The Final Status

That can never be posted on Facebook because the internet is too acidic an environment for sincere things. It is a fly-siphon that vomits the food it dissolves, so that it can siphon it again.

I do not need to tell you all that I love you because I love myself. Do you hear? Do you hear, seventh grader that started this thing? This blog? Who is still listening? I can think of only two people who have read this from the beginning and one of them is dead.

I love myself so that you don't have to. So that all the in-between moments of staring off into the rain while I pee in a bush, thinking about death, feeling the clumsiness of my body as I stumble down the street, do not equal even a single private moment of sober consideration. I love myself so that someday I will be able to love someone who also loves herself.

Love is the unimpeachable moment. It makes me nothing that you want me to be.

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

Terms

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.

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.

A piñata hanging in the darkness. It would be a relief even to be hit. But instead, string and space. String and space.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Horror Vacuui

Southbound 5 at around 4:30, top a crest and the city looms. Downtown is lit eerily by the setting sun. A wash of the magic ochre found mostly in my own dreams. Overwhelmed. I am not looking at the road. I am still not looking at the road. It is so awful and lonely and moving. It all looks like ruins. How do all the cars not crash from awe.

Canon

"There's this tea place in Hillcrest. It would be a great place for you to bring one of your many books."

I had told my new friend about my spontaneous collection of 200-odd literary classics. I had told him about my favorite book, The Magic Mountain, that it was set in a sanatorium in Switzerland before the outbreak of World War I, that it was an allegory for the intellectual milieu of prewar Europe, that it was seven or eight hundred pages long, that well it sounded pretty dull but it was, uh, great. I had offered a self-conscious little silence.

I had told him about something very important, this bookshelf, that fills me with many shades of trembling.

The blonde, a month before - she seemed too pretty for Thomas Mann. She said vague things about him over the music of the bar. Then she pummeled a guy in a wifebeater with her ass.

What to do with this strange impulse, to hear voices removed by centuries and oceans, to make sure others do as well.

Apocrypha

In 2005, I started writing posts that I never published. Some were too specific and remain so. Others were abandoned because for a now unknown reason I was embarrassed to admit that I was in love on the occasions when I was, or because I did not want to betray my own unhappiness, or because I did not want to appear judgmental. In retrospect, these things do not seem so important to me. Here are a few favorites, in chronological order.

~~~

It often takes an hour of wallowing in the dry heat of Kaloustian's class to motivate myself to make a blog entry.

"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" proclaims Massoud from the back of the class. Substitute does nothing.

School is ugly. It's like your underwear after a hot day at school. GOD, it's hot and gross and my head hurts and "Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" Soulless myrmidons patrolling the campus looking for children to bully, grades, grades, grades, the dumb nauseating pulse of the top forty at lunch, the smell of cheese everywhere, hot sun, I VOMIT YOU OUT, I EXPEL YOU FROM MY BODY LIKE A SICKNESS. I reclaim dominion over my life, they get no more anger, no more floorspace in my head.

"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!"

~~~

Late-night drunken thoughts of far-away places:

• Stepping in front of the car, brushing off sixty years or more like so many irritating flies, breaking down in the sunshine walk home listening to Eminem, of all things, fucking Eminem, Mockingbird, and I have to stop and just wait and cry because this man cares about his daughter and I care about my friend and it's as simple as that, because there's something worth caring about. You fill my heart even though you filled my life with pain.

• Confessionals. I miss you miss you miss you miss you and am not afraid to telegraph it secretly over underground internet wires.

• Hallelujah! Hallelujah anyway. There is something to miss and something to fill.

~~~

Crumble, beast. Disappear into the aether and take my hunching with you. Take the peering, the late-night safaris through wanting, illusion, the vertebrae falling one-two-three to your hypnosis. Gather up your hallucinations, your beekeeper's implements, your commerce of make-believe attitudes. Collect them back into yourself and go away forever.

When I first heard the rumor that Facebook was engaged in a lawsuit that might result in its dissolution, I was anxious - I don't like having my social crutch threatened. Then I started thinking about what would happen if it did implode. Not pandemonium, not any kind of lasting malaise, just a few flashes of anger and panic and then resignation; an exodus back into the world of living mouths, or a collective relapse into MySpace.

I liked the idea. I wanted the spell broken for me. When I realized that Facebook is a millions-dollar enterprise that will probably never be unseated from its privileged position in our lives as young Americans, that nobody was going to come and pluck me up out of my glazy-eyed stupor for me, I considered deleting my account. But then I didn't. Because it's hard to turn away from the promise.

Which is communion. Which is stray comments on pictures from girls of varying degrees of familiarity. One provocation, two provocation, three provocation, then the strike, the set, the reeling-in of new mates and allies. But it doesn't work that way. What happens is the thousand-yard stare, across a virtual horizon where forms move lethargically in silhouette, at the exact geometries of your virility.

So I'm done. I have just deactivated. I'm tired of feeling like a fly drawn to seductive death-glow.

This is not to scold anyone for continuing to use it, though I think on some fundamental level we recognize that it's all bad for us in some way (this coming from the guy who has wasted more than a few hundred breaths defending the whole thing to the 40+ crowd as a breakthrough in communication). It is not enough to touch only the most controllable parts of our lives together. It is not adequate to rifle through the digital laundries of others, hoping for accidental deposits of sincerity. It is not acceptable to me anymore to dwell in cardboard galleries and call it friendship.

This has been a fantasy, a mutually condoned imagining.

So crumble, dreamspace. Crumble away.

~~~

There is lead in between their hands, all over their faces, dormant in the crevices. There is lead in the pavement on which they sit outside the house with the party inside. There is lead all over everybody's hearts, it seeps. See it seep.

~~~

Sometimes you must confront the question: do I love you? Or do I look at you to keep myself feeling broken?

Do I love you? Or do I pound on the seat in front of me as we drive past you sitting on the curb speaking with another guy because I don't know how not to want to pound on seats?

~~~

When they put me under to have my wisdom teeth removed, it went blank. It did not go black, there was no color involved. No anything. Just sudden nothing. A cookie cut out of time's dough. Then I was awake, groggy, adrift in the stimulus-response neverland you reach after enough alcohol. I was laying on a table, my mom was sitting next to me. When my head began to stir, pivoting around to orient itself, she leaned forward. I couldn't speak because my mouth was full of gauze, so she handed me a piece of paper and a pen. Suddenly, I needed very badly to communicate to her just how in love with ______ I was, above and beyond anything else. My hand moved to write, "I am in love with ______," and then my self-censoring reason came back online.

~~~

Olympia, you make me feel like a paper cup caught in a dead bush on the side of the freeway.

Your hush is keeping me awake.