Fountain Stopping

Right now I am upstairs and eight years old reading Expedition by Wayne Barlowe in my bunk bed that is now dismantled in the garage. I am home sick from school. Right now I am home sick from school becoming in love with elaborate fantasies involving imagined worlds. Right now I am home sick, from school.

I am reading the thing from cover to cover wrapped up in a feeling of warm security that only comes when you have no responsibilities aside from healing in your bed in your house while your mother cooks you meals and your suspicious father furls his eyebrows over concern for your homework. It is full of mystery. My favorite is the painting of the two-legged alien sauntering along the edge of a forest lit up like a hundred bioluminescent Christmases at dusk. I am warm and making these things real in my heart.

And now I am downstairs alone in my underwear with cold legs at five in the morning and there is nobody in the house. His second and third books contained paintings of Hell so vivid that they kept me awake until past sunrise because I could not stop feeling them in my heart, because parts of them were not so unfamiliar. I am home, sick, from school.

Nothing is different here. It is the same moment. Only I have been gone, lost in extended fantasy. Do not tell me to ignore my thousand overscratched itches that tell me that the whole thing has stood like some kind of offending monument before the judgment of reason. I feel every unmeasurable weight of emptiness that fills the promises of this institution, and part of me disagrees but the wick at the center of the waxy myths smolders. This imagining should not be made real. This piece of paper, this fuck fuck fucking badge of universally licensed trudgery and economic segregation. Something is festering and you can't convince me I don't feel real real ill approaching the last rings of the circus. Like it's all making the world so much a better place, devoting years, years, years upon years to begrudging participation in exercises that mean nothing to anyone. And human beauty still finds a way to poke its blossoms out from between the cracks in the lifeless concrete, but that's what human beauty does forever and ever, and FUCK the concrete, here to eternity, because it covers miles of blooming soil. I knew this from the beginning, pacing at the front of my fourth grade classroom during recess, arguing with my teacher about the fallacies of her curricular agenda instead of doing my tardy homework, the whole thing still like some kind of funny joke I could dispel with rhetoric, before it spoiled to fresh anger, disappointment, loneliness. Before I carried unshakable rage through middle school, until I learned how to quiet it and play the game. And now I'm on the other side looking in, and fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck school. Talk about privilege until your lungs collapse. I don't care. This has been very crippling to some unnamable thing that is precious to me. I am a middle-class white male with a competent mind. I am standing at the top of the mountain. And I am surrounded by broken things, boredom, listlessness, addiction, limitless potential defaulted upon in every crucial way.

The technology, the very fun rap videos, the cars, the everything, I'd give it up in the blink of the eye just to be able to believe in my community and its founding myths for once in my life. This hunger has no bottom.

You tell me I am better, that I am educated because I have learned to sit in a chair for eight hours a day. I am sorry that I hate the things you have mandated me to endure. I am sorry that I have never been able to believe anything you say. You did not keep me warm when I was cold, and you did not keep me close when I was sick. Thank you for encouraging me to thwart my own youth every day of my life. I didn't need your help.

Now I'm going back upstairs to read about sightless aliens hunting with sonar across invented landscapes. And it will be made real. Because it fills my heart with wonder and I am home, sick, from school.

Elegy

Two days ago I wrote this as a final submission for my class:


Right now I'm staring at the spine of a book, The Devil's Teeth, that's sitting on a shelf at the foot of my bed. It's a narrative about great white shark researchers who live on the Farralon Islands in California. They spend every waking hour observing the sharks devour elephant seals. I told my dad I would read this book. I have not.

The things I have learned this quarter are things that have momentarily lifted me out of the dangerous waters, onto the privileged vantage of dry ground. I am sure that at some point in the book, the author draws a parallel between the jagged, volcanic geography of the islands and the serrated horror of a shark's jaws. But the mountains on my island are molar. Flat, reassuring. My footing there feels so sure. Then I'm slipping, have slipped, am once again shivering and terrified, surrounded by vague symmetries of monsters half-perceived in the murk.

I have learned that I have to start swimming, that rogue waves issued from the chance physics of the deep are not enough to keep me safe. I have learned that some people swim better than others. I have learned that my form is poor but that it improves with practice. I have also learned that treading water is easy. Easier than swimming.

It is a curiosity of humanness that the fear of challenge can overwhelm the fear of drowning, of great fish come to collect. Curious because it means that we are not indigenous residents in our own souls. The spirit is domitable. This is fact.

So what of the swimmers? What magic fuel combusts in their hearts to compel them forwards?

The answer is secret. It cannot be contained in self-help books, analogies, stories, therapies with names. The answer is unspeakable and holy and precious. But I have a feeling it has to do with selflessness. They must know that those of us content to bob listlessly in the tide are disturbed by their wakes. They must be more awake to the fear, because they remember more vividly the feeling of earth under the feet. They must be frenzied with self-preservation.

Some of them come back. Out they swim, to smack the blood into our faces, to coax our reluctant bodies into motion. And they do it again and again, for the rest of their lives. They become faster, more agile than the monsters. This is the definition of heroism.

In the past weeks, I have been touched by wakes. All I can do now is put one arm in front of the other, flutter the legs and start swallowing water until I'm strong enough to swim, dive, porpoise away from snapping maws. I hope I will make the return plunge if I am lucky enough to face it.

Here's a prayer, we floaters. Move.



This morning I found out that my friend Mathew has died. A fellow floater, lying on my floor at two in the morning, both of us drunk, both of us lost in morose reveries over girls not paying enough attention. I hope he felt something beautiful before he went. I hope that if he can still know, he knows that his rings will never really settle in my waters.

He seemed to know that he didn't belong. I can say of him what he maybe couldn't of himself: he was better. Smarter. Blessed and cursed with disappointment because his imagination was strong enough to make him know that there was more. Anger, America. He never got his chance. He felt the sting of your lifelessness deep in his heart. Anger for my dead friend with the big soul. He was better than you.

A Story by Corbin Smith

HOW I AM FEELING BY MATT LOUV

I am hungry and horny.

20 MINUTES LATERS

I ate and jerked off. Now I am bored.

Poof

Last year, I turned twenty with a ritual. It was kind of weird so I'm not going to share the details. I turned twenty-one tonight with a much better one.

I spent my last half-hour as a minor collecting significant belongings and stacking them in a pile next to my computer chair. Lots of books. And Superbad. Kenneth Patchen, Kerouac, a book of career-oriented personality tests my mom had to coerce me into reading, the Chronicles of Narnia, even my copy of Diablo II. Then I composed a photo collage of friends and family, took it in to get a sense of story as the numbers rolled by. And roll they did.

Now I'm an adult. It feels weird that it feels good to write that. Not to sound over-sentimental (I, of course, never do), but it feels like a new kind of childhood. Square something-close-to-one.

I'm going to eat a bunch of my words and start practicing Chinese medicine and eating herbs and having fun with myself, because to me, being an adult mostly means having humility and a sense of humor. Why not? It's an adventure. Everything's an adventure.

Exponents

The day after tomorrow, I will be 21. Childhood is over. It's tempting to sublimate my alarm to thoughts of "21 is merely a socially constructed abstraction with little relevance to benchmarks of growth and maturity in your own life; only you get to decide when your childhood is over." But eventually, you have to concede to the rules.

One of my most vivid memories from elementary school was turning eight. At some point right before my birthday, I was at school (I remember the exact spot) and I thought to myself, "I will be twice as old as I was when I was four." That seemed astounding to me.

Now I'm throttling towards adulthood. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Like Drops of Slow Molasses

Some moments are so utterly, transcendentally adult as to be inaccessible after their passing. Some moments allow you to feel your place in your own narrative, can reach back and tap your fingers along the heads of selves past, smell the ionized air of deep time around you.

Moments like watching pornography after a four-month moratorium and finally seeing how utterly stupid and lifeless it is.

Asking my mother to pay for a weeklong seminar in Stanford about my chronic condition, having the honesty to know that I need help, that I'm not ready to flush the monsters from under the bed by myself yet.

Realizing that the retards don't have a Monopoly on the politics of human empathy, that a happier world is probably just as simple as people taking care of each other. Feeling suddenly overwhelmed in class by a desire to help someone, then sad and dizzy at the realization that that notion has an exotic flavor.

Going to bed thinking about the things that I have, not what's missing.

Code Red

I've been having 28 Days Later-related nightmares a lot lately. Sometimes a franchise rotates into mental prominence and I don't really know why. Like when I'll be obsessed with Star Wars for a week, or when I'll chew through an entire TV series on DVD in a matter of days. It's mostly that I become enchanted with the idea of whatever it is that's caught my attention; my whiskers brush along their symbolic core.

I just finished watching the sequel. I had seen it before, but I'm still jittery. Not just from the tension, the violence, but for the sense of distilled hopelessness that pervades its scenes. As I get older and see things change, I come to recognize what I have, to value it more. Unlike when I was fifteen, unmoved by images of gore, seeing things taken away is now painful. And these movies take everything away, ruthlessly. Society, family, the future, our own humanity. I worry that they are so popular because they reflect our culture's self-image: a world of cannibals, grasping tenuously at a century whose momentum is overwhelming. They're not haunting because of the blood, the monsters creeping in the dark. They're haunting because it all seems so much closer than it should. And why is that? AIDS? A global economy poised on the edge of catastrophe? A spiritual ache for a mode of human artifice that does not presuppose environmental self-destruction? All of that, partially. But mostly, I think, because everything seems to be slipping, and losing things hurts. It is the fear of total social regress; of falling off the pedestal we built to keep us from the screaming wildness below.

Revival

http://thegoodnights.blogspot.com/

They Run Away

The day, chopped into little pieces by all these sympathetic diversions, had in fact crumbled in his hands, and turned to dust - and he would notice it now, either in cheerful amazement or, at worst, with a little pensiveness, since to shudder at the thought would have been inappropriate to his young years. It seemed to him that he was simply gazing, 'on and on.'

- The Magic Mountain


Holiness is a sense. The same as taste and smell. Holiness is sense of plot - assembling mosaics from the disparate fragments of life events. The sense of joy is intimately correlated to the sense of tragedy; they are essentially the same feeling, which is acknowledgment of the world's potential for beauty, whether in regards to its fulfillment or its abandonment.

But it doesn't stick. The fragments are mutually, magnetically repellant. Dwelling in holiness requires all of our faculties - it is exhausting. When was the last time you cried for more than ten minutes?

So what is left when my grip loosens is static, a severe ringing in the ears. What is left is feeling like a droswy, beached whale. I look around and I see slow suffocation - the neighbor who constantly has some van in his driveway, some piece of wood or marble set atop wooden horses being ground down to its appropriate shape, to be wielded against the degeneration of his perfectly-fine house in whatever new fit of rennovative zeal he has caught himself up in; the eternal shortening of the lawns; the slow breeze of lives passed in tedious routine.

The part of me that travels into mosaic land complains, like an old man with cataracts bent over some small province of a puzzle with infinite pieces. He knows that these assessments are wrong, are in fact an offense, because there is holiness in absolutely everything.

And so I trudge around feeling like my head is filled with farts and ghosts, fists full of cardboard.

Never Write Fan Letters

Dear Patton Oswalt,

Last night I had a dream about recruiting William Shatner, my neighbor, to combat a murderous cult that lived on our street. We rained righteous fury on them for hours while Satan drove around in a semi. Then I was exploring catacombs beneath Reed College, where I saved this girl from a giant lizard that spit poison. She thought I was a werewolf and we were totally about to do it when my alarm went off.

That was a pretty good dream. One I thought you could appreciate. But I have another dream you might be interested in (awesome segue). Keep reading, even if your psycho-fan-spider-sense tingles.

I am about to be a senior at a college where people have spent whole quarters studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer and making elaborate installation art pieces that allow you to stare at your own asshole while sitting down. Not hyperbole. A professor last quarter was telling me about a study contract proposal that had come his way from a girl who wanted to obtain a baby rabbit, raise the rabbit, and write nice things about the rabbit. For credit.

This morning I woke up and lay in bed for half an hour, gripped in a panic over what to do after graduation. With the economy being what it is today, the anal periscope market will probably have a grim outlook for the next few decades. So what am I supposed to do? Write papers about German existentialist literature and neoliberal reform in China for the rest of my life? Listen to Wu-Tang and eat Taco Bell until Judd Apatow gives me a job?

I feel like the options are to start listening to Sting and find some job that barely dovetails with my interests, go hitch-hiking and get raped and killed, or pursue one-in-a-million chances that will make for warm hearts, broadened horizons and fat Disney film options. I'm going to try the last one before packing my bindle.

What would I do if I had total license over the events of my life and the wills of others? Living in a house made of Scarlet Johansson vaginas is kind of beyond the realm of feasibility, so the next best thing I could think of was apprenticing myself to Werner Herzog. But he might shoot me, or declare war on my decadent images, or eat my shoes.

The fantasy that immediately followed was interning for the Comedians of Comedy. Yes, that's how high of a regard I hold you in: scraping your drunken, vomit-and-semen-caked carcasses off hotel room floors, fetching Mountain Dew and dressing up as a Kobold for you and Posehn to beat senseless in your LARPing manias is at the top of my list of life goals right now.

I don't know if you're looking for help, now or ever. But imagine the things I can do for you:

• Filing
• Data entry
• Chakra cleansing
• Read the 4.0 rule books so you don't have to
• Mail Carlos Mencia cash-on-delivery bricks
• Fetch you Christmas turkeys
• Paperwork
• Enforcement

And what qualifies me to do it?

• I am an aspiring creative something-or-other and am too diminutive to prevent you from appropriating my ideas
• Anal periscope
• I have a car with leather interiors
• Beard
• I own Turkish Star Wars, Turkish Spider Man, Turkish Superman, Turkish The Wizard of Oz and Turkish Star Trek
• I know this guy who knows Patrick Stewart

This is a serious offer, because I admire your work above all other standup, it's made a positive impact on my life and I would love to contribute my energies in your benefit in whatever way I can. I'm responsible, professional-minded and I write good. I would even consider taking some time off of school if it interfered, because I can't think of many adventures I'd rather have.

Like I said, one in a million. But the risk of embarrassment and rejection is far, far less dire than the risk of coming to enjoy "Desert Rose."


Sincerely,
Horatio Alger


He read it and did not respond, which I expected but which has also been emotionally distressing enough to prevent me from viewing myself as anything but weird, gracelessly needy and over-sincere. This is the feeling that arises after writing in a congratulatory way to anyone I admire. I get the impression people look at me and think, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this guy with all the pathos? Go eat an ice cream sandwich and a Xanax."

I wrote earlier, "I feel foolish for searching for a way out. But is that what aspiration is? Looking for an exit until you finally escape?"

Just trying to find the right ladder to climb.

Exactly Why I Am So Viscerally Frustrated by College, the Dire Intellectual Presuppositions of the Liberal First-World in General

A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of ever subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp himself had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by the lack of critique. All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal - then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the personal involved is a more honest sort, that the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to that individual's physical and organic life. For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him - even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why - he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality.

- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

World Without a Facebook

My mom has a gun or something. We're in a compound, in a gray dusk. I am trying to collect as many rare comic books as I can before the shooting starts again. Then she's gone, and I'm charging through rebar and fences, hiding behind crates, rolling back and forth and such. Everything is confused. I find her, except she's not my mother anymore. I've been looking for a love interest the whole time. She has a gun or something.

Aaaah, then I'm back with K, just the same as she was when we parted ways somewhere around ninth grade. Everything settles comfortably.

I wake up un-despondent. I've somehow moved into a place where kissing girls in my sleep leaves me not-depressed. That's a good place to be.

I'd tell you about how it is I believe in God (or some divine holy thing that makes life important) but my words have hairy, fumbling knuckles and God is easily tangled in capital letters. Think about mushiness.

This blog has been kind of embarrassing the past few months. Let's move on and return to consciousness with a pleasant little smile and a stretch.

I have a giant foam stand-up poster with shirtless Mario Lopez on it. This is some kind of meaningful allegory.

Hi everyone.

Departure

Deleted my Facebook today. Feels nice.

Pressed

This morning I woke up listless. One of those "I can't really be excited about my day because I don't know what I'm doing with my life and all my energies will probably be invested into non-returning enterprises" mornings. The texture of my world was drab, mundane.

Then I made the mistake of taking a mid-morning nap, waking after half an hour into a bout of sleep paralysis that was one of two of the most severe episodes in memory. For those of you who have never experienced it, give thanks.

My eyelids flipped halfway up my eyeballs, I lifted my legs up about six inches off the mattress and I was engulfed in electricity. This happens to me about once a month now, and it usually only lasts about a minute, so I waited for it to pass. It did not pass.

When this first started, I was about fifteen or sixteen and I had no point of reference for the experience. My first reaction was that something supernatural was attempting to pull my soul out of the top of my head while I slept. This was at around three AM, when I was overwhelmed by the fairly indescribable sensations of the paralysis and had not yet discovered I couldn't move, so it was more exciting than frightening. This assessment probably seems stupid. But the phenomenon is the genesis of the succubus myth; the feeling of submersion in Otherness is real.

So I waited and waited. Occasionally, I can break it by sheer force of effort, applying all my strength to forcing an arm or a leg into the air. It's a gamble, though, because when it fails the punishment is waves of ethereal fire washing over the body in incrementally more painful intensity. This happened of its own accord. Imagine the feeling of a limb falling asleep, only it's your whole body, and there's an invisible demon with its hand on a toggle, jolting you into submission.

Thankfully, I don't get the visions. Many people who have this problem also see manifestations of malicious entities roaming around the room, staring at them, sitting on their chests. I thought about this as the vibrations became more violent and spasmodic. I pictured a monster with a face covered in horns, gnawing at my foot. I then imagined how I would explain the missing appendage to friends.

"How did you lose it? What happened?"

"You wouldn't believe me. A creature from the fifth dimension rendered me immobile and ate it right in front of my eyes."

The thing is, you're still asleep. Logic operates in dream time; you are afloat in limbic twilight and all religious and superstitious proclivities are given free reign to play upon your imagination.

What felt like ten minutes passed. I was in agony, feeling now like I was being psychically tortured by some evil god for shits and giggles. Hanging within sight was an icon that holds special import to me, so I tried to wield it against my oppressor. Within a few moments, I was free.

The awakening is always strange. The mental space is so different that all the pain is almost immediately forgotten. It takes effort to remember exactly what happened, to recapture the feeling.

I am left with the impression that waking consciousness is a layering of lower consciousnesses, and that hypnopompic and hypnagogic (the transitions to and from sleep) occurrences are windows into this awareness. Sorry if that sounds New Agey, but I think it's important, because it means something as apparently fundamental as the overly-familiar sensational panoply of everyday life is to be treasured, because it is an evolutionary mechanism that puts us in control of our experiences. Sometimes it takes extended sessions of mild in-body torture to understand its sophistication, to appreciate the power it entails.

Lineup

A mugshot of cynicism. Cynicism that is just weariness, like, SHIT, is all there is a bunch of people staring with necrose eyes into the searing luminosity of various capitalist supernovae, is all there is the yawning of the century's grave, a playing-out of all human passions to their dull, imitable, vacant generalities, is all there is a great David Attenborough beyond time and space telegraphing his final, dire assessments directly into hearts and minds that are too exhausted and weak by the end of history's abortive new morality play to reach for the remote? Fire? Brimstone? Robin Williams fruit bats and singing piles of primordial sludge? Hannity and Colmes and Abbie Hoffman and Carlos Mencia and He Who Refuses to Refer to the Police As Anything but "Babylon?" This? Is our dialogue? Is the vocabulary of our future?

Ugh. Ugh ugh UGH MUGSHOT. I am placing listlessness under citizen's arest and thrusting it forward in the sterile, halogen chambers of my soul's jurisprudence, to stagger and lift heavy eyelids in Noltean discombobulation towards the camera. Snap. The ugly ooze. The desiccated vampire. See it. The acquiescence is breaking all the toys, keeping passions imitable, tearing red suits off the overgrown elves of the world to reveal shivering, naked old men. The acceptance of ultimatums, saying things like "we are a virus spreading upon the face of the Earth," plunging curious fingers into the boils, dancing amongst the lepers and playing violin in hopes of a city to burn.

You are under arrest.

You will not allow the idiots, pretenders, charlatans, zealots, myrmidons, monsters, monsters, monsters, monsters, monsters, all of them monsters with gnashing teeth, words that are all violence, New Tomorrows Trojan Horses all, filled to the flaring nostrils and stamping hooves with death and misery and camps and mass graves, I AM ADDRESSING YOU, DIRECT-ACTION-TAKERS, GUERILLA-PROTESTING-SITTING-IN-PORT-BLOCKING-TREE-KILLING-FOR-WHATEVER-IT-TAKES-PROMOTING-SOLDIERS-OF-PURE-HUMORLESSNESS-WHICH-IS-A-TRUE-EVIL. Which wall shall we all line up against, fools, you fools?

You will not allow them to enter your mind and make hope a lie, make beauty uncomplicated, make virtue easy, keep you from saying frightened, unknowing, searching things to others. You will not tread within the fences of their rhetorical ghettos. YOU WILL NOT STOP BEING IN LOVE WITH THINGS THAT DESERVE TO BE LOVED just because banality has marshaled all its most gropingest hands to crawl all over them.

So I say it now,

I love falling asleep to the sound of a lone Mockingbird singing in the night and I want there to be Mockingbirds again and again,

I love the Eucalyptus trees swaying in the canyons, the rope swings that hang from their branches, the memories that clutched at their termini,

I do not love that they have been cut down, for safety, which is something like No More Mockingbirds Because They Are Very Loud,

I love the Earth, the growing things it invented to send breezes through, its deep waters, that which moves upon them, its menagerie of hungry mouths, its awkward, adolescent charge that is man,

I do not love false winds, those who blow them to drown out our senses, nor those who would send us out on an ice floe to die a stuttering, premature death for want of less-acned skin, a more confident stride.

So count me in, in the dreaming, the amalgamating of unlikely hopes. They will not resemble much of anything to be recognized. And my gates will remain impervious to gifts.


Snap.

You have been caught.

Snap.

Did Somebody Say Enema?: Show and Tell Part 1

"If you felt our sketch needed a butthole reference, Jesus did have a butthole and it was bloody, just like yours."

Oh yes. Yes, yes, The O'Debra Twins. Lead us onward, your raggedy masses, misfits, weirdo’s, possible criminals. Lead us to our Big Glam Candy Mountain, where no one will mistake us for homeless people, where well shots are no longer three dollars apiece, where everyone wins the beer chugging contest and home is only one catatonic subway stop away. Or give us one night a week to feel like a family. A dysfunctional, rectally bleeding family.

They have just finished the opening sketch to my initiation, about a bible-based exercise program called Body of Christ. The storm encroacheth; the annihilating wind to disintegrate all my assumptions about art, human behavior, the constraints of public decency.

When my older brother, who has lived in New York for a few years, heard that I would be coming to the city to study poetry, his first response was,

"Oh my god, you're not going to be in the Bowery Poetry Club, are you?"

"Yes, I am."

"That place is like the Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars. Never has there been a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."

I found out later that he had only ever attended one event: Show and Tell, where he had performed an unpracticed standup routine with poor results.


There are only three rules:

1. Do not put your genitals on the O'Debra Twins.

2. Respect the performers and they will respect you.

3. Limit your time on stage to six minutes.


Only one of these is followed with any kind of rigor, and then possibly only because to violate it would lead to police involvement. After reminding the variedly intoxicated crowd not to sexually assault their hosts and that they will be publicly humiliated for heckling too aggressively, the twins pull out of a water pitcher and the lineup is arranged. My two most emotionally schizophrenic hours ever spent at a performance were about to begin.

First came Rachel Parenta, a comedienne whose seemingly trumped-up and hyperbolic jokes about flying to the New Orleans Jazz Festival to stalk her ex-boyfriend turned into a disturbing, confessional narrative about flying to the New Orleans Jazz Festival to stalk her ex-boyfriend, annually. Laughs are scattered.

My antennae begin to tingle. The cantina band strikes up its opening notes. After a forgettable musical act and a self-righteous political monologue about censorship ending with the entire assemblage shouting "UP MY ASS," Gabriel Lockwood takes the stage. I am afraid of Gabriel Lockwood. Sometimes, before I go to sleep, I have my mom look under my bed to make sure Gabriel Lockwood is not there.

His hands are shaking from the moment he begins to read from his manuscript. The drone increases in intensity until his whole body is quivering, bent over the microphone, voice tripping over the unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness Kafka-on-Meth account of the unfathomable horrors of, well, something. He does not seem to be breathing. Just when I think he's going to start speaking in tongues, the timer buzzes. His trance disrupted, he offers a meek "thanks" and descends back into the audience.

And then there was Reverend Jen, leading us up the next vertical grade of the open mic rollercoaster with her bizarre ministrations. The first thing I notice is that she is wearing a full-body latex cat suit. The second thing I notice is that she is wearing elf ears. Wait, is she wearing elf ears, or does she have elf ears? I still don't know. My notes consist of one word: AWESOME.

"I've decided that I'm going to be a superhero all the time."

Her voice is indescribable, a kind of adorable rasp, like Tom Waits meets Dakota Fanning. She reads an autobiographical narrative about being taken to a party in a trailer park, where everyone is taking turns using a friend's unconscious body as a urinal as punishment for his lack of drinking fortitude. I cannot do the humor justice, but the whole club was rapt in spasmodic laughter.

I think this is the moment where my loyalties cemented. I was on board the good ship Show and Tell, and my trust in my captains to guide me safely through the salty tumult of outsider talent was unwavering.

One boring standup set later, a fourteen-year-old girl named Katherine was staring out at us from behind a pair of glasses, a porcupine puppet on her left hand. Not only was the porcupine never explained, it served only as a tepidly deferential, non-ventriloquistic commentator that mumbled encouragement to its visibly nervous host and pantomimed various actions recounted in the story she was telling. It concerned taking a train trip with a boy of the same age with whom she had been desperately in love for a long time. It was less than riveting and, as such, the bar lapsed into drunken rowdiness, incurring the wrath of one of the O'Debras. Then, I almost fell out of my chair for the fifth or sixth time that night. Katherine had abruptly launched into song and her voice was arresting. Not quite beautiful but alarmingly sorrowful and profound for someone her age. It was a song to her unrequited love, watching him sleep on the train. "You gather your hair in back like God was going to grab you by the ponytail."

Then we hit the bottom of a trough. I felt like I was going to start hemorrhaging grey matter out of my ears and would not have been surprised if the next performer unzipped their skin to reveal their true unicorn form and offered to grant our wishes.

Instead, a bald guy is screaming at us. Two people sitting at a table close to the stage had been having a conversation during his nonsensical screed about who knows what and he was clearly panicked and infuriated. Thirty seconds remain. He spends them explaining a detoxification program he's put himself on, whereby he drinks various disgusting undrinkable things in order to pass bladder stones, and he has here a glass of olive oil, and a glass of lemon juice, and a glass of tomato juice, and he's going to dri...BUZZ.

"Do it! Let him drink it!"

Time is extended; I count my lucky stars as I watch a grown man chug the ingredients of a failed salad dressing so he can fish crystals out of his poop. I look around the room for intergalactic ragamuffin smugglers and their wunderkind charges. One more act to go.

He looks seventeen, trying very hard to be a twenty-something troubadour. "I'm sick. If I shoot boogers on you, I apologize in advance."

He continues talking, then a guy who looks like James Carville saunters up the aisle and shouts, "I wanna see those boogers, GOD DAMMIT!"

Pause, Bob Dylan starts talking again.

"GET 'EM LOOSE!"

He has sat down, is staring intently, completely serious, nodding slowly. It's time to go.

The break falls at around one in the morning. Since I had a half-hour commute to my Brooklyn apartment, I couldn't stay, though by that point I was fairly seasick anyway.

Diane O'Debra announced the opening of the beer-chugging competition enrollment, requiring us to submit creative suggestions to the question, "What do I have up my ass?" I scribbled "a smaller ass" on a slip of paper, dropped it into the pitcher and wandered, dazed, out into a strange and lawless new galaxy.

Iconoclasts in the Mist: Show and Tell Part 2

It had all started to feel normal, shuffling past a man wearing a sequin dress and a wig and an overweight and heavily tattooed woman in a Vegas-style cabaret bikini to find a seat. I recognized almost everyone. There was Jordan Carlos, friendly TV comic who was surprised when I could quote his jokes back to him from his Comedy Central appearances; there was John, willowy Lower East Side veteran with the grating voice; there was Angry Bob, obese, hateful Angry Bob; and there was I, the quiet kid with the Moleskine, sad to be amongst the peanut gallery for the last time. Of all the performances I had seen during my time in the city, Show and Tell still remained the most entertaining, the most challenging, the most genuine.

A new face sits down across from me and asks me if I'm performing. I tell her no, find out she is planning on doing a comedy routine and ask her if she's been here before. She has, only a couple times. "A naked guy" is the best she can offer in response to my question regarding the strangest act she's seen. Child's play. I tell her about the bladder guy and, five minutes later, he sits down next to me.

"Hey man, how'd the oil thing turn out?"

"It went well."

"Are you going to do it again tonight?"

"No, I'm going to do an entire standup routine with thirty-two stitches in my head."

As jaded as I had become over the previous six weeks, this crowd still found ways to render me speechless.

He removes a bandana to reveal a gnarled bird's nest of flesh and suture thread.

"What the hell happened?"

"Fell off my bike. Broke my collarbone, too. And got a concussion." He pulls his shirt to the side to reveal a massive bruise on his chest.

"But it's alright, I've got a pocket full of Vicodin."

He pulls out a prescription bottle and giggles.

The reading of the names begins. Jeff Dickerson is called; Diane O'Debra chastises him for the second time for his fart-based rendition of the national anthem. "Do you know how long it took to get the smell offstage? Weeks."

But it's not all scatology in this twilight zone -- Show and Tell, perhaps because of its character or its reputation, attracts fairly big names. Seth Herzog, a well-known comic, opened the night with stories about accidentally signing up to entertain troops in Kuwait.

The real comedy arises about halfway through the show, when Abbie, a middle-aged woman doing a routine about her failed relationships, makes a confession.

"Cocaine is the drug to give me if you want a running commentary with your blowjob."

There are a few moments of silence, and then the audience gradually erupts into cheers, groans and hysterical laughter of recognition. It is a revealing moment.

Most of the content is light fare -- mediocre to good standup with a couple of decent music sets interspersed -- which is both a disappointment and a relief. My mind was saturated and my astonishment muscles were sore from flexing. All but one of my friends had, at this point, stopped coming with me, whether from lack of interest or low weirdness thresholds.

Despite all appearances, the grotesque spectacle is not really the show's greatest virtue. What sticks out most are the moments of lucidity, when a performer reveals something genuinely artful, often more by accident than anything else. I saw film-score-worthy music, HBO-worthy comedy and countless snapshots in time that were just too perfectly strange to adequately summarize.

Show and Tell is a crucible and a Rorschach test, from which molten talent can be easily retrieved, forged, and upon which swims a blotchy and chaotic pastiche of human potentials. There are many things the show is not. It is not necessarily good, as it is an extremely inconsistently bejeweled treasure chest. Nor is it always enjoyable -- some of the rough bits are agonizing. But it is, above all, authentic.

After the last act, I gathered my things, wished Mr. Stitches good luck with his set, and wound my way through the seats to the exit. Of all the spaces I had occupied in New York, in mind and body, I would miss this one the most. The smell will linger for months.

Gathering

What we have in common, I think, is the same unspoken dialogue: overwhelmed by cackling strangers, overwhelming crowd, music, social constellations of the grinning and nodding, backs turned in a circle, ebbing and morphing, the overwhelming crowd a many-headed hydra, some meat beast or other, you wanting only to make the phone call, to that person who is so very far away and say "I had a dream about you last night. I hesitated when you said goodbye and I ran through every single car of the subway train, trying to find you so I could kiss you but you were gone, and you're gone now, and I want to run all night to find you and kiss you, because I love you, I love you so much" but they're very far away, and it's late, and it would somehow ruin everything to call things by their real names.

You wanting only to sit down on the curb outside the party, holding them, not needing to speak much, understanding, warm. You ending up with armfuls of nothing, wondering if everyone is quite so lonely as you are just then, even those piled one on another, at the sides of parked cars, that copulatory lean, hands on hips, are you lonely? Do you possess one another? Show me your receipt of understanding. Show me proof of quietness, wordlessness, hands passing over hands.

You wanting only something to be gentle to.

You running down the aisles, one after another, hour upon hour

upon hour.

Clues

1. Starting to put change in the cups again

2. Cleaning up the first cat's vomit in the middle of the night so my landlady doesn't have to

3. Rushing out of the room, pillow in hand, to try to comfort the second cat in its epileptic spasms

4. Faltering, severely

5. Determination anyway

6. Funny things

7. Perspective from benevolent strangers

8. Having reason to feel terrible about forgetting to call my mom on her birthday

9. Hope

10. Hope

First Aid

I once happened upon a word in the dictionary that was the proper term for the period of exhaustion you experience after crying. That was some amount of years ago and I've never been able to find the word since. It has since became one of my favorites.

Making that post was therapeutic. Writing it reduced me to an absolute mess but what followed was a weird kind of serenity that has lasted since. I make myself miserable with overthinking, with overpoeticizing, with distraction. Ultimately, there's not a whole lot more to analyze than "I'm overwhelmed." If I knew that word, it would be the title of this post, because I feel calm.

The past couple of years have been my two worst. Vicious insecurity has coalesced with a number of unresolved, undiagnosed physical pains and discomforts, a series of minor and major emotional traumas (crushingly bleak night followed by vitriolic confrontation with neighbors, dry ice bombs, moving to college, death of cat, Bryan's suicide) and a variety of domestic/academic frustrations to pound me into the most compromised state of my life. But it's OK, because I'm putting everything above board now.

If I was writing in the same cycle that I've used forever, what would now follow would be some kind of fabricated sense of grand perspective, a makeshift resolve to change. But I don't know what's going to happen, how I'm going to make it better or how long it's going to take. What I do know is that writing about this makes me feel like I'm unwrapping rotten bandages, cleaning the wound, drying it, exposing it to light and air.

I'm not going to say "this is the true nadir, the low point at which I begin to climb my way back up the ladder," because I don't know if it is. I hope so. I hope that I am ready to get better. I'm optimistic, though. This feels right.

Tomorrow morning I'm getting on a train to visit my Civil War re-enactor aunt and uncle in Vermont. They have a beautiful house on a beautiful lake and a beautiful garage full of canons. They're planning on taking me to shoot their MR-15, which is some kind of gnarly-ass assault rifle used for exploding Kuwaitis. Should also be therapeutic.

I will say that I am guilty of being too consumed by my own worries about myself to pay attention to the things that are happening around me. I've been cycling through old photos, which is a habit of mine, and almost every series makes me smile or laugh out loud, because my life is full of wonderful, hilarious people. Sorry if I haven't done my part to return the joy you all seem so ready to share with me.

I think things are going to change. Here's a wish in the well.