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

Do the Twist

Where does it lead? A train of thought chug-a-lugging in a downward spiral, circumventing the single answer to its ceaseless stream of questions, each one less inquisitive than the last. Why can’t I? What’s the matter with me? What is keeping me from getting this right? Questions, questions… Questions I don’t want to know the answer to at all, though they are ingrained in my very identity, a beating part of me as much as my heart or veins.
So what is the answer I’m seeking? Which is the one that eludes me every time I long to grasp it? I cannot even fathom it, really, so much a fool am I. It’s a fantasy, a shadow of a dream flickering in the corner of my minds eye, dancing in light cast from the burning essence of my desire. I imagine a perfect life, a perfect world, a perfect way. I imagine myself happy, successful, at peace. I imagine and imagine, and what is still real to me now is slipping out of my control. Such a daydreamer am I that I’m asleep all day, walking about my business entirely catatonic. Somehow I have become a spectator in my own life, a heckler.
I’ve wondered what’s wrong. I’ve thought about it. I think about everything. I think about conversations I’ve had, conversations I’ll never have, conversations I want to have, and how to get them all the switch places. I think about my life, and how I want my life, and how to make them the same. I’ve also thought about curing AIDS and ending world hunger. I think all the time.
But I can’t remember the last time I really decided to do anything. Really decided. I choose things all the time, like an iced triple mocha or to get bacon with that burger. That’s not what I’m talking about. Deciding to quit smoking doesn’t count if I’ve done it a million times, deciding to take the plunge doesn’t count if I never actually jump. I suppose I’m decision-challenged.
What’s worse, I’m self-pitying about it. Wallowing in personal disgust and exasperation, loathing every today more than yesterday, every older face more than the younger. I know no-one likes “that guy,” I know no-one has ever liked “that guy.” If I could be “that other guy who’s okay,” I would. I swear to God that I would, fuck it. I don’t care if he’s bucktoothed, fat, and retarded, as long as he’s satisfied to be a bucktoothed, fat, retarded guy. God bless him if he is.
I’m not satisfied by anything. I’m not satisfied to be anything. I eat because I am hungry, and I stop because I am full, enjoying the finest filet as gruel, and curling up alone like a homeless man in the cold emptiness of my mansion. It doesn’t have to be this way, does it? But it’s not any way but the way it is, isn’t it? How could it have been any way but the way it was meant to be?
Spirals, spirals, back to the spirals. Thoughts coming, one after the other, like drops of rain. I’m drowning, my whole world is flooded, drenched, sodden, and these fragile sheets of paper are all I have to absorb the torrent with. Alas, they soak up but a single tear and leave me treading water indefinitely. Some are good, and keep me afloat, but all too many pull me away, down towards the whirlpool. Spirals, and god damn me but I’m so dizzy.
It can’t be that bad, dying. Compared to living, I’ll bet it’s easy. If you think sleep is refreshing, imagine a nap so rejuvenating that you don’t actually have to get up and do anything ever again. If I’m an existentialist, it means that I’m only pretending that life has meaning, right? And I thought we all outgrew playing pretend. Ha! Now I see that it’s all we do! Acting like we’ve got love and happiness, things to do, right and wrong. But we made it all up, didn’t we?
Think about it. Some people are born poor and miserable, die poor and miserable, and have nothing they can do about it in between. Some people are born happy and rich, die happy and rich, but try and take every opportunity in between to fuck it all up for themselves, get lucky and still make it. Some people are born and die the very next day. Is that right? Is that proper? Is that correct? No, but it’s reality, and reality has nothing to do with right and wrong. Only people are willing to come along with hubris enough to label it either way, deliberating on some useless adjective for something that just is.
Words, words, words, so damn many to choose from and all I can think of is “FUCK.” Fuck, fuck, fuck. The single word not worth a thousand fucking pictures, repeating in my mind, wailing at me like a siren. Like always, I wait for it to pass me by so I can go about my life, but this siren is inside my head, and I’m always being chased by it. Fuck, what a word. And with a million thoughts behind it.
Words are the pastels of thought. Kierkegaard is my Michelangelo, my brain is my brush, and my life is my canvas. All I’ve ever wanted was to create a masterpiece, but I’m no master. My strokes are sloppy and careless, my lines drawn with an undecided finality, my brush guided as much by gravity and the shifting winds as by my impotent gestures. But I play another game of pretend, envisioning Da Vinci gazing past his easel at a smiling young woman while I scribble crude figures on fast food napkins with crayons.

Posing Questions

Just try to imagine yourself as solely a human. Close your eyes, and picture a world just barely emerged from prehistory, the threshold at which an ape became a man. Forget your culture, your education, your social games, all of yourself that has been merely acquired; don’t look at what you’ve come to be, but at what you’ve always been.
Humanity is dawning: This stunning, fractal phenomenon known as self-awareness (“I think, therefore I am, therefore I think this, therefore this is,” et cetera) just barely popped into existence between these flowing atoms, as evolution opens your eye into the abstract world.
Imagine the potentialities! At this moment, this crux of existence in which life, as we know it, acquires meaning, this fresh breath taken into Mind, there are no expectations or establishments, norms or systems or disciplines or sciences. There is only you, and your amazing human mind, which, opened up to a highly complex and beautiful world, eagerly and immediately flexes to absorb, interpret and analyze all the memories it can catch hold of.
You are capable of grasping the works of Pythagoras, and of Aristotle. If you desired, you could master the arts explored by Newton and Einstein, or argue positions taken by Nietzsche or Plato. It doesn’t matter, in the very least, that none of these men have existed yet; you have the same gift of consciousness that gave birth to their knowledge, and their ability to share it by teaching. All of their potentials lie within you, their common ancestor of thought.
But mathematics has not come to be; nor science, nor music, nor writing, nor art. Theory itself has only just become a theory, one that you are desperate to prove.
So what is it that you would think about here, at this moment of awakening? The slate is blank, every idea is original, and every concept is invention.
What fills the empty spaces of the human Mind?
Buddhism might call this nirvana, the moment of an abstract entity’s perfect freedom from attachment to or knowledge of the concrete world.
Judeo-Christian tradition describes a Tree of Knowledge, which cast humanity from paradise.
Perhaps Eden was the bliss of ignorance, before men laid the first brick in their tower of collective knowledge to challenge God.
Perhaps it was something more, though.
Come back to the present, and take a second to appreciate how much man has invented, what a world we have created for ourselves. So much knowledge has been acquired, so many things discovered and learned and engineered, that we cannot help but feel superior to our foolish predecessors, who dug through the mud with sticks and stone tools. How much cleverer we are than they! we think.
But look over to your average citizen in the human nation, this modern manifestation of generations of accomplishment, in whom all previous thoughts culminate, and ask yourself whether that person is any wiser than Socrates. Is he any more inventive than Da Vinci? More ethical than Jesus? Happier than Buddha? More eloquent than Homer?
Of course not, so then what has he stood to gain from all these inherited standards and paradigms?
And what has he stood to lose?