Life has been all too much and so rewarding and I’m not even supposed to still be alive.

In the back of my mind has been a return to this story, my latest entry still right where I left it, the tale mapped out only now with so much more for the third act. I don’t know how many of you have stayed with me this far, but for those who have I thank you.

I am taking PENUMBRA off the back burner for good.

Buckle up.

“It’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.”

...AND THEN I WAS GONE FOR ANOTHER TWO MONTHS.

Sorry about that. Between evacuating due to the Oregon fires and overworking myself as I am eternally wont to do, things have been hectic. Work/Life balance is something I have struggled with for a very long time. In fact, I would bet good money my inability to get a handle on it contributed to the very subject of this blog; cancer not as a disease so much as an accumulation; of bad habits, bad contracts, resentments. In my case also addiction. My name is Corey and I'm a workaholic.

Whatever I do, I do it 200%. Anyone who has worked with me on set, or been my friend, or my lover knows this about me. I am all-in 24/7/365. I want to do all of it, all at once and all equally well. This is partially motivated by my committment to excellence, perhaps a touch of competitiveness to taste. It's also something I chalk up to a damaged superego and its abusive injunctions; the "coulda, shoulda, woulda," effect of deferred achievements fuled from fatherly disdain– my lack of material accumulation confirmation of his own parental shortcomings. The relationship between my own flagging potential and his sneering condescension in linear lockstep. Convinced I could turn his sneer into a smile the day I condemed myself to a McMansion in the suburbs, my entire sense of my own worth shrinkwrapped in utility to the holy market. I was an '80s kid, reared on hard-work and underdog spirit– if things weren't working out, if my life wasn't where I thought it should be, well it's because I wasn't working hard enough; wasn't hungry enough.

"No," was simply not in my voccabulary. Opportunites not to be cast off into the fountain as common enough to waste a wish on. That which came from the hallowed externality of the market was, by virtue of the holy zeitgeist, more valuable and more to be trusted than my own pursuits, after all if anything I was producing out of love and passion was indeed worth anything to anyone surely there would be some monetary value springing up around it like acorns to the oak. It's next to impossible to shift four decades of conditioning. Add to that 20 years as a Hollywood cultist, accustomed to the predations of the industry, blood sacrifices demanded to get anywhere–only we call it, "paying one's dues."

Two months, eight weeks, however one conceptualises it, can fly by just like that. What have I been doing? Trying to get back to work. Going to my MRIs and CT Scans. Nurturing a relationship that sometimes feels encased in Eocene ice. Ignoring my body telling me that I can't push myself as hard as I did before the Cancer; telling me with exhaustion so thick I can't get out of bed on some days. Telling me with vomiting spells. Nagging me with headaches, with caducous fatigue. Entreating me with blood clots in my heart. Brandishing the cosmic 2x4 in nuclear MRI Mayday returning "mildly enlarged lymph nodes" in my chest. That bit of news finally put the breaks on my kamikaze dive back to bad old habits. Yes, I rememeber now. Cancer got into my lymphatic system and could show up anywhere. I'm a walking game of Russian Roulette. I need to slow the fuck down; that's what I was supposed to be doing. Still, there's such an overwhelming sense of lost time. How did I stagnate so badly? How did I fall behind? In some ways I feel like I am now doing the best work I have ever done, yet I'm still sporting concrete chucks. Was Michael Jordan kind to himself, or did he kick his own ass into the stratosphere of greatness? What resonates more, kindness, or fairness? Am I being fair to myself? I just shot my first job in two years, doesn't that count? I just celebrated a birthday that two years ago they told me I wouldn’t see. How do I square the circle between survival, self-care and having a life I feel is worth living? How do I get back to work, do my bit, meet my responsbilities as a man should without running myself into the ground? How does anyone make it in the contemporary American market milieu without blood sacrifice? Other people have cancer, survive it and go on to thrive. Why aren't I? What is missing?

Mono No Aware, part V of the memoir, has been immensely difficult to write. Maybe it's that I'm out of practise. Maybe I'm holding it to a meticulous perfection– I understand why writers who've been in the business a long time, secure an advance; an anxiety sponge to soak up the acid of life's entanglements. I think it's more that I have overloaded my plate, become unfocused, handed my discipline over to the needs of others, strayed from the creative's aecetic path. I have subsumed my personal value to material externalities and as usual the costs have been too high. There's something to atone for, right on Yom Kippur time. I will fast and give myself a fresh start, re-establish my creative boundaries, re-build practise, pour from the saucer and not from the cup; the cup is mine.

I’m pleased to announce that I am open for business, albeit in a limited capacity as I remain under strict medical surveillance as I regain my footing. My company THE WAYFARER AGENCY offers full creative services, from brand storytelling, comprehensive UX, web design and high-end image-making, to copywriting and SEO. We have already collaborated with three clients in our first month of operation and our waitlist is growing.

Part V. of the memoir, Mono No Aware is in process and will be released soon.

It’s good to be back.

How many, pre-pandemic, championed the dogma of social-justice to their mostly white-liberal / progressive friends on social media while sipping soy lattes at their trendy coffeeshop; biked from their mostly white-liberal / progressive apartment buildings to their Tech or Creative job at their mostly white-liberal / progressive office?  I never knew George Floyd.  I’m sure he was a shade-of-grey just like the rest of us, but I can tell you that he was a human being; not a mere prop to be used in the virtue signaling gamesmanship of narcissistic protocol.  We should not flatter ourselves by pretending that we suddenly care about the fate of this man whose name was unknown before the events and circumstances that ended his life.  We should not presume to stand on the bodies of the dead, shouting our yawp of faux virtue across the rooftops of the world; expecting to be regarded as virtuous while doing nothing, sacrificing nothing in the everyday space between outrages.  We should not delude ourselves that virtue is to be gained merely by thinking the “correct” thoughts;  action and sacrifice have always been the minimum price to be paid for virtue. We should be able to distinguish vanity from virtue.  I think opportunity and entrepreneurship is what’s needed, not riots and protests; not puerile reactivity, or the wanton, thoughtless destruction of our own communities and futures. We should not be the dogs fighting for scraps under the master’s table.

A comet saunters by every five years. Caressed by the white-dwarf it strays too close to the chasing suns; loses material in outpouring, and its tail streaks across the night sky of the system’s remaining planet—a verdant terrestrial world, teeming with primordial potential, rudimentary amino-acids, raw with intent and instinct, evolve into hurried lifeforms in the white dwarf’s embrace. The tiny world arcs on a path set in motion years earlier, pulled and nudged by the gravity-wells of its parent stars.  This time, as the white dwarf returns to giant’s clutches, accelerated into the tensioned influence of the greater gravity-well, the small planet is caught in the ancient margins between. Bathed in golden fire, its atmosphere burns away in the friction heat of twin suns. In this Lagrange infinitude hangs the last sharp gasp of anticipated breath before the blow comes, an infanticide fated.  The planet succumbs to tidal forces—magma erupting into the space between like gouts of hot blood; edenic continents are torn from the crust, rudimentary life forms reduced to cinder before they even evolve the language to describe what is happening to them.  What emerges from between the suns is barely recognisable as a planet; blasted into obsidian analog. This convalescence of stellar dust, come to little more than some grim monument to outside forces trapped in each other’s influence.

The comet witnesses all, helpless, silently arcing on the edge of spreading buckshot terrestrial debris, leaving so much of itself scattered sublimed.  It accelerates, slingshotted by the white-dwarf into the distant edges of the system, back to the Oort cloud with the other frigid detritus, leftovers from stellar settlings-down, the jagged forms that fit with nothing—freezing everything they touch.

Tumbling to the edge of the shared gravity-well, magnified by the two suns, the comet awaits a return, a capture by the white dwarf on its exit trajectory from the volatile inner system, or it spends its Delta-V in a tumult of collisions with other detritus, coming to rest fractured and forgotten on the edge of all things, where nothing grows, while the white dwarf falls this time too close to the red-giant, its corona shorn away and enveloped by the desperate hunger of the older, dying star; a god-scale act of stellar rape. Which way does it go? Who can say? In this moment between gravities; It feels like eternity.

—

I head back tomorrow.

“Nothing retains its own form; but Nature,
the greater renewer, ever makes up forms from forms.”

OUR SELF-APPOINTED BETTERS HAVE EXTOLLED A NEW VIRTUE; branded it "social distancing," I just consider it everyday life as an introvert. Throw serious illness into the mix and one has the ultimate recipe for introspection. Just now walking the dogs, unable to reach Vera for our hours-long FaceTime sessions, I notice something unusual: People, outside, sat on their lawns talking, playing games and most shocking, they wave–At me. All at once, I appear to them for the first time; as neighbour, as peer. I am stroked. The hypervigilance and tension, so paradigmatic to my public face has no home in these passing moments. Hypervigilance born of American social substrate, a matrix of essentialism and appearances–demeaning; my frustratingly proximal resemblance to those dusky, dead-eyed faces that populate the nightly news; mugshots punctuating any sense of commonality with implicit 9mm privations; jungle rule spilled into the suburbs. That old public fear shifted in month-after-month of the chemo pump, alien tubes emerging from my houndstooth shirt as I ambled along, alone except for the dogs, tumour weeping into my diaper and rare of breath. Sickness travels on pheromonal conduits.

People have been coming to me for days, asking me for my quarantine (and quarantined) thoughts. Something about my tête-à-tête with the carcinomic reaper a threshold into knowledge (if they say so). "How to stay calm and patient?" they ask, "How to stay sane?" It all comes down to one question: how to position one's self against the unknowable?

In the Norse Hávamál, an epic poem dating to around the year 1270, the god Odin, observed the Norns–goddesses who dictated fate and shaped individual destiny with their runes, therefore exerting ultimate will over the course of the world. Jealous of their power over the runes, Odin journeyed to Yggdrasil, the sacred Ash tree of life that holds all things aloft, and sacrificed himself. Through starvation and pierced by a spear with his own dedication inscripted onto its shaft, Odin died:

Veit ek at ek hekk

vindga meiði á

nætr allar níu

geiri undaðr

ok gefinn Óðni

sjálfr sjálfum mér

á þeim meiði

er manngi veit

hvers hann af rótum renn

Við hleifi mik sældu

né við hornigi

nýsta ek niðr

nam ek upp rúnar

œpandi nam

fell ek aptr þaðan

I know that I hung

on a windy tree

nine long nights,

wounded with a spear,

dedicated to Odin,

myself to myself,

on that tree of which

no man knows from

where its roots run.

No bread did they give me

nor a drink from a horn,

downwards I peered;

I took up the runes,

screaming I took them,

then I fell back from there...

To sate his thirst for knowledge, Odin pays the ultimate price. To know anything requires sacrifice, blood, sweat and toil, sure, but also conveniance; our comforts and certainties, our ego and our assumptions. Odin also gains knowledge in solitude, fed by no one, aided by no one, rescued from his hubris by no one. Alone with only his pain and his goals in mind.

It is interesting to watch the masses, cut-off from the rat-race; left to spend time with themselves. It appears a terrifying prospect to many; the self some unkown spectre from the id, come to torment the ego. You can often learn everything you need to know about a person through careful observation of how they handle crisis. This, in turn, counts for the self. Currently, as many of us adapt and try to make sense of a bewildering situation, the opportunity to get to know the self–as those who experience Limit Situations amidst mortality often do, is available to everyone willing.

I have always been right at home with my self; immersed in a rich inner life of the mind. My mind-palace holds a multitude of rooms, some for storing minims of data, fragments of memory, while others are populated by the shades. I close my eyes, pull in a deep, greedy breath; Beethoven and Miles Davis are sat in my mind-palace living room, sipping Prince of Wales Tea and discussing the finer points of Shepherd's Tones. Krishnamurti's in the bath watching Kubrickian dances on a silver lenticular screen while James Dean whipsers lovemaking suggestions into the ear of a bored-stiff Emily Brontë. In an A-frame attic room, Nietzsche writes on whitewashed walls with the nub of what was once a pencil, one passage scored into the wall by fire:

Historia abscondita -- Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places — into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed!

Historia abscondita, "concealed history." Not the same thing as occult knowledge, rather story hidden in plain sight. How have we, historically, explained phenomena in the natural world? By telling stories; by assigning character, form, function and a nature to the things we observe. We encode meaning into the names we use for experiential constructs. For instance, the word "myth." In our Postmodern lexicon we tend to think of a myth as being something fanciful or untrue. We might see it in articles, "the myth of real estate," or "10 common myths you've always believed to be facts!" The word myth comes down to us from Ancient Greek mythos, meaning "that which is spoken by mouth." Myths were, at least intitally, couched in oral tradition and grouped together by tribe or nation into a foundational account of a population's past.

Myths comprise a prevailing subsumption of the human condition semiotically ingrained as instinct; This is most clearly demonstrated by what theorists refer to as the monomyth, the universal narrative structure present in folklore, mythology, ancient religion and even Hollywood films. Uncovered through a decades-long discipline of comparative mythology poularised in the 1940s by Joseph Campbell, the monomyth is a narrative structure that transcends disparate human cultures and ecologies. It contains an archetypal blueprint of human hopes, fears, assumptions, ideals and desires. As Campbell described it:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man ¹ If we break down the term monomyth itself:

mono- Greek, "one, singular, alone, containing one."

myth- from French, mythe Latin, mythus, oringally Greek, mythos "That which is spoken by mouth."

We might arrive at, "One thing that is spoken by mouth," or even "the word." If something is universal, trancendant of culture and ecology–such as the monomyth–can it bear out in some way? Could this in fact be a myth that is, for lack of a better term, true? Herein lies an interesting opportunity: while so many of us are now cloistered at home, bingeing Netflix (Hulu, Prime... pick your poison) this could be the largest collective monomythic immersion in human history. It's become a meme, passing the time expososed to many stories that reinforce the belief systems that we are currently forcibly separated from. What fruits might result from an application of the monomyth to our own lives? If presented with four pevailing monomythic structures, one might identify the current "beat" or moment they inhabit within a given monomythic structure, and work backwards, into adolescence, childhood, filling in the blanks. Not in the Jungian sense where we are seeking to find our selves in the archetypes, rather an attempt to place our selves into a narrative context, identifying inciting incidents, influences and motivations. To facilitate this, I have combined the four preeminent monomythic structures into one list for reference (your mileage may vary).

The autopsis within complete, I find myself thinking it's time to look outward again. Emerging into the present warm-sun on my face, dogs asleep at my feet, I leave my mind-palace with gifts, a black spot smudged onto a piece of paper, the flip-side scrawled with three words in Latin: Ordo ab Chao. "Order out of chaos." There is a Hegelian dialectic used to affect cultural changes that human beings might not accept under other circuimstances. It works like this:

1. Create or present a problem

2. Manufacture a reaction

3. Provide a solution

Maybe it's nothing, but regardless it is critical to keep one eye inward and the other ever outward, each engaged in autopsis–the act of seeing clearly with one’s own eyes, interpreting what is seen and weighing all possibilities with empirical data. None of us can know for certain what lies ahead, but we can know where we've come from and for a time, we have an eye of the storm buying us the time to dive inward, gain present coordinates and determine the hero we want to be going forward into the unknown.

The Monomyth: A List Compiled for Your Use.

FOOTNOTES & REFERENCES

1. Campbell, Joseph (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 23.

Panic would not have saved my life. I had to surrender to process; to the degrading and painful effects of radiation, the debilitating discomfort of chemotherapy. There was little else for it: the alternative inexorably unclouded, uncomplicated–death. Instead, I embraced autopsis–the act of seeing clearly with one’s own eyes, preparation and contact; defiance against atomisation. As many strangers helped me fight cancer as did friends; as to my body, I hold the body politic: people will help each other, we always do. Deadliest are the diseases of the mind.

Panic is its own contagion.

#covid19 #COVID_19 #coronavirus #CoronavirusPandemic #coronapocalypse #stoicism #stoicphilosophy #cancer #cancersurvivor #staycalm

INTERLUDE

The Architecture of Spirit.

2014

Somewhere between

Tacoma, WA & Centralia, WA

I WROTE EVEN THEN...

Dispatches from the night train: woods rush past black beyond the window. I'm sat at the cafe car's bar, breathing French Roast steam. Edward Hopper has my number; Nighthawks rules the midnight air of the mind. I pull from the ceramic cup, savour the bite of perfectly extracted beans. No one believes me when I say that I have never had a bad cup of coffee on a train; on twenty trains taken in twice as many countries, every native sip like cherries, or chocolate–whatever dances cleanly with the local palate. Suppose you might say it has something to do with the exhilaration of travel; when confronted with the new, standards expand, the senses grow less skeptical. We tend towards parochial distrust amongst the creature comforts of home.

My senses are expanded everywhere. What does that say? It belies any sense of home at all, really. Perhaps that's the semitic part of me, rootless, wandering the desert, all continuity internal, taking on enough trappings of the haut monde yet never quite being a part of the fabric of things. Or perhaps, it's the African part, footloose but never fancy-free. A token of bad old ideas of possession dispossessed of ethnological record, in alien skin a prison, stripped of myths. A threat just by being; the ethos of defensively fighting everything disagreeable in eternal conflict with my other eugenic parts: Germanic, Nordic, Anglo Saxon; masters of nature. Their push-pull between king and nation, freedom and consensus. Sovereignty prevails. I shove the dead-weight of genetic determinism off me and gather the fresh air of self-control, looking back. Inbetween worlds as I am in between sizes. The waste-heat of this intestinal molecular race-war that, like Wayland the Smith, forged my self-imposed shackles; a desperation to "make it," too monumental a chip for my ectomorphic shoulders.

Seattle was a bust, no surprise there. A week of meetings, the Ad Agency circus shuffle, no one buying the pitch. How to connect with those who must see themselves in you first before buying in? Be more doppelgänger. Self-erasure is the price of success. Be real on your own time, kid! We're not paying you to be yourself! Individuals are a threat to the edifices of ego. I close my eyes and evoke St. Helens, will Ranier's quiet Northern slopes to flame; nature's great yawp to man's hubris intensifying in my mind's eye, keeping pace with my frustrations. I see a cinereal column of pyroclastic death rising above the city, capped in anvil shockwaves that shove aside lazy cumulus. It belly-dances in the mountain's fury, pregnant with fire. God flipping the chess board, Vesuvian irritation at a pawn hedgehog deployed lazily to protect ineffectual Kings, Queens and Bishops. A day or two of terrestrial expectoration before a murmuring sun rises again, muted behind the ashen veil. The survivors emerge, taking tenuous steps amongst the ruins of First Hill where Pike Place Market's sign made monument by the occasion; they crawl from the shadow of Queen Anne's skirts, distinctions fall away, the categories of social order and Weltanschauung meaningless in the face of this. It takes disaster to remind us of our bonds, our fraternal contracts. Why pay such a high price in blood when we can choose to be familiars?

Portland, OR

The train pulls into Union Station, The Pearl's neue-brutalist apartment blocks awash in sodium vapour. I shoulder my duffle-backpack–waxed canvas and reliable, schlepp down the empty car, through Amtrak steam and into the Wong Kar-Wai night. With one husky hand, conductor tips blue hat at the gaggle of dusk to dawn commuters, pant-suited and high heels, chattering away in hushed voices passing office secrets. I take the long walk down the gangway. It's strange to go from indoors, to outdoors and indoors again, I think, passing through doors rimmed by Romanesque Revival sandstone into 1896 or 1913 timeless echo, a hall of polished marble and neon dahlia signs. No one's home, even Wilf's piano bar is closed up for the night, a lone busboy buffing teak tables with orange oil rags. There's no one to meet me, so I make my way into the Pearl on foot, flâneur in my own city in search of a watering hole.

Sat alone at the business end of a bar, reading a worn out book of Jacques Prévert poems, the harsh spotlight above the bar bent and ambered by glencairn and Lagavulin 16. The few barflys there are keep their distance, casting askance glances. Who the Hell goes to a bar to read? Bars in this contrarian part of the world exist to drown any meaningful contact in a torrent of overpriced sauce, hip-hop audile terrorism and kitch on tap; not sling weighty conversations over carvery dinners. Abandon all expectations, ye who enter here. I double down on my book, a lone man alone does not a creep make, though I can tell who thinks otherwise. You see, I begin making inward apologies, rehearsing conversations I will never have, I'm not usually out on Friday nights, I hate crowds. Although, I would hardly mind if some loveless bird, with librarian hands and deep set blue eyes, eased up to the bar on a dare, positioning herself in that way single women do; offered up, to be noticed.

Nearby, friends–maybe colleagues–part after a celebration in their vocal, showy American way, each time hugging each other like they're about to leave for war. I pull from the glencairn, warm in my solitude, peat and smoke drawing my senses to Islay. It's thirty minutes to last call. I eyeball corporate nihilism-powered Millennials down to their last gambits; another night of dodging debt subsidized desperation with low-grade alcoholism. As they clear, another man quiet in tweed emerges like a rock revealed by the tide. 48-ish, sallow, grey-templed, thousand-yard staring into the ghost of his drink, lost in himself; either in possibilities, or retrospection.

I grab the bartender with my eyes, she sweeps sable rockabilly bangs out of them just in time to catch my signal, Pour this fine gentleman one, on me. She winks cooperation, lets her gaze linger a moment on my rolled up light twill denim shirtsleeves and the tattoos they reveal. She makes sure I can see the arcuate pockets hugging her indigo denim derriere as she leans over for a generous pour. I choose not to see, watching instead for the tweed man's broken gaze. Whispers dance in the air between them, she points back at me with a thumb and a hip. He returns a terse nod, raising his glass to me as she makes herself scarce by the ice machine. I match and we share a silent toast across the gulf of the bar. He indicates a perch. I accept.

"Robert," he offers a careworn hand, which soon meets mine. You can tell nearly everything about a man in a handshake; eye-contact, direct, confident. Does he square his body to yours, keeping it open and unguarded. The particulars of the handshake itself, firm not a death-grip squeeze, but solid, confident, present. Far too many younger men, natives of the warm-fuzzy generation, offer wet-fishes in lieu of handshakes, clammy and limp. Dead inside, or terrified by everything.

"Corey," my grip assertive and present, my other hand travels to the forearm then I take my seat abreast. Robert sips the bouquet, "like it?" I ask as much with my eyes as my words.

"Very much. Islay?"

"It is. Lagavulin 16. The next best thing to being there." We sip in silence a moment. I always test the silence that can maintain between people, seeing how much time can pass without the nervous desire to talk it away. All the intimacy in the world is in silence. I can take in the posture, the kinesic tells that broadcast another's true state.

"I love Scotland," he muses, busting the silence after a subdued three minutes.

"Likewise. I love the light at that latitude, especially in the Highlands, the way it sort of cascades out of the fog; like it slipped out of its leash and God's chasing after it."

"Interesting," he sips, "the way you talk about light. Never really thought of it quite like that... like a dog."

"'Seems to have a mind all its own! It cannot be quite domesticated. It's more wolf than abstraction."

Robert makes a grunting noise of comprehension, arcing his neck back to take in something on the ceiling, drawing off some inner discipline.

"I'm an architect," he starts, "there's no room for metaphors in what I do. Everything is regulated and systematised and, fuck... even the placement of light fixtures gets political. There's no room for character." He turns in his stool, opening, becomes animated, "When I start a project I have to detach from it almost immediately. I know the final product will be nothing like it was when it was in here," he taps his temple, almost violently with one finger "in my head. You ever feel that way?"

"Mmm," I grunt, lobbing a chuckle into my glencairn, "I practically live in that feeling–"

"What kind of work do you do?"

"Cinematographer."

"No shit?" This is the usual reaction.

"No shit." A moment passes, wherein most debate the merits of asking me if I've ever worked on anything famous. I have, but I'm still nobody. He spares me that question, keeps the conversation avant-garde.

"So instead of working with material and codes or forms, you’re working with light."

"Against light! Light is the enemy. It's always trying to assert its own will. It can be shaped, diverted, intensified, weakened, but it can't be owned."

"Like people!"

"Like people."

"And some people, would like to clean up, so we can get home." Our bartender returns, swooping up our glencairns like the hawk to the mouse. "Last-call was an hour ago, boys. 'Fraid I have to throw you out into the cold."

"Nice to have a little peace and quiet on a Friday night," I remark back, placing enough cash to cover the bill on the bar, snatching up my backpack.

"Saturday morning, sweetie," she winks back.

"Peace is always beautiful," Robert declares. I forgot to expect the unexpected.

"I see you know your Whitman," I remark, one eye-brow raised. I've known the architect a sum total of an hour, but I can see more of his soul laid bare in the air before me. The mythos of our association a mutual fascination with applied forms and the urgency of Whitman. Two men with depths out of element, unleashed into the night.

We traverse the blocks of The Pearl, ants to the jet set high above, crossing West Burnside at the corner between west and southwest amidst Portland's kitchy half-block analogue to The Castro.

"I have to grab a few things," He thumbs a solitary door, in a brick building repainted hipster mauve–an invitation up to his inner sanctum of the mind. We climb reclaimed wood stairs, above a boutique in the shadow of our only real skyscraper, pink and pornographic in the night air. Emerging into his office, open plan in a way that invokes some OSS nerve centre during The Battle of Britain; I expect to see maps of the Dover coast, maybe Gerry U-Boats creeping into Southend-on-Sea, stacks of papers and material samples as nebulous to me as enigma codes. I am inside a cathedral mind; Buildings as symphonies. Sworn to secrecy the covenant of those who build our reality with occult architecture, the secret politics of building codes and public works. I catch an encore French perfume in the air, something with a feminine touch. It belongs to a cashmere scarf, left behind on one chair as armour against airconditioning. It draws my eye to a muted mustard couch, lying under one of the iron lattice windows one sees in old factories; a crumpled Pendleton blanket collapsed at one end. From off to my left, the telltale clink of glass, Robert is pouring out two more generous drinks.

"Whiskey?"

"Always," I nod my appreciation, moving over to a black mass dominating one solitary table in the board-room. Robert approaches, his own sleeves rolled up, offering me a glass the way one might hold a chess piece–top-down, deliberate.

"It's not your... what'd ya call it again?"

"Lagavulin."

"Lagavulin, right. Fraid this is just simple Yankee bourbon."

"Your hospitality is appreciated. Thank you," I sip, rolling the briery spirits across my tongue and down the hatch, then shift my attention to the black mass, nodding, "what's all this?"

"The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame…" Robert, quoting Hobbes.

"The Leviathan," I watched at he removed the black fabric covering the mass, a to-scale model of a massive modern glass shard of a building, overlooking the River's east-side, "Seems apropos."

"My firm has been working on this for years. We finally got the approval and clearances today," He leans into the dim over head light above the model, shadows gathering on his face. Two men in a workshop, halfway into a glass, opening a well of secrets, "it's going in right on the east end of the Burnside bridge. Crazy place to put a high-rise."

"Congratulations," I whispered, raising my glass, "that's a big win."

"No-no," he chuckled, "it's a disaster. Lotta midnight oil to be burned getting this sonavabitch done," He pulls in a breath, pushes it through a grimace, " 's why she served me with divorce papers today." Now it all made sense, that's why he was staring so intently into his drink he could've bore a hole through the bartop. How do you tell a man you don't know that you're truly sorry for the bad news?

"Tell me more. Now why would she go and do a thing like that?" The three most important important words in the English language, apart from 'I love you,' are 'tell me more,' people aren't used to hearing it, being cared about, invited into the physics of the genuine.

"She says I'm not home enough. She feels abandoned," his hands are quaking, sending ripples through the glencairn which he surrenders, setting it on the table next to the mockup, "I've been holding onto this for eight hours." A knowing silence passes between us, a moment of gravity against one must anchor internally. I can't offer him a line from the Disneyfied tome of lesser platitudes; an 'I'm so sorry, man!' or a 'y'know, maybe it's for the best!' Nothing but commiseration will cut it, so I drill down into the depth of my own pain, my own congealed fears swaddling my heart.

"It's funny," I muse, taking up a position next to him, my voice settling into the slow introspective growl I've only heard issue forth from my lips in dire instances, "the women we've known. When we were broke, living on Top Ramen and driving shit cars, they wouldn't give us the time of day. Start making a little money, show a quantum of promise, earn their attention... They get invested. You marry, or you simply cohabitate. Maybe they're making their own money, maybe you're both living off of yours. Then one day they sour and you hear that perpetual refrain–'never enough,' there are never enough date nights, never enough vacations, they never see enough of you. They lose sight of the blood, sweat and toil it takes to have means; the time, sinew, and worry it costs to stay there, in a place of comfort, and you think 'if ELLE or COSMOPOLITAN or JEZEBEL would just run one article a month on economics, or financial operations, they'd accept that wages aren't set arbitrarily, that one must bring value, make sacrifices, in order to live the good life. You don't know how to tell them that if they keep pulling you off your mission, fouling up the gears of your provision you'll only end up resenting them and they'll lose you anyway. You bargain, 'let's downsize, finagle a cheaper mortgage so I won't have to work as much, I can be home more.' That only makes things worse. They resent your display of weakness and leave... maybe they think they'd be better off on their own, or Kevin from accounting seems a better prospect. There's always some schmuck who makes more, looks better. It's not like we're much different; how many men ditch their families for a younger, firmer office girl who looks like their wife did twenty years ago and doesn't nag?" Robert chuckles, setting free a lone tear, "I see these divorced ladies everywhere, eating alone in chic restaurants, spelunking a bottle of wine. You'd bet they'd eat their pearls if they could. You wonder if they regret it. Then reality sets in and you realise you just don't care. We all make our choices. We all have to live with ourselves."

We commiserate in silence, perfect strangers mind, swap war stories, the complex ecstatic-terrors of the women we've loved and lost. After hours is where the truth is; the truth of the human condition. The American Karoshi happening in slow motion, Top-earners bigger marks for the thermonuclear strike of a no-fault divorce. The man doesn't know me from Adam, but he knows I can dig it. Without precondition or pre-conception. Been down that dark road before and know every crack in the pavement. You can sense it on me - my own private Ypres behind my eyes. He can sense, in the way soldiers can sniff out a brother, that I've walked similar desolate passes: strange perfection.

"You ever been married?"

"I came close. Twice."

"Think you ever will?"

"Sure, but only when I know it's not out of vanity," I bottom out my own glencairn, my thoughts flashing back to the two women in question, Nathalie and Gwen. A frog takes up residence in my throat at the thought of Gwen, the only one of the two still alive and the paragon of pregnant, if rumour is to be taken on board. "It's three am, 'should get you home."

"Nah, this place is...uh," for the first time I could see it: he was losing his footing to the whiskey, now the couch and the Pendleton squared up, "You haven't been sleeping here have you?"

"Yeah... My kids, you'know? I don't wann'em seein' me like," he waves dead fish arms, "–this."

"I understand... Still, I think it's a little worse if they don't see you at all. It's one thing if you and your wife are through, but if you just vanish from their lives without so much as a whimper, they're going to think you left because of them." I was that kid once, and I wish that someone had said the same.

Robert grunted, running one of those workman's hand through hair suddenly far greyer than I recalled it being at the bar.

"Don't spend this time, while your kids are still so young, wasting away here. Show up for them. If you and your wife need to be in separate rooms for the next few months, so be it. Make sure they remember this time with you being as present as you can be; it's not about you, or your wife. It's about them." I offer him my hand, it hangs in the air a spell, while the greater aspect of him hangs in the balance.

"I'm hailing you a cab," Back on the street, in the night air in that Pre-uber modality where getting home isn't so simple. Robert pulls the cool air through his teeth, as a black and white Radio Cab pulls to a stop alongside.

"Thanks. Thanks for setting me straight."

"It's what I do, apparently," perhaps I should take my own advice, "Good luck." We share a parting handshake, firmer this time, affirming a moment shared in Hell. I take a step back from the curbside, turn, stop then throw a glance back over a shoulder, "Hey, Robert!" He breaks his eyes away from the cabbie, rolls down one back-window, "get yourself a younger one!" He smirks and the cab pulls away into the night. I don't even know why I said it, except that I wanted to clear the air with something absurd. I gather my coat around my middle and move East, home.

2018

Speeding east on the Burnside Bridge a hard day behind me. As I gaze up and left I catch Robert's building, a shock of a black monolith towering above the East Waterfront; referred to by the local hipsters as The Death Star for its burnt steel facade, and slivers of windows. I read Robert was shafted by the city on his design, compromised to local "our way, or the highway" politics; clad in black, fewer windows. I remember the beauty of the mock-up, two men sipping whiskey in the wee hours of a Saturday, sharing war stories.

I know I'm getting sicker, this pain in my backside growing worse all the time. Justine has stopped nagging me about it, throwing her weight behind hushed contempt. I've been missing the company of a gang; I need men with me in the trenches. A few days ago I emailed Robert–it's been what? Four years to the month since that night we sat up in his office triaging souls. My phone buzzes, email summary on screen. I slow to a stop at the red light at East Burnside and MLK, tapping open the message:

Corey,

Good to hear from you. I hope this finds you well. I'm doing fine. Business is good, despite the leviathan. Onwards and upwards.

Take care,

Robert

P.S. You were right about the kids.

"Onwards and upwards," a bit on the nose for an architect. There's an underlying plea in his email which I translate into my own dialect: Corey, Thanks for listening that night, for saving my relationship with my kids, but let's agree to not rehash what a wreck I was. I think that instance of naked shame is something best left to oblivion. Take care of yourself. No extension of friendship. My heart falls into my stomach. Sometimes all you can be is an excellent single-use friend. I respect his desire to move on, to not wallow in things he can't change. The traffic light is still red beyond the setting sun. Maybe Robert fixed his marriage, maybe he didn't. I'm okay never knowing.

“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”

ONE OF MY DOGS HASN'T BEEN EATING THE PAST FEW DAYS, just went off her biscuits, decided that only venison and salmon jerky will do–she gobbles that down with reckless abandon, haughtily nosing conventional duck and trout out of reach. She's done this before; the expensive Pacific Stream Salmon soured in her seeing nose–hence duck and trout in the first place. Despite myself, I can't help but think, Well, fuck you, dog! Up yours! You don't have to walk yourself, feed yourself, pick up your own shit. You don't have to earn money to buy your food, pay your taxes, be a productive member of a society! Allen my rabbi and chess partner, thirteen years dead speaking through me What? You think I can just make food rain from the sky? I can't spend an extra $30 each month on different food, just for you, asshole! Do canines dream of socialist wish fulfillments? You live in ol' buttermilk luxury that would make 15^th century French monarchs green with envy!

Then I think to myself again, by the way, fuck you, Corey. Fuck you for getting comfortable! Fuck your cells for getting cancerous! Fuck the Nagasaki sauce chemotheraphy that saved your life! Fuck the radiation that killed tumours, shocked nerves, rendered your penis inert and your efficacy inept! Fuck 80%! Fuck 27% Fuck statistics and their curated expectations! Fuck your ten-year-old slow ass computers, never good enough for any job; always one step behind, always on the goddamn B-team! Fuck your terminally unique mind, out of step with this milquetoast century! Fuck your ambition to be anything more than try-hard average, to claw your way into the bourgeois sun with the vainglorious beautiful! Fuck your anarchical luck, side-lining you from the world, while not having the decency to kill you.

Death over détente; it would have been so much easier than this hurry-up-and-wait game. Peeping purpose with perfect clarity and hamstrung by motherfucking cellular quislings. No one realises the thin ice on which they tread; one moment part of the mise-en-scène of an industry, with clear value and a position in things–a place on the map. Then Cancer happens. There is an outpouring of support and protestations of care and love, but treatments take longer than anyone realises, and before you know it, the world has moved on out of necessity. "Nothing personal, kid... We just have bills to pay, you know? Get well soon. Let us know when, you'know... You're all clear." All clear? This isn't a cold, or the flu or a bad case of the roach-coach runs, this is cancer! There is no "all clear!"

My wayward dog, sidles over, bats me on the knees, What's your problem, human? I'm hungry!

My problem? I think, scratching her ears lovingly, My problem is your infantile expectations! My problem is Charles Darwin! Millennia of selective breeding and you can't grasp the concept of suck it up, buttercup! She trots off to parts unkown. She'll be back. I would gladly buy her different food, two bags a month, one for each dog. Where is the child-support for dog-owners? My co-canine-parent long AWOL.

I have got to transmute shit to gold, have to find work. I have to show up in industry again as useful, unbroken, unfucked. I can't be manual, or run camera–the threat of chemo, its utility in my chest, riding my collarbone like a brand of defenciency. 20 years of skill-set accumulation wasted for lack of others' imagination. Starting over from ABC's, pleading proof that I am not my extensive résumé–as if it was ever a guarantee of fuck all–that I can do something else to those who see people as cogs in the machine. Unless I have done exactly a thing, I'm unqualified for a shot at proving I can do that thing. Why all this excessive education if they think I can't learn a role? Has nobody ever heard of on-the-job training? Billy Shakes said, "Let's kill all the Lawyers!" Ah! But Billy, my light, my brother, my comrade in mental arms! You've never had to contend with HR professionals, those mercurial cerberuses of obtuseness! Those archons of asininity, whose analytical powers involve little more than daily horoscopes and a ouija board!

Resistance as trauma response; protection from what once threatened to kill me. Do I even want my old life back? If I dare set foot on the well-worn track, the uncertain familiar of my last 20 years, am I not just begging for another tumour? In my nightmares, bird-dogging a train. I think I can catch up, but the carriage hammers on. I dig and dig and dig, my legs turning to rust, I can catch up! Although, what is my plan when I do? Will snatching the holds at 50 mph tear my hands off? Roll and snap my ankles like balsa wood? I shed my baggage, strip off my coat leaving nothing to drag, leaving it all behind, down to birthday suit and shoes, still digging and as I hit a 45 miles per hour impossible for my human insides and I feel the snap, crackle and pop my fibulas and tibulas become strangers, come apart, ragged. My talus in splinters, Achilles tendons rip and tear, tibial ligaments vaporise, calcaneofibular ligaments ground to dust like dreams deferred. I'm running on bloody stumps, bitumen stabbing every shrieking nerve. All that's left is a public tumble against quicksand knees, drawing ragged frustrated breaths between gasps of burnt rubber ground. The train is arcing up a golden hill, rimmed with brilliant birds. Onlookers gawk in stunned silence at my naked human wreckage. Then a soft hand on my shoulder, rolling me onto my back. A small girl, backlit, golden hair loose in the breeze. She has no mouth, and her eyes all apologies, she hands me one of my bloodstained shoes.

Waking, vomiting, brushing panic-sick off my teeth then carrying on with the great lie to the world, reality left in the darkest corner behind the scenes. Truth is, I should have walked away a long time ago. I achieved everything I set out to achieve, it's just that it happened backwards. I reached the apex of my success right out of the gate, it distorted my expectations and everything subsequently felt hollow, trite, unsubstantial. Hebrew school words like wet fish to the face; mit’ametzet "Determined," stubborn in a stupid way. I had thought having such huge success early on was guarantor of a bright future: it wasn't, in fact it closed far more doors to me than I would have otherwise experienced–it made me even more unrelatable than I already am. More alien, a threat. Someone somwhere, screams from the top of insecurity mountain, "death, to the overachievers!" I am the sunk-cost fallacy in flesh.

At least chemo is honest, it spared me from ye olde eternal marketing bullshit. Proposition: the more PASSION you have, the more it facilitates success! What are you PASSIONATE about! like they give 1/3 of a fuck... We need someone who is PASSIONATE about data analytics! Because this job pays peanuts and passion is the only benefit you're likely to have. PASSIONATE about Project mangement! Zounds! The sad desperation of the middle-management set made a virtue! What are 13 things PASSIONATE people do differently? Not waste their time with inane lists on the internet? PASSIONATE about food service! Only when being served! What's your PASSION? Our PASSION is diversity! Really? I never would've guessed based on your hiring demographics. What PASSIONS drive you!? Are you PASSIONATE about sales? Depends, do I get 80% commission? PASSIONATE about customer service? We only want PASSIONATE people for our senior road-warrior marketing internship! I guess the niave must be passionate to work for free. Are YOU our PASSIONATE social media badass? I could get tickled lying to complete strangers. Wanna be a part of our team of PASSIONATE fundom officers? I'll be passionate if there's free doughnuts. Are you a PASSIONATE retail jedi? There is no passion, there is serenity. Never played Knights of the Old Republic, hm? Share your PASSION with us! And for Godssakes, be anything but real!

Maddness when one can speak to an entire planet and no one gives a minim of a fuck. Even Spring Sun is muted by a dull ache of the soul. Toska, Russian word roughly translated as "sadness," "melancholia." A man needs a mission. Men have no intrinsic value, we are what we do, what we produce. What we can carve out of stone and soil. Women have an entire industry that tells them how valuable they are, how deserving. The Sisterhood is like the Marines, they leave none of their own behind. It's been beaten out of men, solidarity. The gentlemen's clubs, the instutions where men can look out for eachother–as women do–now non-PC, the vengeful screech their appeals to injustice. Where do guys down on their luck go, other than the gutter? The way of men was the way of the gang, so where's my gang? Legislated away for the new ethos of fighting history's ghosts? If what I already possess, have cultivated, won't cut it, and I can't do the most basic of manual tasks–MAN-ual, right? Ditch digging, warehousing, using my hands for a time, what else is there for me but to gather dust? Accumulate irrelevance like moss on a house no one wants, all the while chuckling to myself at the secret just beneath the pavement, It just as easily could have been you, pilgrim, but for now, it's me. Another schmuck amongst the ranks of the unsung and I'm sorry this is so dour, but America needs a dose of the real; so ginned-up about Washington misrule, yet ignoring their own brother.

Puzzle dog returns, sits and stares with her amber eyes, Human, I'm still hungry! Why don't you feed me? We try this again. I have no reason to believe things will go any differently. Things will go as they must. I must surrender to uncertainty, to discomfort and wait actively. Survivorship is life at the firewall! Incompatible with the Human condition rendered down to Instagram platitudes that passes for taction. My thoughts return, Fuck your vanity! Fuck your pride, your inability to ask for help! A flare sent up, arcing into waning winter sky while I take refuge on incomprehensibly isolated rocks, naked before the storm. This time I can appeal to the tribe, scattered and atomised. Like my wayward dog, I need a bone to chew between industry's cracks; something different, something untried.

"We have a soul at times. No one’s got it non-stop, for keeps.

Day after day, year after year may pass without it.

Sometimes it will settle for awhile only in childhood’s fears and raptures. Sometimes only in astonishment that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand in uphill tasks, like moving furniture, or lifting luggage, or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out whenever meat needs chopping or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations it participates in one, if even that, since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain, it slips off-duty.

It’s picky: it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds, our hustling for a dubious advantage and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow aren’t two different feelings for it. It attends us only when the two are joined.

We can count on it when we’re sure of nothing and curious about everything.

Among the material objects it favors clocks with pendulums and mirrors, which keep on working even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from or when it’s taking off again, though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it but apparently it needs us for some reason too."

— Wisława Szymborska

“Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.”

A SONOROUS CALL SOUNDS THROUGHOUT THE HOUSE. From wood-cabinet speakers: angelic violin voices in A 440Hz tuning, stirring cello, bass and brass. First-chairs noodling warm up soul rhetorician phrases. Through crackling vinyl, I attend that moment when the conductor's baton rises, sections hush into athletic readiness; silence before the first measure, an entire Berlin concert hall holding its breath in 1967...

Now, a meat-and-potatoes low-E♭ double-bass. Bassoons arrive in vanguard, sounding their B♭ an eternal four measures later. French horns, distant heroic voices beckoning the sun over the far horizon; strings arpeggiate, hawks soaring above gathering, effusive audile dawn. Soon after, woodwinds and flutes have breezed in, throwing in their lot with the sauntering sinfonietta, an upsurge of voices, arppegios accumulate, swifts joining the hawks, swooping and diving throughout a monumental E♭ major triad; a shepherd's tone invoking the infinte... rising, then falling back. A lone French horn saves the day from silence, beckons the brass heralding trombones and we tumble down into the depths of Alberich's abode in Nibelheim, where the dwarves toil.¹ This is Der Ring des Nibelungen,² chosen at random on a chill Saturday morning. Music meant to evoke the creation of life itself, as the orchestra builds and builds, achieving something both abundant and miraculous.

Nothing even comes close to the sound of an orchestra; it posesses essential qualities: a collection of voices, each embodying different tones and timbres. Arrange them in time and order and they become pregnant with implication. Is musicality an essential component of an orchestra? Return to the tune up; the same collection of musical instruments gathered in a hall, all making noise. It's still an orchestra. Does anyone turn up in evening dresses and dinner jackets to listen to that howling cacophony of acoustic chaos? Not for long. We impose order, first in the form of 440Hz, the note A on the musical scale, or "La" in Solfège. All voices submit to it, sustain it for as long as breath holds out–the strings indefinitely³–but a single unified note is neither beautiful nor interesting. Tone and order are essential to the orchestra, but our performers are wanting something. Toss-in variation, E♭ major, the opening chord of Das Rheingold, more interesting, but without motivation no better than that lonesome technical A. The chord must be permutated, built upon. Arpeggiated through triads; Lifted from forte to fortissimo. Now we evoke and the audience bears anticipation, where will this go? Where will this end? Break the pattern, launch a Tristan chord–F, B, D♯ and G♯–and in that moment between measures, anticipation becomes expectation and where there is expectation we have the genesis of something new: meaning.

Essentialist arguementation holds that orchestral essence is polyphonic sound, variation and interpretive meaning. This is unalterable, an orchestra without musical instruments cannot fulfill the essential conditions of the orchestra and is therefore something else. One can have simulacra of an orchestra, programmed into a synthesizer or software; allow that a keyboardist or non-linear editing can produce a fair simulation of what an orchestra sounds like, but it's fundamentally not; it will be called out straight away as a fraud for its lack of dynamic nuance, missing subtle imperfections in a string's vibrato, or the mundane happenings of a perferomer's life creeping into the performance. The technical marvel simulacrum misses out the essentially human.

Voices shift, the strings own the day. I see Ms. Sharapova, my first piano teacher when Temple of Doom was still fresh; chain-smoking Soviet expat, breath like a three-dog-night Russian Winter and a heart of Slavic gold–probably long dead now, come to think of it; she was old even then. We slung Solfège in the attic music room of her Hackney home. The Do-Re-Mis, really a primer in linguistic syntax. She sang ad-lib Solfège phrases and we enraptured pupils were to fill in the blanks, our eyes glistening with anticipation. All pedagogy rests on a human penchant for systematising, the obsessive attachment of meaning to things. Consider essentialism in human terms, adages like, "well, that’s just human nature," having no idea what is meant by "human nature" except in reference to whatever social error must be explained away in the moment. "Human nature" is simply an immutable, eternal constant you're supposed to understand intuitively and accept. What is the essence in Human nature? Is it a condition of good? Of Evil? Cooperation and kindness? Self-Interest and vanity? What in "Human nature" grapples with the big abstractions like purpose or function?

Marketing tills the platitudinal ecosystem (or platitudinal egosystem?). For example, take the notion "finding yourself," no one knows what that means either. Are we all born of some Platonic ether, split-souled, missing the fundamentals of our place in the cosmic calculus? In postmodern, aetheistic ecology how can a being's purpose exist beforehand? An absurd, dangerous notion meant to sell magazines and tired romantic comedies; guilty as charged, I came from that industry myself. I was a serotonin technician engaged in the art of paying my bills with lies of light. Our enterprise is the reduction of people to economic units, an atrocity too quickly laid by utopian magical thinkers at the feet of capitalism.⁴ Survivorship involves a return to the desert of the real, but without the gurrantee of years previously assumed, every moment is compact, accelerated, hyper-real. Purpose must be renegotiated in that domain, operating as it always did, but I in it am changed by the experience of disease, by the threat of 27% survival odds lingering in my periphery; now I'm far less apt to gamble away my time on maybes.

Pulling into a filling station, stopping my engine, checking my phone. That essential and irritating gesture sending a cold wave of anxiety through me. The world has moved on and I'm out of reach to the undertow. One work colleague's name stands out in the mounting pile of voices neglected, a voicemail about a shoot, which I’m unable to take owing to the port in my chest. In my stomach a split reaction: happy to be considered, horrified the person has no idea what I’d been through the last year and a half. Cancer Stage IV. Death expectation. Hiatus. Amorous desertion. Desolation. He never even got the news... I summarise it all from a bolgia of rage, keeping it to myself did you not know that I have been to Hell and back over the last year! Did no one in this incestuous creative community bother to mention it? meanwhile outwardly calm, ever professional, putting him in touch with another DP who can do the job. It’s important to recognise the comical absurdities couched in the abject horror of life's accidents. I'm mortified that both of those reactions could exist simultaneously; futility tremens in the soil of The Possible.

A cinch, that gross over-estimation of how often people think of you. Our lives are so busy. This doesn’t arise out of malice, just the dizzying chaos of modern life. Our waking hours clouded by obligation, storms of notifications and demands chewing away like sanity locusts. Even if my colleague did know my situation, most don't understand what having cancer means. There is no cure, it never goes away, only dormant; the possibility of rejoinder ever present. I will remain in that anxiety the rest of my life–however long that is. Every scan, body feeling "off," or doctor's glance thick with uncalm. It’s elementary to underestimate cancer's traumas. I coexist with solemn masculine shame in each neural explosion punctuating the aftermath; paranoia over future abandonments–Justine's mark on my psyche fading unhurried. Huck barks, tossing me out of my skin with a yelp. cPTSD stealing into the synapses. Where was the time to process? I've been in survival mode 18 loitering months. Now a partial remission I thought would never come, the anxiety of time re-opening. Cancer rocked up in the prime of my life, stomping bloody vandal hooves into the comforts of my existence, cellular rape dripping with the betrayals of my own body. Meanwhile, every thing and every one cracked on with life.

As I release the shoot, an inevitable wave of gloom rushes into the vacuum. Why am I not happy to recieve calls for work, even if I can't take it right now? To be useful to the business is to be seen. Once utility is compromised, the business moves on out of necessity. This isn't calculated, merely habit of the species informed by 40,000 years of hunter-gatherer Darwininan pressure. This is the essentialism of industry, everyone knows me as camera department. Imposed by an accident of health, I am unable to satisfy the essential conditions that define Corey Drayton, DP or 1^st AC, and so I make my bed on the heap of obsolecence. I express my attempts to affect a lateral move to writing, or some other creative domain, meeting only shrugged shoulders and a unsettling lack of imagination. How simple as ABC, accepting the systematising of people, wages of the Prussian factory education model that comprises the bedrock of Western industry; "people are what they do," another lexical prison. If I return to the industry, that morass of frenetic uncertainty where every day is frought with anxiety, will cancer re-assert itself? Can I ever go back to the work I love? Recalling the months before diagnosis, that unending slump into irrelevancy, the decline of my business, "where is this relationship going" fights with Justine, guilt borne of never being able to plan or promise; feeling a schmuck, a phoney; then an exile from everything I've worked 20 years for; adrift in a sea becalmed.

I worry about returning to this world of inherent contradiction, recurrence guaranteed by the industry. None of the people buzzing around me, going about their work, know the urgent panic of life-interrupted which has its way with my thoughts. I'm adept at masking my true state behind a veneer of calm affability. Meanwhile, my insides resemble something out of A Farewell to Arms; my shellshocked guts convalesce resplendent in Elia Kazan Milanese hospitals, milking their reprieve from The Western Front, their last nerve out to lunch.

The fuel pumps away, otic cold water snapping me out of my interior daze. An old man, parked alongside leans against a massive 'Merica pickup, admiring my dogs sat alert in the backseat, canine cab fares. He makes sharp ears above his head with swollen construction hands, laughing impressed by their wolfy pricked-ear visage. I smile back semiotic acknowledgement with this complete stranger, his blue-collar Carhartt swagger, grinning through a Visigothic biker moustache and a Trump Pence 2020 bumper sticker loud and proud over one salt-of-the-earth shoulder. The denizens of my industry would sneer down their noses at this man; to them he's the enemy. For all their immersion in ways of seeing, few would see the truth of this moment: just two human beings sharing a love of man's best friend. For an instant, I feel seen; like part of a civilisation again.

The pump clicks closed, the teenaged station attendant hustling back to remove it on beanpole legs. I stop him with a glance and send him to service the old man; he was here first. The man smiles and salutes, the sun glowing through back-lit ruddy skin. I throw back a thumbs-up in return, warmth and connection spreading through my insides. These are the unspoken contracts between gentlemen that oil civilisation. He followed Forester's dictum, took a sliver of time to reach out, connect. I returned the favour, offering up the gift of my own convenience. It's the only weapon we have against atomisation.

At dusk, chasing the setting Sun into Portland's West Hills; chasing after a night of boxing. Against my introverted nature, I force myself to say "yes" to social gatherings. How does one rejoin the creative world and all its insincere grandiosity after 18 months of cancer treatment? There is no dignity in week upon week of radiation. How do I explain that I'm not working on any shows or projects because I spent the past year and change in chemo? Nothing inside the same; all drama and politicking that flavours early middle-age bellyflops in the shallow end of the pertinence pool, followed by a tsunami of tedium and guilt, inundating the shores of my civility.

I sing the quiet song of the sigma male, abandon reality for a moment, off to a place where no one will ask me how I'm feeling. The primacy of a sacred and holy masculine space where my burdens, while set aside for a time, are only my own and not the tribe's. I park, stopping the engine, on an alley that may as well be a paved goat path high above the city skyline, texting Vera, letting her know I made it. Every minute feels naked without her presence. Somehow there are streetlights, even up here on this 1920s Model-T alley. Their glow graces the sable lines of my car with Sodium vapour caresses. Backtracking down the alley, pausing between new houses, black like monoliths, framing a shot of the city skyline. I snap a photo, bringing Vera to my landing.

Not far off is the split-level condo, I promptly ring the wrong doorbell. Something that happens frequently now as more of my energy is spent beating back the hypervigiliance Portland lends me; I have too much history here. From beyond neo-brutalist steel doors barks an English bulldog. It's dinner hour and I don't mean to annoy his master. It takes the man eternity to come to the door, I know I'm in the wrong place and could just leave a mystery in my wake, but don't. Politness demands a schlemiel's apology. A shirtless gay torso emerges through the crevasse between door and frame, I offer my friend's last name pointing at the stairs down, apologising with my eyes. I'm sure it happens all the time.

Passing through a wide open front door, following the sounds of testosterone gathering emerging into a living room that would make Teddy Roosevelt blush. A familiar hush falls on the room: As usual I present the only dusky face in a room full of blank expressions. A pheromonal and semiotic, “what the fuck is he doing here“ passing unverbalised through the air of the room. It plays microcosm for my professional stagnation: the only people my colour with whom the citizens of such a space interact pester for pocket change on MLK. I gird my armour–the perfecto motorcycle jacket I wear everywhere, polished to perfection and worth their rent. While not the blatant bigotry of the Jim Crow past, there remains a breach of expectation, a feeling of un-belonging; ironic from the orange man bad camp of least resistance that rules the creative roost.

My host rescues me with a gentleman's back-pat, offers me a drink. I take a little burbon to settle my nerves, thank the gods my oncologist cleared me for it. I need a little liquid courage to travel, from the social hinterland to these upscale spaces. I watch a boxer, the heavy amongst heavyweights, keeping more of his scouse cadence than I did, praying like a knight before battle. His opponent, fullfilling every African-American stereotype, raps his way unintelligibly to the ring. Now seems ideal time for strategic smorgasboard withdrawal. I don't even come from that culture, yet the habit of easy-bake associations proliferated by my own industry are tough to shake. Progressive on paper if not in practice. Collective association is necessity to a modern psyche so burned out on high Allostatic load. Anyone in the room who asked would know instantly my deeper kinship with the scouse boxer belting God Save the Queen into the Las Vegas night–against bromidic American sneers. How to position one's self against the inevitability of perception, the hasty fiction of complete strangers? A constant awareness that judgements are based in a curated reality that I as an individual cannot change. Pangs of shame like glass shards; how many people in the room question my belonging in their class, while a supporting argument plays out on live TV for all to see? Two years before, I was shooting for Rolling Stone, now I'm nobody's second cousin, twice-removed. All my big shows have come from elswhere; my Portland is one of run around ambivalence. No one would guess the things I've seen, the ground I've trod, the luminaries whose air I've shared; the commonalities clouded by paltry assumption. I come from beyond their ken, from the platonic ether of the other, where the map is the territory. It feels a curse to have a type of mind trapped in the wrong body; breaks the verisimilitude of the world. Chuckling to myself in my solitude in the crowded room, recalling "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate..." and like that hallowed replicant, I'm an alien everywhere.

These instances thicken the resistance I have to returning to old trodden paths. The cult of relevance and the American obsession with lanes. Something can be quality, can be creative, can be visionary but is it relevant? Since when did relevance become the primary metric by which to judge the worth of a thing? Relevance has metastesised into the essence of everything. "That’s cool," they exclaim, "but is it relevant?" This is the new opiate, the perceptual vice excreted from post-modernism where everything in the universe has to have some value of social critique. Where is the relevance of cancer survivorship to those who just haven't been there? I step out into the cool air of the balcony, look down on the city like Zeus from Olympus. Reaching out to Vera in the dark, ordering Salmon and potatoes in a faraway Shasta hotel. In our cancer, we can be real across the distance, technicolour where so much else is in black and white.

With me as I move unbidden through the Portland Night is a fichu of melancholy, wrapped about my shoulders. I see Eryn, two years dead now, wishing she was alive to help me divine the path. In ten years I never managed to carve out a place here. Feeling estranged in my own city, a precariat vagabond pitching a shit-eating grin at everyone he knows, "never say die," while hustling in obscurity. There are no straight lines in The West Hills. Everything is steep, narrow swtichbacks and blind corners through a haphazard strata of time and architecture–1920s here, 1880s there. The switchbacks evoke life, we can see our general direction and destination, sometimes the road hairpins back upon itself around a blind corner. We grit our teeth, commit to the turn, hoping there will be no collision on the far end of the arc. Down, down the Hills I go, sodium vapour city lights returning to view, my exit vector–the rare 1926 catelever Ross Island Bridge–sleek in phthalo blue and deceptively close. The lee banks of the bridge once the site of a depression era Hooverville, and may yet be again. I turn, putting the skyline to my back, loving this city for its eclectic beauty and hating it for its indifference.

My thoughts drift to another of my favourite Wagner operas, Tristan und Isolde, its prelude unfolding in the warm space of my car wending down where The West Hills meet Goose Hollow, inline six cylinders hum and purr in an alloy of precision and flair, almost as if they can hear their nation's music and sharpen up, swelling with Bavarian pride. They say this is the music Dali died to, saturnine and inevitable. My thoughts drift to my cello, resting unplayed in the hallway of my temporary home. I blame the chemo neuropathy in my fingers for its neglect, but the decline initiated much earlier in Justine's complaints; she hated the savorless music stand, the intensity of my music boiling her weaponised PTSD day-after-day. As I leave these sheer West Hills behind, joining the skyscrapers rushing past thinking, How many make unholy compromises to hedge dereliction? Therein lies the seeds of resentment, creeping and thorny. At a red light I finger the pattern of a C major scale on the steering wheel with my left hand, imagining the divits in my cello's fingerboard from years of practise, ashamed of my vaporised devotion. I'll have to start from scratch again here too, just as with everything else.

The night rolls on; moonless, dry for February in the Pacific Northwest, cool and electric. Vera waits-up in hotel room corporate light and there's enough time to connect by phone before she surrenders to sleep and I stay up awhile, thinking, puzzling out a way forward elsewhere.

FOOTNOTES & REFERENCES

1. TC = 0:00 - 11:00

2. (WWV 86) Richard Wagner's cycle of German operas written from 1848 to 1874. consisting of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung.

3. I can’t help but to be something of a strings supremacist since I play the Cello.

4. Who cares if the sheep are owned by one group of shepherds or another? The sheep are still owned.

“Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.”

OF A MORNING, WATCHING A DILUTED WINTER SUN BREAK AGAINST THE CIRROCUMULUS VEIL. My thoughts turn to the phrase "live to see another day." That call for caution–to withdraw or retreat in the face of overwhelming odds–in its inceptive context now takes on entirely different meaning. There is a marketing buzzword axiomatic in the cancer community to which I acquiesce, encountering it in the denouement of the first year of treatment: "survivorship." To all a state, to one a destination, to another that first sip of wine after crossing the Sahara. I like to put words through their paces, draw out the lexical scaffolding that our minds interpret as meaning.

survive mid-15c. "To outlive, continue in existence after the death of another," in the legal (inheritance) sense, from Anglo-French survivre, Old French souvivre, from Latin supervivere "live beyond, live longer than," from super "over, beyond" (super-) and vivere "to live"

-ship The "quality, condition; act, power, skill; office, position; relation between," Middle English -schipe, from Old English -sciepe,"state, condition of being," from Proto-Germanic skepi "to create, appoint," (Old Norse -skapr, Danish -skab, Old Frisian -skip, German -schaft).

Here we have two things of note: Survival being something established in relationship to the death of another, not-in-and-of itself. Also, the condition of surviving, the "power" of surviving; the "office," or "appointment" of surviving. Survivorship is, in essence, a covenant or contract that exists in relation to the death or ending of another; the death of a prior self or state of being. In order for one to become a survivor something else must be lost, either other lives, as in the case of an accident, conflict or natural disaster, or in the case of cancer, the loss of... what, exactly? Bad habits? Old contracts? Innocence itself? Inhibitions? The answers are as diverse as those marked with the diagnosis.

Sat yesterday, across from a friend–herself a member of the carcinomic tribe, a ten-year breast cancer survivor; she regaled me with the wages of her survivorship a double-mastectomy, the long march through epicurean disgusts feeling un-womaned, robbed, returned to second-girlhood by thoracic desolation and learning to love her complanate form like a baby daring one teetering inaugural foot behind another. Cosa mentale; the notion that desire has a life of its own and its own lifespan. Everything that lives desires, it is the naphtha of the mind. A desire for feminine wholeness attracts the promise of material concessions, breast implants a harrowing weeks long shortcut back to the familiar calculus of human desire; a decade of self-worth reduced to tits. Years on, a call from her surgeon bearing words she never would have expected, "the implants we gave you have been shown to cause a rare form of anaplastic T-cell lymphoma within the first ten years. Given that you've already had cancer, you should consider removing them." left with no questions, back to the high-key hustle of the operating room, the promise of another inscision–inframammary or in the fine-grained skin around neuropathic areolas. She wakes up, back in the familiar state of demolition, returned to tread the path of hard-won self love from the trailhead, gazing up the mountain. Vanity is the wages of survivorship, beating cancer–at minimum–demands a price paid in blood, sinew. Something of you must die so that you can yet live. These are postmodern human sacrifices, made daily in the ziggurats of the medical industrial complex. Susan Sontag wrote:

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.¹

Passing through the heart of darkness, how can one return to the the desert of the real? That material noplace territory of our lives which, ever in flux, can have no map? Here serotonin technicians feed from our aspirational exertions; our sanguine hopes and dreams. The social media hauteur dangling a curated authenticity that drives human desires towards the slaughterhouse of materialism. Muggeridgian urgings whoop and roar through my mind, "Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society." Why so much stock in the integrity of the body? What have my friend's breasts to do with the "passion of the real?" My thoughts drift to my own body wasting away during months of radiation and chemo, pants and belts cinched to minimums until everything normally fitted resembled hand-me-down chic. My surgeon telling me that I may loose the use of my penis, and may not even be able to excrete normally. Every morning and every night feeling around my body for signs of recurrence, awash in the terror of colostomic gene death; are these the wages demanded for my survival?

If paid, then what admittance can be expected to a social landscape so caught up in worshiping the Californicated mien? In inconsequntialities rules my generation; everything airbrushed, curated, devoid of flaws: selling, selling and selling anything but authenticity. Sidelong glances thrown in the mad dash between shopping malls, pregnant with kinesic outcry, "Spare us from the real! Do not remind us of our fragility, that youth is a temporary condition, a depreciation asset that can be–that will be–taken away!" Youth, commodified into chasing the latest depthless thing. Trends are like tides, they come, they go; predictably. Only dead fish go with the tide! Instead, swim! Against the tide, across the tide, be vital! Vitalis "of or belonging to life." Avoid anything that lulls into a passive state, into the living death of stabile consuption–of things, of happenings and of others. Life is anything but passive; life is unapologetic. It interrupts, pushes past boundaries, a loamy surf crashing against the sea-wall uplifted in tsunami by mathematical disruptions. Life laughs in the face of those fleeting impositions of human will. It begs no permission or indulgence, it simply quests against the slow march of entropy in search of sine qua non metabolic currency; a hedge against those forces that would interrupt its ability to make more life.

We are the living, all 7.7 billion of us and we converse with ghosts. We are the living. What permission do we need to go on in that precarious condition? Antithetical immersion, paid off by flesh, by the letting-go of whatever delusion we have built our lives around. We watch them vanish, submerged in space and time, and when the last vestiges can no longer be distinguished beneath the waves, we face the Sun, the haze clears and we walk on illuminated.

Footnotes & References

1. Sontag, Susan.Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.

“A minute’s success pays the failure of years.”

ABSURD INSTANCES RESURFACE FROM THE STEAM OF QUIET COFFEE MOMENTS. Echoes of the distant normal: Justine once said, over Sandy Hut ciders, the knowledge of the tumour inside me fresh in my umwelt, "What, are you trying to advertise it to everyone? They'll hear you!" that I “was far too up front about my diagnosis! Did [I] really want everyone knowing?” By extension; that I should feel ashamed, marked; keep it under wraps, not talk about it; smile! Pretend everything is just hunky-dory, y’dig? Just Livin’ the dream, daddy-oh! Trippin' the light fantastic! Kick back and crack a bottle of Vita obscura suds in the tepid summer sun of planet small.

Someone now asks, "what is the part of battling cancer that you've struggled with the most?" My mind revisits the experiential rolodex: The melting skin, passing glass at 2:00 am incontinence of radiation? The chemotherapy malaise, everything I eat tasting like 1945 Nagasaki sidewalk; my mouth filled with the briny ashes of amorous desertion? A grim diagnosis? The 27% chance of survival dancing in Fantasia nightmares with an elephantine 80% guarantee of big C recurrence? An overwhelming sense of injustice that these horrors never seemed to visit the machiavellian monsters of interstellar Faustian renown.

For me, it’s actually quite simple: a staggering aura of futility–not against the cancer itself, but the undefined, grey substrate of its genesis. I can’t determine if the daily futility with which I do combat, alongside the carcinomic Gorgon inside me, is a manifestation of the disease, or its catalyst? Biting into an apple, only dust hitting my tongue. I have felt a caustic sense of fruitlessness for a long time; a sisyphyean doom lurking on the edges of my awareness. The ego meets the reality cheese grater: a panicked urgency upon which compels one to act while simultaneously limiting one's options. Then I borrow a deep breath, and on my next inhale perspective returns: limitations are often the embers of creativity. The iconic arises out of the formerly impossible; against the odds.

#cancer #cancersurvivor #cancerwarrior #cancerphilosophy #memoirs #thoughts #fuckcancer #stoicism #stoicphilosophy

It’s important to me to check in periodically to ask for feedback and gain some insights as to how your experience with PENUMBRA has been thus far and what could make it better. You may have noticed a few changes based on my own testing and tweaking:

1. Content Layout – I've narrowed the "Main Content" Field of the blog pages specifically to encourage a more print-based feel. Tablet and mobile readers should notice no difference, but those of you reading on desktops should have a focused reading experience more akin to reading a book.

2. Glossary – I use a tremendous amount of technical jargon, slang and pop-culture references throughout these pieces. In the spirit of Douglas Coupland's 1991 book Generation X, I've added a glossary for quick-reference, which in the course of writing I've found quite enjoyable to assemble! I've returned to my gonzo roots–many of the definitions are no doubt cheeky, and hopefully will add much-needed humour to this grim subject! I am constantly updating it, so suggested words and definitions are always welcome and a form will be provided on the glossary itself for that purpose.

1. Combined "About" and "Contact" Pages – Duh! Separating the two made no sense from a UX standpoint and now exist as one continuous page. I always encourage you to reach out and say "hello," ask questions, give feedback or make requests there.

What's next? As far as content goes, I'm combining the memoir into a continuous narrative and am in the process of experimenting with ways to make it display correctly on this site. I can be am extremely particular demanding fascistic about how work is presented and experienced online. My goal is to offer an experience that feels like print; tactile and personal. I am also planning on producing a series of in-print interviews to be released monthly.

It has been suggested that I look into Patreon or Subscribe Star as a way of monetising the work. I have been somewhat hesitant to do so up until now chiefly because:

1. I wanted to have an established body of work on offer.

2. I am awaiting market feedback, an assessment of value from my current audience as a means of anticipating how such an ask might go.

Having owned and operated two business over 12 years, I am always in search of metrics to assess the ROI of a given venture. This can be very tricky when working in the realm of creative content or intellectual property. Right now, PENUMBRA is my main gig. It may seem as though "blogging" (a word I despise) is a fly-by-night operation, happening spontaneously with little investment. Some of my candid pieces are written, edited and posted within 1-2 hours. My longer pieces, such as the Memoir & Motif Series or the Memoir installments themselves can take as long as three weeks to research, write, proofread, edit and release; working often 10 caffinated hours a day, 6 days a week; sometimes as long as a month if I'm trying to put out shorter concurrent pieces. Then there's the SEO, metadata and promotion. How much is that time worth? I have an idea, but as always YOU, dear readers, have the final say!

I'm considering a suggested donation via Patreon from $1.00 - $5.00 monthly, of course I want to be able to offer exclusive content for patrons including audio versions of each piece, read by myself or hired talent, liner-notes and even a semimonthly podcast wherein I interview others in the cancer community, from Patients willing to share their stories, to medical practitioners, researchers, non-profit organisations and cancer survivors. Unlike Dinosaur Media, PENUMBRA can be both well-produced and experimental, holding artistic merit while satisfying its intended goal: to offer content that can help other cancer patients, their caregivers and loved ones by sharing stories and experiences around the experience of cancer. This is critical as cancer, once seen as a older person's illness, is beginning to affect younger and younger people, and there exists a content desert of media that directly speaks to the younger demographic of cancer patients and survivors. My goal is to be a pathfinder, helping to raise awareness around the cancer experience.

I'm relying on YOU to tell me what you think, so please do feel free to leave a comment below or message me privately. I plan on implementing your suggestions/constructive criticisms/feedback by March, 2020.

Coming soon will be the next installment of the Memoir Part V: Mono No Aware including the diagnosis and the start of treatment. Things get darker, but they do get better, building to what I hope will be a triumphant conclusion. Also coming are updates on the latest medical developments, plus Memoir & Motif no.3 The Thomas Sowell Effect, where I suit-up and dive deep into the critique of the creative industries begun in Social Media Mazurka.

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The future is yet to be written.

“The thing we long for, that we are for one transcendent moment. ”

DEMONS ARE GENEROUS, WITH THEIR TIME AND WITH THEIR COMPLIMENTS. Sat on the waiting path, with three of the most distichous: Cancer, history and futility. The first of these is unsubtle; a disease inexorably fatal if not combatted, often fatal regardless. Whether genetic (the jury is still out at present) sporadic (true in about 60-85% of diagnoses), or some enigma machine combination of psychosomatics, high allostatic load, and epigenetics. Perhaps, of these demons it remains the most easily confronted. It has a tactile effect on the body that can be quantitatively expressed; chemotheraphy and radiation deployed against it in a long war of attrition that can be directly observed. Surgeries may be undertaken, excising the affected tissue and isolating it from the rest of the body's systems. By all conventional metrics, there is no aspect of cancer that exists in other realms of awareness.

History, more insubstantial lies mostly in our perception. Theoretical constructs such as the [Baysian Brain]1 suggest our nervous system maintains internal probabilistic models as a result of the processing of sensory inputs; as adults we know not to put our hand into a fire, likely because as children we attempted it and burned ourselves. By extension, if this is the mechanism by which history is recorded into our bodies, then the probabilistic model for crisis and life trauma resides within. To what degree could it coexist in parallel with those supplementary models? Does it play nicely? Or does it wrest control from them in times where crisis is predicted, becoming a tryant of our perceptions?

The final and most formidible, of these viscerous demons, is Futility. The exact origins of this intrinsic Archfiend remain obscure by my reckoning. The closest conceptual entity, to which I am aware, that encapsulates this demon of Futility is an Alastor, a sort of tormenting spirit. Percy Bysshe Shelly's "Alastor or The Spirit of Solitude" (1816), cautioned the Platonist that, to seek ideal love, exposes one to the world's torments, and dooms them to die a lonely death. It does seem to have an insatiable hunger; feeding on both history and cancer's effects on one's perception of the possible with vampiric frenzy. In my perception, Alastor isn't so much tied to the romantic, but more a hyperreal sense of the possible. In our contemporary, everyday consideration of what is possibe we tend to place it within the context of circumstantial factors, that which can be directly observed or reasonably inferred–predicted in the Baysian sense–based on prior experience. From mid-14^th century Old French possible and originally from Latin possibilis, "that can be done," (root: posse "be able,") Taking the strictly functional viewpoint, what is possible arises from Kantian synthetic judgement: it is possible for me to throw a ball for one of my dogs, provided I am in possession of a ball. The thought of throwing a ball at all relies on my having done so in the past or observing others doing so. How my dogs react to the ball being thrown relies on past observation of their behaviour and immediate sense data of their cues: wagging tails, facial expression, posture, readiness to chase and fetch. What of the first human being to ever throw an object for a dog? Without prior experience, or an observation of a dog's chasing behaviours, with only immediate sensory inputs offered by the dog's display of interest in the object, that human has to take a leap of faith, a willingness to test the limits of what's possible. From where does such inspiration strike?

French novelist Georges Bataille formulated a concept of possibility as a function of “atheology," his "science against science, a philosophy against knowledge," an attempt to transcend dialetical discourse and attain an experience of "the instant." In Bataille’s lexicon, “the possible,” refers to “organic life and its development,” by contrast “[t]he impossible is the final death, the necessity of destruction for existence”¹–a requisite loss of self. Bataille's impossible is a state of "nonknowledge" encompassing what is beyond the boundaries of the organic and therefore not of the sensory. Similar and yet distinct from Kant's view of a priori (i.e., that which must come before sense observation) modes of understanding, Bataille argues the impossible is a momentary death of consciousness one awakens to through an inner experience of the immediate–eros and sexual climax, art, laughter, tears, sacrifice; all sensory experiences yet our inner experience of them appears intantaneously as a priori understanding.

No dialectic is required to experience the visceral. Considering, for example, Saturn Devouring His Son the oil painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, painted between 1819 and 1823. To look at the work evokes a primal awareness; the taboo of cannibalism, youth devoured by old age, impermanence, the necessity of death in order to maintain life. These epigenetic understandings are of the impossible, the a priori. How to place the painting into an epistemological condition: what might one see behind Goya's brushstrokes? A meditation on the inevitable, time and entropy devouring everything? A metaphor for the autocratic violence and wars gripping Spain? Do Saturn's eyes convey madness or grief? To arrive at an a posteriori (i.e., experiential or empirical) synthetic judgement of the painting's meaning one must return to the possible, drawing from his(her) own experience of the world.

One of the most unforgettable of Goya's "black paintings," Saturn Devouring His Son was painted directly on the inner walls of Goya's La Quinta del sordo, the "Villa of the deaf man," a farmhouse placed on the arid banks of the Manzanares. The Villa became a monument to Goya's growing melancholy in the proximity his advanced age brought him to mortality. His depiction of the Roman god Saturn belies all expectation, possesing none of the majesty one would associate with the devine. Instead we are confronted, even assaulted, with a naked, wild-eyed, madness; a bestial frenzy akin to any experienced by mortal man. Saturn, haunted by a prophecy in which his throne will be usurped by one of his sons, devoured each of them the moment they were born.

Goya presents us with the prospect of catching Saturn in the act, walking in on him in a recondite instance of devouring. For any who know the myth, it is this very act of Filicide that sets in motion the very usurpation that Saturn fears; Jupiter, one of Saturn's sons, horrified by his Father's wanton corruption overthrew him, taking his rightful place as king of Heaven and Earth.

One imagines Goya in the Quinta del sordo, perhaps painting by candelight, these works largely hidden from the world. Were they intended for public consumption? Were they a vessel for his disquiet–a way to relieve himself of apprehension borne of Spain's political turmoil? Until the paintings were removed from the walls and transferred to canvas by Baron Émile d'Erlanger in 1873, who had seen them?

Goya never wrote of these "black paintings," Saturn Devouring His Son included. Their names were decided many years after his death, based entirely upon speculation–the possible–; synthetic judgements rendered by complete strangers drawing from translated, cabalistic myth. Their reading of the painting's subject endures, and yet could be completely wrong, an innocent lie drifting down from the ages.

With the impossible examined, we return to Shelly's examination of the Alastor:

Hoping to still these obstinate questionings

Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost

Thy messenger, to render up the tale

Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,

When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,

Like an inspired and desperate alchymist

Staking his very life on some dark hope,

In reading Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude and from the depths of my own momentary lapse into the impossible Two words came to my mind: Saudade, A nostalgic longing for something (someone) that is absent in the face of a world that has moved on; a melancholic "missingness." Essential to Saudade is a willfuly repressed knowledge that the someone or something missed might never return. The "Bittersweet," a nostalgic sadness in an ending of a thing experinced in parallell to the joy of having experienced that thing–trading in your first car for a newer, more reliable one. Graduating High School. Your child's first day at Kindergarten, all common experiences of Saudade.

The second word is: Sensucht, a term which attempts to encapsulate more than a simple longing in one's life; a feeling of unease at the prospect that something may be missing coupled with at yearning for the ideal; a sense that the alternative life one could be leading exists in some tangible fashion and is therefore attainable if one can only crack the code. Sensucht in Psychology is typified by the presence of six markers:²

1. utopian conceptions of ideal development;
2. sense of incompleteness and imperfection of life;
3. conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future;
4. ambivalent (bittersweet) emotions;
5. reflection and evaluation of one's life; and
6. symbolic richness.

When I lost my ability to work on-set, Sensucht came to characterise my every day, a sense of lost time and lost purpose the state of affairs. In the period of Détente, there exists a hesitancy to embark on anything new, partly out of doubt that any new venture will bear any more fruit than previous attempts at self-actualisation. Attempt, fail, re-try; that vicious cycle whose well-worn path I have spent decades rambling, knowing every stone and blade of dead grass. In such a state one must consider a re-revaluation of purpose. What were the narratives that drove me to persue a career as a cinematographer? There were indeed the usual, "love of cinema," and "I saw Through A Glass Darkly at 16 and it changed my life," canned answers, although lurking just beyond the periphery of my awareness in my subjective blind-spot was something else: I was the spurned only-child in a family that used media, movies and television, to medicate away unhappiness. What better way to be seen by those inebriated by media, than to be in the media? If this was true, then my foundational motivations for a 16-year long career were never my own. In the face of such a realisation there is only existential terror.

Taking the six identifying markers of Sensucht, reconciling them with the fictions that existed in my mind throughout the last 15 years, establishes a possible blueprint for my approach to self-actualisation.

1. Utopian conceptions of ideal development; for me this showed up as total dedication. A commitment to hard-work and skill accumulation. Corey's First Law of actualisation Dynamics: “Merit is the physics by which human enterprise runs.” In a universe run by the physics of merit, these would promise a linear progression from novice to master.

2. Sense of incompleteness and imperfection of life; Life was simply not worth living if I wasn't "Seen." Popularity and the subjective experience of others' experience of me was irrelevant. If my skills and merits were unacknowledged, there was simply no other path to "mastery"/self-actualisation.

3. Conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future; Lacking any sense of nostalgia or continuity of home, the present and future were all that mattered to me. My current efforts towards "mastery"/self-actualisation were something I saw entirely in my hands, hermetically sealed from past influences.

4. Ambivalent (bittersweet) emotions; Corey's Second Law of actualisation Dynamics: "Achievement carries its own merit." An Academy Award win during first of May period in my professional life should have assured others of my worth and secured future opportunities.

5. Reflection and evaluation of one's life; Corey's Third Law of actualisation Dynamics: "People love perfection." People recognise value and they reward it. Be vital. Be essential and they will take you along with them to the top.

6. Symbolic richness. The bargaining phase, saturated with ritual mantras, "I'm doing fine," "I'm working hard, showing my worth. People see and value me," "Keep doing what I'm doing, and I'll get there."

Wherever "there" is.

Existing entirely in my mind, these Laws of actualisation Dynamics reveal an under-developed ability to modulate expectation, even a rigid and simplistic view of the human social ecosystem in which social utility is to be realised. Attempts have been made to axiomatically encapsulate this ecosystem, with a dash of gallows humour drizzled in to sweeten what often seems a sour deal. "It's not what you know, but who you know," chiefest among them. This falls well short of practical understandings required to navigate the professional landscape. How to express it better? "It's not so much what you know, it's that whomever you know must feel kinship with you and not see you as a threat." This is the Heisenberg uncertainty analogue residing in social dynamics, all too often the barriers to self-actualisation are subjective and cannot be reliably predicted: the subjective experience of the individual relative to the social group, and the subjective assessment of the individual by the group's gate-keepers remains an unkown quantity, one with which I had long been wholly obsessed, having identified social utility as necessary but insufficient for inclusion in my target social group, the world of high-end Ad Agencies and production companies. Worse, prior achievement had skewed my expectations; from Social Mobility Mazurka:

More than a decade deep and looking back over the march of time, an Academy Award was in fact a monumental catastrophe for my relationship with expectation. Not only is the unachievable possible, it was possible for me; a shy, lonely kid sans racines. No one should succeed out of the gate; it sours subsequent triumph. The statistical inevitability of failure turns up and I, alone with past glories and present defeats, settle into a Winter of discontentment. I became adapted to loosing. The game had mutated into the ultraviolet; moved to a spectrum I couldn't decipher. I wasn't interested in harvesting 'likes' and 'follows.' There was a sense that I had been exiled from the tribe for my failure to conform to narcissistic protocol.

---

The experience of having cancer is oft something that is marketed in a particularly short-sighted and narrow fashion. The Cancer Journey^TM is separate and distinct from the actual experience of having cancer. A Frankensteinian abstract produced from focus groups and a synthesis of "trends" and "reportings" provided to Ad Agencies by the medical industry.^{3, 4} Cancer as it exists as an abstract in the zeitgeist is confined to the realm of the medical. Certinaly this has utility, as the need to universalise The Cancer Journey^TM is essential in the marketing of treatments and care regimes, but what of the philosophical or even metaphysical experience of a cancer diagnosis? Every patient's Cancer Journey^TM is unique to them; informed by their own history; their own mecosystemic matrix. Parallells uncovered in the comparing of notes during treatment ⁵ are confined to the general–particularly around treatment, an exchange of experiential material as a psychological hedge against one's imaginings.

Ever questing for data with which to place my cancer in epistemological⁶ certitude, a rough theoretical framework seeking out co-morbidity between high allostatic load and psychological factors–life trauma, personal history and social environment–is taking shape in my mind; a "carcino-situationism," named after The Situationist International, a movement that existed from 1957 to 1972 and amalgamated avant garde art and intellectual disciplines in its critique of mid-century Western society. ⁷ Can there be a situationist critique of an individual instance of cancer? Among the primary tools situationists would have employed is Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theory of the “mecosystem.” I introduced this concept in an earlier writing:

brought forth in the 1970s. Bronfenbrenner proposed five environmental systems that made up the substratum of a human being’s development: microsystem (immediate environment i.e. family, school, immediate social environment and peer relationships), mesosystem (interaction between any two microsystems, the results affect children directly), exosystem (indirect but prominent influences such as socioeconomic status and the costs therein i.e. parents' degree of job prestige, and the school system), macrosystem (cultural heritage, customs, beliefs, and government), and chronosystem (transitional influences that play out over the lifespan, e.g. fighting in World War I, growing up during The Great Depression, exposure to mass media during The Cold War).

---

Working from a mecosystemic context, indentifying the prevailing patterns, cycles and mindsets of my immediate environment wherein I identified a devaluation of merit, by what methodology could one predict and even circuimvent the whimsical, subjectivity of the creative set? In Social Mobility Mazurka I touched on an aspect of this problem; stereotyping:

The problem with contemporary American socio-understanding, at least as far as I could parse it, was that for all of their openness to experience and general politeness, Americans lacked imagination. They tended to categorize everything—especially people, who were placed in lanes with an attenuated set of group attributes. I didn’t see this is a moral failing so much as an adaptation to a multicultural environment. Human beings are always seeking easy ways to process the world. Synthesizing high-resolution variety to low-resolution blocks for easy processing made sense. Like most things, It wasn’t personal. People ran their lane. America was no place for individuals who didn’t belong squarely in any lane to begin with, and wouldn’t take being relegated to one—except outside the race; something I found to be out of alignment with the storied Hollywood American mythos of freaks carving out a place for themselves.

---

In the absence of merit, human interactions in the métier ecosystem of careerism and status-seeking, become exclusively transactional. Psychologist Eric Berne argued, in his Transactional Analysis Theory, that such was the essential nature of human beings:

The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction. If two or more people encounter each other… sooner or later one of them will speak, or give some other indication of acknowledging the presence of the others. This is called transactional stimulus. Another person will then say or do something which is in some way related to the stimulus, and that is called the transactional response.⁸

---

The "fundamental unit of social action"⁹ employed in human transaction, in Berne's formulation is the stroke. Defined as a recognition currency, a stroke is given when one person recognises another verbally or non-verbally. The genesis of Berne's stroke lies in Rene Spitz's works on child development, where it was observed that infants who were not handled–not stroked–demonstrated emotional and physical hindrances relative to their stroked peers. Berne extrapolated this to adult social interaction, adding the caveat that adults could cognitively substitute types of recognition beyond the physical; verbal and eye-contact especially. Berne described this requirement of adults to experience recognition from their peers as recognition-hunger. An apt description, as recognition can be the currency by which one eats.

Posessing the education, skill-set and exprience (in summa, merit) that, I felt, warranted me a place in the agency world, yet facing chronic indefference, "ghosting" and exclusion became existentially terrifying. Particularily as it seemed that exclusion stemmed from subjective a priori judgements that were not fielded and therefore couldn't be challenged, only inferred. Deepening my feeling of Sensucht is the unverifiable narrative that the Utopian vision for my life could have been realised if only my social ecosystem had cooperated. Following Berne's reasonsing, the degree to which I did not feel stroked in the year and a half leading up to my diagnosis would have constituted a recognition-deprivation. Berne's transactional analysis reasons that any stroke, positive or negative, is preferable to no stroke at all:¹⁰

For example, if you are walking in front of your house and you see your neighbor, you will likely smile and say “Hi.” Your neighbor will likely say “hello” back. This is an example of a positive stroke. Your neighbor could also frown at you and say nothing. This is an example of a negative stroke. But either case is better than no stroke at all, if your neighbor ignored you completely.¹¹

---

If Berne's transactional analysis is correct, both positive and negative strokes having equal value, then there could be just as many incentives to invite negative strokes as there are reasons to invite positive strokes. It could even be argued that, in the context of a global social ecosystem where one competes not only with their local or regional group, but with the world, being recognised at all is an accomplishment. Utilising shock and outrageous behaviour becomes an effective means of standing out from the competition; the primary way to command influence over an arbitrary subjective selection mechanism.

As I write this Vera, from the art deco waiting room at her acupuncturist's, sends me a photo:

Among the latest in the many synchorinicities that define mine and Vera's relationship, she brings into focus a bodhi kernel the lies at the very core of what I have sensed intuitively about cancer.

Cancer

Deep hurt. Longstanding resentment. Deep secret or grief eating away at the self. Carrying hatreds. "What's the use?"

Vera and I have the same type of cancer, adenocarcinoma. Its assault on our bodies–mine colorectal, hers cervical–in our formulation, align with aspects of our inner traumas and the internecine contracts we have made in our lives. For us, both only children largely unseen by a high-status social ecosystem, self-valuation has been the currency traded for stroking. The page she shared, from Michael J. Lincoln's book Messages from the Body - Their Psychological Meanings is expounded on later, arguing an "Annihilation-anxiety"(p.145) underlying my colorectal ground-zero and a "fuck you all!" powerlessness incarnate in Vera's cervical manifestation (p.122). It was recently proposed to me, by Justine's grandmother¹² a two-time cancer survivor, that cancer is, "[not something to be owned as mine] the stranger you need to deal with...the it." This is very philosophically sound advice and worth considering. Proper framing is invaluable in many life challenges. Although, one thing I have learned in this battle is that each person's experience is different. Cancer can absolutely be framed as the univited guest, but in the strictest medical sense it is of your own body. It has been useful to me to think of it as a rebellion;cellular Bolshevism, or in some part a manifestation of my unprocessed traumas and negative cycles; I aim to take ownership of my cancer, not position myself as its victim. Further, I strive to place it in epistemological context, attacking it from the non-medical dimensions; after all, if I identify aspects of my being that facillitated its invasion of my body and I don't confront those aspects, what's to stop it from recurring? In the face of the 80% recurrence rate (within two years) I hold vigil against, why not open as many fronts against my cancer as possible?

Medically, adenocarcinoma, is an aggressive variety of cancer that attacks and mutates the DNA. Having recently undergone genetic testing to determine the degree to which DNA mutations are now present within my body (more on this in a future writing), having data with which to confirm or deny the hereditary componenet were, excitingly, within my grasp. It was determined that, based on the genetic evidence, including the analysis of blood samples and sequencing of my DNA for evidence of mutational load, my cancer is not hereditary, placing its genesis more likely within "lifestyle" and "sporadic" statistical classifications. In light of such evidence, I am conviced that an epistemological line of inquiry will continue to bear fruit.

Vera and I slip back and forth between the possible and the impossible as casually as you pass through a doorway between two rooms. Much of our daily conversations–often lasting four true to life hours if not entire days, detail a sense of grief and I find myself asking, "how can one grieve a state of being that may have contributed to potentially terminal illness?" Is it baked into the nervous system? A Baysian mechanism firing, meeting only dead air along an excised circuit, awaiting new neural pathways to carry meaning and purpose from the mind to the sinew. Survivorship or Saudade, that nostalgic longing for something long gone as a defense against the inevitable; a state of repose that is anything but restful; a transmutation from dreamt-to-dream.

Footnotes & References

1. Wright, Drew M., "The Impossible Thought of Georges Bataille: A Consciousness That Laughs and Cries." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2017. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses/214

2. Scheibe, S.; Freund, A. M.; Baltes, P. B. (2007). "Toward a developmental psychology of Sehnsucht (life longings): The optimal (utopian) life". Developmental Psychology. 43: 778–795. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.43.3.778. PMID 17484587.

3. Never forget that is is indeed an industry. According to Investopedia, Health Care is the number one industry propelling (some would argue reanimating) the U.S. Economy. Adding 2.8 million jobs between 2006 and 2016–some seven times quicker than the overall economy. Health Care spending accounted for 17 percent of the U.S. GDP in 2017. Inasmuch as the Health Care industry provides vital and heroic services, one can’t help but consider a vested interest in maintaining disease as vital to the continued health of this growing sector.

4. Deutsch, Alison L. “The 5 Industries Driving the U.S Economy.” Investopedia, Investopedia, 18 Nov. 2019, www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/5-industries-driving-us-economy.asp.

5. During chemotherapy especially, I found I had closer bonds with medical staff than with other patients. A social continuity existed between myself, my nurses and specialists. The prickly glares thrown my way form other patients screamed, “don’t talk to me!” and “leave me alone!” It’s a profoundly isolating experience during which I was often pressured by my family to attend Colorectal cancer support groups and make friends with other patients in the infusion ward. Something arising more of our their feelings of helplessness than anything else.

6. Epistemology in this context being the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of knowledge.

7. Inasmuch as The Situationists leveled their critiques against mid-century capitalism, the association of the term I wish to posit is limited strictly to the methods utilized; art, literature and intellectual theory–without Marxist implications. Political correlations to The Situationist International need not apply.

8. Berne, Eric. Games People Play. Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1964. Page 29

9. Berne, Eric. Games People Play. Page 15.

10. Stewart, Ian and Joines, Vann. TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis. Lifespace Publishing, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 1987.

11. Steiner, Claude. “Description of Transactional Analysis and Games by Dr. Eric Berne MD.” Eric Berne M.D., www.ericberne.com/transactional-analysis/.

12. Considering that Justine, her family and I are no longer in contact, owing to her decision to end our years-long romantic relationship during my cancer treatment, I initially found this an odd occurrence. I do think the advice is sound advice on the basis of its own merit, and do take it in the spirit of kindness with which it was given.

ANIMA / ANIMUS

“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I WAS AN ADDICT, HOOKED ON AGENCY. I tended to take too much; gorged myself on other people's problems, strung myself out on relational benders. The Jimmy-Jakes of co-dependency kept me in orbit of the damaged, soul hemorrhaging mass of my fellow black sheep. I was their Ronin, masterless and forsaken, wandering an atomised social landscape, seeking an undiscovered country where my tribe still sauntered. My arrival had pushed Grace's buttons, dinner and a cocktail too little too late; an unintended but insulting placation for days of absence.

"Maggie is a little sister to me, for crying out loud! She looks up to me for advice! Never mind the fact that she's 15–you think I'm sleeping with a 15 year old? Does that sound like something I would do?" I tended to go in, Socratic guns blazing. Half a lifetime of defending myself against Narcissistic emotional manipulation. Like the lone survivor of too many I.E.Ds, expecting them everywhere.

"I don't know what to think! Except that she's been blowing up your phone for three days, while I hardly even see you. You know I've needed help with this opening next month and you're impenetrable; completely emotionally unavailable." Grace blocked the only entry into her kitchen, arguing from the echo of old patterns. I felt hemmed-in.

"Maggie's Dad's in hospital having open-heart surgery. She can't drive. I was helping her run errands," I pressed sea bass into the cast iron skillet, its sizzling in copycat of my inner state, "that's hardly me being emotionally unavailable."

"Running errands for three days?"

"As I said: she can't drive. She has to go back and feed her Dad's cat, bring him things from the house...She's terrified. I'm just trying to be a good friend, plus I have class, and work–"

"While leaving me in the cold–" She was violating Hanlon's razor; Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. I was a bumbling idiot, not an evil one.

"Leaving you in the–" not intentionally, I'm just shit at multitasking, "You're projecting paranoid delusions from what other men have done to you in the past onto me–" Defensive reaction induced. Shut up recommended.

"Don't you psycho analyse me–"

"Why not? You're clearly out of your mind!"

It wasn't until something snapped my face over my shoulder, and the ringing erupted in my ears that I realised she'd punched me in the face. A Left hand jab too quick to be pre meditated; the sound of the ear cells dying. I'll never hear that frequency again–G sharp? or A natural? It oscillated in my stunned right ear. I ratcheted my jaw open to speak. A second blow came, along with that brief muting of the world following an impact, a momentary blurring of vision, a flash of white like the signal noise between channel changes back in the CRT '80s. The world goes monochrome for a split second, then retinal cone-signal returns with a vengeance; spiked with adrenaline. Even the pain is in Technicolor.

I taste copper on my lips, bleeding from a light scratch under the eye. Time expands. If this was a man, I could hit back; would hit back. It would be necessary to cobble together a quick sequence for human disassembly; stealing wind with a jab to the solar plexus, a kidney shot to send a wave of cold error through the extremities. Beats in the space between exchanges, an offer of material for a counter shot, but I'm not there, his fist finding only empty space, jeopardizing balance with an over-thrown cross. My foot flat meets his knee front-on maybe popping it, the deck rushes up to meet him before he realises what happened; that despite my reserved wallflower bearing, I can dance. This was a woman who had hit me. Conventional wisdom was: never hit back, but that didn't mean I had to stand there and take it. I stopped the burners where I had been pan-searing Sea Bass for our dinner, stormed into the gemutlich den of her bedroom, snatched my weekender, shoved my things into it.

"What are you doing?" She had followed me from the 1967 museum kitchen.

"What's it look like I'm doing?" Don't make this any harder, Grace. There is an imaginary line at the door jamb, beyond which is a desperate man. Don't cross it.

"You can't leave!" I hate you! Don't leave me!

"Watch me," I tossed the words over one shoulder like a grenade; tore my things from her armoire. Brown leather weekender packed, I pushed past, dumping her house-key on the floor as I slipped through her front door for the last time. I felt hot in the shock of cold air, my temple and jaw screamed burst capillary shouts. I chucked my bag in the car, my hand shaking as I put my key into the ignition between the seats–slotting it after five agonising tries. Burning rubber in the winter snow, black ice be damned. Lonely on the dark road to nowhere; focusing on the shifting pattern. The clutch holding my attention as much as the gears, keeping me grounded in escape velocity. My adrenaline cascade receded. My breaths shortening finally alone to exclaim the inconceivable, an exasperated "what the fuck!" yawp into the frigid space of the car. I must have looked a madman refugee from some hillbilly antics. I had turned up at Grace's place while she was at work, planning to surprise her with sea bass and a bottle of Macallen 15 I'd won hustling the local Sigma Chi at billiards. A quiet dinner on knuckle sandwiches isn't exactly what I had in mind.

Violence is perfectly justifiable for the defense of or preservation of life–as a last resort. Every reasonable step should be taken to avoid it. If utilized, violence must be efficient, temperate, decisive. A man should be prepared to project a capacity for violence when necessary. Knowledge gained entirely in the field, my instructors the bad-actors of the world. The delinquent molesting my best friend behind the woodshed at school–I lost that one, he was ahead of me on the puberty curve; heavier, faster, stronger. Simple physics denied me an edge. I ended up picking sand out of my teeth for weeks while my best friend shunned me for being unable to protect her from his perversions. Years later, puberty finally caught up and I spent as much time bench pressing as I did getting the High Score at Galaga, I threw two college creeps out of my secret high school house-party for trying to rape my friend Suzie in one of our upstairs guest rooms; Metalhead Dungeon Master Zelenski and I brandishing Casey Jones golf clubs in the driveway like longswords, fully prepared to wax medieval in defense of our classmate. We gave her would-be assailants once chance to beat concrete. They chose taillights over a titanium headache.

Considering the genesis of this chivalrous behaviour, I couldn't pinpoint its conception. It seemed antithetical to the domestic mise en scène of my formative years. While my parents argued, I retreated into Middle Earth. I had been hiding in their walk-in closet large enough to fit an Aston Martin when the sliding door was struck from its hinges, the floor-to-ceiling mirrored glass cracked in the telltale starburst pattern of acute impact. My 5' 3" mother had somehow shoved my 6' 4" father into it, shattering the mirror as well as his nerves. They had no clue I was there, hiding out in one of the built-ins with Gimli and Aragorn. In the afternoon light, I emerged to the silhouette of my Dad's broad back in the shower. Through gap between dappled glass aquamarine tile, I saw blood running down the drain. Within days, they were playing the power-couple angle for their jet-setting colleagues, laughing over glasses of Cab Franc. It wasn't Grace's naked violence that shocked me, rather its ease, a casual escalation from the verbal to the visceral. That, and she was getting away with it.

~

I pulled into Conolly's driveway, practically tumbling out of my Hatchback. Exploding through his front door, I set the Macallen down on his kitchen bar, flanking it with two thick glencairns from his enviable teak liquor cabinet. Connolly emerged, shirt untucked and half buttoned, his auburn hair in Bobby Kennedy disheveled repose; a roach glowed between lighthouse teeth.

"Jesus, man!" He exclaimed, in that clenched way only smokers can manage, "The Hell happened to you?" He played brass, trumpet to be more precise, with lungs up to the task. At only 5' 8" he projected presence–filling the room with his New England voice.

I poured two-fingers of the Scotch each, neat. Brought him one of the glencairns then collapsed in a heap into his easy chair, the light from the table lamp warming up my impending shiner. I raised my glencairn, offering up an old Royal Navy toast.

"To wives and sweethearts! May they never meet," the last half as much into my drink as to Connolly. "Let's just say I've gone off Grace." I pulled a sip of Macallan. It bit, shifting my awareness away from my throbbing temple.

He nearly spat out the 15 year old, oak aged, single malt first sip. "She did that to you?"

"She seems to think I'm fucking Maggie."

"Are you?" He threw me a sidelong Montgomery Clift glance, "Fucking Maggie?"

"Of course not! Why does everyone think that? Just because we're close... Advice, it's what people–" Connolly raised a lone Leonard Nimoy eyebrow, calling bullshit, "–what women in my life tend to do. They see me as their rock, they lean on me for a steady presence. Sex needn't be in the equation and it isn't in this case. Need I remind you she's barely in High School?"

"What gave her the impression you and Maggie were anything but friends?"

"Beats me. She's been cheated on in the past, so frequently in fact if you could crunch the numbers you'd eventually predict the lottery. She says I've become 'emotionally unavailable,' finds it triggering. How one makes the leap to extracurricular games of 'hide the salami' I don't know, but in her mind I've committed the cardinal sin of looming infidelity," The great enemy in any relationship was doubt fueled by insecurity. At the first sign of infection it tainted everything, even the best of your partner took on distorted character. Worse still, there was no cure. In a cultural milieu when men were always two-timing bastards and women were always virginal nymphs redolent in Waterhouse sanctitude, it was only a matter of time before the amorous fruit rotted from inside out, "I have been a little preoccupied, I'll give her that."

"How so?" A telltale needle scratch of a record starting up, the hum of his 1978 pioneer sx-1980 warming the cabinets; rising eighth notes on a Cheers piano, "Changes" off of Black Sabbath's 1972 Vol. 4 studio album; apropos.

"I made the mistake of checking the mail today. Got this thick legal envelope from an Aunt I haven't seen since '96, filled with photographs and correspondence, and a cover letter making the case that I, dear old friend, am I certified bastard."

"Don't mean to be obtuse," he zipped a flame from his brass zippo, lit up a fresh fag, his words misshaped by the filter between his teeth "But even if what she's alleging is true? a) 'the fuck business is it of hers? and b) What does it have to do with you? How does one... un-bastard himself?" He clicked shut the zippo. "Changes" changed key, Ozzy's articulation better comes through when he's singing, when he was with Thelma. Sharon was the worst thing that ever happened to the poor bastard.

"In her grim imaginings I'm sure Smith and Wesson have a wide variety of solutions, in everything from .38 to .45," I sipped more Macallen, slipping gallows humor into the space between us. I had forgotten all about my bruising temple, "She says I should be disinherited. The estate should go to my cousins; it's all political since we aren't even related by blood–my Grandparents took her in when she was pregnant out of wedlock. This is some reptilian genetic gambit, a usurpation of my Mother's bloodline with her own, by Death or exile. Bloody Homeric." We sat in Ozzy Osbourne's melodious tones awhile, Connolly's cigarette burning down to the filter. He rose from the other chair, leaving my periphery for a moment before returning with the Macallan bottle, pouring out two more amber fingers.

"And you haven't told Grace any of this?" I snapped out of my reverie, I took back my glencairn, the notes of smoked peat and oak reasserting themselves in my senses.

"No." I sipped my second glass, "I've barely processed it myself, how could I tell her?"

"You could tell me."

"That's different."

"How so?" How so? Connolly was in my fraternity of choice, a solemn brotherhood of men who had seen too much. I could count on him to compute the complex terror of feminine¹emotionality through an empirical filter. This was the unmysterious triage of male friendship: Assess my state, am I dangerous to myself, or others? Can I perform the functions hitherto agreed upon as the basis of the friendship? A PASS on both checks, advances one to the next stage of analysis. Here, action and reaction of a given situation is submitted to rigorous causality tests; a problem to be learned from, if it couldn't be solved. Life lived as autopsy; we tended to downplay the living part, sadly. With functional utility confirmed and solutions in hand, one could return to the field indifferent to any lingering emotions that, like hairline fractures in the gears, guaranteed future hazards to the machinery. This was where the longer-term care of female friendships came into play, here those emotional hangers-on could be parsed and put in their proper context–without fear of judgement, if there was no sexual tension involved, no performative assessments by the hypergamous filtration system that pruned the species.

Grace lived on a fervid treadmill, everything extreme on the dials. So immersed in the drama of her social circle, the happenings in my life threw 7/8 measures into the cut-time of her emotional rhythms. As far as she was concerned, my place was in her bed, not in her emotional ecosystem. When I wasn't a hard penis for her to enjoy, I mirrored her thespian ambitions. Sound and fury, signifying nothing unfolded on the stage of her imaginings; always practicing for a role. She exuded fire, biting my shoulder as we made love in the weak Winter Sun, Yin and Yang in flesh. She kept a stable of willing men in rotation for power-couple optics, ever the life of the party in the appendix of the art world in which we moved. Eyes shining, she laughed at my jokes. She was the only one who offered a solitary damn about my 16mm monochrome musings; philosophical phantasmagoria where I unpacked my history in Academy Ratio expeditions of light, motion and time. As much the black sheep in film school as I was everywhere else, I moved by different aesthetics, eras and sensibilities from my peers. My take on contemporary pop-culture: Corporate-Gnostic black magic experiments in Crowleyism, casual dabbling in nightclub narcotics; ghetto booty wardrobe malfunctions über culture dysfunctions. Soap Operas where thematic tension used to reside in narrative reverie. A miasma of hip-hop flash-bangs; glitz coated raw-sewage. I looked up to none of it, doomed myself to wander the desert of the authentic. It infuriated me that I'd missed the beatnik era by a mere 30 years. Even still, I would trip the light iconoclastic in the Beat scene with my anti-collectivist, individualist devotions. Grace sensed my longings, our precarious love-affair built on lack. Once so gentle, all Clara Bow smiles she never missed my Sibell-Wolle screenings, pre-demolition; ever in the back row, alabaster face chiaroscuro in the dancing beams of the projector. This human being, who had supported my work against the indifference of all others, had just punched me in the face. Twice.

"All packed?" His question broke the silence. We were both flying out tomorrow. I was bound for four days regrouping in London, before a rendezvous with Connolly in Switzerland for a week's skiing near Gstaad. I wondered how my shiner would go over with the civilised mien of the Swiss; confirmations of a certain dusky savagery disrupting the Gstaad Gestalt. The old cliche shook a chuckle from my nearly barren humor tree, Beg your pardon, Monsieur, but I seem to have had an unfortunate encounter with a flight of stairs... perhaps even a vase or two on the way down. I hedged on another sip, the chuckle had sent sharp pains through my face, 80 grit sandpaper on the nerves. fuck it. I'll wear my beating loud and proud at the Chalet.

"Right, old chap. See you in Gstaad.

~

Back in my third floor flat above the creek, chilly in the February pre-blizzard night. It was time to start packing, stay up all night for a 4 am Super Shuttle to the airport. Finally taking a break from the North American circus, back to a place I knew and could understand. I'd left the Macallen at Conolly's as a parting gift, opting for the tea kettle instead and something to further soothe my alkaline nerves. Should I call the police? File a report? God knows I got screwed enough on taxes; the least they could do was take a report, even if it ended up mouldering in a filing cabinet somewhere. The possibility Grace could get away with assault... is that what it was? Of course that's what it was! She should have to pay some price. I saw her, in that subterrane hollow of my mind's eye, applying for a job, renewing her passport, anything where background checks were routine, those scarlet letter words, "Domestic Violence" dogging her every step along the path of social respectability. I snatched up the phone and dialed police non-emergency with quavering fingers. A solitary ring sounded before the phone clicked over to their version of the automated switchboard "You have reached the ___ county Sheriff’s Department. If this is an emergency, please hang-up and dial nine-one-one." Further clicks at the other end of the legal disclaimer, and a voice cutting in.

"Police, non-emergency," The dispatch operator a young man, around my age, a slight Okie twang dusted his speech. I cleared the tumbleweeds from my throat.

"Yes, thank you for taking my call. I'd like to report an assault." I could hear him arising in his chair on the other end, finally some action in this sleepy little white-bread town.

"One moment, while I transfer you." Yet another click, followed by the warm analog hum of an active phone line just before ringing. The officer on the other end snatched up the phone, annoyed.

"Officer Kelso," A woman's voice, early forties, stocky spiel in the vein of female Lacrosse players. I imagined a round faced brunette, grounded, direct; respected by her fellow officers. Neither one of the guys nor a woman, in the sense most men think of women. Non-sexual. Just a good police.

"Yes, officer thank you for taking my call. I have just been assaulted and would like to file a report."

"Okay..." Old school receiver, held in place between her shoulder and one cheek, her voice gave it away. There was the sense that she was rolling away from her desk, fetching fresh paperwork, "your name?"

"Corey Drayton."

"Date of birth?"

"xx/xx/1982"

"22, okay,"

"And where did this assault take place?"

"817 Beech street," She scribbled details with a medium ballpoint pen, heavy on the paper.

"Who hit you?"

"My girlfriend, Grace Anne Monroe."

"Did you say your girlfriend hit you?"

"Correct," She heaved a heavy breath, the leather of her chair creaking and she leaned back into it, something cluttered to the table–her pen.

"Mister Drayton," I bristled, only my Dad called me that, "I'm going to level with you. I can't file this report." Behind me the electric kettle simmered.

"I don't understand."

"If you press charges, I have to come out talk to you. Both of you... Oh-Pee, says if I make an arrest, I have to arrest the offender most likely to represent a threat–the bigger, stronger one. That means you."

"But she hit me. Twice–"

"I understand that."

"Not slaps across the face, mind you. She hauled off and punched me, with a closed fist, in my face," I leaned into it, "You're telling me she walks? She's getting away with domestic assault?"

"My advice to you would be don't see her again. Go home. Have somewhere else to be. I won't file this report, for your sake." I heard her lean back into her desk, imagined her her forehead in one hand, speaking low into the phone, "Trust me, I'm doing you a favour."

"Alright. Forget it."

"Good luck to you," I tossed the phone onto my kitchen table, splitting off the battery compartment as it clattered to a stop with a sharp rattle. Now I knew better than to appeal to the police for justice. Domestic Violence. The words didn't even sound like they belonged in my mind. The concept held certain connotations in the collective consciousness; I didn't see it as a gendered issue, rather a human one. Men and women were equal opportunity offenders in practice, but on paper, the Duluth model clouds the calculus, obfuscates reality. There was no way I would be believed as the hallowed victim. Even with an arm off, bleeding from the stump, they'd find some way of accusing me of amptuee privilege, gross weaponisation; Dworkin's revenge. Anyone who attends art school graduates with a bonus degree in Intersectional Critical Theory–such vivisections of modernism are as much part and parcel of education as our chosen majors. I had been naive enough to think the more paranoid reality deconstructions as theoretical experiments, safe in Academia where they could do no harm. Here was evidence to the contrary. Exhibit A: a police force unwilling to treat physical assaults as equal. Exhibit B: an officer of the law looking the other way to ensure the recipient of an assault doesn't experience further victimisation by a system fixed by activist animus. Maybe Officer Kelso was right, a shiner and a few cuts to the face wasn't something rest and a bag of ice wouldn't cure. There was naught to do but let my body run its course. About as much could be said of my inner state, which the extension exploding in my living room didn't calm, I yelped, still feeling Grace's one-two special. I lunged into the living room, snatching up the other phone, wincing, forgetting my right side was my phone side, where I was hit. Heavy breathing on the line, smoker's lungs at the summit of some distant stairwell.

"Corey? This is Bob," 1^st Assistant Director with whom I had worked with on a documentary two years earlier. He said I was the best focus technician he'd ever seen, My time in film school was soon ending. There was a 50/50 chance this was social or business.

"Hi, Bob. It's good to hear from you," I forced a smile through the phone. Business associates never needed to know my business. My jaw clicked and smarted. I hoped he couldn't hear it all the way in– "How's Princeville?"

"Fine, fine. Hey look, uh–" I could feel one of his beefy, simian hands scraping a perpetually five o'clock shadowed jaw, a telltale quick beat before something awful came down the pike, "I don't know how to say this... Hunter just shot himself up in Aspen. I thought you should know, 'fore the press gets wind of it." Hunter S. Thompson, my chum and sage was no more, but I think I understood it: why surrender one's self to the tender mercies of grinding down old age in the face of a mutating milieu? Better to leave it on your own terms. Pure gonzo, right up to the end.

~

I awoke in the living room, to hobgoblin banging on my front door. I couldn't remember falling asleep. My head throbbed even worse. My tea had gone tepid and untouched on the coffee table, the embers of the dying fireplace reflected in the teacup's rim. I rose in the undulating glow of the TV, thankfully muted against soft soap Abu Ghraib scandals from the far side of the world. Unlatching the door with the heavy thunk of a 1950s bolt lock invoked Mannlicher Carcano degrees of casting; I swung the door open to my neighbour Erik's nordic underwear model face.

"Hey man, so sorry to wake you," the Norwegian accent would almost be American if not for its musicality.

"It's no problem–" I said waving away the awkwardness, "I have to be on a plane in two hours anyway. What's up?" Erik heaved a timid breath, I had never seen him so nervous. He was in high-altitude training for the Norwegian Olympic Ski Team. This towering kid, carved out of marble actually seemed afraid to let fly whatever was on his mind,"På Norsk?" I offered in Bokmål business Norwegian, hoping to make him more comfortable giving me the news in his native tongue, which, owing to spending part of my childhood there in the mid-nineties, I could speak with decent proficiency.

"These two assholes broke into your car. I heard glass breaking and I looked out and saw," he gesticulated, searching for the right word, "lommelykt...torches, you know? "

"Flashlights," I patted him on the shoulder, snatched my keys from the wall hook, "care to take a peek?"

Erik wasn't lying. The thieves had smashed my passenger's side window, popcorn glass littered about the cab's '79 cloth interior. They'd been surgical, popping the glovebox with a small flathead to gain access to the release for the electrical panel. From there, they had peeled back the instrument panel's Bakelite bezel like a sardine can, extracting the aftermarket stereo I had bought with tutoring money in Penfield, New York–back when playing mp3 CDs in cars was cutting edge. I considered the tangle of wiring, plastic spaghetti beyond the field of my awareness. Always covered up by the pristine bezel I had restored and detailed with my own hands from landscaping jobs. We were always oblivious to the complex machinery behind things and equally behind people. The appliances in our lives simply worked–or didn't; indistinguishable from magic, to the layman. When they failed or broke down, we brought them to the wizards and their seemingly arcane knowledge. It was the contents of the glovebox that told me everything I needed to know about the men behind this carnage: a deck of playing cards, a first-aid kit, a Swiss Army survival knife, a compass, a mini-maglight, a tyre-pressure gauge, a stack of road maps, waterproof matches. Indicia of preparation and clear thinking. They hadn't stolen anything else, and they wanted me to see it; laying out everything on the passenger's side footwell in that deliberate, postmortem manner one sees after airplane crashes; some indoor Football pitch with debris laid out in a to-scale jigsaw of chilling implications.

"What are you going to do now?" Erik asked. Through a Clint Eastwood grimace, I drew in the chill dry February air, my jaw screamed protest.

"is i magen," play it cool, I offered in Norwegian, Erik Nodded, "Go to plan B: Fuck it."

"det er aldri så galt at det ikke er godt for noe," Erik spoke so low he may as well have been offering a prayer, Nothing is so bad it can't be useful somehow.

We wrapped the broken window panel with plastic wrap and Gaffer's tape. I would call my landlord from the gate at the airport, let her know there was nothing of value left in the car, that the break-in happened hours before I was due to fly abroad, that I would have it towed to my mechanic's as soon as I could arrange it and that I was sorry about the mess. Such was the experience of crisis to which I had become accustomed; Wile E. Coyote anvils fell onto my head in clusters, always before the execution of elaborate plans. There was only so much hedge one could field against disaster. More often than not, the only option available was to adapt to current crisis, and move forward with the best available option. Planning and contingency had their place, but without ingenuity, planning could only get one so far before options rendered down to nil, leaving one a hostage to paralysis.

"Say, Erik," I blurted as we walked back to our building, cradling the contents of my glove box in my arms. Erik grunted a stoic Norse reply, his held hung low leading with an intellect he didn't abuse, "If Grace comes around..."

"I won't let her near your place," He pointed at the shiner on my face, "She did that to you?"

"She did."

He grunted again, in his broad Norwegian tone, implicitly understanding. We verbalised nothing further on the trek back inside, but everything had been said; a tacit exchange of experience and meaning had occurred between gentlemen. A lucid examination of functionality amidst crisis, and an understanding of emotional implications to be dealt with in private, and then only once immediate threats had been resolved. At the top of the steps we exchanged an embrace, retreating to our respective trenches. The night time gifted us freedom from care, and there were a few hours yet to draw off.

~

We followed the A20, West of Aycliffe, Past Hougham Battery, bearing a left onto a nondescript turn-off that cut south towards The Channel. It was a brisk and surprisingly clear night. In the glow of Mira's instrument panel, I downshifted into the turn, adapting easily to the left-hand driving of my youth. Mira. A fundamentally un-British name. Almost rebellious in the way it rolled off the tongue, sending tremors through the "R" on the way out. The daughter of Balkan expats who had pulled up stakes and flew to London during the war–a conflict to which my Father was posted, almost moving the family to Croatia where Mira and I would have met a few months earlier than we did.

As it happened, we met while our respective parents where having a lunch business meeting. I had committed the afternoon to beating the High Scores at Afterburner II. Sat awash in the servoed SEGA arcade cabinet, Mira climbed into the seat, meant to pass as a loose simulacrum of an F-14 cockpit. She scooted me over with her hips.

"What game is this?"

"Ssssh!" I erupted in annoyance at the girl's impertinence, this was my favourite part–Hiroshi Kawaguchi guitar riffs winding up my F-14 cat-shot in 16-bit pixel anticipation. I checked my grip on throttle and joystick; Hell-for-leather, the scourge of Soviet MiGs. The servo-actuators shuddered, throwing my little F-14 down the SEGA Enterprise carrier's steam catapult and into the pristine, endless blue sea of Stage-1. Mira's little-girl giggles undermining the gravity of the occasion. A choreographed dance of raster airplane sprites and simulated missile fire soon to ensue, the fate of the free(ish)-world hanging in my muscle memory.

"Do you want a mini Mars?" She was shoving a candy bar in my face, wearing a look of grim determination. Before I could react it was too late, my F-14 dramatically cut to pieces by a hail of enemy gunfire. She brought it inches closer to me, a coda to my humiliating 16-bit death.

"Fine," I muttered, taking the candy bar It's the least you can do, now that we've both been vaporised.

"I'm Mira. Now you're my boyfriend,” She pecked me on one dumbfounded eleven-year-old cheek.

I dimmed the headlamps as we crept down the track; beyond lay only those iconic chalky cliffs, and the waters distinct from the Strait of Dover, known historically as The Solent. It may as well have been the edge of the world. It may have been very nearby that Roman Conquerors first set foot on Britain's fields, or where a Norman Host massed for a blistering march against Harold The Pretender's Saxon Shield-wall, where peasants stood on gout-afflicted legs watching King Henry V’s army set sail for fortune and glory on the fields of France. Geography was cogent with history. Humans left their mark on the land, not only by their efforts to tame it, but also spiritually and in memory. I always cast my awareness as far as I could, eschewing the present. I felt born into estrangement; alienated from the here and now. I gravitated towards people who could ground me in the present, help give it meaning. People like Grace. I parked Mira's car and stopped the engine with a turn of the key, then clicked it back to keep the radio on. Four-to-the-floor measures of nondescript percussion and mnemonic steel guitar, a chorus rising above–listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise... "The Chain," by fleetwood mac off of 1977's Rumours. I leaned back against the pile-lined seat covers, drew my motorcycle leather tighter around me in the chill. We sat in silence. I could feel Mira's eyes looking out past the bonnet of her '79 Peugeot 504, as inborn to the Thatcher Era as the Volvo 240 had been to the Reagan Years. Run in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies... She turned, I could could feel her eyes looking past me, perhaps at my reflection in the driver's side window.

"She really did one on you, didn't she?" She meant my shiner. Her voice had matured, deepened. She had grown measured. A received, posh London accent masked her inner sweetness.

"I was just getting used to the look. People can normalise to anything," I chuckled. The flight from Grace's four days in the past, the sharp crunching pain in my face had coagulated into a dull ache, thrumming with every heartbeat. I recalled the glares from Airport security at Gatwick, tried to keep my mind from wandering to the muttered speculations of complete strangers. Letting my dusty scouse run free relaxed my face, made the anguish more manageable.

"Why'd you think she hit you?"

"She convinced herself I was cheating. Instead of listening to her case, I went to counter-arguments straight away. I can be a complete asshole: diligent in my hyper commitment to rationality."

"Fuck off. Don't you do that–"

"Do what?"

"Don't you take responsibility for her hitting you." I was astonished at Mira's fervent defense of me against myself. Normalisation of trauma. Dysfunctional people circle each other like binary stars, stable in their destructive potential. A star, with its hydrogen converted, chews on helium; entropy-guaranteed collapse. Such interstellar implosions litter the social cosmos. "Have you reached out to anyone for help?" she continued.

"The Police," an icy twinge ran through my guts at the thought.

"And? What did they tell you?"

"Very nice policewoman wouldn't take the report," I reprised my conversation with Officer Kelso from days earlier.

"Are there any resources for men? Men’s domestic Violence hotline?"

"There wasn't time," I breathed, shaking my head. "I had to get out of there, so I went to Connolly's"

"A pub?" She exclaimed, throwing a very Balkan questioning gesture up with her hands. It clashed with this new posh, respectable Mira.

"No, no. Connolly's a friend. I needed a mate to put it in perspective for me; the last thing I wanted was to be at the mercy of strangers."

"I am so curious about what you saw in her in the first place," I hadn't noticed her hand had shifted to my thigh. Something shifted in my awareness. I saw the body that went along with Mira's voice for the first time. The so-called "Male Gaze," known by its other non-pejorative name: biology. A response to feminine fertility markers and indications of interest. Mira had turned to face me in the bench seat, brushing Joan Jett locks from her eyes. She was beautiful, her face the results of an exquisite collision between Bosnian and Turkish, "American Girls are so... volatile, and those ridiculous nasal accents..."

"They have their charms," I tried to break contact, look away from Mira's generous legs, stay on theoretical ground.

"I'm all ears..." Her hand was making its way out of thigh territory and to more private ground. I wasn't yet sure if I wanted it there. And if you don't love me now, You will never love me again

"You can't judge individuals by averages, I always say that. Still–," her fingers were working their way into my pocket. I had not yet ruled on their trespass, "they're less cynical; able to tap into a wonderment, a wide-eyed enthusiasm about things that's both irritating and infectious. So many of them exude bravado, a way of being in the world–loud and in charge. But... if you can get them to drop the act, tap the breaks a little bit," she had undone my jeans and was boldly advancing, claiming territory, "get them to let you in, you see sweetness, vulnerability, they're afraid of everyth–" She was kissing me. My jaw throbbed as I received it. I cupped her face in my hands, eased us apart.

"Mira," I whispered her name, "at least you're consistent," recalling that first kiss at age 11 in an arcade cabinet in London, I flashed her a smile.

"I was such a little tart," she flushed.

"Believe me, I don't want to stop you. It's not you, or anything you've done. You're my oldest friend. You're a kind, courageous, beautiful woman and I do see mutual desire living between us." I kept her face gently in my hands, she nodded, "It's only been four days since Grace hit me. My face still hurts. I think I'm still in shock. I'm in no place for...this, as beautiful as this is, and as turned on as I am, I can't be open to anyone right now. Everything is fogged up and I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know if I can trust my desires, my judgement... I don't know if I can let a woman in right now–" Cycles upon cycles, what if one simply stepped off the path?

"What she did to you, I just want to make it better. I just want to make it go away–" Tears streamed down from her burnt sienna eyes, eyeliner staining puffy cheeks. She reached out with a trembling hand, searching through tear-blurred blobs of colour for my bruised face, touched it, felt me wince, shocked herself back, "how could she do that to you?" Horror, exasperation, helplessness. I had seen much the same look glaring back at me in the rearview mirror on my flight from Grace's. I held Mira to me, our hearts pounded in simpatico, everything racing. She released a torrent of sobs into my shoulder. Beyond the fogged windows of the car there was nothing. We were cosmonauts in time and memory, holding onto the moment as much as each other. Chain... keep us together...(Running in the shadows), Chain... keep us together...(Running in the shadows), Chain... keep us together...(Running in the shadows),Chain... keep us together...(Running in the shadows), Chain... keep us together...

~

"I don't have a dog in the fight," I explained to Colin, my training driver. The AC in our truck was kaput, and we were already cooking in the 2018 summer heat. A national inquest regarding a Supreme-Court Justice was underway and sectarian tensions ran high. I had the affliction of an ability to see nuance and Portland was no harbor for independents such as myself; everyone was compelled to pick a side. Obsolescence and apoptosis; apoptosis being cell death from disease. What of human apoptosis? The checking out of, or nihilism towards narcississtic protocol. "I despise the man's permissive policies on domestic surveillance. Of course, no one wants to talk about policy—High School Civics was boring! I know! Let's drag the man’s sex life, from thirty years ago, into the spotlight, that’ll do the trick!”

"But he's one of them..." Colin played a mean devil's advocate. Under the veneer of his easygoing temperament and a laugh that instantly filled the space of the cab, we sparred over everything, from the best Beatles Album and the proper listening order of Van Halen's Catalouge to Rick Deckard's ambiguous replicant status.

“I don’t care. They're all one of them to me. It's the principle that matters," I was growing more vocal in my convictions, less concerned with optics, "set a legal precedent, we all become subject to it. Proof is the fuel by which the engine of justice runs. Justice does not mean having a result that you think is desirable. It means a verdict has been decided based on what has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s not perfect, but it's the closest we get to objectivity. Without that, all you have is the mob and the mob is fickle, its passions easily manipulated by the influential–often to tyranny."

Colin cut left, off the Hawthorne Bridge tacking into the Portlandia district, past Terry Shrunck Park which had played host to Occupy Wall Street protestors when I first arrived. The city surfed the wave of the 1960s, as it had been marketed, straight into hubris. The Baby Boomer Manifest Destiny of progressive change may have presented a necessary upset to the hyper-conservatism of post-World War II America, but one had to remember that Levittown cookie-cutter orthodoxy was a psychological reaction to the apocalyptic scale of the war. Americans had largely sat out World War I, showing up late to the party as ever. The psychological intercourse between warfare and social organization hadn't affected Americans the way it had Europeans. Those who built the America of the 1950s were the first generation of Americans that had seen the true fragility of civilization reified by carpet-bombed European cities. It had created a desperation to escape into The American Dream, much in the same way as someone who grew up fending off cockroaches kept their adult home in apple-pie order. The 1960s Great Society revolution itself had mutated into the very thing it once stood in opposition to: the establishment; corrupt, power-mad, dogmatic. Every revolution carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. This was an old story, from Robespierre to Che Guevara.

“So you’re an anarchist?”

“I don’t know!”

“But you're defending fascists!”

“I'm defending a principle that was codified, by your founding fathers, in opposition to Authoritarianism."

“But everyone we don't like is Hitler,” He was teasing, but offering me a chance to make my case. I bit, with gusto.

“I know this is 2018 and you're meant to slap the label of fascist onto whomever the hoi polloi are upset with this week, But Fascism is a very distinct set of principles that demand the body-politic of a nation gather all their efforts in support of the state. Physically. Psychologically and Emotionally. Total unity." I held up a lone finger, illustrating my point, " a straw alone can be broken," My other fingers joined the first one, making a closed, flat hand, "Fascisme, a cluster of straws gathered together cannot be. That’s diametrically opposed to my ideal. I’m an individualist. I want liberty from tyranny, the freedom to pursue my own potential without coercion, from the state or anyone else. That is directly oppositional to fascism."

"Ok, I gotcha," he bobbed his head for a windup, "So you're The Klingons?"

"Kirk era? Or Picard?" Now we were even deeper in my territory. I had him on political theory, and Star Trek was scripture to me.

"Definitely Kirk."

"Okay. Kang, Kor, or Koloth?"

"Kor's a drunk, Koloth's too nebbish, but Kang... He had gravitas–you're Kang, only with better hair."

"I can live with that."

This was the timbre of philosophical debates amongst men; passionate, heated, but never personal. At the end of the day, we were comrades working together to achieve an objective. Nothing else mattered. Conflict was not a thing to be avoided; it was a test of integrity, principles, spirit. In dire straits, each of us set aside petty differences, chipping away at the objective. Cross the finish line; take that hill, lads! Any grievances arisen would be settled at dusk, over a bottle of suds, the hatchet soon buried. Ours was an agrestal existence aligned with nature.

In the warehouse, I realised my longing for a fraternal order; a masculine terrain where one inspired through example, jived, debated and philosophized. Never boorish, simply unconcerned with those discarnate apprehensions given undue weight by the Oprah generation; mere monsters under the bed. Instead of the emotional abstractions that simulated problems, we faced down reality. Easy Company in Bastogne, surrounded by the might of the Wehrmacht; The 20th Maine holding the Union Army's naked left flank at Little Round Top against endless Johnny Reb waves of ruin–epigenetic narratives that drove men to produce and excel. These were working-class, salt-of-the-Earth guys, gathered around the dusty warehouse radio, listening to the Baseball Game, hanging on every pitch. Chockablock with the sterling vigor of The Wild One and The Great Escape, It agreed with my 1950s Greaser aesthetic and sensibilities, hair pomaded, prison denim shirt sleeves cuffed, all selvedge and Wayfarers. I tapped into the long dormant swagger of my youth, stuck two fingers up at the hyper-managed, middle-class milquetoast culture, its schoolmarmish chiding keeping our hairy spirits on ice.

Now, supporting the wrong baseball team or football club was casus belli. Underrated by the reckoning of the Geeks, Nerds, Stoners, Metal-heads and Art Students that had populated my springtime, sports served a vital function amongst the unofficial gentleman's clubs in which I now moved. It served simulacrum for tribal warfare, the last vestige of competition and conquest allowed in our reticent progressive era. I began to forget all about the world of advertising agencies and production companies that had been the stage for my last 16 years. There's was an environment as curated as the collections they hawked to the American Consumer; common snake oil against nihilism. Compared to the vacuous political grandstanding, the soy latte ectomorph cynical utterances from goldfish mouths, my new fraternity felt damn honest.

Another day, another patrol, we descended into the basement warehouse vino bunker, a Jesuit cave wherein the vice that gussied up a city stood in standby, "So What" off of Miles Davis' 1951 Kind of Blue drifting up Jack Rackham stairs. Ours was a sanctuary where Socratic dialogues held sway, proletarian philosophizing as afternoon sport. Chip, a tall scarecrow of a man who had once been a Grip on Cameron’s most infamous set, The Abyss, was master of the record player, needling pristine vinyl through the hard wires of a Pioneer sx-1980 as pristine and beloved as Connolly's. Skylar, a wiry powerhouse of a guy who looked more the Italian fisherman than his alleged German stock declared. He should have been playing short-stop for the 1965 Cleveland Indians; here he was moving hand trucks of wine at supersonic speeds. Always the life of the party, he regaled us with his brazen attempts at romance–something this line of work presented a cornucopia of opportunities for in the form of hard-to-get hostesses; a man with a girl in every bar. Colin, 50 and not a day over 37, with a nuclear metabolism and wake the dead pipes, exuded confidence, the sort of guy who, when strutting into the room, everything was going to be peachy. Travis, one half of the office, brought to mind many of the agency guys I'd worked with; quit-witted, sarcastic, but with a grounded quality that rendered him approachable. You could always count on him for the straight dope. Ally was the office's other half; a dishy Sicilian firebrand wrapped up in the girl-Friday package. Brilliant, mesmeric and loyal she was everyone's plucky, matter-of-fact sister, every bit as potent in a boardroom as a bar-brawl. Then there was Stan, running the show with a rocksteady beach-bum collectedness that complemented his taste for Jazz records. As a decade long business owner, I had long been reluctant to take orders, but Stan treated his employees like human beings, was never afraid to get his hands dirty, and was willing to extend me that precious commodity oh so rare in my eight years in Portland: a chance. I respected him immediately and had no qualms about calling him Boss. Finally there was me, the fish-out-of water; a man with a past no one would have believed. Diligent, unassuming, terminally iconoclastic; regarded as professorial and complicated, but haunted by something no one could name, and no one dared ask about. We few, we happy few.

"This guy," bellowed Colin, tossing a thumb over his shoulder at me, "went from civics to Star Trek in less than 60 seconds!" We appeared in the warehouse, King Harry and Falstaff, returned from the gates of Harfleur, tossing our respective kits onto convenient pallets of Amity Pino Noir–wine passed for furniture in that utilitarian space.

"Why're you working this job again?" Skylar, burrito in hand, cut in from across the floor, a shock of raven hair erupting from under a maroon watch cap, "Dude should be teaching at some college somewhere. Someone get this man some elbow pads and three cute TAs," He had an accent that was a third Minnesota, a third Queens, and a third just Skylar.

"I don't think 'TA' means what you think it means there, Bud," Chip, chiming in from the shipping desk, blowing some nondescript loess from the record as he flipped to the B-side, his face glowing under a high key industrial pendant lamp out of Raiders of the Lost Ark throwing hard shadows along his hawkish face.

"I turned my back on Hollywood," I called back, grabbing a stack of purchase orders from my route–downtown Portland plus every New Seasons in Beaverton, "–threw my lot in with the common man." My final pittance of shoots had just ended; a series for Rolling Stone, Land's End's 2018 Winter catalogue and WWE Smackdown. I resisted the temptation to take them as signs things were turning around; they were mere blips on an otherwise downward trajectory. I didn't see my relationship to those brands as elevating me above these guys, just because of my background or profession. I looked up to them, their self-reliance, their gonzo spirit, as Hunter would have said. They were quintessential American men with a hard-won day-to-day wisdom about the only thing that really mattered: people. I could delight them with my travel stories and anecdotes about directors and movie stars, but when it came to naked human nature, I studied at their feet.

"Hear, hear," Chip dropped the needle on the record, the first notes of "All Blues" cushioned the dialogue.

"The angst! It's making me twenty years younger!" Colin's contribution to the banter, punctuated by a PeeWee Herman laugh. He tossed me an Agate, which I snatched out of the air. He was a devoted rock-hound.

"I gotta hold on to my angst," I grunted, slipping into my best Al Pacino from Heat, "I preserve it because I need it. It keeps me sharp," snap, "on the edge," snap "where I gotta be." Movie references were currency, they bought affiliation. Collective callbacks to a pop-mythology that transcended societal schism. This was the old function of cinema, to unify. Our ancestors would gather around the fire while hoodoo holy men spun myths about gods and great beasts. Now we gazed into the fire itself and had mass visions; Galaxies far-far away, archaeologists battling Nazis over holy relics, misfit kids finding a pirate ship on the Oregon coast, a slacker from '85 in '55; ensuring his parents fall in love–otherwise he's toast, a terrified woman descending into a nuclear reactor meltdown to save a little girl from Alien insects. Cinema diverted from its mythological function, hijacked by postmodern deconstructionists. Worse, they used nostalgia as the Trojan Horse for current day political nagging. Unwanted and blown off by the same agencies who publicly lamented their inability to find people like me, was this just me making necessity a virtue? A case of sour grapes rationalised by my Art School baggage? What had insulated me against weaponised dialectic? I had read all the same books by Derrida, Foucault and others. Regurgitating the anti-capitalist agitprop came easy, but I was like the kid holding fish oil between tooth and cheek, spitting it out when his mother wasn't looking. People asked if I had seen this or that new film. Nope. I was indifference incarnate. I missed working with the technology, but the joy making motion pictures had gifted me over 16 years turned to ash in my mouth. My cameras sat at home collecting dust. My newfound blue-collar reality was as much a panacea as it was a necessity. I threw myself into the role with vigor.

We emerged from the vino bunker, into the mid-Summer haze of boomtown Portland. There were yet hours to devour, my commute a mere five minutes up Stark to Kerns.

"Good work today, buddy. See ya tomorrow," Skylar patted me on the back, cigarette hanging from his teeth. He was heading to My Father's Place, an old Portland diner a stone's throw away known for its comfort food, and Lounge atmosphere. Geography was always saturated with memory. I had been there once, some 2:00 am post-soirée frolic, with a producer friend who insisted on walking along slick neon-lit streetcar tracks three sheets to the wind on cheap Vodka. I snatched all 115 pounds of her out of the way of oncoming traffic, vainly sobered her up with black coffee and pancakes while she spilled the beans on her bender. As married to her career as her husband, she had been served up with divorce papers citing neglect. One couldn't know what was going on just beneath another's skin; in that space between the ears, entire worlds could be in collapse, the aftershocks not always apparent to the naked eye. I took her home, put her to bed, called a cab. As with many career women who had come and gone throughout my life, I had seen that which no mere mortal man was allowed: her vulnerability. She never called me again.

~

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. A line that took on new meaning as I grew seasoned on the job. Thursdays were my longest, when I tended to have the bigger accounts–grocers ordering 25 cases of wine a piece–that's 300 bottles, usually mixed and matched. A single case weighed 35 pounds. I moved 5 at a time on a tiny hand truck. 175 pounds of fragile and often expensive, product. Everyone's order was the most important thing in the universe–to them. Be punctual. Be accurate and break nothing. I often failed at the latter, once or twice in front of customers. Stan, unfazed shrugged.

"It's only wine."

Zupan's on West Burnside was among my most daunting accounts, My last stop in Southwest before the Beaverton Gauntlet propelled me into high-median anxiety. Accepted past receiving, through the cramped spaces of the stockroom, I emerged onto the sales floor–an obstacle course of culinary delights, not-all-there Boomers maundering through on island-time, stocking up on Rieslings before lunch. The familiar rapid-fire banter that graced my eardrums belonged to Due. Despite his Vietnamese heritage, he was the undisputed sensei of the meat-counter. He always greeted me with a bear hug and ten minutes of catching up. Had he known me a decade before this would have been verboten. Now at 36, having washed out of my calling, I was happy to be seen at all.

“I said to my wife, 'this is all the money I will probably ever make. I can promise you my devotion, but I am happy and secure in where I am professionally, so take it or leave it!' " Due was imparting his wisdom to a ginger twenty-something with gauged ears, the kid was nodding at speed, trying his best to keep up, " 'you wanna find a richer guy? Go right ahead! You are free. You wanna stay with me, then you accept what I have told you. No complaints,' See? No wavin' a gun around, Just people seeing things for what they are, with the chance to turn back behind them," There endeth the lesson. Due saw me approach, gave me a side-long embrace. I always made it a point to pass his butcher's counter on the way to the wine section, weigh-in on whatever hot debates were on-offer each week. He was in the same fraternity as Connolly and a handful of others; men who could be relied upon. They would help bury a body in the woods, if push came to shove, take the secret to their grave. If I found myself in a foxhole with any of them, my heart would be no home for fear. "Josh's girl's telling him he's not making enough money," Due, bringing me up to speed, " I told him about me and the wife–Laid it all out for her, real simple. Let her choose. She chose to stay, nobody to blame but herself now." He spread his hands in that universal capisce gesture, "You gotta girl, right Corey?"

"I have," I set the hand truck down, the wine could wait on a little philosophy between gentlemen, I mopped my brow with a bandana, and crossed my feet, vaguely aware of a faint wetness between my legs. My little problem never failed to remind me of its presence.

"She ever make you so mad, you think about leaving her?" Due asked. I wasn't in the habit of talking about Justine, or our relationship, but I knew she was talking about me. All her girlfriends knew my business, harbored their assessments; points added and deducted from the boyfriend scorecard. I conducted myself with class around them, but never forgot their first loyalty was to Justine. A sisterhood of accountability deflection formed around them. They couldn't be counted on for their impartiality or objectivity. A few of these blurred the lines between friend and colleague; had so expertly made a mess of their personal lives, that mere proximity to mine was unsettling. I presumed Justine considered my friends the same way. Such was often the state of affairs with men and women.

"You bet," I shrugged. It was the natural course of things. She pissed me off, I pissed her off. We made our assessments, weighed the pros and cons of staying or going, made our choice. When I inevitably wound her up, Justine would exclaim through a playful grin, "That's it! I'm outta here!" Flirtatious, Holden Caulfield horsing around. An admission that, despite our hook line and sinker weirdness, we were in it for the long haul.

"But you haven’t left her?"

"I made a commitment," I declared, throwing him a no-brainer shrug, "When it's good it's really good and I'm far from perfect–I can't demand something of my girl that I'm not embodying myself," I shifted my weight, my right side screaming in pain. Nothing left but to push through it until I could return to the truck, dose on painkillers. I hoped the guys didn't notice.

"What about commitment to yourself though?" This was the kid, jockeying for position in the experiential arena we older men dominated, "any alpha guy would threaten to leave! How can she respect you!" Alpha and Beta I knew this puerile taxonomy, understood why some guys became obsessed with it. Too many of us were reared with no masculine presence, or as was my case, fathers whose role ended with prevision; who checked out with the Nightly News and sports, a love affair with the airwave goddess of television. The father-son bonds of yesteryear had largely been left there. Some young men sought out surrogate fathers online, or in literature for guidance; a map by which to navigate an atomised masculine terrain, a perception of immense and pervasive feminine influence. Others retreated into video games, or pornography, isolated into base-mammalian fixations, felt no stake in things; anomie, that's what one called it. The breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community in which they existed. I didn't hold media fueled moral-panic, or the Soccer-Moms of America trying to legislate away this sickness of the soul as a viable solution; employing violence-by-proxy to stem violence, a frustrating cognitive dissonance. Instead, I trusted in the connections I could forge face-to-face with the men that inabited my everyday life. Despite the geographical discontinuity of my youth, I always had a band of mates. The way of men is the way of the gang; the wolfpack. I offered guidance to the wayward where I could, made calculated observations. The Kid's desire for dominance stemmed from his slight build; he wasn't physically substantial enough to pose a threat to other men, so he wanted to make up for it by dominating women. As I saw it, the problem was in dialectic: conflicting energies, call them what you like "yin", "yang", "masculine", "feminine"... equally potent, and equally valuable forces that needed to be in balance for a harmonious functioning of the world. Neither should be in dominance over the other, within an individual or in the world that individual inhabited. Both needed tapping into at times– situation specific–but neither was morally superior. Due turned to me, a wing-leader letting his wingman manehouvre for advantage.

"Say you have kids. Do you think threatening to leave is ethical?" That got the kid's attention, set the gears in motion, "See, my parents used the divorce-bomb my whole life to keep each other in line and I felt Responsible, irrational as that is. I get there's this notion that most unhappy women are only as such because their man is failing to show dominance, but I don't buy into that bullshit. You can't control anyone else, only yourself. "

"I've met his girlfriend," Due interjected.

"What's she like?"

"Fat and unhappy," The kid rolled his eyes, throwing a mental barrel roll to shake of Due's nimble laughter, "pretty much the Portland average!"

"Well, there you go–no self-control. People without self-control are obsessed with controlling others," I meant it as much about him as I did his girl, "Don't ask me why it works that way." Years of close friendships with women, had brought me to understanding many of them never liked hearing: Keeping a man around is quite simple; be such a good catch, make him feel so lucky to have you in his life that he will move Heaven and Earth to keep you. By extension this advice wasn't sex-specific. Don't let yourself go, be accountable and don't be a nag. It worked both ways. You can’t berate someone into being better. You can only be someone they won't risk losing. "Look at you, you're not a bum. You work, you're paying your bills, you're responsible, you've got good hygiene, you're not fucking other women, right?

"Of course not..." I was getting under his skin, as an older man should.

"Then the basic, very reasonable criteria, underwriting any healthy relationship, have been met. This doesn't mean there aren't problems, but problems should be discussed rationally. If she’s nagging you, the cause is likely her own insecurity. The first place she ought to look for troubleshooting is herself—is she appealing to you? Is she someone you want to spend time around, or do you avoid her?"

"Yeah, I guess I try and stay out of her way." The kid had given ground, shuffling his feet. Somewhere there was a head of Romaine in need of his deft attentions.

"Look, either break up with her–that would be the humane thing to do, or be the best version of yourself you can be. If she sees you taking responsibility for yourself, she either has the willpower to meet you in that, in a way that works for her, or she doesn't. No manipulation. No controlling. No power-games. No psychological warfare. Just self-ownership."

"Wow..." The kid nodded, dazed, "I'll give that some thought," Due slapped me on the back. We watched him shuffle off, shell-shocked.

"Think he's got a chance, Doctor?" Due asked, a glimmer in his epicanthic eyes.

"Oh, no. I was his age once. I'm afraid he's certifiably fucked."

Later I returned home, the conversation with Due and The Kid still ringing in my ears after ten hours. I hauled my worn and sore body up the steps, into the courtyard. Huck's face peering from under the linen drapes that diffused the light from our living room. I opened our door and stood in the gauntlet of two wriggling dogs. Bitsy, our cat peering from the hallway, observing, taking mental feline notes.

"Hi, Boyfriend!" Justine's call from the bedroom.

"Hey, girlfriend!" I called back, setting my canvas work bag down on the office chair, submitting to canine licks on my hands in the festive evening light of our home.

"How was your day?" Her voice rose over the tinny palaver of some nondescript reality show–they were all the same to me. I glanced into the dining room, taking stock. Her grad school work occupying the dinette, black faux leather workbag to hand. An open wine bottle, within easy reach on one the wraparound bars, an orchid ring already staining the 1950s formica countertop. Killing my ego, driving the truck was evidence that I took 100% responsibility for getting a grip on my financial half of the household. I had the receipts. Why was I still coming home to this maudlin drinking?

"Busy, but no mishaps today," I wrapped my voice around the corner so she could hear.

"Did you break any wine?"

"I broke all the wine," Setting the stage with humour seemed the best course of action, always. It lubricated the tensions between our walls. Every interaction was a reset. "How was your day?" I asked, Bitsy announcing her arrival with a breathed click as Justine appeared in the dining room, wine glass in hand, pouring a refill.

She de-briefed her day in retina-detaching detail; the drama between teachers and her fellow para-educators, her students and their varying household horrors. Conflict took hold inside me: on the one hand I wanted to support Justine and her career endeavours. On the other, I lived in the eyes of a maelstrom of frustration and bewilderment, wondering if our own children would play second-fiddle to her students. From my limited outsider's perspective, her work environment appeared out of balance; devoid of any masculine rigor that could divert the destructive potential of some of her more troublesome students to constructive purpose. It seemed that she and the professional sisterhood in which she moved, thrived on the daily-drama of the Special-Ed room; a grotesque soap-opera from Hell that served no one. Most of these were minority kids who would graduate into a world unprepared. Where was the dilligence and preparation they needed? Daily she came home, reporting that some student–often one of a handful of usual suspects–"popped off." Isolating them became commonplace, a disturbing policy from on-high, that seemed tailor made to condition these at-risk youths to a future as inmates, where solitary confiement would be the norm. Offering what constructive suggestions I could, I listened, keeping my concerns in standby. Privately troubled. Being emotionally open about this inner conflict frightened me. Justine often described my live-processing soliloquies as "triggering." Therefore a core aspect of my being was triggering. I didn’t know how to parse that, so I clammed up. Surrounded by eggshells, lack of self-expression became poisonous.

She said otherwise, but it seemed that Justine's career was just a job, another tick on the status scorecared. The Sandbergian ideal in action; building a life of horological commodities–the house, the job, the SUV, the husband, the money, the kids... Marketing spin passed off as moral imperative; so phoney. Wracked with doubt, I didn't know what I was to her: a hard cock, a wallet, some milestone on the road to the attainment of the new feminine mystique; not a human being with dreams, feelings, or history, just a lynch-pin to her having it all. The greater implications of her work, unapparent in her awareness–at least as she communicated it to me. She would laugh and share the goings on of the Special-Ed room, almost as entertainment–certainly not inappropriate to any professional's need to keep her career and its myraid stresses in perspective, but I never saw her concerned about the room's daily happenings on a philosophical level. Unsure if it was coming from her history of existential doubt in the face of endless vocational let-downs–the continuity there being a cycle of emotional investment followed by nuke-from-orbit emotional ejection–or the cool-chick cynicism embodied by those collegaues she admired; I sensed dissociation.

I slipped into the bathroom, undid my jeans, used the toilet. My underwear was bloodstained, how did I go all day like this? Being by nature tidy, neat as a pin. The faint but unmistakable rotting fish odor, with blood in evidence–hematochezia. I flushed, washed, moved into the bedroom half-naked my heart skipping. Time was Justine would be there, ready with a firm slap on the ass. She was in bed, wearing a white button down she'd appropriated from my throwaways, and black yoga pants, her secondhand MacBook on her lap, glass of wine in hand which she never seemed to spill on the mostly white duvet. I opened the closet, grabbed a fresh pair of underwear.

"Boyfriend, where did your ass go?" I had noticed myself losing weight, and was privately relieved. My long history of body hatred and male anorexia satisfied that my full derriere was melting away. It always seemed disturbingly African, distent with the primitive sexuality associated to that part of my heritage.

"Between this job, and the way I walk the dogs, I'm not surprised I'm losing weight."

"There's loosing weight, but whatever this is," she ran a hand down my figure in mid-air, "It's happening just a little too fast..." She was correct, of course. I refused to see it. To my mind-state, it seemed an attempt to shift the spotlight from her unhealthy lifestyle. She gained weight, but I stuck around, valuing her many other qualities. When we first got together, she was tighter in those sensuous regions; slimmer but not skinny, voluptuous in that Bettie Page way that fired up my Greaser imaginings. Never having a "Type," just a threshold where my physical attraction to a given woman fell off; purely biological, not ideological. I had clumsily pointed it out to her once, wounding her when I meant to be constructive. There was nothing but to tack into the wind; set an example by attaining a healthy weight and toning up–use inspiration in lieu of criticism. She began a low-carb diet, it fell away. She tried Cross-fit, it fell away. She took up yoga, that fell away. This comment seemed, at the time and in that context, an attempt to lull me into a state of relative unattractiveness, thereby acquitting her letting go. In the abstract, I was shadowboxing a sardonic Cosmopolitan Magazine attitude that brazenly browbeat men into accepting ever lower standards in women, for the sake of political correctness, while entitling women to hold men to stratospheric demands.² Who could say how much of an influence that was in the day-to-day of things.

"Is this why we haven't been having sex? You barely touch me any more..." The last time we'd had sex: July 4th at Lost Lake. It wasn't the love making of previous years. It felt desperate, like we were both at the mercy of a rapid; grasping to anything to anchor us against the inevitable.

"We haven't had sex, because I kind of don't want you bleeding on me," That's funny, because I don't recall ever saying that to you when you hounded me for sex on your period. Double-standards were the physics by which men and women danced.

"I see," I would have been well justified to point out the double-standard and cold, uncaring way with which she expressed that sentiment. Picking my battles had long been the order of the day, which seemed sensible–the avoidance of a massive conflict that would threaten everything we had built over the years. It was a terrible habit of mine, a coping strategy borne of codependency. At least conflict presented an opportunity for action. Avoiding conflict transmuted tensions into a war of attrition, each side scoring tiny scathing victories, wearing each other down to nil, "I thought you were stressed, preocuppied. A foot massage might open things up."

"No, that's okay." my foot massages used to be as good as gold, now they've gone Soviet, "suit yourself. You do seem tense..."

"I'm just really stressed out about paying for things right now. PPS got my payroll wrong again and I've been dealing with the same stupid lady who messed it up the last time. Money is just tight. I'm glad you got the wine job; it's fine for now, but at some point..." I tried, I really tried, I thought in that moment, a knot tightening inside me, I can't force her to feel less stressed or upset, she has to come to that on her own. Help her feel heard, then exit. You deserve some quite time, you've been doing manual labour all day and have to come home to this. It's maddening

"Don't disagree on any particular point. Money is tight," yet how much do you spend a week on wine, Justine? I ran the numbers: Assume an average of two bottles a night, a decent bottom shelf cabernet runs $7.00. I usually see a bottle or two in your faux leather workbag when you come home. For shits and giggles, that's $14.00 spent per night, conservatively, six nights a week. 14.00 x 6 = 84.00. At $84.00 per week, with roughly 52.14 weeks in a year, 84 x 52.14 = 4,379.76. Throw in an extra 20 bottles in a year, for camping and holidays, of varying quality, say on average $9.00 per bottle, 9 x 20 = $180.00. Now we're up to $4,556.76, but wait! There's more! Birthdays; Yours, mine, sister's. New Year's Day Brunch Mimosas. Date Nights, so what? 16 instances give or take? You pay a premium for alcohol in restaurants, but we'll say $8 a glass, 8 x 16 = 128.00. Thats puts us at ≈ $4,684.76 for a hypothetical year of booze. $4,684.76 ÷ 1,410.00 = 3.32, that's a hair under four months rent. If we saved that much for three years we'd be halfway to a downpayment on a house. That's a Hell of a lot of money to spend medicating away anxiety.

All of this I stupidly kept to myself. I was paralysed with inaction. Everything I said seemed to start an argument and I could already hear her rebuttals, "I'm not buying wine every day and even if I was, $14.00 is not that big of a deal!" and "You're drinking it too!" Frightened of becoming the controlling boyfriend stereotype that I heard ad nauseum from the women around me, I was no use to her. I was unwilling to risk losing her in order to help her resolve the problems underlying this destructive alcoholism. I wasn't showing empathy–for her, or for us. To demonstrate leadership, that was my responsibility and I failed. I was so beaten down by a mounting sense of inefficacy in the world; bargaining from the ninth circle of hell. Stop being a tremendous fuck up at life, and she’ll stop drinking! Stop failing! Stop being a reject! She’s only drinking because she’s managing anxiety caused by everything you touch turning to shit in your hands!

Broaching the topic of Justine's drinking, felt like a hostage situation. I suggested tea after work instead. On nights when she came home first, she found some excuse to open a wine bottle and "decompress." she’s an adult. I bargained with myself, I don’t get to tell her what to do any more than she gets to tell me what to do. How not to be an enabler? I enjoyed a nice scotch or glass of wine after a long day myself. My desire to have my own pleasures gave Justine little incentive to cut back. Some couples dieted together, or took up jogging. One half of the couple pointing out a potentially relationship-ending trend, offering to go along on the recovery journey side-by-side is what made a positive volte-face possible; It wasn’t conditional.

“Boyfriend! Maybe we should stop drinking for a month,” Or, maybe you should take 100% responsibility for your drinking and cut back. I’m not the one with the drinking problem. Agreeing under those conditional standards felt wrong. Accepting her premise, it was only a matter of time before inevitable relapse was blamed on me; I "wasn't supportive enough" or "we can't have wine in the house, if I'm going to stop!" Against my better judgement, I loved and was trying to salvage a relationship with, a wino. What did that say about me? Of course the only steady job I could get was driving a wine truck; the gods are not without a sense of irony.

~

By now I was sleeping on the sofa from the pain, releasing my pelvic floor with YouTube yoga videos devouring my post-work evenings. The air was sometimes as hot under our roof on those summer nights as it was outside, when tarmac surrendered its trapped heat to the dusk air, a city's pent up elan vital collective sigh. Wrung out by domestic conflict, I drove up to the airport, to a little parking spot along the ILS glide-path to Runway 28L, the departing 737-800s roaring just overhead, so close I felt I could reach out and hitch a ride. Watching the ILS lights in sequence, bokeh in the heat haze, as if the signal patterns would offer inspiration for decoding the problem of the human heart, I felt unprepared to deal with emotional crises on the fly. They tended to enkindle my repressed trauma, my panicked feeling that I was responsible for Justine's emotional state. When I wet my toes wading into the waters of other's emotionality I usually lost my way, resorting to the place where I felt most comfortable and most in control of myself: the hyper rational. Logic became my only tool for parsing human relations. It annoyed the Hell out of others. What fictions lived in her head about me became an obsession. What drove the anxiety she drowned with alcohol?

There were two topics that, without fail, metastasized into arguments. When in the grand scheme of the relationship would marriage and children occur? When would my health insurance deficiency be mitigated, facilitating a doctor's visit about my sudden weight loss and the bloody and painful mess below the belt? I remembered a conversation in my car, driving to some out-of-the-way dive bar on Powell. I had outlined my financial plans, setting personal milestones along a path that needed walked before I felt ready to get married and start a family. I thought I was demonstrating responsibility, that I understood the gravity of such an undertaking. It bothered Justine that marriage and children seemed so far down the list of quoted milestones.

"You know that I want marriage and children, and that's not even on your list!" She exclaimed. Already I felt that rising terror after the telltale landmine pressure-plate click, "It's like I don't even exist for you," She had a fair point, but when put like that–with such an edge of blame–I didn't want to listen. I instantly dropped into a mental fighting stance. The height of emotion is not the time to solve problems. I was paying the price for some epigenetic narrative—the men in her family fail and the women are mere victims of their indulgence. If I was truly such a horrible boyfriend, she wouldn’t be living with me, she wouldn’t be nagging me about a wedding ring, she wouldn’t be hounding me about when we are having babies. Evidence mattered–far and away above words.

"We both have careers. Throw kids into the mix: who is raising them?" The Sandbergian "you can have it all" ideal. Maybe one could, but not all at the same time, "One of us is going to have to stay home with them," who the fuck has kids planning to run back to work? What's the point of having them if we're barely involved? I didn't know how to communicate to her this was bringing up deep anxieties from my own childhood. My parents, heavily invested in their elite status, bought me off with toys and elaborate holidays in strange countries. Oblivious to the lonely and isolated child they tolerated. With my business failing, I didn't see how I could even provide the material comforts. I wasn’t about to just have kids on a whim and suss out the details later; that reeked of irresponsibility, aer I say child abuse. I didn't see parenting as a fly-by-night situation.

"We’ll just get a Guatemalan niñera," we'll figure it out! It'll be fine! People do this all the time! Stop ruining this for me!

"Oh, the irony! The self-professed progressive, claiming to champion Latin causes, and yet the possibility that a Latin American immigrant to this country might want something a little better for herself than to raise some gringa’s spoiled kids sails past your reckoning." Will wonders never cease... These mental gymnastics unsettled me, that it was somehow un-feminist of Justine to raise her own kids, to say nothing of the fact that she wouldn't be doing it alone–I had every intention of being involved. No ideology survived contact with reality.

"I don’t know what to tell you," she shrugged.

"You needn't tell me anything but the truth. You've done that and I don't fault you for it. Thank you, really."

There remained the other element in the room: the drinking. I saw marriage as being fundamentally about children. Casting my imagination down the tunnel of time, I did not want my kids to ever come up to me and say, "Dad, why is Mommy drunk all the time?" anymore than I would have wanted them to ask Justine, "Mommy, why can't Daddy afford nice things like Robby's parents?" I did not feel I had the right to bring children into a less than ideal situation. As such, until the issues in the relationship, with Justine and myself as individuals, were resolved, marriage and children were off the table. It was more than just the pressure of the biological clock ticking away, Justine seemed to regard marriage and children as boxes to tick on the status scorecard; mere commodities meant to ameliorate her insecurities. I didn't want to repeat the epigenetic cycle of my birth, marrying out of vanity like my own parents had. I wanted to marry out of love, because I had chosen a woman whose values were so exemplary, so inspirational, that I couldn't imagine not having children with her.

Marriages exist in a social ecosystem. When we consider a prospective marriage partner, we have to also consider the people they surround themselves with. You can judge a man (woman) by the company he (she) keeps, as the old adage goes. Sabrina, Justine's closest work colleague and new best friend was embodied the stereotypical career woman who's life was a hell-on-wheels relational train-wreck. I appreciated Sabrina's support of Justine as she advanced in her education and career, but I worried about the lack of professionalism that characterized their relationship. They texted constantly; sharing boy drama like a gaggle of middle school cheerleaders. Sabrina lived in a hoarded to the rafters house, which she shared with another woman and her son, raising her daughter with a steady stream of men passing through their lives like a port of call. Sabrina was also younger than me, but from her careworn face I would never have guessed.

That Fall we had all gone to the Sauvie Island pumpkin patch to pick Halloween Pumpkins. While Sabrina and Justine were chatting away in the warmth of a glorious Indian Summer, Lily–Sabrina's toddler–attempted to sit on my lap, calling me "Daddy." I turned my lap away, placed a hand on hers and led her to sit next to me instead. I had only just met her. I didn't want her to feel rejected or shunned, and I buried my discomfort deep inside. This tiny little girl was already showing signs of trauma, a deep need to bond with a stable masculine presence. I had seen the final results of this early fracturing in the women I had dated throughout my adolescence, my twenties, before I knew what it was that I was observing; the damage of seminal disunion.

At Sabrina's house for holiday dinner, I considered the neglected fish tank in the corner of one bedroom, infested with runaway black mould. Trying to replace my judgement with compassion, as I didn't have all the details, I was left only to consider Justine’s inability (or willful choice) to not see these red flags. Driving home that night, from the far flung outskirts of town back into the city, while Justine delighted in the evening's events, I focused on route 26 unfolding in the dark, thinking, Justine...this is someone you look up to, have bonded with, and she's a mess; a string of dysfunctional men in her life, her daughter’s pair-bonding is so compromised she refers to total-strangers like me as "Daddy" and tries to sit on my lap. I held my silence in this profound tragedy. It was not my place to pick her friends. I wanted to take care who was around my relationship, my eventual marriage. Human beings tend to want to justify their own situations by enabling others to make the same dysfunctional choices they themselves made. Without Justine's willingness to regard me as her partner, rather than her workhorse, I knew it was only a matter of time before Sabrina's influences were so invasive in our home dynamic, that to be married to Justine would feel like marrying a committee of lobbyists.

To co-habitate with someone and then set off on the mission of changing them is to fundamentally reject who they are. To position someone as the trouble in a relationship is to demand they solve problems from a fundamental latitude of rejection. It translates into the boardroom: there I am pitching a $30,000 spot while in the back of my mind thinking, but my girlfriend spends every night in bed at the bottom of a wine bottle because I just can’t seem to figure life out, so how the fuck am I supposed to sell you on my skills? To undermine someone at home is to undermine them in the world. They will be outpaced by those who have loving support at home. No one could dispute that Justine had worked hard to find a path in her new calling, that shouldn’t be taken away from her, but she had a loving, encouraging partner at home. Someone who made her life easier in what way he could.

"It's like comparing Earth gravity to Martian gravity," I told Mira over the phone, while sat on my car at the foot of 28L. She was commuting from London to Leeds, now two years married and very pregnant, "Justine's a government employee. Her salary is paid by the taxpayers. Unions and lobbying bodies protect her job. She doesn’t have to compete, so of course she’s got the illusion of doing well and being special. I’m in the private sector. I have to compete. We're not playing by the same rulebook."

"She's commenting on how much pain you seem to be in, and she's mad at you that you won't go to a GP."

"I don't have health insurance. I take full responsibility. I've been self employed for 13 out of 16 years. Until now, I have enjoyed spectacular health," I cleared my throat, "That may be changing."

"Right, and I'm lucky enough to at least have NHS–flawed as it is...Still happy you left?"

"Of course not, as if it was my choice. I don't belong here. Never have." An Airbus roared overhead, arcing for parts unknown, perhaps through a night and a day, to Mira's neck of the woods.

"So what exactly is going on physically?" Mira and I enjoyed a casual familiarity, nothing off-limits.

"I'm shitting blood. It's hard for me to walk–I'm sucking down painkillers constantly to do this wine job. It hurts when I ejaculate. When I look between my legs, I can tell one of my glutes–my right side– is swollen. There's something growing out of me. I'd told myself maybe it was a hemorrhoids, but I know that's me bullshitting myself,"

"Jesus..." She let my declaration of predicaments hang in the air, I knew she'd sold the old Peugeot 504 years back, but I liked imagining her driving it anyway, tearing down the M1 in style, "Look, I don't agree with her browbeating you about it–there's no compassion in that, but she's not wrong. It might do to have yourself seen to."

"I agree. She thinks it's cancer. I think she's exaggerating. She tends to exaggerate," I felt insulted and humiliated that I was portrayed as the only person in the relationship who had a problem. My heart waged a counter insurgency against what I perceived as her attempts to ameliorate her own insecurities by trying to fix me. If the prevailing narrative of the relationship was that I am the problem and I change, then everything wrong with the relationship will go away, then she has no influence in the relationship–no power. Simply untrue. The logical next step would be to do nothing. If I am taking no action and the problems persist then clearly I am not the cause. The cause is in the perception.

"That's as may be, but you are minimising her concerns. Until you have yourself looked at, and rule it out, she's well within her rights to drive herself up the wall believing it's cancer," If it was cancer then crisis was on the horizon. had not yet experienced how Justine handled a crisis. Perhaps I needed to before I could take the leap of building a life with her. The years before our relationship had been saturated with romantic false starts; situations where I was used for sex, money and validation. I was still raw, wanting so badly to be ready to take that leap. I rationalised away my uncertainty. In ignoring my doubt, I ignored my own alarm system. Dismissed the council of my inner generals.

"There's something else. Two years ago, when I had the near fatal asthma attack?"

"I remember,"

"I underestimated the signs there too. She has to be worried that history will repeat itself–retruamatization,"

"That's valid," I hear her signal on that distant highway, change lanes and accelerate, the hum of a BMW inline 6 engine graced my ears, just like my precious 325xi. Mira had always been a girl after my own heart, "Corey, I'm going to ask you a question and I frankly don't care if it pisses you off–"

"Shoot."

"Why are you doing this to yourself? You blow off your own health, and I get it we're all strung out with obligations. Maybe you can do that when it's just you and there's no collateral damage, but..." She trailed off, but I followed the through-line of her question. In the abstract there was a feeling of being dehumanized, reduced to economic units. Women had their own experience of this, but the things demanded of us as men were simultaneously beaten out of us by the prevailing culture. The only avenue left in that environment is the inner landscape—self attack and apocalyptic inner wastes ensue. In the realm of the personal it was far simpler. I felt the last supports that held shut my inner floodgates finally buckle, surrendering to the inevitable.

"Mira...I feel like I can't win at life. I feel like my hard work goes ignored while others coast by on their charisma and pedigree. I don't feel seen. Where is my tribe? To make matters worse, every morning I wake next to a woman who doesn't desire me anymore, who won't touch me," I thought of fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain, photos of their wives and sweethearts taped to the instrument panels of their Spits; always in sight and always with them. A man needed something to remind him of what he was fighting for. Not some abstract like God, Duty, King or Country, but the bodily safety of his sweetheart and family, and ultimately his sweetheart's admiration and respect. To loose that was to lose everything, "who tells me she won't have sex with me because she doesn't want me bleeding on her and the only means I have right now of fixing this problem, is to violate my own principles. It is not enough for me to live a life of base mammalian needs! I'm striving for more than that! When you just want to live consistently with your own values and someone is trying to pull you away from those values to satisfy their own needs, that is the initiation of force and is immoral. In that space you are not having a relationship, you’re not having intimacy, you are engaged in fending off a manipulation!"

"I get that your principles matter to you, but what good are they to anyone if you die of cancer?"

"The only way I can get health care in my current humiliating situation, is to go on public assistance. That violates every principle I have. I will never hear the end of it! Every argument I ever make for personal responsibility, philosophy, small-“L” libertarianism, Justine will always be able to say 'but you took medicare,' as a way to cut me down. I don't want to hand over my soul like that, Mira!"

"So you're essentially willing to lay down your life because you can't bear the thought that, as much as she's fucked you off and despotised you, as overbearing and arrogant, and insufferable as she's been, she just might be right–even though she's been a c__t-on-a-stick in presenting her case?"

"Check and mate," I buried my face in my hands, pushed air through my teeth, "That's why you're one of my oldest friends, Mira. You're absolutely right, God help me." What if there’s a way I can accept that I am a problem in terms that I can live with and utilize to empower me? Not because I agreed with Justine's assessments but because I had to take some action for myself?

"You bloody well should've married me. You're a complete idiot, but you're my idiot and I'm going to keep you alive if it kills me! As for Justine, tell her I said, if she's right about the cancer–and the jury's still out on that–she should savor her pound of flesh in silence, no gloating. She should ask herself if being right is more valuable to her than being a loving partner. I appreciate that she claims to care about your well-being, but she's too old to be such a b___h. If she keeps it up she'll drive you off and cats will feast on her eyeballs," Mira's Balkan spirit hadn't been cooled much by Blighty.

"Anything else?"

"No, dear. Baby needs a Mars Bar. The next time I hear from you, you'll have a doctor's visit penned into the calendar, yes?"

"I will."

~

The waiting room at the Urgent Care provided a cooling sanctuary from the late Summer heat. I no longer gave myself days off, my finances were thinning, but I had insurance. I had spent the morning delivering food, the pain in my backside becoming so unbearable, that I hit my daily maximum of Naproxen before noon.

"Corey Drayton?" I rose at the nurse's call, thankful to be relieved of the sharp pain sitting caused. I followed her back to an exam room, submitted to weighing and the taking of vitals, "The doctor will be with you in just a moment." She left me in the sterile quiet of the room, awkwardly hovering my right side over the chair, having only just now returned to a non-pain baseline. A knock at the door, and a 40-something man entered, the light skipping over his salt dusted hair. He reached out with one hand, which I grasped in a firm handshake.

"Doctor Chapman," We nodded a gentleman's greeting, I returned to my hovering above the seat. "What's going on?" I described all of my symptoms; the blood, the smell, the pain, the sense of pressure, the oddly pinched ejaculations, the strange lacerated blood leaking flesh protruding my anus. He nodded hanging on my every word, grimacing sympathetically as I laid it all down. "That all sounds very difficult and I'm sorry you've been dealing with that. Corey, what I think would be best at the point would be for me to take a look," he held up his finger, I'm going to administer a digital rectal exam, It may feel a little uncomfortable,” whenever a doctor says that something may feel a certain way, it’s a guarantee.

"Whatever you need to do, doctor. I'm prepared,” I'd never had another man’s finger in my ass. Never had anyone’s finger in my ass, for that matter. I wasn’t sure who to feel more more sorry for; myself or the doctor. He handed me a sterile blanket and a hospital gown.

"Go ahead and change into this. You'll lay on your left side, with your right leg crossed over your left, as far as you can get it. Put this towel over you and I'll be back shortly, ok?"

He left. I did as instructed, stripping down my clothes, my jeans fitting loosely than they should have, by belt cinched al the way to that last hole. I saw myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror; wasted. I climbed onto the bed, and assumed the position. Another knock at the door, the doctor entered.

"How're we doin'?" My back was to him, I heard the snap of latex, hoped he would be using lube.

"I'm ready as I'll ever be,” I felt him roll up on me with a rolling stool, felt his breath on the backs of my legs, a cold, greasy latex finger spreading my ass, the finger sliding in, circling around. It was quicker than I expected.

"Okay. You can sit up now,” I did, slightly sore in a different way, “I saw what you were referring to, there is blood and lacerations, but what you have is an anal fissure. It's very common. Do you practise anal sex?"

"No, never," not that there's anything wrong with that.

"The good news is that fissures can resolve on their own, and typically don't require surgery. I'm going to refer you to a gastroenterologist, he'll get you sorted out, ok?"

"Ok," All this sturm und drang over nothing. I've dodged a huge bullet with this one. I'm going to be ok.

"In the meantime, I'll prescribe you a lidocaine topical for the pain. You're gonna be fine."

"Thanks, Doc."

Minutes later I sat in my car, pain shooting up my back, relieved.

"It's not ass cancer," I told Justine, "Just an anal fissure. They referred me to a gastroenterologist who'll take over. Probably won't even need surgery."

"That's good, boyfriend! I am so glad, I was sure it was Cancer. I'm so relieved!" Vindication. Worth its weight in gold in the combat our relationship had been of late. The doctor's assessment in hand, I returned to bad old habits; pushing too hard, hoping that I could pass some Event Horizon smoother sailing beyond. Trust but verify. Where verification cannot be obtained, trust is as reliable as blind faith. High on the narrative I sold myself, naked before the carnage of inner deception, I mushed on, gloriously misinformed.

1. By this I do not mean the association as identity, rather as energy and a general set of cognitive patterns or pathways of perception arising from selection pressures in a state of nature. The Feminine pathways embodying "instinct > emotion > rationality," The Masculine embodying "instinct > rationality > emotion." Each possessing the full faculties for these distinct modes of awareness, but prioritizing them differently.

2. I have it on good authority that this is more an artifact of my generation and the Millennials, that Gen Z doesn't experience this dichotomy. I'd like to believe that, but we'll see when Gen Z starts paying off their own student loans.

“There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave,
There are souls that are pure and true;
Then give to the world the best you have,
And the best will come back to you.”

DEBATING THE MERITS OF WRITING A BRIEF HOLIDAY GREETING, owing to my efforts to avoid the sheer insanity of Hanukkah and Christmas by keeping a silent vigil over my senses, I must confess to a certain procrastination about what–if anything–to say in the spirit of the season. Chalked up to my usual anaphylaxis to schmaltz, I wonder what words to offer for a hectic time of social obligation, pandemic shopping, and bittersweet reflections? As Nemesis is an aspect of Aphrodite, procrastination is an aspect of creative resistance. I don't mean creative in the sense of artistic product. In this context, creative refers to the will undergirding anything we endeavor to produce in life, from a piece of literature to Nan's holiday fruitcake.

An accumulation of years can be said to be a long time, but a solitary year is not. Certainly taken from the angle of the excessive, hectic lives we lead in this waning second decade of the 21^st century. Besieged by media, superficial liaisons with, potentially, the entire globe in 1000 x 1000 pixel nosh, yet atomised. Intimacy has been made dangerous by those who would benefit from people not having strong bonds; malaise and Fukuyama fractures, splash damage–implosion implicated. The once venerated social bond undermined by our love affair with convenience, manifested by what is now the only thing venerated: Tech. Neither money, nor sex holds dominion over our cognitive metabolism. All of the human motivators harvested to drive the tech imperative while social technology lies fallow. The Matrix is real, not literally as sentient machines harvesting human bio-energy, but as language; as thought. The power-plant in which Neo wakes, naked and bald, immersed in pink bio-conductive gel– The Real– is the everyday lie to which we conform: That we are more connected than ever before. In this fractured landscape, what territory for self-reflection can we work from? I find myself returning to Grenzsituationen ("limit situations") which populate my daily existence; my constant talks with Vera, who is where I was exactly one year ago. I am walking in my own experience again as I walk with hers. Then, my state-of-being was radically different; detached, face-to-face with mortality–yet again. Now, there is only the imperative of primal contact; daily pieces we share are pregnant with meaning. The nation of my body fought adenocarcinoma to a standstill. The nation of Vera's body must do no less; we have an alliance wherein I can't provide the guns, the tanks, the bombs, but I can provide the morale, the propaganda, a unified coalition against "The Enemy." An enemy that destroyed everything I thought I cared about, and brought me into perigee with purpose.

They say no man is an island. Taking a man alone, what nature provides he makes use of. Fire, shelter and sustenance. Preservation of one's life in the face of nature's selective pressure ignites purpose. Perhaps harmony can be maintained in this equation, but nothing new is created. Mere mammalian survival amounts to a plateau from which all horizons are visible, and one day man begins to wonder, "what is just below that horizon?" Quantifying the unknown becomes an obsession–he must get to that horizon and peer off the edge. It is desire that undermines the man. If the man has built his hedge against nature (all civilization is, really) on poor ground then the best thing for him is to be undermined. In the fall of man, meaning can be puzzled together from the detritus. Individual Human beings are inherently fascistic civilizations unto themselves; everything must be unified, every system and every cell. In the biological world, cellular anarchy equals death. Cancer is a million Gavrilo Princips, sauntering down a fogged-over Sarajevo street, at dawn. Allostatic dissension undermines the totality of the civilizational body–the organism itself. Yet, when Individual Humans come together, we either clash or cooperate. The beauty lies in having the choice.

What words would I offer for this time of coming together, reaping the harvests we've sown? Make bonds; Make them in person. Make them count.