesday

The Events of Wednesday

As soon as I arrived at work Wednesday morning I was fired for "not fitting in" and then excused with a couple of days extra pay. On the way back home my mind raced through the entire conversation over and over again, and I had many emotions ranging from anger and insult to relief. Sure, my former boss, Paul Ramsey had insulted me in all sorts of ways during our talk, but I already knew he was a piece of shit, and that I was not even good at selling Persian rugs. So why did this upset me? Furthermore I felt relieved that I was no longer married to this completely miserable job. It was all I could to just to convince myself to tolerate the hours I spent there. Then while riding my bike across town from King Soopers grocery store that morning, my thoughts still reeling about what to do, I took a spill in the middle of the road, and hit the pavement pretty hard. Groceries spilled out of my backpack in the middle of Speer Boulevard in front of the Denver Diner, and I happened to see my bananas squashed indifferently by a passing car. After a moment of shock I jumping up to get out of the way, and was pleased to realize I had not hit my head (wearing a bicycle helmet is fucking gay). I also discovered that my clothes were all ripped up and covered in a conspicuous amount of blood, presumably because I slid about six inches on the pavement. I lit a cigarette, tried to figure out if my arm was broken, and then called a taxi. "Take me to the Emergency Room." No big deal.
Luckily for me, I was distracted from my troubles for a couple of hours by the really entertaining scenes of suffering I found in the ER. I totally forgot about being fired and financially dicked over and everything. Amongst the general din and mayhem of the ER there was one gentleman tied down to a bed just a few feet from me who was raving drunk and screaming profanities and sobbing and apologizing and telling the nurses over and over again that he needed to pee. I had to laugh out loud when one answered, "You're peeing right now." This reminded me of my friend back home who's catch phrase of sorts was to respond to a query about the bathroom with the simple factual declaration that, "I'm peein' now." I dug out my cell phone and tried calling him, but there was no answer so I hung up and speed dialed an escort service who's number I found in the back of the Westward with the words "CINDY, babe with tight ass, luscious dick." I explained that my name is Paul Ramsey, and that I was greatly looking forward to shitting on her tits this evening, then I gave the bastard's address. "I keep a spare key under the yard jockey (which I happen to know he does). Let yourself in and wait for me to get home. Don't be late either or I'll strangle you with an electric cord you nasty fucking sack of aids!" Then my doctor arrived and came behind the curtain with me, so I politely excused myself from the call to pay attention.
After being x-rayed and rejecting the proposed sling (almost as gay as wearing a helmet), I was discharged and went on my merry way, walking back across town in my shredded bloody trousers, somehow imagining that I looked pretty cool with my underwear showing. I happened to pass by the exact spot where I wrecked and looked at the sad debris of my groceries, now scooted onto the edge of the road. A box of cheese-its was still somewhat intact but not really worth salvaging. My mood blackened. I became extremely frustrated and angry about basically everything in the universe, especially the physical pain and the spilled groceries and what my former boss said to me that morning.
June 6, 2008 / Denver

masters and maggots

A small minority of people are carrying the weight in our world. The other ninety-nine percent are maggots feeding on the work of the few without any hint of gratitude or respect. They undermine everything. Each giant step forward is counterbalanced by a million small and petty retrogressions. Only in a totalitarian state is any form of social progress even remotely possible. And who knows if “progress” is something we can even come to terms with?

July 7, 2009
Greenpoint / Brooklyn

magical colfax

Walking with my Sara on Colfax Avenue late one night, there’s a phantasmagoria of the crippled and insane all around us. People shit their pants at the bus stop and vomit on the steps of the church. One man stands in a shadowy entryway has his briefs around his ankles and no pants on, puking up what appear to be… Spaghetti-O’s? A fat man in a basketball jersey calls me a “faggot.” An old black man tries to trade me an oversized margarita glass he found in a dumpster for enough money to get a hamburger. Someone else demands a cigarette… or at least some onion rings! Morons in pickup trucks cruise past making loud guttural noises at us, shout that they want to fuck us both. Mouthy niggers say obscene things to my girlfriend, then threaten me when I react.
Back at home we enter the high security gate and I say, “There are a lot of people like that in the world. That’s why you need a gun.”
In deed, every time I go up to the roof to smoke a cigarette, looking down on Grant Street and Colfax Avenue I’m visited by visions of wild riots breaking loose on the street below, and I’m holed up on the roof with a riffle and a case of beer, helping the police pick off degenerates. Sometimes I wish someone would sterilize these fucking maggots. But then Colfax wouldn’t be any fun anymore.

Denver
March 12, 2009

"You may say I'm a dreamer..."

“You may say I’m a dreamer…”

It’s another night on Colfax. What’s the lesson of it? That black people must be put in the meat grinder, made into fatty low-grade dog food. I have no interest whatsoever in living in any society where these people are free and equal. I long for the days of segregation, of eugenics. Dumb assholes drone on and on about the virtues of diversity, but it has no appeal to me whatsoever. In most cases, diversity means poverty and desperation with a foreign face. I dream of a beautiful world where the degenerates in the bus stop are actually afraid to mouth off in my face, much less bother my woman. There was a time when you could be hanged for just Looking at a rich white woman. Any miscreant who disturbs reasonable citizens must be hosed with mace and have all their teeth busted with a lead pipe. Seems perfectly sensible to me. Doesn’t it to you? Don’t feel guilty. They hate you too, and always will. Imagine a world where the maggots on the bottom know their place and act accordingly. That’s an effect only the fear of physical harm can provide.
How did the bleeding hearts force us to accept this sort of repellent behavior? How can any politician living in a gated suburban community grasp the reality of social issues? How can anyone possibly be convinced that the people telling us how to think and feel about the “man in the street” know what’s happening at street level? When’s the last time our mayor went for a walk through the heart of Denver on Colfax Avenue? Would it affect his policies if he were constantly ridiculed and called a faggot by thugs in bus stops? Would any politician do the same lip service about equality if a crack addict raped his daughter in the piss-stained back seat of a Cadillac? I truly wonder what effect it would have on his thinking. Policymakers need a reality check; the kind of reality check only an evening with aggressively hostile black people can provide.
Later, John Lennon’s voice drifts out of a coffee shop. The naiveté is appalling. He wants me to “imagine all the people living life in peace.” I’m game, but to live in peace we’re going to have to get rid of quite a few of those people! A whole generation grew up affected by kind of attitude, this completely unrealistic drivel. It wasn’t the drugs that rotted their brains; it was the idealism of their times. Now we pay the price.

February 9, 2008
Denver CO

hot wings polemic

Charley Brown’s is uncharacteristically crowded tonight. An otherwise sleepy neighborhood tavern on Capitol Hill, once haunted by Kerouac and Cassidy, now typically empty except for a few hopelessly drunk middle-aged assholes crowded around the piano singing, lost in the hazy delusion that they are Elton John or Billy Joel. But not tonight. Tonight the place is so full we have to search for a place to sit. Why? I look around and notice immediately that there’s something wrong with the crowd. Everyone’s either elderly or mentally handicapped or physically handicapped or blind, or black. That can’t be an coincidence. Is this a trap? Are we going to be gassed? It could some sort of modern (and highly comedic) euthanasia chamber. After the wait staff quietly exits, the doors will be sealed and poison gas will be pumped in through nozzles disguised as beer taps. Ordinarily I would approve of this if we didn’t have the misfortune of stumbling in on it.

Michael and I find a small table in a shitty corner of the room beside a large party that seems to have been bussed in from an assisted living center. An elderly woman leaves and shoves me with her oxygen tank. On the other side of us there are four other senior citizens, all wearing big dark sunglasses indoors. Their fashion sense is remarkable. Behind my friend I see three black men heckling a frustrated waiter relentlessly about getting them a table on the patio. He eventually stops listening and vanishes. There’s a flurry of irritating activity. What are we doing here?

After a long time a waiter arrives and gives us complimentary hot wings, then leaves hastily without taking an order or bringing drinks or anything. The hot wings lay in the middle of the table, inert and extremely disconcerting. I didn’t want any fucking hot wings. Then everything clicks into place, makes perfect sense. Everything becomes clear in light of these chicken wings. I realize that all these goddamned people have overrun our hangout for these free hot wings. The lure of free shitty food is what drew all these people together. Had the management of Charley Brown’s bar gone insane? Clearly, this is a far-out business strategy. They have deliberately attracted a horde of poor miscreants into the bar, people who’s principle motivation is to not spend money. What the fuck were they thinking?

I stare at the hot wings. They are covered in spicy fluorescent orange goo. It occurs to me that hot wings are the final insult to the poor and uneducated. What’s weirder is that the jokes on them, yet they still play along. Offering this sort of food should be an insult, and yet they still show up for it and love it. Let’s face it: chicken wings are a bad omen. You know you’ve strayed into a nasty and possibly dangerous neighborhood when you start seeing hot wing places. This is the favored food of the sub-human rabble that breeds in the shittiest peripheral areas of our cities.

Michael picks up a chicken wing and begins chewing the meat off a small bone. Suddenly a transformation takes place. This otherwise intelligent and cultured man begins to look like a fool. He gets the brightly colored sauce all over his hands and mouth. No mere napkin can wipe it away. I dig in too. We have blended in with the muck that surrounds us. The hot wings have made our society’s horseshit ideals about equality a reality. It’s as though we have entered a grotesque medieval picture or peasants with terrible inbred faces mocking Jesus on his way to Golgotha, the last true man left on earth. Michael eats another hot wing. I imagine people living someplace down south eating chicken wings all day and throwing the bones off the back porch until the yard is completely buried under a little hill of nasty chicken bones. Oddly enough, this is a plausible reality.

We come to the conclusion that hot wings must be some kind of conspiracy from on high. Mike proposes that hot wings are invented by the wealthy and elite to keep the poor socially immobile, to repress and humiliate them. The experience of eating hot wings is so inherently embarrassing, so aesthetically uncouth, that it must be a deliberate plan to expose these uncivilized peasants for what they truly are on the inside.

Well, surely that’s all a lot of bullshit. What’s true is that the people eating this stuff and smiling about it are the only ones guilty for it. I’m reminded of Pasolini’s weird movie, Salò. In Salò there’s a houseful of inexplicably compliant slave children being forced by French perverts to eat their own feces. Instead of feces, modern man is being fed other forms of shit: things like hot wings, Mexican soap opera, Fox News, bad music, worse movies, etc.

One’s also got to consider that refusing the chicken wings makes a statement too. We saw that all too clearly during the recent presidential campaign. The candidates had healthy solid diets, but didn’t dare refuse to eat any nasty fried fat chunks put in front of them in the name of “local fare.” This is because one who’s too good to eat shit is clearly the enemy of the people. The discerning mind is not an egalitarian mind.

The hot wings are just the beginning, my friends. Tell me how good they taste. Yum.

8/14/09
Charley Brown’s
Denver Colorado

into the slaughterhouse

“There’s a crack in everything” –Leonard Cohen

I’m sitting on the patio of a café on Jacques Cartier Square in the old section of Montreal on a Wednesday morning. But what I call morning is afternoon to most other people. The city is picturesque and the women are beautiful with long hair and fantastic breasts in the hot summer streets. The varying architectural styles spanning over two hundred years blend together seamlessly and there’s no discord in sight. The sidewalks are clean and the coffee is fantastic. Bookstores sell works in French and English, and people are easy to talk to. It’s a most civilized place; so civilized in fact, it’s not to be believed. And rightly so.
I know that this perfectly executed cappuccino, the fine cigarettes, the desirable young waitress, the beautiful buildings on this square, and all the other pleasantries surrounding me are a soothing denial of basic realities. Our distractions and desires pull us through another day in the middle of an existential tragedy. Everything we see is a curtain pulled across our eyes to avert our gaze from the one ultimate fact. The beautiful life is a lie, a massive act of denial both on the personal and mass-cultural scale. Nonetheless it’s a n ecessary lie, for without it we’d be scratching our brains out through our eye sockets in a fit of terror. We just wouldn’t be able to come to terms with the truth of the situation.
If there’s a rule in this world it’s that man is a beast, just another animal. Civilized living is a fragile charade. We must kill and/or be killed, suffer never-ending rejection and disappointment, starve, and turn on a self-destructive axis of lies that never leads anywhere.
And yet, in spite of these prevailing conditions we find ways of exempting ourselves from the facts of the situation –at least temporarily. These magic moments of happiness, these feeling of security, cast a spell and keep us in the game. They keep us striving in a situation that’s ultimately hopeless.
And yet, be it false or not, we cannot keep living without hope. Desire is the engine of life. If we should truly awaken from it, then we would simply die.
When people indulge in beauty, desire, or even hope, I can’t help imagining two pigs fucking on the blood-slick floor of a slaughterhouse, totally oblivious to what’s in store for them.
This world, this life, is a slaughterhouse. It’s a butcher shop of hearts serving some master we do not know or understand.
Everyone ought to realize this. We’ve all seen the cemetery, the faded photographs of memory, and the mountains of history we sit lightly upon. It’s a history of crime and disaster, a long-term perpetual massacre where everyone is guilty. Gas masks and monuments riddled with bullet holes are evidence of this. Men were enjoying good wine and classical music while shoveling Jews into an oven by the truckload. The German’s turn in the fire came soon thereafter. Fucking and murder are the norm for our species. If you want to see men release their most vicious instincts, just observe what happens when people are hungry or afraid. The whole daydream of civilized Christian behavior is completely forgotten.
On a perfect afternoon in Montreal it’s easy to forget how these people would respond if they were in danger or if there weren’t enough food for everyone. It’s easy enough to forget that you are on a one-way trip into some sort of terrible personal decline. The pleasantries are just a thin film covering over a black pit of fearful instincts and terrible realities. Even before we had the means to destroy one another, there were plenty of adversaries in the natural world. There’s always been disease and starvation and death. Even in the most advanced society, everyone is still going to die. How can anyone come to terms with this? They can’t and never will.
We all know this, but no one seems to feel the reality of it. There are merely words, rather than a certainty known deep in the heart. If the knowledge did penetrate to that level there would be no way to stifle a scream. These pages are a scream.
The terror of the situation ordinarily remains a secret in plain view. We turn our eyes away. That’s the only way to go on eating and fucking in the midst of a never-ending holocaust, to laugh and continue living on top of a mountain of corpses.
Modern life in the midst of cities and civilization is a fascinating truce between opposite realities. Fear and hope live side by side, trying their best to ignore one another. Systems of safety and rules give the impression of security, while underneath the surface we remain wolves and maggots. The slightest disruption of our system causes man to revert to beast. Why else would a funeral or a mugging seem so terrible? It’s a normal fact of life in nature, but in a civilized world it’s a shocking contradiction to everything we’re striving for. All the aims of our artificial rational world are instantly and totally refuted by something as simple and as common as a funeral. We deal with its incomprehensibility for a moment; then forget it as quickly as possible. But you can’t avert your gaze forever. The coffin is real. So is the freak, the rapist, the beggar, the deathbed and everything else our civilization is attempting to hide or defeat.
If by some terrible magic, we all suddenly came to and understood what’s really happening to us, what kind of fodder we are for mechanisms beyond our understanding, the earth would convulse in flames. Or maybe nothing would happen at all. Maybe the sun and the moon and stars wouldn’t give a fuck about it. And that’s fine too. In Montreal, I can defer payment on life for another day. I light another cigarette and call for my waitress.

July 9, 2008 / Montreal

burning

“How can there be laughter, how can there be pleasure, when the whole world is burning?”
-The Dhammapada

And yet there’s laughter. There’s pleasure. And not just for those who would refuse to acknowledge the fire. The burning world around us even adds to the fantastic lunacy of that laughter. Wild gods in the rapture of absolute tragedy, we say, “Let it burn.”


Denver
March 17, 2009

existential amnesia

“All gone is as good as never was” –Goethe

“Existence has no memory” –Sartre

“If it is true that what perishes has never existed, birth, source of the perishable, exists as little as the rest.” -Cioran

I got out of bed today around noon and ambled down here to the café. I’m sitting outside on a crowded patio in the warm sunlight of an unseasonably pleasant January afternoon, feeling well rested and happy in spite of last night’s drunken madness and it’s weird fallout. But what I really want right now is to somehow get behind the wheel of a car and drive it west at a maximum rate of speed until I run out of highway and glimpse the misty distance of infinity looming up over the sand and black cliffs of the west coast.
I just want to go, and that’s the truest expression of my spirit. Hit the road and never slow down. My song is the sound of an engine and wheels on the blacktop, the wind whipping through an open window, the loud soaring music of a life in motion and a road that never ends.
But the road does end, and there’s no way around this fact. Life is finite and in spite of the desire to go forever, I know I can’t. The end comes too soon, and I know I’ll never want to let go. I have a strong attachment to my life and it’s beautiful phantasmagoria of brilliance and love. I am terrified and depressed by aging and death in spite of my best efforts to come to terms with the idea.
Death is the ultimate reality, the final word. Man, unlike any other animal, has the blessing and curse of being aware of his fate in the grave. This is what gives us our most unique quality as a species. Man is complicated by his knowledge of death’s imminence, that inescapable end that is impossible to cope with or accept.
There is no solution, although people deceive themselves in many ways to escape the fact. A considerable amount of human activity boils down to just this. The illusive sense of immortality may come from one’s offspring, an important legacy, prolific creativity, worldly accomplishment, or even the wildest religious delusions involving promises of eternal life. I on the other hand feel a strong instinct to confront the terrible fact without deluding myself this way. I’ve got an obsessive curiosity about what’s really happening. It’s a mystery I want to peer into regardless of the emotional cost. I maintain an ideal of bravery and honesty with myself, and I want the truth even if it should prove to be intolerable. It’s a strange and interesting obsession that no one can really explain.
Death’s certainty is the one thing the mind knows, but can never hope to digest. I certainly cannot come to terms with it, nor can I ever hope to accept it. My own personal reaction to this impossible problem is to try and grab the thing by the horns, to barge out of existence in the most confrontational way possible. At this time in my life, that seems to mean suicide. Maybe I will feel differently when I’m older and wiser, but for the time being it appears that this is the best way to approach it. Rather than flee until I can no longer evade the inevitable, I choose the way of Hitler in his bunker. I will not be taken alive by old age, senility, incontinence and physical decay. Mine is not an answer of any sort, but it’s one of many ways of dealing with the total impossibility of an answer. Really, it’s frightening and sad because I don’t want to die.
I guess I can’t know anything certain about it until the time comes to raise a pistol to my own temple and truly confront the strange and inconceivable concept that this thought is to be my last thought. When I pull the trigger the curtain will come down in the form of a paradox of being and non-being. I’ll cease to exist, and with me the whole world will vanish. When it’s gone, there will be no trace that it ever did exist. The zero-glyph circle of nothingness will close over my past in a way that causes it to have never existed. And if this sort of retroactive annihilation erases my existence, what is today? As I sit writing this, my world and I are both positively real. But when I die there will be a backwards-in-time motion sweeping everything that ever was into oblivion. The future will erase the past, with the falling of the hammer on a Smith and Wesson revolver.
In light of all this, I can only assume that here/now is not real and I do not exist. In my perception, reality takes on the suspicious qualities of a phantom. But we are here and this is clearly real, even if only through these human perceptions. That’s the mysterious aspect of it. It baffles the mind that something can emerge from the all-encompassing brackets of nothing. But reality is not carved in stone and nothing has permanence. The idea of permanence is just an unreal characteristic of the mind. Everything is ethereal, just so much vapor dispersing in the empty air. No permanence. No memory.
In the end my conclusion on this musing is that since there’s no real solution, then there’s nothing to worry about. The rest is entirely out of our hands. The impossibility of an answer removes the burden of trying to find one. So we live today and whatever happens tomorrow isn’t our problem. The only thing to do is get on the road and feel the bliss of this fleeting mystery we find ourselves in the middle of. Until the road ends, there remains the speed of life.


January 18, 2009
Market Café / Denver

twenty-eight

Walking on a perfect beach with my friend, looking at the sea on my birthday, I wondered why I couldn’t find any sense of happiness. I wondered why I felt 28 dead years taking me down with them. There was no escaping it. There was no more youth. Only the fascinating descent remained. My song, no longer the exuberant anthem of youth, darkened with the bitter low chords of a death march, and has been that way ever since. Let the sun make a terrible roar while it goes down. Let’s look into the grim face of god fearlessly and without any hope of finding light there. We will stab the darkness with our terrible knowledge.

September 1, 2008 / Cannon Beach, Oregon

from a cold beach

It’s been a calm day on the beach. When we got here, we drove over a hill and I saw the ocean, once again, for the first time. We parked the car and I climbed over a sand dune to take it all in. I walked in the cold surf with Lauren and even took a nap for a little while on the sand. Lauren says happy birthday and throws her arms around me. Everything is pleasant, but I am having a really hard time ignoring how sad I feel. I’m feeling the time. My birthday depresses me. I do not want to admit that time is a limited thing and that I am using mine up fast. Youth is the source of all inspiration. The supposed wisdom of age is worthless. Old people are dead people. Everything right and profound is to be found in youth. Age is just the means of actualizing that innate wisdom. Or at least that's what Hitler said.
Considering the twenty-seventh year of my life, the year I am now burying, I try to interpret the events to find some sort of meaning as to what the hell I've been going through and what I ought to do next. History is simple, but interpreting the chain of events requires the originality of an artist and the understanding of a psychologist. This also applies one who tries to penetrate the meaning of one's own personal history.
Coming of age is a matter of disappointment. When you are young you have faith in yourself and believe anything can be done. You’re sure you’ll be important, talented, youthful genius incarnate. You know everything will conclude magnificently. By the time you turn twenty-eight it has become clear that it's not going to turn out that way.
Real life has emerged as a stalemate of sorts, a halfway meeting of ideals ands reality. But let's not kid ourselves: reality holds all the aces. Hopes, dreams, and convictions are still holding out in a few key strategic positions, but they are locked into and endgame and there's no way out of it.
Yeah, youth is over. You are finally who you're going to be. All the possibilities have been eliminated in a game of existential solitaire leaving just one card: the person you have become. This is it. There you are. The end.

September 1, 2008
Cannon Beach, Oregon

Daily bummer

There’s nothing in the news this week but inhumanity, mass murder, and a total lack of any sort of justice for those who rape kill and fuck over good people.
Last week, in response to terroristic heckling in southern outskirts of their eternally disputed territory, the Israeli army rolled into the Gaza strip for what amounts to the most shameless display of hatred and brutal violence in recent memory. It was done with American tax dollars and with our full political support. Anyone with the illusion that Americans maintain the moral high ground needs to think long and hard about the massacre we all just saw on television. It was a racial hate crime of the highest degree and we picked up the tab. As of yesterday thirteen Israelis had lost their lives as opposed to the nine hundred or so dead in Gaza. But so be it, they’re not god’s chosen race, right? To a Zionist, They’re niggers and their lives are just so much stinking litter to be burned.
Equally shocking is the reaction on this front. Americans have reacted to the daily massacres in Gaza by switching the dial to whatever football game is on the other channel. Even worse has been the so-called Christian response, which we saw a little bit of here in Denver a couple of days ago at the pro-Israel rally in front of the state capitol. The people that turned out for it vomited all manner of unconvincing rhetoric to justify the actions of a small fanatical race cult that has played this country like a violin for decades. The argument in favor of the murders ranged from senseless comparisons to the holocaust to patriotic slogans to the idea of Israel “defending itself.” As if a thing like this can be called defensive. It’s pretty hard for me to accept that people turned out to take pride in this sort of inhumanity. If I had known about the rally in advance I would have gone over there sporting an Israeli flag with a swastika stitched onto it.
It’s not clear what Israel expects, but they seem to believe the Palestinians will simply dry up and die if they keep the jackboot on their throat long enough. But that won’t ever happen. Hatred will escalate forever, and someday Israel may find itself alone and isolated, peering into the next episode of the holocaust without any protection. And that will be perfectly fitting for them. It will be what they earned.
Let’s not get too sentimental about the poor Palestinians though. Just because they are being evicted from their lands and murdered in mass numbers doesn’t necessarily make them innocent. If the tables were somehow turned they would do the same thing to the Jews. It’s too easy to side with the victims in a world where the strong kill and the weak are killed, regardless of who’s who. It’s too easy to demonize those with the power to do wrong, to never think about what the weak would do if they were suddenly empowered. For instance, in America the guilt tends to be loaded onto the archetype of the oppressive white man. But can you imagine what sort of insane and vicious social fist-fuck would have ensued if the blacks were in control instead? There certainly would be no talk about universal tolerance and reparations for slavery. Oh, digressions.
At this time the real crime lies in the general popular apathy about everything. What happens in Israel is someone else’s problem and to the common American it takes too much effort to read a newspaper and care about what it says. Those who back this sort of violence are few and far between, but those who let it happen through their lack of concern are everywhere. And that’s what we’ll be held guilty for if we ever have to stand and be judged. It looks subtle on the surface, but there’s blood on our hands. We mostly looked the other way while crimes were being committed.
There was also yet another nasty bummer at breakfast this morning carried by disappointing articles in the Times. Looks like the new president has no interest whatsoever in launching any sort of criminal investigations into the sleazy fucked up Gestapo tactics that characterized the last administration’s policies and programs. It gives me the impression that he’s afraid to cross the CIA. Obama basically said he respects them too much to put them into circumstances where they would have to be constantly looking over their shoulder while trying to work.
Really?
Seems like people with the power to commit those crimes ought to be considering the consequences and repercussions. Bush was already talking about doing pre-emptive pardons for these unethical creeps until Cheney put an end to that by remarking that pardons are unnecessary for people who haven’t committed a crime. And there’s the catch. They have not technically committed any crimes. The Bush administration has been so insidiously careful in maintaining their legal cover that even while completely unethical acts were made policy, they kept their asses covered. I wish they had been this thoroughly careful while they were theorizing their bungled war. But the difference is that in a botched war there’s someone else to pay the price. When there’s crime or debacle in American politics, those responsible always walk away unscathed while others bleed for it on some foreign soil. There’s no responsibility. You can ruin countless lives, lie to the public, fuck a country over, be it consciously or accidentally, and then just retire. The worst-case scenario is to go home humiliated and live out the rest of your years in wealthy seclusion like Nixon.
Watching the Bush administration slither out that way has me feeling a vicious desire for revenge. Humiliation is not enough. The man and all his accomplices need to be arrested and mercilessly interrogated on national television. Maybe even dragged behind a pickup truck. We’d have the ultimate reality show on our hands. Producers could pitch it with a title like Executive Fear Factor.

January 12, 2009 / Denver

The Scream

The only reasonable sentiment today would be a frantic screech of sheer existential terror. Populations are unconscious and governments are corrupt. The latter is the natural manifestation of the former. They’re gone limp on anti-depressants and TV. People are just comfortable enough for the time being to indulge in that mental laziness that allows there to be quiet on the streets whilst their once great nation is kicked into an early grave by a few shit-sucking pigs on Wall Street and their heavies in DC. The press is on a permanent paid vacation, and even if they did show up for work no one would read the unpatriotic vitriol that’s their ethical responsibility to pump out in times like these. The news would be a perpetual litany of fuck-ups, debacles, humiliations, preacher sex scandals, crime from on high, and masses gone stupid on too much welfare stabbing each other. But there would be no response. We would all collectively skip back to the comics. It’s total apathy from a spoiled people. Let me tell you, people: America is in for something nasty and cruel, and when the shit comes down there wont be anyone else to blame.
Everyone over here is dying or dead inside already, propped up inside his or her cubicle. They are willing to be fed shit by a world they were too lazy to question. We produce and consume at a rate I can’t even comprehend, but it’s all waste. It’s all just distraction from a bigger sense of emptiness. Maybe I can’t prove objectively that there is something in my life worth living for… but I am sure as hell confident that theirs is a dead vacuum. There’s no doubt about it.
We’re making the world hotter and more toxic and even just fucking ugly at a rate of speed that boggles the mind. What was once the front range of the Rocky Mountains, I will only ever know as a strip mall projected to infinity up highway thirty-six. We’re acting like a catastrophic viral infection on this planet. We’re told we’ve gone too far and that burning fossil fuels will have DISASTROUS consequences soon, but no one is even remotely interested in this. Even the threat of disaster does not register in this rotten brain. We’ll never change until change is forced.
Our history, our civilization is a heavy stone wheel headed west and over a cliff into the grave. It’s got more mindless momentum than the few thinking people on board can ever hope to counteract. Nothing can be done, and there’s no way out. Might as well have another drink and watch it burn. Eloquent minds have been reduced to the only sincere expression still possible: hysterical mental stabbing motions.
The ugly and stupid are multiplying geometrically. The noble ones are hearing their coffin lids being nailed shut by a crude and common world that disavows them while openly stealing everything they ever accomplished. Instead of being thanked, the ones who generate progress are being quickly escorted out the back door with a hard kick in the ass. Don’t let the door hit you! Others will take the spoils and use them to their own ends until the wheels fall off and there’s no one intelligent enough left to rebuild them. New populations will rise only to find there’s not much fun left to be had. Once noble races are entering an age of senility and incontinence. There’s no time to be born again. This is no “gold in the furnace.” This is the end.
I’m done.

December 12, 2008 / City o’ City, Denver

*

If eternity were real, people would loose their minds.

^

We’ll be born again -if we can just live through this death.

The discovery of the moon

In this rancid twilight, one god’s sun has set and the next god’s has yet to rise. We catch a fleeting glimpse at murky constellations that depict our hateful fate.

The wakeful souls on night watch are sickened. This is the no man’s land between suns.

Another layer of illusion vanishes and the landscape changes. We are on the moon. We have been here all along, this god forsaken lunar vacuum. You and I exchange a glance full of unspeakable realizations: We are stranded here.

We’ve never known anything different, and yet we cannot suppress the impossible knowledge that wells up out hearts, in our very guts, like a fountain vomiting blood from the unconscious depth. We are not home here in this life. We are lost.

One's got to wonder: will a messenger come?

the state of affairs at this moment

Right now I’m looking at a glass of beer and thinking very hard. I’m experiencing a deep ambiguous longing that’s perhaps crossing the line into desperation. The beautiful waitress clearly does not like me. The fat waitress however is constantly looking over at me while doing other things, failing to hide her own human desperation. I certainly can identify with her position and yet I want nothing to do with her, just as the pretty thin blonde waitress wants nothing to do with me. It’s a weird rejection triangle. There’s a clever term: rejection triangle. It makes me wonder who’s sitting at the top of this food chain of longing and rejection. Who is it that rejected the beautiful waitress? Ah, but enough of that. I go back to looking at the fine glass of Duvel and pondering my own issues. Sitting alone, staring off into space over a glass of beer, and meditating on god knows what kind of hopes and dreams very much reminds me of myself in 2006. Those were better, more luminous times. The road was more open back then. I didn’t own anything but my own convictions. I felt free, totally fearless. Yes, if there’s anyone in the world who can help me now it’s the Joseph of 2006 or thereabouts. If only I could channel some of his energy. He was inspiration on the move. He acted with authentic spontaneity. He had the urgency of a man who knew the world was ending. He was young and alive and on an honest-to-god crusade. Now, somehow, only four years later I’m tired and sick and frightened. In 2006 I felt as though the clock were ticking, as though youth were ending and this were the eleventh hour. Now I know I was right. I burned the fire of youth’s last hours in that weird Vltava dusk, in that “purple haze” of psychedelic intensity. Now I know I was right. Sadly and weirdly enough, I survived the end of the world: my own personal apocalypse. And what can possibly follow that act? Nothing good I’m sure. I desperately wish I could channel that lightning one more time –and perhaps I will. Its do or die this year. It’s time to “storm and break out” from this line of artillery that’s got me hemmed in on Grant Street. One way or the other, I’m going to turn thirty in Sakartvelo. I’m going to find the kingdom of heaven. I’m going to look into love’s eyes and demand: “Answer me!” Until then I will pray and meditate, live the best I can, and storm the gates of the kingdom one more time. I remember myself when I was twenty-five. That’s the self I need to keep with me always. I can still find him. I look up and can’t help but notice that the beautiful waitress is smiling at me.

Nausea/compassion

People will tend to associate the cross, the crucifixion, with Jesus’ love for the human race, the final sacrifice for those unwitting sons and daughters of the kingdom. Well, I’m nothing like Jesus. When I view the stages of the cross in church all I can see is the vicious cruel insanity of our species, the real mortal danger of doing or saying pretty much anything right. They humiliated, tormented, and killed the best person who had ever been in their company. It’s hard for me to get past this and see the supposed theme of the action.
For Jesus, compassion was big enough to override the nausea he must have felt in our presence, not to mention in his own body. Not only did god have to suffer the stink of sweat and excrement and the gradual rotting flesh on his body, but he had to suffer it alone in the midst of this psychologically rotting species. It must have been existentially terrible for him. Just imagine: a god trapped not just in an animal body, but in the psychosis of an animal society. And still, instead of damning them, he said this: “Forgive them father because they do not know what they are doing.” That is a massive gesture of compassion and understanding.

God's address

If God is the continuum in which events flow, then there’s every reason to identify ourselves with him… because we are really the continuum in which events flow.

This place needs a woman's touch... badly

I just waked into the kitchen and took a look at what’s going on in there. The trashcan has literally vanished under a massive heap of garbage that almost fills the room. A blockade of trash has cut off my ability to reach the cupboards. There are a lot crushed pizza boxes, broken wine glasses, filthy dishes, a teapot full of mold, and other things like that. I don’t dare even contemplate the biological hazard brewing inside the sink, which has been clogged for weeks. Adding to the ambiance is the stench of my cat’s litter box, which I can barely even see, much less scoop the turds out of. It’s fucking heinous.
The other rooms are pretty bad too. In my bedroom lies what Lauren calls the “clothes monster”, a heap of dirty clothes that make it impossible to set foot on the hardwood floor, which if memory serves correctly, is quite lovely. If someone were to say, sweep this floor, they would collect pounds of cat hair and dirt. Judging from the smell, I suspect that my cats have given up on the litter pan and begun peeing in my closet. I can’t rightly be angry with them about this, considering the current state of the litter box. Even the living room is littered with dirty socks and trash.
It occurs to me that the dirtier my home gets, the harder it is to clean it. It just turns to squalor and depresses me. My home ought to be my sanctuary, but instead it’s this dump I can barely deal with, so I avoid it altogether. Instead of relaxing, I leave and go to the coffee shop instead. And the mess just accumulates.
It’s just the same as when I lived on Poplar Avenue in Memphis. The kitchen in that place degenerated into something totally uninhabitable, complete with fruit flies and roaches and rotten food. No wonder I was having hallucinations back then.
The old “bat cave” on Tremont here in Denver suffered a similar fate when I lived there. My time in the bat cave ended with all the windows broken out and the hardware ruined. I pity anyone foolish enough to try and use that bathtub after the mess I left in it.
I manage to go on living this way because every so often some woman comes around with a motherly instinct and cleans the place for me. It’s usually an epic task involving all manner of industrial cleaning products and gear. My last girlfriend was very good about taking care of all this, but she’s gone now and I am once again called upon to live like a responsible adult with no mom to clean my room for me.
Many times I swore I would never live like this again, especially if I could ever get a decent apartment. Well, now I have a really nice place and nothing much has changed. What can I say, I’m a fucking slob.