scotch-whiskey

some one of them was telling a long joke that needed a punchline or an abortion. it was warm for December, mid 50's, with an awkward sort of balminess that moistened the skin and clammed the palms right up. their collective breath smelled of scotch-whiskey.

one of his boys spoke as if he was simply delivering reality to those listening. delivering reality. it had impressed him enough to wonder why near every one else delivered their declarations with massive qualifiers. he thought of the quote from Infinite Jest "you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do."


they were doing some records, current was 'the lengths' by The Black Keys. and he was picturing himself bending a solo guitar note into an actual human feeling like that and he remembered a dream...

doctor's note

Patient details elaborate dream in frighteningly vivid detail involving the carrying of a mountain bike over his shoulder in an effort to discreetly break into a large and dilapidated house that is being squatted in by some friends. friends that have 'fallen on hard times' as a result of drug use, apparently. There is also a description of a cursory ice hockey game that is being played outside of the house - '100 or 150 yards away.' the participants of the game are some of same friends that are squatting in the house. ...vague memory of his own near participation in the game...and other .

Upon entering the house which is apparently a quite difficult task given the bike on the shoulder and a confusing fence structure that is unstable but must be scaled; the patient describes house mates as 'dusty with actual noticeable grime on the front portion but not the back of each dweller's body' and also describes the sudden realization that he also apparently also resides in the house but that he is not 'grimy'. Patient cites among hockey players / house dwellers a friend from college, 'a funny friend' and a girl from childhood, 'a pretty girl' that had quote both actually fallen on real-life hard times.

Scenic notes; home is a dilapidated Victorian but of extremely far than less than livable conditions. Fear has permeated dream sequence at time of fence scaling and also a general feeling of anxiety throughout the house sequence. Dirt or dust is blackish and is a prominent feature within the dream. No sexual or libidinous impulses.

projection

he was mad, scowl-wearing and such. And curt with his spouse and with others too but mostly with her. she was easiest to blame and quite harmless and thus a perfect projection for his rages and his own problems, despite unfortunately her total innocence in creating any of them. the irony of the rages now being that he can at this point in life, with such vast and keen knowledge of himself, see where they, the rages, have spawned and which specific stressors are going to send his insides into a panic. he likes to connect them (the rages), via fashionable psychological utterances, to some retention failures as a toddler. no way to prove any of it but in short: something about his life had not turned out the way he planned and, being an anal-retentive in need of constant control, it filled him with a rage. this much was obvious and was practically a defining feature of our hero.

The Rat

Can't you hear me...I'm beating on the wall?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX-S4sIjEeg&feature=related

life

he held life in his arms. his own face contorted into half-smile as he looked around the room every so often so as to not be seen lost staring into the liquid, blinking eyes of the babe - the allure, blue, fresh and new and innocent and naive and understanding and knowing, somehow, and welcoming and incapable of judgment. just blinking and...trying.

the once lively and angular shape of his own face had been naturally deformed and aged, from the fast-living manner in which he navigated his own trashy life, and was no longer a pleasure to see in the mirror - never mind actually making eye contact with himself, a long since extinct act of confidence. only ever shifting between orange-peel, bulb nose; melting candle cheeks; bag of water chin; and carpeted staircase forehead. the eyes jaundiced from self-inflicted mental maladies and sufferings and attempted escapes of internal repressions and always squinting painfully at this point anyway.

"life is a black hole" he said to the babe.

and so he tried then to think of something more profound to say, because how many times in your life do you hold life in your own arms? something memorable that could be etched into stone and told by his friends to other friends or by his parents to their friends as a statement of pride of a grown-adult-and-well-composed-and-spoken son. but his mouth was bone dry nervous and his speech patterns vacuous and; anyway, his knotted dustball thoughts disallowed anything in terms of statements with stellar quotational status: "life. you-fuck." he said then as he touched it, life, with back of his bony, scaly fingers. "you-little-Fuck." whispering.

de minimis tons and tons

And frigging life settled down right on his chest, with its huge ass and weighing tons and tons. Forcing exhalations to the point of panic. And it made him appreciate the light-switch immediacy of death...

But he could childishly never accept that his thoughts would also end with the light switch...as if they were somehow disconnected from the watery flesh of his brain. Idiot child.

...Anyway, the incessant weight on the chest and uncontrollable panic are de minimis when coupled with the dozen or so lightning flash moments of bone-melting happiness that the weight, life, grants. And so he pours himself into his wife's lap and smiles through his tears under her hands on his head.

quote:

Twain on "progress" and "contribution" of man...

"'you perceive,' he said, 'that you have made continual progress. Cain did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added guns and gun-powder; a few centuries from now he will have so greatly improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter [the atom bomb?] that all men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time.'"

- Mark Twain, 'The Mysterious Stranger', c1910 -

he had just finished a collection of Mark Twain's short works - stories, letters, speeches, etc. 'Old Times on the Mississippi' had taught him something, 'The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' had made him smile legitimately, 'The Private History of a Campaign that Failed' had made him laugh out loud, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' had made him think, and 'The Mysterious Stranger' had blown him away, igniting a reconsideration of tenets.

The whole act - of reading by one's volition an author that had been forced upon him and ignored as a student and being genuinely and consistently moved was itself a moving experience.

so he sat back and staring at the junction of his ceiling and far wall with a knowing smile on his face, and appreciated for the first time the John Lennon quote: "The first time you hear (Bob) Dylan, you feel like you're the first person to discover him."

...and but so then he ran off to tell all his literary friends about the magical Samuel Clemens...

a friend of his always carried around an elastic band. in his hands, stretching it between his fingers and out into an oblong ellipse and so on, and on his right wrist when not in use. probably a 70/30 use to non-use ratio. this latest one was red originally but now nearing a shade of pink for fading. he had to change them often - once or twice a week (likely due to the ratio) because the edges get all frayed and the elasticity weakened and stiffened and cracked and so on. he let people know that the reason for the elastic was "as a reminder of tighter times" and no one ever knew what he meant, not even his closest friends - who never even bothered to ask in the first place because they knew him well enough to entirely not give a shit.

he chewed gum too, as you probably already imagined him to be the type of person to do. mostly cinnamon because not many people like cinnamon gum so he never really ever has to share any of his pack with anyone. he chews two at a time - like most annoying cinnamon gum chewers do anyway. but does not put them both in at once. he instead slowly unwraps the first, folds the piece in half, and takes a bite of it, then the second bite of the first piece. then puts the pack of gum away but never for more than a minute before taking out a second piece and inserting it the same way as the first.

with the elastic and the gum he sounded like a bowl of rice krispies. and he always dropped these non sequiturs like "fuck the city" or "objectivity is a falsehood" that he thought philosophical but no one gave a shit about.

he also loved those movies that chicks dig. the ones that start as cartoons during the opening credits and segue perfectly from cartoon to some "real life" city scene for the opening act. and the cartoon woman character turns into a real woman, the main character, but a fuller shaped and with more realistic hip-to-waist ratio version than the cartoon.

the thing about this guy was that he ate his boogers. licked the wet ones right off his finger with a stiff tongue and scraped the dry, harder ones onto the back of his bottom front teeth.

he also indulged himself often in children snacks, though this was of considerably less social consequence. those gummy, sugary fruit snacks that come in little packs of 10 or so - red, orange, green, yellow, and sometimes blue. he would punish three or four packs right in a row. open the pack, pour the entire contents into his palm, and eat colors at a time.

he was doing 'Bron-Y-Aur Stomp' from III on repeat. everyone knows the story (from Nehemiah) where the inventor of stringed instruments upon hearing Zeppelin III for the first time shakes G awake from a nap in heaven to say "Behold, man approaches divinity!" and G just rolls over.

he generally tries to listen to full albums - enjoying the art of piecing together 10 - 15 songs into a coherent unit. many of the artists he enjoyed crafted albums. as opposed to singles and filler and he felt as if he was ignoring an important piece of what they had worked so hard at if the album was not enjoyed as an album. but there were those times man when immediate gratification ruled the fort and there was only one perfect song to be enjoyed for that moment. and caution and restraint be damned, that song was getting enjoyed and enjoyed probably five or six times before it was done with him. he loved the ones, songs, that exercised his emotions. a rolling mania being his favorite and the most enjoyable.

man. he was in a bit of spot where creativity was just not coming to him and so he supplanted with boogers and mediocrity.

age-ed and sick-lee

aged and sickly he sat and read from the yellowed pages of his own journals.

"Hindsightal lessons to a more junior self:

- read this again and again: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.

- listen to this three times before passing judgment: Kid A by Radiohead.

- do not quote from this movie during youthful, precoital relationships: The Big Lebowski.

- appreciate this band's ability to force emotion into sinusoidal waves: Sigur Ros.

- let this change your life: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

- and let this change it back: Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

- note the catalog of an artist or author and study its progression.

- enjoy a relationship with words.

- appreciate genius.

- listen to music through headphones.

- lay with your wife."

hiatal

"my head is on backwards," he said.

he was doing Buckley 'Mystery White Boy'. Buckley was wailing Oedipal about his father not hearing him and "mother dear, the world's gone cold, no one cares about love anymore..."

"it is absolutely imperative for this particular song to be played at peak volume." he, our hero, spoke like that sometimes.

had been spending time thinking about some philosophical relationship between parallel lines and contradictions. something about euclidean and non-euclidean geometry and what they meant for the different levels of contradiction - contradiction to one's own knowledge, to current Knowledge, and then to all possible KNOWLEDGE. Euclid's claim of parallel lines turned out to be a contradiction but was something of a second order truth - it was true to his knowledge and true to world Knowledge at the time of the claim but was later proven false to KNOWLEDGE as hyperbolic and elliptical geometry took form. a third order truth being impossible to actually prove.

our hero wanted eponymy as well.

Anyway, on Buckley: Music wailed, a painful visceral scream upon hearing he had drown. Sighing, music then said "Ah, we really lost one there. Thank god though, we had the chance to witness that. Magic."

1/2

these two are brothers - having, on average, 1/2 of their genes in common and what not or something and sharing other things too, I'm sure.

this one time at a cousin's wedding - everyone is clapping after the father announces the mr. and mrs. for the first time. and so within the duration of the clap where everyone is still clapping each of them independently by himself decides that he, the individual, is going to sound off the absolute last clap among the 200 people in the church. but not knowing the other has also himself decided to have the absolute last clap, they both clap and clap and clap as all the other clappers stop, all after a perfectly reasonable duration of collective clapping. and then it's awkward. but so then they both laugh, while still clapping, when they realize silently that the other without corroboration but sitting right next to him has decided the same stupid thing that he has decided - to be the last clapper - but the laugh is internal and exposed only in a brief smirk by each (both of which are recognized but neither of which, the smirks, is acknowledged) because laughing would reveal the ingenious plot to the church but laughing or smirking because now in order to sound that last clap he will have to beat out his own brother.

anyway, the younger beats the older. and they tell their mother this at the reception and she says something like "you two are sick." and they laugh even harder.

and they both, the brothers, have this unreasonable love of T-shirts with breast pockets, so-called pocket T's. and so the older wears his clothes a little longer (from purchase to disposal) than the typical adult male so his pocket T's are stained and threadbare - to say the least, via two factual but relatively polite adjectives because frankly, the pocket T's he wears around are basically disgraceful and should barely be considered clothing - and garner better public reaction but the younger has like a dozen of them or 15 from some spending spree at some upper middle class faux vintage clothing outlet which resulted in all these enviable pocket T's of various colors including brown and one destroyed red. and so, whichever brother is wearing the pocket T in the most inappropriate situation (e.g., a dinner party, a family reunion, a wedding etc.) has the upper hand for that day.

and so the brothers' sister is getting married soon...pocket T tuxes and extended applause are likely.

i mean these two are brothers - sharing inside jokes and other nuances that are mostly unsaid and informally established.

mania

The volume was way up. The song was in a really fucking cool frenzy. The piano and drums both just like charging full speed at you...a fullback right through your head from one ear to the other. "I'm in a mania right now!" I think he said then to his friend over the sound. Screamed right at him. His friend just nodded back. "No really, I'm manic!" His eyes were actually swirling circles.

This song. He had heard a thousand times before now. But never like this. He basically had started a serotonin drip - a needle hanging on his neck right out of his internal carotid. He picked up the entire apparatus on the interweb. IV needle and bag, drip chamber and black-market serotonin extracted directly from axon cell tissue of a live human brain. Feelings of well being and I think he was actually indifferently shitting himself. Passing the dump from sphincter to the underwear without second thought - like it was just the underwear's turn to hold it, the dump.

AF: Rebellion (lies) - enlarging his vulnerable skull and inducing defecation.

Moccasin slippers, a rabbit-fur-lined-bright-orange-hunting cap, a bandaid across his nose, a bandana around his neck (to cover the IV scars, presumably), a patchwork tweed jacket that was honestly more of an armed quilt, and gym shorts that said "CHEER" across the ass. And a total smug dick smile on his map. He was dressed for nonsense and indulgence.

Doctor's note: "Patient claims to be on his way to a funeral. Care must be taken."

Every time you close your eyes. Lies! Lies!

If he had one goal it was to live life borne of pure emotion. All else being haphazard...like yawns and blinking and ... and other such symbols of indifference and passivity, and worthy of ridicule and not of sweating yourself to sleep over and not of ground toothdust nor of bloodied fingertips nor of tight-fisted panic nor of elaborate complexities and defenses and those X's you wear over your eyes on most days, and actually more transparent but somehow darker than generally considered appropriate.

But that out of emotion...well, a mania, perhaps.

MMJ

He was doing 'okonos'. The saxophone to close out 'dondante' was slowing his pulse. His extremities were cold. His hair was graying, which he was also growing a bit longer than professional to hid some mild recessions.

Something about these guys - mmj. He had read of this surgery where the cardio-thoracic surgeon had just lost a patient - a patient he loved. The chest cavity wide open and the surgeon exhausted with head in hands, it dark and silent in the OR and cool but brisk and sunny outside...a capital day to save a life (sic - Dost.). With nothing left to do, he attaches electrodes to the lifeless heart. The electrodes streaming sinusoidal waves equaling 'one big holiday' directly into the still organ. Less than a minute later, no lie (according to the story), presumably (and hopefully, for mysticism's sake) just when the waves transmit james screaming 'waking up, feeling good and limber'...the heart beats to life. The CT surgeon kisses his intern and thrusts his pelvis about the OR.

milk

Laughing hysterically...more a maniacal, rabid cackle than just a hearty belly laugh. Laughter worthy of ridicule, deafening fucking laughter. An absurd and misplaced, non sequitur laughter that no one else is sharing.

Thinking then what to say next as everyone in the room stared at him. Eyes bulging from the heads of the audience - Black Hole Sun type bulging. Eyeballs out beyond the lids meant to contain them. Out of their sockets and showing curvature never meant to be seen outside of Biology class or an autopsy. One lady crying, another speechless with hand on the topside of her breast saying "jesus mary and joseph", and still another citing a quick 'our father' through a searing apoplexy. "Why the fuck would anyone let that disaster in here? Guy is a fucking disaster still."

"Where the fuck am I?", to himself. And sitting down then next to the podium in his seat on the panel. An uncomfortable smile to the folks in the front row who cannot or will not make eye contact with him. Scratches the back of his head and smoothing his hair down, squinting a little bit pinching the top of his nose and rubbing his brow feeling for pimples that need popping and can be popped with a scratch of the fingernail. The sides and back of his hair are long - basically needing trimming around the ears and squaring and shaving of the neck.

"you've seen that sweaty jetrag feeling come on over him...and I have seen that boy nod...into a dream a time or two"

He drank down his milk. Always with a glass of milk this guy. A clear glass too so that everyone has to see the thick milk slowly recede down the sides of the glass. At home, in public, at restaurants asking the waitresses if they serve milk - and restaurants have those big bags of milk - most often expired - in the metallic square industrial fridges in their kitchens, after working out - a glass of milk, phlegming up his throat no doubt. And then sucking the sputum and mucus up through the back of his throat right through his GD sinus and into his brain presumably because where the fuck else does it go? Sucking it up there with huge snorting noises through the nose but more with the throat and leaving it to sit atop his nasal cavity in his sinus or trying to swallow it down through the other milk-phlegm. touching his brain probably, the portion of the milk-sputum that cannot be swallowed back down and fogging his thoughts, the loogie...and thinking something stupid like "from whence did this loogie come?" all because his throat cannot process it, the milk.

And when he gets annoyed? Oh god. The sucking and snorting get violent - like he, his brain, has to win the fight against his throat or the phlegm or whatever other enemy he has created just then. Just a transference, you know, obviously of some other more massive life problem that he suffers...the violent sucking = a weak-willed thinly-veiled bodily manifestation of a larger issue.

overcoming dogs

Clutter was a stressor for him. Acne-on-the-forehead-,-night-sweats-,-shortness-of-breath-,-restless-anxiety-type stress. The sort of stress borne only out of a childhood teeming with bleached surfaces and museum quality living. As much as he was fascinated with early experiences and their ability to shape your entire adult life - he was sick from recognizing his own as he turned in bed worrying about what had to be done for the coming day, rubbing neosporin on his scarring cuticles, a feeling not unlike falling in his chest, and a sweat about his forehead (likely our acne source) - the filmy sort that an overweight man acquires on his pale breasts.

Staring at a baby sitting next to a dog. The baby, not more than 15 months, looking at the dog and awaiting reaction. He scratches the side of his cheek as he sips his milk, probably wondering when the dog will turn to him. The dog, not a puppy, looks only away and into the distance...like a cold shoulder to the babe...not allowing it or other unpleasantries into its vision, ever.

And so he walks past the clutter, staring straight ahead and not at the clutter and into the distance. Laughing about how smart and willing to confront life the baby was in comparison to the dog.

And blinking and not yet appreciating the irony as he blinks.

Considers then drilling a hole into the back of his skull and pouring in undiluted bleach to cleanse the dark corners and erase that which cannot be overcome with reason. "Bleach me." He would say as it was done. The smell would be too much, wouldn't it?, as the chlorine cooked through his olfactory nerves and his eyeballs turned to a milky white fog. Brain matter, less solid, pouring out of his ears..."get some gauze!" he would probably also say (though more slowly and hardly recognizable this time), realizing that he had made a literally fatal mistake. All before his organ seized and swelled and poured through his other orifices, shutting down his system.

And not yet appreciating the irony as his head and torso spill over the rest of his body. Hunched over.

Mirrors moving away

The controlling device of his life is the mirror. There in front of him so that he can assess the man he has become and assess his performance against the standard he has set - and perhaps (and probably more likely) that others have set and that he has adopted. But the mirror is not stationary. Moving away. And never there long enough for a true look into the eyes. So that even the assessment is impossible. What is it we are looking at? And so he chases, lifelong, sometimes sprinting and barreling through relationships and sometimes just a slow and lazy jog with others at his side. Like a fucking parade.

A manic. Ups and downs. Constant considerations of performance relativity. Against others and himself. Standards. Self-loathing and elation, oft in adjacence. Bouts of exaggerated sexuality - thrusting his testosterone all about - to prove his worth coupled with those of raging irritability...again, to prove his worth. Self-control is a fleeting quality anyway, mostly exercised between the ages of 25 - 35 and then forgotten for a new kind of disregard.

And so he writes:
"When you come back I will want to tell you all about all I have done and all I have accomplished - to make you proud. And so that you will recognize success. But I will then, at that instant, also have too much pride to say a thing and will not be able to tell you for myself. Opting instead to say something ordinary about how it is nice to see you again. But I will quietly watch and listen to overhear every subsequent conversation you hold with anyone who might know of me and what I have done and hope that they say something of my accomplishments in my stead. And then - when they do say something - that is when I will have gained quiet reward. And I will grin, maliciously and rabidly, right then."

---

"I wish that I had known in that first moment we met the unpayable debt that I'd owe you." You can actually hear his voice navigating the lyric. Not just carefully-chosen word after word but also his voice actually making the change from each. You can hear the transition and the empty space. They placed the microphone or some other vibration-capturing device on his vocal folds and we thus hear both the oscillations and stillness.

we both hugged. both we hugged.

Oh my god, this album. Listen to it only by yourself. Wear stereo headphones. Lay your body down supine and stare at the ceiling, or nothing - stare at nothing at all. Register no sense beyond audial. Breathe. Carefully select one or maybe two people to tell about this album and no more. Appreciate the silence and its careful interaction with each note.

Put it down slowly, your skull, so as to not spill its contents out of its orifices. Hug yourself. I don't know - I actually don't. Think about restructuring your unique genetic code just slightly. Wrap your undernourished arms around someone and hold them for longer than is comfortable for them to want to be held just then. Put on a fucking life preserver.

We are on The Antlers - Hospice. Beautiful and eviscerating bone and other once sturdy structures of the body. Actually.

Actually - you are off the reservation. And this will do nothing to reel you back in. Off the reservation and screaming at the disc of the sun at the top of your lungs - mouth open to fullest capacity, jaw aching, head quivering, eyes shut tight, molars showing, hands fists grabbing the ears ... we said something that meant a lot to each of us just then, but it disappeared. and we both hugged. both we hugged. like life itself existed in the other and was needing to be held there. and it did - need it.

Think about, for just a minute, what it would be like to be the one that chose to spend his/her life with you - appreciate that feeling. And use it every day.

... continued

his head was like a balloon when he got like this. and not a helium-filled light balloon delicately bouncing around against the ceiling in the corner of the room in the draft of the oscillating fan but more a manually blown up balloon; heavier and somehow grossly more moist than its helium counterpart and not so much bouncing but rolling around on the dirty dust-ridden floor and basically empty.

he was doing the Elliott Smith eponymous. this, an album especially written for ... and other such moods.

the hf and pompous attitude and 'all is pedestrian' were defense mechanisms, protection. oh, god knows this. he knew this too, probably more than god, but he employed them with purpose. because he was sure that no one outside of a professional freudian and surely no one that he interacted with on a daily basis could ever figure it out, that they were defense mechanisms and that he was one in need of such defense. figure it out for themselves and see through his opacity. oh, they saw. he wore it, the protection, not so well - sort of like a white particulate mask. aside from saying idiot things like 'all is ped.', he over-enunciated his words and used full sentences and paragraphs only when speaking. which generally annoyed the shit out of his family members and basically everyone else that ever listened to him, especially his dog because what dog knows what the fuck "row-ell oh-verr" or "come oh-ver herrre" is?

the stylus had entered the 'alphabet town' grooves. it was a cool and dry night, first one in over a week. something about the harmonica in this one turns his heart to fine powder. the pile of which sits then still atop the liver waiting for that deep inhale - the one that signals the onset of a cry - to blow away...to disappear, the heart. disperse itself around the chest cavity, coating the lungs and back side of the sternum and ribs, and lose function. for a minute or two. poof.

but so he gets up from the desk, sitting on an exercise ball lately to ensure the lifespan of the back is +/- 10 years the lifespan of the remainder of the body, and puffs his chest out a bit with a deep inhalation. puts his shoulders back, mom always said no child of hers employed slumped shoulders, and walks slowly towards the mirror. he lets his head sort of float above his shoulders, swaying lightly as he walks. first looking at the wall. a pain in the back, lumbar but no action to alleviate. and then at the mirror, attacks the face with shitty thoughts. and rubs the sides of his head vigorously with the palms and pads of his hands. eyes shut. tight.

and maybe it was for him - the hf and 'all is ped.' - protection against himself. they were three of him, effectively. that which protected, that which needed protection, and that which observed.

furniture

"You're a piece of furniture." It was true, he was worthless until carefully placed in a functional position by someone that knew how to use him.

This type of man? Well, these men...they're purveyors of silent revolutions. Big ideas mostly playing out inside their safe heads.

Dost.

He then says something about Dostoevsky to his friends. But not just something that exhibits a cursory knowledge of Dost. - he always referred to the author that way. One of those shallow sort of ideas (the cursory sort, if you will) displayed in the same superficial manner an overzealous approval-seeking child may employ when using a newly acquired vocabulary word..."The gerund was eating breakfast next to me in the cafeteria."

No, this, in depth. He tells them of this story Dost. employs for Ivan in The Brothers K. The story, employed, according to our boy, by Dost. to shake one's faith in mankind: a bone-shivering display of punishment introduced by a general on a servant boy that has injured the paw of one of the general's hunting dogs...

After shutting the boy up for a night...

'The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the lock-up. It’s a gloomy, cold, foggy, autumn day, a capital day for hunting. The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry.... ‘Make him run,’ commands the general. ‘Run! run!’ shout the dog-boys. The boy runs.... ‘At him!’ yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes!...'

He had quoted the passage, verbatim. And by 'stands the mother of the child' he had risen off the couch to stand in front of the group of friends. His arms outstretched to the side, as if crucified. And speaking seriously and moving his eyebrows up and down with emphasis. And then hands together, interlocked with index fingers in a teepee touching bottom lip. A deep and throaty rasp for the general's speaking parts. 'At him!' - pointing and taking a sip of beer to pause. A bit of spittle falls when he carries on with the quote. He, our boy, was losing faith in MK himself...all was pedestrian and such.

"Th'fuck is wrong with you?" At least two of his boys say in stereo. And then from another, "First, Brothers K was written for reading in the winter, fuck, no one wants to think about that shit in the airy summer months. Second, keep that shit to yourself when we're sitting here drinking and third...turn up the Elliott Smith."

They were doing 'From a Basement on the Hill'

An Instant

He walked right in the door. Same as every day. It had been a long one, this day. Stress and worries and not much time for the quick phone calls, two to five minutes each, they usually had during the workday, three or four times a day, where she updated him on the minute details of exactly what she was doing or had been doing or was thinking of doing next and why or how she planned to do it. He loved those calls for all their nothingness and triviality that meant so much because it was between the two of them - like the one this week where she called only to say that the roses that she planted in their garden had bloomed. "B, did you see the roses?" "No" "They bloomed, like 20 of them, they look so good." "Really?" "Yeah. That's all." "Okay, bye." "Bye."

And she was there. There she was, as she was most nights, sitting on the couch with her 'fur babies'. She called the pets 'fur babies'. This particular night was stifling hot. And she was less sitting as she was poured onto the couch in the manner one employs so as to not have any two pieces of the body touching, anywhere. Fingers even spread apart. Seeing her induced a smile and memories of how he would come home to her back when they lived in an apartment, with a roommate, in a different place. He would come home later in the evening from work than she. She would wait up for him, sitting on the couch, this one more a love seat, in this exact poured manner - keeping cool and lazily looking at some television show with the remote hanging in her hand hanging off her arm hanging off the side of the couch. And he would, before even placing down his bag, climb onto the love seat, opposite her, and grab her feet or legs or some other nearby body part and squeeze. That's all. Just squeeze. And she would smile, before even looking up to acknowledge that he had come in and before even saying hello. And but this would be communication enough.

This was home for him. Just as it had been back in the apartment. A catharsis. Immediate and total. Home. No, Home! Really, a purifying of emotion. Like coming to the surface of the sea after a near drowning. And it wasn't so much that he was home - like this was his house - as it was that she was there and that she meant 'home' to him. Comfort. Stupid pet names. Subtle knowing smiles. Nighttime laughter. 17 on a scale of 1 - 10. Spooning (when it wasn't so hot). Telling her about nightmares and vice versa. Throwing a leg over hers in the middle of the night. Being late for work because being in bed with her sure beats anything the day can bring. And remembering that time, the exact time, that they realized they wanted to grow disgusting and old together. This 'home', this feeling, could get him through anything, he was sure of it. He lived for it, I guess you could say.

And so he looked at her, wryly, out of the side of his head. And smiled. A satisfaction all over his face. And she knew, he thought, and she smiled back, he thought. Nothing more. Nothing more needed. And 'thank god for this' he thought to himself.

And says..."Happy Birthday, Bushkies." And they'll talk more later, I'm sure, but it won't match this instant - like meeting her again for the first time. He started dancing around the room. Dancing and sort of strutting. He had totally forgotten about the day, about everything. He's moving like James Brown - sort of. An idiot. She made him do this. Not like forcing him to do it, the 'dancing', but something about her turned him into a child. Like seeing her triggered this trick the back of the brain liked to play on the front, it always had, whatever it was. An idiot child with one pursuit, a single objective...to get her to laugh. However brief and fleeting - so long as it was a true laugh. That laugh, so pure, all the reward he needs.

"Stop it Lovey."...laughing

...

he sat there, blankly. like ... - just like that - ...

the electroencephalograph would actually show long, slow delta wave frequencies. lazy and passively undulating. stage IV sleep type stuff - not so much idle and non-thinking as comatose and non-living. the neurologist would actually pull the electrodes off the scalp, bring them to six or so inches in front of his face to examine quizzically. he'd look at them while turning them back and forth, side to side, like a jeweler turns an examined gem and actually blow on them once or twice. then, not satisfied, he'd shake them vigorously before bringing them, the electrodes, to his ear like one does a broken watch. all before reconnecting them to the patient's lousy scalp.

the celtics were being shellacked in the nba playoffs.

he had unfortunately gotten to this point where all had become trivial. it was a bit of a dangerous spot to be in - 'all is pedestrian' became his mantra but he meant more insignificant than just undistinguished and ordinary but 'all is pedestrian' sounded more highfalutin and pompous than any other mantra he had tried out and that was the effect he was after...frankly, so did 'highfalutin and pompous', sound more hf and pompous.

zwiebacks and Berlin

okay, let's have the draft. how much do we have? two eighths. shrooms so good they'll make you feel like you're pissing your pants for the next four hours and the hours will feel like whole days. so, four full days of incontinence? whatever, you ready?

who's first? well i picked 'em up, i'll go, then you get the next two. fair - there are some boomers here. blue and purple...nicely grown. agreed, hit some switches on the stereo, it's not loud enough - and does it always have to be this 80's shit? hey, you want to hang out here? yeah, shut up. then it's going to be my choice for music until we start tripping - then we'll go one for one on the songs - and you can play your Simon and Garfunkel shit, every living boy in new york, and you can tell me all about how Simon switches to the minor chords at the end of america. only - only living boy, pick!

'Take my Breath Away'

ah Berlin (rummaging through the sandwich bag of mushrooms), reminds me of that time we ended up eating your step-brother's zwiebacks after getting baked. haha, i forgot about that - my mom was a bit irate. i'm telling you kid you're not going to be yourself tomorrow, after these. shut up, who's here? Schmitty and the Plumber - no, i'm serious, don't you have an interview in the morning? what are you, the police?

Schmitty still wore this shirt that read:

Pete Smith
5'10" - 175 lbs
145 IQ - 1340 SATs
BS Philosophy - Unemployed
Likes: Radiohead, Blind Melon

he had been wearing it since graduating - 14 months ago. kid was smart but filthy. the Plumber was wearing another concert t-shirt under his unzipped zip-up hoodie. navy blue with black thermal lining, the hoodie. he buys one, a concert T, at every show, for every band, on every tour - he has seven my morning jacket tees...the pirate ship one, probably being the sickest.

i fucking hate this song...Schmitty, about the Berlin.

luxury complaints

yeah, we get it. you like the toadies.
what?
say it again, huh? say that you like them again. it's just geting tedious. 'oh, half a dozen times a week' and 'oh, oh, Away vs. Tyler, which is better - but not actually talking like that with friends...' who gives a fuck?
.
not to mention the brooding. on and on. everyone has problems and has to make decisions and has trouble identifying. and frankly mr upper middle class - with your subtle grey house and your shutters and your job and your new grill and polished bostonian size 9's and leather carryall soft briefcase and your polos as t-shirts on the weekend and your high metabolism and soft hands and your decent looks and good genes and loving, alive family and US citizenship - you don't have a lot to brood about.
fair enough
i mean i gotta friend that was born without nostrils. still has a nose though. just a solid cartilagey functionless protrusion in the middle of the face below the eyes. looks like a nose out of a horror film. always breathes through the mouth. nasally and shit, like a constant, subtle snore. no one wants to see a person's tongue like that all the time and the face all lazy-looking and sometimes drooling...but the guy has no nostrils! friends call him C.Tony - short for catatonia. tried for a while to keep his teeth closed - his teacher had told him that it was unbecoming to always have the mouth open. but then he had to floss like five times a day. and he looked just angry-mad, breathing through the teeth like that. smells by placing the item in the mouth to the back of the throat, and sort of snorts the sinus cavity. choked on a yankee candle tealight last week.
okay, okay.
enough with the soft life and luxury complaints then.

he kept a couple journals, had done so for some time now. this small vertical-rectangular shaped one that could fit in his back pocket. his wife had given it to him when he travelled to asia-pac. this one for immediate codification of small thoughts. like "operational definition of intelligence used by Binet in creating the IQ test...further thought required". and always a larger 80 - 100 sheet composition book. the current, 9 3/4" x 7 1/2", college ruled, and made of recycled waste. the pen slid on the pages a bit - them, the pages, being recycled waste and all. this second one for page- or two-page-long compositions, essays, and other such philosophical musings that he couldn't possibly explain through his "uhm's" and "ah's" in real spoken word. like, the one entitled 'on happiness' comprised of an argument (to himself) that even the selfish seeker of little more than his own happiness (himself included, in this 'selfish seeker' group) benefits from a utilitarianism (greatest for greatest) societal approach to life because 1. reciprocation exists and has spanned evolution and 2. the selfish seeker's own happiness (his portion of the happiness pie) grows with a growing overall pie. if one can envision such a pie.

also, he always did that, started their titles with "on". he read that einstein or some other hero also entitled his/her own ruminations that way.

not sure when this started, the journaling, probably in college when he realized that life inside his head was superior to that outside. plus, he wanted to be an observant songwriter and his memory was a stress-ridden disaster. an overgrown wasteland of misplanted worryings and other weed-like saplings of anxiety. much needless use of the brain's RAM. but just as in adopted garden for the ignorant green-thumb - much confusion between weed and flower, until bloom.

he was doing Rubberneck again, The Toadies. it's 2010. nowadays, it's a half a dozen times a week for this album - strongly concentrated in the friday to sunday timeframe. Music! something about the way it tickled his nervous system.

"confusion of the difference between time and space in the statement 'it started raining' when weather systems generally move across the atmosphere...further thought required."

the face

staring at the mirror staring back at the face. the cheeks used to be fresh Jello molds. the face, you know? so valuable. the brain is cool too, i guess. a second tier kind of cool. but the face. in this society? oh gawd. the man of status is not the man of strong intellect. not yet. and holy christ do we need status. social comparing and ensuring one can point to at least one thing, one trait or possession, that is better on/for/with you than on/for/with all of your acquaintances. doesn't have to be the same thing for all acquaintances but there has to be something for each of them. winning every conversation. and "owning" people. and saying 'fuck that guy, he sucks and makes me uncomfortable' if there is nothing you found that actually sucks about him.

freaks.

our progenies though. our progeny. ha! will they laugh. they will have such gigantic heads, teeming full of cerebral folds and massive prefontal cortices. won't even be able to refer to them as 'heads', the houses for their brains. the term 'head' will be a joke. reserved for someone of feeble constitution. foreheads like GD elephant men. no?

his boy called:
'you want to do some Marley tonight?'
'i'm already on the Toadies with a head full of triumph, can't stop now, knowwhatahmeen?'

they debated a bit, just whether 'Tyler' or 'Away' is the better Toadies song:
'at any rate, and I think we can both agree with this, it doesn't get any better than the way he sings;

"...and if I'm asleep, make sure my blanket covers me, yeah...when i'm away..."

regardless of meaning. he puts his whole life into that effing lyric.' but they didn't actually talk like that with each other.

saw the boys play a few nights back. the boys from brooklyn and cincinnati. something about meloncholy made to sound so sweet and triumphant that actually makes me happy. some fairweathers from i don't know where or how that took off early anyway. some diehards from Sad Songs, or Alligator more likely, describing the band and it's wino frontman to friends they wanted to impress. some college kids dancing like flopheads with no neck muscles. some girls screaming like "i can fix you, Matt. i can." and other such moist longings. some supercilious prick that actually took his balls out and rested them on the chairback in front of him. just left it there all night, the sac.

memes?

he wanted his map plastered all over the place. people to know of him. his likeness on billboards like those real estate agents buidling relationships with smiling square depictions of their strong jawlines. his name broadcast on the radio for all the radio-wave-capable universe to hear. his hand shaking the president's. his arm outstretched above his head and his index finger extended in a #1 sign on WCVB as the 6 o'clock news fades out to commercial...like Larry after hitting playoff three or something. people to enjoy his written word to a certain extent. his portrait across the evening sky. no really, "project my smiling face from a satellite onto the atmosphere above the northern hemisphere for one year after I pass." he told NASA over the phone.

no that would never happen, the phone call. he was from boston. so. he lived in this self-imposed middle. this range of geniune comfort. it was unacceptable to exit this range. one could lose friends and suffer utter alienation the instant one exhibited an emotion or excitement one iota outside - save of course at the TV during a Sox, C's, or B's game. what one did instead, when meeting up with one's boys for example, was like make one's eyelids a bit lazy and bring one's head back slowly to a slightly raised position ending with a brief jerk of the chin. and make fun of something someone is wearing right away. the first guy to not be wearing all white sneakers, say.

do not shake hands with one's boys. do not talk seriously about anything with them. be emotionless. be malleable. don't take a stand on anything. ensure that someone else likes something prior to you liking it. don't have dreams. or if you do, don't you dare express them. and exhibit the exact same indifferrence in the following three scenarios 1. dream acheived, 2. dream still oustanding, 3. dream fallen short of. enter a room and be present at certain events but go unnoticed. disappear to the corner of the room but appear intelligent by being reserved and carrying a concentrated look. generally, be a coward but pound the bridge of the nose and soft eye-socket bones of the first guy that points out that you are such. punch with your pinky finger not fully engaged in the fist, like rich executives drink their diet cokes, because it looks cooler in the mirror when you practice at home. call "the family" if you ever run into trouble above one's head. do well in school but play it off. love the story of will hunting. go and see about a girl.

he was a quiet and reserved boy with the humility of christ. in fact his friends called him that, jesus. but they also were from Boston and resided in the same mediocrity. so. they placed no emphasis on either syllable. a monotone...je-sus. lovers of the middle, so to speak. these men are loyal men and are men that will raise families of equally loyal boys and foul-mouthed but beautiful boston girls. but these men, like he, leave no non-genetic legacy, sadly, of themselves to be remembered.

gold

Struck gold, once. Still have it.

who's driving?

and so but now he had this thing where he shut his eyes while driving. each time longer and longer - 'just to the next telephone pole' and then 'for the next two telephone poles' and then 'just to the next mile marker'. but always on the highway, so with fewer turns and no intersections.

this nerve in his brachial plexus had been ravaged by an office chair. the dull pain in his armpit and shoulder dampened his mood a bit.

what did he do? what did he do? what did he do next? and so then he walked around his house. aimless. in a stifling heat. he sat there with his shirt off - his torso skin is fucking nasty, for the record, and he is starting to get chest hair, not the manly kind but more the one-here-one-here-a-little-patch-over-there kind - and he sat at his computer desk (three pieces of particle board held together by hidden screws from ikea) with the skin of his, not fat or overweight but, extra-massed stomach physically sitting on the edge of the desk (you know, with chair pulled in really and almost too close to the desk) and punched away at his laptop, experimenting with commas and details and one-word sentences.

his left eyelid acquired a twitch recently. a rapid movement that absolutely could not be voluntary. it happened mostly when he discussed serious things and made decisions. he knows when it's coming and can feel it happen, of course, but he wonders if others can see it. is it dramatic enough for someone else to observe - that's a whole nothah question. tough to tell if from stress or not, the twitching.

he longed for a simple life of frankly just survival. he owned all these things...all these fucking things. and all these fucking clothes and he really just wanted to wear this grey sweater over a blue button down shirt and olive green pants everyday...he'll probably wear a suit tomorrow. sometimes it's not so funny to see all your dreams as reality.

he drove like a GD douchebag. the eyelid was twitching and the extra stomach mass was greasing up the desk. he felt it was a waste of time, the driving, so he tried as hard as possible to get to the desination as fast as possible. this caused problems for his passengers, if any, and for basically every other car on the road.

so fragile, really. and delicate. he was beginning to notice this. all these things he observed of himself, and probably nearly everything else, held together by these feeble ties...like, barely actually connected and more just 'next to each other' in flight and plummeting to the earth. sprinting at breakneck speed in the absolute black and actually doing okay and not tripping or being destroyed or destroying anyone else and really actually making it for a while but being able to disunite and recognize that it can't possibly last for that much longer, can it?

?

drank himself silly last night as we sat motionless, heads cocked and eyes quizzical - watching. "shee-zuss" as he drilled down a plastic bottle of vodka that his dad had been using to de-rust the lawn mower blades. ended up at the tattoo parlor run by the biker girl with that pearl jam lyric I NEVER SUCKED SATAN'S DICK tatooed on the back of her neck not because she knew PJ or the song but because she had sucked it and loved the irony. he ended up with a chest full of a bearded russian farmer wearing a rubber apron performing a caesarean section on a bovine birthing a calf...a nice piece.

"come on!" you screamed helplessly, looking over at your other friends. and he would just quote that Melon lyric he used when he wanted you to butt out..."...and I only wanted to be sixteen and free..."

"..."

"...hey william, is that the last time i'm going to look at you?"

m. chills

We were going to do High Violet.

Something had changed in the air. We were done hybernating in a sense; winter depression had passed and our neomammalian brains had taken back control. Amazed at how blood did not rush from our heads to leave us faint with the immediacy of our ascent from supine misery to upright victory. We had literally morphed from a state of utter disrepair to smiling balloonheads. As if our dopamine had itself snorted cocaine prior to release into the synaptic cleft. We were in the garden staring at the sun extended inhales and open-mouthed-eyes-closed exhales - fuck the city, we said - raising arms like goalposts and making our bodies X's arching backs heads back the sun boiling our milky-white maps into full smiles...life! We bipolar manics.

'And I can't fall asleep without a little help. It takes awhile to settle down my ship of hopes.'

He was a merciless intellectual. A total prick grammarian - searching and attacking. 'Who' vs. 'whom', any absence of 'ly' in adverbs, the supplant of 'me and you' for 'you and I', and other such imperfections. "Goddamn, I'm tired of being correct." He spent 70% of his time correcting others. A verbal accountant. He cared more than anyone I know who and how many would be at his funeral. It's amazing what insecurity will drive us to.

'I don't have the drugs to sort it out, sort it out. Little voices swallowing my soul, soul, soul'

We rarely talked world events - the reds running amok in Thailand just two years after the yellows shut down the airport and such, new revelations about France and Spain strong-arming Germany into this socialist Euro project to save the laggards - and how Greece singlehandedly proved the Germans' point, and the conservatives shitting themselves over our President, his evil ways, and his latest nomination of a woman without many womanly features to the high court - we always thought that if the news big enough then we would find out sooner or later.

'Lemonworld' is the kind of song you listen to three, four times in repeated sequence to bathe in the impact. Wash yourself in this song. Get emotional about it. Make the lyrics mean something personal to you. Say "fuck" and mean it. Tell your brother about it and try out some new adjectives. Keep it for yourself. Hum the melody when you're laying with your wife. Cry when you see them play it live. Listen to it in your car, in traffic, on the way to work. Lipsync to the mercedes to your right. Think about driving into the guardrail or a tree...Some bands get it just right, don't they?

catching yawns

He sat. Chain smoking. Cigarette after cigarette. Smoking, smoking, smoking. "I think I'll do another cigarette." Just seconds after fidgetingly ashing out the prior. The new stick hanging from his mouth in the nonchalant manner that smokers use with unlit cigarettes, his lips slightly askew and the white paper wrapping of the cigarette just miraculously stuck to top and bottom lip and not touching any teeth - not to mention the lips so dry and pale and sort of stuck together themselves. He striked the match - 'fitlt' and the tiny roar of yellow orange. Staring then for just an instant at the fire atop the lit match. Entranced and oblivious to everything - absolutely everything else - eyebrows involuntarily lift ever so slightly. "Eh. The anticipation of a com- a coming peace. A minor consolation, I know, but like a sort of solace anyway." He spoke quickly through the stick. Tightening his lips' grip on the stick, he brings both hands to his face, the right - holding the lit match - more slowly. Inhaling no, sucking, hard to ignite...a 7mm bright red circle. The stylus had just begun to touch 'Hyacinth House'.

He had this way of rubbing the top right side of his scalp furiously with the inside of his right thumb as he held the stick extended away from the head with the two first fingers. Closing his eyes when he made his points, "the thing is...". His face was just a desiccated cow's hide. "The thing is...why, what do you think about it? About all this?"
"..."
"I think I'll do another cigarette."

Have you ever really watched someone smoke? Closely? The ridiculous battle with the slightest of breezes to keep a lighter or match lit long enough to ignite the cigarette. Or even worse, the putrid tip-to-tip use of another's already lit cigarette to light. The manner in which the stick smolders in between index and middle finger in the downtime between inhales. Emitting black/yellow/brown smoke all over hand and shirtsleeve, staining also the fingernails. The spasmodic flicking of the bottom of the stick with the back of the thumb to ash the tip - an uncontrollable tic. That eyes-closed instant after inhale where they rhythmically hold the inhalation lungside for a single beat before release - near orgasmic, you'd think by watching.

"...I want to tell you about Texas radio and the big beat..."

I cannot possibly even pretend to know what demons tear this man's heart out. What ruinous thoughts have control over him and have demolished his composure and self-esteem. He has started to dip tobacco at work now. It's a riot. In an attempt at surreptitiousness, he carries a worn paper coffee cup around the office. Faking sips whenever he has to spit. The guy stinks.

And how quickly we learn the ease with which we can swerve out of control. And how painful it can be to reflect back on our former manageable selves...while the memory still lasts. I guess that's the killer - being able to remember the feeling of composure but know that it's fleeting...just after the pilot aborts but while flight is stable for a short time, stable by momentum only.

"The fucking ants...crawling all over my skin...gah! My back just kills, you know? And like my neck, aahhh. Don't you get like this? I have like this yawn in my chest - you know what I mean? I can't get it, I can't catch it. No matter how deep I inhale...no inhale is deep enough to turn the corner to climb over this yawn."
"..."
"I think I'll do another cigarette."

old and broken

He had been sitting again. In his rocking chair on that front porch that he built with sweat as a younger man. He was once proud. Of what he had built and the friends he had and, most, the wife he loved. She loved him too. Enough to care for him ceaselessly and to ignore his selfish tendencies and to try, even before herself, to make him smile...always before herself. He had promise, or so he thought. Unfulfilled, and that he knew, and now this is what he considers most.

The warm summer was giving way now. To cooler months and shorter days that always bred depression. None worse than that one though. When it happened and they lost promise and his mind weakened and his resolve dampened and optimism died. The proper vocabulary did not exist. The perfectionist had lost control, words became tougher and uglier anyway and silence was easier for his diminished capacity. The world was wrong. Or maybe it was god or evolution or all them at the same time. But there was no one to take it out on and so, he blamed himself. Then and soon after and then for years on end. And this was ruinous.

He rocked methodically. Content and comfortable like one does when favorite song plays in head. Looking at him, one can see the years. Living still within his wrinkled face, greyed head, pained movements, and yellowed teeth. His eyes give a thousand-mile stare and his responses are delayed. Long enough for one to question whether he even heard the question in the first place. And so he rocks, measuring his life against the ridiculous standards he had set for himself. Sure, the friends he knew, the days he loved, and of course his wife, his partner, his queen. But goddamn those standards and how they were never neared, for whatever reason and whomever's blame, and the angst that brought and how it kept him frightened to death of committment for fear of failure...and where that leaves him now...an unfulfilled promise.

control

the animal returns!

he loses restraint in an instant. no longer even-keel. no longer of acceptable mental capacity. no longer composed. he is rage! uncontrollable furnace. he's kicking and screaming, literally and primally - totally uninhibited. clenched jaw and the gritty taste of grinded toothdust.

and he's searching unconsciously, feverishly, for something of comfort...something he can control. 'where the fuck is this?' or 'why the fuck is this so untidy?' or some other triviality. trivial to his human form and under normal circumstances, but to animal? of life or death criticality.

and when he finds it? that something that was so necessary for him to restore congruence? that he sought without cerebral thought? does it provide evidence that he has control? that he is...man? does it restore status? meh. unfortunately the assuagement is but a brief breeze.

just...need...control...

...or perception of it, at least. please, we beg of you, trick us into thinking we are in control. and in return? happiness and obedience.

genius

these men? these men are heroes, son. fashion yourself after them. burrow your soul in the wombs of their writings and sap on the teets of their knowledge. for if i am to be considered man at all, then it is only because their genius has long outlasted their genes.

thank god for these men and others like them. for they have done most to shape our species into one of pride.

heed not that outsized rewards are granted to those that play on field and screen and with money. it will long be this way, as our advance is ever mitigated with wanton desire. but immortality will be granted not to these men; for that will be the province of lasting genius - those that have deceived the deity and altered the course of his divine plan.

Are you a strong man, a hero...a conqueror? Barrel chested? Destroying opponents and mocking the weak? Brow thickening and intimidating when furrowed? Confident like the alpha lion and with the coveting mates to match? No one left to insult you? Nothing existing to suprise you? Never having been subordinated? A supercilious hero? Face kept stone when life - the only one who truly can - slaps it? Or, better yet, an ironical smile, because you had anticipated this and expected that very slap at that very moment...are you immutable and blessed by the Gorgon?

No, I am sorry, you are not.

You are, my friend, soft and mealy. Mottled and pallid. An over-ripened apple. A milquetoast. A fragile ego with insecure intelligence. Clinging to life with brittle and rusted ties. A mere gust of wind would blow your world to dust...and you? Staring at the sky with those X's over your eyes.

You pathetic fool! You cartoon! Can you at least balance your worthlessness with some reserve and end this, this naivete? Can you not, for once, react like the hero, indifferently when life treats you as God Job? Who is to blame?

I see, my son, that you have grown your hair to hide the face God granted you. And, that you are - brick after slow brick - building your wall. If you remain muted, you'll end a neurotic, conversing with himself...ruined. Who will take you in then? Who will listen to the ravings of a madman. Who will be the one to carefully and painstakingly loosen and untie the bunched and clustered knot your ego has become then?

Surely, not I.

open letter to science

you and your induction. everything you have taught us, so fragile. nothing i'm afraid can ever be proven by such methods, regardless of the number of successful repetiticns. asymmetry abound - one nonsuccess or contradiction and, ah, all is lost even after seemingly-infinite successes.

forever yours,
- mathematics

walking across the desert

"it's...just...laying me to waste"

And now 30.

And only a slightly more melancholic version of the decade-junior.

Face unshaven, hair caked with filth, brain knotted and immobile and heavy, sad eyes and hands tucked into armpits, a slight rocking motion for comfort, and sentences amiss. Insufficient vocabulary to explain - noone to understand, anyway. Social skills long extinct, barked at an adolescent today. A litter of thoughts fighting for a spot...

...our proud jesus, disengaged and walking across the desert, sun sapping the fucking life out of him.

And now slowly lifting leg into casket - just to try, just to lay down for a moment, just one minute I swear. Final thin pages of an average and unexciting book turning mindlessly in the draft, dust-wooden, empty room...blue-gray...

"Let me see your tongue, son"

the rote individual

The man who has acquired knowledge via memorization and without intellectual challenge has suffered a grave disservice. Becoming, in life, a sickly and vile man to work with. His entire being now functioning via rote processes and rules manufactured in head; rigid and defined and incapable of responding appropriately to dynamic situations. One can almost smell the painful inner deliberations, almost all of which end in rejection (which, to be sure, serves to protect and preserve). "Where does this fit? How to react? What rule to follow?" "Warning...exiting comfort zone!!"

One may award him the euphemism 'principled' but a more precise categorization would be automaton.

"Normal"

An operational definition:

That which is currently and has been, in recent times (for the most recent ten year period), practiced by a majority (greater than 50%) of your population sample.

For example: working a greater-than-40-hour work week is normal while maintaining a blog of harebrained non-verbal recitations of personal literature and inner cannibalistications is not.

For example: stress, normal; congruence, saved for one or two weeks per annum.