Category: Redux

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God

What monsters are alive right now when god is not awake? The time is short. Spacetime is a difficult concept. Matter bends spacetime in a way that’s difficult to wrap your mind around. Matter moves spacetime. More matter, more movement. But your and my time is short. We don’t live in the capacity of spacetime. I mean, we do, but our capacity to understand can only see years. Minutes. Sometimes, seconds make a difference in our understanding. Time, as we speak about it, though, is a human construct.

We talk about what I would do if Hitler were alive. Read. Read. And then read. Know. They aren’t putting Jews in an oven. But this is what happens first.

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Go

The moment is so small that it makes bigger things happen. The moment has to happen now, so it has an advantage. It insists on being like a second on a clock. It says, “Whatever the fuck you want.“

I love pace. I see why it matters. I love compulsion. I see why it matters.

I love the parts that are compelled to go, “Go go.” And I love the parts that have the self-control to say, “It will be better tomorrow.”

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Santa Monica civic

I sat behind you at this concert (Portishead, Santa Monia Civic Center, if you don’t remember). You were a dancer. You did ballet. It seemed far too refined for me. For my birthday, you bought me a plastic hula dancer for my car that bobbled when the car moved.  You thought about me outside of our interaction. I suppose that was good. The hula dancer was horribly inappropriate, the worst kind of appropriation of something I actually do care about, but I wanted to fuck you, so I didn’t say anything.

Imagine flashbulbs going off. Life is that. What do you remember? A flash? Butterflies at the beginning. Love at a moment? Love ends. And then what? The way we deal with the way love folds our emomotional clothes. It puts things in their places.

Lost. It’s hard to find the bathroom.

Love works separately from how you’d prefer it to work. It’s an octopus that squeezes to fit the empty spaces. Lost is lost. Love is not different. Love only hurts a little less because there once was something. It’s gone. There will be no more questions. If there were a few, theyʻre gone.

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Vowels

Ask. I can almost guarantee you will disagree or maybe hate me. I don’t really mind. Life is a pole slathered in vaseline. I slip toward the floor. I belong on the ground. Bleeding and oozing is what I know. You are a problem. So pretty and so French. The words come out of you. I have to make the words. I have to make them mean something. You slink. I trouble to be hidden when I try.

You have a boy’s name in French, but you’re Swiss. Where I’m from, I just have my name. You are vowels, and I am consonants. Hard at every guttural stop.

I know you love me, but you can’t love me. That’s a hard love. I’ve lived it before, and you haven’t. That is what life is. I’d expect nothing else.

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Consensus

The thing about doing the right thing. You’re probably going to piss someone off. There is no consensus. Think about it. What question has a consensus answer? Beatles or Stones? Creamy or chunky? Tits or ass? You want to go a little deeper? Buddha or Jesus? They both kind of said the same thing. There is no such thing as everyone agrees unless someone with a gun is pointing it and saying, “Agree!” At that point, come on. I’ll say anything with a gun in my face or a knife at my throat. The irony is we’re all the same. We’re all exactly the same. There were different traumas along the way. We’re all verily, similarly fucked up. In the same way, when you watch Discovery, and you thought chimpanzees were herbivores, and then they rip a monkey’s head off. I mean, you understand they have to eat, but that was violent in a way you don’t learn at the zoo.

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Thatʻs not funny

These jokes are funny only if someone doesn’t know you. When they know you’re not lying. When they know it’s the truth. The irony is that’s what’s funny. Lies aren’t funny. You laugh at a clown because he painted a face over the truth. When you know the clown, it’s not haha funny. The paint comes off sooner or later.

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Sharp

Sharp-nosed and tight. I didn’t know I had a type. I might describe what I meant if I weren’t sober. I like angles. I resist arcs. This is almost a self-hatred thing. I hate myself, but not like that. My dreams are consumed with sex and death. And I prefer the former.

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Broken

If you don’t understand, then you’ll never understand. Understanding feels good in fleeting moments. Understanding is a lie. Understanding is true only for a moment, then the balance returns to chaos. Scared, broken, and alone was familiar to him. Happiness and sugar and smiles were sinister in intent. Sweetness always had an agenda. He never trusted feeling well, he never liked it. Good, by definition, was precluded with, “But.”


Even before everything changed. Everything he did, he did silently. Without malice he acted dastardly. He was cunning. Always able to see the crevasses, he filled them with intent. And still he saw himself a victim. Of course, the universe was agnostic. It was an unending flow of water. Wishes mattered like sticks in a stream. Everything goes where the water goes. Choice is irrelevant. Fear and hope are the only things you have once the water comes. Fear usually wins. And he was afraid.

His fear was as nebulous as it was constant. It was provoked by the immediate and the eternal. He walked the world ready to pull away at a touch, but was simultaneously self-righteous.

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Hard truths

And so reality had become motionless, inside a box of what he could think or feel. As his body melted, his mind froze. It is hard to describe what could never possibly happen. The worst part about any kind of incarceration, and he was almost perfectly incarcerated, wasn’t the lack of freedom. It was boredom. Freedom is mostly overrated, and almost always misidentified.

The hard truth that we don’t like to think about is that we’re all dying. Degeneration happens at different speeds, but it happens. He stopped the inevitable with a wish. And then he wished for an un-wish. Death has a reason. It may not be immediately clear. When you cannot die it becomes the everything. He wished he could die as strongly as he wished he might live. Lessons don’t come the way you want them. When they come.

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Killing me softly

There are songs that kill him. Songs kill slowly. They don’t cause cardiac arrest, and at the same time break hearts. This song was playing when, that song then. He couldn’t listen to some because it brought back a flood that he couldn’t dam. And maybe he wouldn’t even if he could. He liked being neck-deep in the water. He liked the ghost of her. She was nicer as a memory. So was he.