Theft

Inviglioed on the upper inner portion of my brain flaunting images, glowing like still-cooling lava glazing into glassiness, assure me that experiences are lodestones building in people, hefting their bulk, compacting internal air into denser matter. The emotional alchemist always was about a kiss looking like a butterfly held in a vacuum of glass large as the universe. Strange how these experiences alter us, turn the mirror's image into fugitive motions no longer consonant with the perceived self. The more you feel the more you move and harder it is to capture yourself. And what has moved me more than you? A handful of experiences, maybe; and those not even more, only equally or in some semblance of equality to my pearls.

And I wonder if pearls before swine.

Vendor Beware

I go to the Canadian Superstore here and, lured by the near-register positioning and glaringly cheap sale price, I decide to spontaneously add to my purchases a box of seedless mandarin oranges (5 lbs; $3.59). Well satisfied after calculating less than a buck a pound for citrus, I merrily go home, open the box, unwrap one, and find a half-green, half-orange, mottled monstrosity that in better, unmodified times; in the recesses of genetic botanical history, might have been a mandarin. Poor and outraged, I return to the store box of mandarins in hand (exposed greenie placed back), and ask for a refund at the service customer desk. I am denied. My expression undoubtedly kindled into a startled look by indignation, I ask to speak to the manager, who promptly appears after his name echoes from a loudspeaker the chagrined service customer lady has deigned to use. I lodge my complaint. He, with a phoney look of incomprehension listens; then a smug glint steals into his eyes and he says, "Sir, caveat emptor. Buyer beware." A point of muddled common law, I understand. I ask him for whom laws are made. The smugness is replaced by a slight cloud. He mumbles out a "for everyone." I agree. I ask him, feeling hot and annoyed at the hypocrisies of consumerism, if he thinks, asking any single person in here--the market was teeming with people; must have been hundreds--whether or not any of them would agree that I should get a refund. Duh, stutter, "I'd have to ask them." Then let's, I suggest. The cloud becomes rattish alertness and he's really uncomfortable. Marshalling his confidence with a bright notion, he turns the tables: "what is your point, sir?" My point, I return, is that if the laws are created for everyone, and if everyone in this store would agree that I should have a refund, then the law must be revised to reflect the will of everyone. Everyone would say, "vendor, you're wrong." I could see he wondered if someone with a baton and sociopathic tendencies should be called in to deal with me. Something, I imagine, in my own eyes suggests that I'd get a swipe at him at least before something removed me. He decides, turns to the customer service lady, and tells her, brusquely, to return my money. He then vanishes.

If you're deceived, and you know it, you know there's no misunderstanding or genuine error on the part of the seller; if they're concealing a product and then selling it very cheaply, not suggesting via exposure of the product just why, it's in plain english a scam. Encountering one, say so, complain loudly, force the lie that laws are designed to help and protect the masses to the fore. Under the light of a few honest direct questions and the unwillingness to feel intimidated by the immanence of physical threat, you might get some justice. True justice would have included an apology and something free, for the time and frustration I experienced. But some measure, scrabbled for, leads to another.

Westcliffe to Margate, U.K

 

...emblem of the beach: a little girl who just learned to walk, wearing a frilly white sunhat, pudgy fingers curled around a small green plastic beach pail, other hand grabbing fistfuls of sand gleefully thrown into the pail..

...two middle-aged men with metal detectors, each a shovel in the free hand, scouring the sands for objects of worth or of curiosity...

...charming curio: the ordinance most routinely flouted in the world appears on the stretch of coast between Westgate and Margate on a sign that reads "no dogs allowed on the beach"...

...middle-aged women with massive sunglasses, blowsy pants and floral shirts, bulbous beaded necklaces enlarged to conceal the fleshiness of their wrists and arms, chattering side by side with small dogs trotting ahead of them at a brisk pace...

...young girls and women walking briskly and with a feigned sense of purpose, dressed with leotard-like pants or jeans they try to wrap around their hips to accentuate their asses, shirts hung low to give passersby a glimpse, glancing to their left or right when passing every single reflective surface (car windows, glass store fronts) to satisfy their insecure selves that they look hotly irresistible or at least passably doable...

...shards of light like tiny spikes deflecting off blue plastic garbage lids, car mirrors, slants of bay- wave, piercing the iris with poignant disregard...

...the quiet bespeckled woman sitting alone on a stone bench close enough to the beach to feel its community; far enough to give her space, a sense of safety, and perspective, book in hand, glancing on thoughtful occasion at the shifting scenes outlaid before her as if for her alone...

...a tallish, handsome man in black slowly trudging along the promenade, black computer case slung over shoulder, his receptive immersion in the environment intermingling with thoughts of the woman he loves for whom he moves in his quest for patterened letter paper, his mind in a paradoxically serene turmoil, replaying her every word and gesture, teasing apart cryptic motions of head and of word, her eyes for him the marriage of bay and sky; of glinting light and little girls; of young beautiful women; of pensive bespeckled and quiet poets; of mature women who will afterwards go home and stitch socks for their grandchildren; of men and their quest for and fascination with mysteries they try to unravel; of the laws of the masses casually slung aside in favour of individual expression; of me and of you and the sum of all good things.

The Aphotic Zone

A welter of woe and study hybridizing into something named me. The last year's taught much; a narrative and personal change not consciously sought and brashly insistent was the result.

(Egotism's become inverted into externality, it seems to me, for most. An aqueous human world, splintered by imposed political fear, biological directives eviscerated)

I'm trying to reconcile the macrocosmic world without and the galvanizing, condensing, black-hole symbols and signs within in the hope that the sprawling mess of my mind coheres into a whole whose byword is "meaning." I'm feeling very alive, O Mine Wee Muse of Fire and Curled Horn.

Ironic that someone so bemused by meaning assigned through the arbitrariness of our minds believes as axiomatic in a personal stop-go transformation pinned to a Gregorian date... I turned forty. I had prefaced, excused, dismissed, exhorted; whinnied and brayed; waltzed inelegantly around and defended to the teeth my drinking until that time by claiming myself bound to constructed chronology. I thought I was lying; now that is the strangest thing: I wasn't.  

I don't know why except I do and cannot say it aloud because, as you say, I am the one of broken promises (happily, nothing thrills me as much as dashing absolute certainties in others through grand gestures grandiloquently given. And so I say "ye of little faith" with a small knowing smirk inside me).

For I always knew nothing is for naught; this net caught all. Fished and found bounty. And I am a born hoarder.

 

Impressions of Saskatoon

When one consciously looks around, it tells you where your mind's oriented. As it happens, my own seemed today to see a combination of economy and symbolic sociological traits (where the two differ).

Turfing warm, breeze-slapped sidewalk a stretch of walk about twenty minutes at a brisk pace, I saw: clogging cars with mufflers consciously removed, loud cars; stores spitting catchy slogans like "cool and cheap: it's easy!"); people bustling with trammeling good health where not bucket-bellied (and even these), in a straight brisk gait with a slight smile curling their lips at the thought that their hometown's the fastest growing economy in the Americas and that perhaps Burton Cummings was prophetic when penning that tune; seniors outnumbering the middle or younger-aged, all of them unbent by genetic deficiency or time, all of them seeming to buck the usual infirmities as if in tune with the other buck unbuckling the carnal optimism of the populace, giving them wind; wide blasted as if razed streets with austere spaces between traffic lights, the need to pedestrianize space not yet caught up to the expanding population; exceedingly polite drivers who invariably stop whatever the traffic to let one on foot cross; limitless sky invoking a vertiginous sense of spaciousness, dizzying, the worst Freudian nightmares of untethered Place with body or mind or community.

Jellyfish

The speckled reminisces of the stings imparted by jellyfish are thought by some mystics to reside in their tendrils. These creatures by their gelatinous and translucent appearance cast an eerie and benevolent glow whose charm leads the uninitiated to trod upon them or touch them or when accidently fishing them out amongst other sea creatures, thoughtlessly toss them aside whereby the tossers learn the painful though rarely lethal lesson that beauty and pain often associate intimately.

The mysterious look of the jellyfish and its reflexive, natural need to protect this mysteriousness causes in its behaviour a skittish though passive quality that often finds it awash on shores. A strange, beautiful, mysterious and gentle creature, its only desire it to have its nebulous dreams safeguarded against the careless hands of brutes who fail to share in those dreams and cannot understand them.

Were you an animal; had I to assign a totem to you, N, it would be the jellyfish: beautiful, reflexive, gentle and in its principled desire to rightfully protect its own loveliness, dangerous. Do by all means protect your dreams; they are magic.

You are magic.

 

I denuded you, threw you, have been stung.

 

And now the currency of my regret exchanges at next to nothing.

Three Days With Nits Remembered

January 3, 2011

Something Catholic in me—I refuse to stain it by calling it some species of “taint”—compels me to say that sex is sordid, lurid, unwholesome, corrupting, unnatural…

It’s that last one that’s a stickler and effaces the superlatives preceding them, those self-defining, isolated adjectives like “lurid;” the only thing lurid is the word itself.

Having done nothing sordid recently or ever, I can safely itemize the following details of my day, given in serviceable, digestible chunks:  awoke, watched, ate, shat, snoozed, walked, showered, brushed my teeth, talked with five people (Paul, his girl, mine, clerks) and fucked my girl several times.

The last item I introduce disingenuously, as if it were not the sole activity summoning the tepid, leprous muse as you, whomever you are, read. Three times (four?), we performed the mechanics of sex, culminating in my greed, successful orgasm each time and hers, once for certain; twice possibly. The certain pop for her happened shortly before I picked up this pen. The maddening curiosity about these frequent, compulsive, and at times farcical prance generally but often doubtfully labelled “sex” is that here exists a mutuality, the quintessential exemplar of human unity, whose paradoxically definitive quality involves—nay, demands---selfishness. She came because I felt tender towards her and tickled her clit gently, just so, following with concentrated, selfless precision the shifting hips to ensure that my middle finger kept unbroken, massaging contact with that frustratingly small nub which to my amazement causes her body to shiver into paroxysm of paralytic pleasure.  My tenders towards her, Nits, the whole of her, coupled with an awareness of the one eternal tragedy (i.e, of the infinite worlds simultaneously existent though we can only occupy one. Universes bloom and die, untold suffering unfolds with our every fetid/glorious/interminable exhalation), to produce an ineffable though stoic gentility towards her, Nits. She, Nits, consequently held my unwavering attention to her needs; in point of fact, horniness had abandoned me at the moment hers, Nits’, was most and suddenly there.

(A note: justice occurs at this juncture. And the only possible positive slant on the point I here proffer: she gives when I need; I give when she needs; love, in a word)

Earlier when we had sex, I experienced less affection than unfettered, (dis)reputable want, rendering me a brutish, singularly orgasmic lover.

Query: Is her, Nits’, pleasure dependant on my mood, hers (Nits’), ours, or is pleasure situation and arbitrarily so?

She lies now in bed observing me while I light a cigarette, the flame nearly singeing my increasingly spiked eyebrows. She sighs; she shifts; she observes me (I don’t see but I know); she tells me I look handsome as the shuddering pleasure and my semen in almost mutually hostile relationship co-exist in her, Nits; she, Nits, dreams her dreams; I write that she does so. The basement where we are is windowless and lit by a miner’s lamp whose feebleness breeds shadows from every object here, a nicely apt metaphor for the intrinsic though unintentional and even benevolent doubts and power struggles qualifying anything worthy of birthing the curious expression, “romantic relationship.”

…an hour or so has eventfully transpired since the last sentence was written. She (Nits) dropped to the floor (where else?) a coffee carafe.  After I raced upstairs and we cleaned up, we retired to the basement and she slept. I heard a noise upstairs and went to investigate, calling her name thrice in vain to awaken her, only to hear her groggy, mildly startled voice call after me just as the heel of my foot hit the last stair at the top…

A descriptive bland paragraph about our immediate physical environment: grey-green, short-haired carpet, mottled by pop stains and dog paws covers the entirety of a room perhaps 30 feet long and 12 feet wide, which is book-ended by a functional and ugly brick fireplace and the bottom of a staircase adjacent to it. I write now from one of those millions of cheaply-manufactured, low-slung, obscurely-patterned armchairs standing sentinel (almost sentient) in an equally number of other windowless, stifling, 9 foot ceilinged basement rooms whose walls are faux-pas strip wood (brown, naturally) striving for cosiness and achieving instead a kind of metaphysical and slow decay of all organisms dwelling amongst it, save harmless arachnids and many-legged crawlies. To my immediate right lies two double-sized mattresses (ancient, sagged to paper thinness) upon which presently reclines her (Nits, love of my life, if life-loves there be). In front o me, several feet and slightly to my left stands upon an old, brown, wooden television stand the object for which the furniture was fashioned; an assortment of broken VHS tapes occupy the stand’s hollowed torso. In indescribably haphazard manner lies boxes of VSH tapes, a broken tv, scattered clothes, odd scraps of crumpled ad pamphlets, all girded by snaking and insensately menacing power cords. To my immediate left, a chair, nondescript, mellows. Between the fireplace mantelpiece and the Styrofoam-planked ceiling are two plastic, rectangular, garish orange-green, dimpled panes designed to further horrify even the amateur aesthetes’ sensibilities. Plate on the floor. Her (Nits’) belongings lies on the floor to the right side of the bed, whose head is at the base of the wall. That’s all for now.

January 4, 20011

And what comes of it all? In relation to Nits, stronger, ever-growing feelings of need for her, affection towards her, curiosity about her, and an unmitigated, steady desire to be in her. In short, she is prepositionally perfect. In long, she is adjectively inexhaustible: her myriad attributes, subtleties, disarm one. She catches me off guard, demotes me peremptorily to the rank of a dim child by quipping fast and wise after stretches of undecipherable silence.

Her glory earns her double-spacing in

this notebook. But economy and tender consideration for trees has me resumed single spacing.

Nits and snow: the latter fascinates her; she’d never seen it in abundance. She tries to catch snowflakes; she observes them joyfully on her coat; she takes pictures; she makes snow-angels. Her childlike enthusiasm for snow charms me completely. I find her so very tender and endearing.

We went to Niagara Falls yesterday. Nits and I are trying to have a baby. The incongruity of the two phenomenon seem to demands separate paragraphs; yet I know they are related, both somehow and in an infinite number of ways. But of the latter:

I here ask myself why I want to have a baby with her. My simple answer is that I love her. And not once, in all cases, and extraordinarily, did it occur to me to use contraceptives. I love blindly (sometimes), passionately (always) and with an unrestricted fealty towards the oft-bitter host of material existence called “Nature” by most. I’m not reasoning about having a child with her. For me, the matter delves into the very constituents of love, so that I can refer categorically to biological love, instinctive love, romantic love, and mystical love; and all streams will drain into the same baby-wanting basin. A veritable watershed of a radius as large as my life, as the love I feel while my life funnels all impulses towards a happily pro-creative glance at my lover. I’ve seen those talk shows where quarrelling couples desire—usually the hubby—paternity tests. They astound me; for I cannot understand how a person would not want his progeny repeatedly adamant, generationally-speaking.

What I told Nanda on her answering machine moments ago in response to her not letting me see Galeno during Christmas: people can change; I believe that you believe that, so please exhibit towards me the same magnanimity you extend to others, and let me see my child…

Cake; birthday; Nits’; bought at Glencoe’s Foodland; vanilla with pink icing; the last hunk of it stoically, stubbornly, sits encased by the plastic, transparent container in which it came…

Nits wept openly and with intense sorrow a few days ago, citing as cause her belief that I will never love her as much as she loves me. How to quantify, then compare, mutual affections? Perhaps I cannot love her as much as she does me; but I feel it not; and even were it so, I could say with unpardonable honesty that I love that woman as much as I could love any other ever; and I’ve never loved anyone as much. Towards her, I feel love as I understand the word. Any suspicion that she finds me a bore wounds me; every stretch of silence becomes miles of waterless marching through an emotional Gobi. Intelligibility eludes me as often as not when near her. I consider with uncharacteristic selflessness her best interests. And to see her hurt crushes me. Her laughter hoists me up into the air as if I were an infant, gurgling with thoughtless, sensual joy. These bedbugs of doubt, well camouflaged by this verdant relationship, stalks me; and their names are Jealousy A and Jealousy B. Ad infinitum.

January 5, 2011

Preceding evening events recounted nervously under the eye of the Beloved One: explosion. After writing in this journal and growing duly pensive about all in all and well for all, I met an awakening Nits sombrely, though not unkindly, at least not in intent. Our seeming inability to mine fertile conversational round has been and sometimes still does gnaw at my confidence about our relationship. She’s reticent, but it seems to me not naturally derived…rather, she seems melancholy. Yes, she’s sad. I cannot pinpoint why, but it silences her. She fears hell. Something else…perhaps she fears me, my commitment to her. I asked her why she wanted a baby; what her favourite book was; how she felt about religion (I already knew); and more specifically how she was relating to her religion. The issue runs deep and painfully for Nits. She became in turn solemn and nearly reticent. Reticence, incidentally, well descrbes her general response to topics I introduce. Strange how on the phone, I would go on at length and she would seem to be fascinated. Perhaps the problem is mine; perhaps I am hesitant to talk and then blame her for my own dithering.  Or perhaps she is not well-familiar with the topics I introduce or feels insecure about her ability to keep up, which speak about her and most people’s desire to remain in control and not appear foolish, which itself is a scathing critique about the way society stigmatizes and penalizes even the most rudimentary forms of honesty.

Note: advantage to this aspect of our relationship with Nits: it obliges me to release my need for extended communication through journally which may yet bear fruit.

(Clattering of necklace I made from a red string, a strong pen light, and a compass, all gifts from Nits, to help guide me to her. The most symbolically romantic gestures I’ve ever experienced. She expresses herself in the most poetic fashion through symbols, signs, gifts, attributable in part by her organizational, spatial mind. Through these symbols, I see touchingly clever she is. It’s in her eyes, too. Sharp)

To resume: we have trouble finding an easy conversational flow. After she gave several non-commital responses to my search for a lingual running stream, she abruptly asked if I’d like to return to our basement. We did. We screwed. She didn’t cum after laborious attempts by both my wiggling, probing fingers (alternating from index to middle) and her own, working in tandem.  Must work harder to engage her verbally, find what interests her and get interested in it. Adjust my mind, mould it to fit hers seamlessly.

Sorrow pervades. She, Nits, the optimist, thoughtfully but with near-good cheer said that she’s going to fly out on Saturday instead of Monday. I say she leaves me earlier and with good cheer, but only comparatively; because I was afraid that when I told her that I’d miss her…she doesn’t seem to want to be here, it seems to me sometimes. Her happiness at returning earlier than we’d anticipated doesn’t seem to strike her as a statement about how she feels there, with me. I know I disappointed her, not paying her for the flight, appearing at the airport drunk, that bullshit with Meagan—all these things are bound to disturb, but then I wish she would loudly proclaim what troubles. She suppresses her feelings, conceals her deepest grief, and I want to talk to her about it but cannot find the right words. It’s a defense mechanism with her to remain cheerful, or try, in the face of any vicissitude. Which is why her sudden outbursts of crying take me by surprise. I should view them as well as testament to her love for me; for she cannot contain those feelings of hurt as much as she tries. She’s really extraordinary. I wish I hadn’t made her feel as she does. I wish we could get past this once and for all.

…but to with heavier heart resume: she didn’t go “boom” last night after much twiddling and twaddling, and I fell into a sulk, the kind of petulance awarded after eons of patriarchal preoccupation with…no, that’s not so: we usually haven’t much cared if a woman has an orgasm by our deft maneuvering or not; that is something relatively new, an equation between masculinity and the ability to gratify a femme physically. In any case, I have succumbed to it, probably more ardently than some since I am what is called Being In Touch With My Feminine Side. This has drawback, because one fears going too far and consequently becomes a reactionary. An argument ensued, replete with confused ideas and bewildered subjectivities vying for one comfortable foot in tis subectivity; another in some objective field, neither quarry willing to either relinquish all sense of self nor lose all sense of the other. I suppose boundaries were established, which is somehow worse thn when there weren’t any, when we were boundless in each other, when there were amorphous, nebulous erotic waters whose waters could not be navigated, where we lost ourselves in each other. Now, we’re two countries, each slightly wary of the other, convergent only by mutual necessity.

Moment in time: I hand her (Nits’, the Nits) a bit of food and while transferring the greasy morsel, we spontaneously lock lips. Silkysoftwarmmoistened lips.

Resuming: feelings bludgeon me. I realize this when considering that in a scant few days she will be gone and my life will then immediately hollow. It’s not that it will go back to usual, but will instead be actively worse; now longing with replace mere and habitual state of being nonplussed. The perplexity of the situation resides less in what to do than how to cope (ssssssh, the bottle is always listening, and glistens with anticipatory, ironic thirst; one speaks of coping tentatively for this reason if no other, though many others exist). Distinctly am I conscious of the impending crisis. Though painful enough by virtue of its nature, our relationship has proven for me profound; or it imitates profundity with the dexterity of a Chinese or Russian acrobat. Lapels, had I any, would emerge from their somnolent unanimated existence and flare at the outrage to my already friable pride for that which is to come. Let it.

I’m using the book-light she (Nits) gave me. Late evening, with Eat, Pray, Love playing in the background at the behest of Nits. The movie irritates, mostly because I hate Julia Roberts, but perhaps for reasons. A male parallel might be found in my favourite movie. The Razor’s Edge was almost as good as the book, which rare. No acclaim, though. Go figure. She (Nits) lies beside me; rather, behind me, since I sit and she lies on the bed, soon asleep. She sleeps often or at least very early if I’m to assume she sleeps poorly at night. She been consuming no caffeine, takes folic acid daily, consumes lots of milk. These are for our child, that she might already be carrying in her.

Late evening, same day: Nits sleeps. She’s leaving on Saturday. My heart hurts. When I express my sorrow over the fact, she laughs. I realize—or hope—that it is a laugh of relief; for she has with some reason mistrusted my love for her; and my distress subsequently is interpreted as indicative of the sincerity of my affection for her. I think of going with her (Nits) back. Seriously. But I’ve no cash.

When I write here alone, when she sleeps, I get a taste of what it will be like without her; and it’s a stoppage of time, the unyielding preclusion of happiness; since no series of events can occur or induce it in her absence; it is limbo; it is purgatory. The last time she was here was different. I did not sense the oncoming horror of her departure. Bluntly, I loved her less then than now. I’m at a loss. She’s leaving and I can’t stop it, but I mustn’t waste precious time here now. I want to hold my Nits, smell her beautiful, feel that long, warm fleshy, puresex body close to mine, feel her breathing. I even love it when she kicks my shins while she sleeps. It’s cute. How many people know that about her? 

Burped solitude, a hazy if

A film of sweat covering me as I lay in bed as still as possible to avoid generating more sweat. Finally stand to have a cigarette and cooler air outside. An unusual display flashes in the sky. A storm rumbles, the thunder still faint. The unusual part is the grid lightning hiding high behind cloud and lighting up the atmosphere, all of it, in intermittent bursts, like someone flipping a light switch on and off repeatedly. The glow comforts me while I struggle to remember the awe this would have inspired twenty years ago; it comes, slowly and unevenly. I put out the half-finished cigarette on the cement ground, turn two feet, and walk through the red door of this apartment feeling vaguely....

And now a mighty blast fulminates and with it a massive light attack and downpouring rain. The storm's summoned its forces and now unleashes an extremely heavy, angry rain that loudly announces itself against roof and tree and ground. The thunder comes in half minutes, literally shakes this compound; I can feel it...

...symbolic, feeling vaguely symbolic. Something is going to happen, I think. I'm going to say something to you or maybe not but something is going to happen. The preparatory thunder made the suggestion I then internalized. The elements guided my mind instead of media and politics. How refreshing to be sombre for no reason.

The rain doesn't scrub away the heat clinging to everything.

Someone outside meows like a cat, twice, then stops. I peep out of the blinds but see nothing. Today's a day of paranoia for me. People entering the compound who do not fit, look right, have rattled me a little. I wonder if ghosts from the past materialize into flesh and pursue me. Chequered lives like mine forge many demons, some human, some psychological. The human ones are those today preoccupying me. I try to let go of my uneasiness and almost succeed.

Recurrent thoughts at first amorphous clarify themselves each time they manifest anew: did we feel the same? Could our tired grievances ever be obliterated through the compression of time and memories less gripped than gripping? Does true love ever die or only burrow into psychical crevices? behind walls?

A frisson of excitement and of fear knocks my knees a little for no reason I can discern.

I think of your walls and how they are the most sorrowful thing that I know. The image of a small soft faceless being trembling inside a crusty cocoon makes me think of how the most sensitive mostly suffer.

Another meow issues from beyond my wall. I won't look. The cat or the man fuse meaninglessly. The meow alone counts.

Something changes between us or maybe only for me the longer we are apart. I feel each new day that I remember only your presence; and feel a pristine affection and desire. The problems we've had become harder to recall. A hard sob spindles somewhere to the left of me, a thing detaching like a glob of anything leaving its host: moistly, audibly, not a fleck of matter lost in the exchange for new room.

I think I feel fragile tonight. I do not think but know that I miss you and that I feel a dense sob in my chest too mournful to even reach my throat. I feel a little afraid for us tonight. I fear losing you, though not to another man. Never something as paltry as that.

Suddenly I imagine your tears and mine intermingling while we kiss. A memory to be made; and how I imagine we might respond to these, my current thoughts if we were together or even while we are, or because we are, apart.

There are many strange noises outside my apartment tonight. The place is normally silent at this hour. Tonight there are crashing and banging sounds. I think of trespassers and feel concerned. A small fluttering in the stomach occurs.

Do Not Fuck the Fish (to Nits)

You're not going to see many people who get sexually aroused by goldfish and who hoard bobby pins as if the greatest treasure, but there likely is at least one in this world. Anyway, I think that between you and me there's little deviation in the kinds of aesthetics and material we'd appreciate; I think we're pretty common that way. Put us in a room with twenty random people and we'd probably agree upon which are attractive. Place us in front of randomly selected artifacts, paintings, sculptures, furniture, we'd also probably broach the same conclusions, though here the taste is less defined by the media and therefore our respective experiences will inflect our choices far more (and the taste is less defined by the media precisely because the body and all of its vain accoutrements prove more psychologically accessible, pliant and urgent to people in terms of soliciting from them purchases. Nothing sells like selling the necessities of life: food, sex, shelter, clothing. Tapping into basic, primal needs is, like inducing fear, a very persuasive way of selling something).

("Common" is not a bad word in all instances and to be a contrarian merely to avoid any stigma associated with it is itself, ironically, "common;" because the self-defeating messages paving a free path for rank consumerism include the idea that individuality, being different from everyone else, is either a "right" or morally desirable or what one ought to be (depending on the context, "individuality," like "freedom" or "reason" is a word whose meaning changes according to the "needs" of the elite exploiters of the world who bind concepts in an insidiously deceptive way to induce a specific attitude in the populace that allows them to continue being elite exploiters. It's a conundrum. Hence how a jean company can advertise actors glowering defiantly at the camera, each saying "I'm me, I play by my own rules," to sell a mass-produced textile so produced with the explicit aim of homogenizing it for as much profit as possible for the producer: people do not seem to realize the contradiction, the absurdity).

My point is more than one but there's one I'd fasten on: our brains have been programmed from the get-go. This is not an evil or bad but entirely natural, biologically-necessitated means of survival within the species. The program itself needs to be examined; what we'll teach our offspring to give them a better shot at survival and a better life, a means to fulfill their own biological imperative and reproduce in a way that's perpetually viable for us until we learn the thing we're here to learn; or conversely never learn to the point of some finalizing conclusion. How do we put them closer to God?

When I asked if you would prefer a muscled stomach or a diamond ring, reflexively there's a cringing from you as from most people who know that we're not long physically for this earth and that there's something more to us than sacks of undulating flesh. Yet answering the question one way or the other, even if by saying both are equally desirable, doesn't make you superficial. Or put another way, it makes you superficial on some plane of your existence, one that many share; but it doesn't define you. Stomach or diamond. Sex or food. Necessities (the first a species-necessity; the second, both an individual and species necessity, although true asexuality in humans is extremely rare). Boils down to ancient precepts, central to the very gnostic philosophy or theology I mentioned not long ago I'd been reading about, one where gnosticism and the traditional Abrahamic (not to mention Buddhist!) religions meet: there is the spirit and there is the body. Jesus fuses the two at least in Catholic ritual when wine becomes blood; food, flesh (very fitting; my kind of thinking). Appreciating material and appreciating a body for the food and sex they represent's no shame. But here's the crux of it: like wine into blood, the apt metaphor is the interdependency between the body and the spirit, not how they differ. Chris Langdon, an American and one of the most intelligent humans on the planet (he's a bouncer at a bar :), proclaims he can mathematically prove that there is an afterlife. And, again, Christ says here is body and here is spirit and never do the two run in opposition or detached parallel tracks. In our death our bodies do persist as energy recycled.

And again, returning to an earlier point and binding it to the one I wish to make in relation to us and how, where, our perceptions and beliefs meet, I say that the biological necessities, of themselves blameless as the body of an infant, as needy, as wholesome, are appropriated by exploiters of humanity and used with language, imagery, law, and military might to coerce us and deceive us into enriching them materially so that their offspring alone will perpetuate (this is the capitalist form of euthanasia, a program laughably identified as originating with the Nazis when in fact its a concept at least as old as the ancient Spartan, and with a very long tradition of advocates). And in short, we end up fulfilling our needs--all of them good and natural, keeping these vessels intact so that the spirit might soar always--according to truly self-destructive because totally illogical pathways. A woman who gets a boob job to have huge tits does so in obedience to a script that is precisely fucking designed to make her the most unreliable mother in the world; and the illogical part is how a physical attribute which in the natural world denotes for a male a good prospective mate because she can feed his offspring amply (such is the instinctive reaction) becomes inverted: she cannot feed his offspring amply because those mammalian glands are fake and produce nothing but poison. The qualities that make a person a good catch are really the ones that lead to, enrich, and in all ways harmonize with the spirit: loyalty, endurance, faith. And you are a very fine example of a good catch, Nits. And if you were not, I don't think I could help loving you anyway.

If you'd have asked me the same question, diamond or "nice" tits/ass, both constructed representatives of real needs, I would have said both are the same in importance: you can't have sex if you're dead from hunger; and what good's being fed if you can't help fulfill your biological imperative to perpetuate the species? The thing is a diamond is not directly food; and the form of a body is not directly sex.

As an related aside, I'll end saying this: some people say perpetuating the species is not merely overrated but pointless; they say this because they have no faith in anything or think they don't; it's been stripped from them by concepts like "individuality" which align and are used to both support and be used as support for other concepts, like true nihilism. The fact that their very bodies cry out to assert the value of reproduction eludes them; and they absurdly render sex (illusorily) meaningless; they are, in short, mad, bungled by the circular, counter-intuitive beliefs that the system pathologizes in the population.

Cosmic therapy

Minutes after I finished watching a documentary relaying some celestial curios (such as the existence of gigantimundous ethanol clouds, happy hour gone amok), I went out to deposit my garbage and to buy milk, bread.
 

Rain patters gingerly outside, the usual mill of folk mosey or bustle around cars and shops and sidewalks, some hugging them, others trotting uncomfortably as if the concrete were hot coals. I felt complete serenity. Lately I've been feeling socially-anxious, a bit self-conscious, which I attribute and is almost always the case to a bad conscience. Now, outside, all I could think of was the billions of neutrinos passing through my thumbnail every second. A secret, it felt, that I held and others did not know.

The comfort derived by the awareness of these cosmic flints of near-light speed particles racing through everything gave me a becalmed gait and mind. Sauntering across the wide avenue at the lights, nothing crabbed my thoughts; wonder and awe, surreality almost, informed my mental space. I looked around at others and saw them as I most often did throughout my life as an alien species, with strangely moving parts and odd gestures of impertinent randomness, while feeling the tight yet thoroughly comfortable intensity of my own physical economy. Air swept before me. A giant puddle spanning bumper to bumper a parking lot I was crossing appeared as a moat one moment, a stream the next, beady silver balls of rain spitting off the surface. The retail clerk was unusually friendly. Smiles greeted me. An uncommon expression of easy friendliness, not feigned or loaded with energetic charm, felt itself on my face. I came home the same way, smiling at space like helium must at oxygen. It occurred to me not for the first time that the best therapy for any anxiety is watching a documentary like the one you shared; or contemplating the grandeur of the universe. Our problems reduce to mini-black holes. Clarity pervades. Peace enters.

"We'll take it from here": Dr. Drew exemplifies the tyranny of globalizing ideology(ies)

Dr. Drew of televised fame is the latest exemplar in my purview and I thought a few words addressing a show I saw should be had.

The episode in question concerned child-spanking. The grizzly-bearded Pastor Pearl appeared as the advocate for child-spanking. Thus polarized between Drew's anti-spanking agenda and Pearl's pro-spanking ones, the debate ensued. Pearl retained his composure against the goading Drew, who kept repeating how much it hurt when Pearl demonstrated his wares by tapping Drew across the back of the hand with a tube of some sort. Not only did Pearl retain his composure, but he sure-footedly invoked studies to support his contention that children respond favourably to spanking; that a child who disobeys a parents and thus endangers himself must have if necessary as a final barrier to self-destruction a punitive measure physically doled. Noting Sweden as an example of radical increases in childhood malignant behaviour after the introduction of a no-tolerance spanking law, and adding that of course the law itself is not wholly responsible but part of a series of interrelated cultural factors, he spoke of the multitudes of spanked children who grow to be loving, successful, happy people (he seemed to emphasis entrepreneurism to cite this, which was interesting).

Drew was outraged. Like an idiot savant, he kept repeating this especially telling mantra: "It sounds like you want to raise a warrior class." Drew's contention was that spanking inspired aggression in children, spoke to their "reptilian" brain (he brought out a couple of psychologists who offered a ludicrously simplified support for this); that a child will be--get this--brain damaged if spanked (we're not talking massive beating against the skull; this is taps on the butt and hands). The psychologists ignored Pearl's continued citing of people and of studies where rather than become anti-socially aggressive in adulthood, men and women who had been spanked, including Pearl's own children, were socially well-adjusted. One of the psychologists misspoke and no doubt harmed his career on the show by saying that Pearl didn't know what he was talking about because he had "no eduction." Drew's house psychologist, meant to support Drew's advocacy of non-spanking, ended up like Drew himself to appear far more aggressive, angry, outraged and much closer to physical violence than the peaceable and logical Pearl. The irony abounds but fits.

Drew is part of the media machine and its corportist interests, of which ideology a vital feature is the subjugation of the populace, creating a pliant and docile populace, in order to control them at State-Corporate levels. Drew baulks at the idea of parents physically disciplining their children, a routine that would preempt the child from becoming an undisciplined adult. An undisciplined adult does in fact get disciplined, finally by the legal system which will physically violate the adult through the penal system and its fashioned violence, itself ensured by the coercive threat of violence by the state (e.g, police, army). To this, Drew has no complaints; this does not solicit any outrage from him; and precisely because his agenda, conscious or not, in denying a parent the right to prepare and guide his/her child is to allow the state to do it--the Corporate State is to control people, "nurture" them, plow the metaphorical fields for them in their old age, not their biological parents. By ommission, hypocrisy and prosyletization, Drew petitions mightily and to millions who imagine him enlightened, mantled by his brutalizing authority as a doctor for the absolute, inescapable exploitation of children (humanity), on a scale Ceausescu dreamt of in his headiest moments of grandiosity.

Drew and his tiny but through television and state (educational) sanctified, powerful clique, claims that a child who is spanked will hate his parent; he believes (?) this a psychological inevitability. The absurdity of the belief that a spanked child will hate her/his parent is axiomatically and in observable truth denied: the parent is the guide, the life-giver and maintainer, the teacher, the beloved. A child even in the face of the most egregious abuses of parenting will suffer acute pyschological torment rather than actively despise the parent; and in situations of corrective spanking, of hindering the child from hurting itself, the child will be able to grow and adjust favourable in its social climate and thereby appreciate all the parent did (for spanking is, after all, a small portion of the parenting). In like manner, a child unmoored from his/her parent; a child who life-giver, corrector, sustainer, becomes the corporate state, will love that state, which is far more repressive. The child in loving the corporate state will give its allegiance to it, will freely and with love offer his/her labour-energy to it as a farmer's child will labour for his/her parents when they're age precludes them from sustaining the farm.

Drew claims that spanking would create a warrior class and in one way he's right; for as Pearl notes, politicians from top (presidents/prime ministers) to the bottom rank very highly in the incidence of spanking when children; that is, many were. They indeed became warriors, not "street criminals" but grand ones. What frightens Drew, on his own behalf and those to whom he prostitutes himself, is that the spanking will occur within a context of parental love, understanding and involvement; for how could a small group own so much of so many if all thought and acted alike?

Drew indeed believes in spanking; however, he's a globalizer and wants that spanking and its consequentially-won allegiance given to relatively small number of people who own most of the world's wealth, creates its laws to sustain that wealth, and with self-generating greed wants more. Like the former Romanian leader, he would take a child and place it directly in the hands of a centralized authorit(arian)y immediately after birth. He would have it raised by that authority's apparatus of control: the television, video games, psychologists, malls (food, clothing, drugs, entertainment), and public education (which mandate has increasingly become caring for students beyond teaching; they are to parent them). Children who defy their parents blatantly, routinely, are said by these same venues--movies, television, psychologists, psychiatrists--to be undergoing a "natural" phase in their development; that is, we are told that a biological and universal principle of human life is responsible for their defiance; that it is to be understood and even embraced while ameliorating its most painful side-effects and affects by--guess who and what-- a doctor who will dispense pills and render counterproductive advice (if happiness is the sought product). The cycle ensures a front-to-end containment and control of human energy whose continuity, made possible by organs like the media, the education system, the legal system and the medical system, almost precludes the ability of an average man or woman to circumvent it and raise children outside of the tentacled vortex of global human exploitation before imagined and now seen.

hairspraying love

--says she is a mistake

--didn't get a video message

--she makes me laugh (dead bird) turky comment

--how I slept on the couch

--Frohe Weihnachten

--stuffing: butter, eggs, two loaves of cubes wheat bread, celery, salt, pepper, pears, pecans, apple, rosemary, parsely, poutry seasoning; mashed potatoes with garlic, roasted carrots, boiled peas,

I was admonished for using Jessy's deodorant spray. She said it was hers. Marjorie the bloodless, hypocritical landlady concurred. I assented to her concurrence like a whipped son. What I should have said is this: if you sink yourself into a woman, smear you body and soul into her with all the grief of dreams fulfilled and forgotten; if you devote the fundament of your passion to hers, your very spit sheathing her tongue; if the cry of your ancestors burst through your lungs when you bury your seed into her; and if she gives you the very same, her everything, her mournful and hungry womanhood, with abandon and lust; if two people thrust with the will of God themselves unto another in the oldest dance, sopping and smeared and always right; if you've given everything worth anything, your spirited anguish and love, how can you baulk at the person to whom you've relinquished your all for using a bit of spray. The absurdity is a modern/post-modern one: we are told that we're individuals, unrelated to each other except through economic exchange. We're told that we are or if not should be isolate units; that is "natural." That, I say, has nothing to do with nature and everything with prescriptive bullshit designed to enslave us by divorcing us from the strength we gain by doing the natural; that is, recognizing and fully immersing ourselves in our humanity through others, a biological directive sung since time began, in our very genes.

Packing abs properly

Following a slew of irate responses to an article somewhere about six-pack abs. The author conveyed that as a goal in life it's an unworthy one, though he agreed that trying to have them is fine (his ambivalence bothered me a little).

Agreeing that a life led by the wonky want of capitalist-construed imagery the better to sell sell sell and distract distract distract proves unheroic from every perspective I care to have. And having many, I'll approach six-packing thusly:

Assign each of those potential units of six to another aspect of your existence: An ab for sexual prowess; an ab for a spectrum of personality traits whose constellated form paves the path towards enlightenment or depth or joy or all or nothing but sits better as a testament to life when life's about other than putting all of your doubly metaphorical abdominal eggs in one basket. Another ab--kids and bunnies. Ab four clearly bangs hammer to iron in efforts to extract enough material from this o so generous earth to feed kin and self and future generations thereof sprung. The fifth ab is all about you in some way that's uniquely forged; the originality ab. Splinter the remaining ab, post it to the four winds of your body, stay healthy but never in subjugation to the other five abs, which must certainly labour for the sixth as much as each other.

To Her, And to the Reader

Struck down, we're able to rise; arisen, we can relax. Every horror has its countermanding and reflexive beauty. The only sorrow is mental inertia. Our only clothing, the Arts. We hold hunger at abeyance with thought while thought creates an ever-increasing appetite for itself never gratified and always so, like the Ouroborous. And that's what these counter-impuslive instincts mean, the whole dichotomous thought of dichotomy, Hegelian dialecticism, a dutchman's movie about welding together several people surgicially: the need for an acceptance of the self by whatever is not known to us, by something outside the physical confines of our bodies and the limitations of the mind held within them. It is a need to contact the source of us and our purpose, "nature without check with original energy"  (Whitman).  Humanisim, egocentrism, solipsism and its functionaries (humanists for example), the Cartesian division between spirit and matter, scientism--these are some of the terms used to describe the shape this need has taken, which is to say that our "original energy" is us and not to be found in commune with something not us, not individual, not just you and not just me. "Centipede" is actually an apt expression of this need for communion when it's shorn of any abstract or metaphysical and true kernel of vital, original energy...it's like mechanically having two dead otters (pick a creature) mate: nothing will be produced, no new life. The films talks about futility. It's the logical conclusion of the philosophies that have become in the last few centuries entrenched guides to our worldview: the attempt to reconcile the need for an Other who is the Self but not the Self, with the belief that there is only the Self. Do you not feel these competing energies inside of you? I know I do. I know the bewildering love of all whilst drawing from life life, and the sense of power in replenishing the gift with a smile or a story or a treatsie. I know at the same contrasting time the antithetical belief that I am in all ways alone, and that all else is but an illusion...you have dispelled that illusion for me. I am not alone. In your difference and in your likeness I find myself in love again and like only love can mean: for the first time. Your being purges all of my inertia. You make me want everything all the time, and everything is that thing that makes me want: you. There's not a gesture or glance or inflection or thought or moment between us where I am not happy or aroused or anxious or amused and prompted to exist. I feel myself fully with you. Excited, curious, grand, hopeful. I can feel our lips as one, our eyes closed as the world gutters into oblivion and is replaced by ours.

I have and always will favour creation, whatever its nature or guise. And I will always acknowledge the fundamentally corroborative :) nature of that creation. Because what comes through me is a new form but not a new essence. I participate in essence and create in form. The form does not essence alter; for the essence is to me itself the process of endless reformulation. Therein my personal dichotomies are reconciled on an artisitc and mental plane: being independent in the profoundest way, by making myself from myself and issuing it back out into the world to feed from again. I grow my own crops. 

I only want to eat with and you.

You asked me to love you boldly, Reader. Or you parents did (some animal outside my door did call, I remember). I do, will:  ardency razes all deterrence, all trifling indecision, with a want no other singularity could in energy and in determination compare. Alone not subject to the artifices of analysis and recommendations of carnal or imagined fear; alone my only song sung before I could speak; alone a primordial need I race towards, atop of Time, pestering and whipping its back, you are for me, and for me unique.

Your Servant,

Iphurthen