I don’t know when my mutant ability emerged, but it did. Somehow like a failed Rumplestilskin I take whatever love, compassion and earnestness that is directed toward me and transform it into lead.

It’s a talent, this ability to make fools out of people.

I guess it began with my mother’s boyfriends. She had a lot of them. Well, maybe not a lot. How many did yours have? I don’t know the averages of these things. There was Earl who was big, black and mean-looking, and there was Wendell who was big, black and mean-looking too, and there was Gary the artist who was sensitive and a drunk, and there was the scrawny white guy who fixed her plumbing, and there was the old man whose name I forget.

I did not like them. I did not like any of them and so I made fun of them. I poked at their ignorance because they were big and black and simple and could not hit me back. I made them spell words they couldn’t spell and I made them answer questions they could not answer. It was so bad, so humiliating, to be talked to by a fourth grader like that. But what could they do? They wanted my mother and I was the price they had to pay.

Besides my mom seemed to like it. Even encourage it at times. She called me her bookworm. I was the smart one. My big brother, he was the strong one, the physical one, the dominating and imposing one, but me I was small, scrawny, uncoordinated. All I had was a brain and 90 pounds of vitriol filling my body.

I always have to be the smartest. I always have to have the last word. That’s why I write. When everyone else is dead, my words will still be here having the last word. They will serve as a reminder of how brilliant I was and how the world did not deserve me.

Mom liked it until I started doing it to her. Everyone likes it until I do it to them. Everyone says, “that’s so true.” They go, “you’re a trip.” Then I tell them something true about themselves. I notice something silly. Something ridiculous, something unthought out and uncontemplated. This is what I do. It’s so easy, it’s so very easy.

People do not think. People think they think and then they speak, but they do not think. People only act. Thinking happens so rarely.

People’s minds are rooms and there is a spot for everything. A place for the couch, a place for ottoman, a place for the TV, a place for the rug. And as they go through life, they generally end up furnishing those spots with the first things they come along and rarely do they change. Maybe they change the upholstery – convert from Christianity to Judasim. Or maybe they add a new painting to the west wall when they learn to read music. But the space never gets any bigger. There’s no more room eventually and things start to pile up.

When this happens, there is no more thinking. There is no more moving the furniture around. No more throwing out what’s tattered and old. They forget what the original space looks like. They can’t even imagine it differently. They learn the narrow paths that will take them from the bathroom to the bedroom to the sofa and they are content. They invite people over, but they never come. They are invited out, but they never go.

I know people very well. I have watched them my whole life. I have wanted so very much to be like that because in a way it does look like happiness, or at least contentment, this life of not thinking. When I asked my Dad, “Is it better to be fat, dumb and happy?” he answered in shock, “No, of course not.” But in retrospect even this strikes me as foolish. What are we after if not that delicious moment of satisfaction when words fail, mind fails and we are aglow.

So imagine my shock when I realized one day – I am people too! Me, meandering through my cramped apartments, trying not to stab my foot on something sharp and forgotten. Me beating on the walls of my mind trying to get someone’s attention only to scare them when I do.

Who is that strange man making all that racket? Why won’t he sleep like the rest of us? So vain to think a man can live without sleep. Leave us alone. Go away. But no, I am better than sleep, I tell myself. I tell myself this and wake up only to remember it was a dream.

How foolish of me, how very very unthoughtful to forget. What did Hawthorne say about that magnetic chain of humanity? I cannot forget it. I haven’t been able to since high school.

You must never break the magnetic chain of humanity. You must never imagine yourself above your fellow man.

Jesus would approve. Nietzsche would throw a fit. He’d roll over in his unhallowed grave and say, Look child – do not let these rodents dissuade you. Do not accept cheese from rats. Be alone. Be a superman atop a mountain. Contemplate the error of their ways. Do nothing. Be like stone. Be as fire and burn away.

But Nietzsche, you are a liar! You wrote books not because you wished isolation, but because you wanted to be in the stream. And Jesus, you are a liar too! You did not come to save the world because you thought you were lower than the world.

It’s a strange rub – that those who dishonor their fellow man love them the most, and those that love them for their flaws dishonor them the most.

We are all such fools. It’s all so easy. So very, very easy.

There was this time I was going through some serious shit. I had no job. I was in a loveless relationship but didn’t know it. I was radiating negativity. I wanted to die. I woke up everyday thinking that. Kill me then. Kill me or give me what I want. But I didn’t want to work for it. I didn’t want to do anything to give life the satisfaction of my participation. What else can I say? I was low, low, low. Down, down, down. In the ass crack of perdition. In the bowels of human misery. Metaphors fail me.

I was looking for absolution on Myspace. I was posting a lot of crazy stuff. Dark stuff. Actually I don’t know how dark it was. No darker than this. No darker than any other thoughts I’ve had since I was 4. Morbid maybe, but not evil. Maybe self-destructiive, but impotent. I wasn’t going to kill myself. Narcissists don’t kill themselves unless they know it will win them pity. I have never imagined anyone would miss me if I died.

That’s all different now. I have a kid. I’m obligated to stay alive now. I want to. I want to see my kid grow up. I want to see what kind of evils he will pick up. What kind of virtues. What part of me will survive in him and which parts will he destroy?

Even if that weren’t true, I’d still stick around out of a sense of obligation, because it wouldn’t be fair for me to check out voluntarily before my kid has a chance to get his legs under him. My dad didn’t do that – at least not physically. I mean at least not literally. He didn’t kill himself. He was just gone a lot.

My kid deserves a chance to make up his own mind about this mess called life. I hope he comes up with something better than I did.

Anyway, I remember after that rash of postings, a friend of mine commented she was glad I was back to “happy” posts because the dark ones were so depressing.

So depressing.

Nobody wants to be depressed. Nobody wants to hear about how bad anyone else’s life is or how bad they feel. That’s called the blues and we don’t do blues no more. Not in music, not in art, not in nothing. Everything is about growth, movement, change, pushing forward, doing the damn thing, balling out, pimping.

Good for you. Keep it up.

You guys have made the world great so far.

My life doesn’t make any sense. The breathing part makes sense – I need oxygen. The eating part makes sense – I need food. Even the making babies part has a sort of logical ring to it. It’s everything else that doesn’t make sense. The job, the morality, civilization, humanity, love, faith… all that jazz.

I work at an advertising agency. I help produce online ads to sell people things. That’s my job. It’s what I get paid to do, and I work for a place that’s very good at it. I’m proud of where I work. I take pride in being a company man.

But I also watch the news. People are losing their jobs. Thousands of people. Tens of thousands even. They are losing their jobs and we are selling them things. Not food or water things. Just things. Things that light up, things that make noise – play things.

The argument for why it’s OK goes like this – If people don’t buy things, the economy slows down further and more people lose their jobs.

The argument for mob extortion goes like this – If you don’t pay us to stop bad things from happening, worse things will.

There is a strange, cold familiar ring to both.

I’m getting older. My birthday was yesterday. Obama is now President. How do I feel about that? Honestly, not much. Define “feel.” My body is still tingling from a bout with the flu, my stomach is still a mess, my eyes are still scratchy and watery. I’m watching the news coverage and wondering what it would be like to be there, although I already know. One big crowd’s the same as the rest. I’m not impressed by that. Or would I have been? In a philosophical sense how much of life is what it is and how much is what we say it is? And if we’re the only arbiter, who’s to say at any given time?

Fucking pointless rhetorical exercises like this take up so much of my day.

I think about volunteering. Obama says we should. This country needs us, needs me. Not just the abstract “me” but the real me. The me lying here on the couch and watching CNN on my relatively new HD TV. Some people don’t have TVs. Some people are permanent fixtures on TV – refugees, politicians, war victims, the dead and the dying, the living and the lying.

Volunteering would be better than doing nothing. Better than just surviving. Which is what I’m doing now. Just going to work, clocking in, yessiring and no mam’ing, pretending, pretending, pretending. Is anyone not pretending? Is everyone sincere but me? I think this is called cynicism, me always questioning everyone’s sincerity.

Some people have to be sincere, right? But even if they are, what difference does it make? What good is sincerity? The chameleon survives because it can blend in. The tribe survives because the individual suppresses his individuality to the needs of the group. I guess you could argue it the other way around too. Maybe we survive because some people don’t shut up. Some people stand up and argue for the right thing to do instead of the right thing to say.

I’ve been sober for days now because of the flu. Who wants to be stoned when you’re sick. Being sick is like being stoned. Being sick is definitely an altered state of consciousness. So can we say that being stoned is another form of sickness? I think so. I think life is very much like this.

There’s a mother with a sick child. The child has a 50% chance of survival unless he gets a radical treatment that carries a risk of blindness. The mother gets the treatment for her child and the child does go blind, but lives. Now, did the mother save her child’s life or did she blind her child? Could she have taken the risk and let her child possibly die? Can a great good justify a little evil?

Life is constantly like this.

we welcome you, _______, and good morning
the dew is still fresh on you
the clay still soft
the light you will bring only just now rises in the world
the horizon goes forever
today we honor all that you will become & celebrate your journey
where you’ve come from and where you are going
we honor the mother you gave you her womb
we honor the father who gave you his essence
we honor the ancestors who carried you through time to bless us today
(the grandparents who are with us and those who have passed into eternity)
and we honor ourselves for the trust you have given us
may we never abandon it

we welcome you, ________, and good morning
the world is expecting you
a place has been made
the tent has been opened and everyone is here
have no fear, have no doubt
you are protected, you are safe
the light of our love embraces you
the light of god embraces you
all is well –
good morning.

we welcome you, __________, and good morning
the path before you is beautiful & yours alone
we honor the work you will do and the souls you will touch
we send you to it with faith and joy
humbled by our responsibility
may we never impede you
may we never eclipse you
may your star shine until ours has long burnt out
until one day it sets
returning to the light from which you now come -
good morning.

Amen/Ashe/Sobeit.

God doesn’t want you to depend on him or else he’d have made the world invisible and himself obvious.

I just want to write. About nothing. About everything. I just want to write. I want to express myself. Second guess myself. I just want to write. I want to scribe, to pen, to ink, to type, to hear the click beneath my fingers. I don’t want it to run out or to run away. I don’t care what words in particular come to mind, I just wanna keep my fingers flying in different directions you know like comets or something criss crossing against space and time and all that jazz like Dizzy blows or the trumpets the angel Gabriel does or Peter Gabriel and a sledgehammer and how do you spell sledgehammer anyway I can’t type as fast as I think in particular if I’m high which I am but not the way you think better faster stronger more improved let loose free in a way i haven’t been and you see how the typing grammar attention to detail capitalization devolves however since I must type I also second guess the next words because I have the fraction of a moment when I backspace to make the words at least spell correctly since that irritating red line appears when I don’t.

When my fourth-grade teacher asked me if I thought I was perfect, I said yes. It was the right answer but she was too dumb to know that. She thought I meant I was Hercules. All I meant was Hercules would suck as me.

We are all perfect, children. The moment you were born, you were finished. Like a solidified crystal there was nothing else to add or take away. You shouldn’t feel bad about this. Didn’t you already know you were powerless to change yourself? That your fate was sealed by the interaction of atomic angels countless millions of years ago.

We are created from the past. If you want better people tomorrow, believe in your unborns. We cannot change. We can only recognize and accept what actions must be done now. Like cogs in a great machine we turn and turn, fulfilling our manufacturer’s specifications. Perfectly uniquely suited to be ground into dust.

To me this is beautiful.

You know what bullshit is. Improvement is bullshit. It’s a one-sided way of looking at anything. The problem is anytime you improve one thing, you jack something else up. Some asshole looks at a pristine lake and says, you know that would look great with a bunch of pre-fab houses and golf courses around it. People will get nice places to live. The value of the property will go up. Money will flow to the surrounding folks and everyone will prosper.

Except for the fish that start dying and the air quality which turns into shit because of the new malls that start popping up and the vast trains of commuter cars heading into town for work. The problem with improvement is that it’s a story told by lions and not lambs. A normal, decent family man looks at his neighbor and suddenly, because of recent political events, realizes he is his enemy. He picks up a machete with the rest of the mob when the call is made and he improves his nation.

The same applies to self-help, self-improvement, and the talk you hear all the time in the media about the latest Opera-approved guru offering some improvement to your life. Be more happy. Stress less. Have better sex. Make your family life better. Improve. Improve. Improve.

You can’t improve. All your thrashing around trying to do so only makes you weirder and stranger. There is no better than right now.

Try and learn compassion. Tell yourself everyone is your brother. Now get in your car and let everyone pass you. Obey every traffic signal. When you are cut off, quietly congratulate the driver to yourself on a job well done. Don’t get angry. Don’t lose your temper. Breathe in and out. Go to yoga. You’re improving.

You’re so zen you can breathe right past the genocide in east Africa, the persistence of slavery throughout the third world, the militarization of the US. You are taking walks in the park with your family. You are getting to know the inner you. Life will be less painful for you. One less person will suffer.

Under no circumstances abandon your material possessions and minister to the poor, the sick, the malnourished and forgotten. For no reason renounce your citizenship in denouncement of the industrial-military complex and it’s hegemonic global agenda. Don’t go crazy or anything.

Moral outrage is overrated anyway and best expressed on the internet where it makes a real difference. Doing something extreme would be, well, extreme and we can’t have that can we? We are living in the present. We are staying with the moment. Out of sight, out of mind.

After all, you’re sane.

You see, you can’t improve. All you can do is reinforce the same bullshit we’ve always been told. Be calm, don’t act up, learn how to adjust. Life sucks, get used to it with prayer and fasting. Pray to God and when He ignores you, pray to the government, pray to money, pray to Oprah, pray to anything but you — regular old fucked up you.

You are not improving. You are just learning techniques to cope with yourself, with the world and the ways we make it wrong. You are building your dream house on the lake and fish be damned. You are a vegetarian with leather seats. A yogi with a diamond wrist watch. You love yourself and all the things you can fit into you.

Don’t kid yourself. Or, fuck it, kid yourself. But don’t kid me. I do not believe you. I am unimpressed and I do not want to be saved.

I will be in Hell with Jesus and the rest of the criminals.