girls

So wordpress has a stats page that, to my shame, I check obsessively.  At the bottom there is a little field for “search term” that almost always just says “unknown search term.” Every once in a while though, for whatever reason, something else will appear down there.  It’s not uncommon for that something to be along the lines of “fucking with handkerchief,” or “girl tied with handkerchief.”

Some non-zero number of people are sitting down with their pants around their ankles, reptile-lust-brain fully in command, searching for very specific bondage porn, and ending up on the bindle.  This pleases me very much.

A lot of people, a LOT of people, will or would react to that with, “ew.”  And yeah, sure, “ew.”  But there are only a few variations among human here:

1) you don’t masturbate;  2) you do masturbate, but not to pornography;  3) you masturbate, at least sometimes, to pornography, but you think handkerchief bondage porn is a fetish too far; or 4) some combination of the above, plus you’re embarrassed / guilty about it.  The connective tissue across all those options, excepting maybe the aesexual, is shame.

What bothers me about “ew” is our knee-jerk tendency to “otherize,” to point at someone else to prove we, at least, are not that.  Our need to create “in” and “out” groups is an evolutionary imperative, and it’s been the cause of some of our most callous collective activities.  Being “out,” to a group of humans, means they’ll torture you slowly to save their children.  Don’t be “out” come winter, says evolution.  I would ask, among consenting adults, what constitutes a fetish too far? Why must your answer be “ew?”

Why must you not be that?

Human sexuality is such a funny thing. Some of it’s rooted in nature, some of it’s nurtured in the darkness of our formative years, but after a certain point, it is what it is.  We like what we like.  And because sex is so vital to us, because it causes us to act so irrationally, it’s also our catnip, our exposed heel, susceptible to the machinery of institutional control, via the state, religion, madison avenue, dad’s shotgun, whatever.

Our endless capacity to live in thrall to lust is such a truism it’s become trope.  It’s no secret, this weakness.  Your sexuality, growing up in a self-aware society that thrives on conquering and control, is never quite your own.  We’re slaves to our sub-conscious, and to our sexuality most of all, and the key to those chains has always been our shame.

Making art, for me, is about honesty; it’s about harnessing truth to help us feel less alone.  This shaming and exclusion, this hurting alone in the dark, that’s my bread and butter. The sad irony of our alienation and shame is that it’s something we share.  I’m interested in the stuff we know but don’t talk about, the underwater caves and connected tunnels that exist below everyone’s surface, the impossible lights in the darkness we all see but can’t raise in polite company.

I spit on polite company.

Bring me your reptile-brains with their pants around their ankles, bring me your picked-on teenagers, your girls with daddy issues, bring me your fetishes and your orgasms and send them to the bindle, and let them wank if they wish while I play my guitar and sing a little White Stripes song about children walking to school.  The bindle delights in it all.

Fuck the shame of rich old men. Live your own weird life.  Come sadness we’re all the same monkey, hurting alone in the dark.  Open your window, toss out what you don’t need, let me in with the light.  It’s just life, darling.  Have a wank and a giggle.

In the end, it’s not so serious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM6m_bbVShc?rel=0

0

come back, baby

Inspiration for Inside Llewellyn Davis, mentor to Robert Zimmerman, sage of 1960s Lower East Side Manhattan, The Mayor of Macdougal Street himself:  Dave Van Ronk.  

As with a lot of his arrangements, I thought, hey that sounds easy enough, let’s pull up a tab and give it a go.  Nope.  Hard as shit.

I’m so tired of trying.

You do it, Dave.

“Climb this mountain, call my baby back…”

0

clark and michael

First, in fairness, came This is Spinal Tap.  That was the genre-breaking beginning of the “mockumentary,” the inflection point of this wonderful innovation.  But before The Office exploded, and before Netflix web-streaming had brought television online, there was Clark and Michael.  

The brainchild of pre-fame Michael Cera and Clark Duke, the show was delivered as a web-series before web-series were a thing, breaking the fourth wall by filming filming, by taking a meta-contextual step beyond the camera long before Jim was lamenting Dwight’s antics with a knowing wink at the screen (or Tim and Gareth, if you prefer — which I do).

Filled with deadpan, serious-sad humor, and flush with rising guest stars, this is a concept that was well, WELL ahead of its time.  It almost hurts the brain to consider the thought process of its writing and inception.  Michael Cera rode this to Arrested Development and beyond.  And Clark?  Well, Clark Duke had a harder road.

It’s become a trend these days for young intellectuals to trash J.D. Salinger, and bear with me here, but it grinds me up inside.  It’s very easy to disparage a Perfect Day for Bananafish when you’ve read a thousand shitty short-stories that end in suicide, all them — like it or not, know it or not — owing a debt to Salinger.  Same goes for Rushmore and The Graduate and The Royal Tenenbaums, they would never have existed without Holden Caulfield and his phonies and his kid sister Phoebe and her floppy hunting hat.

Having been raised on a generation of Salinger-influenced art, it’s now a hip trend to talk down his work, and I understand how it might seem uninspired in the wake of everything it inspired.  But that’s lunacy.  Salinger was a genius, an innovator, and while he may have been an asshole, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t great.

Even if you prefer his imitators (which I don’t), he should get credit for his creation.  I’m not calling Clark and Michael J.D. Salinger — far from it — but innovation means something, something extraordinary, and if it’s your creation?  Well, credit is the only currency that matters.  For what it’s worth, this is me, giving them theirs.

Also, not for nothing, their show is dark, and sad, and funny, and very sweet.

“Despite the skepticism of their friends and family, Clark and Michael are convinced that they have a TV script that will make them stars.”

THE INTERNET presents:

Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 Episode 5 Episode 6

0

mysterons

Walking along a shortcut through the forest, yoga mat over my shoulder, singing softly to myself.  Listening to the leaves crackle underfoot, I looked left and — BAM.  Startled the shit out of me.  See, what’s really weird is that this is not the first thing to be nailed halfway up that tree.  It used to be a urinal.

“A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, for he shall be going out on a day when he shouldn’t.  But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.”

-John Millington Synge

0

knife

Weird shit is my shit, it’s my life.  Unusual things are what get me out of bed in the morning, it’s where I find most of my beauty.  But I don’t like weirdness for weirdness’ sake.  Years and years ago I watched the first season of LOST and loved it.  As an aspiring academic political philosopher, I was tickled by all their references to state of nature social contract theorists (i.e. Locke, Hume, Rousseau) and by the general edge of absurdity and darkness to the show.  It was weird for a purpose, and genuinely good art.

Eventually though, as the series progressed, it became apparent that the creators had no real vision for the show, no direction, but because of the nature of popular television, this thing had to grind on, and it had to grind on in a specific way: cliffhangers.  By shocking the audience, they got us to sit through commercials.  By shocking the audience, they garnered chatter between episodes, playing into the hands of deftly synced marketing campaigns, social media astro-turfing, all the whirring bits of the New York ad-industry hype machine.  By shocking the audience, they sold advertising.

It didn’t matter what the shocks were or what they were for, what mattered was that they were effective, and they were.  This is the formula for daytime soap operas — no meaningful part of this process is about making art.  The show had become an advertising delivery mechanism, where the advertisements and the back of my brain talked directly to each other, while the front of the brain was distracted with explosions, death, sex, laughter, all the shiny monkey shiny look shiny things.

Shocking me to sell advertising, once I’ve wised up to what you’re doing, is both alienating and upsetting.  It’s cheap psychology that’s painfully effective because in many ways we are still slaves to the evolutionary imperatives of our atavistic monkey brains.  I would argue free will itself is suspect, and all our choices are constrained, but that’s another conversation.  My point here is that we are eminently manipulable, and the incentives of the global capital system reward our manipulation.

It’s not that advertisers are evil, any more than corporations are evil, I have good friends who work in both areas.  These people by and large are doing only and exactly what the system they exist within values.  It’s like water flowing out to find the limits of its container, this shit was always going to happen.  It’s symptomatic of the real problem: a global morality based on pure profit.  More than anything else, it’s this morality, and the plausible deniability of all of our participation in it, that will one day ruin us all.

But though advertisers as a whole can’t be labeled evil, some of them certainly are, and the umbrella under which they operate definitely is.  Advertising is evil because it works on us in a way that’s beyond our choice, it preys on us without consent.  It’s about planting seeds and turning the science of psychology to its logical economic extreme; it’s effective despite us, and it feels like being used because that’s what it is.  Shiny thing, snapping fingers, get your wallet, snapping fingers, shiny thing.  It’s insulting because it works — it’s evil because it’s rape.  I want what I want to be what I want.  Is that so much to want?

I realize most people weren’t… personally insulted… by the artistic direction of the LOST franchise.  I realize this is part of why life is so difficult for me.  The reaction I’ll get from people who care about me when I get worked up about things like this is usually, yeah, okay — but is it worth it?  Are you happier for having spent your time this way?  I don’t know.  There’s certainly no societal validation in it, but I have to believe it’s worth it somehow.  You have to believe in something, right?

Weird is still one of my highest compliments, and taking risks is a huge part of making art.  The psychology of advertising exists in art as well, and the line is a blurry one sometimes.  A really sad side-aspect to all of this is that the best advertisers are incredibly smart, incredibly capable creatives.  They’re evil geniuses, who in another world would have been artists.  They’re the black knights, in their Manhattan towers and sushi dinners, to my white knight with no home and nothing.  We all make choices.  And in the end, when all is said and done, outcomes are irrelevant; what’s important is the motivation behind our risks.

This Grizzly Bear video has always bothered me.  It’s weird for the sake of being weird.  The song itself is ostensibly about domestic violence, but the video, though it has interesting moments and visuals, connects neither with the song, nor with itself.  It’s just sort of meandering psychedelia with a diffused hippie message about the mechanization of mankind.  I think.  But in the end, I forgive them, because this is not about selling me anything, it’s not about tricking my monkey brain to sit through commercials, or planting the seed of a product so when I go looking at a shelf I have that subtle prodding push to buy what’s familiar — no, this failure is about art.  And in the pursuit of beauty, unlike profit, there is nothing more noble than a weird, embarrassing failure.

“Can’t you feel the knife?”

0

time after time

Here’s Julian Lynch, a member of the weird multitude she fostered, venerating Cyndi Lauper note for note.  His breed of freak-flag-flying gender-playful modern human owes her a great debt — this cover is a love letter.  There’s a whole generation of LGBT folk living in the light today that looked to her once in their darkness, at a time when it took immense bravery to make the now commonplace public assertion that a person is a person is a person.  She’s a goddess, that girl, and gay rights aside, her songs had a layer of artistry and heart that always belied their incredible popularity.

Oh, Cyndi, sweetheart.  You were right.

We all just want to have fun.

“If you’re lost you can look and you will find me…”

0

a life of missing notes

“We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof in the end come despondency and madness.”

-William Wordsworth

When I was in 4th grade, this kid Greg was going to go sign up to learn the trumpet.  For whatever reason I said, hey, alright, I’ll do that.  So we both went down to the music room at Belle Sherman Elementary and got permission slips for our parents to sign — something about the financial liability of loaning a trumpet to a ten-year-old.  I went home that night, threw my backpack on the floor and I guess went and played video games or read a book or something.  Whatever it was, for whatever reason, that permission slip just never made it to my parents.  Greg’s did.  So now Greg can play the trumpet.  In my later, wiser years, that shit has always killed me. Continue reading “a life of missing notes” →

5

on remembering to look up

So the bindle is two years old today.  How about that?  When it was born I was living on wasabi peas, drinking myself to sleep every night on a mattress on the floor of a bare room.  These words and sounds and images were a desperate attempt to communicate with a world that didn’t particularly care.

But life is a wild thing.  Perpetually shifting and uncertain, each fading sunset could be replaced by literally anything.  It’s so god damn beautiful — casually, constantly, like it’s nothing.  Whenever I remember to pick my head up out of myself, there it is:  so vivid, so bright, so saturated with light and sound and sensation.

Sandwiched between billions of years of darkness and endless nothing, this tiny riot of existence is unbelievable.  Some days it’s so much I can’t stand it.

Some days it’s hard to be a cynic.

Joshua Clark Orkin

0

all my friends

“All My Friends will not make your coke habit more poetic.”

–LCD Soundsystem, Official Website

(bullshit it won’t).

That’s the thing about co-dependency, about anxiety and addiction and sensitivity, about moving around the world — you’re always losing people, so many people, for so many reasons.  But no matter the situation, I’ve found if I can submerge myself in an ocean of loud music I can survive almost anything.  It soothes me, music, and what’s more, it records:  Old playlists are better than any diary.  When I hear a song that flooded my life during an emotionally resonant time, it takes me right back to not just the place, but the feelings and sensations of being there.  The immediacy of the emotions is almost frightening.

We live in a magical time for this, a digital golden age unlike anything that preceded it, where all the music ever made is literally in our pockets, available exactly when we want it.  My parents were good hippies and listened to good music, truly they did, but their relationship to it was more along the lines of buying the new Cat Stevens album and getting everyone together to share a joint and listen.  There was a record-player plugged into the wall and there were crates of vinyl you carried about when you moved.  It was something you did at home; there was a physicality to it, a degree of separation between music and life.  It’s not the same.

My entire adult life has been set to a soundtrack.  From the dramatic to the profound to the mundane the scenes line the shelves of my mind, cinematic, infused with art and meaning and metaphor, and I picked the score myself, and it’s perfect.  The memories aren’t just linked to songs, they’re linked to the right songs.  It’s incredible, all this activated potential, all the sensations of life on constant offer; truly, unspeakably gorgeous.  But the film I see when I listen, for all its loveliness, all its emotional depth and richness, is ultimately very sad.

“…where are your friends tonight?”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRBdav5qFag?rel=0

1

golden chords // good house

Joshua “Deakin” Dibb, the notoriously expendable member of Animal Collective, left the band on a “hiatus” right before Merriweather Post Pavilion dropped and sent them into the global music stratosphere. As the three-man Animal Collective toured the globe and became internationally famous and wealthy, Deakin faded deeper and deeper into the mists of their history.  Unfortunately (fortunately?) he was never truly forgotten, because the internet was still busy reviling him.

sCpXN2P

During this hiatus he put together a Kickstarter asking for  $25,000 to go to Mali.  I’ll say from just a travel expense perspective, that’s an outrageous amount of money to send one person to Africa.  Ostensibly he was going to play a show with Gang Gang Dance, record an album, and produce some kind of visual poster/book to go along with it.  Gang Gang Dance dropped out, but Animal Collective fans still, sort of shockingly, donated enough to meet the goal.  So he took the money and went.

And then nothing.  Nothing happened for years, no music, no nothing, and the internet was not impressed.  His micro-fiscal backers left angry posts all over message boards, and a new breed of “crying Deakin” meme was born.  It got bad.

1auFOMp

During this time he would pop up periodically to reply to some of his most virulent critics, saying he was sorry, that he had actually given most of the money to an anti-slavery NGO in Mali, that he was trying to work on an album, that it just hadn’t happened.

Later he would talk in interviews about the crippling insecurity he struggled with, the weight of his doubts about what he had actually brought to Animal Collective, about his singing voice, about whether in the end he even had anything worth saying.  So this year, when his solo album finally came out, it created a small sensation.  And honestly?  I hated most of it.  The meat of this record is a painful, try-hard mess.

I’m moving into the realm of speculation and opinion here, so it’s important to back up and say first that I think Animal Collective was one of the most innovative, influential bands of this generation.  So much art, even great art, is the rehashing of old ideas, the use of old tropes in new ways.  It’s trope because it works, and there’s nothing wrong with that; this kind of art represents most of our cherished cultural heritage.  But real genius, that sporadic flash of true human miracle, is innovation.

Animal Collective, at least up through Feels and Strawberry Jam, and to a lesser extent Merriweather Post Pavilion, were truly doing things that hadn’t been done before.  It was fresh, and weird, and difficult, and exciting.  That being said, it was always sort of understood that the driving creative forces there were Avey Tare and Panda Bear (Dave Porter and Noah Lennox).  To echo poor Josh’s demons, it’s hard to tell what exactly Deakin was doing that was vital to this phenomenon.  I mean shit, they kept sort of telling him nicely not to come anymore.

PxTwBiY

But Animal Collective of late, both with Deakin and without, has lost its fire.  They’re still weird, but it’s more weird for weird’s sake, and it’s not new anymore.  The heart has gone out of their music, for me at least, along with the heat — their new songs are missing something important; they feel hollow.  As a band they’ve moved very far away from sitting on the floor singing “Covered in Frogs” to a room full of confused people.  So it was with surprised delight that I discovered, despite Sleep Cycle‘s rancid meat middle, that Deakin opened and closed his late little offering with bookends of pure blue sky.  It’s authentic early Animal Collective, and it’s bliss.

He may not have invented Panda Bear and Avey Tare’s irregular rhythmic and vocal methods, but he was there, and he helped, and he learned.  Those years on tour and in the studio were not for nothing.  Animal Collective after Merriweather Post Pavilion no longer sounds to me like the Animal Collective I fell in love with — but here, Deakin does.  His songs are excellent, and real, and full of simple, vulnerable heart.  Despite his public humiliation, his failures and paralyzing insecurity, he did have something to say, and he says it here softly to himself, and it’s all about redemption.

“You tell me what’s wrong…

…But what’s right?”

0

9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9

This internet of ours has become a brand new medium of expression, and as such it has opened up all sorts of new spaces, new folds and crevices in our brains where art, as it will, slipped in and sprouted.  Perhaps my favorite example of this (beyond the bindle itself of course) is the ongoing saga of the Interface Series.  From what I can tell, it’s a science-fiction/horror story, being told in installments by someone calling him/her/itself 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, primarily as comments on reddit links.  A small subset of the geek underworld is going bananas over it, and rightfully so.

Without giving too much away, I’ll say it starts with the narrative history of flesh interfaces, a recounting of pseudo-historical events told by some large number of distinct and unreliable narrators, each a fully formed character, each easily identifiable by their own individually realized voice.  The existence of this story as an unfolding mystery in the mossy places of the internet is not what makes it special, though it certainly is genius advertising, and speculation certainly fuels the small but growing hysteria about it.  What makes this work special is not the artist, or artists, or whatever the back-story ultimately turns out to be.  In the end, what makes it special is the writing.

Holy shit, it’s so good.  So good.  I say this with the authority of someone who has read both his share and yours of bad writing.  It’s cerebral, and philosophical, and littered with symbolism and connective foreshadowing.  With an incredibly deft touch MHE wields the twin tools of voice and mind-melting creativity to coax the various disparate narrators and perspectives into slow focus as a single horrifying meta-story.

If this is just some shmoe off the internet, some lonely alcoholic basement-dweller and not an established author, then it’s someone who has been writing and failing and struggling and learning for a long time.  This is no first-try amateur, it’s the fully realized, written and re-written work of someone who has paid their dues and knows what they’re doing.  And what’s most exciting about it, is that it’s happening! This is a live thing, going on today, yesterday, tomorrow!  Every morning I check the user’s post history, and the subreddit that sprang up around it, to find the new narrative pieces.

Things are speeding up, story lines are coming together, and the whole horrible thing, this shambling meta-monster of creeping underground art, this work that began so innocuously as a few head-scratching non-sequitur ramblings about mass LSD dosing, flesh interfaces, and segmentation, is beginning to hit some sort of stride.  And the best part is it’s happening right now, it’s dynamic, and weird, and this sense of continuous syncopated growth gives it a buoyant vibrancy.  Well, that’s not true — the best part is the writing.  Holy shit, it’s so good.  So good.

So here, this is your invitation to a weird new thing that I’ve just spent five paragraphs trying and failing to explain as introduction.  Instead, I’ll do what I should have done from the start, which is simply hand you over to Mother Horse Eyes herself/himself/itself.  If you’re my sort of weird, and you enjoy it as much as I do, then consider this my gift to you.  For those who appreciate it, I see it truly as a gift, though I make no promises about your sleep tonight.  And if MHE isn’t your thing?  Well, then move along, you.

The slick lips of the magical space pussy beckon:

The Compiled Interface Narrative, begins at the beginning.  Start here.

/u/_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES, the user/author/authors.  You’ll have to scroll way back to get to the first posts, but a good resource to stay current.

“I will always regard the first instance of a flesh interface to have occurred in Treblinka, 1944. The geologic disturbances, partial tunnels, so-called interdimensionality, and wealth of clearly segmented bodies leave no doubt of its existence. The Soviets have documented this.”

/u/_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, post 6, 4/21/2016    

3

i keep losing heart

The summer between 10th and 11th grade was a time of training — after playing junior varsity soccer for the first two years of high school, it was time to try out for the big leagues.   The varsity coach came from a track background though, so part of tryouts was a mandatory run.  We had to do the 800m (twice around a standard track) in something like 2:20.  If you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t make the team, simple as that.

So I spent the summer going periodically for runs.  I would lace up my shoes, run down the road for a while, then run home.  I did this kind of a lot, I don’t know, I mean it felt like a lot.  I absolutely hate running.  When we had to run on the JV team, these long cross-country 5k type runs, I would hide behind a car with my friend the goalie after the first turn took us out of eyesight.  Then we’d just catch up as the group came thumping back around.  The coach, Gilbert, was something of a space cadet.

Running for me, in all the sports I played, was never connected in any meaningful way to being successful in games, scoring more goals, whatever.  I’ll compete until I collapse, but when I run it’s just me and this little voice on a loop in my head: “this hurts, I can’t breathe, this hurts, I want to stop, let’s stop.”  It was something I was forced to do, all the god damn time, for soccer, hockey, baseball, lacrosse, every god damn thing, and mostly by men who were overweight balding alcoholics, men who enjoyed yelling like drill sergeants, men whose own glory days had ended with their proms.  Maybe that’s not fair.  The point is I hated it.  I still hate it.

That summer wound down, and eventually it became the week before tryouts.  An old friend of mine, a year older, happened to be at the track one day when I showed up to run.  He’d made the leap to the varsity squad last year and knew the deal, so he offered to time me.  As I came around the home stretch, he held up the stop-watch and started yelling out encouragement, and I found myself running like I’d never run before, rounding the final corner, gulping breaths like a drowning man.  When I crossed the finish line I crashed down and collapsed, helpless, on the red rubberized track.  From my wheezing vantage point on my back, unable to speak, the look in his eyes was worrying.  When I caught my breath and managed to ask, he told me, tactfully, that I wasn’t even close.

A week later, at tryouts, I tried.  Really I did, but what I had learned that day was that this run required basically sprinting the entire 800 meters.  To my genuine surprise, the jogging I’d been doing all summer had been woefully inadequate.  Given my apparently lackluster training routine, I simply wasn’t physically capable of it — without a time machine, it wasn’t going to happen.  So I  tried, and I failed, and I packed up my things, and I went home.  For the last two years of school I played tennis.  The tennis coach didn’t give a shit about running.

I say this a lot, and I’m sure my friends and family think I’m being sort of a dickhead every time, but I really believe it: there is metaphor in everything.  It’s the great gift I’ve taken from writing, a wisdom that extends beyond poetry, the idea that there is connection and meaning and symbolism everywhere, not just in art, but in life.  Awareness cuts both ways though, and metaphor doesn’t discriminate between happy or sad, good or bad; these are human concepts.  Metaphors are just connections, lines between two points. And this one really haunts me.

I think I’m trying.  I really do, and I find this life incredibly difficult, every day is a struggle inside myself.  And yet for all that striving, there’s precious little to show.  I’m 31 years old, living in an un-insulated room, with no career, a handful of crumpled dollar bills, and a pile of little arts that I find beautiful but nobody sees.  When I reflect on that honestly, there is a part of my brain, a part that I hate, that wonders:

am I just… jogging?  

0

Listen, Please Listen — It’s In There With You

Oh little one, locked away
with such lovely distractions,
in the bone box you built
by yourself. You’re not safe
in there anymore, can’t you
understand that? You can’t
hide from the world inside
your own head, it doesn’t work
like that. There’s still time, love,
and light, love — Come outside
yourself, please.  It’s not safe.

“The devil said, ‘I’m a dream, and you’re alone…'”

0

no bold villain

“The world runs on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery.  People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see.  Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one who made them look.”

-Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

 

0

sam stone

Here’s a leap for you: modern ideologies are just window dressing; we’re all ruled by the same supra-national murderous fucks. As end-game global capitalism approaches, the merchant-kings atop the great monopolies will openly ascend to their thrones, the morality of profit will at last supplant and destroy what’s left of our aggregate decency, and we as a species will become nothing but an empty host for the carnivorous mask of market “freedom” we once put on to use — one that fit so well we couldn’t pry it off, even as it ate down to the bone.  This soulless incorporated nightmare with its fixed leather face will then burn through the galaxy or annihilate itself, either, with equal indifference.

Still with me?  I mean, it doesn’t have to be like that.  There’s still time, something drastic could be done.  If I were a betting man, though, I’d say…

“Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose…”

0

A Sad Story That Isn’t About Death?

Yeah, I’ve got one.

We had only been in Tanzania for about a month. After her two-week, bare-bones project orientation in Dar es Salaam, we were driven down south and dropped in this village and left there to struggle. More often than not in those early days, we simply failed. Food, water, language, electricity, everything. It was wild, lurching back and forth across the delirious line between adventure and nightmare.

Now, we’ve only been here a month, but it’s about to be her birthday. I’m trying to get her this expensive jade ring to replace the one that broke, the one I got her when we first met. Problem is, I have to contact an old friend in Taiwan — who I haven’t kept in touch with — and have it bought at the jade market and mailed to me.

The birthday arrives, and no ring, and I’m at a loss. Everything here is crazy and difficult and completely overwhelming me. Everything. I spend the morning making a card on white paper with pencil while she’s at work, then cook a couple scrambled-egg-on-white-bread sandwiches, in a beaten-metal wok over a little portable gas range, on the floor of the empty kitchen, in our decrepit, furniture-less house.  It’s not much and I know it.

I start to walk to meet her, to have a picnic outside her building, but she’s already walking home and doesn’t want to go back. My lone plan is shot. So we go back to our crumbling house, eat the sandwiches and have a fight. I give her the card, mid-fight, and it’s whatever and forgotten. The whole thing is pretty indescribably awful; we both feel wronged, and angry, and everything is terrible.

Fast forward a year and a half. Much has happened. I went home and came back, a second time, to go on safari with her parents. We’re on Zanzibar fighting like cats in a bag, because that’s the obvious outcome for two co-dependent addicts living in isolation together. Drinking all day and all night, ending each night with a fight, but still sometimes curled up in each other, still sometimes sweet; still kissing, still fucking.

I now have the jade ring with me. My friend in Taiwan finally came through and it just showed up one day, a year later, at my parents’ house. I give it to her and in surprise she tells me she thought, way back then on her birthday, that I was going to propose. She thought I was going to propose, and then because of that fight, I just put the ring back in my pocket. She carried that inside her! She thought that in silence for a year!

Now she has the ring, on a chain, and it looks lovely there against her skin, but I can’t help myself. Everything is terrible and I have to ask: “If I had proposed back then, on your birthday, what would you have said?”

There is a pause.

“Yes,” she says.

“And now?”

“No,” she says, lying naked in my arms.

“No.”

I miss her every day.

I guess this story is about death after all.

1

to my wife – with a copy of my poems

I can write no stately proem
As a prelude to my lay;
From a poet to a poem
I would dare to say.

For if of these fallen petals
One to you seem fair,
Love will waft it till it settles
On your hair.

And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand.

Oscar Wilde

Alfred,–

[…]Secondly, I come to the more painful part of this letter—your intimacy with this man Wilde. It must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyze this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience have I ever seen such a sight as that in your horrible features. No wonder people are talking as they are. Also I now hear on good authority, but this may be false, that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes. Is this true, or do you not know of it? If I thought the actual thing was true, and it became public property, I should be quite justified in shooting him at sight. These Christian English cowards and men, as they call themselves, want waking up.

Your disgusted so-called father,

Queensbury.

Father,–

WHAT A FUNNY LITTLE MAN YOU ARE.

Alfred

0

changes

Charles Bradley listens to Charles Bradley sing Black Sabbath. I’ve been covering this over and over on the guitar for the past 48 hours, and each time I have to stop and interact with the world it’s still there, coloring everything, the last notes ringing echoes in my saturated brain.  If a little cry helps get it out, that’s okay.  I would if I could.  It’s been a powerfully atmospheric couple of days, weeks, years…

“I lost the best friend I ever had…”

0

sometimes life is a sad mess

she left him and met me
when i was trying it alone
freshly sober and healthy
badly needing a friend

she loved him but actions
told her he was addiction
and she needed to escape
what he was and she did

how could she have known
hard drugs and his cancer
as we kissed would agree
to at last stop his heart?

2

beat (health, life, and fire)

Bright and warm and fun, Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down are my gift to you on the eve of real spring.  You can’t see it, but I’m clapping my hands here like an excited little girl.

Spring!

It’s coming!

Spring!

“I must battle without her…”

0

big mistake

The two ends of the bell curve, the perfect human and the worst of us, can have each other.  I’m not interested in either of them, except insofar as if the perfect human were ever born, perhaps it would do something about the worst of us.  The evil ones who rule the earth can go fuck themselves, I’m doing my best to opt out of their world entirely, and the perfect human?  Well, it would be an interesting phenomenon, but the philosopher king wouldn’t be one of us at all.

A perfect human is no human, our tragedy is our beauty is our definition.  What makes life worth living for me is to be among the ones who scuffle in the dark, always stubbing our toes, crashing to the floor, destroying what we struggle to build.  I’m here for the ones who are doomed and flawed and know it and try anyways.  A perfect person does nothing for me.  I’m in love with the cracked ones who care.

0

Website Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑