Monday, February 17, 2014
Deathless and incomprehensible
This life, merely an expression of eternity in time, merely a fleeting and obscure projection.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Fat in the fire
Dispatch from the Walnut Room, Denver CO:
The impending doom we perceive bearing down upon us like a freight train seems considerably less tragic tonight. It's because we can console ourselves with the knowledge that although we will be thrown in the fire, all these other people will burn too.
The impending doom we perceive bearing down upon us like a freight train seems considerably less tragic tonight. It's because we can console ourselves with the knowledge that although we will be thrown in the fire, all these other people will burn too.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Two for Augustine
The stillness of holy reality confounds one's thoughts because God is imagined as somehow living, and yet he is also considered to be frozen in permanent changelessness and eternity. It remains impossible for us to conceive of something living or alive without the processes of life as perceived in time, without motion or decision or change.
***
In a dream last night: I have returned to my home town with some people. We are at a shitty half-destroyed restaurant that offers a choice of fried catfish or chinese food. People I knew from high school enter. I am happy to see them, but they snub me. The close friend I am traveling with points to the railroad tracks nearby and says, "Is there a place where we can get across those tracks?" I turn around and look. Just barely hidden from view, a very picturesque dirt road leads across them. "Yeah, right over there," I say. Then I look again. Deepening back on the other side of the tracks is a misty pastel morning to rival the most beautiful I have ever seen. It's as though not just childhood, but the era previous to even being born is seen in the hazy distance of hills and trees. I think to myself with wonder, Arkansas.
***
In a dream last night: I have returned to my home town with some people. We are at a shitty half-destroyed restaurant that offers a choice of fried catfish or chinese food. People I knew from high school enter. I am happy to see them, but they snub me. The close friend I am traveling with points to the railroad tracks nearby and says, "Is there a place where we can get across those tracks?" I turn around and look. Just barely hidden from view, a very picturesque dirt road leads across them. "Yeah, right over there," I say. Then I look again. Deepening back on the other side of the tracks is a misty pastel morning to rival the most beautiful I have ever seen. It's as though not just childhood, but the era previous to even being born is seen in the hazy distance of hills and trees. I think to myself with wonder, Arkansas.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
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.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, April 19, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, April 5, 2010
...
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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