WITHOUT A CENTER: ORIGINAL. [© 2012.]

A Brief Preface to a Simple book.

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.

The corner café had a distinctly modern and authentic Italian look and a refreshingly sane European feel to it.

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

o    Dear 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.

[Copyright 2012. 

Dmytri Andreev. 

Dm.A.A.]