The feeling undergirding everything, for me, for everyone maybe: waves of nauseating, terrifying, debilitating fear of death.
Brushing my teeth, "Your life is a cobblestone in a road leading either to the edge of an apocalyptic cliff or an emerald city populated by strangers who will never know your name or hold gratitude in their hearts for the sacrifices you made on their behalf."
How have we been convinced not to feel anger that our worlds must end?
Weird pride, filling my heart with passion against this moment of national self-annihilation. Samurai partisanship. The Tea Party one drop in a sea of historical insult. I want your heads on pikes before I disappear.
Long road. Long, bumpy road.
Friday, November 05, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Light Lies the Crown
I look at your photo and wonder how many dark ages could fit in the enchantment-space between your lipstick and your fishnets. I wonder what it would be like to possess a magic body, with its capability to legitimize any attitude, any artifact or trinket.
You are a ship, afloat on a sea of equivalencies, up whose sides a million and one inherited gestures clamber to escape the depths of obsolescence. The tattoo. The rings. The lolita skirt.
A hammer, hung from chicken wire, would become an article of cultural gravity if bracketed in your cleavage. A sneer of your beautiful mouth would justify a Hitler moustache drawn above it. Today, Led Zeppelin mariachi Baudelaire electro-hookerism. Tomorrow, S&M post-punk Eskimo archaeology.
You are our laureate - we, a generation without art. A poetry of ornaments. You are a ransom note, written with fragments of ancestral wreckage. Give us back our ability to be more than beautiful. Give us back to the ocean.
You are a ship, afloat on a sea of equivalencies, up whose sides a million and one inherited gestures clamber to escape the depths of obsolescence. The tattoo. The rings. The lolita skirt.
A hammer, hung from chicken wire, would become an article of cultural gravity if bracketed in your cleavage. A sneer of your beautiful mouth would justify a Hitler moustache drawn above it. Today, Led Zeppelin mariachi Baudelaire electro-hookerism. Tomorrow, S&M post-punk Eskimo archaeology.
You are our laureate - we, a generation without art. A poetry of ornaments. You are a ransom note, written with fragments of ancestral wreckage. Give us back our ability to be more than beautiful. Give us back to the ocean.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, June 05, 2010
Then I Woke Up
I rarely have nightmares, but when I do, they come in sagas. A couple nights ago it was dusk and I was paddling on a surfboard towards an island half a mile away. The water was oily, yellow with the sunset. I could feel the sharks swimming enormously below me.
Last night, the world was gripped by an amazing plague. Profound orgies of violence, everyone's faces mutant, horselike. Flesh unbounded, warping capriciously and arbitrarily, consuming itself in fountains of gore as I watched. A taste of Hell.
The only part that really disturbed me was my resignation to it, its feeling of inevitability. Because in the dream the horror was the unseen, inherent consequence of living on the planet for as long as we have.
An enormous part of me thinks the normative force of the universe is holocaust; tracks, unblinkingly, the monsters circling beneath the surface. Sometimes I am very, very afraid of the next twenty years.
I wandered away into "the Infected Forest," vertical pillars of wood in engulfing darkness. Silent. Alone.
Last night, the world was gripped by an amazing plague. Profound orgies of violence, everyone's faces mutant, horselike. Flesh unbounded, warping capriciously and arbitrarily, consuming itself in fountains of gore as I watched. A taste of Hell.
The only part that really disturbed me was my resignation to it, its feeling of inevitability. Because in the dream the horror was the unseen, inherent consequence of living on the planet for as long as we have.
An enormous part of me thinks the normative force of the universe is holocaust; tracks, unblinkingly, the monsters circling beneath the surface. Sometimes I am very, very afraid of the next twenty years.
I wandered away into "the Infected Forest," vertical pillars of wood in engulfing darkness. Silent. Alone.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Lease
Everybody has a few indelible moments in their lives. Game changers. A few of mine: being shown my first Playboy by the neighborhood kids, saying goodbye to my family on the first day of college, recognizing that I am going to die.
A few months ago I announced on Facebook that I am an Atheist. I guess it was narcissistic of me to expect a reaction, even some subterranean snark rattle.
This silence is instructive to me. It tells me what I already know in the part of my brain that has grown up - nobody's really keeping score. Not amongst us, really, in a way that matters. And, as suggested before, not in the stars, either.
This means that I am alone with my life. And, appraising it now, I have been very narcissistic, very lazy. My narcissism suggests that clutching to resentments wins me points in some cosmic Taste ledger. It recommends elaborate rationalizations for why social misgivings lie at others' feet and not my own. Its sneers buttress the glass walls, goad me to ridicule, seduce into complacency.
It is easy to stand in front of a dairy aisle and smell blood on the wind. From behind, history's deathstench, permanent, like the ghost of a murderous uncle blowing out birthday candles. And from a distance, the annihilating nothingness of the last moment.
How small these feelings of inadequacy and hatred are. How unworthy to occupy the tiny, thrumming engine of my brief machine.
I can't say it enough. I am alone with the contents of my heart. We are alone. We choose our tenants.
And how, how, how do you evict the delinquent ones?
A few months ago I announced on Facebook that I am an Atheist. I guess it was narcissistic of me to expect a reaction, even some subterranean snark rattle.
This silence is instructive to me. It tells me what I already know in the part of my brain that has grown up - nobody's really keeping score. Not amongst us, really, in a way that matters. And, as suggested before, not in the stars, either.
This means that I am alone with my life. And, appraising it now, I have been very narcissistic, very lazy. My narcissism suggests that clutching to resentments wins me points in some cosmic Taste ledger. It recommends elaborate rationalizations for why social misgivings lie at others' feet and not my own. Its sneers buttress the glass walls, goad me to ridicule, seduce into complacency.
It is easy to stand in front of a dairy aisle and smell blood on the wind. From behind, history's deathstench, permanent, like the ghost of a murderous uncle blowing out birthday candles. And from a distance, the annihilating nothingness of the last moment.
How small these feelings of inadequacy and hatred are. How unworthy to occupy the tiny, thrumming engine of my brief machine.
I can't say it enough. I am alone with the contents of my heart. We are alone. We choose our tenants.
And how, how, how do you evict the delinquent ones?
Friday, March 12, 2010
Night Terrors
Another cancer dream. My only recurring nightmare, emergent in bi-annual cycles. Last time, I was a child in the dream, and woke up in tears, and my heart went hollow when I realized that it is not a dream for many real children.
Strangely, they are my only mundane dreams. No phantasmagoria. High detail, intense realism, no fraction of awareness of the waking self.
In this one, I learned I had a year to live. Weeping, I told my mother all of my secrets. Overwhelmed and hopeless, I felt the permanent incompleteness of my now unreachable hopes.
And all day, I was on the verge of crying. I am almost crying now. Because I have a horrible talent for understanding death. Everywhere, I hear the tinkle of shattered glass.
Consciousness is too heavy a burden for something as fragile as an animal body. What indignity to have a mind to refute the godless unsympathy of physics and causality. What grand injustice to cleave self-awareness to a form ruled by entropy, subject to a million upon a million frailties.
We deserve a life unshadowed by death. We deserve so much more than evolution has given us.
Strangely, they are my only mundane dreams. No phantasmagoria. High detail, intense realism, no fraction of awareness of the waking self.
In this one, I learned I had a year to live. Weeping, I told my mother all of my secrets. Overwhelmed and hopeless, I felt the permanent incompleteness of my now unreachable hopes.
And all day, I was on the verge of crying. I am almost crying now. Because I have a horrible talent for understanding death. Everywhere, I hear the tinkle of shattered glass.
Consciousness is too heavy a burden for something as fragile as an animal body. What indignity to have a mind to refute the godless unsympathy of physics and causality. What grand injustice to cleave self-awareness to a form ruled by entropy, subject to a million upon a million frailties.
We deserve a life unshadowed by death. We deserve so much more than evolution has given us.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Prole
The feeling of adulthood, heavy in the gut: is: 1:1; action/reaction, everything being exactly what it is, resting where placed.
As a child I showed more mercy to injured birds, comforting them in their inevitable deaths, shoebox upon shoebox, than I do to my own life. My own precious life, finite, unguaranteed. My own precious life. My own small and precious life. Frail thing. Untended. Unguarded. Exposed.
As a child I showed more mercy to injured birds, comforting them in their inevitable deaths, shoebox upon shoebox, than I do to my own life. My own precious life, finite, unguaranteed. My own precious life. My own small and precious life. Frail thing. Untended. Unguarded. Exposed.