Smoke a cigarette as the evening’s last sunlight dies behind the silencing veil of weightless white clouds turned dark orange, goldenrod, light coral and indian red, slate blue and orchid…. Smoke a cigarette as the air chills and the street lights come on. Cars light up along the freeway in glowing red and shining white; cars, — dark shapes between alien words of light, indecipherable and blurred. Cars as a metaphor for my thought. Far above, there appear the first of the few stars visible here, far above, far removed, distant — but like relatives still close as blood. Smoke a cigarette; inhale the killing carcinogens, exhale the dying dreams.

And the drift net of my concern, my grasping care for my life, catches on the heights of the city’s boxlike structures and all its poles and towering forms, like the words catch in my throat even now.

It is the season again for me to wonder why: “Why on earth do I go on?” And although I have answers — varied and sundry — it all feels somehow sadly like a collection of dryly pragmatic excuses to my own heart. Crush out the cigarette. Watch the last feeble stream of smoke drift into nothingness, or a haze of pointlessness (as it were; and what’s the difference?). I am here, now, and it is another day. And it is the season for me to wonder why. I wonder why.

Disparate images: all the jetsam of longing and flotsam of hope gathering itself together on an endless strand of an otherwise empty beach… while Sigur Rós’s ( ) — “Untitled 4″, currently — plays in my headphones. What am I telling myself? What is it I hear?

My mind keeps going back to the interview with Robert Pirsig I recently read. He’s 78 years old, now, almost twice my age, and yet I feel closer to his age than to half of my own. Bookstores still place Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila in the “New Age” section rather than the philosophy section. That book — along with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — changed my life, or the way I think about my life. But at the age of 40 years, I have to wonder what the change mattered, what it meant if I make it current and ask what it means now. I am not a contented person. I am not a “happy” person. I am not satisfied. Nor do I believe I ever will be any of those things. What I found in ZMM was not an answer but a deep, abiding, permanent question that Lila did not seek to answer but only compounded. I gather from the interview with Pirsig that he is still working on it for himself, but I am perhaps projecting a bit (for the fact is that I don’t really know). And I have to admit that Pirsig’s path is not mine after all, however similar it may appear to be, …which is for the best, of course, because I can learn more from the quality of our differences, you know?

I tried reading the 30,000 page menu at the metaphysics restaurant and found nothing in the end (which, as Pirsig points out, is what they serve there). But unlike Pirsig, I did not find myself asking the question, “Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive?” The answer is simply that there was no motive, and it’s too bad for those people who feel unhappy about that. All we have are our own motives as we find them, and they exist beyond physics (qua the physical universe) even as they emerge from and depend, in the end, on them (so far as we can know or rationally assert); i.e., there is no way to know or experience them apart from what we, as human beings, who are a (by-?) product of the physical universe, know and experience as the universe. So-called “metaphysical” ideas are, themselves, merely part of the physical world like any other thoughts. Putting it in entirely other language: with regard to so-called “metaphysics”, there is nothing to transcend and nothing to transcend in-to. To quote Pirsig again, “The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there”. That really rather says it all.

So, here I am. Darkness has settled over this side of the planet and the sun, existing as it does in the sky of some other country, is for me but a remembered thing I expect to see again. An old French comedy, Marquet and Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Les Vacances Monsieur Hulot, 1953), plays on the television. My lover is sleeping. The heat of the room is impersonally palpating my skin and my ears feel damp, nestled in my headphones, as “Untitled 9 A” plays sweetly, sadly, beautifully…. I am not sure what I am doing. I light another cigarette. It’s the weekend, and I have time left in my life to figure things out, for whatever that’s worth. But I am also fairly sure that I shall feel again like I know what’s it all about, when I am in the middle of an extended embrace and loving eyes are fixed on mine, all acceptance and empathy, and love slays that noisome portion of my mind once more… (though, that is not why I go on).

You walk into the watershed moment all rainbow by moonlight and plastique by dawn, coronal diadem verses leaping plosively from each uncut jewel and its refractive properties. An alliterative splurge surging westward through the brow, proudly saying, “Fear’s feckless feint frames the fantastic failure of fatalistic misfortune! I am free now forever!” And so you, my Captain, are to the heaving and sparkling prow what the wind-pregnant sail is to the foaming waves or as the cyclopean lighthouse is to the Hydrobatidae of the Straight of Messina. And in the spiralling curls of your amber scented ebony locks — decorated with a thousand drops of life-giving water, resplendant in those locks’ embrace — is the history of the ocean and its love for the moon, your ur-cu sister in blood. And in your eyes is the light of the black sun, shone as from a movie projector. And in your mouth is a scorpion bearing her young through a ring of scarlet fire sweet as pomegranate seeds. And your heart is the furnace of love. So it is you have sailed on through three decades, a myth made of mercury and ash in an earthenware skin glazed by the sugar sweat of stars….

This morning as you lay sleeping, I gazed upon you with the accumulated interest of our times together and I sighed. How it is you came to be here, now, is a tale-and-a-half not to be told out of school. What I know of you is both a blessing and a burden, and, inititiated as I am in your mysteries, all the more reason for me to love you as you are, for who you are and how you are. It is my contention that we have only just embarked on the real voyage of our lives. What came before served to teach us who we are, or were, or could be, — though never the three at one time, or so it seems to me.

Perhaps today marks for you the end of a thirty years’ war; perhaps the treaty you shall sign with your life will mark a new era with whole new freedoms.

Perhaps it’s like I said only yesterday: “Life is like a bargain show in Las Vegas. It’s all in the sequins of events”.

No matter.

Today is your birthday and I am grateful, grateful, grateful for your being here. I’ve all the hope in the world that it will be a good day in the same way that our evening at Mimi’s Café was a good time. You deserve no less — ever. And, too, it is my sincerest wish that every birthday to come will in some wise be better than the previous one.

So, happy birthday, Kisha, my love, my heart, my life. Happy birthday.

Just a note to say “Thank You!” to things magazine for linking to me.

I’m honored. ^_^

There are many issues where I am, in the face of whatever it is that’s annoying me (like an angry pimple) or grating on me (like a stiff piece of broken plastic being dragged edge-on down a dirty chalkboard), a quite tolerant person. I can put up with a lot. Often enough I smile when I want to strangle, kindly defer when I want to shout down, reasonably articulate my objection in a mild manner when I want to crush and burn, etc. I do my best to see the other side of an issue, even when we’re talking things I’ve very strong opinions about (like abortion rights, GLBT rights, and human rights), even when it gives me a freakin’ headache. It’s the way we remain civilized in the best sense of the word.

Normally, I am utterly opposed to the “death penalty”. But there are times when I feel I need to make an exception. There are times when the annoyance is ratcheted up to psychic migraine status and I start hearing Cannibal Corpse’s “The Time to Kill is Now” (lyrics after the break) flailing about in my head like the Angel of Death, weapon set to ANNIHILATE. Images appear in my mind from my Fallout 2 days….

I know it’s wrong to kill… and yet…

The spammer should die. Spammers should die. Blot on the Internet, bane of decency, chokers of bandwidth and wasters of precious time, leeches and parasites wrapped in capitalistic (even nationalistic) masturbatory fantasies, worthless punters and prats, peddlers of the foulest garbage, greedy hucksters of deception; there’s no good spammer but a dead spammer.

80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases and addresses, redirects, hosting locations of sites and domains, to a hard-core group of around 200 known spam operations (”spam gangs”), almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database. These spam operations consist of an estimated 500-600 professional spammers with ever-changing aliases and domains. The vast majority of those listed here operate illegally and move from network to network (and country to country) seeking out “spam-friendly” Internet Service Providers (”ISPs”) known for lax enforcing of anti-spam policies. [Source]

These criminals see nothing wrong with what they do to me or you. In fact, they don’t care about anyone but themselves — and what’s there to care for in them? Nothing! Nothing whatsoever! When I look at the spam I receive every day — via email or caught by my blog’s filter — I feel violently angry. I am not amused at all by their efforts. I don’t find any of it ingenious. I don’t think for an instant that they are using any sort of a viable business model. They are simply wastrels, deadbeats, assholes, no account shitheels. I don’t care what they have to say about themselves or their efforts. It is perfectly clear that their one real motivation is to make money as easily as possible, regardless of consequences. I can hear Daffy Duck saying, “Consequences, schmonsequences, as long as I’m rich”. (Or was that the BushCo chorus?) Point is, they’ve not one redeemable feature or characteristic to them. They serve no good purpose.

So, — they ought to die. Spammers should be rounded up and killed en masse. They should be used as extras in movies where people die violently, only it should be real when they die. Butcher them, I say, and then feed them to dieased dogs on a radioactive island somewhere. Use them as armor for vehicles in Iraq (doesn’t matter whose vehicles). Experiment on them with new medications or try out radical new medical procedures on them. Supply bloodthirsty, sociopathic, psychopathic mental patients with genuine, unwilling victims. Use them in place of cadavers to teach premed students about the body. Make car crash tests more fun.

But only after they’ve had everything taken from them. Whatever is of monetary value should be taken and auctioned off to help feed the hungry, clothe the poor, make shelters for the homeless. Whatever spammers have feelings for should be publicly stripped from their lives. And as they are reduced to nothing, before the blade falls or the bullet flies or the psychopath begins to chew and rip and rend, they should be publicly humiliated and ridiculed and shamed. As a culture, we should learn to focus all the badness in us — all the ill will, hatred, detestation, dislike, distaste, abhorrence, abomination, execration, aversion, hostility, ill feeling, enmity, animosity, antipathy, revulsion, disgust, contempt, and odium — on them. What an orgy of catharsis and purgation that would be!

We totally should do it. Just as soon as we’re done with molesters and rapists and those who lead us into war for no good reason.

.

Hey, I can fantasize, Twenty-first Century style, can’t I?

more…

Google “my mother died” and you will get over 500,000 hits. Google “my mother is dying” and the number drops to a little over 15,000. I think I understand why that is. It’s the finality of the former that prompts people to talk. It’s the grief. It’s the need to say something about her death that makes a person speak. While she’s still alive there’s only the moment of her death approaching, like a sky darkening with an oncoming storm when the first drops have yet to fall and the air is beginning to smell vaguely of rain, — while she’s still alive, there’s only anticipation, and breath, and quiet anticipation.

Tonight, the day after her 83rd birthday, I spoke with my mom on the phone for awhile, hearing her labored breath and fatigue as well as her joy at talking with me. She was very up front with me: she’s not doing well; her health is sliding downhill faster, now. They have her on both methadone and morphine to ease the pain. (It won’t be long.) My mother’s bones are as fragile as a bird’s, her spine is curving from the exclamation point of the young to the interrogative mark of the elderly. Her organs, especially her heart, are being compressed and distressed. “Sometimes I find myself thinking, I just want this over with! I don’t want to wait any longer!” she said to me. Sometimes, though, she wants to stay long enough to hear the voices of all her children one more time. Just one more day with familial voices softly, implicitly entreating her to love each moment more.

Tonight, I thanked her. “I know that you always tried”, I said, and she did. She tried. She loves me now just as she did when I was born, and however she mismanaged things or misunderstood me, her heart’s love was, and is, genuine. I made her cry with my words. They were words she needed to hear at the end of her days. She said, “After I’m gone, I’m going to give all you children a hug every morning”. Genuine love. (It won’t be long.)

Some part of me feels, totally irrationally, that someday I’ll look back on this whole “my mom is dying” thing and think how glad I am that she didn’t, that she’ll live forever. But when I look into my own thoughts, I know that she’ll soon be gone, permanently gone, irretrievably gone. My mother will have died, will have entered the silence only broken by those left behind. She will exist as a dynamic collection of memories in my brain and in the brains of others. My memories of her will be unique and wholly my own, and nobody will ever be able to read them or comprehend them in their totality. When my mother dies, I will never feel her warm hands on my cheeks again, never again feel her breath brush the short hairs of my neck as she hugs me, never look into her pale eyes that saw me as me. But I will remember, and I will feel her hands and her breath in the emotions I’ve wrapped them in. In my memories I will always know that my mother did live, concretely, as a real person who gave birth to me, fixed food for me, tucked me into bed, nursed my wounds and smiled at my laughter, fought with me, made up with me, rallied for me, … and on and on, loved me.

My mother is dying. She will soon be gone. I, however, will carry her love on. She taught me to carry it forward, even when she failed me. Even when she failed me, I say, but I have forgiven her her shortcomings. She has been, like me, like all of us, just another person in the world, as prone to minor and major follies and foibles and tragic flaws as anyone else. Unlike anyone else, though, she gave me life and she loved me endlessly as her child. Even when the meaning amounted to different things, she wanted the best for me. Well, she was the best for me; from her I learned that love matters most, that kindness is better than its lack, that in the end there is no one whose story you know completely save your own — so who are you to lay judgment on anybody’s doorstep? She didn’t mean you had to love or even like everyone, let alone those who did terrible things. She meant that you ought to at least understand that people all have lives you can’t really know, and what they do is caused or created in them for reasons you’ll never fathom or even see.

I’ll do my best to remember what she tried to teach me, try to grow on what I learned from her. That’s how I’ll honor her now and after she’s gone. (It won’t be long.)

.

But oh… how this hurts.

This strange creature I am…. Every day another gambit, another stumble, another folly, another stroke of genius or spasm of the idiot savant in me. Yesterday: melancholy, death metal, and smiles for Jung. Today: vitriol, treacle, and a joke concerning a man and a bar. Tomorrow: …? I have no plans; my outlook is a façade of mother-of-pearl. And I notice again that my belly is a little more round, now. My hair is a bit thinner and has receded farther (I do not say “retreated”, as my hair is not afraid) up my skull. My eyes are just as blue, and for all the same reasons — reasons both scientific and superstitious — and express with delicacy my unspoken thoughts. Blue eyes as blue as the sea, as the sky, as Billie Holiday’s veins or Nina Simone’s light. My longing is intact in fleshed out paradigm, but it is suffering from pixelation — a numb penumbra of platitudinous plasticity. Every day, I hope to get by. Every day, my hope gets a little bit broader, a little more vague. Every day I feel a little more everyday, but my heart remembers Borges and worries its feathers as absently it contemplates. The night’s still solace remains terrific to me.

Hmm…

Let’s go, you and I should. There is a place in me I’ve been dying for you to know. It is where the river Sane plunges smoothly into a void. The opening to the void is shaped like the lips of a courtesan saying, “Ahhhh…” — run in reverse. It is the very moment, formed into the likeness of a place out of time, when I simultaneously fall fast adream and awake, eyes wide open. I am never sure on which side of the equation I am, on which side I exist. But I am sure Borges was right when he said,

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

I have known this for a very long time, now. I discovered it shortly before I died my first time. Don’t ask me when that was; I was a different person, then, and the time was a different time. Some lessons transcend particular timelines to become eternal. Such lessons reside at nodes, at nexus, as nuance resides in the educated meaning of some sentence, beyond the frail claim of the dictionary proper.

I have known it, and, too, that it means nothing more or less than what I import to it or from it. Here and now I am thinking of fractal forms, of self-repeating replicators reproducing ceaselessly. In the end, they recreate the face of all faces. That is where you get closest to the anthropomorphic “God” of our species, and see yourself therein like some grand secret. That there is infinitely more beyond it is — inconvenient, for some, hateful, for others, a relief for a few and an inebriating fire of profoundest pleasure for fewer still. But once you have fallen into that courtesan’s mouth (like a candied cherry or a peeled grape) and been sucked into the void, there is nothing to deny… or, well, nothing is undeniable and everything is everything. In such a state of mind (“Æternum servans sub pectore vulnus” — Virgil) and weary from the labors of some given/unnamed day, I lay me down by my love’s softly, slowly, undulating side, to feel her stir somewhere in the warm depths of her own deep night. She presses back into me and sighs out her breath and I feel as if I understand in this moment why it is that I remain “I” against the familiar dread pull of all entropic reason.

The night’s still solace remains terrific to me, and I am terrified by my failure to be negated, but my mind glows in the redolent embers of love’s bare mythologies and strives to live on. As I light another Kool cigarette and take another swallow of malt liquor, arch my back and stretch my toes, the sheer inertia of my animal sense of Dasein overwhelms my wounded pride with a cosmic lust for encompassing existence wholly by being consciously encompassed by it. To completely and absolutely (not to say utterly) recognize the whole along with one’s part in the whole, one’s place and role in it, is to forget for a time the stinging barb of the ineluctable modality of one’s unassuageable existential vagabondage.

And so I go.

“God is dead.” — Nietzsche

“Nietzsche is dead.” — God Death

“Death is God.” — Some Goths and Death Metallers

“Death is dead.” — Cthullhu

And still, life goes on.