Fool on the planet.

A certain sort of something, that feels like a fairytale.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 04:58:00 +0000

On a morning of little consequence, a young man with warm air in his lungs and firm valves on his heart was walking through the wind and the grass.

Some would say that he was hopelessly lost; but others might politely suggest that for one to be lost, they must surely know where they had been going in the first place. And so it was, with no destination, the young man with warm air in his lungs and firm valves on his heart strode on. And on. Alone through the twirling wind and the whipping grass, alone on a path that wasn’t much of a path at all.

But winds change, as winds are wont to do; and as the young man walked, the wind turned chill before beginning to howl like a young wolf on the night when it first discovered the moon. Even so, he strode on. And so it was that the young man with warm air in his lungs and firm valves on his heart came upon a proper path.

Well-tread, beaten through the tallest grass; it was formed of sandy brown gravel, circular stones that seemed far too perfect to have been formed in nature. But they were.

At the head of the path, a grizzled fellow with the face of a deflated toad sat alone, tossing bits of gravel into his mouth and listening to the nightmarish sounds they made against the mortar and pestle of his teeth. When he saw the young man, he spat out a feast of chewed-up stones and grinned.

“Howdy hello,” said the young man with warm air in his lungs and firm valves on his heart.

“Salutations.”

The young man had not been prepared. No man, no man could have been; for what came from the vocal chords of that speckled little creature that looked as if he’d been flaked off a taller man’s back, what emanated from the deepest depths of that squat-spud’s throat, was the purest, most melodic trill of a voice that one could ever hope to hear. It was a voice that could send a shiver up the spine of a morning. And so it was, that the young man with warm air in his lungs and firm valves on his heart fell to his knees and vomited tears.

“Er…” said the Toad-faced man.

Eventually, the young man managed to gather his composure amidst the wailing winds, and this time managed to brace himself when he saw the other about to speak.

“You seem a stout chap,” said Toad-face, with the raw power of a thousand arpeggios.

“Aye sir,” said the young man, as he kept his knees from buckling, “Aye sir! I sir, am indeed stout of person -- after all, I’m a young man with warm air in his lungs and firm valves on his heart.”

The Toad-faced man’s head tilted, as if he were looking for the core of a puzzle box.

“That may be, that may very well be…” the squat-spud Toad-face said sympathetically, symphonically, “But this path ahead, this trodden-spot of sandy-stone…this path belongs to me, young lad. I have little to call my own, but I do, I do have music -- and it turn, I have the path. And in turn, you should turn away.”

Despite the strength of the path keeper’s voice, despite the range of its influence, something began then to rumble inside the young man. The warm air in his lungs began to turn and churn and yearn like a gale, and the firm valves on his heart began to shake and quake and ache like the gaskets of a steam engine. He was angry.
He really, truly was.

“What do you mean?” said the young man, with all the force he could muster.

“I mean nothing,” serenaded the Toad-face, “nothing which is meant as an offense.
“But the path ahead is not one for you, even if you’re boisterous, even if you’re blessed, even if you’re brave -- the path ahead is for those who have music. For those who have suffered to find their voices, who have suffered through the voice itself; for those who have taken the time to sing.”

As this opera came to a close, the young man with warm air in his lungs and firm valves on his heart suddenly found that he could not help himself. He was angry.
He really, truly was.

The warm air in his lungs grew hot enough to boil his blood, and the blood then surged through the firm valves on his heart, sending the young man forward as if he were an engine, a gnashing, burning, hellish engine that charged toward to the Toad-faced man with a singular sense of purpose. The young man grabbed a fistful of the immaculate gravel and rammed it down the squat-spud ugly fellow’s sonorous throat, which caused him to choke and sputter and fall to his warty knees; what remained of his beautiful tones were all but lost in the howling of the first-moon winds. And so it was, that the young man with warm air in his lungs and firm valves on his heart set forward on the path, finally having someplace to go. And so it was, that the young man found himself hopelessly lost.

For the path was long.

So, so long.

Long, and cold, and winding, and dark.

For even with the warm air in his lungs forcing back the frost during the endless nights, even with the firm valves on his heart keeping him always moving, always forward, charging down the countless turns on the sandy-brown path; even with all the efforts of his breath and blood, the young man still had no harmony.

He couldn’t sing his way through sorrow, couldn’t see his way with sound. The young man with warm air and firm valves had no music. And so it was, that the young man grew old.

The warm air in his lungs had long-since cooled.
The firm valves on his heart had worn themselves down.
Still on that path, with that wind howling ever louder,
Still on that path, with that grass growing ever taller.
Still on that, on that…that same sandy-brown gravel.
Still lost.

Until another morning, still one of seemingly little consequence.
The old man had lungs with no air; the old man had a broken down heart.
And so it was, that he could go no further.

He fell. With the wind spinning around him, sending up clouds of dust from the unknown recesses of the tall grass, he fell to his knees. His hands hit the gravel; the stones were surprisingly warm between his fingers. The old man shuddered. Despite the wind, he could hear the sound of his bones. And then, as if it had nothing left, his body fell. Face first. Into the smooth, warm stones.

Which is when it happened, of course.

The last of his breath -- the last, tiniest, hidden puff of air was pushed out from the depths of his lungs. Alongside that, there occurred the last, the last, the last, shakiest, involuntary flutter of his heart. And so it was that the old man, in his last moment, whistled a pure, revelatory note.

The note sang above the scream of the wind; the note tore through the density of the grass. The note spun up, around, and down, forcing everything that stood to lie flat as if in deference, forcing all that were alive to weep as if in shame. It forced the sky to blanche.

The old man was dead. But even so…he might have heard his music.
It was far too far from being lost.
It was nothing but beautiful.

A man adrift in a metaphorical sea; A Moon proves himself to be decent, while still being an asshole; A Triage.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:14:00 +0000

Part The 1st:

Looking up, he sees an expanse akin to the face of revelation.
Bright and shining, cold and alive. He thinks that he might look down, look away; perhaps toward his own chest, so that he might watch as it bobs up and down beneath the surface of warm, salty water. If he were to look hard enough, he thinks, he might even see how fast his heart is beating; the way it sends a driving tremor up through the surface of his skin, making a tiny, precious ripple in the sea. But he won’t look. He can’t.
He knows it, too.

There are stars above his head. More than he had ever known with his dullard eyes, taking command of the world there-was-to-know by way of white fires in the sky and blurry doppelgängers in the reflective surface of the gently swaying water. The darkness is here, but the light is all around. He thinks it’s peaceful. It barely moves.
He thinks it’s frightening. It is lonely and devastating.
He thinks it’s quiet. It is.
Oh, it is.

He closes his eyes and tries to listen. There is little wind, right now, and the sounds of the waves are negligible at best. He wishes that they would come down hard, that they would crash around him as if he were the screaming heart of a gale -- he wishes that this was not this place. He wishes that there were motion, right here, right now. He wishes there were things to see. There are, of course. But he wishes nonetheless.

He opens his eyes once more, and looks around. Looking up, he considers those stars again, the way they have meaning in their meaningless fashion. He wishes he could be calm, he wishes many, many, many things. The man pushes his head beneath the surface, and listens to the echo of the sea.

Curtains fall across the scene.

*
*

SCENE TWO.

(There is NOTHING here. Nothing at all. A man, a FELLOW is sitting there in the harsh spot of the single light. As he sits there, he looks up…he looks…he looks up. And then, as if it were natural -- because it is natural -- THE MOON descends from the sky and sits down next to him, glowing with luminous sadness. The fellow turns and gives the moon the slightest of non-committal nods.)

THE FELLOW: Well then.

THE MOON: I suppose so.

THE FELLOW: Is there anything that might be done?

THE MOON: I suppose so.

(He looks over in an irritated fashion, as it would appear that the moon is kind of an asshole. Naturally.)

THE FELLOW: You’re kind of an asshole.

THE MOON: Naturally.

(The moon pulls some beef jerky out of the depths of one of his moon-pockets, and begins to gnaw on it as if he were trying to chew on the cow while it was still wrapped in the hide.

He offers some to the fellow, who DECLINES. Naturally.
The moon shrugs, and throws the remainder of the jerky towards the audience, where it misses all who are seated, instead landing with an audibly wet PLOP in a warm sea. The sea may or may not be surrounded by an uncanny field of stars.)

THE MOON: This is foolishness, you realize.

THE FELLOW: That much I can work out, yes.

THE MOON: I could ask you why, but that would make me the fool as well.

THE FELLOW: You’re not wrong.

THE MOON: I never am.

THE FELLOW: How arrogant.

THE MOON: Naturally. Comes with the territory.

THE FELLOW: Oh?

THE MOON: Such is the way of the boundless sky.

THE FELLOW: Oh.

(Beat.)

THE FELLOW: Is there anything to do?

THE MOON: Not that you could manage, no. After all, there is no actual situation -- no actual problem, no actual trouble. No actual earth-shattering revelation. You and I are sitting here on a pleasant evening, looking out over faces who will never be real, but will always be beautiful.

(The moon gestures outward, sending his own light out against the pressure of the spot-light shine. The light suddenly shorts and bursts, sending the lighting technician diving away, shielding his face from the sparks. The technician’s name is Allen, and you would think him a pleasant enough guy were you to meet him. But you won’t. He’s a lovely man, but this isn’t his. Even if it would be more interesting that way.

The only light is that which the moon provides. His glow is what remains.)

THE MOON: It’s nice, you know. And you’re tired.

THE FELLOW: I am.

THE MOON: You are.

THE FELLOW: Is there anything for it?

THE MOON: Sleep, you dullard.

THE FELLOW: Other than that.

THE MOON: No.

THE FELLOW: It’s just…

THE MOON: No.

THE FELLOW: It’s just that…

THE MOON: No.

THE FELLOW: It’s just that I cannot find a way to abide this. This. This looking up and out and around. Constant vigilance is no way to manage living, especially if there is nothing out there that I might see. Looking towards the uncertainty, staring at it, hoping…hoping that it might collapse into a singularity, if only because that crushing nothing is at least a something.

THE MOON: A black hole is nothing luminous, chap.

THE FELLOW: Not remotely, no.

(He looks down, towards his chest.)

THE FELLOW: But it moves you. It gets you moving.

(The moon sighs, and the force of it is uncanny. Everyone in the audience finds themselves trembling at their very core, as if their nerves were suddenly twisting and writhing like the desperate, frenzied dance of a man set ablaze.

The moon does not reach out, does not try to pat the fellow atop his head.
But that’s alright.)

THE MOON: A body doesn’t stop moving. Not til the end, anyway.

THE FELLOW: But…where’s it going to go?

THE MOON: Somewhere, fellow. There’s nothing more than that.

(They sit there, together. Alone.)

*
*
*

Where I am right now, is a great many places. I’m in my old coffee shop once again, looking over at some unknown who is staring down The Pickwick Papers with an intensity that suggests it troubles him, as his hand grasps his coffee cup and occasionally trembles. There are new paintings on the inside, and out there you can see a fire truck funeral, lorded over by a man in full-Scottish regalia playing the bag’d pipes. It’s a day.

But there are other places, underneath the underneath. Places of wondering, places of question, places of past. Places of inquisition, places of stress, places of unknowing. Places of ticking clocks and pleasant eyes. The places we consider, again and again.
Past and Present and Yet To Come.

There’s a lot to say, you know. About these things, these places, these worries and considerations. About what it means to me, and to the lot of us. About what really constitutes a moment, and what is simply the ephemera that sparkles us towards giddiness without granting us any truth. About the differences. About what we know.
But then again…

There’s something to be said for letting them lie.
Here I am, I think. In the quibbling, maddening, silly places, the wondering bothering irritating place. One finds this place via caustic inertia, the kind that begins in neurotic nervousness, the kind that only ceases when all comes crumbling down. And that...that is no way to move, not towards a place of worth and mirth and gently endearing calls, not the world of hearts and heads and fluctuating voices. That's not how to live, jolly chaps. Constant vigilance is only going to make you weary. So. Hm.

So, yeah.

So stop.
Right now.

Right?

A meandering melancholy.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:44:00 +0000

“You wake up in the morning feeling gloriously alive, with the firm conviction that the problems that’d disturbed you in the past would disappear, disappear, disappear into the midnight of your consciousness.”

Even though I cannot see it, I know that it’s nearby; I lower my skull underneath the intensity of the showerhead, and suddenly, sharply, vehemently, beautifully; I catch traces outside the opacity of the glass, like Hitchcock-flickers that cease to be faster than they ever actually existed.

Even though I cannot touch it, I know that I believe it’s here; I close my eyes and sweat in darkness, intensity doubled by the weight of the summer night, and think, and think, and wait, and think, and get somewhere, somewhere that’s gone the second I open my eyes, the second I move and let a trace of cool air stream-slip over my trembling person.

Even though I cannot know it, I…well. Well.
Even though I cannot feel it, I know -- I know.

I know it’s been about this place for something resembling an age. It has to have been, right up to right now, sweating once again, but with open eyes and willing ears that are picking up the traces of the neighbors that I don’t really care to know, while still paying more attention to the light cast from this busted behemoth that sits on my lap, as it plays songs that endear themselves to me by the strength of their trills on the harmonica. These days, this thing runs pretty hot. It’s a wonder that it hasn’t run itself down. That it stays alive, throughout everything. But then again…we were focusing on something else. But it’s hard to stay with, I think.

I want to remember the quiet times.

When it was morning, when I could look out the window and see the mostly-empty parking lot, no signs of life beyond my own breath on the glass; when I could look about with a grin that might be described as impish, and run, run full-tilt boogie down and around the narrow hallways and open corridors, hearing nothing beyond the roar of caged air turning to wind; being overwhelmed by the way it found freedom around my ears. When I would listen to that, and stop, and think about how it sounded like the inside of a seashell. But all around. Like it was everything. Like it was the sound of my own blood.

That doesn’t change anything. But it seems like something I should note.

I’ve been someplace. For a while. The kind of while that seems almost unheard of, given the state of averages in regards to the business that I’m in. People in my line float about, like dandelions blown off the stalk by a pudge-faced six year old boy, only to get snuffed up by a passing adult in a business suit. It’s not a fool-proof system, and it doesn’t take long for such things to run their course.

Usually.

Hard to trace, something like that. Hard to trace, and harder still to remember. Because something like this, something that lays deep and quivers like a creature in a the solitude of a burrow; such a thing stays there, cold and alive, away from the injustice of open eyes. Unseen, but still living. Still there.

I’m losing the trail. Of the thing that’s been there. Of these words.
You know how it is. Out there, you…you. You know what it is, to be looking at yourself, looking down at a path that you’ve carved in the depth of your chest, so that you might twist your legs up and around, bending your body into something unheard of; ghastly contortions that make use of all the pain brought on by the collision of the calcium pale and the viscera glow, using the clarity of active senses to make it happen as you know that it should, driving your mind on, keeping everything focused, moving forward upon this inwardownward sort-of sorta journey. You know. What it’s like. There.

You know what it’s like to look at yourself.
To know that everything, everything is fine. The rigors of an uncaring world notwithstanding -- because those are things that you’ve long ago made peace with, those are things that you smile at with the wide teeth of a smug bastard, those are things that make you feel as perfect and wonderful as only the purity of a void can -- you know that for you, despite the domineering forces of linking trails and possible options…you know that things have turned out pretty good.

It’s going well, your life. It really is. After all, what is it that people have, beyond the realm of the world and its influence? Hearts, heads, and fluctuating voices.

Things that exist to be clear.

They’re all right there, and right now, they’re all here. There is a heart that is unlabored, a head that cannot form a coherent sentence but still seems to steam ahead, and a voice that sings along even when it’s advised against doing so. But then…there it is. Right there. Can you see it? Out of the corner of your eye, something that trembles at the base of the light that being made manifest by your screen. There it is, right there. Here and gone, but always here. Something that isn’t as brackish as fear, and isn’t as sickening as depression.
Something that you notice, living in the stillness.

A shadow that floats like vapor, obscuring the clarity of certain moments.
This very afternoon, I found myself sitting next to a girl. As a side effect of the books that we each were reading, we ended up discussing both the specifics of narrative savagery, as well as the various initialisms related to the Irish Republican army. Before she left, she asked my name. She had a British accent and eyes that were Illyria-blue.

And there it was. The whole time, there it was.

Years ago, when I was laying back on a borrowed mattress, I remember getting a phone call through the haze of a Sunday morning. It was received, and there was something about it that made me feel, oh, so, special. But now, I can look back.

And there it was. The whole time, there it was.

Recently, during the stagnant depths of this stillness, I had thought something went well. Nothing that had earned a name, nothing real, nothing tangible. Nothing yet special.
Still -- for a bit, I had thought the something was going well. And now, here today…it would appear less so.

And here it is. Right now, here it is.

In my depths, but on my skin. Despite the strength of my many desires, there’s been nothing like a drift towards a place of fury and wonder.
There’s just this.
This stillness.

In the summer heat, I still feel the tremor of a chill.
Here I am, in the Way of the World. Right?
Maybe.

Maybe it’s enough, for now, that I’ve managed to put this down, as chaotic as it might be; and maybe it’s good that soon I’ll find myself enjoying my vocation once more. Maybe it’s true that sometimes, sometimes, sometimes…sitting there at night with nothing but text and layers of stacked memory to keep me warm, it’ll find me and take a moment to blur the clarity of my world.

And maybe, it’s enough to know that I’d miss it, if it were gone.

Because somehow -- somehow, it makes me feel like me.

A time, just another time.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 03:10:00 +0000

I’m going to listen to myself, right now. But I don’t think I can hear anything. Just whistling, just echoes, just the sound of this empty room, groaning and grinding and existing around me. That’s to be expected, I suppose. After all: There’s no one else here.

Just me.

I’ve been busy as of late; compound conundrums composed of certain cads who couldn’t command their compunction for catastrophe in any fashion that could be deemed “reasonably competent”. Needless to say, it became a little bit stressful. Needless to say, it brought the fellow who is listening to the ambience of this empty room to a place where thoughts and words and wisdom and stupidity couldn’t quite be accessed, as if Mimir’s Well had been covered by a lid of the heaviest iron, and jovial Bragi had decided to go on holiday. It wasn’t best of times. Nor the worst.

Just another time.

Which is where we are now, I suppose. Just another time, just one time in the place of the other, the other being the last. The previous. The last. Whatever. A year began, the same as any other; my dear sister’s birthday came upon us, and just a day later, a new man came into an office. People were happy, people were proud, people waved flags, people had things to say. Good things. Such things. Things are bad, but everyone takes a day to start singing for the prospect of the good. Things are good, while everyone else’s things go the way of the bad. True, Life, Love. Good, Bad, Weird. Way of the World. Right?

Just a new year.

Right you are. Right here, beside me, as is everyone else, even though they’re nowhere. But the times they are a changin’, as the day to day keeps up appearances, and most people are waiting for something new to happen, perhaps because of this cool new cat who is sitting in that chair made for men to be big, or perhaps because they know that as history repeats itself, and as years tumble forward one into t’other, that things are going to be made new, things are going to be different, things will tumble and burn and fall and crash and rise and gain and grow and smile and then fall down one more time. It’s what happens, it’s what will happen, it’s probably what’s happening. Because that’s what happens. And as surely as I’m sitting here, looking forward to the next episode of United States of How I Met 24 House Lights, I know that this is how civilization goes.

Just a time, like all the others.

I was busy, before. Busy doing very, very specific things, writing down so many numbers that were importantly separated by semicolons as opposed to colons, making sure that all fell into place, digits and fades and colors and chyrons and mattes, all exact, all to the frame. I did those things, made them exact; and then, and then, someone else screwed it up. Part of the business, the stressful part. The part belonging to those certain cads, falling into their aforementioned compunctions. The part that makes me so, so tired. Tired enough to step forward, I suppose. To try something just a little bit different, even though it puts me into quite a different position: The position where I might tumble. And burn. And fall. And rise. And gain. And grow. Just because I can.

Just because that’s what happens.

A minor sequence of maybes.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:32:00 +0000

Weather has come to our city again.

Out of our bleary smoke-choked California sky, droplets are forming, water is falling, landing, splashing on the ground. The earth underfoot is turning dark and thick, as earthworms writhe outward in an attempt to breathe. They’re drowning, they are.
They need the air to keep them going.

Part of me wonders if that means something, even if I know that it really doesn’t. Simulacra and Simulation; “Unless you want it to.”
Maybe it’s a want, more than a wonder.

Maybe I don’t care, and I just want my fingers to be moving.

Maybe I should shut up, and listen to the way the rain falls.

Maybe I should do more than listen.

Maybe I should try something, something more.

Maybe I should try to know it.

Maybe I should slip on my jeans, tug on my socks, jam on my shoes, and walk outward, out into that. Bare-backed and Rain-slicked, all in some attempt to breathe.

Maybe I should get wet.

Maybe I should close my eyes, and get to sleep.

Maybe I should take that time to stop worrying about what is going to happen on the day after the day that is now today.

Maybe I should worry more, instead.

Maybe I should spend tomorrow (which is today) thinking of an explanation. Something solid, something fierce. Something quiet, but not, not, not something cold.

Maybe I should pretend that it won’t come up.

Maybe I should get away from the unpleasant moments of the future, and focus on the sounds of this place, right now.

Maybe I should close my eyes.

Maybe I should listen harder, letting the sound of the traffic bleed through. Let it mingle, maybe.

Maybe I should sing to myself, just a little.

Maybe I should stop singing so much.

Maybe I should be worried about the eyes that look.

Maybe I should sit here.

Maybe I should rest here.

Maybe I should figure something out.

Maybe I shouldn’t.

Maybe…yeah.
I mean…yeah.

It’s like that, out there. The clouds are rolling, making no noise that I can hear; yet I can hear them nonetheless. This is good, I say. The rain has come out of dirty skies. The fires are in the ground, in our hearts, not in our air. It’s a moment to listen, not to speak.

So -- for now -- that’s what I shall do.

A dream and a dream and a concert and a fall.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:27:00 +0000

Earlier this week, I had a dream.
It happens, I guess, and it wasn’t much to write home about: Just a simply-structured situation where I found myself at my old grade-school, suffering my nervous ticks through a one page test on transitive verbs in my 8th grade math class, all with my current boss playing the role of teacher. Not much happened.

But still. I remembered it.
That’d be the odd thing. For me, at least. Because it’s not something that’s done. It’s not something that I really do, as if my conscious thoughts were trying to create a buffer zone, a dense wall built of spittle and tar and chunks of dried-out bread, building it high to keep my subconscious and my open eyes in a place where they can cohabitate, but not coexist. It’s rare, truly rare that I remember my dreams.

Earlier this week, I had a dream.
Another one. A second one. And…and I remembered it.
It was stranger, this one. Longer, and stranger, and far more dangerous. Still, in the end, after all of it -- after the sudden screeching halt of my cars tires, and the sudden dive behind the barricade on the suspended bridge; after the excessive debris came crashing towards damnation upon the Earth, and the entering without breaking but still without asking; after the garbage can full of hot urine, and the solemn summation outside of a screen door where I sat next to a mustachioed police officer while being calmed by the gentle lapping sounds of the sea -- not much happened. There were some wacky circumstances, but I got out alright. Except afterwards, I remembered.

Again. I remembered again. And as I said, this time, it felt far more dangerous.
I expressed this sentiment to someone, the very next day. Not just the explanation of the events -- because again, while amusing, it wasn’t exactly a holy terror riding roughshod across my mindscape, laying waste to all thoughts that I could ever hope to have. It was the way that I felt afterward, in the new light of day. It was the memory that did it, the memory remember-ed. When I felt my temples that morning, they seemed dense and malignant, as if a tooth were rotting inside. So I told someone. I told someone about my nervousness, about this transparent ghost from my subconscious, the one that found itself transubstantiating into a solid thought under the glow of fluorescent work-approved bulbs, the one that used its new weight to lay heavily upon my blade of nerves, not caring as it began to cut deeper. My friend, she told me to wonder, “Why?”

Why feel that way?
Why worry about dreams made solid, even if they rarely choose to make themselves known? Why care about newsreels cut and color-timed by random happenstance in the depths of the subconscious, burdens let loose in a dark room for the sole purpose of a safety-net for sanity, helping me and you and I along a guide rail so that we might fare better in our waking hours?

That’s…that’s a damn fine question, I tell you what.
So damn fine, that as is our custom, the answer is hard to find.

I know that for a long time, I’ve found myself wary of dreams. Both kinds: The thoughts of the resting night, and the aspirations of the driving day. One because they represented thoughts that could never really be realized, ideas that existed only in chaotic realms, sometimes to be harnessed by other ideals, but never really there as a solid benefit, never helping nor harming in the way that me and you and I have grown to appreciate, in a world of consistently better things. They’re just…there. And for a man that hates sleeping, it always feels better if the act doesn’t leave things behind.

As for the other?
Because of what I’ve seen them do. Human beings wearing themselves down past flesh and into bone due to the misjudged, sometimes misguided desire to consider themselves as human doings. People should keep trying, of that I’ve no doubt, but still… “Dreams shouldn’t control you. You should control them.”
Sometimes, it’s alright to be content. Maybe.

Maybe.
Maybe I was thinking about that, while at a show last night. About those ghosts of the subconscious sticking like spurs underneath my ribs, striking me more with the sudden metallic cold than the scent of my blood in the air. About those fateful aspirations, the kind that lay waste to men that sometimes might be construed as Good. John Darnielle was playing, as he is wont to do. And as I was watching him, Miss Kaki King was watching that mans back. Eyes riveted to that space, fingers moving in the dim light, as if she were seeing the future unfold on that dark patch of cloth. Who knew what her aspirations held, and who knew what her subconscious wanted her to think; who knew that the force of that room bursting with energy and love and sensation and thoughtless, fruitless, thankless desire were enough to strike someone down where they stood?

Someone was struck down.

A woman, a girl fell in front of me, her body going limp in a flash of time that couldn’t even be considered a second, sending her falling, crashing, dropping down onto the surface of my knees. I caught her; a reflex action. A cradling action, bringing her down to the floor, trying to figure out what was going on without losing hold of the sudden weight that had been brought upon me. This happened to me, once before. A girl got drunk and fell on my head, as I was squatting down to give the lengths of my legs a rest. On that previous night, she laughed, and I silently rolled my eyes and went the way that I knew was mine. I thought that this happened to me, once before. This night…not quite. I was wrong. Looking at her face, I knew I was wrong. Hearing her boyfriend’s voice, I knew I was wrong. Her eyes weren’t moving. They just stared straight ahead, as if they were made of glass. I snapped my fingers, dropped my sweater upon the ground as I tried to get a better grip, moved my knee underneath her to support her weight, all while the lad she knew was calling into her face, trying desperately to get a reaction, to get some sort of action, to see some indication that sparks were still flying in the engine of her heart. As I held her, I felt something wet expanding on my knee, and without any clarity of vision connecting the thoughts, I found myself in a moment where she was dead. Whether it was true or not, I couldn’t really say, but to me… Her skin was so pale.

Like rice paper wrapped tight around a spring roll, showing the immobile pink and blue underneath. Her eyes still didn’t move, even as colored lights still rained down upon us, the various hues giving her skin an illusion of a life song that made clarity all but impossible in the situation that we were presented with. In my arms, was a ghost. No Conscious, no Subconscious, no nothing left to worry about. As I glanced up to see that the person who had accompanied me for an evening of musical revelry was dialing the appropriate numbers, the girl’s friend who was a boy and I set to work cradling her within the womb of our arms, trying to carry her back towards life. Pallbearers, working in reverse, drawing her back from her supposed grave as best as we could.

Around the edge of the crowd, they cleared the way; they parted easily without a word. The music played on.

We stumbled outside, propped the limp form up in a chair, shouted with clear, directed voices, waved an LA Weekly in her face, trying to force air toward her as it is done in the moving pictures, brought out cold water, rubbed it around her eyes, felt the bass pumping through the wall of the club, waiting for the siren to begin making its way down the boulevard, hoping to see a lucid spark, trying to figure out a new motion, one that would serve the right purpose, bringing this situation to a place that we could manage. A place where there were no ghosts, and no subconscious. Just open minds, and thoughts singing aloud, clear as bells of brass.

She came back to us. Frankly, suddenly, immediately. As if someone had flipped a switch, her voice came to her mouth, and she wondered aloud just what the hell had happened, her eyes moving freely while surrounded by skin that was still so, so pale. As the siren began to reach our ears, I looked down and saw the dark patch of dampness on my knee that was growing chill in the night air. It was what had supported her, her lower extremities, back when it was bad back in there. She had urinated on me.

In her more lucid state, she thanked my friend and I. She shook my hand, and asked my name, which I happily gave. I’ve forgotten hers. I’ll never see her, and I’ll never remember her name. Just how my mind works. She got questioned by the FDLA about her health as well as food/alcohol consumption, while my friend and I stood off to the side. Eventually, she signed herself off, and her lad and she wandered off to a place where they would eventually discover that his car had been towed. But before that was revealed, it was just my friend and I, left alone out there in the night. When all was said, and all was done, I noticed my coat resting in a bundle on the edge of a sign by the door. I still don’t know how it got there.

So then. All that we’re told inside our heads, all of the horrors that erupt in the spaces of our dreams, all of the wishes that tear us apart like screws driving into meat; well, they are important. Like so many things that I know that scare me, that I know I don’t desire, sleep and wishes and the sun on my face…I know that I need them, sometimes. I hate those ghosts, fading in and out. But even with that said, I think that I know something else. In my lucid mind, in the thoughts that I make for myself, formed with the clarity of cold air and buzzing light.

Dreams -- Dreams cannot tell you what you are.
And they can’t -- they can’t tell you what you’ll do.
As horrid as your mind might make you feel, in the real world, you might still do the right thing. You might not.

But hey…there’s a chance. Whether you dream it or not.

***
*
***

In the process of writing this, I found that I had fallen asleep. There I was, listening to live recordings made of .m4a formatted audio through individual Quicktime windows, when all of a sudden my eyes were open. Daylight was setting the room aglow through the diffusion field of my thick curtain, keeping it bright, but keeping it soft. Night/Day. One to the other, no time in between. When my head rose up, there was no fear, and no uncertainty. Although logic regarding sleep cycles state otherwise, as far as I could recall, there were no dreams.

It felt good, crossing that divide. Quick and clean, solemn and steady.
So perhaps that’s it…moreso than any deep seated contradictions, or fears that give way to the Right Thing in a pinch. It’s might just be a desire to step away from that yawning black pit, taking it as a fresh start every morn. Here are our thoughts. We’ve made it, me and you and I. Our eyes are open, and there are things to see and say.

I am refreshed, and I am ready, with no baggage of the night before weighing me down. Duty-free. This is how a day should begin.

And today, I'm glad it has.

A fucking fuck, you fuckers.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 03:52:00 +0000

Ok.

You…You madcap society of delightful fiends, who run across the countryside with wind blowing through your hair, trying to fight your way towards something sight unseen. Wonderful people, beautiful people, ebullient people; people all over the place, who I can’t manage to lay my eyes on outside of my window that fails to look over the Earth, giving me no sights, but plenty of sounds.

Originally, that paragraph was supposed to lead us somewhere else. It was going to talk about you, and I, and grand wonderful things. It was supposed to segue into a series of sentences that would essentially call David Foster Wallace a cock for subjecting himself to a short drop and a sudden stop, tearing himself free of this moral coil, and proving himself a coward. He had been a lion, but he became a coward.

That’s where this was, a short week ago.
And still…just like I felt when Hunter S. punched his own ticket, it seems that the grand and the great take themselves a notch or two down when they do this to themselves. How I felt, how I feel. But even so, even with that being the case, I just can’t seem to shout.
My eyelids are falling -- I’m becoming weary, with my feet up high and my head laid back. Too tired to scream out about this sort of thing, unlike the week before when I blasted songs about an Aeroplane over the Sea and drove through a sky devoid of stars. There was anger, then.

Not now, you lovely bunch. Not now.
Let us just sit here, you and I.

Let’s sit here, and think about the things that we like and the things that we love. Details and rain and soft loving smiles. Supposedly godly things, things that survive through devilish hues. Things that make the world run rivulets around our spines, like cherished sweat falling down all of our broad backs, making us feel as if a job has been done, has been done so well.

I’m tired, and I’m ill.
My eyes are welling up, and just last week a good friend who keeps getting better sent me salutations that eventually admitted that she wasn’t in a good place. Another friend got shit-canned for no good reason, and all I could do was bake her cookies and listen to her speak. My Dad’s dog died, and My Mom’s Mom has had attacks on her heart. A plane crashed, and a train crashed. High-profile people are making unintelligent pitbull jokes.

But the Mountain Goats are playing on. Cars are running by on the freeway, keeping life after life contained within them, bursting at the seams with sordid and spectacular stories while somehow keeping it all held in. Friends I know are working through the problems that they have, holding foreheads together in displays of meaningful intimacy, all because they want to fight for a world where love works out. People are working, flirting, dancing, moving, driving, making cookies and carrying on.

Somewhere that I can’t see, there is surely another tired person somehow getting by, and a host of sad, sad people still standing up with feet planted firm, looking out the window and learning to stride again in a manner that reminds the world itself of voices singing songs. Way of the World. Right?

Right here.
Right now.

There’s air in our lungs, good world of folks. There’s blood in our veins, surging from our hearts. There’s heat in our bodies, noises in our ears, churns in our bellies, and sensations on the surface of our skin. And I say for you, for us, that these things keep us going. They must. They have to.

They will.

A burn on the world.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:35:00 +0000

You could see it from the freeway. Going up, up into the sky, mingling with the particles of smog like blood pooling in water. It turned the air into a sickening yellow cloud. Anyone driving by, they could see it. Helicopters soaring overhead, vivid orange colors dotted, dancing through that nasty yellow. There sat slouch-backed I, one person, staring it down, watching entropy work its way upward towards the blue, hazing up the gentle air. The air that we happen to breathe.

Well, it happens, and we -- this stink of a sweatpit of a claptrap of a squeezebox of a limpet of a city, that sticks to the side of greater whatevers with a sense of purpose that doesn’t seem to make much sense -- are still here to breathe. As it happens, as it stands -- it’s terrifying. As terrifying as a day. As terrifying as a life. Watch it: there it goes on.
All the time, this happens.
All the time, this stands.

All the time, this is what we view, and keep on living through.
After the smoke went higher and higher, just like the Sun in the Sky, I went onward to the post office. It was where I had been going, all while something burned hot underneath the heat. It was full of people.

There they were, the lot of them in a holding pattern. Holding off on living for however much time they would be spending under those buzzing lights, smelling nothing but the sweat deposits building on people’s shoulders, and the scent of cardboard in the air. It was hot. It was something, it was something, it was something…it was something to see.

It really was.

Because the post office is like an airport, or a traffic jam, or a frigid street corner, where people gather while waiting for the bus -- it’s a place where people can be seen. Their fibers start to unravel, because of the heat and the cold and the tedious sways and half-hearted half-steps. It’s where people let elements of their façade start to flake away, falling down like their skin, hitting the floor, becoming the dust.

Outside, the world was burning up.
Inside, the world was burning down.

It was a place where people could be seen.
Like the balding man with sweat-stained shirt of robin’s egg blue, holding sadness back in his eyes, only letting it escape through the distance of his thousand yard stare. He looked worried about something as his young son came up beside him, gibbering happily about the dinosaur on the poster that stood to remind people about the eventual switch to digital television signals. His father nodded his head, while never moving his stare from their spot in the vicinity of nowhere. But he…he cradled his son’s head, carefully, delicately. As if it were the only thing that he knew was real. In the face of his terrifying life, that was the only face that he could feel, like the hands of the blind, feeling out love.

He was living through the ways of the world.

PS
I got a new job so you dont have to worry about being paid on time ever again. Im sorry about everything.

That was the notice scratched on the back of a piece of scrap paper, pressed against an assortment of other things so that I could not see the other side. The man with the new job was sending a money order, with the note to be delivered alongside. He was two people ahead of me. He borrowed my pen.

He was getting by, as best he could.
All the while, things were burning.

Things are always, always burning. Out there. Way of the world.
Right?

I suppose so. I suppose it’s terrifying, in a way. I suppose it’s comforting, in a different way. I mean it. Because if things are always burning, that makes it easier to understand when things are happening closer to home. Things are happening, out there in the world. To people of mine.

And yet, as people speak in hushed tones, I find myself surprisingly unafraid. This is what happens, as the world out there continues to burn. This is what is supposed to happen, so that the world might turn. Sun in the Sky. People who cry. Moving on, getting on by. In a terrifying world, where people can be watched scrawling fear on bits of paper, where men can stare into an abyss but still hold onto something they know is real, then that which is always happening -- naturally, expectedly -- is nothing to fear. Entropy burns the world down, while life builds it up again.

So don’t cry, dear people. Look out there, out at the haze from the fire.
Look at it, and don’t worry.

Things will grow again.

A series of cracks in memory lane.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:35:00 +0000

Today, after wandering past famed director Rian Johnson and famed semi-useless lump Lindsey Lohan in relatively quick succession, I ran into an old friend. An old friend with a cackling sort of laugh, and a mouth full of yellowed teeth. I’ve known him for most of my life. And yet, standing there in the hallowed space of the Arclight entrance, under the knowing expanse of the big movie board: he scared me, a little.

His presence, and his grin.
It makes me think, if only for a moment. Which is just as well, I suppose. Moments are all that I ever seem to have time for, these days. So! Right then: I’ll take that thought, I’ll take that moment, I’ll take what I can, and see where it lets me go.

It seems, that as a person, I can never quite handle the past. My past, I mean. My memories of days gone by seem to fall out of my head like flakes of skin taking their leave of the body; layer by layer, I build them up, and layer by layer, they’re lost to the air. Persons places things, all those nouns that combine to form the elements of a life. Gone.

Replaced by meaningless trivia and odd, dangling things, such as words that are beautiful in their specificity. Case in point:

sup·pu·rate: verb - to produce or discharge pus

See what I‘m talking about?
See how grand that is? That word, that simple bloody word which serves no other purpose than to describe the status of pustules and sores, or open wounds from motorcycle accidents that are advancing in a stage towards healing. These are the things I remember. The things that none care about, not even I. Except I do, I do care. I care about the silliest of things that fill my empty mind.

On this very same day, I came across yet another remnant, yet another person from the past. A person that was a friend, while all the while not quite being a friend at all. He was the lover, the love, the person for that friend of mine. That one friend in particular.

The one who I remember.

I remember this fellow, too. The things that happened in his wake, the things that came about. The places that he supposedly went. I’d often wondered what had happened in the end. If only because he never gave back my copy of The Dark Knight Returns. Ashes to ashes, whatever that means. I was surprised. I was confused.

I didn’t know what I should say.
If there was anything to be said, anyway. Because c’mon…we weren’t really friends. He would give me discounts on my cup of coffee as an act of civil recognition, an act pointed more towards his special lovely than anything really having to do with me. I was her friend, and he chose to respect that. That, and he was nice. He still is.
I can hope that he always will be.

But I won’t…I won’t know. Because I’ll let this encounter drift, just like so many other things. Just like all those people from my past, the ones that others choose to keep in their spectrum, learning about their lives, the things that they’ve been doing, the people that they’ve chosen to kiss. My old, cackle-mouthed friend, he spoke of people whose names I had nearly forgotten, whose time might as well have stood still. My younger, not-quite-designated-an-acquaintance friend, he told me of the things that he’d been doing, the places that he hoped he might reach.

If I could just tell you what they were…

de·fen·es·trate: tr. verb - to throw out of a window.

There they go, there they go, there they go.
Out of the window, out of my world.
Out of the places that I can understand.

After all that, I went for a walk, through that shithole of a town that has slowly endeared itself to me through its gleeful tolerance of madness. So I walked through the madness, and I found a group of the mad. A sprawling, singing, drinking, laughing carpet of people, waiting for amusement in the waning light of day.

Together, they were.

All of them together, old and new friends, coming there to make a memory. Hardly caring about the weekly event that was scheduled to take place, not even noticing the monoliths of stone that surrounded the single oasis of this location, locking us in, trapping us within a wall of the things that have been done, and days that have since ended. So happy, they all were. Together. No singular person, no one fellow looking out over that bunching of banditry, looking for another to summon close and call companion. Except of course, there was indeed one. One person.

It didn’t take long before I walked away.
To do the things that I do, to think the things that I try to think. To be afraid of the things that frighten me, clawing out from the corners of sight, in such a narrow field of vision that I can’t quite make them out. I ate ramen, in the corner.

It was pretty good. Way of the world.

There hasn’t been much thought in my narrow head of late, and if I were being honest, I’d say that there aren’t very many thoughts on this page.
But there are facts, of sorts. There are useless things.
And there are words. One by one, brick by brick, layer by layer. Perhaps, that's enough for I myself to remember them.

And if I'm lucky -- if I'm so, so lucky -- I could call them a memory, someday.

A symbol of status.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:10:00 +0000

Oftentimes, when you run out of words, you change the way the words are read.

You twist, you turn, you melt. You manipulate. To change the way the words are read, the way that the sentences come across, so that the nubile-minded reader might reach into the Grand Guignol universe of the Whatever-It-Is that is presenting them with the sublime gift of printed text, if only to bring themselves ever so much closer to someone else’s headspace, if only to help people come together, like precious lovers in a movie running across the width of a 2:35:1 frame with so much careless abandon; you -- meaning I -- the proverbial scribbler; we do this when we cannot bring our capacities to manage anything else. We manipulate. I try to manipulate, when I can’t bring my sentences to a place where the main idea could be managed by anything else. It’s cheap, is what it is.

It’s cheap.

It’s also fairly common. And it works, for a time at least. But bit by inch, inch by bit, the people -- the you’s, and the I’s -- start to notice. They start to see through the mechanical nature of our proceedings, and then the take to the streets, throwing fruit that’s rotted through, so that it might freshly bud and blossom on the soil of our only pair of battered shoes. Truth be told, it’d have been a long time coming. It’s been a long time since I’ve -- it’s been a damn long time since I called myself a Writer.

And now, still: It’ll be a long time yet. If ever.

These days, all days (as is the case with the internet) I’ve been making my living doing something else. Something that I like. Something that gives me room to grow, something that will possibly let my fingers dance in a different way than that with which you precious -- so, so precious -- non-existent readers are so joyously familiar. Somewhere with people that I can appreciate, who I can talk to in dire hours; people who I would happily pick up from the airport, with a morsel of delicious muffin at the ready. I like my job enough to not mention what it is, as I’ve no desire to get TOTALLY DOOCED LIKE A DUMBFUCK. I like it enough to keep on truckin’, babydoll.

And yet…it’s cheap.

Even more than the last few jaunts around this tiny block of free webspace, wherein I danced like a silly gorramn clown with sentences hanging from the edges of my lips like churros covered in seasoned salt, dancing, dancing my way into some kind of oblivion while hoping that the precious We of us wouldn’t notice. But we -- you and I -- we noticed. And nothing happened, of course. Why would it?

How often do you wish you could manage proper words?

Constantly, I’d imagine.
“Constantly,” a precious -- so, so precious -- non-existent reader says.

As people who live in the world, we wish that we could see clear enough to let our words -- and consequently, our thoughts -- stand lean and tall, like willows laughing defiantly at roaring typhoons. We wish that they might be able to fend for themselves.
No tricks, no weapons. Skill against Skill alone.

“They get brutalized,” that precious -- so, so precious -- non-existent reader says.
“They always get brutalized,” I say, “But at least they could manage it on real terms.”

The world where I exist, where I work now: It’s a world founded on manipulative things.
It’s acknowledged, it is. To a point. It’s tolerated, it is. To a point. It’s cheap -- so, so cheap -- but I’ll be damnable entity if it doesn’t pay well.

So.
Last week was my birthday.

Here I am, a sweaty entity in the midst of a sweltering world. Not a Writer.
Not as far as we -- you, and I -- are concerned. Because a Writer means more. A Writer writes. A Writer does more than simply fill pages, a Writer does more than try to spin fancies by way of complicated jibber-to-jabber ratios, a Writer does more than simply try to get things down. A Writer writes. S/He just does.

And that, babydolls…that there is a world of meaning.
Here, here, there is a world to see. Perhaps someday I can write it down.

Until then? Until Ever?
A fool -- this fool -- will spin his wheels.

Anon.

A WHEN for the EVER.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:12:00 +0000

WHEN that time comes around, the time when I find myself yearning for steps, when I find myself desiring concrete getting softer beneath the rhythm of my steps -- when that time comes around, I never find myself expecting much. EVER.

If I did, it would rarely matter if and WHEN I would EVER find something. Those times, where I look down. Where I see the place for what it was, and find that things, that normal things always have more impact than you might expect. At first glance. At a glance. To see the world, you have to look.

I try to look. I really do.

WHENEVER I get the opportunity, I try. Most of us do, I think. I might not know, because WHEN do I EVER know anything? But I think it, goddamnit. I try to.
I try to expect something glorious, fascinating, wonderful and lush. I try to expect a nervous dive into a stank-ass pool of personality and grandeur, ranting and raving and anger and fear, countless things that affect that which is dear. I expect to be interested.
I try to.

WHENEVER something happens, I try to let it mean something.

That’s why this is funny, it seems to me. That’s why this I find this weird.
I’m sitting by myself, on that red faux-leather couch of times past, listening to the Allman Brothers play “Ramblin’ Man,” into my cochlea. If I look over my shoulder, out through the window, out into the light, I can almost glimpse a place. A place that almost seemed to mean something.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a fella sitting on the street, his back against a stoplight. He had a violin gripped between fingers that were surely strong. They have to be strong. Fingers and arms, gripping as tightly as can be done, moving assuredly, swiftly, sharply. It’s the only way you can play. It’s the only way it can be done right. He was busking in a decidedly non-showy manner, nothing but his checkered shirt on his back, his violin in his hands, and an empty tin can, polished to a brilliant sheen. The can granted images of a man on the rails, washing metal in clear river water. And it reminded me of a WHEN.

EVER since past.

I moved on.
Until I saw that fellow again.

Same spot, same checkered shirt, same gleam of machine-fashioned tin. Except this time, something was different. Except this time? The fella had hisself a banjo.

Just sitting on that corner, with assuredly strong fingers picking themselves something that could be called Banjo Fury. That’d be a reference, if it wasn’t just a wee bit off. But then again, then again, then again…the whole thing was just a wee bit off to its own side. It’s a combo that you don’t see all that often. Violinist/Banjolier. In my own life, I can only recall one such previous instance. And WHENEVER it’s remembered, I find myself struck down.

Even after time has passed, it’s surprising how little it takes.

WHEN certain times come, I find myself talking within this light of boxes -- scratch that/reverse it -- box of lights about a period of my life where things were not getting better, instead always sinking towards the bad. If you’ve read these things, you might know. You might think you know. You might think you know what happened, you might think you know what it meant. You might think you know how bad it was. Believe me, good friends, good family, good people whom I love with all that I can muster -- believe me, such things are probably beyond what can be explained. Not to be known.
Not EVER.

There was a time WHEN things were bad. WHEN I heard the siren call of the violin, WHEN I heard the spark of the banjo string. EVER and EVER, I run these times by my understanding of the world. And EVER and EVER, I find myself a little bit lost.

On that street corner, only a few days ago, I couldn’t have told you what I was looking for. But believe you me, nice people -- it sure as fuck-balls wasn’t that.

I might have kept looking forward, but there was water in my eyes. So I looked away. So I walked away. I looked again. I walked back. WHENEVER and EVER, I walked in circles around that block. Wondering what there was to think. If anything at all.

I looked around, at the other things that might be seen on the scene. I looked around. A too-young girl with attractive socks, men who reeked of ganj; the roadtrips we will never take, the days that run so long. In my head, instruments dueled away, refusing to be lost. So I walked away. Not far.

WHENEVER I feel depressed, I go and eat Ramen by myself. Not that it makes me feel better -- it’s simply what I do. I go and I eat the food that makes me sweat. Sweat like I’m sweating right now. Seeking clarity through the water in my eyes.

WHENEVER I feel lost, as a person, as a man, I sit down and watch Fred Rogers speak before Congress. Not that it puts things in perspective -- it’s simply what I do. I sit and I watch the things that make me cry. Cry like I did on that corner, back where. Seeking clarity through the water in my eyes.

WHENEVER I bring myself out into the world, I never expect to be introduced to anything of particular consequence. Because that’s not how the world works. There are always things, various bits of life ringing out like the clearest bell on the tallest hill, echoing across our landscapes, singing in our ears. But rarely, if EVER, do we notice. The ringing is loud, but most of the time, WHEN we hear it, the frequency is just beyond our range. We never think we’ll find something. Not something that will change our time, anyhow. Nothing like a fateful knock on a wooden door. Nothing like spittle flying on wings of misdirected anger. Nothing like lives that aren’t really worth anything, but still shouldn’t be considered cheap. Life is never cheap.

WHEN it finds us, we’re not going to be ready. Not EVER.
WHENEVER it finds us, we always just do the best we can.

A stageplay that is not a stageplay, that makes no sense but that's ok. -OR- A straight line.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:20:00 +0000

INT: A ROOM - ANYTIME

(A room. A man enters, with hands that shake like they’ve been living through fear. He stares at No-One. He’s looking at us.)

… : Verily, verily, hither and yon. I knew a guy who broke his leg once, doing little more than just walking down the street. When he was on the ground, I took his hand; I held it as he wailed. If I’d seen it actually happen, I’d have laughed.

(A man enters. Another man. Not the same man. How different do you want them to be? That’s how different. Distinct. Separate. They’re similar.)

--- : I’d never have believed it. Not a dash of a snowball of a foundation of a beautiful chance. Where?

… : I stay awake at night, thinking about that. Do you know what that says about me?

--- : Where’d you go?

… : It says that I’m human. A person that lives and breathes in the world we were given. We gave in. We’ve taken. We took it, ourselves.

--- : Where’ve you been?

… : It makes me fear what that means.

(The man turns, looking at the other. The another. The another man. The another man doesn’t flinch.)

… : I think I’m in a desperate place.

--- : Is that where you’ve been?

… : Still there, I am. Verily.

--- : Glad to hear that there is a somewhere. If it were here that I was hearing, I’d be cross. Where did you take yourself, that’s a here to there? Where?

… : Down a ways.

(The man turns back towards us. Addresses. He looks hungry.)

… : S’ further than you’d think. And nearer.

(The one looks back at the another. He looks full. Which one? Pick one.)

… : I’ve missed it here.

--- : Here is where we’ve felt missed. Being missed was not never ever to be our mission. Where we are feels left behind.

… : Verily, verily, hither and yon.

--- : You never made any sense to me.

… : Was I supposed to?

--- : I haven’t a compatriot’s inkling of a semblance of a resolute clue. What’s the sense in something not-sensical? Things have to make sense, Mr. Man. If they do-ent, what’s to prevent the truant-truancy of mindliness? Where we are is where we are to be.

… : The world makes sense. Verily.

--- : Of does it course. Of course it does.

… : So it does.

(The man wrings his hands, as if he were trying to scrape them clean with little else than the particles that betray the visual spectrum. He cannot see them, they cannot be seen, but they have been seen, they have been categorized, they have been documented in tiny notebooks in handwriting as small and neat as that dust in the wind. The man sighs, but it is not a sad sigh.

Listen to yourself. To yourself sighing. Go ahead. I, and he, and you again, and the another, you and I and he will wait. Did you hear it? Was it special? Of course.)

--- : If all we have is the physically material, then all makes sense in the interlocking building blocks aside from the positively ephemeral, which is just a silly serious of stupid scenarios. Silly so silly.

… : He’s not wrong.

--- : He being me who is I. WHO IS yet another.

… : Yes, you are. And no, you’re not. You’ve wanted to know where I’ve been.

--- : I have notes of you, Mr. Sir Man. To leave them incomplete would be practically preposterous to a degree which I cannot found on confounded logic. It’s irksome, to be sure to say the least.

… : You’ve wanted to know.

--- : Yes.

… : Where I’ve been.

--- : Yes.

(The another nods, clears his throat, and bows his head as if he were in silent prayer. The man takes a step backwards, then turns, moves forwards, looking out over the sea of non-committal faces, including you, and yes, including this me that is sitting here. And there. He crosses his arms. He pulls a small bottle of mouthwash from his pocket, takes a small swig, and then swishes it around his mouth, loudly as he possibly can.

[He has a microphone to aid him in the purpose. An old-timey radio mic, lowered from the ceiling like at a boxing bout. It’s his, and his alone]

He looks ready for something. Whether he is or not? You know. It remains to be seen. You know.)

… : I like to speak. I like to make guttural vowel sounds in the depths of my throats. I like it when my thoughts are known, when and where they’ve gestated enough to be worthy of regarding. I like it when I’m worth something.

I could tell you a story. The story that I’m not telling him, this other another. I could tell you of that day before, when I was walking down on the path from whence I had came, singing quietly to myself about days that had never really happened. My ears were plugged with the sounds of my words, and I can tell you that I was nothing if not happy. I can tell you that. As I was walking, my footsteps began to slow, as the path that I was on suddenly seemed different beneath the beating heart of my bare, exposed, pasty white feet. The ground felt as if it were covered in darkness. It FELT like it.

I could tell you that. And you, just as likely could tell me that it doesn’t make sense. Because you’re right -- it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense, and in the words of the world, it didn’t happen. Undoubtedly, you’d be right. It didn’t.

Even though it did. To me, it did.
How do I explain it? There’s no way to explain it, because it’s not real. That doesn’t matter, but I still know that it means nothing. I felt it, so it matters to me. There’s value to an enigma, even if there’s no true joy to a mystery.

(He bows his head, as the another did, as if he were lost in prayer.)

… : Pointless, but beautiful. Not quite meaningless. If you feel something -- if it makes you feel something, it’s not quite meaningless. As long as you still know. Know the world, I mean. As long as there are still no lies. Verily. Verily. Hither and yon. Amen.

(He takes a step backwards, out of the light. [The microphone rises] Together, he and the another are barely visible in the edges of the glare. The man is breathing harder now, and somehow he can still be heard. The man looks at another. At one-another. Together)

--- : Where are you going, where have you been?

… : Haven’t the foggiest.

--- : Who do you think you are?

… : No one of consequence.

--- : Consequently, you consign yourself towards a conundrum. I hate you for it. I Hate You For It. Make sense, please. Make sense, you git. Make sense, you trollop. Make sense, you anarchist. Make sense, you antichrist. Make sense, you dingo who ate a baby. Make sense, you fool. Make something, something of worth. DO IT.

… : I’ll make what I please.

--- : What pleases you is meaningless.

… : Not quite meaningless. Fall down go boom.

--- : Meaningless.

… : A shapeless man cries out through a rainstorm of tears. No one answers.

--- : Devoid of meaning.

… : He imagines himself in a monochromatic hallway.

--- : Without meaning.

… : He reaches into your face, pulls, tugs, jerks upon it, finding something, anything, everything that can be tugged free. Your eyes are weak, your skin sallow and pale. You fall, because you can. Fall down go boom. Verily, verily, hither and yon.

--- : MEANINGLESS.

… : You think so?

--- : I do, you devilish do-not.

… : You know so?

--- : How can I?

… : Precisely. It’s pointless, but it might not be meaning-less.

--- : Meaning?

… : You fall down. Go boom.

--- : Verily.

(Another falls down. Goes boom. Fall down go boom. You get a headache. It thunders across the stage, cracking the walls, causing lights to shake from the tight hold of their casings, raining down shatterings of glass that fill the air with sparks and shrieks and puffs of smoke. There is darkness, here. Nothing left but. But you and I, and whoever might be up there, doing and being and meaning nothing. Whatever. We’re quiet, now.)

... : Verily.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd -SCENE-

A homing beacon.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:34:00 +0000

What was promised has yet to come.
So here instead, is something muddled and addled and mad. Cheers.

*

I came here to see a friend.
That one friend, actually. The one that once upon a sometimes propagated this place with mention after mention, the only person who ever really took root in these bimonthly (not always) writings of white on black.

Until she left.

On that day, she was the one to whom I said goodbye. “Sayounara, fweckles.”
That was two years ago. Not exactly, but very nearly. Here we are, two years on.
Here I am. I’m sitting in a bowling alley on a Saturday night on the classically afflicted Ides of March. I’m alone. Surrounding me are people of various assortments, decked out in tattoos and leathers, while they stand next to families, and four year old girls who wrap themselves cozy in squishy pink coats.

I’m in West Allis, Wisconsin.
In this sprawling expanse of land that’s somewhat like a colder version of Northridge, California covered in dirty slush, there exists a bowling alley that almost seems to boil; with a demanding need for human interaction, a place that gets by with the action of throwing open its doors and declaring Ten Pins To Paradise!

There are a lot of people in here. Good people, I’d wager. Rebels without causes who haven’t yet stepped out far enough to realize that they haven’t got anything to rebel against, managing to somehow spread their wings across the contradictory identities of the sloppy chaos of the lanes and the comparatively (surprisingly!) cosmopolitan built-in-bar. Smoke Free Bar/Smoke Filled Alley. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

But then again, maybe it’s just me. Just me, the only fellow here on his lonesome.
I came here to be around people.

Earlier this evening, when the dear friend and I were out for a bite, she talked about how it had been when she had first returned to this state, state of being, state of mind; state of winds that cut thin, like slivers of paper that send stinging pain through your ears. We talked like we once had, in diners and dirty cars, either one or the other of us saying a bit too much while one or the other egged on. She talked about how hard it had been. Leaving things behind.

Leaving people, leaving places, leaving what felt right.
For a long while, she wasn’t happy.

She’s happy, now. Happy and settled (to a point; always, to a point), so much so that she had to get herself back over to work, something that I’d known about beforehand when setting this flashflood of vacation and schedule and technical difficulty and value and holiday underway. What I didn’t -- what I didn’t anticipate was the place.

So I’m in this place, watching people joyfully pantomime the lyrics of popular 90’s thrash tunes, being rowdily loud and sending balls plowing through pins with a collective skill set that documents serious effort. In this place, these people feel camaraderie run rich in the very air, warmth that overpowers the cold of the slushy outside ground, laughter mingling with the crescendo of steeeeeeeeeeerike!, lines of people coming along fine. They’re at home, in a way. I’m still lonely, and they’re at home.

Back in the earlier, it wasn’t so. I was there alongside my dear fweckled friend, feeling nothing but comfort in the waning sunlight of this place that I had never before seen. And then…it was less so. I had felt home before, at home, comfortable as a wayward lad, stretching my legs out into the frigid air with a sense of place that placed me as well, well as I could be. And then night fell. My friend was to work, and I was to sit. That feeling of home long gone. There I was, in a hotel room with a high-ceiling and little light to see by.
What could be done?

In the chill of the Saturday night, I bowled.

Five names on the board, me playing every single one. A couple of the meselfs manage to break 100. But I don’t talk, I didn’t speak. I pass the time, I didn’t extend an olive branch.
That night is done, and still, here it is. Place isn’t a home. Home is.

It just is.

It’s comfort, no matter where we are. It’s the touches that we add, the things that we make our own. The people that we grow to understand. When my friend was gone, she was here. She didn’t actually make it back, back to the point where the world made sense, until she settled herself down, worked out her workspace with people that she could grow to know, to care for. She built herself a home, covered with bricks, yes; but made of people.

That’s what we do.

I work a lot. Most of the people I know do. So what do we do with our time? How do we keep ourselves complacent, at peace, piece by piece by piece by piece? It should be obvious by now, so I won’t even bother saying it. But that’s it. We take the place that we spend so much of our time, and if only in the slightest manner, even if we don’t really recognize it, we mold it into something that is. Pictures and posters and people around.
“Do it for…,” You should know the rest.

When I’ve been around the person that I came around to be around, I’ve felt at home in this place that isn’t much like home at all. When we painted walls and tore the heads off of mudbugs; when we talked freely and well, or sat silent and stared out the window.

It hasn’t been an eventful time. But when the moments counted, I felt at home.
And that, good people, will do.

A primer.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:37:00 +0000

What is going to follow is something that I did not write, written by a somewhat forgotten whirlwind of talent that probably didn’t agree with the opinions contained within this speech in question. But they resonate with me -- they stand as true within the feeble confines of my life. So I present them here as a sort of primer; something to give you footing, so that I might elaborate with my own thoughts on the subject at a slightly later date. If that doesn’t do it for you, then let us call this a taste, a notification of something that you should be aware of, something that you, gentle strangers and friends, should take the time out of your time to stop and read.

So then.

From The Sunlight Dialogues (1973):

He leaned forward, glaring, and for a moment he couldn‘t speak. The room filled with the sound of the rain, a rattle like a river going by. He said at last, quietly, driving the words out by intense pressure, “What did you expect us to be? Are you a grown-up? Is Dad? How do you think it was all those years, listening to you two bitch, the same old sentences over and over, neither one listening for a second to the other, like a couple of deaf idiots shouting at each other in the dark? Every word he said was moronic, according to you, and any fool could see what you said was moronic, not that the Old Man didn’t trouble to point it out. And you were the people we were supposed to listen to! -- take orders from! Jesus, I’d sit there in the living room hearing you blather at each other out in the kitchen, the Old Man sitting there fuming at the table with his bib tucked under his chin like a baby’s, and you slamming around at the sink saying clever things like some brat to her mean old papa. Talk about childish! And then you’d go to bed and he’d come in in his stupid damn nightdress and beg you like a kid that can’t have candy, and you’d sit there wide-eyed like an outraged little virgin. By god it was an education! Prepared us for the world, that’s a fact. The great university, for instance, where the stupidest people you ever saw in your life get to teach you. You don’t know what it’s like. You’re so stupid you believe them -- or some of them, which is stupider than believing all of them. It’s the truth. Listen.” He suddenly stood up, as if afraid she would cut him off. “They’re like chickens, big fat stupid chickens. They come examine the inside of your brain like chickens inspecting the inside of a clock. I had an English teacher, he had us buy an anthology and then he got a different one, and every question he asked, the answer was there in the other book. There wasn’t was single thing he knew! Not one! But Jesus what a show that horse’s ass put on. He had all the gestures. He knew how to make his eyes light up just like a human being. And oh was he kind -- to fat, dumb girls. And he would lecture on what trouble they used to have getting snow cleared off the sidewalks at Hahvid. Yeah. With diagrams on the board. And another one. He taught us how to find symbols in novels. Like this blue parachute that comes down in Lord of the Flies. ‘Blue,” he’d say. ‘What does blue make you think of?’ He looked like Dylan Thomas, but with yellow hair and pink cheeks. He was in Counter-Intelligence during the War, which is why the fucking war took so long. ‘Blue,’ he would say. ‘Think now. Blue.’ Some fat dumb girl with blue pimples would say ‘The Virgin Mary?’ and he’d say ‘That’s it! That’s IT!’ Sweet Jesus please us! One class I was in, the lady brought in a World Book salesman. I swear to God. He took half an hour giving his pitch to the whole fucking class. And then the math classes. Man would spend an hour writing out on the board the same explanations you could get in the book, except the book was faster and clearer, and he knew it. He cut class maybe twenty-some times in one semester. But history! Jesus!”
“Stop it,” she said.
“Let me finish.” He was leaning on the mantelpiece now, pressing his hands to the sides of his head. “Everyplace you looked, children. You’d see them in the cafeteria primping and preening and puk-puk-padokking, speech-making at each other, some of them, and the rest of them nodding, very solemn, as if it were all oh so interesting, talking about books nobody past the age of twelve would read all the way through except to punish himself, yammering about Communism an Capitalism and the Good Lay, and back in the dorm all the baby professors would do imitations, learning the gestures and the Right Quotations, prattling about Tillich and Bishop Pike and Mr. Fromm, and relaxing their minds in the great American way with talk about baseball and football and cunts, and the brave stupid ones would talk about defending freedom in Vietnam and the cowardly stupid ones would talk about How We Had No Business There, and if you fled to where the intellectuals weren’t, it was as bad as anywhere else, cooks, bartenders, ushers at the show, talking talking talking, or standing around like mutes because they hadn’t even the brains yet for their kind of talk, not human, kids, not even grade-school age yet, big as they were, or the med-students, the real true anti-intellectuals, with their contests over how many girls they could screw, parties where everybody screwed everybody, eight, nine in a bed. Fun? Christ’s hair. But they were great stuff, they thought -- all of them, med-school children, bartender children, professor children -- they were all somebody; thought they were cops. If a movie came out that was supposed to be Art they all sat solemn and said Look at the Art; if it was supposed to be funny they all went Ha-ha, if it was supposed to be sad they made crying noises; if they were church types they preached at you, if they were atheist types they preached harder than the others. They kept falling in love, and it was like one huge chorus going up in the park, a thousand voices all howling ‘She’s different!’ But I was ready for it all. I understood. They were children, horse’s prick children dressing up. And I was one too, right -- the grouchy one that wants to play some other game, because he can’t play this one -- but say what you like, at least I wasn’t fooled. There are no grown-ups. There are only children and dead people. So I quit. Bon soir, mes enfants. For which I thank you.”
“Are you finished?” she said.
He laughed. “Am I finished. Eschatologically speaking, I am finished.”
The glass was empty, and she went to the kitchen to refill it. When she came back he was sitting bent double, his eyes clamped shut. She was glad he was in pain.
She said, “Even raving Communists believe in something.”
“All foolish people believe in something.”

That was the irreplaceable John Gardner, speaking on my behalf. Even though he wasn’t, obviously. In truth, the man himself was a professor, in his tenure teaching the likes of Raymond Carver and Charles Johnson. But he said this, once. And that can count for something.

So just let it sit.
We’ll get there.

A watchman's call.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:58:00 +0000

Shhh…
Come closer, come in.

Huddle up with me for a moment, as we sit here and be quiet. Taking a split of a second to gather in the warmth. And now that we’re here, let’s imagine there are people around us. Hustling and bustling, carrying on with the normal activities that people tend to do on lazy Saturday afternoons, that momentous occasion where they find their week in transit between the back-breaking dullness of work and the contradictory obligations of religious gatherings, between that last nightly quiet and the leap back into the fray of stillness that tears flesh like a horde of Mongols in their prime. This is the time when people are people, when they sit in the world and talk out loud, because it might be the only chance that they get.

This is the time to listen.
That was the time where I used to sit back and watch.
I don't get many chances to watch people in motion, not anymore. The reasons for this are nothing sinister, of course. Nothing sinister, nothing special -- Nothing to be called a "happening". It’s just that I find myself at work a lot, which only gives me the opportunity to survey people as they chime in with occasional storytelling and idle insults directed towards people on the other end of the phone. They’re good people; there’s pleasure to be found in that place. But it’s hard to see folks as they are. People in function are not people in fact.

So I’ve brought myself back. Back to the place that has since been morphed into a different sort of animal. I can look around from this elevated perch located in the corner of the coffeeshop that I used to frequently frequent, seeing memories of old spatial arrangements popping up like holograms in front of my veiled eyes. When I come back here, sometimes it feels like everything is nothing but a ghost. Or maybe the ghost is me; I never really seem to know for sure. In any case, when I get a chance to sit back in public, tracing the roads of memory lane the best I can, I remember the scenes that I’ve been lucky enough to see play out, even if the show on display wasn’t meant for me. Sometimes, casual voyeurism is the best way for people to figure things out.

I say this because of the condition -- that pesky “human,” one -- has a tendency to make itself known all around, in ways that are stupid and meaningful and drunk and calamitous and vengeful and quiet; lives that screech like a kestrel’s call, yet still somehow go unnoticed. Like the fellow who sits to my right, voice churning in the very back of his throat as his grinds out unintelligible slurs of speech to no one and nothing, while he clutches a copy of “High Times,” close to the silvery jacket which binds his chest together. Earlier, I’d seen that he had a can of Miller-Lite jammed unceremoniously into his back pocket, and I was amazed that he seemed to have no issue with sitting down atop of it. It makes one wonder if such a thing would ever burst into squirts of foam under his (admittedly thin and frail) weight. Later, after he took a stop in the commode, he emerged, red-faced, from the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of his back pocket. The can was gone.

I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed this. The watching.
It’s all there, you know.

Wincing before you like the sunken shoulders of that girl behind the counter, the one with a face that isn’t handshake firm. But earlier, I saw her smile. Earlier, she comped me on some eggs. I like her more than the one who stands directly to her left, the one who poses as if she were trying just a little too hard. What she’s trying for, I’ve not a clue. But whatever it is, she wants it.

I look around, I look around -- I see a lot of new faces. The girl who has her rounded features half-hidden by a shelf; the pretentious peacoat-wearing motherfucker who was slumped down on the slippery skin of the faux leather couch, who I could see beginning to sweat as our preferred star burned behind him (Now that I’ve secured his former seat on this couch, his eyes look at me with the force of the rampaging wild as he plays online poker and unsuccessfully tries to hide the porn that he keeps going back to); the mismatched couple who sits in the corner in silence. I remember how it felt, being a silent watchman in the midst. That feeling, the one of plucking plump secrets out from the air.

It really can work out fine. Where you find the trouble, is with the people that you know.

After all, it has been said -- by others, as well as by this particular fool who sits alongside the silvered growler -- that the internet is a tool that steps us forward into a new idea of the ages, helping people establish new modes of humanity when they take a second to stop looking for boobs. It changes the way that we exist. And more often then not, it also helps us watch.

There are people that we know, who won’t say things to our faces. Yet the still speak out into the ether. And we, the watchmen -- we listen.

Listen to words that are draped with ambiguity that somehow manages to cut our thoughts like razorblades as we try to puzzle out the problems that are going on in the lives of our friends, the problems and the loves and the lives, all while never stopping to ask what it all means. We can’t ask. If we did that, they’d know we had our ears to the wind.

And if they knew that, they might not say anything at all.
But as we, the you’s and the I’s, come close and come in, sitting quietly so that they might not hear our breathing -- they say things. And we listen. We watch.

We wonder.
About the lives that are going on outside of the vanishing point of our perspective, the lives that we know -- the lives we thought we knew -- that are moving forward even as we sit around, waiting for clues and voices to give us knowledge of the human stain that we hadn’t been lucky enough to discern in the quiet lulls within our own thoughts.

Here I am, waiting and watching and wondering. I don’t…I don’t know what’s going to happen. Not with the people outside of me, the people who I’ve loved. The people who send out signals of pain that race with nerve speed to my ears, to my eyes. I hope that I might figure something, so I might figure some manner of hope. Even though that’s ridiculous. Even though I know it’s pointless. Sometimes, listening is the best you can do.

After all: a watchman’s quiet voice gets lost on the wind.

A sleepless night.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 11:04:00 +0000

“He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won't go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.”

-- “Der Sandmann,” (1816) by E.T.A. Hoffman

For a good portion of my life, I haven’t been fond of sleep.
Haven’t been fond of laying my head down on cool pillows and closing my eyes, haven’t been fond of wrapping myself up tight against the chills of the night and then shifting, shifting, endlessly shifting while trying to counter-productively shout away the din of my thoughts. It started when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I couldn’t sleep.

There I was, something close to twelve, spending my nights doing little more than staring off into the darkness. No books to read in the agreed upon darkness, no laptop to stream in youtube fantasies, no hard-boiled noirs to talk me down with razor sharp patter. Just my eyes, trying to focus on patterns that probably weren’t even there. Just me, waiting for dreams that weren’t going to happen.

Even now, I rarely remember my dreams.

Back then, I’d do what I could. I’d eventually sit up because of the onslaught of boredom that had been pelting me throughout the night, and I’d do odd things like melting candles into horrific little snot-puddle sculptures made of wax. Seriously man, I aint gonna lie -- these things were ugly little fuckers. But I made them, and I kept them, and some of them still sit around, made. Some nights, I could imagine them staring at me, thin membranes in place of eyes that focused upon me through the walls of the dark. It wasn’t scary; they were mine. But these days, it’s not something I’d like to think about. It had come to a point where I harbored a general feeling of distaste toward sleep, if only as a means of self-preservation. These days, when I don’t sleep, I simply stay awake.

It’s refreshing, really.
Right now, right where I am, I can listen to the rain spatter down onto concrete outside the window over my shoulder. If I were to close my eyes and fall gently, elegantly asleep, the sound of the sky-water would drift away from me, sinking into the depths of my mind as I pull away from the sensations of the world, the ones that I actually make some attempt to understand. If I so wished it, I could step out into the wee hours, feeling my toes get wet behind the insufficient covering of my not-wool socks as I step forwards to nowheres. In particular, these nowheres seem to be. Nowhere and nothing at all. At three in the morn, most things turn out to be meaningless. But still -- I could go, if I wanted to. There’s something to be said for that.

Hey, I could probably hit up the doughnut shoppe!

After all, they’re one of the few sorts of establishments that has the unmitigated audacity to actually stay open past 1:00 AM in the (apparently?) sleepy city of Los Angeles. They’ve given me options, on those nights reminiscent of my youth; the nights where I could do nothing more than stare into walls that began to bleed by way of sheer youthful resolve, as a brain stayed open far past the point where it would feasibly remain useful. It started then, and it’s lasted until now. Long days and longer nights. Sometimes, your head forces you to live like that. To live through that. And sometimes, sometimes, sometimes…in some Stockholm sort of way, it’s what you learn to love.

I love the sounds of the world, while it exists throughout the night. When the sun shines, the sound doesn’t…feel..quite the same. It doesn’t touch the edge of your earlobe in as nearly a delicate manner, not when the general people mill about, unlike the starlight sublimation where the world is like a secret. Know what I mean?

Of course you do. You’ve heard it, you’ve seen it, you’ve felt it, sometime or another. I know you have. And so do you.

I hate sleeping. I hate missing chances to catch knowledge on the wind.

So it was really kind of shocking to learn that I’ve got sleep in me. Because lately, I’ve felt awfully tired. And moreso than ever before, I’ve found myself needing sleep. Long days, and longer nights. I come home with eyes that feel so heavy, it feels like I’ll need drag chutes on my eyelids to keep them from crashing down hard and curling themselves under and around my eyeballs by way of momentum, stretching out sheets of flesh and leaving me totally blind when morning light comes my way. I suppose these things happen, to people who make their dues along the way. Things change. Eyes close. Yet even so, I still hate it when I need to lay myself down. But even now -- now I lay me down to sleep. Et cetera.

Here’s the part where I would usually say, “And so on”. I tend to repeat myself like that. Sometimes as a part of constructing some kind of a whole with this little bimonthly word excursion, but mostly just because I have a tendency to forget what it is I’ve said in the past. It’s rare that I’ll read these, before I toss them into the world. I know them in snippets, the little bits that I focused on, the ones that I can really remember. Like the days in the waking world. You look at the bits while you can, during the virtuoso beats where you manage to keep your eyes open, and you let them affect you how they will. Most of the time, it’s the best we can do. Some of the time, it helps us pass by.

About a week ago, I was ill.
I’m better now, save for the occasional coughing fit that leaves me huddled on the floor like a wounded animal, trying to claw out my lungs with bony fingers while gossamer threads of goo cling to my lips, catching the edges of light. Before that, it was a little worse. I was walking death. I couldn’t sleep.

And yes, right then, I wanted it. Granted, it was more due to practicality as opposed to any real, any solemn desire to close my eyes…but even so, sleep was what I wanted. I wanted it to help me feel better, so that I could stop chugging low-grade drugstore Theraflu knockoffs which caused my body to become little more than a furnace, offsetting the temporary moments of respite with a burning forehead and a body made of nothing but unsettling sweat.

So there I was, sitting in the dark. Twelve years old, even though I’m not quite there anymore. When those seconds are ticking by, it really doesn’t matter, not the years before. In that place, everything feels the same. I could feel the eyes of the garish wax staring me down, wondering what to make of the hands that made them, just like it had been in those old times. This went on and on.

It was after four days had passed that someone offered me an out. Nothing terrible, nothing severe. It was simply something to take the vestiges of panic out of the edges of my thoughts, where they seemed to be clawing themselves into my eyes; it was something that might help me sleep. Alprazolam’s the name. Tiny and white. In the palm of one’s hand, they almost seem to glow. And I turned them down. I had to. I closed that hand and saw their flash slip away as they were taken from the light.

To me, it’s the only thing that made sense.

Now, I’ll have no one mistaking me: I have no patience for supposedly dynamic treatises speaking about advantages of organic foods, holistic medicines, the glorious ways of the rich earth, the old mind, the natural world. The ways that were set by people gone by. The ways set by people who died. Horribly. From a lack of real medicine, from a lack of nutritious food, from a lack of things that truly exist in a world that has gotten better. We’re alive. We’re older. We know things are out there. These days, we know where to look.

But that doesn’t change the fact that some things are ours. Our sleep and our sleeplessness. The sweat on our brow. The pain that has us choking back a grimace. These are the things that sometimes help us grow, that teach us how we might be strong when we need it, how we might be ready when trials come our way.

Whether I like it or not, my sleep is my own. And to give it up, to take my control of it out of my hands, out of my eyes, to give it away to something like that, something so small and white…it feels a bit like losing. It feels a lot like giving up. When things like that begin, I often wonder where they’ll end.

Where my spine meets my neck, I carry my burdens, as do we all. I carry them, even as they grow slick from the falling of the rain that I can still hear cascading behind me. I hate sleeping, I really do. But I still won‘t give it up. After all, every so often, there’ll be an unkind night where I won’t seem to feel that hate quite so deeply.

On that day, my rest will be my own.

A bloody business, wot wot.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 01:54:00 +0000

It only takes a little bit. Just the smallest, the faintest, the tiniest amount. Right now on the back of my hand, I can glimpse the blood. It’s barely any; it’s nothing, even. Yet there it is, oozing idly in an altogether orderly fashion that fits right along with the fact that these spontaneous bleeds come year after year, time after time. Sometimes, my hands bleed. It’s the air that does it.

And the cold, yeah. Yeah. If I tense the muscles that bind my knuckles together, I can see them move beneath the layers of skin. I can see my bones hiding, teasing my blood from beneath the surface of me. Everything moving, all these things -- anythings, plentythings, manythings -- working themselves around, waiting to be skinned out of layers of epidural that are not particularly deep. Not deep enough, anyhow. It’s strange, seeing how easily things can be set free. Sometimes, it only takes the air.

You see it all around.
In things that you care for, in things that you wish you could push down on, keeping that fair bit of pressure going, so that you might…so that you might…so that you might be able to keep them the same, keep them charged with delicate hues of warm color for just an instant more. Before they tense, before they slacken, before you feel their hands stop feeling like hands. You stop seeing movement beneath the layers. You stop seeing it anywhere. It happens all the time. It only takes a little. Or a lot. It’s hard to know, with things like this.

Holy shit, I’ve got a headache.
And that means not a thing. So!

It’s time to keep it moving, keep it fluctuating; as per the standard, we here are going to keep going with this little bit of business, so that by the time we get to the end of my standard allotment of two-pages-or-some-such-maybe-a-little-more-if-I-feel-particularly-perspicacious, we (you, of course, and I as well) will feel a fraction better about the days to come. It’s a tall order, especially for people who don’t exist, and for just one guy who rarely bothers with anything of consequence other than the mass of hours that he puts toward an output that isn’t particularly meaningful, that still manages to be satisfying on a functional level. It’s good work. I like it. But work like that, it doesn’t show blood.

If you were to peel back the layers of such things, you wouldn’t find any blood, and you wouldn’t find any tears of meaningful resolution; you wouldn’t find the liquids of thought that form pools inside mountain caverns, dark and silent and endlessly deep. No blood. Just sweat, dripping from the brows of me and mine.

So much sweat, staining everything I can see. Sometimes, it feels like it may be all that you need. But then, the air comes rushing over. With it, comes the cold. And then nothing more than looking at the back of my chalk-colored knuckles reminds me of the world out there, the things that I know, the people that I’ve felt, the people who have fallen, the people who have traveled with epic strides, the days that have felt like reality in the haze of similarity that surrounds the rest.

Sometimes, you’re reminded of things that bleed. You see the red cells for what they are, in front of your eyes coursing through the halls and filling everything with warmth and hope and dread. You see how people live. Way of the World. Right?

Earlier in this very week, something happened.
Not to me; I was off to the side, standing quiet and watching cautiously as I held a transparent plastic cup of delicious Goldfish crackers. Some people made a mistake, which turned into a series of mistakes, which turned into an acre of tasks, which turned into a kind of seething resentment that made a hissing sound as it moved through the office, filling all spaces as if it were sentient steam. There I was, off to the side. Hands still intact, eyes wide. Waiting to see what would come to be.

Things came to be. There were occurrences, yes indeedy-do. And in the aftermath of it all, that still managed to somehow be before it all began, someone sat directly next to me, ready to perform a task. There was work to be done, and we were going to do it, anger be damned, confusion be thrown to the pit of despair. It was the right thing to do, and I respected this person who had the will to do it. So then: we worked.

The countless machines around us hummed their oblivious hum, and the office as a whole went on coursing about, unaware that one of its veins had been laid bare. Blood changes color in the open air. There we were, there we sat. We didn’t say a word about the things that felt like they were happening around us, even if they were actually locked behind thin office doors. We just worked on, the person in question pulling a sweatshirt tight, while I doused my discomfort with fish-shaped cheddar goodness. It was there, in that moment, that something was said. I’m not quite sure why it was spoken, and I’m even less sure as to why it was spoken to me: The pair of us had never been particularly close. But I suppose that’s what it was; it was something to do with proximity, the way that a dying man might reach out to the person closest by, gripping onto the leg of their fatigues, pulling them down to the dirt that’s suddenly metamorphosed into crimson mud. It was a shot in the dark, looking for something, somewhere. From someone. Beat the drum slowly, play the fife lowly. The streets of Laredo grew cold as the clay. Solace, and fairness, and the things in between.

“I’m probably getting fired today. Over this.”

It was the kind of sentence that can steal the sound from a room. Uttered quietly, privately, almost as if it weren’t meant to be heard. Yet it was heard -- and in its wake, all sound went away. Not the air. The sound. Speeches, those steal the air. When someone begins shouting with propaganda force, drawing all of the breath in the room to them, so they might hold it to their breast, squeezing it tightly in order to spur themselves on, growing louder and prouder and more magnificent by the second; taking the room to a place beyond breath, where thought and beauty are the only things that are known, until all of the people suddenly feel the air that they provided rushing back towards them with the strength of a gale, turning around their bodies, pushing them up, up, up -- pushing them to the point where all they can do is stand and clap. When the air goes, the blood stays quiet. When the sound goes, all you can hear is the blood in your ears.

I practically choked on Goldfish smiles. Right now, just the thought of that seemingly bioluminescent orange turns my stomach. Because there was…there, there was a person. A person with cheeks flushed by pumping blood, trying to warm away the cold of the situation with a sweater and handful of words. Trying to talk to me, to reveal the situation. Setting it free, throwing it at the mercy of the world. If I had said anything at that moment, it would probably have sounded like, “I are NOT function OF words.” Whatever I might have said, it wouldn’t have been the thing to say.

Because the right thing to say belongs in a different world. I’ve spent the majority of this small gathering of pages talking about the blood in the hand, the blood in the pocket, the things that churn within our bodies, the things that set themselves free. When we see them out there, they let us remember something fundamental, something true. We see our fragility, we see our beauty, we see how we’re the same. The blood in our veins puts us at the mercy of the world. And there you have it: The world as a whole is an unfair place.

People go to work, people work hard. People get thrown under the bus. People get up in the morning, people brush their teeth. People get reprimanded for the faults they cannot change. And so it is, and so it always will be, and that’s not such a terrible thing. The world is unfair, such as chaos demands. Shikata ga nai.

But that’s the trick, you see. The world is an unfair place; that much will always be certain, and that much I will never even try to deny. But people…but people…but people have no right to throw fairness at the mercy of the cold. This is our planet, our world where we live; we have to do what we must. We should treat others not as we want to be treated, but as we should be treated. We have to live in the world.

So take a moment. Stand up, stretch, and go step outside. Close the door behind you, letting the sounds of your living facility be locked away from your ears, for just a fraction of a moment of your day. And while you stand there, close your eyes. Close your eyes and listen to the world around. There are people out there, with blood pulsing in their hearts, rushing through their veins. There are cars out there, churning and burning fuel, forcing themselves down roadways like energetic cells. There’s a world of lives, all of whom deserve a moment to bleed. All of whom will get it, whenever that time comes by. It’s the way of the world. There they shall be, eyes pointing at the stars, body losing color.
When the time comes, what are they going to curse?

The world?
Or its people?

What do they bleed for?

A Roman Goddess (Juno is).

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:08:00 +0000

It only took a few clicks forward into Juno’s initial succession of color-moderated shots before something…before something altogether striking happened. For me, at least.

Before everything began good and not quite proper, before the screenplay sets forth upon its trek of fingersnap dialogue and human conditions; while the majority of the audience members were still sitting back and taking care to properly situate themselves within the frames of deep blue seats, I saw something that really, truly, utterly endeared itself to me.
It got to me.

There sits a boy, there stands a girl. She approaches him, small creases forming on the sides of her mouth, marks of effort formed by hard-earned smiles. They come close. So close that all we can see are mouths surrounded by soft skin, mouths that don’t quite touch, mouths that are just taking a careful moment to breathe heavy and warm.

I see this, and I remember.
There sat a boy, and there stood a girl. The boy was me, the girl was she. Coming together in a series of moments that seem altogether separate while being all together, a myriad of feelings forever encapsulated into a series of steaming breaths. Moments in close-up. Bright eyes, close to mine; quick glances toward the door, in case her lesbian mother might burst in with the hope of catching an untrustworthy boy in the act; mouths on mouths, mouths not on mouths; fingers sliding over smooth spaces, common places that we still could not see from the proximity of our interaction; finally, a sweet voice uttering “Hi,” into the depths of my ear, a word dripping with sweat that tasted sweeter to my ear than that word ever has had the right to be. Yes. We were in love, she and I -- as simply and sweetly and completely as it gets. We were just another pair of ridiculous youngsters, but it was love.

First loves are in soft-focus.

And they are close. And there it was. There was my past, the way that it cannot help but be remembered. After that?
There were jokes.

That’s the beauty of it, you see. Because of all the elements that turn this screenplay by the indefatigable Diablo Cody (copywriter turned stripper turned blogger turned biographer turned screenwriter) into an act of wizardry, the part that makes it so goddamned watchable is that even if it didn’t bother with dredging up slivers of pastlife that make the pretentious blathering of Quarterlife seem as loaded and grating as they actually are, the words present in Juno would still get around to making me laugh like a H-I-L-A-R-I-O-U-S S-I-M-I-L-E when the receptionist at the Abortion Clinic leans in to discreetly reveal that boysenberry-flavored condoms make her boyfriend’s dick “smell like pie.”
Nothin’ says lovin’ / Like somethin’ from the oven.

Which brings us to the baby.
As I appear to not have previously mentioned, the titular character of this earnest little snark-bomb of a movie happens to be exceedingly pregnant for most of the running time. However, separating it from the recent swell of surprisingly high-quality comedies about women who are with child when they would rather not be (the charming Waitress, and the hilarious Knocked Up) Juno manages to differentiate itself: It’s not actually about the baby at all. It’s not quite about motherhood or fatherhood, not quite about buying diapers and cribs, not quite about the choices that we make. It’s about the things that we actually do, when presented with choices that we didn’t make ourselves. With jokes.
And with truth.

Earlier in this year that ends with a series of ferocious films (No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood come immediately to mind), I had the pleasure of seeing a film that was so, so, so…genuine, in the way that it conveyed human speech-interaction-emotion, the way that it wove it with music and spoke its feelings in such a way that gave us a beautiful taste of something real. Once, that movie was called. It was something special. Juno is something else altogether, but something about the pairing of them…

While Once stood from the pack by being entirely genuine, Juno earns its praise in a similar, yet significantly different manner: by being unwaveringly honest.

There’s ferocity in that, as well. Because while finding traces of reality in the world might be somewhat difficult whilst being distracted by the gaggle of golden colored runners who are continually running through the frame, while girls in high school don’t generally have such silvered tongues that they employ in the midst of Diablo Cody’s charming vulgarity, while the tone of the movie stretches us past the breaking point of things that we might call reality…it never plays a false note. It’s always true, no matter what happens, no matter what words we hear from inside the sizable expanse of Juno’s brain. Yes, even while she’s calling people “douchepackers”. It’s fierce, truth such as this.

It feels right amidst the rest of things, and it breathes warmly into the room of the theatre, bringing with it such a sense of the world and the people in it that when we come to the final, unbroken shot of the movie -- when we came to that, I stared, transfixed, at one of the most romantic images that I’ve seen in a good, long, time. It was like it was reaching out to me, one final gesture, taking a moment to whisper into my ear.

“Hi.”

-ADDENDUM-

At the request of my friend Jorge, I state this here for no particular reason: Skeet, skeet, skeet. Make it rain.

Take that how you will.

A sullen series of segmented snippets.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 07:40:00 +0000

First…

The air was crackling, electricity flying through it carelessly, as if it belonged there, not looking for any grounding. It crackled alongside the rain that fell, the two of them locked into each other through some kind of bizarre symbiosis, mutually giving each other purpose, purpose as well as life. They were both alive, both always moving, one falling, one flying. Neither cared about anything else, only seeking to continue their carefree existence. It was in this place, that the men had fallen silent.

…and then…

He was trying to make it work. It was hard, suffering through mornings. Wading through people and their stares. He would try to say what he thought should be said. He did alright. Some of the time. He didn’t know about other times. The person would walk to the bathroom. Or outside. He would get there and look up at the ceiling or the sky. Didn’t matter which. Then he would spit out all that he could. He’d hoped that no one would notice this. If they did, no one told him. He would hack it all out and then walk back into their world. He was home in the dead of night.

…followed by…

His eyes were bad, but he tried. He would lean back as if trying to appear relaxed (for the benefit of anyone who might have casually walked on by), while in reality his muscles were as taut as those of a moonlit tiger; both of them waiting, waiting, waiting for their moment. Milton only wished for things that soared across the sky.

…continued with…

I force myself to remember those things. Sitting here on the hilltop, looking over at my friend Walter, shivering from a cold that none else can feel, but all can understand. Remember those times when the world thought it was wallowing, wading through a knee-deep refuse of horror and discomfort, problems with the air and the water and the feelings and the lives and the people. People snapping down their freshly delivered morning papers, spouting off lines about the abuse and the mistrust and the anger and the deception and the real, honest to golly truth. Mothers marching down the streets, holding signs up in the air, shouting that their children are under attack by the vagrancy and the lies and the vulgarity and the depravity and the hatred. I force myself to remember. But really, I remember the children themselves.

…interrupted with…

P.S.
You can also be kind of a cunt.

…resuscitated by…

“Do you trust me?” Her voice was clear. It didn’t waver.
“Of course I do.” My voice was dry. It crackled out of my mouth, sounding as if I’d been gargling buckets of sand. I didn’t want to sound that way. I wanted to sound like I was standing tall, a man to be counted on. I’m not normally that way, and I’m usually ok with that. Usually. She was looking into my eyes.
I couldn’t look away. My face was locked in, focusing on those two tiny little dots, finding that center as easily as one might trip and fall. And fall I did, I couldn’t help it, my mind falling right down, losing myself simply because she wanted me to.

…connected to…

She was a journalist, you see. A journalist, fair and true. Not one who stood before a cameraman, feverishly checking her hair only seconds before informing everyone on a nationwide network that the building behind her, clearly burning to the naked eye, was on fire. No, she was a true journalist, in every sense of the word.
As he would learn over the course of time, she was a person who had known what it was like to be cast to the icy cold concrete floor of some godforsaken shit-hole of an African schoolhouse, all in the hopes of finding the words of the current insurgent military leader who had been holding his armaments in a house built for learning. If you knew her well enough, you could ask her to tell you a story, and she could then paint a portrait of the time that she had spent with one of the worlds greatest living authors, watching a great man wither away physically while listening to the sound of a once tightly wound bag of thought being torn apart at its innermost seams. And if you had the stomach to listen, she would eventually tell you how it felt to hold the hand of someone who was falling, falling, falling, until the very last moment where his thoughts finally burst open like an already wounded animal splitting apart on jagged rocks. She had felt him go. And she had only let herself cry once the story had finally been done.

…passed on with…

There were trees, where we were. More trees than I was used to. It felt like we were driving down a stretch of classical Americana, Mary-Jean singing silently to herself as she adjusted the wheel with casual, subtle motions. She held her cigarette close inside the car, afraid that she might toss it out onto a patch of incendiary leaves. What a shame that would be. I can just picture it: A single glowing spark from that little tube glowing just a little brighter than the rest of its brethren, its soft orange light hot enough to ruin a patch of the world. Dry leaves, resting for a moment before the next gust of wind carried on with their journey down the road. That single, hungry spark. I wonder what it would be like, driving down this tranquil lane, if all the world were heat and fury.

…and so…

The sheet of darkness covered me, black as the face of perdition.

…anon…

But now, for all that were there to witness it, there was only silence.

…so that’s something.

Right?

A picture (a review).

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:06:00 +0000

For you, a picture:
There’s a man, walking under the unwavering glare of the Sun in the Sky. His feet scuff quietly in the shallow yet always swirling dust, kicking up tiny clouds around his feet that mean nothing to anyone but him. If you could hear him, his breath would be hot and labored, coming out in staccato bursts that do nothing in the desert expanse. The man, he’s alone. The man, he’s cold.

Under the unwavering eye of the Sun in the Sky, he’s freezing.

His heat is leaving him, erupting in a steady series of gobs that force their way out despite the pressure of his fingers, the pressure that steadily wanes as the heat, the heat of him, the heat of him draws dark patterns on the dryness of the dirt. He hasn’t got long. Not long before his legs go slack, bringing him crashing down with a tiny, but thunderous echo; not long before the legs eventually stiffen, his glassy eyes fading to black with nothing beautiful before them other than the swirling dust pecking at his face.

It’s cold. But it isn’t strange.
It’s the world.

Yeah.

No Country for Old Men is cold. That much is certain.
And certainly, it’s not without precedent. Them there splentacular Coen Bros. have provided us with a multitude of offerings over the course of their filming years, films that have been funny and sad and violent and verbose and lengthy and quiet and dismal and sordid and random and obtuse. And yes: they’ve given us a wealth of things that were cold. Warm blood dripping itself icy on hardwood floors; cold sweat running down foreheads as a man dragged a corpse from the light; feelings that shatter like glass as a man with a gun in his hand dismisses emotion in order to do what must be done; something moving within us, as we see a daemon force his way down a the halls of a building consumed by angry fire; and of course, dismal landscape of blistering white, enveloping everything with truly, truly oppressive nature. Truth be told, when looking towards this New Country for Viewing Wo/Men, there are many similarities to be found.

There they are, in the quiet, and in the loud. In the spaces wide and cramped. In the worlds those Brothers have built under the Sun in the Sky.

But this…

This is different.
Even though it isn’t.
Because it is.

The differences come, and we don’t feel the same. We feel shamed and frightened and invigorated and tense and alive. We feel different. Because of the cold.

It affects us, as we sit there in the dark. Away from the light of the Sun in the Sky.
We sit down, and we watch. There they are, a small pack of people revealing themselves in full through the course of their methodology. And they do, you see. Lives and pasts, unfurling before a transfixed audience without exactly being explicitly stated, instead only being expressed by the manner in which they do things, and the way that they seem to bend down and touch the world with their fingers, as if they were looking to feel a pulse. It’s strange to me, thinking about that. Because we never seem to learn for sure. But we learn that they try to feel.

They feel cold and alone on our warm, lonely planet.
They don’t feel lonely.

They are alone.
We know this, as they discover this. We can see it in their faces: The horrifying smile of the monstrous Anton Chigurh, knowing enough to accept the ways of Chaos and the altering paths of Choice. The stoic features of Llewellyn Moss, locked in acceptance of a possibility, while still holding a silent hope -- a belief -- that there is a chance of weary absolution on the face of the Earth.

And there is the face of the Sheriff, looking as if he wants to cough the bitter taste of the world from the corners of his mouth. That’s it. That’s what he wants. He wants a sense of knowing, something for him to comprehend, something for him to believe in. A man terrified by the choices made by the Sun in the Sky. A more pleasant way of saying that there is nothing but the heat and expanse. Choices made by nothing but Chaos.
No, not lonely.

Alone.

When I sat in my seat of this film for the first time, watching the credits roll in their quiet way, I heard a man speak these words from behind my head:

“You gotta be a genius to figure this one out.”

Such words are ones that I will never really understand. Because while this film is never easy, it is certainly never difficult. It knows what it wants, and it knows what it wants to say. Sketching marks of cold across the screen with the same deliberate methods of its characters, letting us know all that we need to know. All that we need.
Not what we want. What we need.

When it was over and done with, I looked down at my hands and saw that they were trembling. Something so slight that it wouldn’t be noticed by anyone other my own self.

And yet, I was unafraid.
This film has been called nihilistic, it’s been called brutal; it’s been called numerous things, some right, some misguided. But while the world presented here is caustic, violent, and random it is never depressing. Not to me. Because this is the world that I believe in, a state of being a person beneath the Nothing in the Nil. I trembled because of immersion. I trembled because of wonder. I trembled because those Coens reached into my caffeine soaked heart and traced cold through me, with nothing more than the brutal lives of men. I trembled because I was affected, by things that I might not even be able to say.

Here I am, cold and alone on our warm, lonely planet.
Am I sailing to Byzantium? No.
But I’m nothing short of amazed.

A rhetorical question.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 06:48:00 +0000

Sometimes, there are sallow afternoons.

Where you notice a delicate throb at the back of your head, too small to really take action against, but large enough to occasionally strike you with its pulse, making you shift uncomfortably in your seat. Where your throat closes up, and you can taste something sour creeping in around the edges of your mouth, despite the fact that all you’ve had was water. You remember the water. The water was cold and sweet.

Where you sit silent, and still, and wonder, and wonder, and wonder, and wonder, and wonder, and don’t really wonder about anything worth wondering about. At the end of it.

To-night, under the cover a fresh evening, I went out and bought a bottle of Cool Mint Listerine™ at a 7-11. The man behind the counter -- a man with tired, yellowing eyes -- put the Cool Mint Listerine™ into a tiny, nondescript paper bag that made it seem as if I had bought a tiny, nondescript bottle of scotch. I didn’t think much of it, until I found my way back home. People looking at me, and it, and then making subtle decisions about the life they saw in front of them. For whatever reason, it irked me just a little. The headache at the back of my noggin struck at a sharper 45 degree angle, and I blinked my eyes with a tremendous force brought on apropos of extravagant similes.

All in all, there’s not much to go on. Just another one of those days, as they say. We and you and I, we’ve all been in a place that sits in a position less than the place that we usually hope to be. In our heads, in our minds. In our moods. Sallow days, burning sickly and sweet in the wavering heat of mid-afternoon sun. Days that will surely move on by, like the rest of those things that get easily placed into metaphors of tidal fluctuations. Meaningless, stupid, pointless worries, about a host of meaningless, standard, ridiculous things. There’s nothing to talk about.

So let us talk about something.

Or rather, let me ask you something; something which needs no answer, despite the fact that the host of people who may or may not exist, who may or may not read this website, who may or may not be people that I know; despite the fact that such (existent?) people might actually have an answer that might be declared, the sort of thing that could be enthusiastically thrown out like leaflets into the drift of the common air.

I ask you, compatriots of the electronic variety:

What do you have?

What’s that thing, that illustrious thing that you break out on the already-mentioned-twice days that are colored sickly yellow, the thing that you look over with muddled thoughts with the hope that things are going to be made clear? What’s that thing, the thing that sits in the bottom of some dusty old drawer that is rarely ever opened, seeing as it is only to be opened during those trying times of thought and life where it’s really, truly, genuinely, actually needed?

What do you have when you need something?
What’s the talisman of your life?

I myself have a thing or two. A precious book that has been mentioned within the e-pages as lost, but has now -- at long, long, long last -- been graciously found. A picture that gives me help towards a memory, when I find that I need to remember. When I need to remember more clearly than usual.

And I have a letter.
It’s a formal letter. It was written by a formal someone, serving a formal purpose, one which had been done for other members (but not all, mind you) of my peers. It was something that I asked for, something that I had to wait for. But more than anything else, it’s something which means something to a someone. To me.

It’s about me. It’s someone else, speaking about the things that I have done, and the things that I might do. It was someone I respect, someone who explained how to stand tall despite the fact that he happened to be rather short; someone who could take your shimmering confidence away with nothing more than a wayward glance. If he wanted to, that is.

I have this letter.
It’s there, alongside other things, when I need it.

Where do your feelings go, world-at-large?
What do you have?

A call at any hour.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 12:11:00 +0000

There is a call I will always take. No matter where. No matter when. I could be raging down a stretch of the loneliest highway, feeling a weak car rumble from going just a bit faster than it ought to; I could be sitting down on an empty curb, at the tail-end of getting dumped by a person who could see clear and bright. That person called, and I answered, those times. Any times. Rain or shine, light or dark.
So far, I’ve always been there to answer. Whenever that call has been made.

I wonder why she calls, sometimes.
After all, there’s no majesty that blinds the darkness. No amazing sort of answers, hewn down from thick trees into little splinters that manage to wheedle their way into secret sorts of places, finding out the things that most cannot know. Nothing that fancy. No words, no sounds. Nothing built by grand designs. It’s just me, here.

Me, myself, and all within my grasp. Fool on the Planet, looking out at all that I know, trying to find a piece that will generate peace of mind, if it’s needed. Looking out over uncertain futures, and muddled pasts. Wondering how to be, who to write, why to say. Trying to ford the waters of our world. Trying to be some kind of a man, when those times comes when I ought to be. We are beings of uncertainty, that much is certain.

I wondered why she called, tonight.
I answered, because I will always answer, and she and I talked a little about the way things come to pass. It was simple, and quiet, and lovely, the way that it often is. But still: I wonder why she calls, sometimes. If she wants advice, I wonder what I might say. If she wants laughter, I wonder what jokes I might tell. If she seeks solace, I wonder how I might use my gravel-toned voice to pat her on the back. I wonder.

I wonder more, when the line goes dead. In an instant.
It’s rare that the line will come back after such a thing. And I’ve tried to bring it back. Believe me, I’ve tried. All it does is ring. It never seems to stop, even when it clicks over, and I can hear a real voice for yet another instant in the center of mechanical drones. It still feels like it’s ringing, while that is going on. It might still be ringing, even now. It wouldn’t surprise me. It wouldn’t confuse me. It would just, still, make me wonder.

I wonder about the person coming through the rings. The person that’s supposed to be me, supposed to be I; the person who gets the call, who answers whenever that moment comes by. The person who will help, somehow. How to be, how to be, how to be. It’s hard to figure, even on the drive home, a silent move through the darkness of a town that’s usually as dry as a shimmering desert. Yet it’s not dry out, not this night.

No. It rained. On me. Reign o’er me. Rain on me. The rain was falling down through the sky, while I sat inside a cold metal shell listening to the ringing that has never seemed to stop. I was driving through it, and I saw the way that it began to storm upon me. And I couldn’t help it: I started laughing, really, really laughing. And crying, a little bit. I parked the car while still trying to return the lost call, the way that I had been the entire way home. It was there. It was coming down on me. Reign o’er me. Rain on me. Even in the midst of that dismal ring that never ends, with uncertain futures and muddled pasts, all of sudden the sky breaks apart. All of a sudden it’s a beautiful, wonderful place to be.

The rain comes, and at last I feel real. The rain -- it’s real.

It’s really, really real. It streaks down and I can feel the way that it makes me, carving my features out of soft limestone, breaking me down and finding me, choosing me, knowing what I will be. And yes, I walk through it. Holding that stupid, contemptible, unreliable phone in my hand like some kind of pointless-yet-meaningful talisman, I stride through the thickened droplets, chanting like a madman in the middle of the street. Not caring who sees, not caring who hears. I can feel myself alive, I can hear the wind. I can look through it all, and see the face through the rings.

I’m soaked and I’m cold and I’m just a wee bit gassy. Wondrous ones, I’m incandescent.

I will always take that call. When the person on the other end is sitting quietly in the dark, I will take that call, and I will speak whatever words that I can manage, whatever they might be, however they might be formed, they will be there. They will be there. They will be there.

There’s pride in that, for me. Knowing that, trusting that. Believing that sometime in the future, that someone across the land can call. Believing that whenever they might call they will get an answer. A touch of certainty, amidst the rest. Being a part of the world. The real, live world.

They say that in this world of hours that is our world, you cannot trust in things like this. That entropy collapses all the things that we know and love and trust, that things are the way that they are, and the way of the world is Chaos and Choice. One and the Other. Uncertain futures and muddled pasts. I can see them all, in this world where I have a friend who wishes to talk. To me.

I see those things, those things that break down. I see them clearly, with eyes washed clean by the force of that lifesong that I've long been waiting for. I look out, and right here, right there, write this, I know: I will answer that call, because that is the kind of man that I wish to be. That is the kind of world I wish to live in, where a dear, dear friend will answer, no matter how hard it might be. The world that I live by, in the midst of the real world. I live in the world. I live the way I think I should. She calls, because she wants to. I answer, because it's good.
Just like that rain. It's falling.

I know it is. I can feel it coming down right now, even though the torrential madness that flowed from the heavens seemed to stop after but a moment. It’s come back to us, back to the world. Like it always has before. Like it always will. It will be there, when all is said and done.

After all: It’s real.

A traveling companion

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 11:18:00 +0000

.Thursday.

partially written on
a discarded gum wrapper, a bookstore receipt...and yeah, that's another bookstore receipt

I am going somewhere.
One of the odder aspects of traveling is that all the details become disturbingly real. Your eyes seem to grab hold of everything around, picking up data with the sense of immaculate detail of a bargain bin scanner. Clear – but sometimes, the edges blur. It makes you wonder where you really are. How you fit.

So I look. My prying eyes trying to pluck words out of the venerable air, grabbing sentences from any source that manages to grace me the path of my veiled brown eyes without the tender embrace of context to make any knowledge the slightest bit whole.

The cure for anything is salt water. Sweat, tears, or the sea.

“Your father was a bastard (section unseen) as swift
and sure

you only pick the best
Love,

They're all that I can hold onto, right now. My head feels heavy, my eyes lidded, pulling me down into a tired world. Even as the taste of burningly excessive caffeine still mingles with the tartness of aircraft cranberry juice on the back of my tongue, I feel myself start to drift; outside of me, things keep on keeping the fuck on. My compatriot and I are shushed by a curly haired dynamo, as she apparently took offense at our having the audacity to speak on the subject of dead dogs in the presence of a six year old boy that we couldn't see. I can see him, now. He's holding something. A book, one that supposedly teaches young minds with a one/two punch of words and colorful stickers.

It's about pirates.

He sits still like a hummingbird, as boys (and boyish men) are known to sometimes do. His mother shields him from the context of unpleasant truths that are going on in the world, as she concurrently denies him the context of the murderous plunderers that he has chosen to idolize. No history, no knowledge of Edward Teach carving men into paste as he sailed wild across watery expanses in Queen Anne's Revenge. No fresh context for the world. It just seems a wee bit sad, that's all.
That's all.

The sky roars on outside, letting horrifying images of dried-out hillsides that somehow manage to terminate into epic towers of smoke drift right on by, while the sound of our velocity through the thinness of the upward air makes it difficult to speak. To connect, in any cheerful manner. I want to reach out, to touch...to stretch out my shivering legs. Yet it cannot be done, not yet. For better or worse, the free range words are all. They might do, for now.

.Friday.

partially written on
a previously forgotten piece of work-related notation, a receipt for a box of jasmine green tea, and an old note that was to remind me that I was in dire need of a haircut

Yet again, yet again, I find myself happily getting lost on darkened streets.

Now: It's around 1:17 in the illustrious AM. My friend and I are seated in a curiously warm 24 hour eating-type-joint, where alongside me a boisterous trucker is getting over his drunk by jawing with the staff about the quality of the food. He wants me to try the Chicken Parmesan.

Before: We were out there. Striding carefully like a pair of spectral wisps, afraid to disturb the quiet stillness of the night. It's out there, all around us. Descending from on high like a fluid pressure that does little more than sweep through the streets, completely covering all things. Making it denser. Pressing down. In fact, I might as well say it – in this town, the level of quiet is quite nearly disquieting.

Even for me, even for I, even for the sort of person that I am. The sort of person who has built a sense of personal peace on turns of phrase that are echoed out across the space of empty lanes, orange city lights buzzing down with nothing if not approval. But this...nothing is out here, nothing more than the sudden explosive flash of headlights from down the road; nothing more than towering cranes, swaying lightly against a death-black sky. Nothing but street lamps that suddenly die as we try to walk beneath the oasis of their glow. Not even a flicker. Just gone.

It happened twice.

Now, again: Coffee hot, lights warm. Flames erupting on the other side of the counter, causing a somewhat snarky waiter to announce “Fire!” in a crowded restaurant, yet not in any way that would incite a stampede of people suddenly trying to claw through the solid walls to the get to the quiet air outside, shoving each other out of the way, looking to crush faces into the backs of heads if only to save their own sorry skins. No, it merely flares up, casting temporary illumination upon our faces. This place might be a little bit fantastic.

Let the morning come.

-&-
Holy fuck! they have some amazing water pressure in this joint.
-&-

Out of the door, down the elevator, out of the building, down the street; it didn't take long, not at all. We're pacing along with a torrential downpour of other sorts of folks, making our winding way through an epic room. Elsewhere, across it all, I can hear the sound of this places favored ultra-caffeinated Guarana beverage being tossed away, the glass bottles sending hollow echoes towards our ears. The sound of it makes us shudder, the first time. Echoes that move like ripples that have forced their way across a stream.

It 's a quick move across the space, all things considered. Passing by ropes, stretched out to serve as guiding arms; passing by gleaming windows, tall like pillars; passing by an old man named Stacy, who looks over us disapprovingly as we chat about things that us whippersnappers tend to talk about; passing by people. So many people.

Places like this always make me feel kind of strange.
I can watch colors bleed out at me from every corner, attached to a host of people that carry with them various tastes, stories and smells. I can watch the things that they do, the games that they play. I can play the games myself. And I do. It's fun, discovering cell-shaded bits where I can construct people with devastating facial hair, and playing dynamic shooters that make it obvious that the developers really have a big wanger for Michael Mann. This place isn't quiet.

In the midst of everything else, I'm sitting back, watching a pair of people connect. Not in any fanciful, sweeping romantic gesture kind of a way – they're just sitting together. A girl and a fella, perched together on the thin bench that finds its place in front of a polished black piano. It gleams. It reflects their faces, as he sits there and teaches her how to play. Neither face is, neither face is smiling. But it seems right, whatever it might be.

He takes his leave and she sits there, alone, feeling out Zelda themes with the tips of her fingers. I ask her to play a specific song, the one that represents the only horse that I ever gave a damn about, never mind that it was never real. I sit beside her and listen to the surprisingly powerful trill of her voice as she tries to pull the song out of her memory. I sit beside her and watch the movement of her fingers as they stride carefully across the ivory. It doesn't mean much of anything, the song or our idle chatter. Yet it seems right, whatever it might be.

I also bought some T-shirts.
So that's nice.

.Saturday.

partially written on
a receipt for bulletproof chicken, some sort of prematurely faded slip from the Seattle airport, a stub from “Superbad,” and proof that I bought a muffin on 08/07/07

I am staring George Orwell in the eye.
He has a charming face, one that – despite the sunken lines of hard-won ideals and hard-thought ideas – still manages to look through layers of time: To affect me with his state of whimsy. It's a bit depressing, actually. Not any fault to the creator of ol' Winston Smith, of course. No, the feeling was there before I popped into this bookstore in search of....something, I dunno. But even in here, it's too bleeding loud.
And even right now, it occurs to me that I'm getting ahead of myself.
So then.

This morning, the world began beneath a gray sky. I proceeded to shower and failed to shave, and then stepped into the elevator, only to find myself dominating the middle of a pack of senior citizens. All of them staring, as if I were about to try and hungrily, viciously tear my way through the un-trodden path of their flesh. As appetizing an idea as that was, I instead turned to them and asked that faithful old question: “Why do you suppose that no one reads John Gardner anymore?”

Empty smiles, blank stares.
They didn’t remember him. These days, fewer and fewer do.
It wasn’t long after that, that I was sitting on a cold, hard floor, reading about the frost. That same room, the room of high ceilings and clinking glass. It was a somewhat troublesome place to be. On that cold floor, alone.

There were others there, of course; the world of the winding line that stretches farther than the coasts is nothing new, certainly not to me. There were people on my left, throwing down the blue sparks on the handhelds in their hands (obviously), while the people on my right were chatting in hushed, excited tones about the prospect of the music that was to come, occasionally letting loose an echo of a laugh. And behind me? In the part of the line that had curved its way around, the nature of the thing creating a place beyond my little spot? They were playing Family Feud. It was on a VAIO, one that had clearly seen a season or two.

I said nothing, to no one.
This was somewhat out of character. My old habit in lines like this, in situations like this, is the somewhat dubious procedure (that is to say: Yes, I realize that this is fucked up) of moving through lines like this with the simple act of conversation. I would walk forward a bit, drawn to some sort of something on a someone’s somewhatsamawhozit, and through the act of speaking about it, and then other things, blend into that portion of the line. And then again. And again. And so on.

Rather prickish, you might say. I’d agree, too. But I’d probably still do it. But this time, it wasn’t being done. I just sat there. On that cold, hard floor. Waiting for something to happen.

Whatever did happen on the in-between, my friend and I made it through the day. We listened to a charmingly adorable French-Canadian man talk about historical accuracy in regards to murderous crusaders in the streets of Ancient Jerusalem, and then watched him endear himself to us by way of offhand comments directed toward his creation. We watched something that we’d forgotten about, that still had the ability to make us laugh. We rested our backs against cold, hard concrete. It was the most comfortable concrete that we’d ever experienced.

Whatever happened, we ended up here. In this place, sitting silently as we stare at the opened bottles of Black Cherry soda that are rested right before our eyes. George Orwell looking over us, wondering what to make of this pair of sour blokes. With all of this going on around us, we -- the pair of us, yes -- still feel a stretch away. Looking for something to connect with, so that it might bring us toward the noise, meld us into its psychotic rhythm in a way that makes the pounding in our heads vanish into the depths of the ether. It reminds me of the other night.

Back when we had set ourselves adrift on the streets, waiting to collide with something, anything within the night that fell thick around us like a fog. No one out, few things awake. We wandered into the nearest light source beside us, a sex shoppe/adult bookstore. The door was open.

We talked, a bit. We had a small chat with the lovely tattooed lady behind the counter, who greeted us with a pleasant smile and shared our view on the state of people floating across the streets. No one to see, out there in the cold. No one to go to, to strangely revel in the act of being alone. It was a pleasant diversion, I can say that for sure.

No such luck, right now. Back here with Orwell, back in the world where the normally quiet confines of a bookstore manages to somehow be loud enough to grate at my damnable ears. So with that in mind, the only true solution? Make it fucking louder.

“If it’s too loud, you’re too old.”
A hero of mine once said that, in the middle of one of his well-trodden talks. We shall see, denizens of the intratubes. We shall see. After all -- I’m a young man, yet.

-&-
We saw.

.Sunday.

partially written on
the receipt from a Pizza Hut where I once saw the truly horrifying attempt of a customer trying to hit on the girl behind the counter

Well, here I am. There’s a window in front of me. Looking through it, I can watch the leaves on a paltry sidewalk-tree shiver against a slight wind. I can watch the people similarly planted outside the glass, whose conversation I cannot summarize, seeing as I never bothered learning to read lips.
Other things.

There go the people, walking on by. Making their casual strides as a tallish gent sits in a franchise that he’s actually none too fond of, but, well….they have chairs. Old habits, I suppose.

it’s a place

that

face

pancakes

Sgt. Pepper

across the path
b
y
t
h
e
park

REEL MISSING

all ate the knuckle-grease pizza, as Blue Planet made colorful observations about marvelous things in the world behind us. Within it, all things seemed to glow.

It was a time, to be sure.

.Monday.

partially written on
something far too faded to make out. But something was there, once.

Outside, the expanse of the sea is a vision of blue.
The blue is so deep that it hurts.
The vast, unchanging uniformity of it.
The sea is best when it’s caught in a storm.
No storms here.
Not for me, anyway.
I have yet to feel Seattle rain.
And I have wanted to.
Honest and true, I wanted to.
It seems that the more I miss it, the less likely it becomes.
Another getting lost in the vast uniformity of time gone by.

It makes me think of the woman sitting beside me, her small hands creased and freckled with age. When we took off, her hand was resting on her throat, as if it were holding back her breath. Her eyes were still like stone. She’d seen it all before. She probably will again. But it makes you wonder: What did she see, the first time her eyes looked out over that stretch of narrow runway, while the Earth roared by outside? What did she feel, when she first looked down to see the frightening blue of the sea?

I cannot keep from questioning the history of weathered hands. I can look over at them, at her. She’s reading something. The pages are set aglow in the arches of light.

was sich seinem Blick

It’s all I can manage to see. It’s not much that I can comprehend. After all: It’s not my life.
Mine is not hers, and mine is not the places that I have been. We move around through hosts of places, gathering things that we tuck away at the back of our minds, so that we might find some use for them in the future that we wish to face. They can give perspective, that much is certain. But the places don’t always make us. We do that ourselves.

And we are, for the moment, home.

A declarative measure.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:02:00 +0000

Alone in a busy coffeeshop, watching with a sense of dreadful interest as a fly perches on my arm, yearning to taste the stink of my sweat. Letting it all move past, forcing eyes to watch the world with whatever willful energy can be mustered. Those days…those days of ever-churning time. Days that are meant to pass on by.

Sometimes, those are all that you get.
Sometimes, those are all that you need.
Sometimes…

All things considered, regardless of what might be said or done in fits of trembling willpower, I remain in this world as a simple sort of man. Simple enough to drink his daily coffee with a smile on my face. I look out on the world I’ve built, and at the man that I’ve tried to become -- I look at the things I’ve done, the things that encompass me when I’m alone in the dark. For the most part, I can see them, and I can live on.

I can see the things that I’ve borrowed, and the things that I’ve lent.
In more ways than one, more types than none, a whole host of things that have seen their way to and from my hands in a manner that sends them up and out, back and forth, back and between reality and meaning and places where things are lost in pits of unquantifiable absurdity, where I can only turn my head round and round in some kind of vain effort to figure out where on Earth I’ve brought self to, after all of this time, after all of these people, after all of their things, after all of my things…well. Where does this go?
There are things to be said, and the night is burning into day.

Running out of moments to say what I sat down here to say. Which isn’t monumental, all things considered; if this remains unfinished, trapped within the walls of a wide-screened laptop with busted-ass hinges, you’ll go on with your lives as if nothing were wrong with your day to day. Everything passing on by, none of your time borrowed, none of my ramblings lent. Way of the World. Right?

Sometimes…

Things were borrowed, things were lent.
Trying to make connections through the use of communication through derivations of ideas caused by wood pulp and plastic and petroleum and sweat and fabric and laughter and chicken and sugar and memories and more ideas and dreams and kisses and breathes and wisdom and timetimetime; trying to, and sometimes, sometimes, sometimes succeeding. And sometimes, some things just end up missing.
Things loved, things lost. Some things more than others.

I can remember a book.
It was mine.

I’d earned it, once upon a time. That tale of ontological nausea, that had been tucked carefully into my bag that one day that I was to do something. With someone. I was to accomplish something. With someone else. Under a sky full of roaring clouds, I was to live my life. The book and I.

Such a day it was to be…
But encouraging Murphy can be a hell of a thing. Know what I mean?
I think you might.

Things happened. Things didn’t happen. Opportunities were lost, and as it was to be, they would never come around again. Money and time, art and life, food and drink, good times, good times -- gone. Drowned in the last great storm that this city has seen.

And there I stood, my book and I, making a journey through the heart of the gale. Stepping, and singing. Loud. Loud as I could, trying to out roar the crying walls of frigid water. The book and I.

When all was finally dry, the book didn’t look the same. The crispness of its pages seemed have been suddenly misplaced, with the all that was left behind being warped and stained, with words that bled around the edges. And just like that, it was a book that had lived. It was mine. And I had earned it.

I lent it to someone.
It was a good deal later -- I’d done a few things, spoken a few words, and she and I had found some memories in the midst of all the rest of our things. I thought, I knew, that she would, could, should read it. So I lent it to her. It wasn’t long after that she moved to Utah. The book and she.

Needless to say, I was a wee bit pissed the fuck off.
But you know what?

Things were borrowed, things were lent. She took that book, that book that had been mine -- she took it, and along the way, she read it. She devoured it. She stared at it, at its pages that had been so lovingly drenched into a sense of beautiful definition, until it began to wrap around her, the pages becoming the things which she was to know, the words becoming that which she was to comprehend. She lived with it, and she lived. She worried, and she suffered. She wondered, and she cared. The book, and she.
She made it hers.

It will never be coming back.
And I would never ask for it. Sometimes, such things work out that way.
Sometimes…

They don’t.
Sitting with days that pass on by. Watching them pass, watching them move. Carrying things with me, alongside my thoughts, alongside my sweat, alongside my plans. Carrying things that have somehow, drifted out of my slender fingers.
Meaningful things, if only to me.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.

Things that were held close to me, that hold within them the dusty scent of a place that I might never see again, of a time that I wish to never have back, but still…that made me a certain kind of me, that drove me towards the type of man that I wanted to be. Something that helps me think.

Things that will never be said. That were never really had, that were never really there to be had. Things that will never be held in my hands, beating like a warm heart under spread-eagled fingers. Things that wouldn’t couldn’t…shouldn’t? Something that I will let be.

Things that burned. Hot as the forge, sharp as the steel.
“A sweet, soft grenade. The stillness of the night.” Something that is missed.

Sometimes, what you are left with is all that you get.
Sometimes, what you hang onto is all that you need.
Sometimes…Sometimes….no.

I sit here, shivering. A man who sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, has the good fortune to make a choice, to try and live, to try and move. Things were borrowed, things were lent. Loved and Lost. Here I am. Saying right here, right now:

I’m going to get them back.

I’m going to stretch out my arms -- and make no mistake, they are long arms -- and reach out towards the things that have gone away. Because after all, we have nothing to live with but the things that we’ve done.

So we try to make it right.

A resting place.

noreply@blogger.com (Your friend, the fool) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 06:07:00 +0000

Another night.

Here we are, basking in the warmth of our cathode ray tubes (that are not, in fact, cathode ray tubes) on yet another summer night. Looking for things to do. Things that have been said. Hopes that had been made, some time before.

I’ve got something for you, intranetts.

Something that was conceived as a shot in the dark.
It was a little bit of an attempt at getting out there in the world, utilizing the means of the MACHINE OF DEATH Anthology. It was a shot.

And as is so often the case, my shot in the dark got swallowed up by nothingness. No harm done, no big deal. But still…

I want to lay it to rest. Somewhere other than here, within the humming confines of my extravagantly screened laptop. I want to give it somewhat of a sending off, so that I don‘t feel quite so sad about its humble passing.
It’s a story.

I told it, and it sparked away into another night.

And now it’s being told to you.
One hopes that you might find something to like.

--------------------------------------------

What’s to say about it?

I don’t know. I never know anymore. Just a soft flurry of images drifting ahead of me, ones that I can reach out and grab with narrow outstretched fingers, like snowflakes in a fall. Out there, they stand unique, their own little design made of encapsulated time; and they turn to water in my hands. At first, I didn’t know.

She didn’t tell me. Not at all. And so I went on with my living, not having a glimmer of suspicion of the things that would come to be. The things that would grab my silly little world, and shake it with a thunderous sense of violence that I doubt I can ever truly comprehend. Nor would I want to. She had known something.
She? Jill. Her name was Jill.

And she was my love on this Earth.

Anyone would have told you that she had a certain sort of something on that night I first saw her. At least, when they saw her. I for one had spent the majority of the evening rooted to one spot, staring at the frozen eyes on a statue of a classical Roman. His eyes hitting with a terribly, terribly expressive nature. They made me shiver, those eyes. And then…I saw her, her indescribable presence, and all else was stricken from my memory. She made me quake, back then. She still makes me quake now.

Still. Nothing about her was still, her existence being one of omnipresent motion, one that swept up willing little me into a series of a separate-yet-connected life moments, in a manner of such grand immediacy that to this day, I’m still unsure of how I found such a presence in my arms. I was never much of a…I was never a devastating man. Never the sort that brings someone to stand casually in a doorway, enticing growls building in their throat. She saw something. In me.

So it was that she graced me with that feeling of her omnipresent life. Dances built on park benches and soft footfalls across dewy grass. Sharp ideas and murmurs in our sleep. Quiet whispers and dreamlike sweat in the night. Sitting close together on Sunday mornings, eyes glancing over Times headlines that announced things like: “BLESSING OR CURSE?,” or “PRIME MINISTER TO DIE BY WAY OF ‘INSURANCE FRAUD’: Public Demands Explanation”. Headlines of the sort that occur even now, this very day. Back then, we would disregard and discard such announcements, while we giggled and pulled in for an achingly soft kiss. God…that softness.

During those times her fingers would somehow always find mine. And I can remember…I remember how they would quiver. Gentle and firm, like a babies’ heartbeat.
Those were times when I could feel the world.

But even then, I suppose there were traces. Moments when her touch turned cold, where her terribly, terribly expressive eyes grew dead and distant, like the eyes of that Roman statue from a time before. I can still see her, the image locked in my thoughts. One of those moments. Her gentle and firm fingertips teasing the nearly invisible hairs across the surface of her belly, her voice echoing across time: “Found things still have a way of getting lost. Sometimes.” Sometimes.

I’d thought it would be alright. I’d thought it was just a trace of the world as it was, as it is; a side-effect of people as a collective coming to terms with their own mortality. After all, look at any street corner, any face in the pale gray of the morning. Look, and you’ll see it. We’re all more somber, these days. Still, I was happy. Happy with her warmth, happy with my life. She had been around longer, had experienced far more. And she, Jill had chosen me to be the one she caressed under moonlight, the one she whispered to during warm summer rains.

It was a cold winter storm when I found her at my door. Before then, we’d had countless days of wonder and joy. Yet this night was different, its existence drenched by that raging symphony of angry rain. Water beading on the surface of her coat, water clinging to the thin strands of her beautiful amber hair. She had a look on her face. Such a look. Her arms found their way around my waist, and she gripped me tightly.

She held on for dear life as we fell into the dark. I gladly let her grip her way towards safety, and I can clearly remember the way her fingers tensed on the small of my back. In the warmth of my arms, Jill gently fell asleep. Her hair was still wet from the rain.

Still wet, but not from lack of drying. The warmth of her body and the room caused the moisture to evaporate, slowly, but it was definitely there. My eyes moved over the thin haze that shrouded her head, and I couldn’t help it: It looked like her, a part of her; a part of her was trying to leave. As if any and all of her doubts were manifest above her head, pulling her away into the fog, a solemn funeral for human emotion. I could feel the concept of that, of Jill leaving. It was almost as if it was in my skin, trying to scrape its way out from inside of me like living sandpaper. The sound of that dragged across my eardrums, a terrible, jarring sensation. I didn’t know how I could do it. How I could slake her thirst. How I could make her doubts towards me go away. There was nothing. Nothing at all. So I tried for the only something I could manage. I leaned closer to her ear and whispered, “Tell me how to be in love.” She didn’t answer.
“Tell me how to be in love.”

That night, I had a dream.

I stood amongst a council of grand humans. Gods, even. Standing alongside them, my body covered with heavy armored garments that spoke of me being one of their own. In that place, in the air, one could taste a sense of stability and understanding, a feeling that these beings held on to their world with strength and ferocity of intelligence, with conviction and destiny. It was also only a moment before I realized they were all afraid. They and I.

Before us stood a creature unlike any nightmare. A wolf, yes; but bigger, stronger, angrier, uglier, yet with a kind of beauty realized by anything designed for a single, unwavering purpose. This creature felt rage that this place could barely contain. Its rage was a song in its eyes.

So I watched myself as I walked up and put my hand in its mouth. My colleagues moved toward it, slowly wrapping the creature with a binding that appeared be nothing more than a silken ribbon, thin and long. All while my fingers soaked in the hot saliva, which ran like the broadest river from the glands surrounding my hand. The beast was fettered; the beast fought his bonds. First with arrogance, then with rage. But his thin binding could not be broken, staying smooth and cool as it dug into the cursed flesh.

It wasn’t long before I went blind with pain. Lost in a world not my own, blood coloring the landscape with a disgusting flourish. I didn’t think I belonged. Not in this place, where truth was writ in blood on stone.

When I awoke, I was alone.

It felt like just another morning. Except after I had walked into the kitchen, if only to watch the last vestiges of the rain drift through the wind outside my window, I felt something. A stinging in my hand, as if a malicious insect had attacked during the night. When I gave it a closer look, I saw a miniature speck of red, staring me in the face and daring me to question its tiny world. So I squeezed it. The action brought out a single, gleaming ruby of blood. I swear that I saw it sparkle. It might as well have, anyway. Nothing else did.

Nothing. Jill didn’t bring herself by. Not that day. And certainly not the next.
So the days fell into the nights, and the nights wrapped over the days, mixing themselves until they got softer and smoother, more uniform the longer they went on. They all became the same, those days. Those nights. Those mornings. Those evenings. My useless sense of time.

I would go and stand outside, watching people drive home from somewhere and sit in their cars for a few moments before finally going inside. I would take care to observe the look on their faces, which was often just a touch of weariness after a hard-won day, but sometimes, sometimes, sometimes…it was more. A look of singular, genuine fear. Fear, and wonder. It’s the kind of look you see a lot these days. More and more, I find it hard to take. So more and more, I look away.

Instead, I found myself staring at the back of my hand. Looking over a majestic landscape of miniscule scars. As hard as I tried -- and believe me, I tried -- I couldn’t remember where they came from. None of them, not a one. Not a single memory tracing the outline of their smoothly curved backs. But this one, this new one, it stung. In her absence, it stung. It stings. Like the rain of that winter storm, darting at my face, hurting my eyes. But I stood there, and I endured. There was nothing else. Not from that day on, nothing else to give me a sensation of the moment when she had vanished. No matter how much it hurt, the pain was some kind of something, built out of the nothing of her absence. I stood there, alone against my elements, my own pain and confusion and loss. And yes, I endured.

Except I was breaking apart.

It was a bright Thursday morning when she returned to my door. She came alongside a cool breeze with a touch as delicate and light as a silk scarf. It moved around us as we stood, cold and immobile in my doorway.

I hadn’t a clue how long she’d been gone. My Jill-less world was nothing more than worry and regret, and now she stood there, close enough to touch. Her heartbeat fingers, right within my grasp. I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to say.

So, I was endlessly grateful when she spoke first.

“Sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’m -- I’m so, so sorry about this.” Her soft voice couldn’t conceal a solemn need for tears. But still, she didn’t cry. Not a drop was spilled.

“No need for sorry.” My voice was pale like milk. And it was real. Whole. My voice in that moment was all of me, everything I had ever thought and felt, all jammed together with a single, uniting prospect: I just wanted warmth again. Warmth. Skin. Her. Sinking into me, faint traces of breath with a touch so gentle, they almost couldn’t be felt. But I could feel them. Right then, I could feel them. Almost as if they were a part of my own body. “No need for anything else. Not now.”

“Not so sure about that,” she whispered.

“Hey…” I moved in closer, dreaming of touch. But she would have none of it, her body suddenly quaking like the heart of the Earth, a fearful movement from the very core of her. That was a bad thing, that day. There was a terrible all-encompassing silence as she composed herself, as if even the breeze that had flowed between us only moments before was in service of her whims. She looked up, her eyes suddenly frozen and clear.

“I did something.”

Out of the periphery of my vision, I saw her movements flow with a certain deliberate pacing, one that seemed, so, so, so…unnatural. For her. It was wrong. Despite the way I had yearned for a reunion, hungered for it like a dog whimpering in a dark corner, it was then that I found myself stricken by fear. Fear, and wonder.

It was a fearful man that watched her reach into the back pocket of her well-worn jeans, watched her fingers come up with something small and thin. It was a rectangle of paper, about the size of a business card; the surface of it colored a mottled gray, like smeared ashes on the last-standing wall of a burned down house. I knew what it was.

These days, everyone does. Oh.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

“I gave it your blood. I gave it a piece of you, because I needed to see.”

Oh. “Oh.” The stinging on my hand suddenly intensified, as if the beast that had taken hold of me with its world-ending jaws had finally tightened its grip, preparing for the true end. Its mouth then opened, wide and quiet, calm as the gaping depths of an ocean crevasse. My feet gave way and I tumbled into that limitless darkness. All while staring into it, looking deep with terribly, terribly expressive eyes. What had she done? To me? To her?

Jill’s hands came together and brought the scrap of contemptible paper closer to her, cradling it against the white cotton that was pulled down over her belly. Her interlaced fingers, still firm, alternately grew tense and relaxed in a series of even, steady pulses.

“What is this, Jill?” my voice cracked as I spoke, “What the hell kind of end?”

“It’s not…”

“Jill.” My voice was bone scraping on concrete. I had to know.

She breathed in. She breathed out. Again and again, as if building up enough rhythm to pull what was needed out of her, like it were latched on somewhere deep inside, someplace hard to reach. She spoke. She had to speak. “I’m still sorry,” she said, “For all of this. Nothing is ever supposed to happen this way. It does, though. Believe me.

“We’re all gonna die, I know that, I know that much. All of us gone, some…sooner.” For a moment she paused, a look on her face as if she might vomit; but she stoned her face and jaws, and made as if she were going to once again look me in the eye. She didn’t. But she came damn close. Seeing it then, I hadn’t a trace of doubt in my mind: There was effort here. A lot of it.

“But now, it feels like -- like I’ve killed you. Even though I didn’t do it, it wasn’t some decision that I made, it feels like I’m a part of it. Your death is in me.” And again, we were draped with a limitless silence.

In that space of time, that little world, I knew that I wanted to say something. Something important, something that might have made it just a tiny, tiny bit better. I’d had it right there with me, the thought in my head, the words in my throat. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t speak them. They lodged there in the base of my gullet, like some tiny animal, heart racing with fear at what might happen in the radiance of the sun. Here, now, I haven’t a clue what it was that I would have said. But it would have helped. I’m sure of it.

“I can’t stand this. Living like this, seeing you like this, knowing that it’s coming.” Jill’s fingers finally stretched themselves out, flat and open, the miniscule expanse of wispy gray standing out as a blight against the glow of her skin. “Could you?”

She looked at me, forcing her presence upon me in a way that I had yet to experience, even amidst all of the life that she had struck me with before. Her eyes grabbed hold of me, One. Last. Time. Those eyes. That hair. Those fingers. That voice. Those memories. That taste. Those feelings. That life, dancing within her. And in that very instant, I felt it all get pulled away. Moments being tugged from the very core of me, heartstrings pulled free and clear; and I knew. She was done. Gone.

Long gone. I stood there, alone, for twenty minutes, cool breeze still bringing the sounds of the world to my ears. It wasn’t until after I turned to open the door that I noticed the card in my hand. Pale gray, this proclaimed death. And hell followed with it.

What else is there to say?
I can see it. There it is, sitting on the edge of my bedside table, a heavy coat of dust nearly camouflaging it against the surface. Untouched by my hand, not since that day when I laid it there to rest. Nothing left to go on. No ground left to tread.

There are times that I find myself coming closer to it, looming my height over that tiny thing, as if I thought I might scare it away. Any time I get close enough to touch, my thoughts turn to ashes and my body falls apart. This won’t do, not at all. I know that much. Now, I know that much.

I can’t bring myself to look. Face-down, the information of me locked in between its own disgusting back and the smooth surface of my own fine oak. I can’t do it, I cannot bring myself to, will myself to, force myself toward a final decision. I don’t know what I want to do. Not since I’ve been left standing alone, just another pillar of salt waiting to return to the Earth. No motion to my moments. Just me and it, waiting for that day to come. And I know it will. I know, as she knew -- the day that I look will be the day that I die.

When I see those words, stamped onto that paper, that will surely be my end. It can’t be anything else.

I couldn’t stand it any other way.

--------------------------

Requiescat In Pace.
And all that.