A Full Page

A useful decor would be posters only of yourself, indolent in bed and in front of your computer, so that you could not escape your context through distraction.

There has never been a superhero with a scarf.

All unwise behavior begins with a response of "Yeah, but..." to the instantaneous dictums of conscience. The brain is much quicker than the self-identifying consciousness it creates. Conscience is an immediate reaction to events. It is your brain's most thoroughgoing verdict on best possible actions to undertake to ensure you thrive. It is the kneejerk response of memory to the incursion of events. A truthful identity is not an imposition of values frameworks onto moments past and future - it is fidelity to the nanoseconds-swift judgement of the sum of all analytical faculties. The ideal is to live at the cusp of the wave as it crashes in rapid syncopation. It is to remove fancy and the second-guess from the spontaneous task of meeting the moment. You are not smarter than your brain.

Chewed Up

Something taken at random from my drawer full of late-night existentialist scribbles.

You ever stop and listen to yourself while you eat? That must've been the first thing we learned as kids - how to ignore the sound of our bodies. It's fucking horrible.

Pages upon pages of this.

Waverunner

How far off the mark would the songs at your memorial service be if you died today? Some softfocus things you'd hear very late at night on television? Maybe devotionals to gods you don't believe in. Will they say "he loved to jetski, oh he loved to jetski, and he shared his love with the people around him?"

The proper songs are kept secret, gramophones spinning at the bottom of mineshafts. The proper ones are those you play in your car every single day, that really belong to you because your okayness depends upon them. Or the ones that punch your heart with their beauty. They would frighten your grandmother and confuse the priest who talks about you without ever having known you. They would make your friends and family shift in their seats.

Here are mine.









Not that I foresee having a memorial service. But if I do, no fucking priests.

Why I Am a Comedian, Part 207

The girl I still love against all will and effort, who hijacked my life for three weeks, whose memory perches on the rim of every beer glass and metastasizes in the fertile culture of other beautiful girls' humorless incomprehension, is apparently a lesbian.

Value

Imagine the time I've spent not doing. Not writing, supposing myself to be a good enough writer, sliding into metaphors on bare, uncalloused knees. Not reading, assuming I am smart enough and insight can be shaken from the tallest branches like coconuts. Safe indoors while the world is made of split lips. Sleepily boozed and content with rattling windowpanes in the worst part of the afternoon.

I am old enough and young enough to want to be absolutely free all of the time forever from everything that does not matter and makes me small, crippled or indentured. The idea of wages stirs the deep murder. This is what Marx says to me. He says that we are free to be always bound by our compassion. Capitalism is too small a word for what has happened, and Marxism too small a word for the project of regaining what has been lost. I must be free; my heart demands it. I cannot be free until there is not one unfree person alive. I do not know how else to say this. Everything is shame. Even the happiest moments are obscene in the shadow of our Wrongness, and the only human moments are those in which we stir the slop at the bottom of the emptied spiritual well.

They took time away. All of it. The time we do have is not owned but leased on terms that are not ours. They took the soul away, by putting a collar on it. There is a they. Whose fingers clutch the thing you made today?

I am done with the waking death of alcohol and pornography. I am adult in my desire to never have to work a job again. This is what you feel as well. They took away the adultness of that feeling (or they who were taught to teach such things). They taught you how to smirk at it.

I do not know how else to say this. I must be free all of the time forever from the people who think I am more valuable to them than I am to myself, and I hunger for unfreedom from the lives of others. Real freedom is the duty of kindness, the time to share moments, the means to explore what you are and what can be done. This is not possible when your time is owned by a fuck at a desk, and when plants in China would rather install anti-suicide nets under their factory windows than raise pay by a single increment. I do not know what else to feel but shame and disgust and anger. I do not know how to take the fuck in the too-big house seriously, or how not to want to take everything that he owns away from him. I do not know how to speak measuredly about the charlatan fuck in the white house who sold our virgin optimism to Goldman Sachs. I do not know how to identify with the fucks at the bar when they go woo and put their fingers in the air because they got permission to escape ownership for two days. I do not know how to wade happily through the blood and guts, or how not to want to bite the hands that feed me off at their smug wrists.

So for now I work towards a time when I will break my fists against the faces of those who presume to own my fists.

My sin is not hating, it is not being better than the things I hate. Yet.

Mann Gegen Mann

Blood enmity is maybe the most honest emotion in the world; is it a male symptom? Or is there a violent river babbling under our toes at all times?

Some of life is broad strokes. Some of life is knocking other lives down. Nothing for poetry. I save my punches for you, friend.

You Should Have a Thing

This blog turned an invisible corner many months ago; the key plot development of my decade is that I've started doing standup comedy and getting paid for it. On June 10th I will be performing at the most famous venue in San Francisco.

You should have a Thing. A Thing you do that you have complete control over.

Things are what you use to fill the spaces left by shit-ungiving women and absentee senses of self. They insulate your mind against the Moment, which if untended by a Thing, will tell you that everything is futile and ugly and sweeping along an arc of decay.

I recommend you have a Thing.

The Most Moving Thing I've Ever Read

What will my last words be?

Those who die in combat often call for their mothers. From one account in Vietnam: "I didn't really speak the language. I could understand a few phrases, though. One day during a firefight, for the first time in my life, I heard the cries of the Vietnamese wounded, they call out for their mothers, their wives, their girlfriends. There I was listening to the VC cry for the same things."


From "What Every Person Should Know About War," by Chris Hedges