This much has been the source of my constant struggle: an
overwhelming lucidity where right and wrong are concerned. I could never delude
myself for long that my decisions were arbitrary, however I might have
respected the teacher who insisted that they were so. I was much too intensely
attuned to the need of those Others around me. And yet this was not an accommodation
for pretensions. I would not condone for any course of action that would be
self-destructive on the part of an Other, and that course of action would of
course by extension be destructive to my own self. Neither will I tolerate
accusations of self-interest made by self-interested parties. It is clear that
they are deluded when they insist that my allegations against them are somehow
false because they are “convenient to me”. CLEARLY, Justice must be of
convenience to the Just. And I cannot honestly pretend that I have simply
appointed myself to be Just in administering Justice. It is rather that Justice
appointed ME. Justice has provisions for all innocent people, and I am among
them. Guilty people can have no just say in this matter. It is impossible to
conceive of any world wherein harm to one person is not of harm to all others.
So an inconvenience to me is a threat to the people that I criticize. I would
not condemn them were it not in their own best interest as well as mine; it is simplest
to say The Best Interest, devoid of possessives. I will fight to the death any
delusional meme that promotes the concept of benefit at the expense of an
other. Such parasitism all ways hurts both leech and host. And I have as much
sympathy for the one as for the other. In my hatred I condemn the leech, but
this hatred is not far removed from my love for the host. The same passion
drives both emotions to their logical conclusion. Life is never a negotiation
between parties. It is rather a constant battle of good and evil. And I cannot
delude myself for long that it is otherwise. This is the source of my struggle.
I have no sympathy for any one who is an inconvenience to me. There is never
such a right, because it is all ways a symptom of Ill Health. And if a world
COULD exist wherein the inconveniences to one party might convenience an other,
no one would be justified in pursuing his own convenience at my expense, least
of all when he tries to accuse me of doing the same. I would sooner that such a
parasite perish than to allow the sickness to proliferate and take more people
with him. This too has been my constant struggle.
As much as it is a testament to the Grace of God that I just
so HAPPENED to remember the film "Network" [which I have yet to see
in its entirety] on the very same day as Sidney Lumet was borne, [as I only
learned minutes prior to this moment] it is a testament to the Godlessness of
Google that they did not wish him a Happy Birthday. Hm. May be you have to
croak first.
Adding to the beauty of this moment is my memory of the time
there was only one chair available at Cold Beer and Cheeseburgers and the man
to my right (whose sentiments are of a similar leaning to the protagonist of
Network) shared a birthday with mine [as well as a conversation spanning hours
in that one night I knew him]. And that thought occurred to me too before I saw
Lumet's birth-date.
We do not fail to want something because it is
unattractive; it BECOMES unattractive to us because we DECIDE to want it.
The moment that one refuses it, its persistence is
a threat to the seeming omnipotence of one’s Will.
Dm.A.A.
EVIL:
One is not born evil, and neither does one become
evil by one’s own decisions, at least not all ways. One is pushed into evil.
King Richard III surely exhausted every last ounce of strain in proving a lover
before he decided to be a villain. It must have looked as though God Himself
had cast him for this role, and man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.
Would things have gone differently had some wench
broken rank and slept with him in his youthful days of glory? It would appear
to him to be as much a violation against Nature as his own deformity, and the
one does not promise the Other. Admit it: you too might scoff at the conception
of the possibility.
You know, I’m
tired of your lying. You keep going on about these adolescent delusions like
you expect me to believe them. You honestly are trying to get me to believe
that there are people at this moment who would sooner GOSSIP about me than to
address a concern with me directly. And you seem to suggest that these same
people are out of high school, have in many cases graduated from some
educational establishment of some repute, and accrue enough funds to sustain an
apartment, and to add to this they are sexually active, at great risk of
reproduction! So you mean to tell me, BASICALLY, that ADULTS are talking ABOUT
me, maybe at this VERY MOMENT, and about what? Truth? Justice? Honour? No. “Convention”.
I don’t know if you are trying feebly to delude me or to delude yourself, but
you are pushing the ROMANTIC notion that these “adults” are prone towards the
Fallacy of Naturalism: that because things ARE a certain way they SHOULD BE a
certain way. And now these people – in their TWENTIES – seek to find their
Solidarity NOT in Rational Discussion with the person that they find fault
with, in a state of total vulnerability, but RATHER in this state of
collective, magickal Tribal Thinking that is, to my mind, totally devoid of
Reason. YOU MEAN to tell ME that these people that SUSPICIOUSLY never speak up
about the things that you are saying are in fact secretly harbouring some
fearful PREJUDICE against me, likening me to a serial murderer even as they
carry out the BIDDING of serial murderers, filling JOBS for CORPORATIONS and
elevating that sin to not only a VIRTUE, but to a REQUIREMENT. And they call ME
the danger?! I am the one fighting this battle!! They have not even yet stepped
out into the Light! How else can one explain the PREJUDICE that the man out in
the FIELD is by his very nature a Villain – no, THE Villain? ENOUGH. No one is
so stupid to do so, so do not think that *I* will be so stupid or so ARROGANT
as to believe it. There is nothing special about me save for that which abides
in All Human Beings. They are ALL my allies in this fight.
A man who is still virginal in his late twenties is the most blessed of all. Women admire him for his perseverance, eager to assuage his pain as they are stirred by basic human sympathy. Men look on him with envy for his virtue and the attention it accrues. He is set apart as a true human being because he is not competitive but cooperative, so his allies are the entire human race instead of only a few cohorts. His pain is perpetuated only by this provision of fate: that women are afraid to break something so precious.
Nobody likes men to be aggressive. This is why there are entire laws and mores designed purely to stifle male aggression , and even if you ask men most of them will discourage you from any display of mutiny by providing an entire list of restrictions of their own device. It is not becoming for men to be aggressive. But for women it is permitted. And because women are every bit as rational as men are, it is wise to simply make one's move and to wait patiently for them to take initiative based upon what is in the best interest of all involved and Human Values. This is what it means to truly Understand Women, for a man. One has to follow one's own instinct to be passive so that the woman can manifest her own need to be aggressive.
I
have been a great friend to many, and I shall not be dispossessed of that
virtue, nor of the consciousness of it, by some degenerate who betrayed me. He
owes me only an apology; I shall accept nothing more from him. The act of
betrayal is a total loss of any ethos in this matter. It was HE for whom
friendship was a technicality employed towards private means. May the record
show with glaring obviousness that any agenda that I pushed was a public one.
Even if I took part in a deception, I was upholding the values of someone I
cared about, and I never conned any one (nor tried to) who had not wronged me
and who would not have pledged loyalty to the same person I cared about (were
he in fact motivated by those ideals of Friendship which I have upheld). No: these
traitors laughed and scoffed at the very word and practice of these ideals, and
it was only by upholding them (both the ideals and the traitors) that I made
myself vulnerable to betrayal. My very pain is my witness, that they cannot
disillusion me nor besmirch my reputation, but that they can only feebly
attempt to escape responsibility for their own shortcomings. That I feel pained
by their devices only proves the degree of empathy I have lingering on their
wretched behalf. They have depended upon me and my sympathy, and they still do.
It is only by giving my SELF that credit now which is due unto ME, and only by
being a friend to my own SELF, that I can find salvation from these vermin.
Besides: it was true that they defied my agenda. Yet their agenda was only to
their selves. How pathetic to be told what a friend is supposed to be by
someone who would not stand by me in my hero’s quest, but would rather condemn
it as a misadventure! I need not to be lectured to from such a wretched
position. I need only to be followed with faith and dignity. Perhaps Camus said
that to be a friend is not to follow nor to lead. But to disavow one’s entire
mission is never the mark of true companionship. The moment of sabotage,
painful and inconceivable before the fact, intolerable after the fact, remains
my witness. I allowed you to defy my will. But not to the point that it blocked
my own path. And if your path was other to mine, then call me not my friend.
For then you walk neither behind me, before me, nor beside me. You walk upon a
totally different road, and you have robbed me at every crossing. It matters
not that I availed myself of your resources, for however short a time. I took
only what I needed for my quest. But at the entire root of your own theft is
narcissism and self-interest. And you took it without my permission. A friend
would never do that. And any time I took any thing “of yours” without your permission,
it was long before I considered you a friend, self-entitled as you might have
been. Even now you steal from me, denying me the apology which is due unto me,
making it clear to set boundaries between your interests and mine, but never respecting
the boundaries I have set of my own accord. A friend does not do this; if he
dissolves boundaries, he dissolves them all. Even now you have no excuse. All
of your spit that you spit up at me falls back upon YOU. And so I need no
warrant for what few claims I make of my own good will towards myself, a mirror
of the good will I have shown unto others. You have all ready, in the very act
of accusation, confessed to all these wrongs.
The majority of the Dream was spent in an intermediate state, almost as though it were the "womb" of the Dream. Yet then it took form. After the events of Actual Life from yesterday night I took a long shower, contented that I'd not only stood up to my parents but that I had established with finality my ability to bear responsibility.
When I emerged I saw my father creeping around downstairs with a white flashlight, probably from his phone. He did not speak to me directly, but made his sarcasm known by implication.
It was not long before I knew wherefore he was so sardonic. It became clear soon that my bedroom had become host to a party. Micaiah had apparently invited a few friends and four of the Coyotes from Coyote Ugly. They were all hanging out in my room, acting all but as though they'd not seen my father, and to the same degree they acknowledged either his existence or mine they only acted wilder, as though to wrap up their debauchery more quickly before any one could shut them down. I tried to calm them, using this (both their presence and my own calming presence) as an opportunity to get some action. I began to lean against the shoulder of Jackie Virgo, as though ready to spoon or cuddle. She simply reacted with distaste and disapproval, asking what the hell I was doing.
If that was not enough to dissuade me, what proved sufficient was the appearance of Micaiah's roommates. These were manipulative bullies. They had followed us from the womb, which I have now begun to remember. In the "womb" of the Dream, which clearly represents the Fourth House, of childhood (and which was triggered by the matriarchal tendencies of Jean back in 2013, when I started this Dream Record) every thing is a mind game of some sort. Life not yet lived becomes a sick and twisted mess of complexes with no definite resolution or purpose. It begins briefly to resemble Reality before the moment of Immersion passes and it becomes again an elaborate two-dimensional side-scroller that dazzles with its colours but no more than it nauseates with its arbitrary redundancy.
And in the midst of this game emerge the Bullies. These enemies follow the protagonist through the level even after he has first bested them, at least by his own standards.
These followed us. And they were none other than Micaiah's room-mates. They barged in in alpha fashion, quickly winning the approval of our women. Lounging on my bed they were no more than mere hipsters, going on like nerds about the works of Tolkien. Any attempt I made to establish my own respect and self-respect as an intellectual was shot down and one-upped by something to the effect of "this guy is making a short film just about the Black Gate". And they asked me if I could recite the plot of that chapter, about which they would geek out collectively and with macho bravado, praising Tolkien's brilliance. And the guy in question, lying on my bed with his head facing the end closest to me, was about to recite the plot, but I urged him not to, insisting (with desperate conviction and seeming futility) that I had only recently re-read the trilogy.
Then I noticed something: The window of my bedroom that faced my neighbour's house. In Actual Life it simply opens out into a patio that is likewise overlooked by an other window from my parents' bedroom. In THIS dream, however, the two windows are united by a steady-looking, comforting balcony of grass. The partition that would in Actuality segregate the patio from the front yard, stopping short of the next lodging by a drop of several feet, like a tooth in an giant parapet, did not stop short; it continued and combined with the next lodging in the form of a neat bridge. I wondered if all ways it had been so. In the back of my mind I must have known that I was dreaming. But why grovel before sheer fact, especially if the Reality was so remote at this moment? The theme is transparent: why dwell on the illusory nature of Samsara when Nirvana is so far away? If Maya allows one to merge with one's fellows, why not celebrate that Tantric connection that only appears in Dreams?! Is Spirituality not all so a form of naive realism (in addition to all the other things that Spirituality is, as well as in addition to all the other forms of naive realism) if it becomes so ascetic that it isolates us to our separate egoes? (Which are, of course, what is represented by the houses.)
This part of the Dream serves as a reminder not to let either Yogic convictions nor Scientific cynicism (which eerily lend themselves to one an other quite frequently, as Jung had pointed out in his analysis of the religious neurotic living in the modern age) to stopper the expression of Love. The Will to Truth is truly a passion that burns to its own destruction, and it takes Opportunity along with it in the process.
Hence my phone confrontation with my Father in Actual Life last night was not the mere culmination of neuroticism on my part, but its transcendence. My father's own influence over my life was that of the truth-seeking scientist who had become dogmatic in his prideful convictions. It was not as though he had not found a use for his knowledge, though it is not the usefulness of the knowledge that is the arbiter. (and here I depart from an other father-figure of mine: Friedrich Nietzsche.)
It is of course in part [as one finds upon second thought] the arbiter, but not in his favour; the very Utilitarian conviction that compelled him to call me in the middle of the night was what triggered my final break with the Life of Thought. He had ostensibly good intentions, but his attitude was one that was both patronizing and threatening. My thoughts were not simply interrupted by the call; they found their natural consummation in it. I told him, as considerately as was possible, to fuck off. And by so doing I shut up not only him but some part of myself that he had imbibed in me: the need for life to make sense on MY terms, rather than on ITS terms. And what did I find? On its OWN terms, Life had all ways sided with me! It was only when I resisted, out of shame or just Pavlovian conditioning, that its Richness of Opportunity was obscured to me.
Every thing my father represents is the Life of Thought. My Mother, in turn, represents its natural corollary: the Mind Game. When I emerge from the shower my Father is DOWNSTAIRS, feeling about in the dark with only his cellular phone for light, not unlike a bottom-dwelling bioluminescent fish. It is from these same depths that the Bullies emerge. I would not be surprised to find, should I choose to investigate, that a trip downstairs would have produced a passage back into the Virtual Reality that had first produced these Bullies.
It is thereby exquisite to note that by the morning, when I looked out of my window and found a dawnlit stretch of paradise connecting me with my neighbors, I noticed that my Father had all but disappeared, his memory the only imminent detail. It is even more beautiful and Beatific to consider that paradise lay BETWIXT ME AND MY NEIGHBOURS, no longer isolated to my own ego.
Of course my Father's presence on the phone I.A.L. felt like a Bullying, oppressive force. He was the man who had supplied my enemies with their weapons against me. And probably unwittingly, as pure research men do! (The only reason I ever hated Cat's Cradle must have been that Vonnegut's message was too obvious and close-to-home for my tastes.)
What follows woke me up with a smile, if not on my face then in my Heart:
The window was no longer a window but a Door with a window in its upper half. This door, with morning's light streaming through it, however feebly, caught my attention. I looked through the window and found the aforementioned bridge and balcony. I wondered, as aforementioned, if it had all ways been there.
It is of course glorious to note as well that the balcony connected me to my PARENTS' ROOM. Sure: the same stretch (but of space, in Actuality) connects me to the same window in Actual Life, but the fact the Dream not only RETAINS this fact (not substituting my sister's room, for instance) but ADORNS it indicates the potency of the symbol.
What is good about dogma? Why is it important to discern "pseudo-science" from "real science"? It is the Nietzschean appeal: Utility. Yet this Utilitarianism on Nietzsche's part (despite his hatred of the Utilitarians) was what produced the Nazis. And it all so produced Big Pharma and all the scars I have from That Stint. At this moment I remember that a lot of the earlier stages of the Dream were set in the complex combining Aurora and Palomar, as though they were Athens and Jerusalem, [it's not pretentious to name-drop if it gets the point across, however Utilitarian that very statement might be.:-] most probably (and thereby definitely) transitioning seamlessly into my parents' old laboratories in Baltimore and then merging again with the Great Mind Game (post-structural philosophy) that one had to use for Escape. (Hence hyper-rational photo-Fascist Mike Daniels called games "an escape". They are, but not from Reality so much as Naive Realism, which Mike was then slave to and might yet be.)
Mike was a Libra. So was Aisha. So is my sister. And my boss.
All of them have discouraged me from going too deeply into these existential matters. Mike felt like I was driving him insane. Aisha warned me not to drive my SELF insane, and she spoke from her own experience more so than from my reputation. (As a Scorpio would.) my sister simply told me that she decided not to study her dreams because she was afraid of them, implying quietism by example. And Katelyn simply laughs nervously at every Zen curve-ball that I inadvertently toss her way.
And who could forget the pothead sitting outside Starbucks who drugged himself dumb just to stop the carnival of thoughts, telling me to get a job because I was going insane because of my passion for the Truth?
Even Nietzsche, the Great Libra intellectual, seemingly devised the concept of the Ascetic Ideal to put his own evil genius to rest, joking in half-seriousness and total sincerity that a philosopher's Will to Truth is proportional to his failures with women!!
At the root of it is a Libra's impotence. Venus wants to Know, but only enough to serve Her Purposes. She can have knowledge, but only for her own sake; she dares not cross into the realm of Knowledge for its Own Sake.
But Neptune can transcend himself. Hence Einstein was a Pisces. And so was Schopenhauer, whose greatness of mind did not reflect on the form of Popularity.
I opened the door.
I knew that it might lock behind me, so I propped it open with a Pumpkin. I moved into the morning light just enough to see what was going on.
The place was crawling with pirates!!
I ran back, just as the Bullies and the girls, who had now returned, were beginning to crowd at the doorway. I yelled to Micaiah, repeatedly, to keep it propped open: to watch the Pumpkin. It was obvious to me that this was my one way back into the House; I would Lose Myself otherwise. (And not like the Eminem song, though he too is a Libra.) the doorway to my parents' room has all ready been reached by the hostile agents (bullies) as I could see through its window.
What follows is hazy, and that is probably because I missed a great deal of it. Venturing forth once more I allowed much to happen behind my back.
The Pumpkin served this secret purpose of connecting me to my House. It is not unlike my dog, whose name is Pumpkin and whose role is that he gives me an excuse to live here I.A.L. as his primary caretaker.
I was afraid the Bullies would learn this and remove the Pumpkin, shutting the door that he propped open for me.
But then an altercation transpired with the pirates. I don't deny that I am making this up as I go, but is that any different from remembering a dream? Shannon was wrong; dreams come from the same place as Art. And I felt no less dazzled upon waking than I do now.
The Leader of the Bullies was killed. His talk of the Pumpkin, which he had sought with futility to destroy, had left an ironical impression upon his wife. The dogmatic patriarch could only get others to do his work FOR him; he was in that sense the perfect character foil for ME, in that I required my friends to have my back. The villain wants to hero to self-identify with him, but by agreeing to this the hero turns on Life. Life would show the hero that in fact he is more different from the villain than he is alike. The villain delegates because he wants Power; the hero delegates because he requires Freedom.
Trusting Micaiah helped. The Pumpkin kept the door open. Now only three people remained who knew of its significance. Two had run off to fight the pirates. One had come back; he might have forgot its significance. Last of the three was the Deceased Bully's wife. She stood in the doorway, bewailing her husband's passing. She was not the vengeful type. She wanted nothing to do with any sort of Pumpkin whatsoever, all because they all reminded her of her dead husband. So she stood right next to our Pumpkin at the doorway, all most as an Usher or a Hostess.
The bully who had returned remembered then the Pumpkin. But he wanted no more to do with his deceased boss's agenda. Then the other bully returned. He asked: what's a Pumpkin? No one has the heart to tell him. Laughing with hysterical relief, I awoke.
The Double Agent: A Tale of Crabs and High Horses.
The religious neurotic is a double agent. He is caught up in a
perpetual conflict between opposing factions. These are Christianity and
Satanism. Each has something to offer him, and though their offers are distinct
their appeal is the same: delivery from his fractured Soul. The situation is a
vicious cycle, because to the same degree that he pursues either path they both
lead to the same end: a perpetuation of the schism that divides his Heart in
two.
One begins to wonder why he does this to himself. If he is capable of
finding fault with both factions, why should he feel the need to CHOOSE one
over the other? Why not choose both? Or neither?
The answer lies in that his motives are entirely egocentric.
Between the two villages there stands a mountain. And any one who
leaves any one of these two villages can avail himself of this mount, and from
its peak he can behold the beautiful interdependence of the cities.
Yet the mountain does not offer the shelter that the warring villages
do. And because he lacks the courage to leave and undergo the quest alone he
stays the night at one of the two homes. So he spends his life in a perpetual
state of guilt and guiltiness, running frantically from one to the other in the
Dead of Night, abating sorrow only with anxiety and exhaustion.
He never can fully pledge himself to either God or the Devil. Amidst
Christians he feels the burden of Christian guilt, because he knows in the back
of his mind that he will return to the Devil some day. When he returns to the
Devil he brings with him all of the pious peace of mind that the Christians
bestowed upon him generously, and to which he feels indebted for eternity. So
he looks the Devil in the eye with recrimination, not only towards the
Christians he has betrayed but all so to the Devil whose own sanctuary he has
corrupted with Holy Water.
Each of the factions deplores its opposite, unaware of its own
pretension in this naive dualism. The Christians hate for the Satanists to drag
them down like so many crabs in a bucket. But the Satanists hate the Christians
for their condescension. The Christians insist that their way is the only true
way. The Satanists have a common pretense with them, but it is more complicated
by way of the passion for manipulation. Their pretense is that the Christians
are trying to trick them by pretending to be better. Yet even as the Satanists
preach this they are hoping that the uninitiated will elect Satan over Jesus,
only because it seems easier than to side with a one-sided dogmatist. Yet the
Satanists are no less dogmatic, for they too have chosen a side. Besides: it is
they that do unto the Christians the violence of calling them a “dogma”. Dogma
becomes a Satanist’s karma; they point the finger at the Christians and by so
doing have four more (at least) pointing right back AT THEM. Christians do not
bother to say “dogma”, usually. They simply say: We are Right.
Both sides appeal to some sense of ease. The easy way for the
Rational Being is Christianity. The easy way for the Emotive Being is Satanism.
All beings are both Rational AND Emotive. So ideally we would all be
both Christians and Satanists.
The Double Agent is a step towards this realization, but he is a
dysfunctional one. He succeeds in being both Satanist and Christian, as well as
being neither. But he is divided by time and bound by his own egoism and
hypocrisy. He is never BOTH AT ONCE, but rather one at a time. He is never both
and neither at the SAME TIME. He is rather neither only because he is never
both at once.
When an agent of either party follows him into enemy territory and
seeks to expose him, that agent is thrown out of the city on the Neurotic’s own
say-so. Never does the Neurotic seek to convert Christians to Satan nor
Satanists to Christ. He rather acts the part of the devout wherever he stands
at a given moment.
We wonder: why does he HAVE to pick a side? If he can find fault with
either, sufficiently so as to get a scout banished and excommunicated upon the
Neurotic’s being followed, then why does he not abandon them both? Why MUST it
be EITHER, if it can only be ONE, and if it MUST be either, why MUST it be only
one, and not both? Why not either make peace with them both externally, signing
a truce betwixt them, or otherwise seek one’s peace up in the Mountain?
The truth is that his religion is one of temptation. Each faction
offers him something to appease his egoic addictions and alleviate (but
temporarily and superficially) his Soul afflictions. Christianity offers
lightness of Spirit, forgiveness, and solidarity. Satanism offers power,
passion, and individuality. The former is Spirit, or yang, or Heaven. The
latter is Earth, yin, and Nature.
The price he pays to each is the loyalty of a fanatic who is at the
same time a traitor. He is the Nazi minister for propaganda who is secretly an
American spy. He is the American Nationalist who is secretly a Neo-Nazi, doomed
to admit that even if both parties want the same thing each would to that same
degree annihilate him for even suggesting peace between the two. And worst of
all fates would be to be found in league with either by its opposite, for then
both would forego him violently.
He will never attain that state of Absolute clarity he so craves, all
because it is simply a political ideal. It is borne out of ignorance: ignorance
of the fact that both sides are part of a Whole. Each party DEMANDS fanatical
devotion without even knowing what it wants. Its most pious adherents even
startle the other party members, who retain their humanity only to the same
degree as they are hypocrites. The Neurotic sees this all over, and yet it is
only because he is the greatest Hypocrite of all of them. And the more that he
perceives it the more he projects it, even upon visitors who belong to neither
village but who simply visit it from the Mountain.
The Double Agent concludes that they are relative to one an other.
But by so concluding he renders them both trivial. He becomes even more
parasitic than before, all because he respects neither. His guilt is transmuted
into hostility; why should he be made to suffer a poor conscience when he is
surrounded by hypocrites on both sides? Is he not the most honest of all of
them?
In truth: he is the most DISHONEST of all of them. For despite all
their contradictions the dwellers of both villages do, for the most part,
BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE RIGHT. Our anti-hero KNOWS that he is wrong, because he
sees how THEY are wrong. Yet he PRETENDS OTHERWISE. And so he is the lowest
form of life in this entire ecosystem.
There is only one form of salvation for him, and that is in the
highest form of life: that of the Mountain-Dweller.
The Mountaineer is one who has left both of the warring Villages and
found solace in Spiritual Heights, alone. He understands not only the
attributes, virtues and vices of each faction, but ALL SO the various MOTIVES
for which people pursue these paths, and any path at all, for that matter.
Some people pursue religion because they lack love.
Others pursue it because they have too much of it.
Some people pursue it because they want answers.
Others come to it because they all ready HAVE the answers and want to
be Right Together.
Some people pursue religion because they believe they should.
Others do so because they KNOW that it’s the BEST thing to do.
Some seek because they find it comforting in theory.
Others wish simply to find words for what they’ve all ready
encountered, first-hand.
The Mountaineer has a Vision of Integration: that the factions become
reconciled and work in an external harmony. Yet this is a path that begins in
solitude, for it is only by restoring balance to the Soul that the World can be
redeemed. A one-sided man all ways acts out of harmony with the Universe, which
strives daily towards Integration. And if the Soul is a map of the Universe, it
is by nurturing the Soul (and not oppressing it) that the World can be saved.
The Neurotic condemns the Mountaineer for his freedom, for the
Mountaineer insults every faction at liberty, and often without meaning to. The
Neurotic in turn harms the Mountaineer, exploiting the latter’s kindness when
they travel to a land that seems to be without rules. Yet all the Universe is
God’s Kingdom. All religions, both those of the Spirit as well as those of the
Earth, are intended to remind us that love is the whole of the law. But since
they are factions at war with one an other we confuse this Divine Law for
Religious Law, and in the absence of a Theocracy we act lawlessly.
The Mountaineer abandons the Neurotic, casting him off as a
degenerate parasite. The Neurotic hates the Mountaineer, remembering all the
times that the latter broke the rules and asking how this fool could think to
condemn him. Yet those were rules that the Neurotic himself had broken, but in
secret; the Mountaineer had simply broken them out in the Open. Besides: the
Neurotic himself does not know his own defense. Is the Neurotic innocent,
because he was allegiant whilst the Mountaineer was deviant? Did the Neurotic
retain this innocence when the seemingly amoral deviant condemned him
arbitrarily? Or is it not possible that the Mountaineer represented the Way of
the Opposite Faction? And then is the Neurotic not guilty on their terms? Will
he not return to them with remorse, accepting hugs and lodging only with
resentment, tasting poison in the food offered to him by his temporary allies?
What the Neurotic forgets is that there is a Higher Way. He is guilty
not only of disloyalty but all so of arbitrary loyalty. The sin of conformistic
condemnation emanates for him from the same pit as does the sin of parasitic
betrayal. So the Mountaineer is just as innocent in being condemned as he is
right to condemn when he is betrayed. After all: the Mountaineer betrayed no
one. His loyalty is not to either church, nor even to “himself”, (a veritable
construct of either of the warring worldviews, which mimics virally) but rather
to the True God that rests between, above and Beyond them all.
The Neurotic only ever takes sides. Because he is governed not by the
needs of his Soul but rather by the wants of his ego he never attains the ideal
of integration. His Soul is in perpetual disarray, and so are his relationships.
He does not admit to his own failings, because he cannot afford to be honest
with anyone. Instead he employs the same dualistic, reductionistic reasoning as
perpetuates the war of the two factions. If the Mountaineer thinks to condemn
him for being disloyal, he will accuse the Mountaineer of being divisive. If
the Neurotic is accused of being divisive, he will accuse his critic of being
disloyal. In truth, the Mountaineer is neither divisive NOR disloyal. He has
simply attained peace of mind and clarity in transcending and including both
the factions of Heaven and Earth. His Soul is refined, and so he is undivided
and non-divisive. He belongs to both parties and neither, so he is totally
loyal, but never to such a degree that his loyalty estranges an opposing party.
The Neurotic cannot understand this. He will immediately equate a
lack of divisiveness with disloyalty, as he will sum up a wealth of loyalty as
though it were divisive one-sidedness. In so doing he even divides the entire
IDEALS of loyalty and unity from one an other, so that he might claim to
represent one when held accountable towards the other. And since he has so many
weaknesses to be held accountable for, he must perpetually switch sides, for it
is from that many sides that the blows come. And in that he proves his
disloyalty as well as his divisiveness.
The only salvation one has is in loyalty to a Truth that is Higher than
Faction. But until one finds the courage to climb that Mountain, one remains
selfish and Godless. All factions offer you something, yet to the degree that
they require warlike loyalty in exchange they are inhuman. What they offer is a
poison that only “nurtures” the addiction of the ego; it KILLS the addict,
whose Soul is overwhelmed by the weight of this ego. Only the selfless one who
climbs to a Higher Vantage point, of one’s own free will and guided by a Higher
Calling, can transcend the poisonous aspects of religion and find the God that
they all are supposed to point to. All others will remain mere villagers, and
some will become Double Agents.
The primary human instinct is solidarity. Man is a social animal
whose every instinct works towards his self-actualization and his ultimate self-transcendence.
Via self-transcendence he helps his fellows to self-actualize and to
self-transcend, the ultimate effect of which is a society of equals living in
harmony and unity under the banner of Unconditional Love and Justice.
The primary impetus for our discussion is the pain of the victim. I
suffered, and to find meaning in my suffering (and thus to transcend that
aspect of my SELF) I must first ask the moral question: am I or am I not
guilty?
It is obvious that I had observed every nicety. Besides that, my
intent was pure, my demeanour trusting and appropriate. I accommodated her
needs to the best of my ability, thinking nothing of self-preservation. I
pardoned the delay of our first meeting, gladly rescheduling to a later day on
behalf of her histrionic friend. This friend I held no grudge against, even
going so far as to travel to their college on a WHIM the moment that I learned
that the friend was suicidal again. I dared not to allow any harm to come to my
beloved, and I trusted that my beloved, unlike you, cared about her closest
friend enough to die for her should any danger arise to that friend’s
well-being. I could not risk that fate, so I demonstrated my sincerity by
taking the long and arduous trek to San Diego State University, where by God’s
will I first met her.
I have followed God’s path with ardent adherence and faith. It is
from this faith that I assure you that He did not intend me, at least, to
suffer.
You owed me your trustworthiness and loyalty in exchange for my
trust. I was doing God’s work, and God did not intend for me to be sacrificial
lamb. Yet your path was deviant from God’s. So you took the earliest opportunity
to destroy my relationship with her. And I have had to spend the last two years
resolving your error.
The question of Jealousy arises.
Jealousy is not a Universal Human Emotion. Its consequences are never
positive, so we are not universally entitled to it. It alienates us more than
it can bring us together. It misses the point of solidarity, an ideal without
which it would be meaningless to even speak to one another.
There is no doubt that you were afflicted with jealousy. It was your
solitary motive and excuse for your treachery. It was a frequent affliction and
a dangerous double-standard that you set and violated, as tends to be the case
with double-standards that the one who sets it violates it. It was singularly
responsible for your loneliness. And it became responsible for mine.
I thought initially that it was jealousy on MY part that had produced
my pain. Were that so I would have shared in guilt, especially if jealousy had
blinded me to sympathy. But it is obvious now that I never suffered from a
jealousy of my own origin. Ockham’s Razor dictates that the simplest
explanation is the best. The simplest explanation is NOT that I was jealous,
for there is no evidence for that; after all, in act I was totally innocent, so
why should I be guilty in affect? The simplest explanation is rather that YOU
were jealous, and I could feel it. I had SENSED this strange, aggressive
feeling as though it were OUTSIDE of me long before I felt it in my own Heart.
It came FROM YOU; I was simply Empathic enough to pick up on it. And in my
empathy too I felt YOUR LACK of empathy towards me. I felt at once YOUR DELIGHT
and MY SORROW, and it was this contradiction that drove me mad.
Had we both been jealous and you had been sympathetic, you would have
seen your own affect reflected in mine, and you would not have dared to act as
though yours were the sincere of the two sets of feelings, the other set being
mine. But this did not occur. So clearly it was not that I was guilty in any
respect. If I was jealous and unsympathetic, as were you, the simple fact that
I had been a VICTIM still grants me the first and final word upon the matter,
for it was YOUR SOUL that produced the tragedy. Even if we were both jealous,
your lack of sympathy would have been your sin. Even if you had been sympathetic,
my lack of jealousy stands as my vindication. And the evidence ultimately
produces this: that you were as unsympathetic as I was unjealous, and the same
Empathy that had allowed me to PERCEIVE your jealousy as my own all so gave me
clarity regarding your own lack of sympathy.
This is a novel. Yet, it is not a fictional novel.
The events of this book were mainly recalled just after
parturition. There is brief reference, episodically, to the circumstances of
conception.
Please do not take the aforementioned metaphor literally.
Some of the actors come on stage under different guises.
Those are predominantly the drug users, as well as people
who are like to hold anti-pathy towards me.
Those who come on as themselves I have cast thus because I invest
in their integrity.
Should it be found that I was naive in my trust, I shall
seek the counsel of the Freedman family, who I am sure will be the owners of
the first two copies in print.
The patriarch of that family knows his stuff, and his nose
is tough.
Sincerely,
Dmitry A.
Andreyev
Wednesday,
November 07, 2012
9:55 am
“You will know the truth, because the truth works.”
Part One: Washington, D.C.
One
It was a very loud
silence when we arrived in Philadelphia. The kind where you can hear everyone’s
thoughts mumbling, unintelligibly.
“This whole flight has been one
big fuck-up,” said the man sitting next to me, who had occupied himself with Su
Doku puzzles and economic novels for the majority of the flight.
When I had first boarded the plane, a
middle-aged woman in a uniform with an intimidatingly comfortable demeanor came
up to the three of us (myself and my two wingpeople) and asked us to verbally
confirm that each of us would be willing to open the door to our collective
left in the event of an emergency.
What I had first taken to be
silver crosses hanging from her lobes had actually turned out to be tiny
airplanes.
She
pointed out that I spoke “French”.
“Russian”, I corrected.
The man to my right said, “He probably speaks
better English than I do, and I only speak English.” His eyes were sad, though
not morose, self-deprecating and almost apologetic, but preserving the acquired
dignity of reserving the right and almost the duty of being so.
It was a relief to get up when our plane
arrived. The broken silence washed out all of the fuzz in my left lobe.
As
our plane flew in circles and weighed on my friend’s patience, I felt a
sensation of being pulled to my left by some invisible compulsion, as though a
rope had been tied about the left hemisphere of my brain.
The woman who had monopolized
the window, I had learned from many curious intrusions to the privacy of her
laptop, was some sort of a psychiatrist.
She didn’t say much for the
whole flight.
Two
Philadelphia
is drastically different from California. They have the same basic linguistic
amenities here (“When you gotta go, you gotta go.”), but it seems as though
there is an unspoken agreement that this is not to be taken too piously.
Maria had enjoyed riding the flat
conveyor stair. It gave her of a kind of possession of confused wonder. “What’s
going on?” she would exuberantly chime, with much gusto, vibrato, and tenor,
and with also a pervading quiver of nerves, as if the experience of being
carried along by this rapid conveyance and feeling her stride accelerated to
twice its normal pace was real and terrifying. Which, of course, it was.
I borrowed a pen from an
Indian woman, half of a serious Hindu couple, sitting to my left and across in
the waiting room. She had a charming look to her, an elegant glow of colors
that could just reveal themselves vividly if I clutched at them with my eyes.
My mother eyed me like a ferociously terrified territorial animal during this
exchange, watching for opportunities to saboutage my rendezvous with
excessively obvious courtesy.
Three
“Do you
remember the fireflies?”
I had been
in a somber mood then. A self-righteous overwhelm, like being taken under by an
ocean current or preparing to jump from a mountain cave into a waterfall.
I eyed her,
and retorted with a completely reserved smile, stripped of any attachment safe
for the utmost delicacy. Complete infancy. Joy like a dewdrop in the heart.
She scorned
me. My heart was broken for the next few hours, and my sister had to, with some
considerable frustration that even somewhat overstepped the boundaries of her
unwaveringly good nature, pick up the pieces and tell me what to do with them.
In
retrospect, I water the seeds of my mother’s insensitivity, her impulsiveness,
with my forgiveness, hoping that the rains of my pouring compassion, a steward
in the castle, will relinquish their authority some day and allow again for a
dew-drop to arise. Perhaps as a tear for my lost moment, when summer and autumn
have passed and I hold no further obligations to other people.
Four
The boy at
the Moldovan Embassy looked reminiscent of Ricky Fitts, except for a slight
bend in his nose that suggested an imperceptible sneer and a somewhat glazed
look beneath Soviet eyebrows that gave the impression of a man who had grown up
in close emotional and intellectual proximity to his mother, but who by the
same token had taken the first opportunity to go drinking with his friends, and
who cultivated a European taste for rare Jewish art.
“Posmotrite
syuda,” he spoke, indicating for me to look into the big, white camera lens in
front of me with a genuine softness that I could not remember ever hearing from
someone who had ever said those words to me.
Five
“Hey, aw, can you tell me, aw, where the shopping center is… or
the mall?”
I looked down for a moment, pretending to think, and
then, looking up, said:
“I’m a tourist. I don’t know,” shrugging my shoulders
comically.
“Aww, for real?” the boy replied.
He drove off, and his car did a u-turn as I walked
past it.
Six
We passed a
hippyish girl of college age with fair central American features and a
preeminent slouch.
I like
olive-skinned women.
One
particular one was with her boyfriend, demonstrably, in the French Art exhibit.
She had a noble nose,
lips curved cleverly, and billowy black hair. I bent my head over the back of
my leather seat as my sister sketched beside me to get a better look, but the
hint of temptation evaded my eyes as I strained them to recapture the luster of
that gorgeous Mediterranean nose.
At the end of the Modern
Art display, having ascended the staircase with only a few minutes to go before
the entire museum would be submerged in closing time and everyone were
evacuated, I passed the atrium with its canvases of mostly off-white, each
sporting a single line standing off center, and finally came to a big open
elevator upon which a Japanese girl was already standing. With only a moment’s
hesitation and an upsurge of gusto, as the door was sliding to a close from the
right and she faced me unexpectingly, I hopped through.
After
a moment’s hesitation of planning, I said: “How do you like the exhibits?”
An exuberantly nervous laugh erupted with startling immediacy from her mouth.
“It’s so big!” she said, hands flying to the back of the elevator.
Seven
The cars
whine.
A bouncing
dance beat passes by in a car behind us.
The clouds
will take care of it.
The squirrel smiled at me.
“No center.”
I looked back up at him.
He was chewing his nut.
The birds had all planned this.
After miles
of climbing the mountain, now at the top, I cannot see the town.
The
flickering waters wave at me.
I am excited
to return to college.
Eight
A woman
lounged in the reception hall, with a sizeable leg slung over its twin in what
she must have taken to be a luxurious demonstration of class.
The woman
had blonde, straight hair, like a lampshade from a Swedish furniture store. Her
lips were composed in a red smirk, and her eyes looked intently ahead, feigning
confidence at the expense of the less proficient.
She was
settled next to a man in a black suit. She wore a white skirt over a black
business shirt.
I approached
the desk. My friend the sizeable black woman greeted me with the usual
exasperated hospitality.
“Could I
borrow a pen, again?” I asked. I had borrowed two, at intervals, in alternation
culminating in three total visits to this desk the previous night.
“Sure,” she
said, not looking at my face, as usual, or looking somewhat between my eyes.
I smiled in
what I hoped to have been a not only warm but a transmitted manner.
“Thank you.”
A delightful
black boy with a shaved, bobbing head ambled splendidly out of a hotel room,
throwing phrases behind him…
As I passed
the open door, a woman with a curtain of red hair, merely a novice in the art
of aging, emerged headfirst and asked, “What did you just say?”
I had
already rounded the corner. So had my companion, who replied, “nothing!”,
looking back slightly. He sported a tiny waffle cone with two scoops of ice
cream, strawberry atop vanilla.
I guffawed
as I turned to go the other way.
To laugh at
people: Is it so bad? I ask the space between the walls of the corridor and the
night air.
Nine
“I’ll be in
the hall.”
“What?”
“I’ll be in
the hall.”
“No! Just
stay with us.”
“Okay.”
“Wait. Don’t
lose the page.”
Chapter
The woman was reading a novel. I sat on the
other side of the room, just in front of the T.V. blasting ‘Family Guy’.
‘How is that novel?’ I finally find the courage
to ask.
‘Oh, it’s good.’
Maybe her response was not quite like that.
‘My (whoever it was) is upstairs, so I came down
to read.’ She was shy.
‘Oh, okay.’ After a few moments, I said: ‘My dad
is upstairs reading, but I came down because I’m trying to write a novel.’
‘Oh, that’s interesting.’
Don’t say it.
Holden Caulfield.
Eleven
The bridge’s arms reached up to the
peaks of its necks as we passed through the ribcage of its skeleton.
The houses were shaped like
mushrooms. Or what one would imagine mushrooms to be shaped like if one never
saw one.
Twelve
I wait around for a few seconds, and finally the man,
a portly black, approaches.
“How are you doing?” I say.
“Great,” he says, in almost an
automatic parody of enthusiasm, with a hint of sarcasm and fighting sleepiness
nobly.
“I just wanted to say goodnight.”
I had taken a considerable moment to
plan this, and it had seemed crazy. Then I reasoned: that’s the kind of thing
that would be expected in a Zen monastery, and everyone is a Buddha in
disguise.
“Oh, thanks,” he replied. I was
surprised by his lack of surprise. He was pleased.
I looked back as I took my leave.
I think he was still looking at me.
The look of surprise had emerged from hiding.
Thirteen
My friend Josh and I had agreed on
one thing about the American people, and this was about a week and a few days
prior to right now. That they have to learn that people are not for sale. Josh
had laughed in enthusiastic agreement when I said it.
He had been driving his car down a
long night-lit road. Any moment spent with Josh, save for the moments when his
lack of discretion overstepped other people’s tolerance level, was ecstatically
natural, free-flowing, and inexhaustibly interesting.
We were visiting an old friend whom
I had not seen since one year after we graduated high school, on the
anniversary of our graduation, wherein I snuck into the ceremony, legally,
under the auspices of seeing my friend Tyler graduate.
I had seen Josh at that first
graduation ceremony. He was in his blue cap and gown when I approached the
crowd of people from my class. He showed me a sock he was wearing, if I am not
mistaken, that glowed orange. Or perhaps it was his shoes. Yes, his shoes. They
were “Josh” shoes. Brown and comfortable. I’m confusing fantasies.
Fourteen
Hypnotised by home, my mother’s eyes
are glazed.
“Yay, you made it in time.”
Washington, D.C. is like a ghost
town that is still barely alive and is not fighting for survival. San Diego is
still fighting for survival. But then, San Diego is not barely alive.
Part Two: San Marcos, California.
Fifteen
The immense fear in her eyes was
stifling. She protected herself as a woman who had never become disillusioned,
as most would, with Buzz Lightyear and the inexhaustible kindness of strangers,
but had been very disillusioned with the unreliability of men, taken to
a pathological extreme, as well as the oppressive system that they had
established. Perhaps this was from a young age, for her. She approached me,
Buzz doll in her bag, ready to present itself in her hand. It was well beyond
nightfall at the transit station.
The woman exuded a maternal care with a Hispanic
immediacy and flare, and it was literally impossible to draw one’s attention
away from her, nor to withhold from her compassion. But it was not the brand or
flavour of ‘forced’ compassion, nor sustained, ‘polite’ charity. The sympathy
and in fact vitality and complete support for her and any cause she could
devise, flowed from me in almost a gush, but then her eyes and the neurotic
ramblings of her mind, the darting suspicions, the cruelly immediate shots and
interjections of brutal realities, delivered in a candid, unself-conscious and
yet almost matter-of-fact plea, as though she begged for mercy from behind a
raised sword and offered up her life with a grin that radiated self-malice and
false hope, ensured that, for all my knodding, I could never, in her presence,
settle into what society might deem a ‘comfortable conversational ease’.
Sixteen
Mike was
depressed. He flaunted it. I think the good friend of mine just had, for some
inexplicable hang-up, self-defense, or private dream, an anxiety in regards to
admitting the moments in his life when he was happy. He did appreciate
his emotions, all of his emotions, and generally treated them each with care
and the rough hands of a reluctantly grateful father. But at times, I cannot
help feeling, the ecstasy of Life was staring him right in the face and he
merely stared off into space, pushing Her aside, asking secretly, “Am I
worthy?”
I cannot
fairly say that being around him was depressing, as if to blame my good friend.
But I would say that it is like drinking wine. That’s what it is. I suspect
that my own depression, in high school, had been a bad habit that had gone too
far.
Seventeen
Happy Chang's was the place. Mike did not agree with me
on this, and would even go so far as condemning it on perhaps any point on the
spectrum from 'worst Thai food' to 'worst food in the city of San Marcos'. He
was probably right, in a sense, for he was himself asian from an ironically
rigid Buddhist family.
And yet, I always must have known, in the far back of my
mind, that Mike, for all of the times that he visited Chang's (or 'Randy's', as
my more regular friends called it) be it with, as I can imagine, the likes of
Austin, Gustavo, and Amy, and for all of the times that it failed to impress
his tastes or to perform up to his standards, he never could, in that
particular flavour of company, know of what Randy's meant to me and my daytime
companions.
Randy's was camaraderie. It was a haven, a surprisingly
comfortable nest tucked into the Dry Cleaning plaza but standing nobly and
unwaveringly, almost stubbornly, in plain sight.
And Randy, although he had, from the beginning, impressed
me as somewhat of a show-off with a one-track-mind, had grown on me over the
years, from dozens of visits with a plethora of cats, until the back rubbing
intimacy of college students and the welcome of his testosterone-charged,
old-fashioned (and presumably Thai) hospitality no longer struck me as strange,
but even second-nature.
Yet one thing that endured was my inevitable intimidation
in Randy's presence. Randy's intensity, be it the product of war, tradition, or
watching the ebb and flow of drug tides from a metaphorical houseboat on some
river coursing through the Thai landscape which I had never seen, was designed,
like a cannon loaded with grape shell, to blast even the most self-assured
machismo to smithereens, and Randy almost always carried around a verbal gun,
loaded with, I imagine, orthodox Buddhism, legal power, and rice wine, which
could blow an ego clean off any kid's head.
I emerged from the restroom, jovial spirits generally
unperturbed, self-confidence intact, and a sense of humour that endured despite
my befuddlement. Randy’s desk was strategically and conveniently
positioned right across from the door, shielded from the window by an
ornamental dressing curtain and keeping the company of a cornucopia of trinkets
and statuettes.
The restroom itself was also ornately decorated with
equal enthusiasm, and I can only begin to think of the stops that old Randy had
pulled out for the womens’ on the other side of the kitchen.
‘Hey, I’m sorry about that,’ I approached the today
cranky and wry old asian man. I had come with Zac and Puffy Dylan, and in the
midst of our excursion had, in a fit of self-righteous unorthodoxy, bellowed a
jolly ‘buenas tardes’ to a troupe of schoolchildren who had immediately eyed me
indignantly with a collective turn of the head.
‘I’m used to Buddhist monasteries, where they don’t flush
it if it’s yellow.’
Randy looked up in righteous grogginess and masculine
exhaustion. ‘Sit down, young man.’ He indicated, with a heavily bejeweled right
arm, the desk chair across the table flanking his side in the event of an
assault from the lavatory.
‘This i’ not a monastery. Thi’ is a restaurant,’ and,
eyes unmoving, lectured me on the importance of respect and his shock and
dismay at having found that I had not had the decency to flush my (although he
avoided the precise word) piss the last (several dozen) time(s) that I had
frequented the establishment. I apologised uncomfortably.
'I’ve got to go back to college.’ This was the first time
I can remember since my first ‘romantic’ relationship that, in the company of
close friends and good food, I shocked and confused both of my genial
lunchmates by announcing that, for reasons undisclosed and nebulous to myself,
I would be leaving early.
The caffeine from the Thai tea raged in my stomach, and I
felt a nostalgic grittiness that mirrored the first time that I had walked down
this brief desert path to get to Randy’s neighbor, the Palomar Off-Campus Book
Store, back in my existentialist days. I took the two wine-besotten poems that
I had written the previous night from my binder, and, crumplingly, tossed them
in the trash can by a bus stop, marching onward, with equanimity, to my doom in
the battlefield of love.
Eighteen
Nineteen
“Chili
powder and meth… chili-p, bitch!”
The punks
stood in a circle comparing and extrapolating upon the disparate virtues of
ketchup, catsup, et cetera.
I stood
outside, ‘in my own outside,’ to paraphrase my friend from high school, Dennis
Bykkov, as though I stood in a separate room with invisible walls and an
invisible door, and the wind alone had the temerity to enter and grace me with
its exquisite company. Having just voided, I felt a release that challenged the
rigidity of the pen. And yet, I write, slightly self-conscious yet of the fact
that I had suspended moral judgment on what proper toilet manners were in this
venue, choosing to give the monastic way the benefit of the doubt.
Twenty
I
met a girl who was from Poland on a bus. This was a rare circumstance.
She
had struck me as a shockingly distinctive person; I did not know how to
interpret what my senses were perceiving, nor how to categorise her in my
usually monotonous and faithful preconceptions.
With
an abandon of piety, I ventured: ‘What are you studying?’
She
exuded an unorthodox sanity as she held up her book considerately and with
enthusiasm.
‘Just
macroeconomics.’
‘Where
do you go to college?’ I mechanically retorted.
‘Oh,
I actually abroad.’
It’s
not every day that I get to talk to a sane person, much less a physically
attractive one, if I may be so bold in retrospect.
Twenty-One
I had
decided to follow Fernando the moment that I saw him leave the cafeteria. Oisin
had been keeping me good company, earnest and unostentatious, with sad eyes, so
it was with great pains that I ventured to follow the Fern. Not that I was
afraid of Fern, nor that I would have dreaded the prospect of his retribution
should he be so surprised as to find me following him. This time, my intent was
to be inconspicuous. Yet my fear had elapsed, and only the embers of a secret
hostility and a conceivably superficial uncertainty remained.
‘So, is there any validity for the
Hindu concept that the world is speeding up, and speeding up, and speeding up?’
‘Yes, actually it is,’ replied the
young man with the Roman nose and the salmon-and-silver-striped sweat shirt,
after a moment had elapsed.
His neighbour, a man who looked as
though he were of mixed Hispanic and Judeic lineage, with calm, probingly
intent blue eyes and owlish features to which the structure of his facial skin
conformed, knodded, and qualified:
‘But that is way beyond of
the scope of this class.’
Twenty-two
The stereo was playing ‘Dare You to
Move’ by Switchfoot. Josh could never know, for hundreds of trips, what this
moment was.
In front of the ‘Employees Only’ door stands a girl
who does not know that she is the Buddha, and that she is listening to herself
on the radio.
I had the temerity to leave my
backpack half in the walkway. I regret it, and try not to blame the Antonio
that had taken mushrooms for criticcising me for ‘trying to keep every
relationship in balance’. I have to stay away from people like that. He is beyond
help.
Poor guy is lost out at sea. He
can’t get off the boat yet.
I should kick my iPod addiction. I
am now uncharacteristically tempted to go running down the street every time
that I hear a good song.
‘Somebody that I Used to Know’ is
playing. How far will it follow me?
I suppose that, if I truly have
nothing to defend, I cannot regard myself, fairly, as a victim. But to be
realistic about human frailty is to fully recognize the evil of what Riciano
had done. I could go on for days extrapolating on how that tiny insensitivity
was a poison spore. But I tire of this conflict. Tomorrow is another day.
Perhaps a sane Sun will rise and
touch an old opportunity sprouting from the ground, hopefully unpulverised.
Twenty-Three
The hard-nosed Mexican man got off
the bus, saying something in Spanish behind him as he bid farewell to his
friend. The other, whose hair was greased, held a Coke bottle in his hand. I
looked at him. My eyes were focused. He grinned back.
I think of how stupid I had been. I
had awoken one morning, body tingling and full of love, imagining what she
would say to me if we lay in bed together. She would have told me that I was
sweet, that I was loving, that I was intelligent.
As I had walked down the street, I
thought of all of the negative things that I should remember about myself. I
couldn’t think of any.
By the time that I arrived on the
bus, it was clear what my shortcoming was: I let criticism get to me too easily.
I saw her again today. I shuddered
and walked past.
My ego, the ego that never had
existed, of which I had been falsely convicted, had been threatened.
Did I lose her to that?
Twenty-Four
I could listen to Andrew digress for
an hour, and I wouldn’t get bored. He could have an hour-long lead-in to a bad
punchline, and I would not mind.
Twenty-Four
‘Say, hey,
can I get a chili sauce with that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thanks.’
The man, who
looked like a premature grandfather, leaned over the counter like a rooster.
Michael Buble
was playing as the patron sat, his somewhat burnt beak intent upon his book as
though in curious puzzlement.
‘Here you go,
sir.’
‘Thanks,’ he
sighed gratefully.
‘Have a good
one.’
‘Yeah, have a
good one.’
They had
saved me a bowl.
Twenty-Five
‘Hey, do
you, uh… can I use one of those pens?’
‘Yeah, go
ahead.’
Her face
fell from a receptive smile to a glare the moment I hesitated.
The coconut riggled
in my mouth.
I was
struggling with what seemed like a four-way traffic jam in my head. All of the
cars were honking their horns.
With Syd,
you felt, invariably that everything was going to work out.
I would qualify that.
With certain cases, it was hopeless; obviously Fredd
was one.
Syd was realistic. He knew how to
observe patterns and to make sensible predictions.
One could trust Syd.
‘Do you go to the college near?’
‘No,’ you replied sleepily. ‘Not yet.’
I love
Mexican women.
The jovial tiki masks
grinned exuberantly at me, like so many dancing Shivas, as the Japanese woman
smiled gently at her son, on the floor.
Twenty-Six
‘We could
wash them. You can go,’ she said.
‘Oh, okay.’
They both
smiled self-consciously.
As I darted
out, the first girl said, ‘Your backpack.’
Grabbing it,
I planned what I was going to say.
‘I’ll be
faster next time.’
They all
laughed awkwardly.
I could come
up with a thousand excuses for why I worked slowly today: Why I slowed you down
at both our expenses.
I could make
up sociological reasons, economic reasons, psychological reasons, cunning
machinations by which to blame my parents.
I could even
write a poem, perhaps having my state of mind as its focus. I would have, thus,
a poetic reason as well.
I could say:
You’ve had more experience on the job, or I was bound only by a sense of duty
perpetuated by a difficult home life, or so on.
But that’s
not it. The problem is me.
But then the
always tempting question:
Is there a problem?
Twenty-Seven
I felt like Simon wanted me to fight
him, because he knew that he would win.
Every act of violence, be it moral or physical, that Simon
perpetrated was accompanied by a justification.
Walking back from the punk show, he
unabashedly and quite sincerely said: ‘No one has values that are as strong as
mine.’
He was a mechanical redwood.
Part Five: San Diego.
Twenty-Eight
I decided against having the picture of the
Washington memorial as the desktop background for the computer. It would have
made mother nostalgic, and when she is nostalgic, she is difficult to deal
with.
Edward’s mother had met me at the college. She
suggested that my mom try taking the classes at Palomar. “It is such an opportunity”,
she said. I had knodded in exasperated agreement.
I had been trying to get my mom, by one means or
another, to go to the college for a long time. This night, I had almost been
successful.
Edward was a sweetheart. So was his brother,
although he didn’t give his younger brother enough credit.
Edward had been diagnosed with eight different
disorders. I was convinced that he had not one of them.
“I can’t even remember what the eighth one was,”
he had said.
“I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar, schizophrenia…”
“That’s the one!”
“Schizophrenia?”
“No, bipolar!”
He would be at once, as I had surmised upon
meeting, the nicest and most intelligent friend I would have on campus.
Katherine had driven me home from the Maritime
Museum today, with Mr Pogue in the right-side seat.
We had cruised into the Little Italy district,
with her friend in close pursuit, to get Gelato.
I passed up an opportunity to exchange words
with a very Italian server-girl to have my order taken by a polite but intense
young man with gelled hair.
Katherine had paid.
“I’m paying for all three,” said Mr Pogue at the
corner facing the door.
He looked over at me.
“I got the cappuccino.”
We sat at the table. The people behind me, I
could allow myself to see for moments at a time, were very Italian young
gentlemen, presumably in soccer shirts, although I am not certain.
I kept playing ping-pong with my words across
the table. Mr Pogue sat right next to me.
He was no longer the grandfather figure whom I
had first met.
At one point, Katherine’s friend brought up the
topic of beer. She alluded to a study done in what were supposed correlations
between a person’s choice of beer and his or her political affiliation.
“I would suppose that Tecate in fairly liberal,
although I’m not big on beer.”
It had been something like that. Mr Pogue looked
over at me as I had said it.
All of a sudden, we left.
I laughed when I surmised what our reason was.
As I deposited my cup in the trash can, I asked
Katherine, “You don’t like to be around smokers, do you?”
Her response was fairly immediate, and her
friend’s qualification was frankly political.
Chapter
Facebook was to blame. Of
course, the fact was: We were. We all were. I had ventured into facebook
naively with the early intent of continuing my pursuit of a young, vibrant and
jovial Chinese girl whom Amber had joined with even the girl’s closest friends
in calling a ‘flake’.
Women propelled and perpetuated
facebook, and, in truth, the one summer of my life when my relationship with
the social networking website was one of neither resentful compromise nor
outright contempt was when I was talking to young Ally Nicholson for, at one
point, up to eight hours in a row, over the messenger.
In light of such intimidating
statistics, I must admit to having been as tempted to return to facebook, with
open arms, as I had fantasized, at the depths of my mental and emotional
turmoil in the summer that followed, that Alexandra would have been towards me.
Yet, now having learned from her skill in exercising the sword of discretion
where many others, myself included, would have employed the tip of compassion,
I must assert the need to go beyond facebook. There are many other places on
the internet that one can go to find what facebook has to offer, and to
necessitate that all these services be clustered in one place is to facilitate
a perpetual train-wreck.
Chapter
My relationship with Alexandra had not been
‘merely’ an ideal. It was what the ideals that she and I both had grown up with
represented.
The thing that made it the real
thing, and perhaps the closest thing in my life to what mushrooms had been for
Kresten, was that neither of us could have made it up.
When I saw her walking down the
hall, my legs shook. When I had first seen her, although I mistook her for Wafa
Ben Hassine, she glowed. She was a presence, and I could not, in her presence,
say where I ended and she began.
She was a goddess.
And yet, was she secretly afraid
to be more than a goddess? To what extent could she allow herself to be human?
Definitely not to the extent that I could expect of myself.
Chapter
My throat had a bad habit of strangling me
whenever I was about to make a colorless remark.
Marissa was nowhere to be found, although I had
had an hour of a window in which I might have approached her and admitted,
mostly to myself, what I felt.
But instead I had chosen to shoot Holden Caulfield’s
bull with Ketchup, parroting my own orthodoxy, like a man who goes drunk to his
own execution on the electric chair, letting her slip through my fingers with
every self-righteous twitch.
God was looking me straight in the face, and I
could only say, ‘Am I worthy?’
Chapter
Riciano may have not known it,
but his gentle jibes, which in any company would have been commonplace, were
actually the weeds that engendered perhaps the most dangerous and pathological
virus to have infected the western psyche, one that always invites us to delve
more deeply into the mystery of our existence. Perhaps I feel more eager than
Antonio does to truly swim to the depths of that looming abyss, or perhaps the
mere silhouettes of those nestled caves, tucked under the sea and through which
it shone, stared up into my eyes with clarity and vividness that surpassed
Anthony’s vision by the length of an ocean to its horizon.
Antonio espoused the same ignorance, the same
self-righteousness, that the man holding the ‘Go Hates Sin’ sign had. His sin
was not in his self-assurance. In spite of the vision that he had had, in spite
of the Ocean in which he and I had swum, and which he may have, in truth, swum
further out into, if not as deeply, he was a man overboard, and it was with the
height of a true minister’s anger that I looked over the edge of my own vessel,
helpless to help him, impelled to sail on, hoping only that he had not strapped
himself to some explosive that – quite aside from the threat it posed of his
being swallowed up by the ocean’s mouth, which needed to feast on those who
regarded it as solely a monster, but more profoundly those who did not
understand and thereby rendered it a monster by evoking its monstrous
qualities, two risks which he seemed to have, by a grace that he had likely
misattributed to his own cunning and ‘illumination’, avoided – threatened the sanctity of my ship, and could be a
menace to boats on other voyages in the later hours of the night and on the
higher latitudes.
To say that nothing I said amounted to anything,
an accusation that carried within it the implication that something or another
in life ‘had to’ amount to something, was not only a demonstration of what
Lao-Tzu had meant when he had drawn attention to time as being a conceptual
entity and went on to qualify that “to say ‘I don’t have time’ is to say ‘I
don’t want to’”, but it was also to espouse the villainies of a culture that
favoured a sick ideal over a healthy one, and which had more sympathy for the healthy
economy than the ill individual.
Chapter
‘Dude, you want to take a
break?’
I looked up at you, in a
presumably suspicious fashion.
There was no incrimination in
your eyes.
‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘Here, break.
‘You’re like, “aww, dishes.” ‘
You had looked at me as though I
were an alien. I could not surmise why.
Rather than outrightly asking, I
did the dishes, occasionally shooting the bull.
‘What did you do this weekend?’
‘Nothing. Hung out with my
boyfriend.’
After some time, I had decided
that it was bold enough to ask where Arianna was.
‘Why isn’t your sister here?’
‘Because she is at home,’ you
remarked sarcastically, ‘with her husband.’
My eyes must have widened. Yours
did when you saw the look of surprise in my eyes.
‘You didn’t know?!’ You were
amused.
‘No!’
‘How old is she?’
’23.’
‘Ahh… ah!’
I felt like Mitchell Freedman,
doing that double-take.
Chapter
With
the places that my brain goes, the uncharted avenues that it
knows so intimately, any form of inebriation is dangerous for me. It
would run amok amidst clowns and scarecrows, whose company it would
commonly keep in dark alleys, but it would bump into them, and, in its
terror, attack, leaving their corpses on the ground, finding, in the
inevitable dawn, their disturbing visage, a sight more ghastly than
one it would ever encounter sober.
Simon's company, on a usually unseen level, was really one that I
could only take at two hours most at a time. To see him every day, to
frequent his hang-outs, was excessive to say the least. I had to
exercise the sword of discretion. In this new incarnation, he would be
nowhere near. I am not prepared to exorcise people's demons.
J.D. was also a demon. Her at first amiable huggishness had hardened
increasingly until a friendly smile had become a gargoyle grimace.
Out, out, out. Even Edward, with his violently preoccupied Hispanic
mother, was a bit too close to home, and I shudder to think of the
hells, both private and public, that he had seen.
I need to cool it. Especially with those vermin and barnacles that
dwell on the underside.
My rules are simple: To never preach, and not to blame. To always
reach, and never claim.
Edward's company, and Zac's, too, I shall keep, but only to the extent
that they join me in avoiding those other two.
Chapter
When I look in the mirror, I look to find what
everyone else sees in
me. Facebook, particularly, be it a sexual Skinner box or a kind of
social dope addiction, engenders this neurosis. The problem is not
merely in that it is a quick fix engine, as well as a gossip mill,
that marginalizes people by its design and encourages individuals to
become what Alan Watts had once called a “rubber stamp”. And, although
the solution may be as simple as fleeing to the mountains, of which
facebook is a mere foothill, of finding one’s interactions in the real
world and of maintaining the virtual spheres of the internet in their
proper, as befits a human habitation, separation and balance, it is
not merely that this problem may be without its withdrawal symptoms.
When I look in the mirror to see what the collective, the Borg, the
hive-mind, the Higher Self, the Christian Clerical God sees, although
facebook diabolically obscures the fact, I see the eyes of not only my
friends and family looking into mine, but also the eyes of all of
their devils, their repressed, starving demons, their ghosts.
It is too much for someone who goes to Starbucks to take.
And yet, it is everywhere. Especially in Starbucks.
It is day three for me, off of facebook. Eleven more days to go and,
ideally, (although I worry for my criteria in estimating this) the
habit will be kicked.
Facebook has done more harm, much more harm, than good. In fact, had
it not been for one of my best friends inviting me to gossip, I would
have ditched it weeks ago, having abandoned it just before discovering
that Marissa, my fascination, the now rotten apple of my eye, had done
what in our culture is a dismissal of archetypal finality: Blocked me.
How do we live with ourselves?
Chapter:
(The Morning After.)
Simon was not the problem. Simon had never, and
would never be, the problem.
I had been sitting at a Starbuck, typing away at
my novel, on a laptop. To my left, I was witnessing a planking.
'... would not sign a contract because it's
like, well what? You don't trust my word? And so they want a hand shake.'
'Right.'
For one brief moment, dear, you had a chance to
prove that you were human.
'Well, I'd be like, no. If you don't want to
sign... I'm not losing my job.'
I got out of there with my left lobe thoroughly
aching.
There is a witch-hunt in this society. Someone
is making soap from the bones of every variation.
Simon was not the problem. no fluctuation of
human character ever is. It's the similarities that you've got to watch out
for.
No individual is a
menace to society. But any society may be a menace to an individual.
Chapter
I miss Nick. I miss the
ways in which he and I are the same person. But I mostly miss him in that
moment with Marissa. I had had the gall to ask him: ‘How do you know Marissa?’
He had, with a shot of indignation, replied, ‘Because she is my friend.’
I wish it were that he
and I were the same person.
Daniel Minx had been the
first person to invite me to gossip. The nostalgia for Kevin’s early days, and
the new feeling of being somehow more involved in his circle, added to the
delight that feeling oneself to be immersed in the hidden story of another did.
Dan was my best friend, and sitting at the table, anything seemed welcome to
discuss.
Gossiping with the
intent of attracting Marissa was comparable to chasing her through smoke-filled
coffee shops.
Fernando was what Aldous Huxley
would have described as ‘curiously remote’. I wonder why.
His eyes, which I find in
writing, interest me much more than most eyes do, seemed always, in eagerness,
to be probing, searching, as though the sexual ecstasy that he had felt himself
to be morally obligated in recounting to his ‘guy friend’ persisted.
In the absence of eagerness, his
whole face became like a pair of plastic scissors, prepared to cut unwelcome
visitors with a single glance, and he seemed to be frowning diligently.
In renouncing both praise and
blame, I need to find a new vice to ground me. Gossip has become too great a
hassle.
Something in this culture
festers. The advantages provided by technology allow the most depraved of human
selfishness to find its justification in a phone, as a spoiled child becomes
preoccupied disproportionately in a handheld.
I am listening to a girl named
Birdy covering ‘The District Sleeps Alone Tonight’ by the Postal Service.
The chorus moves me, but what a
shame.
So much effort to ‘portray’
music. This narcissistic trend of portraying beauty in the guise of some
sentimentality shared by alcoholic patrons who do not know each other at 3 in
the morning.
It is delicate and sad, and yet
it is beautiful, by its intrinsic nature, but it is almost apologises for being
a song.
I prefer Ben Gibbard.
Is romantic poetry written by
people who are afraid to love honestly? It would seem so.
Chapter
‘Surprise me.’
The girl looked almost afraid when I said it.
‘What?’
I tried to appear amiable.
I was at Starbucks. The barista was staring me
head-on, tired eyes petrified beneath glasses.
‘Well, do you like coffee, or tea?’
‘So you’re Russian too?’
‘Yeah,’ Dennis drawled, ‘That’s kind of how I
know him, too.’
Dennis is the same as he had been in high
school.
Chapter
oDear Anthony,
We need to talk. I have tried for months to repress how I feel about what you
said. To deny that I am fucking pissed is dehumanizing. You do not recognize
the evil of what you are doing, but it is in fact The evil. To invoke the
power, the ‘authority’, of some abstraction such as ‘society’ is in itself
patjological. To value that over the individual is absurd. Your notion of the
‘ego’ is deluded. What the hell? The ‘ego’ is a concept; a word. You can use
the ‘ego’, by that definition, to usurp any human activity. But that is not the
problem. The problem is never the individual. Never. Hitler was not evil. His
people were. Stalin was not evil. His people were.
I’m in a crisis, Anthony, and it has nothing to do with my ego. It has to do
with my being a human being with feelings. Not an automaton in service of a
terrifying regime. If you had ever spent the time I have away from all social
influence, you would know that all that you regard as society could be
conceived as one man’s illusion. The fact that most people have this illusion
does not make it true; the world is not ideal, where something like that could
be so simple. And yet everyday people collectively presume that. And the threat
is in its collectivism; not its logic or illogic.
It always is.
Dmitry
“Maybe.”
Chapter
Anthony
called the Nicholson sisters witches and bitches, but I think it might have
been just out of courtesy.
Chapter
·
·
·
I tried to hold the girl in my eye,
but she turned towards me and her face seemed to sting me.
I
feel as though, since I got off that plane, I have been living in an Indication
of life.
Chapter
'You
know, I really respect the Mexican culture.'
'Really?'
'Yeah.'
I
look off to the bushes as you smile at me.
'Now,
I want to say something about Mexican culture, but I don't know if this is
going to be confusing and I don't want to confuse you.'
Your
smile persists, in subdued eagerness, with a pervasive hint of awkwardness.
'You
know how in religion and spirituality
they say, "Find the center. Be the center. Go to the
center." '
A
brief pause, with a touch of recognition.
'The
center of what?'
'Exactly!'
Chapter
Normally man, (and I mean, quite
unabashedly, to say ‘man’, for males tend to suffer from this with much greater
sensitivity and helplessness than women do) is divided tragically from himself,
crucified between what he must not be and what he would like to be.
Striving for some ideal of
woman, of what women should be, does not help. The models that men lust after,
for whom they invest so much energy, -- energy which they distill into
aggression with both painstaking care and painful foolishness -- are mere glass
statues of the true women that stroll unwittingly into boys’ lives, mannequins
that contain in them their power drives which, on the rare occasion that they
attain consummation, leave the poor boy with either a broken glass doll or the
shards of a shattered dream.
Chapter
I had a friend in high school. He was among the most
brilliant individuals and the most individual brilliant people whom I had ever
known. He had the tender heart of a child, the mind of an experienced and
battle-worn adult, and when they met, it was a nonchalant, unimposing immediacy,
a real humility and the most genuine, intimate concern for your feelings and
interest in your life, and whatever you were going through. And to that
discourse he would always bring, with the utmost enthusiasm and unostentatiousness,
the most brilliant insight into his own nebulous life, which nonetheless he
strove without stride to convey with legitimate caring for its being as
immediate to you as your own life would be. I saw him for the first time since
the first anniversary of our high school graduation, about a month and a half
ago. It was a harrowing experience.
Harrowing.
On the way back, I asked Josh how this had happened.
‘Oh, you know Sven. He’s always had an ego problem.’
Even as a Buddhist, I cannot help thinking: ‘Those bastards.’
Part
Three
On fire
(fading) perspiring
petrol. Will work, computers
and drink
sustain the human spirit?
Clearly, no. But it would
seem that some
still want to hear
that dream.
I see a woman held together like a
robot
A robotic skeleton
holds together
a woman whose
impulse
to touch
has run into the gutters
And whose heart
bleeds through her
pores
Traversing the
ducts
once called
'veins' now
called wires.
Mired
in her husband's
admiration.
On fire
(fading) perspiring
petrol. Will work, computers
The
woman was starting to talk about some kind of meditations that she went to.
She
began talking about wanting an iPad.
She
began to tell her elderly, grandmotherly friend with the short ball cut about
something.
She
began to tell her friend about alcohol.
‘This
is some serious shit!’
I
prayed (violently) for someone (not myself) to take the terribly unfulfilled
task of throwing the loudspeaker blasting inane, drunken folk yelps against the
wall.
Chapter
two
What ‘reality’ is must in fact be the same predicament
as favouring what life “should” be over what it is.
Realism is an unimaginative idealism.
Chapter three
The anti-Christ had returned. I was comforted by his
presence. My left lobe was screaming like a maniac locked up in a cell (as
befitted its nature), and his untainted, caffeinated, acid-driven neurosis
immediately gave me that fix of whatever it must have been that he had gotten
me hooked on.
The Shift Manager enthusiastically engaged him in exuberant
interlocution.
Chapter four
I saw
Marissa again.
This time, emphatically, for real. Although
her smile, the gentle sway of the way in which she carried the folds of her
cheeks, evades my memory, the warmth endures, radiating from the embers of an
ecstasy that possessed me.
I took every moment in stride, and by
virtue of every gesture on my part, the laughing glory that came up to the
surface like Dionysus through the floor boards moved my pen and slowly but
surely took over, as I spotted her, weaving, in and out, standing in luxurious
repose, but nonetheless wholly unostentatious and gently aware of her own
glory.
Superficially,
you presume that it is just a simple, silly thing.
But it's
not.
That's
why you do it.
Chapter five
I had absorbed
a lot of pain from a woman I knew from my philosophy class, two years prior.
'Clinical
depression': She slapped that phrase down like a slab of deli meat.
My friend
Carl had told me that, as an empath, I feel people's feelings for them, so that
they don't have to struggle with them as much.
Syd was
unabashedly skeptical of that.
I wonder
if she is cold tonight, in the mist.
In
wondering that, I am not cold.
Chapter six
You could
hear the people breathing together, as though through one conjested larynx, as
the politician spoke of the commitment of citizens to a nation. The quivering
of the breath landed like hooves on the cobblestones that were his vocal
nuances.
Outside
my window, it seemed the wheels of the car alone were unperturbed by the
racket.
Downstairs,
as I sat in my room, his shouts continued. Booming, thrashing.
Chapter
‘Odin
is on my side!’
There
are certain institutions in America that the average citizen is not in the
habit of poking fun at, chiefly by virtue of taboo. This is not to say that the
average American takes culture, sophistication, and even social norms into
sincere consideration, but it is to say that certain institutions in this
culture are protected by unwritten laws that are enforced by violence with,
occasionally, greater consistency than many of our written laws.
I
am very distrustful of seriousness overstepping itself. Any thing worth being
sincere about is worth laughing for.
‘Hey!
Could you be quiet, just for an hour?’
Zac
was shocked. His characteristic innocence, which normally drifts on the
‘wonder’ end of the spectrum but is apt to drift into (sometimes admittedly
misguided) incredulity, was vivid in his blankly aware and anticipant
eyes.
‘Let
Adam be the arbiter.’
Several
minutes later, the Undersiders, the inhabitants at the wall, shielded from the
rain by the overhanging roof that was their home, were still mumbling in
uncharacteristic solidarity, which can only remind me of a film recording of
Jewish neighbours in a German Concentration Camp.
‘Oh,
no!’
Zac
did not want to see Adam, although Adam was eager to have his
acquaintance.
Adam
was wearing his naval camouflage costume and Indiana Jones hat.
‘Did
you hear Zac laughing?’
‘What’s
so funny about this?’
Although
Adam’s doughy, skim face retained its tenderness, his eyeballs had a hardness I
had never seen in them before.
Zac
jumped in immediately to defend himself, but I took the heat, stridently.
‘No,
he wasn’t even paying attention to this; he just laughed because
he nearly killed me by crushing my head in with his boot.’
Adam
was unmoved, although the kindness of his heart had become more vivid to
me.
Fifteen
minutes later, Zac was still defensive.
‘We
don’t go out of our way to disrespect them.’
Chapter
The
temptress was imbibing Zac’s right hand with ink. He had his bandana covering
his eyes, melodramatically.
‘Hey,
I know that this is important, but: When are we going to Sorrento’s?’
She
drew attention to his hand. He guffawed, and I qualified:
‘Oh,
it’s a Hindu sign of peace! With the word “Nazi” written over it!’
Chapter
Fernando
was standing at the rim of the quad, looking pious.
I put a layer of vibrato into my voice and upped the volume a notch,
but my feet drifted, steadily, out of his radius.
Chapter
I
would, honestly, for the life of me, not claim any pretension to qualification
in the treatment of depressed people.
Over
the past year, I have managed to re-learn how to be happy, and I will admit
that I am liable to be massively irked, still, by individuals who insist on
perpetuating their own subservience: to sentimentality, to habit, to delusion.
In
truth, this is the matter that I am crucified on. For although I do regard my
own depression, in both high school and early college, to have been a selfish
neurosis, I have such a sympathy for the ignorantly sensitive individuals who
are like slugs: Slow to change their station in life, tender and, in a funny
way, perceptive.
Yet
I cannot live that way.
It
is a violation of all of my morals, and it is too unnecessary a load on my
whole system.
To
elevate the sensitivity of consciousness to a level that tries to compete with
the unbridled splendor of God.
It
is a false prophet.
Chapter
Briefly, I had become preoccupied that I may have been
imposing my
company on the girl at Starbucks with the professional bespectacled
gaze and soft, technical frown.
It was surely Alex's influence from the previous night.
He would have looked back, still, at the event with regret to rival my
own enthusiasm or the memory of the casual, serendipitous rendezvous.
Chapter
The flags hanging on the plastic string waved at me, as an ambrosia of
balloons played with me, dancing up and down the sky, floating up with
the wind as their accomplice.
Chapter
'Ahh, too many people for me.'
His friend in line at Starbucks giggled.
The man, who had strolled outside, scanned his surroundings with a
baseball manager's probing gaze.
It was a windy outside.
The Starbucks was playing the Freudian jazz that its cousin
off Rancho Bernardo road had been obsessed with. Some drunken bastard was
yelling about some sweet mama, tactlessly, and the whole trainwreck degenerated
into a scat. He won’t leave me alone.
