Joy

“I can’t believe some of the things you post there.”

I can’t, either. It does give me somewhere to put all of this where you may choose to scrutinize it at your leisure. And I do very much enjoy the additive nature of this project; that it grows in size and overall message complexity. I like to believe that some day I might dress it and send it out in my stead.

As for the content, I have no apologies. I sure hope no one finds out that I’m strange. BREAKING NEWS.

I’m fairly sure my readership consists almost entirely of past and future girlfriends, anyway. Hi, ladies. A valuable service is being provided for you here. Those past get to cluck their tongues and shake their heads knowingly. Those future may as well find out what they’re in for: spectacular melodrama and needless nautical references. I AM IN YOU. Well. You know what I mean. I also guarantee a deeper and more complete overall experience than the other candidates offer. They’re just a person. I am everyone.

What I do regret is the incompleteness of this tapestry. There is little joy. One doesn’t find Jesus on prom night nor does one run for pad and pencil when things are well. At least I don’t. There’s little need to make sense of experience when that experience is already what you wanted. You simply exist and enjoy. There is no reason to process it further and doing so would only serve to create damage and distance.

It presents a very real issue in terms of voice. Is this severed perspective punctuated with moments of shuffling ache really adequate? Were that the whole of my self I would be a sorry figure, indeed. However, I find it difficult to reproduce the rest of the equation, stretches of simple pleasure, in a satisfactory way. Even the quiet, daily happenings that constitute a happy day. Kurt Vonnegut said that such moments should be acknowledged, that we should do so out loud saying, "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is." I want to do more, but it's slow going. It somehow fails to translate textually though it accounts for the majority of my daily experience.

The only exception to this are periods of love which, while certainly falling under this heading, are the exception rather than the rule. Exception is easy. What remains, the rule, are the portions that I am tempted to summarize and skip over.

I am concerned that this is a serious error.

The Good Girl

Today I watched The Good Girl. It was your standard tale of quiet desperation. A life of dirty kitchens with things left out on counters. Little miseries and retail lighting and insufficient fellows.



It was very sad. Not the boy, Holden. Were I to have read a synopsis this is the character I would have expected to like best. He’s a writer, struggling with inner demons alone. He wants to be understood. I found him repulsive. I found him empty, parasitic, leaking fluid and delusion.

The husband is just bland.

No, I liked her. Despite her ridiculous tan – how was this allowed – Jennifer Aniston handled this well. The sadness had little to do with her acting, though. The premise of the film is that her life is a prison due to decisions she had made earlier. She married the wrong man. She didn’t go to college. She stayed at a dead-end job.

I have a lot of gift cards. This is a popular present combining the flexibility of cash with the assurance that you were remembered. They sit on my desk and I observe them. I like thinking about the different things I might buy. I will go to, for example, Amazon, and examine interesting choices that I might make. A shirt. Some book. Titanium rings. I then close the browser and make a sandwich.

I cannot express how pleased I am that I never got married. I have done incontrovertible things but not that, never that.

“You ever feel like that? Like you gotta escape?” her husband asks.

But she doesn’t escape.



She throws herself on the mercy of the court as women so often do in stories like this. She remakes the same decisions and the lighting and music lead you to believe that things are better somehow, that she accepts this life. No more unfocused stares.

It just sort of starts over, but now there is a baby. If she were trapped before what is she now? The characters seek transfiguration through one another and basically accomplish nothing. Oh, one of them dies.

Fineskinde Farm

It rang and rang.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is Liz there?”

“Which Liz?”

“Liz O’Brien.”

“Hold on.”

I squirmed and clenched the phone cord. I wiped perspiration onto my pantlegs.

“Hello?”

I didn’t recognize the voice at all.

“Liz?”

“Yes, who is this?”

I told her.

A pause. “Oh my God. Hi!”

“Hi.”

“How did you get this number?”

“From Jessica. I gave her a message for you at the record store. I waited five years and didn’t hear back so I thought I’d call.” My best smile.

She laughed delightedly.

We spoke. She was in college still, in the south. Worked at a library and volunteered at a battered women’s shelter. She was studying English.

“What do you even look like now?”

“Pretty much the same, I guess. I had the Jennifer Aniston thing for a while, but now I’m back to just the standard. How about you?”

I told her.

“Haha, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I always imagined you turning out that way.”

She sang in a punk band. I was post-punk but willing to compromise. I was willing to do all sorts of things.

I was on point like never before. I don’t think I’ve ever been so charming. Every joke landed, timing tight, every nuance noticed. Pretty soon it was like we were children again.

“Do you remember when I threw up on your lap?”

“What?”

“On the bus. We were at Josh’s bus stop and I just turned and threw up all over you. His mom took me inside and called my mom.”

“I forgot about that!”

“The part I most remember is how you barely flinched. You were like a nurse, completely professional, trying to make sure I was alright. Helping me up.”

“I don’t remember that part!”

I do. I should have known and never did. She loved me all along and I never knew.

“What ever happened to Josh?” I asked.

It was getting dark. An hour had passed, maybe more. She had a boyfriend but I didn’t care. He was a placeholder.

“Usually when you talk to someone from your past, it’s awkward and strained. I can honestly say that you’re the kind of person I would want as a friend. We need to talk again.”

I could not agree more.

“Oh, you know what? Do you like writing letters? I’m an avid letter writer. If you write to me, I will write back.”

“That sounds great,” I gushed. “I’ve always wanted a pen pal.”

“Be warned, though. My handwriting is almost unreadable! What’s your address?”

I told her.

The Centrifuge

The potential energy that clung to this body to reprimand and retard is forced now to the perimeter. It is released as heat and I feel it radiate from my person. I am heat. Netted muscle knits in advancement. A feeling of well-being settles upon us now as we affiliate with this, the world of common and communicable experience. I am jarred into wakefulness. I am pried from the abstract. Standing in the center of the sigil, gloriously present.

We are nearing the end of our exile.

My fear was always that there were a certain, fixed number of resources to allocate. I have come to suspect that this is not the case. Okay, really it was absurd – a revenge fantasy of the impotent. To test this hypothesis, however, it is necessary to construct a worthy vessel. A bearer befitting the borne. This is Unified Field Theory shit, kids.

Still, there is some property of physical activity that interferes with imagination. I use the word imagination for want of a better term. Imagination is not what we think it is. It is not simply a fictive picture show derived of contained chemical happenings. It is something far, far stranger.

I suspect that coma patients, opium addicts, and autistics are furthest along this axis. What they see and know is otherworldly, unique to each, and incommunicable. They cannot access this middle band, the wavelength on which communication is possible. What they can access is pretend and yet not false, or so goes the supposition. Related to this are art, dreaming, and creative enterprise generally, but also barking lunacy in its many shades. The capacity to make and alter is to fashion form from nothingness. To remake some portion of the material world. Is that not the very basis of power?

At the opposite end, of course, we have simple machines such as the lever. We mostly fall somewhere in between. I am moving left and am pleased to do so. It is easier and less dangerous. I spin and burn. Watch me shine.

I can still feel it. It’s not gone – not even dormant – but waiting, perhaps have fallen back to take position in marrow or vertebral crevice. It lurks and bides its time. Someday it will win. I know this; have always known this. The important thing is that it will not be soon.

In the present it is time for change. It is time to stand and take what is mine.

Boredom

It is the great devourer.

Every resource is exhaustible. If it inspires, it is only for now. Music is the most frequent culprit. Some series of sounds will access some hidden trigger deep within my person. The thrill is indescribable. I will chase that thrill. I will become engorged with that sound until the process becomes predictable. Each note expected, each lilt and lyric and wobble wrung dry. It gives now only a stale sort of pleasure. It is agreeable and nothing more. I therefore chase novelty, forever seeking newness and all that it offers. It is the same with fiction.

It is the same with people.

It’s an awful thing to say, I know. I must specify that this is not the case with all people. Those closest, who have penetrated to the inner circle through time or some unspecified set of unknown variables (see Magic Spells), are not subject to this brand of fatigue. For the rest, though, they simply wear out. We will be out somewhere and suddenly I know what you will say next. I know what you will say after that. It’s like realizing that, half asleep, you have begun watching a movie that you’d seen before. I turn it off and go to bed.

Strangely, this relates to alcohol.

For many years I would regularly go out and drink to excess. I would do this even knowing the horrific repercussions that faced me the next day. I would do this even during the KotB period when I think sleep deprivation brought me fairly close to madness. What I was warring against was my own behavior. I knew what I would do next and I hadn’t the choice to turn that particular movie off. There was no novelty and so there was no excitement. The trigger could not be flipped.

Pickling myself in alcohol meant that I was unsure of what would happen. I mean, of course, drinking until the governor went off-line. I would hook up with unexpected people. I would say amazing things. I would perform acts of incalculable stupidity. The point is, I would cede control – that is, the forebrain would cede control - to some baser self. Letting go was secondary, though, to the real goal, which was to achieve unpredictability.

I do not recommend this practice. It’s a miracle I didn’t die. Most people go through a phase of rampant substance abuse, typically alcohol, but are content to dismiss it as youthful caprice or questionable stress management. I think there’s something more at work here. It certainly warrants analysis.

A Play

BOY: making noises with his face
GIRL: making noises with her face

CURTAIN

Keep on the Borderlands; II, ii

You need to understand the ship.

We talk about it a lot. Most recently it has been the HMS Swanky Blumpkin but is known by so many names. It is a table and it is a place and it is a vehicle. It is a vulpine monstrosity that was assembled of the earth and then expelled like a splinter from the fleshy coast.

Boasting twenty three forty six guns a load most substantial thickly twined and lacquered black decks and, at the prow, Athena with sword and scepter her brow furrowed in anger and disappointment. It is crewed by a brotherhood of survivalism. We have boiled soles and caught rats and known lean times. We have run down lesser craft without malice in order to fill bellies and maintain the Divine Propulsion. Piracy is wicked, I know. But you must understand that this is a warship.

It is needlessly ornate in crustacean rococo. Charred relief of daemons and water sprites interspersed with asymmetrical horns and swept scrollwork aproning each deck in a thick syrup of input. The decks are rigid and well-planed, buffed to a matte gloss catching points of reflected light at the peak of midday and when fully lanterned. Below decks are the dim halls full of directionless clicking and festooned with anonymous, locked doors. There is talk of lavish appointments, though others talk of cells. The crew is kept in barracks, row upon row of hammocks and sea chests bolted to the deck and stuffed with all manner of sanguine cargos. There are conference places and other rooms of particular purpose. A map room, for instance, dense with papyrus produced exclusively in the Nile delta fashioned as charts that must be chewed to a pulp and taken deep into one’s own cellular structure in order to be made plain. Information transference of a kind known only to the weathered primitives who see with sight unbounded and fold in upon themselves with laughter at the thought of such meager expression.

The banner above is graying. A skeleton, certainly, but not a head. Not a man at all, in fact. No one had ever surmounted the mainmast beyond the nest and so the original standard flew still. Flew, that is, when nature allowed. The bulk beneath had no such propriety. She needed no wind, no oars. She simply continues.

To understand that vessel is to understand her master. Identity in this case is not a matter of essence or achievement but rather a by-product of the relationship between captain and ship. It exists as function; even as lack of function. It exists in perpetuity even hacked and burned, rent asunder by indignant authority or criminal neglect. It is really just an error, a pock or defect on the cornea perceived as a black shape insinuating itself across each field of vision impossible to arrest impossible to approach.