The Dagga's Edge

First Series: IN FLUX

2009-11-06T02:30:00.001-05:00

IN FLUX is a contemporary experience in literature of a sort.

Welcome ... This is a Blog:
My First Virtually Published literature wherein I have the distinct pleasure of sharing a lil' of mah self with ya...

My works are both divers and sometimes even awkwardly genre'd. I have a strong use and preference for idiomatic structure...

...And yes, I use ellipses as if it were one of the only punctuation marks acknowledged by the English language. My reason...

...Simply the fact that life, wine and literature should all flow as smoothly...as an ellipse...allowing nothing more than the impact of the following experience to punctuate, discipline and even tame what would have been otherwise an other than wise, unruly mane.

From time to time you may come across things in which you don't understand...

GOOD

... I'm not always trying to speak to your ration-al, but to your heart, for lack of a better word...

        Yup...Your Heart...You know...that place where those

Feelings of rage swell,

        Love rests,
                Envy bubbles,
                                   And lust
                                                Cultivates.

        You know that place all-too-well...The Back of your neck, the pit of your belly, the corner of your eye where those tears of remorse, woe, pleasure, ecstasy, laughter, love insperation, anticipation, jealousy and downright loathing repose themselves.

Enjoy!

What Is Truth

1993-12-04T09:18:00.000-05:00

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? -- Sils Maria Upper Engadine, JUNE, 1885.

Nietzsche’s percpectivism posits a similar assertion that I am about to make. Logical truths are founded on the concept of absolute truths, those truths which are universal. Are the statements I am about to make a set of truth-claims or simply claims? Does Nietzsche’s posit of truth stand firm if we hold percpectivism (Nietzsche & Hollingdale, 2003) as the subjective consumption and synthesizing of information, which during a transitive phase, becomes neutral? For instance, my truth is my truth at the time of writing these words, however, perhaps, upon the commitment of these words to paper, the words become neutral and devoid of a truth value (Evans 1982: 227). At this point, the reader can choose to agree or disagree with these claims, devoid of assigning a boolean value to it. My paper can neither be true nor false, because truth does not exist, nor does false exist. Does the absence of truth default to fallacy? Does the intention of truth hold sway over the received truth, or does the received truth trump that of intention? An anecdote: there once was an individual who claimed that Nietzsche had a somewhat narcissistic perception of man and self. At this point, said person was redressed for his “cavalier” and “judgmental” reproach of Nietzsche. Further it was explained to the former by the latter that his statement was ad hominem – an attack on the author directly as opposed to the intellect or content of said author. If the former’s intention was not one of attack but an intended compliment to Nietzsche, was the author ever attacked? Who should judge whether the author was attacked, the former individual or the latter (Kant & Gregor, 1998)?

In our culture and rhetoric, “Truth” is a fallacy because it presupposes that there is something opposite to it when in fact there is no false or “Untruth” within the realm of our existence. There is simply a truth which is wrapped by other truths until we render it false. I say the word WE, not by error or by whimsical assertions of poetic measure, but quite on purpose. I will speak of the measures of truth as they pertain to our culture because my knowledge and experience regarding other cultures are both limited, at best. Throughout all of my readings, scientific, philosophical and otherwise, the determination has been made that “way leads on to way” and that we do not arrive at a thing spontaneously – neither individually, nor as a group. With so much said, we must begin from a place to go to a place, further we are all assumed to have a common origin, birth. We all have an intuitive predisposition to survive (Wilson 1975). This may be genetic; however there may be an overarching universal law that governs survival. Albeit, there are exceptions such as suicidal individuals and warriors that sacrifice their lives for the life of others; I would fancy both of these tendencies to be derivatives of the social contract, wherein the suicidal is opting out of the social contract by means of premature termination and the warrior upholds the social contract—sacrificing oneself for the continuity of members of the social contract, thereby supporting the survival of the contract. Both of these cases are beyond the scope of this essay and so I will not continue to digress any further. Before I branch away from my initial statements any further, let us circle back to the last point and align that with the aforementioned.

To survive – means to persist. Everything which we collectively, and or, individually accept as an existing thing, strives to survive. This survival goes beyond the base survival of the thing itself, but of its kind. To put this into context, let us explore a human being. A person first strives to survive with immediacy, seeking the Maslowian elements of base survival, such as: food, shelter, sex, sleep, breathing, and so on (Maslow 1943). The search to consume these elements of physiological survival is the first priority of survival. The anxieties of termination, death in the human, not only catalyze this search and development of survival products, but spur the innovation of ways to cheat death. Cheating death comes in many forms, most of which have to do with the creation of a thing that will persist beyond the lifetime of the individual. Here I do not speak of the basic survival tactics found in every living thing such as natural reproduction – participation in the conception and birthing of another entity of the same species (procreation). We all originate in this fashion, we will always return to this base. The ancillary creation of the persistence set that will persist beyond the natural life of the human being can be the creation of wealth, knowledge, ideas, physical structures, art in audio or digital form, or anything else that one may produce which will be consumed by others, after the individual’s physical death. Natural reproduction, birth, is the most basic form of transcendence beyond one’s lifetime in that it promotes generational survival (Watson, 2006).

If the aforementioned survival technique is basic to the existence of man, then what is to follow? For something to be given, the thing must be received. Logically, the recipient of a thing may be the same giver of a thing. The contrary is true – the giver of a thing may well be one and the same as the recipient of a thing, however where survival of an entity beyond its lifetime is the goal, it is impossible for one to give to oneself any element of self in order to forestall the termination of one’s existence. And so in human beings this “cheat of death” technique, the search for immortality must be a group exercise. A group in this case may be more, but not equal to or less than one – two individuals can be considered a group. What does any of this have to do with “truth”? All of the aforementioned are indicative to the measures we employ to do a thing: the building and negotiation of social contracts, and finally the performance of said contract. There is a quote that I have yet to disprove on any level – “how we do anything is how we do everything”. Perhaps the exploration of the correlation of the Fibonacci sequence and the Mandelbrot Set as it correlates with the formation of natural structures would elucidate the premise of this quote, however, qualitatively speaking; I have never experienced the contrary. Social contracts are at the heart of individual survival, let alone the survival and persistence of a group. Which brings us back to our original point, truth is true in and of itself, “untruth” is the collective wrapping of other truths around a truth until it renders said truth false. I used the word “we” quite deliberately, and in the same fashion I use the word “render”. The definition of render is: …creating, shading and texturing of an image. In this discussion, the image is the truth. Truth, much like the word underprivileged, by dint of its definition, is a fallacy in and of itself. Underprivileged infers the existence of an overprivileged, yet the word overprivileged does not exist in the English language (The Pathology of White Priviledge, 2008). When something is rendered false, it is thought to be false in its entirety; if this statement is untrue then something false must be in part true. If something is true and that same something is false then should it be considered true or false? If we contextualize a thing and say that this thing is true at this time but false at this time, then we must include the time vector in the assertion. If the total composition of the assertion is true, that assertion remains true, regardless of its false cousin, because it is not the same thing, but a derivative or modification of the first true thing. The first true thing remains true and the false thing is an inversion of a truth. We can then reduce the inversion – the fallacy, and have an equivalent truth. If the reduction of a fallacious thing results in a truth, it follows that the fallacy was derived from the truth. This brings us full circle to the assertion that truth is a fallacy, because there is no such thing as false only true comprised of other truths that render the first truth false. If truth is a fallacy, and there is no such thing as a fallacy, then truth may not exist either.

Truth is a descriptor which is subjective in measure and objective by agreement. We apply this descriptor after the consumption of a thing and the rendering of a thing. We derive categorical attributes of the thing; assign ancillary descriptors of the thing, and then further assign a value to the descriptor of the categorized thing consumed which we agreed on to build an objective base, which we first had to perceive subjectively to arrive at an initial descriptor (Hughes, 2010). Yes, this was a run on sentence, and yes, it dilutes the point, and that is in itself the point. Once a thing is diluted it is no longer the thing. From a chemical science point of view, H2O is the descriptor for water (both well-established social contracts). If an additional part of hydrogen or water is added to this construct, it can no longer be called water. This is exemplary of the homeostatic contract. We agree that a thing is a thing and once changed becomes another thing. If this is agreed, then the truth is the truth until it is changed. It cannot be changed by taking something away, or it will become different from the first truth. This makes the derivative false, but the derivative remains true unto itself.

These assertions may lead one say, I agree, there is no such thing as false, and truth becomes truth unto itself, so how could there be no truth? One may further use counterpoint, leveraging my statement of “no fallacy” to say that to render the truth false is not possible, because applying further truths, to the truth would either change the first truth or further modify the first truth to render it more true (if the aggregation of truth is accepted as being an augmentation of the first truth and not a separation from said truth). These counterpoints would in fact render my argument ineffective if not for one simple fact – a thing is only a thing if that thing could ever be something else. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. What under this construct would be the opposite of truth, ambiguity? If so, can we say that it is true that this thing is ambiguous? How can a thing be ambiguous and true at the same time, would they not cancel themselves out? The semiotics regarding a thing and the thing are not the same thing. A rose by any other name would still be just as sweet – and thorny. What we define as the truth in our western culture is perhaps the closest thing to “The Way” found in the Tao Te Ching (as I interpreted it, subjectively) (Tzu, 1995). Laoists believe in a natural order of things, or natural form, Confucianism would push for “the Way”, which is his own system and could be thought of as his way. Laoists unfortunately have interpreted “the way” to be our way (Tao, 2010). My interpretation of the way, is that there is no way, no tangible way -- but the thing is what it is unto itself as it presents itself, to whom it presents itself, and is a collection of all of these perceived and unperceived aspects. The sum of all of this is the way of the thing, only that way is active and not passive and by the time the way is perceived it is already not the way, in that the thing is transient – and is continuously on its way to being the way in another form. Further, time is in itself both a human and relative construct. Assigning an attribute to a thing is a subjective and oppressive measure that modifies the thing. The modification of the thing becomes the symbol of the thing we discuss, and not the thing itself.

The truth is the nothing which resides equidistant of every conceivable inquiry into it. Our interpretation of the truth then becomes an approximation of the sum of all results of our inquiries. The accuracy of our truth then becomes subject to the qualified number of dimensions of our inquiry – the aspect of the truth we inquire upon. Lastly, the vector of currency of the reporting must be taken into consideration. All of this – and still only an approximation of nothing – and if it something, it would be an incomplete artifact – can an incomplete artifact then be true? Is causation a matter of fact or a matter of inference? Is there order in the universe or a unified ignorance of the disorder of our everyday habitat? What is the truth? The truth is a fallacy because it is wholly subjective, and because there is no thing as false the truth cannot exist.

Let us take a look into the relativistic and subjective nature of man. Our archaic measuring system is bound to the relative as if there is no other form of measure. Perhaps we may become a grander species once we have innovated or adopted such a form of measure, free of relativism. Many philosophers and scientists have inferred that to explore the new in freedom, one must first delve into the mouth of madness. Madness, in that they must free themselves from the social contracts that bind every man. He must elevate, remediate, and eliminate every governing notion of what is known – he must question everything. The philosophical question then becomes how a person can elevate, remediate or eliminate these notions if the only tools at the actor’s disposal are these notions. The eastern philosophy answer is to “remove a wedge with a wedge”. In this light, we may fashion the tools at our disposal – the learned elements, to unlearn what has been accepted in the social contract and explore a personal madness for the sake of returning to reality – the social contract with the bounties of free thought. Perhaps we can go to the Tao Te Ching for a third way – perhaps we can look at the truth cycle discussed in this paper – perhaps we can question everything by questioning nothing. To be more specific, we can question every social notion by questioning nothing of the natural order of anything (actively excluding the social contract).

Earlier I mentioned inversion of truth and fallacy – what happens when we begin to invert notions? Weird things happen, like the discovery of heliocentricity, God Forbid (or so said the Catholic church). When we exert inversion against the concepts that we hold dear, we open the opportunity to use the reality that we have all accepted as our collective and everyday habitat as a springboard into the realm of possibility. The inquiry into plausibility will naturally follow; however, from rote, our natural inclination and predisposition to pursue homeostasis will cause us to digress and to quickly revoke the rights acquired by freedom of thought in exchange for the security of the known. How do we then take our experience out of the “cave”? We must force ourselves into the question of plausibility of an inverted notion. I do not suggest that we propel ourselves recklessly into this state, but rather leave bread crumbs in our wake so that we may return to the collective contract of our reality, more knowledgeable and open minded. We must follow and record the path from our sanity to our personal madness so that we may find our way back to sanity with the booty of madness in hand. Once we have crossed the threshold of possibility, we must then challenge what is plausible – redefine the notion of statistical evidence and suspend its hold on us. There is an eastern philosophy that says (and I paraphrase), just because you’ve dropped something and it has fallen to the floor a hundred times, does not mean that we should take for granted that on the hundred and first time it will occur in the same manner and not fly into the sky. A tool that can be employed here is inversion of statistical evidence. There are several ways to analyze the evidence of statistics and to infer upon it the result of an action. One way – the traditional way, is that if the sun has risen every morning for over one thousand years, it will continue to do so. It is then a plausible and valid inference to believe that the sun will rise on Tuesday, as it did on Monday. This arrogance is tantamount to the ignorance encapsulated in beliefs such as yelling at the sky during an eclipse will scare the wolf god away, that he will not eat the sun because we have frightened him and that the sun will appear again. How arrogant is it of us to assume that we have such an intimate knowledge of the universe, that we can presuppose anything upon it, let alone the “rising” of the sun. Does not our archaic and semiotic vernacular indicate the immaturity of our notions? Perhaps the sun has “risen” over 200,000,000,000,000 times since man’s inception and the odds of the sun NOT rising is 200,000,000,000,000 to 1 then does it not follow that if Monday was in deed that magical tick of the clock, that we are now overdue (statistically speaking) for the sun NOT to rise? Again, the barometer of our relativistic measurement subject man to the aggregate social contracts he holds dear concerning truth.

Let us investigate the madness of subjectivity and its correlation to truth. I see a color, I call it red, you see a color, you call it red, we agree that the color we see is red, however, I will never know that my red really looks blue to you or otherwise, we just know that we agree that whenever we both see this color that we will call it red. What experience is not subjective? Do you know for a “fact” that you were ever born? Perhaps the whole life that you have you experienced is a scenario, a notion or idea played out in the mind of God, as he decides whether to bring you into reality. Perhaps there is no God, and you are the first of your kind and the whole lot of us, including the self you project is your personal pondering on what the structure of reality should be. Perhaps still, your notion to survive is driven by Freud’s definition of the id which is fully aware of God’s conjecture and so it drives you to prove that you are useful and worthy of birth – that you are good, or wise, or intelligent and worthy.

What if you were born but only had three hours of life. You lay unconscious in the hospital, you are not reading this writing, but have conjured it up. Likewise, you have conjured up all that you have perceived to exist. In your dwindling state, you have never seen the light of day, if in fact such a thing exists, and your infantile mind has simply grabbed the bits and pieces of whatever sensory functions are available to you and have constructed the notion of the life of which you live? You are trying to make sense of the anxiety of your impending death, and so attempt to justify it and rectify it in any manner you can. If you were truly born, you would have knowledge that you would never die. You would see how silly your concept of war is – why would there ever be any such thing? You would do something comparable to laughing if you had the opportunity to consider the way that you have imagined people to look, or the notion that there is such a thing as animal or love or hate. Because time is relative to the expected lifetime of the agent, it follows that the experience of 43 years would be divided by the three years of life of which you actually existed in your semi-slumbering state. The notion of subjectivity remains a social contract still in that when we all thought the world was flat, the notion to follow, you fall off of the earth if you travel to far out was an easy correlation to come by. In our contemporary and relatively enlightened state, we take for granted all of the discrete corollaries that both individuals and the social construct would effect as rote, without question. When we were the center of the universe, what did this mean to an individual? What did it mean to society? What if it were a fact that we think that we are born with eyes facing forward, as opposed to eyes facing inward? What would that mean? What if it is a “fact” that what we have perceived as looking out into the world is us actually peering into our very own body? What if the notion of biology is in fact astronomy, a microscope allows us to peer into the workings of the universe? What if the galaxies that you perceive are really your very own synaptic pathways, that the trees that you see are the nerve endings of your very own nervous system? What if I am not a man, but a cell or some other entity in your system? If this social contract were to be adopted, would war exist? Would we fight for power over one another, or would a natural synergistic order go into play? Would not our selfishness and notion to preserve oneself force us to protect each other for the sake of our own preservation? Is it really so implausible? Once we discount the notion of why would that be true, and replace it with how can that be true, the notion begins to crystalize itself.

There is no such thing as truth as it is subjective. Truth is a fallacy and there is no such thing as fallacy, simply other truths wrapped around a single truth until we render it false.

Bibliography

A.H. Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review 50(4) (1943):370-96.

The Pathology of White Priviledge (2008). [Motion Picture].

Evans, G. (1982), The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hughes, F. (2010). Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: A Reader's Guide. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Kant, I., & Gregor, M. J. (1998). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lagattuta, K. H., & Wellman, H. M. (2001). Thinking about the Past: Early Knowledge about Links between Prior Experience, Thinking, and Emotion. Child Development, 82-102.

merriam-webster.com. (n.d.). Retrieved April 26, 2012, from Merriam Webster - Dictionary Online: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perception

Nietzsche, F. W., & Hollingdale, R. J. (2003). Beyond Good and Evil. Penguin Classics.

Tao, L. (2010). RETURNING TO 'ZISI':THE CONFUCIAN THEORY OF THE LINEAGE OF THE WAY. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 85-100.

Tzu, L. (1995). The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Watson, A. (2006). Self-Deception and Survival: Mental COping Strategies on the Western Front, 1914-1918. Journal of Contemporary History, 247-268.

Wilson, Peter J. (Mar., 1975). The Promising Primate. New Series, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 5-20: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

FOUR LETTERS

1977-03-15T15:46:00.001-05:00

Love: A temporary Insanity cured by marriage.

--Ambrose Bierce

Love, a four lettered word that drives out another four lettered word when that four letter word lead to a finalizing four letter word – LOCK, as in wed-lock.

Now the driven out four letter word, I’ll leave to your imagination.

Imagination is the part that can become detached from the driven out four letter word,

when “love”,

our fiery four letter word

gets stabilized and secured and

so-dulled by that finalizing four letter word.

If love is insanity

then our driven out four letter word,

or rather the feverish passionate act of that word

is a mad man’s cadence.

That finalizing four letter word is the breath thereafter.

Not that intoxicating

barely breathing breath

that stoge in the mouth

reach for the lighter

eyes glazed over

click click kshhh -- cigarette lit

inhale slow

– imagination of the moment’s sweaty predecessor – breath.

But the one with bills and kids and yeah – we’re married.

Take a breath.

Love

mODEz

1977-03-15T12:41:00.001-05:00

The old blind bastard's trying to sing to you, listen as the Isley Brother’s say, to the music. You must learn to do that before you can expect to understand. Slowly, slowly, a few licks at a time.
--John Edger Wideman

Reality is a blinding blaze of incandescent light – bright and efficient. She’s a butch type dike of a bitch. She gnaws perception and feeds you bit by bit of her truth, past satiation and pleasure, past the it is until you complete her circle of charity on the throne, the porcelain one, with a moan and a grunt. Reality is your best friend, though that two timing broad has ran away with your wife.
--Ron-el Greaves

Hmmmmm

1977-03-15T09:45:00.001-05:00

Why ask questions I ain't gonna answer....

Why waste time on the preponderance of reality...

The diaspora of your vision defined scarce and few,

The spectrum of my eyes see way beyond you...

Look into my soul and have it swallow you whole,

Gorging its famine on your ignorant soul,

Try as you might, my dept shall surpass,

Beyond my present life's cycle for your spawns to amass,

Not a threat, though you may take it as such,

Not a promise, though it means just as much,

Simply a prescription,

Of benediction, encryptioned by me...

Peek into my heart's core...and tell me what you see...

Am I?

1977-03-15T09:00:00.001-05:00

There was once a time when questions were easier to come by than answers, but I have learned now, that I already know the answers to questions which have yet to be disclosed. I have seen the solutions within the mouths of disparaging complications. I have watched these solutions suckle on the tit of dilemma and fervently coo on with gurgles of wisdom, but all to befall deaf ears. I mistook it for clamor though my innards listened close.

The problem we all seem to agree on in race relations is the deficit of physical sameness. I preclude that it is much more than that and ambiguously indifferent to scalar quantification. It is an irony of such magnitude that it blooms implosively, folding in on itself finding never-ending detail to its detail. It is OK. For I’ve heard words yet to be spoken and have seen the pain in the eyes of those who’ve sought to humble me, but my humility lacks not. Please understand that what you choose to halt is in essence awaiting such attempts, attempts which breathe fiery life into the pools of kerosene blood that we have collectively harnessed. You sought to destroy, but did not know – you sought to know, but did not understand. And and but when you sought to understand, all accrued knowledge was destroyed by non-acceptance of the simpler facts and the disbelief of things which needed not be questioned.

You were merciless, be proud. You were a force to be reckoned with, accept that valor. You were the czars of conquest, the monarchs of mayhem, the liege of lies and bloodlust, I commend you. Please, revel in that glory, I entreat you to that. I thank you, and stand erect, with your brand on my chest. I accept that I am as your child. You made me. You made a man who’s bones have grown dense to withstand the gravity of the plights you have made my everyday habitat. You have rounded my shoulders in muscular in muscular mass to support the burdens you’ve heaped upon them. You have sharpened my eyes so that I may see through the guise of mortals and unveil the cloak of demigods. I thank you for these things. I understand and respect and accept and perhaps modestly exemplify all that you were, but pay heed to who I AM.

I am not me, I am we. I am the consciousness that cannot be compromised. I am the word which needs not be spoken. Iam where you do not look. I have risen. It is my time now, as your dusk is upon you. You thought that I would subtly rear my head, giving time for resistance. No. I am.

You need not fear me, for I do not bring death. I bring life to the lifeless. I have suffered deprivation of the unalienable, still I am. I have understood degradation and fastened my feet inot the soil so that I may not buckle. In the stage of my life, of first conception, you denied me, you said that I did not exist. Throughout my embryonic development within your womb, you poisoned me by gorging yourself on the perversions of irony: giving God to the godly, giving wisdom to the wise, chastening the chaste and freeing the free. You took the liberty of redefining language at whim: protection, discovery, the law, the holy; and I turned in the belly of the earth waiting to be birthed. And when the time, by natures choice, arose for me to swallow my first taste of air, you would not release me from the womb. You held me there hoping that I would be unborn; that the defiled uterus of your malice would contract about my throat and that I would stifle on the indignations coiled around me. An attempt, but still I am. With macabre resolveI tore through the recess of my maternal prison, and of time and of continents and of islands and seas and fields, haciendas, yoke and suffering. My initial travail was an onerous one, but never the less, I am.

On my outset into the world, I was misled and exploited. You took my trust and mangled it, you took my gratuitous insight and called it ignorant, only to peddle it at a later date for profit. You bled me and allotted me only the barest portion of this gore to dampen my parched lips. Still, for this minute amount, I showed gratitude. You see I am no longer that child, but a man I am. Reaching throughout the expanse of space and time, touching those far and near. My mind rages with all the fury of an encaged bore, craving, lusting knowledge that was once beyond my grasp. You would not allow me to come into manhood, still, I am. As I entered adolescence you said with a smile and kind gesture, “No, here my friend you may not be”, and I replied, “But, I am”.

Then as for insult to injury, you said, “No, my friend, these things are not for you to understand,” and I replied, “Relinquishing my ignorance, I am”

Because of such audacity, such tenacity, you smiled and said, “My son, you are ready to be a man, I accept you as I am, and love you equal to the kin of my loins, : and I lavished the adoration and sat with you, and feasted with you and laughted with you, and slept, full of food and mirth, as you slept awake, creeping over my slumbering form, an ax in hand above your head – you struck, with all of the desperation of a fish on a fisherman’s hook, beating about, choking on the dryness of the air, at my sleeping form, hacking it to bits, sullying your home with the carnage of my corpse. You did not like me, you did not love, you did not want me, you did not accept me, and I did not sleep. Please look again at the slain, it was not me. Please examine close to see blood of your blood, instead of mine, upon your sleeve and face. I am here, I am awake, I am alive, I am aware, with sarcasm I say, “My friend, I am.”

For this guile and wit you hated me, but for the lessons our shared history has taught us, I adore you. I credit you and chortle at you. Once again, the men deemed prtectors, protect the fragile weavings of a society built on the foundation of contempt, synchronously, making efforts to strip me of my manhood, all failed. I am. Displeased I am – abhorred I am, all of this ingrained in my heart, but standing fast I am.

Have you yet understood who I am?

I am the inertia of the universe, turning about itself, within itself, on the axis of itself. I am the essence of what is feared and cherished, I am the moment between life and death, I am what cannot be stopped.

For each time I am disassembled, there will be ten to replace me, equally fortified and palatial.

I am a tower, erected in the midst of desolation, my base deeply fixed in to the soil – my mobility at angst with my endeavor to remain perpendicular to the despair about me.

I will not stand forever, my form will be deconstructed. I will not fall, but my shattered pieces will descend onto the ground to lay dormant, however, impromptu to the blackening of the sky, a darkness caused by the ashes of my smoldering figure. A tower whose peak once punctured the sun – glistening as the sun’s dew seeped through this accidental orifice, dribbling down my lateral. I will appear beaten and broken, into many pieces which have all descended onto the ground to lay dormant, however, impromptu, to the rain that falls from this blackened sky.

Each piece of I will soak up the airs’ moisture, the dampness of the clay it lay on, the clay it came from. At that moment, not subtly, giving time for resistance, those pieces shall explode into the sky standing to replace me, equally fortified and palatial. You, my friend, will be forced to tread between the mountains and caverns that these new factions have formed.

But it is not important that you understand or respect or accept or even modestly exemplify these facts, it is for you to know simply – that I am.

War is God

1977-03-15T07:57:00.000-05:00

War is God or rather God is war. War of the soul's damnation vs. the pleasure of the flesh. War of the mind's righteous, do it right, it'll work, just…like…that vs. impulse and spontaneity. War is God or rather God is war. Man vs. Man vs. Woman vs. future bearings.

War is God -- what love won't chase let hate pursue. From the fake-working but raking in six figures to the back-breaking, hourly pay, you can count on six fingers -- to the trigger of the barrel of a gun to the woman jumping from hung to who's more hung to the next CEO rising from the slums to the last CEO who is today's plain old bum.

War is God, no, God is WAR -- children feasting on the bones of children in their hood, no meat left on their carcass -- abuse, malnutrition and a twisted system took their share first. God is where silence dwells; where knees meet concrete and no final remittance of a guilty life is waged. War, the purgatory of closing eyes, blind to decency.

War is God, NO God is WAR.

IN FLUX: A Gruff

1977-03-15T02:26:00.000-05:00

There once sat a man, his arms in fold,

His hair of weeds and teeth of gold,

His eye a diamond, splintering gleams,

His other a hole, where one had been,

Seven digits, mismatched

But not one thumb...

His clothes a rag

Tied front to back

His once bronze skin a blemished black...

This old man of nothing nice,

Spoke to me once sullen, thrice

A Gruff...

He said, "...Boy this life,

Is to live,

Be not fooled, but what to give,

Of oneself, to gain a glory?

Bequeath your heart for fabled pleasures...

Stolen from your youth of life...

Days beneath a swollen sun,

Nights among the playful stars,

Working, slaving...Day and Night...

All to give unto a wife...

Friends and dogs

Both one and same...

Will give you loyalty true...

Till one day when such darkness comes...

They'll ask of you enormous sums,

But think of it not true to form or friendship gained...

Without regards of living lame,

You'll follow through both, both leg and thumb,

For fear of canine jaws untamed...

You'll surely choose o share your crumbs...

And family, such a cursed gift,

Through pestilence’s rift,

Exiled with taunt,

They'll dare not drift...

For fear of want,

In future gains and garb and care

And you the lame, say,"Fear not fear!"

And they, the priests and flock about...

Laugh and smile with righteous shouts,

Flame and liquor bought with your hand,

Engulf the heat of concession’s lamb,

You my friend, the sacrifice,

Shed garment, to shelter your family's life,

And that night

That very night...

They'll feed said garment to the light

The one you sit upon and roast...

Toast not toast, but be a host,

Of your Life of which to live...

This counsel I SHARE

For son, I fear

And bid

You'll forgive,

But I've got nothing left to give.

THE BIRTH OF CAUSALITY

1977-03-15T01:29:00.003-05:00

Everyone in the building survived. Fathers will go home to their children, to raise them and protect them; mothers will return home to their children, to nurture them and guide them. Bosses will return to their places of employment and will work hard in fits of execution, enforce policies and double check their prospectuses, while assuaging their board member’s apprehensions and inspiring confidence in their shareholders.

These Executives will win new contracts and execute those contracts, and close those contracts. They will pay their senior managers, who will pay their middle managers. These middle managers will check and double check the timesheets and work product of their line-staff and will disburse checks to them, in a bi-weekly fashion, minus taxes and deductions, such as FICA – which includes payments to Social Security, not their own, but for those drawing on it at the moment. Some of those employees will receive their checks by direct deposit at their bank, where the bank will float the aggregate sums of all of the accounts held at their branch and will invest in stocks and bonds and investment properties. The bank will float loans to first-time homebuyers, and will refinance the mortgage of a family who has a new child. The bank will give an elderly couple a reverse mortgage to supplement the couple’s combined Social Security checks. Other employees will wait on line at a check-cashing location, will pay fees to cash their checks, and will purchase paltry items while there, such as, public transportation cards, and money orders, and a movie sold by the booth off to the side.

The sum of all fees paid for these transactions by the whole lot of employees who do not have direct deposit will combine into the salary for the cashier of the check-cashing location, as well as, pay the month-to-month lease to the property owner of the physical property.

Doctors will survive because everyone in the building survived. Among hundreds of others, there are three doctors in the building, twenty-five nurses, and one airline pilot. There are six people working for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, one of them drives a bus, two of them drive a subway train, three of them are administrators, one high-ranking decision maker and two line-staffers. There are seven cooks, two of which are chefs in well renowned restaurants, five of which work in the fast food industry and so we can hardly call them chefs. Of the five of these fast food workers, four of them have, the misguided notion hitched to a pure-hearted aspiration to start there and work their way up to chef of their very own restaurant –real restaurant. They dream of owning the type of restaurant where men propose to women and fathers eat with their families. Where hard working men go to have a home cooked meal when away from their homes. Of these four dreamers, one dreamer will learn from his ignorance and will go on to work as a cook in a diner. He will do more than just reheat frozen beef patties, and he will work there for several years.

When the owner of the diner dies, his daughter will be at a loss when trying to figure out how to keep the business running and she will offer the dreamer chef partial ownership of the restaurant. Our dreamer will seed his legacy here, his family will take pride in ownership and several generations down the line this partial ownership will grow into a multi-billion dollar, international franchise.

The building has nine computer engineers, three of which are telephone “help-desk”-type operators, two of the nine work tirelessly on hardware, repairing broken components, explaining to customers that using a computer as surface-area to perch liquids on, is a “bad idea”. Four of those nine engineers develop software -- from video games to websites to operating systems. Of those developers one will seed the industry with a new way of looking at artificial intelligence, several iterations later – as this seed breeds new seeds in the minds and computers of other developers and those breeds seed new breeds into yet other developers around the world – several computer generations later, true artificial intelligence will be born.

Everyone in the building survived. The doctors who will save lives, beautify the deformed, and rearrange the mental state of the mentally deranged will continue to do so in full capacity. For this the world will be healthier and more beautiful and more sane. The pilot will safely land a Boeing 747 carrying over 200 passengers, under emergency conditions, with no engines and damaged landing gear. He will keep the nose up long enough to glide the steel bird onto a semi-cushioned, make-shift landing strip. All of his years of experience will allow him to navigate without use of the computers, and though some passengers will be slightly injured, they will all survive.

A little boy named Darius was born on October 13^th, nine years ago, to a crack addicted mother. Darius, miraculously, was born relatively healthy given the condition of his mother. However, his heart had an irregular beat. It would palpitate in an unnatural pattern and so the doctors warned that any beat could be his last. Sadly, his stability was more luck than lore.

Darius was separated from his grandmother in the mall, and so he wandered across the courtyard into an office building. Innocently and quite by accident, he slipped by security, and onto an elevator which went to the 23^rd floor. The passengers all looked at the child oddly, wondering who he was with, but each quickly dismissed it in their minds, assuming that he was with one of the other passengers on the elevator. In the selfish, self-absorbed fashion that most elevator passengers board and eventually exit the lift, each of the passengers filed out, paying no mind to Darius, who lingered behind and exited last. Young Darius wandered over to the cafeteria on the 23^rd floor and picked up candy and cookies because children like these things. Darius did not intend to steal – the open fashion of the strange corporate cafeteria would give a child, foreign to its interior, the impression that all this “stuff” was free for the taking. Darius was not greedy, he only took a small piece of “this” and a little bit of “that”. Darius concluded his full circle about the oval cafeteria and as accidentally as he wandered in, began to wander out.

“Hey, excuse me little boy,” a cashier who happened to be walking by said to Darius. “Who are you with?”

Darius began to answer but was interrupted by the cashier, who had just happened to be walking by,

“Excuse me sir”, the cashier said to a gentleman punching minutes and seconds into the cafeteria’s microwave. “—open that up, let me see what you’ve got in there.”

The man obliged the cashier who had just so happened to be walking by, who stopped for a moment to address Darius. The microwave man opened the microwave without hesitation, with a sort of – dopey, I didn’t have my coffee yet, I work too hard, and I’m going through a divorce – look on his face.

“Sir, you can’t leave that pot pie in the aluminum container when you put it in the microwave,” said the cashier, who just happened to be walking by, who stopped for a moment to address Darius, who just happened to catch a glimmer of foil in his left eye as the morning sun shone through the window of the oval cafeteria.

The dopey man obliged again by removing the pot pie and placing it back on the refrigerated shelf near the microwave – too much work – the dopey man thought. What the dopey man did not know, was that the placement of the microwave was one of poor choice, next to the refrigeration unit. The refrigeration unit’s placement was one of poor choice, on the wall that housed the main gas-line to the kitchen.

What the cashier, who just happened to be walking by, who stopped for a moment to address Darius, who just happened to catch a glimmer of foil in his left eye as the morning sun shone through the window of the oval cafeteria, which in turn prompted him to address the dopey man, did know was that the aluminum on the pot pie would have a bad reaction in the microwave.

What none of them knew, including Darius, who had momentarily became separated from his grandmother, and then walked passed security, and then was ignored in the elevator by self-centered passengers, and who thought he was taking a little bit of free stuff, was this – had the dopey man been just a little less dopey, had he been faster on the draw, he would have pressed “start” on the microwave. After pressing start, the aluminum of the pot-pie container would have began sparking, those sparks would cause sparks to jump out at any metallic object nearby, including the refrigeration unit. The refrigeration unit’s Freon container would have been heated and the super compressed gases inside of that container would have exploded, punching a whole through the wall, rupturing the main gas line that ran through to the kitchen. The sparks from the microwave and explosion of the Freon container in conjunction with the sudden rupture of the main gas line would have compounded into the ignition of those gases, which would have traveled both up and down the main gas line, which ran through the entire spine of the building. The building would have exploded right up and down the center, with a final, secondary, devastating explosion at the base of the building where the gas line receives its accidental incendiary, and which housed a cacophony of other incendiaries. The final explosion would have burned to death, crushed to death, dropped occupants from heights to their deaths, blew apart bodies, limbs – strewn about, internal organs propelled out of their bodies -- finalizing bloody deaths.

No one in the building would have survived. The fathers would have burned. Mothers would have been crushed. The bosses would have been propelled from high places. Sometimes God births a child in subtlety, no one knows of the child’s birth, she is a secret. At other times, God births a child in fanfare -- it is a celebrated occasion. Still, at times God births a child in tumultuous contexts, the child is born in the middle of war, of a great disaster such as an earthquake, a hurricane, moments after a tsunami has struck or levies have broken. However, there is another type of birth, wherein God births the child in a notion -- he thinks it up, and loosely strings together a destiny, and deconstructs it a bit, drafting and redrafting loose odds and ends. Sometimes parts of this notion may be unnatural with a broken, half-conceived rhythm to it. A palpitation that lands on the odd, unhealthy 109^th second instead of the perfect, health reinforcing 110^th second – this is the meaning between life and death.

Darius, at birth – his heart had many beats -- over one-hundred of them. It was God’s notion that tailored the context of his birth -- the fate of his mother to promise herself to a glass pipe and white rock; and to a man named John, or perhaps he was a john named man. It was God’s notion that she would carry Darius for seven months and that one night, after “turning a trick” she would hop out of a station wagon on a cold winter day and would slip on a patch of ice. Her frail frame seemed to carry a three month-old fetus and not the seven month child, which she did. Her water would break, and if not for the fact that her leg had broken as well, she would not have been taken to the hospital, as her attentions toward her pregnancy took a back-seat to her thrill of the chase, the elusive race to capture the feeling of that first “hit” of crack. In the doctor’s hands, he held the little crack-baby, who seemed to slip out from her gnarled crotch effortlessly, almost dry as a desert, his flesh matching the wavy, and wrinkled grainy texture of the Sahara. Barely any amniotic fluid found. His heart beat its final irregular beat on the 109^th second instead of the 110^th second. God’s notion, a fate reconstructed – the difference between life and death. Darius died.

Therefore, no one in the building survived.

The Things I've Carried

1977-03-15T01:20:00.001-05:00

This bag is heavy ... I weighed it once, it came up to 20 pounds, a duffle bag, polyester, 100% polyester. I found that out when I was pricing it once, wanted to know how much this bag costs, not my bag, I gotta’ replace this bag. I can’t return it the way it is, I used it, a brand new bag, overused it to the point of it being a brand old bag, so I’ve gotta replace it. How much is this bag, had to search for the bag online, you know, the internet, Google it.

Borrowed the bag once because the bag I had, was torn to shreds. When a person writes, he sometimes exaggerates; that exaggeration is the way he perceives it, not the way things are but the way things are is how he perceives it. So I had a bag before this bag, it was a green Bally's duffle bag, I carried lots of things in this bag. Originally it was a gym bag -- originally as if it became something else; sometimes when a person writes, he doesn't just think of a thing as it is, but as it becomes over time. My green gym bag, the duffle bag was a bag I bought at the gym -- used it for gym stuff and then I used it to carry other stuff.

I carried a laptop and documents, I carried personal care items when going on a trip, I carried my children’s pampers, and toys and other items of interest to the younglings. I carried the love I had for them, I carried the hopes and aspirations I had as a professional, I carried the desires I had for personal fitness and an "oh so wow physique".

It was a gym bag though and as I carried it from New Jersey to New York from Manhattan to Queens from Queens to Brooklyn; with it was carried the dust and dirt from one borough to the other; from one state to the next; from trains to buses, from buses to railways, and once in a while, from railways to planes -- the things a person carries is a kind of answer to the question that nobody asked. Who is this guy? Maybe nobody asked because nobody cares about the answer; but that's not true; the kids cared about the answer -- Where are you daddy? They asked on a regular. Daddy always gave a response in return that did not make much sense. How could they understand that I was at work, and was doing it for them?

The things I carried in that green bag, once upon a time, brand new along with brand new print outs of those important documents and brand new toys that the kids couldn’t get enough of. The laptop was not so brand new, but had brand new programs on it that would match my brand new ambitions and help me get the work done. The gym clothes that it had in there at one time were brand new too. The gym clothes didn’t get that worn in always in use kind of wear and tear, but that ignored, not focused on, still kind of new, but kind of used, ignored kind of – I’m just old and forgotten about -- feel to it.

The toys got used and then forgotten, forgotten in a bag, a duffle bag where too many days went by without them being completely delivered, so the objects, of affection, the toys for the tots, just ground their faces and plastic elbows and obtuse shapes into the fabric of the bag, reshaping the roundness of the duffle bag into a bag of ridges and broken dreams. Its etched right there in the polyester. I think its polyester; the new bag is polyester, so I think the old one was too. When a person writes, he sometimes assumes things, assumes that one thing is what another thing was, and sometimes does this in reverse. He assumes that one thing was what another thing is, its easier that way to see the world in a kaleidoscope of confusion that he will later make sense of when it makes no sense to even ponder on it, let alone make sense of it.

So here I was, traveling to Philadelphia, with a ratty tattered green duffle bag. Brandi was kind enough to lend me hers. And so I moved half of the important stuff over to the bag, the other half remained in the ratty tattered bag. Its funny how sometimes everything seems important until its time to make the cut, and so some things are important and others just not as important, or maybe the others are even more important but just not right now. Like the McDonalds toy that was lodged in the corner of the bag for my son, it was more important than the items that made the cut, but just not right now. Who in Philly would understand that this little “free” action figure was my son’s favorite toy, a toy that I fantasized about giving him when he was three months old and in the infirmary, where every single breath that he took could be his last. He was born two pounds and nine ounces. He was small enough to fit into my back pocket.

The laptop in my old duffle bag weighed more. He was frail and ugly and undesirable. He spent all his time under an ultraviolet light with tubes in his nose and in his mouth and down his throat and in his arms and little frail legs. His belly looked empty, and in fact it was – he wouldn’t eat – that’s what the doctors and nurses and janitors said. When a person writes about the things that he has heard, he may color outside of the lines, he may say that folks said things and those folks weren’t even there, but it felt like they were there. It felt like they knew his secret, his shame and his pain – the boy wouldn’t eat – even the janitor knows. That’s not something you can change Superman, it’s on him. And I was mad at her, his mother, Chevon, why, I don’t know. I felt afraid for her, weaker than her, protective of her, confused for her and in adoration of how she was able to do the things that needed to be done, make those runs back and forth to the hospital, pump milk from her breast using a device that to me seemed part pleasure part pain.

Pleasure in the mechanical sucking of her nipple and release milk that had her breast swollen and over-firm, pain in the fact that it was not her son, her only son sucking on that nipple for nourishment, pain in that he may reject her milk upon delivery, much like the children may reject the toys that I brought for them in that old duffle bag, toys not loved any more-- out grown and forgotten. And so she carried this milk from Queens Village to Long Island Jewish hospital, night after night after night. Her son in an incubator raspily sucking on air hoping to repeat the action several times in the hour. His skin discoloured from lack of nourishment, his arms and legs frail. “He looks like a little monkey” his father said, in a way being candid, in another separating himself from the pain. When a person writes, he sometimes tells the story in such a disconnected fashion that you, the reader, may think of it as being objective and something to admire, however, if you look closely, you can see the pain, no, feel the pain of the writer, a person wishing to hold and care for his child, a person so desperate to take his son home that he begins “casing the joint” for escape patterns – thinking how his son’s foot is so small that he could probably slip the security band off, how he checked the schematics of the sensors around the hospital ward, and how he figured that if he put the tracking band in another crib, it would be hours before they knew that his son had broken free of their prison.

He would hide his son in his hooded sweatshirt, and drive slowly to his In-laws and his son would get better, and stronger, and would live a regular life, and they would play catch and would have talks about girls and how to “snag them and bag them” and how to handle finances and how to excel in school and at work and how to become a pinnacle of society and how to be a father and teach and nurture and how to be a husband and teach and nurture and learn and choose a good woman.

But he is in the writer’s hand, not hands, hand, small and fragile and looking like a little monkey and won’t eat and is failing. They said to the writer once that his son wouldn’t make it and he looked at them with the same obstanance that his mother looked at the doctors when they told her that her son would be retarded based on too much oxygen lost to the brain during his birthing. He’s going to make it. That’s the only thought that the writer had in his mind at the time. It’s funny how a writer can talk about himself in the fourth person, a writer talking about a writer who is talking about himself. Perhaps that is indicative to the guilt and the hurt, and the pain of a situation where he watches his only son die.

The boy didn’t die though, the story takes a happier trail, where he lives and suffers, and prevails and becomes to all who can see a natural normal child, even if only relatively so. His son carries his father’s name, first and last, but the first name is spelled just a little different so that he may grow and excel under his own identity without carrying junior affixed to his name.

This bag is heavy, the new bag that I have to replace because it is overused, worn, tired and in need of replacement. Brandi gave me this bag, to hold, to use but not to be used up. I have to replace this bag. A Free promotional item from Hugo Boss, I knew that and knew it more upon research on finding the bag online, googling it so that I could replace it. It looks like “the sun never sets on the British empire” even in the sale of free commodities as the UK was the only place where I could find a replacement bag. It’s funny how a person tries to replace a thing with a thing as if those things were ever equal in any way. It serves further to humor when a person tries to equate and compare two items in the same genre and realizes after much comparison and analysis and questioning and posits that most things, even in the same genre are not comparable. Such as her and her, but I won’t get into that here. Too much to write, too much to carry. I carry this bag to the School of New Resources, to the College of New Rochelle, and in this bag I have books that in no way resemble those of CTU –Colorado Technical University, that in no way resememble those from Lehman College, that in no way resememble those of Bronx Community College.

The books the bag carries are unique syndications of a story that was aired a long time ago, when a young man gave birth to a seed, to a child at the ripe old age of 16. Where he lied to the mother of his child, not on purpose but rather allowed a lie to live, that he was an older gentleman. What was one lie compared to another. He thought he had it all figured out, but in truth, figured it out as he went along. Sometimes that’s what a woman needs from a man, even when that woman is a girl and that man is a boy -- to know that somebody has it all figured out. A lie? A stretch of the truth. Sometimes that’s what a writer has to do, he has to take bits and pieces of the truth and stretch it out in a hustler’s fashion. He as to take nickel bags of weed, 20’s of cocaine, a dub of heroine and stretch those sales into Similac and pampers, and French toast outfits, and rent and Con Ed and food and his and her clothing and transportation and phone bills and cable TV and little shopping sprees. He has to use what he’s got to get what he wants, and has to smile with an internal frown, be strong with internal weakness, be sure with inward confusion.

He has to look at a little child while still a child and decide all at once to stick his hand into the chest of the world he lives in, grip its heart and squeeze it in a pattern that he has chosen -- so that every pulse of the street sings to his song. The rhythm of the street mocks his beat, and all of this must align with the twinkle of a star, a star that he saw in the twinkling of his first born’s eye. She was cute, no gorgeous. Beautiful in every way. Thick and fat, just right, perfect complextion, even her similac breath was a pleasant scent. Her hair was sligltly curled, she was three months old, her clothes fit just right, and her roundness, excentuated by her pampers made her perfect. If God himself were to shed a tear and that droplet would fall to the ground, my first born daughter would have emerged from the earth, his most beautiful flower.

If she were a flower then I would have been the dirt from which she grew, filthy and necessary, everywhere, but upon close inspection, nowhere at all, just a spec, engulfed by the vastness of the world; scattering with every sigh of the wind, fighting my way downward, to recede to the ground again. I covered everything and was in everything, I was necessary. I was the stuff that men and women are made of and return to. I was the mass that separated oceans and rivers and the stuff that natural dams are made of. I was the stuff that got under your shoe, and made a mess of the carpet when you came home from work and your wife would yell at you, and you would scowl at her. And your kids would call your name “Daddy!” and you would smile and hug and spin them and kiss them and your wife wouldn’t be so mad about the carpet or the scowl anymore.

I was the stuff that was necessary on this earth, for the earth to be called earth, I was her world. A writer sometimes tells his secrets in such a fashion that you wonder if it were made up, or exaggerated or embellished upon. Here is the trick though; the writer hides his secrets in metaphors and ad sequitors and similes. He never says certain things but keeps them to himself.

There are some things too horrible to write about, some truths too corrosive to pen to paper. Stickups, heists and high-speed getaways are the stuff that movies are made of, but movies last 90 minutes, and circumstances happen at about 24 frames per second, some of which are missed by the human eye only catching 18 of those snapshots. In those 18 frames the onlooker sees a crime occurring, a masked man and crew of bandits, a gun brandished and cash and jewelry taken. The six frames remaining hide the secret of a family who needs food, of a man who wants to do better, of a young family hoping that there will be some resemblance of Christmas this year. In those six frames there is a little girl learning to walk for the first time, a man buying a computer with his ill-gotten funds, a hospital bill that is paid for, a cousin who he bribes not to commit a crime – “…here you go cuz, be easy, crime doesn’t pay…”.

Six frames later my daughter was 3 years old. She is walking and talking; my wife and I are arguing and cheating. The universe being the great equalizer it is, decides to punish the actor, who by this time, mind you, has walked a straight and narrow and quite noble path. The universe rewinds the film, by having him wrongly incarcerated; by having him spend 18 months explaining to judges that “…no, your honor, one man in the back of a limo on his way home from work, working an 18 hour day, did not get out of the car and assault 5 police officers…” Is it absurdity or the universe at work equalizing, judging and executing its will?

Six frames later he is raising his daughter alone, the “rent-man” has him in court, the five “assaulted” police officers have him in another court. He is “holding court” with his college, appealing to the professor, filing a motion by way of assignments, going to trial by finals. He is juggling a docket of two low wage jobs, and fighting to find a smile for his daughter who he is raising alone.

In the 18 frames that a person sees, along with the dramatics aforementioned, are the climactic changes toward resolution, the stuff that movies are made of – rent being miraculously paid, assault cases fought and won – a white do-gooder attorney and a black boy in the law library doing research; two low wage jobs, consolidating into one great paying career. Within the 18 frames we see a man become a real “Mister Mom”, cutting coupons, learning to braid his daughter’s hair correctly, cooking wholesome meals, not just hotdogs; taking her to the park and to the movies. The 18 frames a person’s eyes can carry and call resolution search for a special kind of resolution, a completion. By the 19^th frame, the onlooker is done, completed and whole. By the 19^th frame, our hero puts his daughter on a plane to Nebraska, not knowing if he will ever see her again. He wades in the water of the following five frames, lost in a kind of purgatory.

Movie magic is just that, magic, a secret answer to a baffling question. Why is this bag so heavy, a duffle bag, the new duffle bag that I carry to work and to Hartford to shut down a site that may mean good-doing folks losing their jobs? I have answers, reasons, foresight, and only two hands to concoct any solution to the issues at hand. On the way to Hartford I carry with me, work for the major contract, and work for a minor contract and phone chargers for cars and phone chargers for walls and a laptop charger for a laptop and a phone that can give my laptop internet access in case I have something that I have to google.

On the phone I carry a voice mail message from Raven, the third child born to me, the sweetest child anyone would have the pleasure of meeting. A child who was born from her mother looking like a prune, like every ounce of moisture was torn from her frail little frame. A child who I held on her birthday, her literal day of birth and said “You are going to be the one to change my life…”. A child who was allergic to every food you could think of, who’s gentle demeanor was at angst with her horrific skin condition, a special kind of eczema that made her whole body burn always, all the time, never receding into the calm cool us, that we take for granted. There is a saying “You’re not comfortable in your own skin”; this child knew exactly what that meant in the most literal fashion.

Moreover, her eyes were big, dark, and beautiful, and her smile was coy and inviting and her sound was pleasant even when she was in pain and crying and scratching and bleeding and scarring and hurting and she was fearful, feeling as if she were constantly under attack, which she was. Her nerves attacked her skin, her skin was itchy, her nails attacked her skin, her sores attacked her health, the germs attacked her open sores, her sickness attacked her piece of mind, she was under attack. A barrage, of unrelenting attack – but she was so sweet, so so sweet and kind and thoughtful and considerate, and docile and satisfied with the smallest pleasure or ease of her plight.

If the devil sought to inhabit a body, sought to entrench a soul in misery or pain or suffering, he chose the wrong one when he attacked Raven. She is the strongest of my four children, strong willed, strong minded, a strong heart that never turns cold or backs down from a fight. Could you imagine that? To wake up every morning on fire, your skin on fire, with no hope of reprieve and still be kind and good? She seemed to carry with her the sins of man, the questions of why, the campaign of not smoking while pregnant, the necessity to drink lots of water, yeah, H2O when carrying. “Don’t be stressed when carrying”, she seemed to carry it all and delivered it with a smile that the angels themselves would envy.

My new duffle bag is a little heavy; I have taken some of the stuff out now, piled parts into my pockets and others onto my desk at home; the desk in my bedroom. I have moved stuff out of my old wallet and into my new wallet. Some of the stuff in there did not make the cut. My “dearly departed” father’s old driver’s license made the cut, I wonder why. Was it the sentiment? Was it so that his raspy ever-critical voice would echo from my back pocket up the lateral of my spine, onto my left shoulder and into my ear? Was it so that I would have one picture of him that I tote around without looking too soft? Was it because all of our quality time was spent in one vehicle or another or in the garage of his job where he had several of his cars parked?

Sometimes when a writer writes, he thinks of things in a way that he’s never thought of them before, asks questions that he wasn’t brave enough to ask out loud. The paper is a kind of shield and the pen the colloquial sword. A writer has an opportunity to do battle with the demons and the ghosts and the Harpee-type questions on the wind. A writer can purge and cleanse and rummage and explore and stop and start and read and write and control the whole world through the whim of each sentence to follow. He can sigh and breathe and inhale and exhale and shake his head and maybe, just maybe shed a tear if necessary. A writer is necessary, a writer is the dirt that flowers bloom from, the stuff that keeps the world from being engulfed by water, the writer is something to put your foot on and to lay on and to lean on and to till and to harvest from. A writer is the spirit of all things like the thing in my wallet that I carry, a driver’s license.

“How is Riana?”, he always used to ask. Of all of the kids, somehow he took a special liking to her. As a man who was fond of girl children, it could be clear why she was his favorite. She was feminine from birth, decidedly female, no question to it. She seemed to sway her hips when crawling and wrap men around her finger from birth. A decided female, can you picture that? Think of all of the greatest women of the world, using feminine wilds, not the sexual type, but the decidedly female type. That was Riana, from her motions to her notions, to her intellectual stamina. As gorgeous as you could ever imagine a single female child, she was an intellectual killer! As early as three months of age, Riana knew how to get what she wanted, would dart out and about, crawling and climbing and cooing. By the time she was one year old she would form full sentences, show hints toward understanding written words, climb on everything, hold small conversations prying into the minds of adults. She would observe and “play the game”, she would make enemies out of friends, friends out of enemies, the whole world was her oyster. Riana was a born star and so to hear my old man ask for her first in his raspy voice “How is Riana?” was absolutely no surprise.

I got lucky with that one. If there were ever a daddy’s girl, she would be it. Then again, maybe that’s just her feminine wilds at work, making a man feel more like a man than maybe he deserves. Making a man think that he is the singular object of affection; the whole world even, though maybe a ploy. That one will be the one to give her mother a run for her money, there’s no question to that. “How is Riana?” he would ask and I would give the same old non-commital, non-explanatory response: “She’s cool”. We would go off and banter with one another about women and life and his health failing and his plans to secure his safety and his plans for me after his death. And I would push my agenda, detailing all of my great accomplishments, not as an ego driven sentiment but as a gift to my father, the only gift that a young man can actually offer. And though I received some accolades and pleasant gestures in regard to how “proud” he was of me, I could never stop carrying the thought that this man was always a major player.

Now when I say major player, I’m not talking about the MTV video type, with glitz and glamour, I’m talking about the type of man who had women, I mean really had women. The type of man that was monstoruous but only 5 foot 7 inches in height. The type of man to ride motorbikes and have five cars at a time and women in every state and a wife in one house and three women in a little apartment down in Williamsburg. A real player. Every cent that passed through his hands was counted twice, and he always ended up on top. But don’t mistake my words for adoration or admiration. He was a real player. He had a perfect wife, smart and sexy and kind and good, and independent and financially she “held her own”, but that wasn’t enough for him. He had to rummage through the scraps of woman kind, and cycle new ones in and old ones out, keeping them in his own little stable in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Maybe once in a while a good one out of his tryst of three would be good and worthy, but for the most part, he seemed to find the lowest that the world had to offer to fulfill his masculine dream. His dress wasn’t that of a player, but that of a hard working stiff. His clothes all seemed to be work clothes, but not suits, real blue collar work clothes – stained and smelly. He was always on the go, and so the only time we really spent together was in one of his cars. He carried with him the masculinity of the Deans but upon further inspection the self-esteem of a tattered victim. I never quite figured out what he was the victim of. He was smart and carried with him years of medical school, he was strong and carried with him professional bodybuilding trophies, and he was industrious and carried with him several semi-successful entrepreneurial ventures. He carried with him years of secular schooling as he was on his way to becoming a priest – the man didn’t lose his virginity until he was in his 20’s. But he seemed to carry something else with him, a sort of discontent, a living purgatory, six frames of unanswered questions. He was a thing of pity, all of the women in the world could not right it. The cars and cash could not transport him far away enough from it. His physique could never be strong enough to lift it. He was in purgatory, a living purgatory where up and down and left and right were all the same. He had it worse than Raven, his soul was on fire, and you can’t scratch that. Maybe his problem is that he never found a single thing to carry.

And so my duffle bag is not so full anymore, because I have put some things where they belong and I don’t have to carry so much anymore. Some things are right, just not right now. Others have meaning but not necessarily to me, and so to carry them in my new duffle bag would only make it ratty and tattered. I think I’ll enjoy the things I carry, whether it be two pounds and nine ounces or 20, whether it be from state to state or borough to borough, in my new duffle bag which I have to replace, because it’s all used up or in my wallet in my back left pocket, these things are mine, mine to carry.

HELL OF A RIDE: THE CATEGORICAL CONCEPT OF CYCLING

1977-03-15T01:11:00.001-05:00

So many misconceptions abound regarding the thrill of the ride – the motorcycle ride. Some describe it as pure power; others as their therapy, still some say it is a “shot in the arm”, when the adrenalin courses through their veins, they “feel free”.

The First Ride Out, the warm-up ride. It begins before the bike is mounted, before the rider takes that walk, the 360-degree inspection of his bike. Both rider and bike inspect each other for road readiness. The first ride out begins once the rider has determined that it is a good day to ride. The weather may be melancholy, and so the rider’s mood matches. A melancholy manner is hazardous to the rider. The rider allows that feeling to recede to the back of his mind, down his spine, along the lateral of his thigh and left at the heel of his boot, as he saunters away from that melancholy mind-set.

If it were sunny, his thoughts would go the way of dodging the drops of dew raining down on the asphalt from the sun. Each droplet of light would be either tenderly avoided with a snakes slither or surgically split with the warm sticky tires of his motorcycle, the cycle he affectionately calls his “horse”. He may bellow crackles of thunder with every rev of his throttle, a mean old growl, with occasional explosions from his exhaust, accompanied by short bursts of flames from those pipes. He pelts these back at the sun, in retaliation – the anarchy harmoniously blending the glistening fractals of light bouncing – like miniature lightning bolts, bouncing from the smooth reflective surfaces of his bike and helmet. A perfect storm indeed. The true rider wraps his mind around these unwieldy pleasures, trapping them in the deepest parts of his cerebellum. He takes a deep breath in order to mix the right proportion of oxygen with his kerosene dream. Then he exhales a defused mix of the lot with a carbon dioxide filled sigh. His dissipating breath takes with it all emotions: happy, sad, joy, elation, and any other within the spectrum too varied to mention. A rider’s mind must be clear in order to raise his odds of returning home with all of the same body parts that he pulled out of his garage with.

After careful reflection, introspection and inspection, the rider mounts the bike and commences the Mounted Ride. The Mounted Ride is the ride before the ride, where he may tighten his gloves, place his body in mock positions, insure that the clasps and zippers of his jacket are fastened and tight. Here is the moment where man becomes demigod. The time 10:36 and 45 seconds in the A.M. – the rider pictures his oppressor – momentum – and decides to make a lover out of her. Psychically he engages the throttle, pulls out from his parking spot, exits his driveway, rides down his block, swerving to the right to avoid a car door, tapping his break, swerving to the left, and opening his throttle to avoid a stray dog. Flying toward the on-ramp at 45 MPH, he glides onto it, his body at a 30-degree angle from the asphalt. He slows down, smoothly “eats” the turn, regaining an even momentum as he navigates its circumference. 50 MPH, 60 MPH. Much like a jet plane raring to take off, you hear his ramjets sucking air, but it is the wind beating on the steel and rider. You see the sharpness of images to the aft of his bike begin to blur, into a Monet-esc ripple. The colors of the world are bleeding, the scenery melting from the heat of the jet, but it is the exhaust pipe. The relativity of a 60 MPH starting point, to the rapid acceleration upward of 100 MPH as the rider completes his transition from ramp to road, can be likened to a jet screaming down the runway, wings straining, bending sky-wise as the air lifts its monstrous mass from the ground.

The rider has lift off!

Cutting to the right lane from the middle, back to the middle from the right, then the far left lane, but now with a 25-degree lean to the left so that he remains on the road – corner winding the same. The bridge, the road, the weather, the wind, the truck, the car, the oil, the puddle, the gravel, the shards of tire and debris – his ‘biker eyes’ see them all, such vision does a demigod make. The turns, lean left, go faster, lean right, faster still, GEAR UP, more throttle, 120 MPH, GEAR … DOWN, DODGE CAR, GO FASTER, GEAR UP, 140 MPH … 10:36 and 48 seconds in the A.M.– the rider returns to his present place. Three seconds have passed; time to actually start his engine. And so the Mounted Ride is complete, as the rider has stretched his most important muscles, fore sight, and the muscle that manipulates time itself. Kick Stand UP!

Warming up the tires, the Dancing Ride -- a bit of a ballet, a dance, a jig … jazz to some, hip hop to others. The rider slowly rides out, at about 15 to 30 MPH on the backstreets of his neighborhood, shimmying his bike from left to right, teetering from side to side, lean to the left, now to the right … ride straight but lean, back up and lean. The warming of the tires determines how well the rider’s BIKE will stick to the road and forestalls the rider himself doing the same!

Notice the rider, leaning into the bike as he takes his first turn at the intersection slow, another mock movement. There was no need to “lean in” that low, but momentum, his lover, he flirts with her. He understands that she wants to keep him at bay. She smells the aroma of kerosene on his neck and threatens to taste it, but not before he has completed his mating ritual, not until he has flashed his feathers and done the dance. He makes another turn, closer now to the expressway, more aggressive, testing the stickiness of his tires. He revs in an undesirable pattern as anxious lovers do. The ramp, the freeway, he has been here before, just moments ago, he is prepared to conquer his lover.

The Lover’s Ride is in some respects the first ride of the journey and the last. It is the place where the rider and momentum meet on the sheets of satin asphalt. The culmination of all previous rides is foreplay to this moment. The stage is set for the final seduction. Moving in and out of traffic, the rider at times must take ease to slide gently between the fiber glass on either side of him – white-lining, he rides between the cars who are stuck in traffic, literal inches between he and the protruding ligaments of these semi-stationary vehicles. Their drivers look into these protrusions to see behind them and in that glimpse, the rider is ahead. He is beyond them, now looking back at them from his motorcycle’s ligament in subtle irony.

Still momentum and the Red Sea of vehicles to either side are in collusion; a role play ensues; momentum the Pharaoh; the rider Moses – the waters part as God lays his hand on the rider’s staff, his bike, and the rider lays his staff to the shoreline paved in asphalt. Inviting another player to the ménage the rider entreats velocity to coax his motorcycle, enveloping momentum in jealous spasms. Now across the metallic aquatic, the rider begins to experience perilous contractions as momentum toys with him, holding him back, pulling him forward, and holding him back. The rider becomes hyper aggressive, and asserts himself, both hands gripping the bars of the bike, holding it in place, his back arched, chest pressing against the steel of the tank. He pulls the handle into him while lurching himself forward!

Momentum gives way, she submits, and drags the man and machine forward, refusing to let anything interrupt their journey to mutually shared, kerosene-gasms. The road and cars ahead that they traveled toward, now stop, suddenly, as if God were to put his finger on the second hand on the grandfather clock of the universe. It is as if God and Mother Nature conspired together at that moment. If there were children running about rambunctious, if there were bubbles in the air, if there were birds in the sky depending on forward thrust and air to feather ratios to stay afloat, all of these rules were suspended. In this moment, this fraction of a second, everything STOPS! And then …. REVERSE! The rider is no longer riding toward these objects, the road, the cars, the trees … he now stands still and drags the entire world around him. The rider has begun his succession of kerosene-gasms. The world begins to bend into a concave form, the outer edges a pure blur, the center -- crystal clear, the shoulder of the highway pelting trees at the rider’s periphery creating an autumn tunnel, whose walls are a mosaic of brown and dark green bits. The road, more volatile, fires missiles made of metal, rubber, glass and flesh at the rider, all the while attempting to dodge the rider, quickly ducking to the left, to the right, dropping low in a decline, rising skyward on the incline. The road is a plaything—momentum dominates.

De ja vu, the rider’s three second premonition fulfilled. 120 MPH, he leans into the wind gliding on his portside, 130 MPH, 140 MPH, momentum a greedy lover forces him to exceed. The rider leans deeper into the turn and then rights himself, but now digs deeper into the motorcycle – he and momentum’s shared mistress – 150 MPH, 155 MPH, the heat from the engine feels like flames on his leg. 160 MPH, the wind screams for resolution as it is unnaturally gaped by the riders physical force. 165 MPH.

Momentum is now satiated. The rider begins to slow his pace and momentum aids him now, 130 MPH, 90 MPH, breathing returns to normal. The voyeurs around them are released from their concave prison; they are allowed to move forward again, with only the burning rubber scent of the trio’s exhibitionist behavior to mark their memory.

Cooling down, and now wedded under the sun, with once violent, but now silent vows, at a 65 MPH cruising speed, they are placated – the rider, the ridden and the road.

Tom Cat

1977-03-15T01:05:00.000-05:00

Here's a little story about a cat;

That damn cat wouldn't stand for chat,

That damn cat knew where its at

Now that there fee

Was awfully...

When a young Tom Cat climbed up her tree;

This Tom Cat had style and grace

This Tom Cat had a face to chase

This young skit

Knew how to git

EevvErythang

From stit to bitCat slid

Now that old sow, we called cat ace

She sat in tree, called it her place

And every time Tom slid

Sow Cat itched to have his kid;

Sow Cat purred and Sow Cat co0,

Jimmy cracked corn as Tom Cat flew

And just by chance he peeped her prance

And Sow Cat did a mean 'ole dance

Now Tom Cat jived and Tom Cat Jigged

But this 'Ole Sow...

Had Tom Cat rigged

And So he stammered and then Tom strum

And mad the Sow put feet to drum

Tom played well that game of his

Till one day Tom's Jive turned to jiz

And Sow Cat made her wishes his

Now that's not bad if two for two

The each played tunes that Co0 Cats do

But just like the monkey, that Tom Cat wore,

That damn core thought was true for sure

The game was old, like cop and blow...

Chase a Tom, Catch a Tom, Let...Him...Go...

Still Tom was slick

Mo' den a bit

He knew his name to scheme don't fit

So Tom Cat layed and Tom Cat curled

Cause Mista Line knew its a Tom Cat's world

Early morn as Sow Strut cocked

Tom Cat kicked the Jive...Pulled frock

And said, "Just how slick you be?

Try to make a fool of me

You tried to lay the law down hard

Was almost there, all but a yard

You snuck a Ace, three Jokes to start

While I played 'lil 'ole Jack of Hearts

You cut the cards and cheated, yet

You double dealt to insure wreck,

French cuts and calls of Nig on check

But still there's one thing you forget

Lil 'ole Tom had brought the deck

No matter how, who what or wy,

Ya can't beat the deck my dough did buy

Set all up from get to go

So...

No matter the throw

Tom's in the know

You cheated with rules I wrote myself

Doubled up on Hell and thought it wealth

Now Game is called -- by me Tom Cat."

He spat the chat, then turned to skat

And said, "One final thing, should see,

Ya tree ain't tumble weed to me.

Come morn this 'ole thing hits the ground...

The Man a have it chopped and bound,

And that 'ole Dog will love the sound...

Cuz he just came home from Famine Pound"