gandhi?

They say that you can pick your battles, and I have come to understand that we are defined by the adversity that we face, and choose to face. If life had been easy for Gandhi, none of us would ever have heard of him; he was confronted by certain challenges and injustices that he decided to throw himself against. It is not that he was the only man witnessing these things, merely that he was the only one willing to take issue with it at first. He picked his battle, and paid the ultimate price of assassination for it. We are picking our battles as well, but are finding ourselves left in the ever-growing ocean of mediocre and ineffective individuals because we fight the little battles, the personal ones for sustenance and income. Who is fighting the big battles today? Who is our Gandhi?
Does anyone really believe that there is less injustice and oppression in the world now than before? Because there certainly seems to be less protest over it. What we are participating in is not a culture of action, but a culture of distraction. If Gandhi had been able to watch The Sopranos on a semi-regular basis, it’s possible that the thought of activism might never have occurred to him.
I discuss all of this because I feel an overwhelming lack of contentment. Whatever part of the system I am participating in, whatever role I have in the American Dream, is not working for me. It seems to me as though life ought to be worth living for its own sake, but more and more trends are emerging making it seem as though life needs medication to be worth living, as the pharmaceutical industry is exploding. What are we compensating for, in needing all of the Xanax and Ritalin? Is it truly a case-by-case problem, as doctors seem to think, when individuals find it difficult to cope and function in normal society? That would be a logical conclusion decades ago when there appeared to be less people “needing” medication to function. However, it is seeming more and more like everybody is developing a mild case of ADD or clinical depression or anxiety for which they require some narcotic solution. The logical conclusion now, having observed this, is that most of us feel we can’t quite function in society!
So is that our fault? Is the flaw inherently ours for not fitting into this system? If it were just me, I’d probably say yes. But there are so many of us feeling this way that I can only think that the system is the problem, that society is somehow making us feel oppressed. I know that I’m starting to sound like some raving hippie, but I’m not an anarchist (yet) nor do I advocate that we all renounce society and become an army of Alexander Supertramps, refusing to participate in the public. These would be selfish acts of disdain towards our fellow men. I just think we need more activists in this country, more charity, more whistle-blowing, and more scrutiny directed towards our politicians.
At the risk of sounding like an extremist, the entire political-legal system is fucked. Anyone operating under the assumption that the Constitution is like some perfect, divine document is an idiot. It’s got more loopholes than an afghan blanket, and when people find these loopholes, they don’t correct them: They exploit them! Lawyers, politicians, and lobbyists can make entire careers out of this, reaping the benefits of their taxpayers’ ignorance. This is the upshot of our selfish, individual-oriented capitalist system, and so we even come to admire these people because their lack of moral fiber makes them wealthy and successful: So it is we see flawed people prevailing in a flawed system, while virtuous, hardworking men scrape by on minimum wage and are fooled into believing it’s sufficient, even deserved to live as they do.
So where is our Gandhi? Happily watching American Idol?

Brief but to the Point?

The problem with trying to be a writer is that it’s not all book signings and admiring readers. It turns out that I actually have to write something first, which, it turns out, is actually really hard. Especially when one is as fried and addicted as I am to a chemical which has no particularly necessary side effects, just an empty sense of contentment and enduring exhausted laziness. Don’t get me wrong, I love weed, and I love everything that weed has done to broaden my perspective and update my worldview, but it just may be that, at this juncture in my life, I have already enjoyed all of the benefits of marijuana that I possibly can, and that continual use of the substance is not needed to enjoy these effects for the rest of my life.
As it stands currently, I’m lucky to be able to form sentences for all the damage I’ve done to my short-term memory and basic mental functioning. Although cannabis has a tendency to make people think more deeply through long-term potentiation and an increase in retrograde signaling between synapses, it is also notorious for making them think more slowly due to getting them high and letting less oxygen reach their brains. Yes, this is all true, but no, I won’t link to any studies or sources because this isn’t a science paper and I’m frankly tired of all the pomp and circumstance that comes with doing anything academic in today’s world where ink on a degree is worth more to an employer than all the knowledge in the world. But that’s another matter, really. What I am discussing now is my inability to write, to structure, to plan what I am going to write and then execute it with no tangential ranting.
I must say that’s probably the only thing I am conveying effectively.

I Wanna Be Sedated

Have you ever wondered whether you could decide to go crazy? Ever taken a look at your life and thought that maybe it’d be easier to make your own world and live in it? A world that seems proper, and that makes sense to you? A whole new existence, a different type of life, spent entirely in the ecstasy of imagination rather than the confinement of reality. What might be different? What would you change?
Then again, what if it’s not really the reality that makes life so difficult, but the living. The going on, continually being aware and concerned for your own well being, thinking about your future and your past and trying not to forget the present, waking up and brushing your teeth every day… Even if you lived in a fantasy world and there was no brushing of teeth, there would be something else to face day after day. It’s no easier to be insane than not, I understand.
And the definition of mental illness is something that is expanding every day – not that there are more crazy people now than 100 years ago or anything, but we’ve started noticing and labeling every little tic and tell in everybody that before long there will be one distinct mental diagnosis for each person and the concept of normality will be logicked out of existence. Of course, in my opinion this is how it always should have been: None of this grouping of completely different personalities together because one sees their commonalities as “symptoms.” A person should be expected to have a personality, however it is connected to their intellect, and this, unless dangerous, should be accepted for what it is: a unique perspective, a different train of thought, a breath of fresh air. The last thing we want is a brave new world of hyper-medicated clone drones, so before thinking something is “wrong” with yourself and rushing to your nearest rich, fat pharmacist, ask yourself whether it is truly a crippling mental disorder you face, or merely the “slings and arrows” making you long for a crutch in a rough patch.

Exhaust Fumes

Camus said that beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. This is a fairly easy thing for me to believe; I have discovered that the more fully I become aware of the world around me the more anxious and dissatisfied I become. Age-old questions to which there have never been answers are bothering me now as they have other contemplatives for thousands of years, and no more progress has been made on them than on alternative energy. Questions as to the proper nature and application of the sexes, the formula of happiness, or the dilemma of a universal morality. For millennia we have considered ourselves civilized, but why? Because we cleverly crafted the spear, then the rifle, then the bomb? Because we have developed vast systems of subjugation from which there is no escape? Because we promote our own ways insistently and ethnocentrically, labeling our culture as “high culture” and crushing any who refuse to be indoctrinated?
I say that no man can be considered civilized for as long as he eats well and another goes hungry. I say that no man can be civilized whose home was built by the homeless. I find myself wondering what the hell we are doing presuming to tell anyone how to run their countries, trying to “spread democracy” and all that bullshit when we haven’t even proved that the system works yet. The Iraq war itself is symptomatic enough of that, that democracy served the intentions of the president before those of the people or even of the Congress. This isn’t even anything new, although usually it is not so blatant when government gets its purposes reversed. Often it is something subtle, like taking some shavings off the civic budget for an inflated paycheck, or jumping in a businessman’s pocket to keep the market’s “invisible hand” a little lighter, but it has been going on for pretty much as long as we’ve been used to the Constitution enough to exploit, ignore, and insult it.
The best part is that politicians have created an impression among the people that there is nothing wrong with this, that government naturally functions this way. We’re supposed to watch the president get waited on hand and foot twenty minutes away from where his constituents are living in one of the nation’s hardest ghettos and ask no questions about our tax dollars and our healthcare and our rights and our government’s duties to us. Here we are, in today’s world, preaching our old nationalistic doctrines of capitalism and democracy, claiming to be the greatest nation in the world when we are only the laziest, the most pathetic and squalid, the nation which could’ve been great and gave it up to chase its own money. We are not the strongest nation in the world economically. We are not the strongest nation in the world militarily. We are not the smartest nation in the world, we are not the hardest working nation in the world, and we are not the happiest nation in the world. Apparently, we’ve been wasting breath on over fifty years worth of Americanized rhetoric insisting on the superiority of capitalism and the folly of socialists, because the socialist nations in Europe have been showing us up. We even had an 150 year head start on some of these nations, that only recently restructured their countries after the world wars, and they’ve managed to pass us by in terms of quality of life, even though we’ve been exercising our precious Constitution for such a long time.
It’s not that the Constitution “doesn’t work,” it’s that we won’t let it anymore; we think we’re far too clever and see every gap and loophole as an opportunity to rape the intent of the founding fathers by seizing for ourselves a scrap more of wealth and influence. Even trying to fix and amend the Constitution we are making it worse. Why do we ask for amendments regarding same sex marriage when no one is looking to do anything about poverty and hunger? What matters more? Who gives a fuck about the sanctity of marriage if your average couple isn’t eating? All our focus is misdirected and none of our intentions are noble. We didn’t go to Iraq as liberators, but as beggars thirsty for oil. If we truly gave a fuck about human rights and the dignity of our species and the spread of “civilization,” where was our liberating army during apartheid, as Mandella sat in a cell for forty years? Maybe fucking over Africans is becoming a tradition for our government.

Folly and Youth

There’s something inexplicable about being young. A certain feeling exists, like an aura around me, as I go about my daily tasks. I work late into the night, shedding sweat-stained clothes to enjoy a dinner of cold pizza by moonlight, and a part of me prays to God that my life is nothing like this in five years. Another part of me wonders, after these days truly are behind me, whether I will miss them. What might I miss, what significance might nostalgia infuse these memories with, that today seem so mundane and menial? I haven’t been alive very long, as far as people go, but I have certainly noticed that I tend to most fondly remember the little things about my past, the nuances and fine touches that make each chapter of our lives so distinct in our recollection.
Nostalgia is a funny thing, and deceptive also; in my experience, most of what I long for in my younger days is the simplicity of things, which equates to my relative ignorance of the complexity of the world in which we live. The process of growing up seems to consist in taking on more and more responsibilities: a child is given chores, a teen a car and a part-time job, and the emerging young man eventually becomes entirely responsible for himself. As time goes on, he will become responsible for others as well, friends and family, children and grandchildren. There is an ancient Chinese proverb which I remembered particularly for its familiar chiastic structure, but also contains some great wisdom. Upon looking it up I find it is the opening section of the Classic of Great Learning, one of the Shi Jing. The translation is a little rough, but I won’t risk losing any of the subtlety and intent of the Chinese original by further altering the language:

In-past those wishing-to make-bright bright virtue in under-heaven:
First order his-own state;
Wishing-to order his-own state,
First regulate his-own family;
Wishing-to regulate his-own family,
First cultivate his-own person;
Wishing-to cultivate his-own person,
First correct his-own mind-heart;
Wishing-to correct his-own mind-heart,
First make-sincere his-own ideas;
Wishing-to make-sincere his-own ideas,
First extend his-own knowledge;
Extending knowledge is-in “investigating” things.

Things “investigated” and after knowledge comes,
Knowledge comes and after ideas sincere,
Ideas sincere and after heart correct,
Heart correct and after person cultivated,
Person cultivated and after family regulated,
Family regulated and after state ordered,
State ordered and after under heaven great peace.

That is quite an adequate explanation of the process of maturing and becoming a good steward, and serves as a reminder to those who have sufficiently ordered themselves and their families of their civic duties, their need to spread their own prosperity by aiding society in the democratic process. Of course, none of them do, and I’m not one to show them how it’s done; I’ve only barely begun “investigating” things and have practically no sincere ideas, a wholly incorrect mind-heart, an uncultivated person, an unregulated family, and a state that’s pretty much a mockery of itself. My only consolation in all of this is that I’m young enough so that none of it is totally my fault.
Yet. I’ve got a long, treacherous road ahead of me and will easily have as much opportunity to fuck everything in the world up as much as anybody else did, maybe even more with all the exciting new doors being opened up by technology nowadays. And if history has proven anything, it’s that man-made disasters usually weren’t started with the intention of becoming such. Mad scientists don’t really exist: just clumsy but influential individuals lacking in foresight. So is it worth the trouble to be prominent and dedicated and advocate a cause if one unwittingly leaves the world worse off for it? I suppose we might have asked Dr. Leary.
In any case, I face my future with definite apprehension. I’m both terrified and exhilarated to think of what I may get to experience and become responsible for. Some days adulthood just can’t arrive soon enough, and others I wish I could be a child forever and never have to worry about all this fucking grown up stuff like bills and leases and interest rates and arraignments and performance reviews and automobile repairs and health problems ever again.
But then what would make life worth living longer if we couldn’t find ways to get more out of it as it went on? Things have to get harder in order for us to get better at handling them, and the better we get at life than, theoretically, the happier we can be. I think it’s a hypothesis worth testing.

Better Days

I live for thinking of better days, gazing backwards at regrets now past the haze of things a mind may fabricate or forget. The best times behind, I say, are what let good times roll on unbidden, even when history’s rewritten with nostalgia writ over the pain and the trials, and the sin and the shame. We all play this game, catch ourselves in a bluff that perception isn’t reality, but it seems close enough to the likes of us, and our vanity. How can we not take this power of God’s and paint earth with our face and the sky with our thoughts, cannily, to resist realer daydreams than heaven or Oz to not live in a world that’s what we think it ought be? It seems that delusion’s a symptom of sanity.

A Little Soapbox of My Own

It’s funny, I think, how life is always just barely easy enough to live, just barely not too hard. I’m astounded, sometimes, at just how much a person is really capable of enduring, of overcoming. There’s just so much potential tucked into the clever corners of the human mind that it’s no wonder some people have been able to achieve and devise such amazing and awe-inspiring things as riddle human history.
We shy away from hardship, and flinch when it comes near, but after the storm passes and the trial is over, the weaker elements have been scorched from out the crucible and those more ingenious faces of the soul are forced from their hidden places. It is our suffering that makes us stronger, as the benefit of exercise comes from the rebuilding of muscle tissues torn down and destroyed by exertion, and the benefit of education comes from the painful tedium of study and unabashed contemplation.
It’s not that horrible things happen to people because they deserve them, but so that they have an opportunity to prove their strength to themselves in forcing life to go on. We’ve all had moments of perfect darkness when it seemed to us as though our lives were over and that there was nothing left of the world we wanted to live in, but before long it dawned on us that that world had never truly existed, and before it ever could we had to do something to bring it about. The darkest depths of hopelessness can be liberating, the sensation of complete impotence very empowering. Enlightening, at the very least, to see the world looking up from the bottom and understand just how little control anyone has over their lives and what happens in them, enslaved always by the version of reality they were born into and taught to perceive and to follow along with…
Ethnocentrism. We have a word for it, and we know what it means, but that doesn’t keep us from believing that our way is still the best way, doesn’t keep us from falling into the same misconception that has afflicted every great civilization to come along before us. But every great civilization sees its zenith, and is quickly humbled by the instructive rod of history in the making.
Hardship comes inevitably and to everyone, a mask of disaster and fear pulled over the winking face of opportunity and change, revolution and growth. I see the coming troubles as the fever that will burn the disease from our society, not as a herald of the apocalypse or the early rumblings of the next World War—I have higher hopes for us. There’s a lot going wrong in the world right now, and there always has been, and though it seems as though there’s more problems than there’s ever been before I feel as though we’re the closest we’ve ever been to really solving things for everybody. The answers, as always, are just locked away in our heads somewhere. We only need to get at them.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein

Novacaine - A Short Story

As Brian turned the key forcefully and creaked open the door to his place, he sighed in exasperation at being greeted by the same old sight: a cluttered one-bedroom apartment, with a tiny crumb-covered kitchen, its floor stained by beer, coffee and neglect. There were cracks and smudges from careless hands and fists on the walls, which Brian supposed might have, at one point, been white, but have since seen so many tenants, landlords, and years in general that they grew tired of keeping up appearances and reverted to a sickly pale yellow, something like the color of an old smoker’s teeth.
But he made the best of it, he felt. He still had all his hip-hop posters and pin-ups, stolen street signs and a Raiders flag from when he was in high school that he used to try and cover up the filthy walls as they grinned cruelly at him. The kitchen linoleum was just as ugly, or at least he remembered it being just as ugly. Dusty footprints, smeared spots, and bits of discarded then trampled food had blended in and become part of its hideously dated original pattern. Whether this made it easier on the eyes or not, ever since Brian had moved in his renovations had at least made the linoleum easier to ignore.
He hated his carpet the most; it was a filthy, tangled mess of pea green shag. For the first month, Brian couldn’t help but feel like he needed to be wearing bellbottoms to walk on it, or at least buy some circular sunglasses and grow a set of ridiculous lamb-chop sideburns. He snorted in amusement at the thought, and settled on a more preferable solution for his carpet problem. After a few weeks of torturous deliberation, and some trial runs of the method, Brian decided to hide the green monstrosity underneath a nice solid layer of his shit.
He killed two birds with one stone here, a fact he noted quite smugly. Not only was the abominable carpet invisible to him, but now that he had established his new system of self-organization, he discovered that he no longer needed to procrastinate shopping for shelves or a dresser. They would have taken up so much of his space, really, that he was glad to no longer need them.
Brian slammed his door shut behind him, reaching back without looking to turn the deadbolt with a bit more force and haste than would seem necessary to anyone else. He was irritated, definitely, though unsure why. It wasn’t the sea of dirty clothing, candy wrappers, and other assorted shit that stretched out before him; he had long since grown accustomed to that, as he had to the questionable hue of the walls and the collage of stains on the kitchen floor.
Though oddly enough he still resented that green carpet, the peeling linoleum, and the walls themselves. Inexplicable, he thought, and so shrugged away his realization of this resentment, dismissing it as one of his many quirks not worth worrying about. But the agitation remained… hanging around him like three days worth of body odor, making him wrinkle his nose in disgust at anything he saw. Brian shot his glare to every corner of his home, running his eyes over the entire picture of his life, taking it in.
Since when has life been lived like this? a tiny squeak of a voice challenged from the very back of his mind.
Brian suddenly realized he had been standing still, slack jawed and staring around his apartment aimlessly, taking deep, labored breaths through his whistling nostrils. He shook himself, reproachfully banishing whatever had been paralyzing him in front of his door. “What the fuck am I looking at,” he muttered to himself, “it’s not like I see this every damn day or something.” His frustration clearly remained, like the unwanted boy in a circle of friends, persistently trying to get his attention in spite of his attempts to ignore it.
It wouldn’t be a problem much longer, he knew, whatever the problem really was. Brian knew exactly how to deal with things like this, and he fully intended to take thye necessary steps immediately. He picked up a toppled plastic lawn chair from a pile of clothes and scratched CD’s and set it in front of his kitchen counter deliberately.
Before sitting, he had a thought and went back to that pile, rifling frantically through his carefully filed CD collection before finding and blowing the dust off of his only Tool album. Triumphantly, he straightened his posture and strode to his stereo like a war hero.
Jesus Christ, did he love that stereo. He’d had the central deck for years and years, but over time had spent hundreds of dollars to give it its chest-high speakers and glass-bending subwoofer. The amplifier alone had cost half a month’s pay, but Brian knew it was worth it. Whatever makes me happy, he figured. He put the CD in, pressed play and started to walk back towards the kitchen. After a furious bass line chopped around, alluding to the possibility of guitar and drums but disregarding any sense of rhythm or tempo, Brian was forced to turn back with a snort. “Fucking CD, fucking scratches,” he growled, “making this damn shit skip. Fucking waste of my money…” He returned to the stereo controls, skipped the track and was pleased to discover that the second one played fine. “So, you decided to behave, huh?” he asked the stereo, or maybe the CD, he was unsure. Either way, it must have been guilted into doing the right thing. “Don’t do that to me, I need you on my side, okay?” he continued, half jokingly.
He didn’t find it at all funny, and wondered for whose benefit he even attempted the joke. “Just… keep playing,” he muttered, putting out an arm commandingly to the deck, “I don’t want to have to speak to you about this again.” God, why couldn’t he stop?
With a snort, Brian turned and finally returned to the kitchen. Plopping down into the flimsy plastic chair, he seized a long-expired Target gift card from the counter and used it to scrape the crumbs and dust off of one small corner of its surface. In the act, he found that he merely dropped most of them into his own lap, and pursed his lips in further frustration as he brushed them off his pants. He set the card down.
Alright, here we are, he told himself smilingly. His mouth practically watered as his left hand plunged into his pocket, searching around furiously. His fingers pushed past the Leatherman, around the cigarettes and the lighter before he felt them touch his prize. Exhilaration was filling him already, widening his eyes and rushing blood up to his head in overwhelming excitement. He’d been waiting for days now…
Then Brian heard a set of knuckles rap three times harshly against his door. He jumped nervously, rushed to his feet and scanned around his room for anything he wouldn’t want strangers seeing, taking a second to stop the music. Also, he crammed his precious little package back into the very bottom of his pocket; it was a matter of habit by this time, a natural reflex.
He cautiously approached the door and put his eye to the peephole. Staring back at him through the fisheye were the grinning faces of Chuck and Ginsu. God damn it all, he thought. It was almost as if they could smell it through the door.
Chuck could only be described as a big ass motherfucker. He was something like six five, just under 250 pounds, and had a smile big enough to match. Chuck was a white boy, like Brian, and a little too jolly, but still got a lot of credit around town. He had been walking their social circles for nearly a decade, much longer than either Ginsu or Brian. Brian always wondered what might have happened to Chuck if he had gotten involved in sports in high school instead, took up football and spent his time that way like all the other big kids in their grade. Not really much use to wondering, though.
Ginsu must have been the exact opposite of Chuck. He was a scrawny and belligerent little Mexican bastard with way more energy than Brian felt any human had a right to. His real name was Emilio or something similar, but for whatever reason Ginsu hated the sound of “Emilio” like all get out, and threw tantrums whenever he heard it. One time, as Brian had witnessed, Ginsu even got violent with a complete stranger who was only addressing his own friend, whom happened to be named Emilio. How he got the nickname “Ginsu” Brian couldn’t even guess, and had never really cared enough to ask.
He watched as Ginsu raised his fist with some irritation of his own and slammed it against the door three more times. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Come on, fucker! Open up, we know you’re in there! Chuck saw you walking in.”
Brian swore internally and, knowing that he had to let them in, he counted to three and put a tired face on to make it seem as though a nap were responsible for his delay. He turned the lock and swung the door open slowly, squinting into the hallway light. “Oh, hey guys,” he greeted them softly, trying to appear sleepy.
“Whassup, boy,” Ginsu said with his same too-happy smile and slapped Brian on the shoulder familiarly, though a little too hard, Brian thought. “Can we come in?”
“Yeah, sure,” Brian invited reluctantly, rubbing his eyes exhaustedly and stepping out of the doorway to let them in.
“Thanks, homeboy. Oh, and cut the shit. We know kids like you never sleep.” He nudged Chuck and gave him a glance, spurring him to laugh at Ginsu’s little joke.
Brian ignored this as he led them in, making sure Ginsu locked the door behind him. He flung himself onto his bed, settled in a little and looked up at his friends. “So what’s the story guys? You hear any good news?”
The two of them obviously intended for it to be a fairly long visit, because Ginsu tramped straight through all the shit on the floor to grab the lawn chair from the counter and set it down facing the bed. Chuck gingerly toed his way nearer and carefully cleared a spot on the floor to sit. Ginsu’s eyes were twinkling as he bared his teeth, “Why, yeah. Actually, we did hear some good news.” He turned his smile towards Chuck, who barely shifted to show his assent. Ginsu looked back to Brian and nodded his head towards him incriminatingly. “How ‘bout you, boss? You got any news?”
Fucking shit, Brian thought, I can’t believe these bastards picked right now to hit me up. He shook his head in mock sadness. “No, man. I got nothing on my end,” he lied smoothly. Brian knew he had few talents, but lying was definitely one of them.
“Oh, yeah? Hmmm… that’s a real shame,” Ginsu said, putting on a falsely serious expression and nodded patronizingly. “A damn shame. Ain’t it Chuck?” This time Chuck seemed more reluctant to respond, and started looking a little uncomfortable.
“How’s that? I thought you guys said you found some.”
“Oh, we have, sort of,” Ginsu said reassuringly. “Don’t you worry about us, man. We got something on the way.” He rested his leg on his knee and leaned way back, throwing his hands up behind his head and almost fully reclining with a satisfied look. “But you, man? No news on your end, huh?” Brian shook his head in confirmation, beginning to get annoyed by the persistence. Ginsu breathed deeply and nodded, staring at the ceiling and faking bemusement. “That really does suck bro. See, me an’ Chuck—“ he gestured to his companion, “—found us some shit, but it’s really just enough for us two, you know.” He held his hands up and pinched his lips together, trying to look regretful, “Sorry.”
Brian was struck very suddenly at how weird this situation was. Why the hell would Ginsu drop by just to tell him there wasn’t enough to share? If that were really the case, he and Chuck would’ve just gone straight to one of their homes and done it, right? Ginsu was kind of freaking him out, but to be fair Ginsu always did that. What he didn’t get was why Chuck would look so anxious; he was in a familiar setting, among friends, so he ought to be as relaxed and amiable as ever. What was wrong with this picture?
“That’s alright, bro,” Brian ventured tentatively, “You know how it goes, a man needs what he needs.” Unsure what game he was playing, he looked Ginsu squarely in his smiling eyes and shrugged resignedly. “Am I right or am I right?”
For the first time that night, Ginsu’s grin broke as he paused, a slight expression of shock on his face. His look turned more thoughtful for a moment, and then the old Ginsu front was back with an uproarious laugh. “Yeah, right man?” He tapped Chuck and looked at him endearingly, “Right? Hahaha… shit Brian. You never told me you was such a philosopher.” He seemed way, way too amused by Brian’s response, which made Brian feel even weirder. He got even more excited and slapped his hands together, rubbing them eagerly and leaning in towards Brian. “C’mon, Socrates, you got any more heavy wisdom to lay on us or what?” He was the only one laughing at how far he took the joke. Chuck was gazing distractedly into an empty corner.
Things were getting a bit too freaky for Brian, who decided to stop playing whatever game was up. He interrupted Ginsu’s laughter abruptly, “Hey! So what’s up, Ginsu? What you wanna be hanging around me for? It sounds like you guys got your own score right?” He changed to a more reproachful tone, “Did you guys just come to tease me about it or what? ‘Cause that’s not cool, man, waving it under my nose like that.”
“Whoa! Whoa there, killer! Slow down!” Ginsu responded, putting his hands up defensively. “We’re just shooting the breeze with our homeboy. What’s wrong with that?” He leaned back again, settling in comfortably, and reached up to the top of his head to push it to either side, cracking the vertebrae in his neck sickeningly. Then he put on a serious look and placed his hands in his lap. “Besides, we haven’t necessarily scored yet. It’s definitely on its way, but me n’ Chuck have got some errands to run in the meantime, you know? We got shit to do.”
“Well, yeah, man. We all got shit to do—“
“There he goes again! All philosophizing and shit… tell us another platypus, Plato!” Ginsu interrupted. All that pent up energy of his was beginning to seethe to the surface, and the smile was twisting halfway into a sneer. Brian noted this, and recognized something dangerous was afoot with the guy; it would be best not to correct him and say "platitude," he figured. Chuck still wouldn’t return his gaze.
“—But what are you guys doing sitting around here shooting the breeze if you’re so busy? I don’t want to hold you up, guys. Don’t feel delayed on my account.” Brian was struggling to keep a tremor out of his voice. Damn, it was hard to still sound friendly with all this shit going on, and Brian didn’t even really know what shit was going on.
Ginsu laughed the hardest he had all day, clapping as if Brian were Richard Pryor on stage. He gathered himself, sniffed, and started nodding happily, “You know, I appreciate that, Brian. I really do. What a nice gesture, really. Don’t you think, Chuck?” he asked as he looked once more at his towering companion.
Chuck squirmed in his spot on the floor, and looked up with an expression of contorted anguish on his face, “Look, Ginsu, I don’t know about—“
But Ginsu cut him off, glaring back at Brian gleefully, “So very generous of you, Brian. A lovely gesture, lovely.” His smile became somewhat distracted and whimsical, “So I think we will get on about our business. You know, we wouldn’t want to hold up any of your important plans, would we?”
“Look, man, it’s not that I mind I was just asking—“
“Oh, no, of course. I wouldn’t take any offense to you, Brian. You know that. It’s just…” he gave Brian a significant look and perhaps the wickedest grin he had ever seen, “…aren’t you the slightest bit curious of what we’re up to today? Don’t you want to ask your old friends how they’ve been, what they’ve been up to, what other old friends they ran into and all that?”
Brian was still confused, but the tension in the air was growing clearer and clearer to him. Some dangerous shit was up, and Brian had no idea why. Chuck still looked like he wanted to say something, but was just biting his lip agitatedly. “Well, yeah, Ginsu. Sure I wanna hear about you day, it’s just I barely got home and I had a rough day and I was looking forward to just crashing for a few hours.”
“Oh, yes. Of course you were,” Ginsu said in that same mocking way, “and I’m really sorry to hold you up. I just wanted to tell you about our day.” His grin grew sinister, “Crazy day we’ve had, me n’ this guy,” he waved to Chuck again, who averted his eyes again.
“Oh, yeah?” Brian sighed, hoping that whatever game this was it would be over with soon. Maybe Ginsu was just having one of his episodes and that’s what was weirding him out so much. Maybe if he just played along a little longer and let Ginsu talk himself out, he would be satisfied and finally leave. “I guess I got time for that,” he conceded, sitting up straighter on the edge of his bed. “Tell me about your day, man.”
“Well,” Ginsu began, smugly arranging himself as if he were reading a story aloud to children, “me n’ Chuck were out doing business as usual, just innocently being ourselves and looking for some good news, right?” Brian nodded, hoping the story wouldn’t take long to tell. “And you couldn’t have guessed it, but we ran into a common acquaintance while we were out and about. It was really such a pleasant surprise to see him, such a dear old friend as he is, and so the three of us sat down and had a nice, long conversation. Fascinating conversationalist, this fellow. He had the two of us absolutely enraptured, and we just talked and talked and talked…”
It was clear to Brian that Ginsu was drawing thee whole thing out as much as possible, so he jumped in, “Who was it you ran into?”
Ginsu shook himself out of his story with a look of mock surprise on his face. “Huh?”
“Who was it? Who did you run into today?”
Ginsu pretended to be taken aback, and looked down contemplatively as if troubled. “Oh, dear, did I forget to mention who it was? How rude of me to withhold that.” He set the full force of his glare on Brian, all smiles vanished from his face, “It was none other than your old pal Dominic!”
Shit! Brian’s mind began racing. How could that be what this is all about? Fuck! These were his friends, they barely even knew Dominic. Godammit! He knew he shouldn’t have tried pulling that stupid shit that morning. Cunt-ass Bitch! Everyone knew that stealing product from guys like Dominic meant trouble, it’s just—the Fucking Shit!—it’s just he was hurting for the cash and couldn’t afford to spend it. Damn! A man’s gotta eat, he reassured himself. A man’s gotta get high, too. Pussy-ass Bitch! Fucking shithead motherfucker!
“And boy, did Dominic have an interesting story to tell us. Didn’t he, Chuck?”
Chuck may have finally gathered the courage to speak, but didn’t get the chance before Brian broke back in, “So is that what the fuck this is all about? Huh? Did that fucking asshole Dominic send you after me, and you did? Is that what’s going on here, you’re coming because you think you wanna collect on your own friends?”
“Now, now, slow down, big guy. We’re not coming by here to shake down a friend. You know I would never do that,” he said softly, pressing his palm to his chest and looking hurt, “never! Me and Chuck here would never do anything that would hurt a friend.”
“Alright, just fucking stop it, Ginsu,” Chuck finally burst out. “This ain’t cool, man. It ain’t worth it, and I don’t even know why I agreed to it.” He stood up to his full height and glared down at Ginsu reproachfully, “I don’t know why you did either.”
There was nothing smiley about Ginsu anymore, whose entire body was tensed as he leapt to his feet also, a vein visibly pulsating from his forehead. “Oh, but you did agree to it, bitch,” he spat furiously. “So you gonna back out on your word like the fucking pussy cracker that you are, is that it?”
Brian started edging further back on his mattress. He was getting a very bad feeling about everything, and wanted to get closer to the 9 millimeter he had tucked beneath his raggedy pillow. “Back out on what, Chuck?”
The giant looked apologetically over at Brian. “Sorry, Brian. We ran into Dominic, like he said, and Dominic told us that you stole some shit from ‘im. Well, Dominic goes off sayin’ how nobody makes no fool of him and whatever. He’s pissed, man, and he told us he’d give us an eight ball each plus whatever you still had if we—“ he paused and looked shamefully to the floor, “—if we came and…” He seemed unable to continue, looking fiercely down at Ginsu with a furrowed brow and a sulky lip.
“What the fuck, Ginsu? You wouldn’t hurt a friend, huh?” Brian was indulging his fury now, surprised at how good it felt. Some of that frustration from earlier was working its way out too.
“Fuck you, bitch!” he sneered, “You and your fucking ‘no news today fellas!’ routine!” He spat on the floor, or rather tried to, because the phlegm fell on a tattered old comic book instead. “You had that cocaine the whole fucking time, and you were lying to us through your fucking teeth about it! If we were friends, maybe you would have busted me a line, no? Or at least been honest, said there wasn’t enough to share like I said.”
“Man, you were playing a sick fucking game that whole damn time, and I knew it. You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that Ginsu?” He shook his head, “Shit, Chuck, what’s up with you guys today?” Chuck once again averted his eyes, clearly sorry. “In any case,” Brian went on, “I think you guys need to get the fuck out. A least for now, Chuck,” he said aside.
Fires lit up in Ginsu’s eyes and he laughed insanely. “Uh-uh, homeboy,” he growled, baring as many of his teeth as he could. (It occurred to Brian that maybe Ginsu didn’t even know what a real smile was for.) “I’m not going nowhere without my shit, bitch!” He made like he was going to come at Brian, but Chuck grabbed his shoulder.
“I said that was enough, Ginsu. We ain’t gonna do this shit, and that’s just it.”
Ginsu’s expression never changed, and he barely looked away from Brian. “Maybe you ain’t,” he said, reaching towards his belt and lifting his shirt slightly. “But I fucking do what I want!”
Chuck couldn’t see Ginsu’s wandering hand, but it was clear enough to Brian, who was almost too shocked by what he saw to shout, “Look out, Chuck!”
The warning must have just barely been too late. Brian saw sunlight through the window flashing off the blade of the knife as Ginsu swung it in a graceless arc, bringing it just over his own head as he plunged it with finality into Chuck’s chest.
Dear God, what’s going on?
Ginsu struggled to pull his knife back out as Chuck stared down at his own chest incredulously. He wore a wide-eyed, almost childlike look of astonishment, his mouth gaping open and laboriously drawing breath. He was barely moved by all of Ginsu’s efforts to recover the knife; his chest was holding onto the blade like a vice.
Ginsu was paying Chuck little mind, trying to drag his entire giant body, knife and all, towards Brian. A droplet of blood appeared on Chuck’s bottom lip, and quivered for a moment before Chuck’s entire face finally contorted in rage, shaking the tremulous droplet off and down onto Ginsu’s distracted head.
Brian had already dived towards his pillow, scrambling to get his gun out from under it. Things hat gotten way out of hand, he knew. God damn it, had things gotten out of hand. His fingers finally found their way around the handle of the 9mm, and he whipped around, holding it shakily aloft just in time to see Chuck’s final act.
He drew one last, furious breath, and growled through a mouth full of spattering blood, “You can suck my dick Emilio!” before wrapping his enormous hands around the smaller man’s neck and squeezing.
Chuck died that way, knife still buried in his chest, locked in a deadly embrace with a man who was his friend that morning. Ginsu—Emilio— had given up on getting the knife back and was now fighting against the hands wrung tight around his neck, gasping and spitting, turning redder as his eyes popped farther and farther out. Brian watched in appalled shock as the crazy little man shook and squirmed, punching and kicking with all his might trying to get away. But nothing could shake Chuck’s grip, and soon Emilio stopped his flailing, and his gasps grew quieter, and stopped. The ghastly pair swayed ominously, almost as if dancing, before collapsing in a disgusting heap, landing right on top of his stereo and smashing it to pieces, sending splinters and useless electronic innards flying everywhere.
Brian dropped the gun in amazement. What in hell had just happened? Shit, had the world gone crazy on him or something? He was breathing heavily, staring blindly at the incomprehensible mess in his apartment, and felt saliva begin to gather threateningly in his mouth. He put a hand to his lips and thought of rushing to the bathroom, but his feet were rooted in place, so he just fell to his knees, went forwards on his hands, and vomited right onto the old, grease-stained vest he had once stolen from his prep school.
Well, what are you going to do now?
Brian coughed and spat miserably, looking up at the motionless forms of Chuck and Emilio. He sniffed, took a deep breath, got slowly to his feet and walked slowly towards the kitchen counter, grabbing the cheap white chair along the way.
He set it deliberately on the spotted linoleum floor, reached for the Target gift card and began fishing through his pocket, pushing aside his Leatherman, and then his cigarettes, and then his lighter before finally discovering that tiny little knotted corner of plastic bag filled with a few spoonfuls of cocaine.

God Shuffled His Feet

The existence of God is something that has been disputed ever since it emerged as a concept. What is both frustrating and undeniably convenient is the fact that the existence of a Judeo-Christian God-like entity is impossible either to prove or disprove, despite the tireless efforts of Nietzsche and Fénelon. Actually, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was established solely to point out this fact, and to demonstrate that our all-too-precious faith can be placed unshakeably in anything, however absurd.
But if we take a step outside of our Western enculturation and look at God differently, thinking of him in a more Eastern, mystical sense, we are confronted with the curiously familiar idea of Brahman, or the divine transcendental ground of all being, time, matter, energy, and space. Brahman encompasses the entirety of everything, and the invisible systems through which they work. What is convenient about Brahman is that it does exist, it absolutely has to, nihilism and solipsism aside. The existence of Brahman is impossible to disprove (except possible for Zeno), and descriptions of it in Hindu scriptures ring bells of “the First and the Last” and “Alpha and Omega.”
What I’m getting at here is a loosened definition of God—no two people can entirely agree on their conceptions of God as it is. Sure, we can all cling to the idol of God we shaped in our minds as children, a shaky image of a smiling, fatherly divine face that the infantile find comforting. But this is a mental security blanket, I think, and detrimental to one’s spirituality. How can you truly know God if the God you think you know is different from the God your priest thinks he knows?
But God as Brahman, and not as a man-like entity, or a paradoxical trinity… Brahman can only be one thing, and if God is not Brahman then God at the very least is contained within Brahman, being a part of existence. But would this not make God a subordinate being to Brahman, and go against the definition of God?
Brahman definitely exists, if anything does. God might exist, but if he truly adheres to the expectations of Judeo-Christian tradition than he exists as a being inferior to the universe itself. Brahman is the universe itself, and therefore the best candidate for Godhood.
There’s just so much about the God I grew up with that I don’t really get. Certain Christian sects believe that God made man “in his own image.” Aside from the fact that we’re clearly not Gods, I have to ask why God would make chimpanzees 98% in his own image? And then continue to stratify the genetics of the primates further and further from his own, filling in the remainder of their genetic code with animal DNA, which so closely resembles God DNA… I just find it unlikely that this is the case.
As I find it unlikely that God is sitting atop a cloud keeping a log of all of our sins and good deeds. What I do find likely is that the scribes of antiquity, much like the writers of today, felt an urge for an artistic flourish and indulged it in clever metaphors, hyperbole, and, most importantly, personification. God is the personification of nature, the makeshift explanation for phenomena which science has yet to enlighten. Moses was a smart and influential man in his time, and when his contemporaries asked him to explain things, he did the best he could as a poet to inform them. Thus we have the Creation story, an elegantly crafted poetic explanation for where life came from.
Was Moses a prophet, and did God speak to him? Whichever definition you use for God, the answer is a resounding yes. In the sense of God as Brahman, God speaks to all of us, all the time; prophets are merely those who listen. Moses saw an imperfect world and decided to take action—he was blessed both with capability and with wisdom, and combined these traits to liberate Israel. God commanded him to only in the sense that Moses himself recognized what was right and wrong in the situation through what had been shown to him, and felt he had to take action.
If the Judeo-Christian God exists, and he manifested himself to Moses in a burning bush (a thought amusing to potheads, especially since Hindus just on the other side of Mesopotamia were consuming cannabis ritualistically for spiritual enlightenment) and truly showed to him visions of the Creation, which Moses reproduced in the Bible’s record as infallible fact and truth, then half of the findings of science and archaeology in the past 400 years would have to be bullshit, and our human sense of logic overwhelmingly fallible.
But if we assume that we are not idiots and that sense makes sense, and re-examine the situation with God being Brahman, hypothetically, then we are left with a little more wiggle room. God blessed Moses with a capable mind and a sense of duty: seeing manifest in reality (the face of God) a need for action, Moses took action. Being a man of wisdom and faith, he did so claiming an authority higher than his own, an unchallengable one.
Just what Moses’ concept of God was I can’t be sure. I know that our dear grandfather Abraham was very much onto something when he made the leap from idolatry to monotheism: the oneness and unity of God is central to Brahmanism, which developed in the Indus Valley shortly before Abraham’s covenant was made. Now, just what took place between Abraham and God is impossible to know, especially considering that neither one ever existed for sure. Couldn’t it be possible that Moses took some artistic license with what happened?
It’s not unheard of, at that time. Poets and storytellers were definitely emerging as a central aspect of people’s histories and cultures—The Epic of Gilgamesh was written 200 years before the Torah, and do we doubt that either one enjoys a certain amount of embellishment?

From Soundgarden to the Moody Blues

I’ve fell on black days, as Chris Cornell might say; my sun has set and left me in the shadow of its absence wondering, and pondering. Dawn is inevitable but far off, and our sundials give no comfort at night. When will it come? The night has just begun, and yet it feels as old as God himself, decrepit and staggering but eternal in all memory, reaching back to the image of what was before all reality became this instant. Memory, memory: when did the sun set? What things I’ve yet to suffer in the moonlight, trials borne witness and jury by an army of stars, what awaits the watchful this night? Herculean tasks to endure for the sake of seeing the sun again, and a life’s work to set about.
What secrets are uttered in the holy, frightful night, however shaken loose by stark, momentous transfiguration of the eyes, are the most sanctified of scriptures, the most sincere of confessions.
Let nighttime come! the braver, or rather bolder, men will say. What they forget is that the depth of each man’s sunset is suited to his nocturne capacity for blindness, and that night hits hardest those with the insight to lose. Perhaps the sunset treats you kindly, keeps you from the deeper blackness and leaves your knowledge of the darker places shallow. But this is rare, and most of us have suffered hardship enough to realize what it truly means, and how lucky we truly are.
Isn’t life strange? I always say that life is a trip. And, being myself somewhat of a drug addict, I mean that with entirely psychedelic connotations. The events, emotions, lessons, and just general nature of life, especially life as a human, are all incredibly trippy to me. Just to think of how many coincidences have historically and prehistorically occurred so that things are the way they are, and work the way they work, is amazingly striking, as are the many different forms and expressions that human life has taken throughout the course of its cultural explorations.
And whether you are a Hindu or a Buddhist or whatever, most people seem to agree that there is inherent in the universe a karmic mechanism that brings to people their just desserts. And things actually do tend to work out for what some may call “karma,” but what’s trippy is that it is just the nature of life that people attract trouble appropriate to their flaws, which is why karma works. So it is that the greedy receive no charity, and the brutal no mercy. Call it karma or God or life itself, I think it’s just the way things happen.
The purpose of the trouble is educational, of course, something sent to the individual from the universal as a message declaring one’s incongruities with the natural course. Usually people recognize poor actions as “mistakes” and “bad karma” as lessons, but if they ignore these things and continue indulging their flaws and vices the upshot of their attitudes will grow more and more severe.
So the question is this: What have I done? What flaw have I blinded myself to and nurtured, bringing about this dreary nightfall? What must I learn, and what must I change?

Censorship, Lennon, and Rap

FUCK CENSORSHIP.
That’s right, FUCK CENSORSHIP!
There is nothing dangerous about an idea. There is nothing evil about a word. Censorship is a weapon of tyranny, and its only goal is ignorance. If we truly seek to enlighten, then no word, thought, or phrase can be forbidden us.
People speak fearfully of iconoclasts because they ask questions about the essential nature of things. They insist in the most bothersome fashion on pointing out hypocrisies and injustices whenever they see them, regardless of how long they have been established as tradition. What people see in this, and what they are so spooked by, is the label of CHANGE blatantly hung round the curious heckler’s neck. It goes without saying that change can be good, but that doesn’t mean that most people still don’t hate the thought of it. “Why would you ask questions like that? Life is good enough and you want to compromise it all over that?” These people are forgetting a crucial fact, and that is that the truth thrives under scrutiny, always.
If our government had things going right and were really doing their jobs, there would be no question the American public couldn’t ask. So many things are senselessly labeled “top secret” by our government that we, as taxpayers and citizens, deserve to be aware of; of course, big brother takes it upon himself to “protect” us from the petty details of illegal wiretapping and water-board torture. “National Security” is the popular excuse of the time, and it’s a hell of a good one. God only knows what natural rights we’ll have confiscated next for the sake of “National Security.”

Just look at the lengths the government will go to, and for what? A goddamn Beatle, and Nixon thought he was a threat to “National Security.” Wiretapped, deported, and shot, all for writing “Give Peace a Chance.”
And you know what? It doesn’t surprise me one bit.
Let’s look at Tupac Shakur. At the time he was making music, members of the legislation were appalled at the content of his lyrics, and indeed with the entire genre of “gangsta rap.” The contents of these songs were unacceptable, they would insist, and disgusting. They treated gangsta rap as if it were the cause of black crime, when really it is the other way around. The cause of black crime is legislators fucking up and not fixing it, but since this is not as loud as rap music is in the public sphere these congressmen catch a lucky break in being able to point a finger at Tupac and say, “He is dangerous. His actions are propagating criminal activity, and his ideas are upsetting the social order of things.” Really, they are trying to distract us from the fact that “social order” has become a myth, and that they grow fat and affluent while would-be criminals struggle and starve.
Gangsta rap arose from a culture of economic survivors, processed through a hell of the US government’s design: the ghetto. I’m white myself, and I swear to God it’s a white man’s fault that a place as horrible as a ghetto even exists in America, and definitely a white man’s fault that all the ghettos are filled with black people. It’s a fucked up situation, and everybody knows it, but no one is willing to do anything about it. So what happened in the ghettos? People endured it.
The harsh realities and ugly truths that old white men find so offensive in rap music are the upshots of their societal neglect, coming back in the form of eloquent, angry poets to let them know, “This is what we have to live with, and it’s so bad that you can barely stand to even hear about it.”

I'm Alright, Jack

Words turn me away scornfully as I come calling for help, seeking only the company of a fellow spirit whose heart, soul, and mind feel as isolated and in need of contact as my own. Would that these clumsy, broken sentences could convey just the state of mind I’ve been in this week. The frustration, the worry and obsession, fears of inadequacy and hours of pensive rumination. This is how I pass my time, fishing vainly through the stagnant depths of my dusty mind for a way to say something, a way to close the gap between you and me just a fraction more. Being human, do we not have enough in common? Why should we exist in mutual silent ignorance, uncaring and inattentive to each other, when social relationships have been shown time and time again to be the only sure-fire path to happiness? Sartre proposed that Hell is other people. I find it fitting that Heaven should be other people as well. This sort of balanced contradiction, although it may seem baffling at first, is actually quite characteristic of the functioning of the universe. Every thing has its two sides, its potential for good or ill use, and although few things can be more harrowing than helplessly watching the disintegration of all of one’s friendships, nothing can be more satisfying or fulfilling than seeing these relationships through to their culmination.
Existentially, the meaning of life is to create meaning, and the first facet of reality that all people assign significant meaning to is their own selves. This has always been the case, before money was, before laws were, before art or science or any of the things that we think are important ever existed, people meant something. But now that we’ve crowded our brains with so much concern for economics and entertainment, BMW’s and business, we’ve forgotten just how much. A sports fan will admire and idolize an athlete he has never met and disregard his own wife. A connoisseur of fine art will bid millions on an established masterpiece before sparing a single thought for the starving artists of today, brushes held loosely in emaciated fingers, shaping something we don’t yet know but will never forget. And it is the objects we love and want, the trophies and material justifications, our too-fast cars and too-fancy televisions. Societal expectations of physical comfort, affluence, and social prominence have become unwittingly ingrained into our personalities, overshadowing a simple truth and misleading us to seek satisfaction in such irrelevancies as vintage cars and collector’s items.
Seriously, has Donald Trump ever looked happy? Think about it. I know it’s a tired old cliché that money can’t buy happiness, and whenever somebody today says so their audience has become so desensitized to the damn adage that the words run in one ear and out the other. Sure money can’t buy happiness, we say as if we believe it, but it can definitely buy everything else, right? Check enough things off of your list of life goals and it’s only a matter of time before the Porsche and big screen develop into happiness, or at least contentment.
Except they won’t. To append the old saying somewhat, money can’t buy happiness, friends, love, youth, accomplishment, sunsets, or the exhilaration of looking out the window early on a beautiful summer morning and knowing the world is your playground. Money can’t buy an hour shared with a loved one, or the look on her face when you put fresh, aromatic flowers in her hands. Money can’t buy forgiveness, or second chances. Money can’t buy the unquestioning support of your friends and family.
But it’s all we care about, so confused are we.

Before Sunset

God’s fingers brushed another stroke to this masterpiece, as last night I felt a turning, a changing of the taste in the very air. Night was falling soon, and everyone could feel it’s crisp, secretive breath coming to hide away the magnificent canvas of resplendent existence. Solemn beauty, bathed in twilight, waves to greet me as I drive past, barely able to notice as I dodge traffic on the freeway, consumed by the passing and merging, deafened by the hurried scrapes of rats’ feet all around me. My music and my art, were the clanking of industry and green lines traced into dollar signs, when it occurred to me in a moment that I had never and would never attain a complete experience of these, my twisted modern muses, whose wine could never give me satisfaction.
It was in these final seconds of the day, when all the earth is gilded by the soft touch of Helios’ farewell, that I understood I didn’t need that enlightenment, nor the visions it accorded. The falling of darkness would be as a downy blanket gathered around me, like a child cocooned and ready for a bedtime story. Let it come, I say for the first time, let the waves of impotent waking action wash away as the moon turns its face to frighten away the tides; let sun’s skewed perspective fall away, and peel off the stifling ceiling of a fool’s blue sky that I may see from the remotest corner what infinity resembles, staring as the prophets did into a million twinkling eyes of God, daring to wonder what glorious stars may burn behind my own eyes.
This bleak spontaneity, this lacking reliability on the part of my scarce-appearing epiphany, makes me savor its presence all the more. Such a rare thing to feel, to observe from beginning to end with complete awareness, is the process of awakening. I love it, I long for it day and night; it is my religion and deity. It is what I pray to, and desire with all faith and sincerity to become one with. But this I fear I may never do, for it would be an awakening into a dream, too much like heaven for me to absolutely be walking on the earth. Would I abandon reality, or it me? Or perhaps, would such an apotheosis truly grant to its fledgling deity a godlike control of its world? Fitful is my sleeping, and gradual my awakening, but look and see already the powers I have come into. A millennium passed, and this god has learned to fly! Are we not impressed?
It can only be a matter of time, before we, too, turn the wheels of the earth and sun, holding together the spinning and floating threads of gravity, shaping cleverly the systems of a new universe. Can you not see it beginning to form, even now, dispersed in the ether between your mind and mine? Your eyes are passing over its bricks and mortar, your head giving life and law to its gasping continuum as imagination opens the way to itself, removing from your brave steed its blinders and giving it a firm, encouraging slap on the flank to start you on your way. Ride freely and breathe deep the verses a mad young god utters; twitch not your hands to the reigns, for here they serve no purpose. Pay no mind to hindrances in this land where none exist, until your thought gives it birth and forges locks without keys, which, once given shape, a god only can undo. Without you, this world cannot exist, and without your consent it cannot turn.

This is our one word, our singular poem, the indivisible prose of our universe, which I am whispering eternally.

The Fun of Writing

What peculiar inspirations am I waiting for, to push forward my pen and give life to my daydreams in my writing. What thought must I think to spark this epiphany, to begin rolling the stone of my method so that I may finally put onto paper what I cannot put into my life, put into your minds what I cannot quite complete in my own. I think that that must be one of the strong appeals of writing for me: the audience, the eagerly waiting readers who chose to pick up my particular work. I can almost envision them, stumbling across my yet-to-be masterpiece with looks of half-interested curiosity on their faces as they thoughtfully thumb through a few pages; then, in my little author’s fantasy, a miracle happens and they begin to read.
This is phenomenal, this is exciting, this is awesome— first of all because it is a hell of a stroke to my ego, and second of all because of consubstantiality. Big fucking word, I know, but here’s the gist of what I mean by that, in the most drawn-out and boring explanation possible: Abstract thought being (to our knowledge) an entirely human trait, one could say that merely having the capacity to realize, “I think, therefore I am,” is one of the primary symptoms of humanity. It is sort of an existential epiphany that allows us to verify for ourselves that we do, in fact, exist. “I think, therefore I am,” such a beautifully succinct statement that it is no wonder it is heard so often; unfortunately, like all clichés, this one has lost its potency with overuse and people pay it less consideration than it deserves. To assert that thinking is conditional to being is really a rather bold claim. The chair I’m sitting in right at this moment does not think (that I know of) and yet the fact that it is currently supporting my weight makes a strong case for its existence. I think, therefore I am; my chair thinks not, and still is. So is this classic excerpt of prose truly a non sequitur, a spurious assertion made solely for the sake of aesthetic poetry?
Or is there merely a semantic disparity between our definitions of existence? Consider the world objectively, as though you could perceive it without needing the lens of biological existence or sensory perception: without the ear given to us by God/evolution, all music and sounds are nothing but vibrations in the air. Without the eye, colors are just differing wavelengths of light bouncing off of objects. We, the cleverer monkeys, have invented the concept of color because of how our brain processes light. We invented the concept of harmony according to the peculiarities of the ear, the concept of flavor to the tongue and of beauty to the eye. We even invented the concept of concepts, started forming ideas, making plans, and just plain thinking things through. Having discovered a potentially infinite world in personal abstraction, we humans rush to fill the spaces of our minds with whatever seems fashionable at the time to know, whether it’s fashionable contemporary philosophy, the state of the stock market, or a pile of sports statistics. So occupied are we with knowing things and finding new things to know that it rarely occurs to us to ask what, exactly, knowledge is.
But before going into what knowledge is, I’m going to take a step back and look at whether knowledge is. As I was saying before, we have subjectively created and assigned meaning to certain aspects of reality in order to make it seem more organized and manageable for the mind, usually by assuming traditional, established paradigms that people have agreed upon for generations. These are of course learned behaviors, the unwitting enculturation every infant goes through while observing other people, who learned it from watching other people, and so on backwards into human history. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this; it’s a very functional paradigm and it has a very impressive pedigree, but we must remember that these are learned things and not necessarily a result of human nature. We learn to like art and music and certain foods because we are surrounded by people who like art and music and certain foods. We identify with paintings and literature that possess artistic quality, and stand like aspiring critics in museums fervently pondering this quality. There’s an unspoken agreement among intellectuals that holds them all to continue pretending that the whole damn idea of artistic quality isn’t just imaginary to begin with. This, among many other concepts such as democracy or freedom or love, is paid an inestimable amount of reverence for something that isn’t even really a thing at all. Quality. The shit drove Pirsig crazy, you know.
So does quality exist, or love, or democracy? If so, then where is it? Can I find it, see it and touch it? “Sticks and stones…” you know. Quality is just a word, just a thought some guy had years and years ago that he liked so much he decided he needed a way to share it. But it’s not tangible, it’s not visible, it’s not concrete, and people can’t even agree on what it is most of the time. The rock in my front yard, however, is tangible, visible, and concrete. I could ask my neighbor’s opinion and most likely get his assent that it is, in fact, a rock. The rock definitely exists; can we say the same thing about a concept such as quality or love?
Consider the rock a little more. Imagine if you will a straightforward conversation in which I hold a rock out to my neighbor and ask whether it is a rock. Naturally, my neighbor will say that it is a rock and he will be correct and the two of us will stand there and exist with the rock. Replay that same situation in your mind changing only one thing: assume for the sake of argument that I have never heard the word “rock,” and have used the word “shmiz” in its place for my entire life. In the scenario, I am holding a shmiz and I know that it is a shmiz I am holding. However, my neighbor will disagree and assert that I have a rock, a claim that I find completely ridiculous considering all the shmiz-related experience I’ve had in my life. And so I insist it is a shmiz, and he insists it is a rock and our disagreement is unresolved. When we agreed that it was a rock, the both of us were correct. Who was correct when we disagreed?
Naturally you ought to think the neighbor was, but that’s only because you sympathize with his perspective. Without the human lens, a rock isn’t necessarily a rock. It’s like that disgusting old debate about the tree falling in the forest and making a sound, only with an existential twist: the tree does not make a sound if no one is there to hear it because only the presence of a human awareness could assign the title of “sound” to what would otherwise just be air molecules rubbing together. “A rose by any other name can smell as sweet,” but only as long as someone is there to smell and name it. Otherwise it’s just another meaningless lump of matter like everything else.
Would it exist? Of course, the lump of matter would exist, but would the rose exist? I don’t believe it could truly be a “rose” unless someone was there to call it such. In so doing, a person bestows upon the flower its “rosehood” by symbolically associating the concrete object with the word arbitrarily pulled from abstraction. The rose itself may have always existed, but until that moment it did not exist as a rose.
This is getting confusing, I know, so I’m going to revisit a few thoughts. We’re examining the concept of existence now, particularly examining whether the imaginary can be considered real and vice versa. My awareness is proof of my existence, and my awareness of objects in the manifest world is proof of their existence. Although these actual objects could be considered to exist without the presence of a consciousness, they would exist without meaning. There would be no such thing as love or beauty in the whole universe if a person hadn’t thought of them. Even the concept of “existence” wouldn’t exist.
This is the human ingredient in reality: the relevance of things. Our great power over nature is our ability to discover or dictate what it means. And just what is so great about this power? How much does “meaning” really matter? What does “meaning” even really mean? What is significant about significance, and what is our reason for being reasonable?
I don’t know whether this metacritical approach will seem insightful or inane; in any case the questions were rhetorical. I don’t intend to be a nihilist, although I think it can be healthy for an intelligent person to understand philosophies with which he or she might not entirely agree. I believe these are important questions to consider, regardless of the fact that we are evidently not going to radically restructure what we classify as meaningful, significant, and reasonable. I’m not trying to alter these things, I only want to take a look at how things ended up the way they did, epistemologically.
So, based on the assertion that the concept of “existence” would not exist without human awareness, one might argue that said human awareness is conditional to the “existence” of anything. Hubris, I know, but this is a semantic discussion and I’m finally getting to the point. If we assume that subjective recognition has more bearing on existence than physical presence, we are a short step from recognizing concepts like love and quality as being fully existent.
But they’re just made up. They’re just ideas that people had off the tops of their heads, like anyone could have done. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but please remember that this is an act that expands existence. Thought is the creation of something from nothing, the human’s greatest contribution to reality. We are truly gods in the abstract world, creating and destroying and reforming entire realities within our minds. The potentialities of this abstract world have only begun to be discovered, and I believe that the most fertile of its parts are those still hidden in the spaces between our various human minds.
And that brings me back to consubstantiality and the appeal of being a writer. In writing, and more importantly in being read, we create conceptual bridges between our awarenesses. The work read becomes a common experience between the reader and author, an intellectual relation that recognizes the content of the work as being real, as actually existing. So we see that writing is man’s favorite way to exercise his divinity, using what are concretely mere ink and paper to create dazzling landscapes in the abstract world. This is the fun of writing.

Could it Be

Could it be, after all this time spent evading the cliché, that my idea of a fun evening is actually just curling up with a good book? It practically makes me sneer contemptuously at the first thought of it, but then I realize that, with all the different wild things I’ve tried, I still haven’t discovered the definition of a good night. But reading, my old insomniac companion and mistress, with whom I have long since parted believing there were “bigger, better” things—maybe even “more mature” things. Reading, I thought, my foolish childhood escapism, which withheld me from real life and actual experience. So for these past years I have let dust settle on my bookshelves as I thrust myself into the world, yearning to live life to the fullest and all those other inspirational aphorisms.
I struggled through all this just to realize it wasn’t reading that held me back, but ignorance, still. Even with my reading glasses lost and still not replaced, with me racking my brain every night to devise some form of distraction, with me longing for the kinds of memorable nights, revelry and unspeakable passion fit to inspire a masterpiece, even with all this I find no more enjoyable and profitable way to pass lonely moments than reading. Have I not longed for the life of the intellectual, the erudite? To spend evenings in languished sophistication, indulging fine tastes and enriching myself with some engaging classic piece of literature—is this not how I have always envisioned my solitary life at its most settled, its most content?
Obviously, I need a little more love in my life. She’s beautiful enough to stun silence from my lips, a shudder and stutter slipped out, with a hiccup strong enough to stop my thought’s shit up. I’m speaking weakly, shifting my gaze to chase my bouncing nerves in circles around the room, and my sentence just ends in a second, interrupted this time by dryness in my throat, so I give it a coat of saliva. Bombs drop when the knob of my neck gives a bob, sweat follows it after I swallow, so loud how I think it brings me to perspire like a fire but with a man’s stink. She’s a goddess, desired divinely but mine is a thoughtless try, clumsy, bad timing and not just a tragedy that it’s me she’ll forget after the happenings of what young life brings. Like things to mothers who never see children, good brothers not given a sibling, it should bring sympathy with a mood to mine, of those others thinking of would-be lovers. And hers is a face that will make my own burn, like she shone the sun’s life giving rays when she turns to smile at me, while I watch lips I would taste, but cannot. Wasted days are these I’ve seen gone by, wondering why feet won’t follow my gaze to her side with a smile of my own and someone’s hand to hold just for once so I won’t walk alone.

Before Summer

A poem that I fear may have been stolen, so I'm posting it first to reserve published rights in case it gets plagiarized. Presenting "Before Summer"

She’s beautiful as dew-breathed spring
Fresh, resurrected flowers sing
Around her sun-browned crown, which sounds
And drowns all else I think
Within the drinking in of her aroma, those
Lips I breathe in tastes of
Comatose with all the weight of
Burdens I can’t find a trace of
Grown to waste love so I bloom alone. A toast!
A toast proposed to those who chose
To take the leap, to love her deep
With a plucked rose, promised to keep
The flower fresh, comp’ny kept the best, and two at rest
Him solely pleased, as we believe, with her alone
Second to none, his only one, the lover
To be the end-in done-all, with no other
And stay content in life all spent desire dangling above her
Beauty sinks in the wrinkle’s depth, ferments to wisdom before death
The wisest man’s a happy fool who anything but her forgets

A Whole Crate of Irish Spring for Ya!

I skipped history class to go and relax with a friend of mine this afternoon. We enjoyed each other’s company and visited nicely, and very soon an hour had flown by. The two of us were chuckling amiably at some mutual joke, as we are prone to do when hanging out in this fashion, when he suddenly looked up at the clock with a look of mild disappointment and said, “Aw, shit. I gotta go to class, man.”
I glanced up, “Twelve thirty?” I asked. He nodded, and we were at his place so I gathered my backpack and sunglasses to walk out with him. We bantered a little more as he went around gathering things for his class. “Oh, shit!” he said, spitting a little this time. “I forgot her book back at the theater. Damn it, I hope it’s still there…” Clearly distressed, he began gathering his things more frantically.
I recalled that she had loaned him her psychology textbook, a hefty tome that was probably worth upwards of one hundred dollars. As she handed it over to him, I saw her say with blatant affection but mocking reproach how much it cost and not to lose it or damage it; it was a joke, of course. The irony is that normally, she is always forgetting her things, leaving her purse or makeup or keys scattered all across town, for which he ceaselessly mocks her. “You’ve got to stop forgetting your shit!” he would say condescendingly, with a joking grin on his face.
I kept the humor of the situation to myself because he was clearly upset, and instead voiced my sympathy and concern for the value of the book. It was left at the campus theater not one hour before, a short walk from there, where he had set it in plain view of the ticket booth attendant. Most likely it was either untouched or taken into lost and found by the man behind the glass. I could only hope.
We left his apartment complex together and were walking down a grassy slope towards the student union and the theater. Just ahead of us on the sidewalk was a black gentleman fully dressed in a suit on a hot Cruces day, with a toddler over his left shoulder and his right hand preparing to drag along a small rolling suitcase.
“Oh, no,” he muttered, “I think that’s that preacher guy that’s been walking around.”
I gave the man a second look, thinking of the irate Bible thumping rednecks that usually came to set up their soapboxes and bully pulpits and shout at college students. “Nah,” I say, “It’s cool. I don’t think that’s him.” We continue walking down along behind the well dressed fellow and I find myself staring into the eyes of his little girl, who is leaning over his shoulder and examining me intently, her mouth slightly gaping with the awe of an infant.
I smile at her as pleasantly as I can; I don’t really have any experience with children that young, at least not since I was that young myself. She follows the basic human instinct and beams right back at me, thrilled to see a smile. Just adorable.
My friend is in a hurry, needing to both find her book and get to his class, so he is taking long, quick strides, as am I to keep up. We are both long-legged fellows, and the gentleman barely cleared my friend’s shoulders, so the thirty feet between us closed quickly. We were conversing as we normally would have, perhaps in lower tones than usual, but still audible to the other fellow when we got near enough.
He must have heard something else in our tones, because as we caught up and were passing him, he looked at us critically over the back of his daughter and said, “You young men need to obey Jesus. These things you’re doing, they aren’t right and you will go to hell.”
My friend and I both rolled our eyes internally; it was the preacher. Some students, particularly the offended and disagreeable ones, would often be baited into talking to these proselytizers and trying to argue with them. I’ll admit to giving it a shot once or twice myself, and had eventually resigned to simply tell them not to take themselves so seriously whenever I saw them. There’s no sense arguing with men who fight without reason. Faith transcends logic, they sneer, and deny the Theory of Evolution, insisting the Creation and Adam and Eve and all of Genesis to be literal. We point to Neanderthals, and chimpanzees, citing the development of their skeletal structures and genetic codes, and they wave their hands and counter with “Jesus says this about science” and “God hates this” and “You’ll go to hell” that.
So, the both of us being thoroughly experienced in the matter, my friend and I turned slightly away, quickened our step and kept walking past the preacher. The preacher would not be so easily dismissed, and began matching our pace. “Is that a Led Zeppelin t-shirt?” he asked me disdainfully, “Oh, no, rock and roll is a path of sin, and you’ll have to do away with that or you’ll go to hell. The drugs, the alcohol, the fornication, it all goes against what Jesus wants for you, you must obey Jesus.”
He saw me respond slightly to the Zeppelin comment earlier, and revisited that, “You don’t wanna burn in hell like John Bonham, do you? He was a miserable man, and all those things sent him to hell. Drinking, partying—“
We were getting clear of him now, walking faster and faster and suppressing smiles. The preacher could not be deterred, and began shouting after us over the shoulder of his baby daughter, “Masturbation! Illicit sex! Hip Hop music, pornography, and filthy literature! Abortion and homosexuality! Lies and Hellfire! Damnation! You can’t be out every weekend, trying to get laid and smoking your marijuana!”
Twenty feet were between him and us when we lost control and burst out laughing. I realized how rude this was and put my hand to my mouth, but then I realized that this preacher was shouting after me in a public place about smoking pot and jerking off. I didn’t feel so guilty about laughing then.
My friend stopped laughing long enough to say, “Alright, later bro,” and hold out his hand, turning towards the theater.
I am bound for the student union and, grin on my face, pound his hand and say, “See you, man. Good luck finding her textbook.”
“Thanks,” he said, and walked away, shaking his head and chuckling.
The preacher was still behind me and wasn’t about to let me get away without putting in the last word, or last million words. He continued defaming me from behind, yelling, “Smoking will send you to hell!” and “You must obey Jesus!”
Just as I was far enough away not to hear him, I saw a whole troupe had come with my clown. A whole crowd of students was gathered around, sneering into the circle. There was another gentleman, in a bright yellow blazer, like the ones elementary school crossing guards would wear, only this one said “THANK JESUS” across the back in huge letters. He seemed to be the shouting ringmaster, with a few other blazer-wearers nodding their assent off to the side. Maybe they were saving their acts for later; they wouldn’t want to have to close up the circus too soon after getting into town.
I grinned dryly and shook my head, swinging open the door to the student union and swiping off my sunglasses. I got a few steps further inside when I heard a friendly female voice call, “You’re going to hell, Soren!”
I turned and recognized her immediately with a friendly smile, “Yeah, so I heard. About a hundred times I heard.”
She laughed amusedly at the joke and went along her way. I walked into the campus branch post office, mailed my letters, and did the same.

Elucidate the Sober Hour

Elucidate the sober hour by maddening your dreams, such sayings appear insane but still convey just what I mean, although I know it looks quite droll it’s smarter than it seems: It brings to eye something you think instead of things you’ve seen.

I just want to say that there is nothing wrong with drugs. Call it aspirin, ibuprofen, NyQuil, antihistamine, penicillin, nicotine, marijuana, Ritalin, ecstasy, Zoloft, cocaine, codeine, LSD, Oxycontin, morphine or heroin; they’re all drugs, and they all have their uses. These are not the problem. The problem is that most humans (present company not excluded) lack the capacity to use drugs responsibly.
Now of course there is a rather valid theory that the use of drugs such as marijuana or cocaine has a negative correlation with acceptance of responsibility. Okay, that’s bullshit; it’s actually not a theory but a fact that most real drug abusers are pathetic emotional masochists highly dependent on the support of their social circle. Some would say that this behavior is a direct result of the drug abuse because of damage it has done to his/her brain and coping mechanisms, while others might postulate that his/her inability to develop emotionally in this matter predisposed them to drug use.
To me, it’s obviously a bit of both. We have a self-feeding cultural stereotype of drug users as degenerates and failures. This social consideration alone is enough to keep any individual that desires to be respectable and successful from getting involved in drugs, while to already “shady” characters a drug habit is just another drop in the bucket. In any case, the government’s main case (unspoken, of course) for the war on drugs is the effect that drugs have on people’s civic behavior and the types of people that gravitate to drugs. Statistics show very effectively that this is, in fact, the case, and I don’t in the least intend to dispute it.
Government drug campaigns often insist that this is always the case with drugs, and they are very nearly right. But on occasion, a freak ripple runs through cultural norms and a perfectly decent and contributing member of society will smoke some weed. And a perfectly average and ethical student uses illegally acquired Adderall to help in studying, and a wife with a sprained ankle will pop one of her husband’s old hydrocodones from when he had surgery. Whatever, it happens, and it happens all the time, everywhere. And I, personally, don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. “That,” of course, referring only to this paragraph. The other aforementioned situations I think everyone can agree are regrettable. We just have to appreciate that the propaganda isn’t always accurate, and sometimes perfectly reasonable people do drugs.
Cosmically, the legality of the drugs matters very little as long as they’re psychoactive. You’re just as high or higher on Ritalin than anyone has ever been on pot, so don’t try to tell me which is “worse” for “coping mechanisms” or whatever. The fact is that drugs do alter your mindstate. The fact is that sometimes this is a bad thing, depending on the drug and the mind. The fact is that sometimes this is a good thing, also depending on the drug and the mind. Currently that is at a doctor’s discretion for psychiatric therapy, usually reserving drugs for the “troubled.” Classically, drugs were taken and issued by tribal priests and medicine men, as sacred aids for contemplative rituals, during which individuals reflected on life and overcame inner obstacles. Well, shit, it seems near enough the same thing to me. But what sort of spiritual legitimacy does a psychiatrist have, representing what higher ethical authority than the US government?
Now, I’m not trying to be Timothy Leary. I think he was crazy, that the acid had addled his brain as it is prone to do, and then subsequently the brains of everyone who bought into his philosophy. His religious dependence on LSD is exactly what made him so ludicrous. Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, took a much more responsible approach to psychedelia. He experimented, though notably not enough to fry his mind, and conceded that while psychoactive substances can help a person change and progress into a happier and more enlightened state, they are by no means necessary. Nor are they healthy to use excessively for extended periods of time, because each drug naturally has eventual negative side effects to counterbalance the positive. This is just evolution telling us not to get carried away with all the poppy seeds and morning glory, and that we need to stay connected to reality instead of indulging emotional dependencies on altered mindstates.
I just hope that someday a trend will emerge for responsible drug use, but remembering human nature, I’m afraid that won’t happen. Maybe the next step in our evolution will grant us self-control, now that we’ve got the thumbs.

Discarded Prose

Although it may be clichéd, pretentious and nerdy, I do dabble in writing poetry from time to time.  Here are a few old fragments that aren't good enough to be showed alone.

Do you ever sit back and marvel
At how closed your eyes really are?
Of the incomprehensible vastness of our world
And then of the universe?
With all you think you know and understand
When you can’t even fathom how small a fraction
Of reality you can perceive or imagine
And whatever thought or feeling you have
Billions in history had it already
And everything you live for
All that you see will end
The earth swallowed by then sun
The sun swallowed by the galaxy
The galaxy by the universe
As gravity pulls everything back together
Into ONE: What it once was
What it always has been
And the cycle we are all slaves to
Will not begin again; There are no beginnings or endings
Only continuance
There is no progress; Only change
Steps that carry you forward in time
Lead you everyday back to your doorstep
And how can you dare to believe
You ought to be anywhere else?

Every year I peer back at my footprints
In amazement at how much larger they became
With every step, how much more swollen
My breast with every breath
And I adjust to the light that once blinded
To see clearly for a time
Thinking dawn has come at last
Each time the moon
Peeks a little more over the horizon
And I find it hard to fathom
Any wiser or older a self
While stunned at how many things
And in how many ways
I’ve learned and aged since yesterday
I still find it a struggle
For my heart to know the words my lips profess
And I wait for the sunrise
When the two will see each other illumined
To stumble upon agreement at last

When I touch a pen
I do not feel the might
That dwarfs a sword’s
I do not feel the power
Of words it can form
Or the intent that falls between them
I do not feel my mind
Lifting from itself and concern
In a rapturous revelation
Poured like a flood onto paper
I feel nothing
But a trickle coaxed and forced
To flow the ink from the tip
Of that hollow pen
Each letter a labor
Sweated more for its burden
Than bricks meticulously mortared to a mansion
Until I find
The architect an absent madman
And my careful construction crumbles
Shaken by false foundations

Upon discovering the works of Saul Williams
I find myself inspired in some reaches of my spirit and discouraged in the others.
To speak with an eloquence equivalent to
The rawness of emotion or immediate
Comprehensiveness and holistic constancy of a thought
To cage the bird without
Taming its immortal wild spirit
But can its majesty be grasped
When it is kept from burdenless flight
In empty skies over clean, green landscape
Chasing horizons with no desire to travel
No need to go anywhere but just to see…
To take a look up from the tiny
Machinations of our own hands which
Seem so big
Looking up so close
Every wrinkle a crevasse, every molehill a mountain
Until we climb our mound to find
Sinai, with its unattainable heights
Abandoned now for thousands of years
As aspiring fools are lost in battle
Within its mere foothills
But I see its greatness from a distance
And, reaching out, watch as my hand shrinks beside it
And a tablet of densest stone appears within it
So I search for the Words of God
Etched into its smooth, blank face
Every fiber of me prepared to surrender
Exaltation for the multitude
And find my covenant in the nothing
That appears as a response to my foolish desires
Waiting for the voice of God from without
Without myself, without my mind, without my effort
And I feel the firm weight of a chisel
Coming into existence in my other hand
Whether it just came as a miracle
Or I just became aware of its presence
As something always a part of my stance
I lifted it and resolutely
Placed its tip against the frigid rock
And began my long, tedious toil
To carve love and spark warmth upon it

Who are you? That is a good question.
Who are you, and I’ve a million ways to answer
But until I can’t gather a response
Worthy of the breadth or absolution
That has become identity
I will not be worth knowing
Who are you? An infinitude of differences can be named
But only one person seen in one crowd in one world.
And who are they? I’ve never cared
I’ve no thought out retorts to such questions
That frighten rather than stroke my fragile ego
Which I construct so intently
Like a house of cards, it consumes my focus
Even as a draft from the open window
Scatters all my Kings, Aces, and Jacks
I fret to gather them
Ignoring the view beckoning to me
Calling out in a voice of fresh air from the breeze
To see mountainous houses
Sculpted as God’s temples
How can they be dwarfed
By my synagogue of self
Sealed neatly in a deck of cards?

I recall strolling down sunny avenues
As a young boy full of innocence and hollow ideals
With little or no comprehension of sin
And I suppose I still don’t get it…
But I would walk with my siblings
Down the safe, isolated streets of our town
Not knowing how unreal it would seem
To people in some parts of our country
Or even in our vast and dangerous world
For children to wander unminded down the road
Without a care for their safety,
No concern wasted on thieves, kidnappers, or perverts
And that little Candyland seemed to me
To be the only world there was
I was ignorant, blind to harsh realities
A boy in body, an infant in thought
Whose love of reading surpassed his discretion
For upon stumbling across a piece of graffiti
Not grasping what would inspire an individual
To write it where it was – seeking to understand
The motive behind tracing this word
As yet unfamiliar, unknown to my sheltered mind
I pursed my lips and boldly pronounced it
Driven by curiosity to feel this new word on my tongue
And filled with a joy at learning
And an absence of awareness of the concept of vulgarity
Not in the least expecting the reprimand to come
I pointed to the etchings in the cement and said, “FUCK.”



What if I could freeze the frame
Of the world seen through my eyes
And push over the walls that surround me
Watching them collapse like cheap theatre props
Painted cutouts pretending to resemble reality
What might I see behind what I discarded?
What is there for the insane explorer to discover
In the final frontier of man
In the realm of fact beyond thought
The law beyond form
Incomprehensible forces we try to understand
By giving them names – like love or gravity
But neither words, alone or in the millions
Nor science, expansive theoretical concepts or equations
Come near unto doing justice to what they try containing
The truth that transcends anything physical or visual
That I could see, or feel, in abandoning the shell
In which these laws merely reside
Touching on the holistically spiritual solution
Hiding just behind these walls
Just above the ceiling
Just under my skin
It is dwelling, constantly acting, constantly in use.
Guiding the paths of our minds and feet
As surely as it plots the course of the sun, stars, and planets

To become a hermit of memory and thought
Irreconcilably isolated within the midst of a multitude
Willfully ignorant of my unique presence
And I of their ordinary ones
Squandering none of this precious concern
For that which already absorbs men in the millions
Such affairs are attended to well enough, or not
Without the addition of yet another clueless voice
To the already confusing and deafening cacophony
Let the countless fools
Number their countless worries
As I grow enamored with the singularity of my silence
The divine simplicity of acceptance over struggle
Even as battle wages ceaselessly on all sides
I fight with no man, and no man with me
As I serenely reach to pluck a sunflower from the Ground
Before it is carelessly trampled to lifelessness
Who has not known the sight of a sunflower?
But in seeing I also perceive
And, looking closer, God speaks to me
In the infinite fractal growths of the petals
The beauteous design and function
Inherent in leaf, stem, root, and earth
I forget all but the search
For my own roots
Stretching out with unconscious longing
Sending tendrils to every reach of existence
Waiting to bloom.

What manner of madness is it
Ambitious delusions of grandeur wrapped in obscurity
A foolish convincing of myself
That the voices of the past are reaching to me
Conversations across time from one victim to another
Sympathizing the atrocities committed by God
Upon those too fragile, too vulnerable
To shrug off their suffering and bear it in silence
We are far too weak not to cry
And even as we conceal it from temporary men
We cannot hide the sobs from ourselves, or God
Knowing as our laments fall on deaf ears
They shall be heard in the future
By children as mournful as ourselves
Inspired to their own grand song

So what do I really know
I know myself, and what things I’ve seen
Or rather what things I’ve seen in myself
By seeing the world through myself
And just how much I’ve yet to discover
Inside and out, I cannot guess
And what things I will never learn
I cannot begin to comprehend
Staggered already by what I try to remember
Overwhelmed by the tiny fraction allotted me
As the burden of my awareness and its curious memory
What a funny thing this life is
To seem so great and be so small
All-important in my imagination
All but nonexistent in reality
A world so objective and impersonal
Containing so many subjects and persons
It’s almost laughable, but not at all humorous
And so we hide this ironic futility
From others a little, the most from ourselves

A boulder, precariously perched
Tenaciously teetering on the edge of a cliff
Contemplating the concept of toppling
Falling against the face of immortal stone
To see what can be shaken loose from the unmoving
It savors the second, unbalanced, it sees below
The faults and fissures grown into the rock
The weakness infiltrating its firm front
Dust, pebbles, loose rock and boulders
Slowly separating from the dissolving dogma
Of the singular, unified face of the harsh cliff
At the top, it knows, it feels
They’re longing for a landslide
Speculating the slip that will liberate
Waiting to flow like all of God’s power
From the Mountain to the Valley

Everything is just made the fuck up
Already, get it; surreality
Is the only periscope man has into the real
Details possess the mind, growing like coral
Encompassing the imagination, anchoring it
But they are weightless, fabricated
Infinitely lighter than feathers in truth
Though it drags us into the dust
Have you seen the sun in these long years?
No, son, I’m afraid
I haven’t ventured into the unknown
The void behind this veil of clouds
I see, feel, breathe the dust in
And fathom no purpose in gazing
Past what lies before me
But what of you and such
A Curious question?
But from what else do questions come?
Now, you smartass
Leave me be and speak elsewhere
Of sunshine and semantics
You are blocking my view
You old fool, you study no more than an anthill
The view is just beyond you
I cannot block it from you
Nor pry your eyes to its glory
I will leave you, but where you are
No man will find you, fare well
And good riddance to the gibbering
On and on from you mad types
With your science of fantasies and methods to folly
Speaking so much shit about life,
Death and delusion which are on their doorstep
Farewell to all courters knocking!


Just bullshitting
Pouring out whatever comes to mind
Flowing in then out like stale sewage
Spewing recklessly onto the page
With no care for beauty or art
Just fuck it, I’m alone
And these are meaningless
These symbols, these tears and smiles
Are fake, plastered onto me like cheap makeup
And my eyes are worthless
Seeing only empty space within the frames of a painting
And hearing the echoes of contempt in music
My food tastes entirely of insufficiency
And my life is but a prelude to quiet death
What a goddamn waste of ink and breath
To speak my mind out loud
When no one listens or thinks
What can be related to contemplation
For the clueless, gibbering idiots of society
How can I share experience with those
Whose thoughts are like a black hole
Absorbing and compressing all that comes to it
Never to be seen again
Like whatever the fuck I was thinking
To write this worthless piece of shit
What do I really have to say
Especially to myself? NOTHING

Oh, the bullshitting
The layers upon layers of pretention
The ceaseless acting for no particular audience
In an attempt to prove something
To the nobodies paying attention
Isn’t it such a waste of effort
To be someone insincere and unreal
When truly you are baffled by self-examination
Wanting entirely to be a projection of ideals
Ungrounded in reality, a golem
Of all things cool or acceptable
Pieced together and given unholy life
By your inner alchemist of personality and passion
Faked interest and inauthentic indifference
Who instills within an imitated life form
A sort of capacity for an ersatz existence
But who is real, golem or alchemist?
And which strong enough to knock down the walls of the temple?

Tracing gibbered symbols
Into the pure, white beach sand
Eying the tide with half a smile
Awaiting the liberating purge
The re-sanctification of nature
That is obliviation of statement
A connection forged between fantasies
Known simply as communication
Standing as a solitary colossus
Imitated and attempted but never replicated
The gem of ideality dangles
Just beyond reach, as a rainbow
And tantalizes the naively reaching hand
With its weightless illusion
So we never speak as we would like
Avoid confession and blunt honesty like disease
Hoping to sell lies always
But never succeeding
What a fool am I
Distressing and charading
When life can be lived only in truth
Thus the Object is one with the Subject
And the passing sands of time
Will freeze in perfect moments of myself

So, the illusion of eloquence
A literative elevator to new planes
Both glorious and false
Duplicitous in their elusive appeal
A world of fantasy may have its uses, but
Dreams are no use to the waking
Life and thought are far from familiarity
And some roads never cross one another