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.
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.
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.
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.
Wasatch
My reflections on Salt Lake City’s airport: Sitting in the belly of the beast. Well, the beast’s international airport, anyway. The mountains are snow-covered and beautiful. And, of course, the Department of Metaphors, located in my head, immediately sullies the beauty of the almost-winter, desert landscape with this thought: isn’t it appropriate that rising above the heart of one of the newest, strangest, whitest belief systems ever concocted by man, are the harsh conditions of the Wasatch mountains, also now covered in white, hiding the ground-level impurities and imperfections with a smooth blanket of pure, white snow.
Everything is in its place, buried under that which seems to fall from the heavens.
New originals
This is the new beginning. The new originals. The new today. This is the past countable. It is impossible to count. If the universe has a bookkeeper, then this is accounted for. But for all real purposes, there will be no count. It’s a thought exercise. Like wondering how many potentially fatal doses I’ve ingested, or how many times I’ve actually been close to death. No one is counting. But it is a set of integers greater than one and less than infinity.
Inexorable truth
We all know our own obvious flaws. It takes eons of time and wisdom to more fully understand our more nuanced scarcities, but the others are obvious. You don’t need to tell a fat person they’re fat. In the middle of that spectrum of our obvious proclivities, we are really capable negotiators of denial. A drunk knows he’s a drunk too. But there are a million good reasons why. When you’re fat (like I’ve been), it’s self-disgust and shame. When you’re drunk (like I’ve been), it’s because she did that, or he said that, or I lost my job, or she left me.
Here is the part that’s embarrassing. If you are half a human being, these are obvious, inexorable truths. Did I say obvious? Everyone can see them. Everyone knows they’re true. And I guess this evolutionary survival mechanism helps you explain why it’s not true. And this earned weird evolutionary instinct helps the closest to you in your tribe make you feel better; they describe infections as a phase. As an anomaly. They look for reasons to share blame.
I’m telling you now, a human living in the midst of proclivity. There’s probably no one to blame except the universe. And that’s not really blame; the universe is by definition everything. Your proclivities, faults, and failures are by definition part of everything. It was inevitable, but that doesn’t let you off the hook. If your sadness and falling down were inevitable, in an infinite reality, so was your happiness and standing up.
The choices we make feel like free will. Ok. I choose to be an alcoholic sleeping at a bus stop. Does that make sense? Ok. I choose to finish my master’s degree and buy a house and have a beautiful wife and two kids, and a garage. Those sound like opposites. I am the same person, and I HAVE chosen both. And they both seemed like the exact correct decision when I made them. EXACTLY. THE. SAME. Confidence at DEFCON 1 when I pressed the button.
What I’ve realized is that even the best minds of our generation risk being destroyed by madness. I’ve been mad. Mostly I love, but I’ve been mad (crazy) and mad, and when I was (second) mad, there was no reason to be mad. I’ve come to see, and it’s taken far too long, that madness is actually sadness. It’s like a white blood cell response to a threat to your body. You see a threat, and you grab a can of Raid and spray everything in sight. The people who love you and reach out a hand. Fear is a cunt. You spray their hands and mouth because you’re so afraid of whatever is making you feel is making you feel so much. You spray their hands and then go hide. And hide and hide and hide, until showing your face becomes a threat.
Hawaiian journal of history
So, these constructs that taught everyone how to box it all in, I didn’t have that. First, I was the fat little boy who seemed to know everything about volcanoes, whales, and the solar system circa 1980. Then the fat pre-pubescent who seemed to know it all, and who certainly believed he did. From the age of 12, I could do whatever I wanted to. No curfew. No rules. (I didn’t break any major societal ones; that came much later.) And at 16, I was on my own in Tacoma at university. The smartest boy in the room, so even more, I could do or say anything I wanted. And everyone seemed to listen. They asked for more. Now, in this relationship world of deadlines and people who cannot understand the pace, I think I am troubled. I used to drink to slow down so I could speak slowly enough. The problem has been that I don’t enjoy or naturally speak or think slowly. Imagine your mind is a browser. Mine is only comfortable with 26 tabs open, and I’m monitoring all of them. This path, though unnatural to me, will be healthier in terms of my interactions. Do I want to shut down 25 tabs so I can make everyone else happy? Can I live in the 1?
A story about everything
How do we start this? How do I tell a story about everything by telling a story about me? Why would you care about me? I certainly don’t. Why should you? I’ll give you a reason. This isn’t a story about me. It isn’t about what happened to me, though that is all I’m going to tell you. Every word that follows is about you. I only know what I’ve seen and read, so I can only write that. But none of it is that specific. I’m not that good.
This is my story, so it’s everyone’s story. It’s my voice, but it’s your voice too. My friend told me I was self-absorbed. I’ve been wrapped up in the vision in my mind since I knew I had a mind. Her calling me out is just saying the obvious.
We were talking about lovers. She’s happy with hers. I’ve been juggling. I was telling her that as I get older, it has become very easy to talk people into doing what you want them to do, especially sexually. We have this whole pretense, mostly women, about how sex is this fortress that needs to be climbed or conquested. It is not. It wants to surrender. It wants to be given up. It just needs a reason. If not for the world, then for itself. Legs want to know why they are spreading. I didn’t know that when I was a boy. I was always looking for a superfluous cause. Everything is so simple if you don’t make it difficult.
It’s why drunks succeed before they get too drunk. Alcohol removes pretense. It removes that chameleon dance where you jump and jump and try to fit this skin or that color. And instead just be the fucking lizard that you are.
Deep Ellum
I stood with you, three feet away from Robert Cray at the Gypsy Tea Room in Deep Ellum. The blues. I’ve always had such an affinity for sadness. Some come to mind. I’m not sure if it was born or learned, but it certainly is. I watched the movie, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, because I thought it might be sexual (spoiler alert: not really, unless you’re very patient). And then I tried to read the book because I liked the title. I bought the titular Fine Young Cannibals’ first album for the same reason (and the Screaming Blue Messiahs). I still don’t understand the former. I still listen to the latter.