Some wait their whole lives to find out how good it was.
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At it’s best, life’s a big happy fight. Remember to throw punches.
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If you could choose your family, they’d be useless.
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The first thing you gotta get over is you’re going to be here your entire life.
I’m not speaking in tongues
But there’s a forest growing in my mouth
Singing you my saddest song
And it’s all off key
The world has a way with a man
Makes him madder the harder he tries
Can’t win for losing
As the saying goes
As the wind blows
empty
Free as I wish I could be
Sure wish I had something smart to say
Can’t remember the last good thing I read
Don’t look at me like a sphinx, woman
I’m telling the truth
Only it doesn’t matter the more I explain
I had a point but the moment’s gone
It’s like this every time
What kind of kryptonite are you
Standing there with hands full of my hair
And with these two coarse hands, I would shake this house to the ground
I would tear down the world
But who else would have me?
I’m good. I must be because I’m tired of talking about myself. That’s why I haven’t been inspired to write lately. I’ve been OK with things, no quarrels. The times I am upset, I am just upset, not about anything in particular. I’m not holding on.
Life has blossomed into different, more interesting things. My son is elemental. He’s awesome. I can’t say enough good things about my offspring. I love him to the point of physical sickness.
And my wife is… I have no words for my wife. Inexhaustible magnetism. If I have my way, we’ll die together. I need her more than I allow myself to realize. The realization of that kind of interdependence is too much to comprehend. It would be like seeing the colors between colors, the spaces between spaces.
While I’m big upping, I might as well include both my mothers, old and new. My biological mom-dukes who gave me access to unlimited spiritual energy. She’s a dynamo, a creature of pure force and sadness. But also my sweet mother-in-law who has come into our lives at precisely the necessary time to create Langston’s family.
Already I can see the building blocks of his psyche downloading bit by bit into his cavernous little mainframe. He’s becoming more amazing every day, synthesizing the best parts of us without even trying.
May we all be happy.
I’m so terrified of telling the truth. So scared, I hardly remember how. A wall goes up, a wall made of all the things I’m not supposed to utter. All the things people walk around plastered on them like a billboard and no one is supposed to notice. The deformity of the species and our pathetic culture. The things, the people, we leave lying strewn behind us like the aftermath of a hurricane.
I look at it all and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’m blinded.
The drugs don’t numb me anymore. I’m in a corner and there’s nowhere to go. I’m looking at a phalanx of desperation closing in and they all know my name. I’m no prophet, no poet, I’m not anything. Liars take a name, the trees go perfectly fine without one.
Today, let’s start again.
I’ve always wondered what this blog is for. Honestly, I don’t know most of the time. It certainly isn’t to entertain. To philosophize? I dunno.
I put down my thoughts.
They’re often strange even to me. I don’t expect anyone to get them. Every once in a while I start to talk about something that sounds pretty smart (even to me) and I guess I’m trying to enlighten, to teach, but I feel weird about that. Truth is, I don’t want the responsibility of being a teacher. I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s life but my own.
I’m not even sure I want to be responsible for a child, I just am. But none of you are my children. I don’t even know who “you” are… if there is a you. I don’t mean that philosophically, I mean it just like I typed it. I have no idea who’s reading this or why. Probably because we’re Facebook friends or you follow me on Twitter… Probably not because you’re in desperate need of the universe’s secrets.
Maybe it’s LA, being so far from my native Virginia for going on a decade now. That kind of distance takes a toll. You don’t realize how much of your memory is contained by other people until no one remembers what you were once like. So easy to forget yourself what you were once like.
Two options when that happens 1) you sit around moaning for what might have been (but probably wasn’t) or 2) you wet your finger, find a direction and start walking again.
So let’s start walking. Today’s a good day to walk.
Really, the only bad part about not having a job is how sometimes it can make you feel a little less awesome than you actually are.
Mommy, why don’t we have a daddy to come home with us?
Second worst is the pity you get from people about your new untouchable status.
Jeez, how do you do it? How do you go on drawing breath not knowing where your next order is coming from? I hope you find a new boss soon before it’s too late.
They’d have you believe it’s because of the money. They’re concerned about you. Your family. What will happen if you get sick? How will you survive on non-organic food?
Is that stuff even palatable?
It’s not about money. Deep down, everybody knows it’s not about money. Everybody knows it’s really about status. How much you have and how much you can give or take. Money just being the short-hand for how we keep score.
Money, the invisible current that allows us to do or take things. Property, the invisible force field around stuff that means they’re yours and no one else’s.
I mean, if you really think about this stuff, you start to see it’s very juvenile. All of this taking and hoarding and stuffing ourselves is precisely the behavior of young children not even fully aware of the existence and subjectivity of others, much less themselves. We’re like kindergarteners running around trying to lick things so no one else will touch them.
Meanwhile, the clock keeps counting down to our own personal judgement day. A lot of us want to forget it and shove it to the back of our minds, but it’s always lurking, the knowledge that we’re powerless against the onslaught of time. Time gives us all things and takes it all back at once.
We do so many things to stave off the trembling, but there it is. You’re dying. Life is killing you. The wick is eating itself up in ecstasy, in pleasure, in agony… everything cascading into darkness.
We create stories called “meanings” and “purposes” to parse the angelic flame that is existence. We haven’t evolved much from gut-readers and bone-grinders. We change our clothes and think we’re reborn.
I don’t want pity from children.
Even if I live to 99, I will die a newborn. Humans are transients in the music of the spheres. Soft flesh, mostly water, easily discarded, quick to reform. What is there to mourn?
I’ve seen my brother lain on a metal slab, his face identical to a drunkard’s in death, and I’ve held my son, still wet with placenta… separated only by quivers and spasms.
When the music of these quivers and spasms becomes unbearable, we call it living and we start seeking our escape. And the entire movement of our escape is what we call the body of life and we adorn it with stories. Like a Christmas tree, we hang our hopes and disappointments on it, singing it hymns and dreaming of a bloody red savior beyond time.
The best short story I’ve ever read was written by Neil Gaiman. It’s called “In the End” and it goes a lot like the beginning.
Folded in time, bent like a telekinetic’s spoon, life is the interval between beginnings and endings.
Don’t pity a blue note when it sings.
It’s nice when you have hope, but you shouldn’t let the lack of it stand in your way. After all, hope is irrational. The realistic view is to admit you don’t know and move on.
Too much fuss is made about hope. It’s not necessary. All that’s required is the will to move forward, to continue, to keep dealing with things as they come. Hope is passive, another word for waiting, another mode of biding one’s time, procrastinating the inevitable present.
Now is all there ever is. There is no back-story. You weren’t born, you didn’t grow up, and no path brought you here. You woke up and there was now, that’s all, nothing else.
Your memories are the notebooks of an extinct being. Your old photographs are hieroglyphics of a bygone era. They are two-dimensional illusions. There is nothing to extract from them.
I mean, look critically. You live, what, 100-years if you’re extraordinarily fortunate? How old is the universe? How long will it continue? A billion more years? A billion billion?
How can your few, trivial years spent living in the midst of this aeonic drift tell you anything about it’s ultimate nature? You’re like a chimpanzee contemplating Motzart. Not even a chimpanzee. An amoeba.
And the future? Dare we even speak of the future? What gall to stare into its protean depth and imagine some comprehension. Countless probabilities cascading into an incalculable event horizon, quantum states blinking in and out of being with such speed, the mind cannot grasp their intervals.
Why seek to grasp the music of the spheres? Many sailors before you have run upon jagged rocks attempting to divine its source. It is always beyond us. Beyond everything. It continues, oblivious to observation, agnostic of meaning, devoid of hope, complete in every possible way.
The women I’ve dated before her were almost all of two types: assassins and cripples. But these designations aren’t limited to females. The assassins were the kind who were so into themselves, and yet so insecure, they would shoot down any idea that didn’t jive with their agenda. They weren’t really interested in getting to know anything but their own needs and desires. Having a man for an assassin was just like carrying around a bullseye for emotional target practice. Since assassins are essentially victims of another assassin, they are especially dangerous because their insanity is contagious.
Cripples seem to be a better option, but they are far more insidious. Cripples pose as normal, functional human beings but the minute you start to get close to them, everything ceases to function properly. They can’t do anything without you. Can’t decide where to eat, can’t figure out what to major in, can’t see themselves with anyone else ever, doing anything but loving you for eternity. But you’ll have to carry them, like a sack of potatoes, everywhere you go.
