Category: Care-uh-kter

Human encyclopedia

He would say the name, then he would pause for a long second to see if I had met them or been there, or at least if I knew of the person or had heard of the place. He talked like an encyclopedia. Every twentieth word was a proper noun. He enunciated the first letters of the names to remind me they were capitalized.

When I didn’t know of the person (which was more often than not) and confessed that I didn’t (which I only did a few times when his pauses were extra long and accusatory of my ignorance) he would say, “Oh, they are important, you must read about them.” Of a place, he would say, “Oh, it’s beautiful, you must go there.”

Afterward, I thought of a couple of possible reasons for my conversational partner’s manner of speaking. Either he had learned in the past that bringing up names was a way to seem intelligent, or he just wanted to be anyone other than himself, somewhere other than where we were.

Posted on by Cole

Runner

Walked
To the window
In the bedroom

Looked down
At the sidewalk
Just in time
To see—

Running out of sight
Underneath
The bay window
Next to ours—

A pair of legs
Not-too-skinny
Dressed in denim,

A hand
Holding a grocery sack
Blowing in the wind,

And sneakers
With lime-green
Stripes on the sides

August 04, 2021 at 10:02AM

Posted on by Cole

Meeting Henry

I held onto the metal bar above the doorway into the basketball court, doing leg raises. He stood on the other side of the chain-link fence, behind a storage container to shield him from the wind. He was drawing on a pad atop a tripod. I wanted to know what he was drawing, but I could not decide if I would go over and ask. By the time I finished my exercises, I had decided that I would.

I walked over and asked, “Do you mind if I take a look?” He stopped drawing, looked up, and, after taking a moment to resurface from his deep, drawing thoughts, said, “Oh, yea, sure, it’s not finished, but …” Then he took a step back and lifted his hand, palm facing up, to point at the pad, signaling to me that I was invited to see. I stepped into the studio he had made with a dirt floor and two walls—one, storage container; the other, chain link.

It was a pencil sketch of a tree. There was smudging that made a sort of background and eraser marks that looked like calligraphy—one art form within another. It was obviously a tree. The trunk and the branches were clear to see, but it was still unfinished.

As I was admiring the sketch, I remembered that I was meeting a stranger at the same time as I was admiring an artist’s work—both of which are events normally accompanied by certain manners. I said, “The eraser marks are interesting.” And explained how they looked, to me, like calligraphy.

He then explained how he used the eraser as part of the drawing process. He would erase to create a lighter shade and then wipe across it with a cotton swab to make a purposeful smudge.

We went back and forth about the sketch itself. He taught me about his methods and I asked questions. Lately, he had been using a ruler to get the scale right. Otherwise, he said, he would get carried away with drawing a certain part of the sketch—say, one bough—and then it would end up out of proportion with the rest of the sketch. So his solution for this was to buy a ruler at the art store and make tick marks along the length of the page that corresponded to different parts of the tree. Scale had been on his mind a lot recently. He wanted to draw the tree as it was.

I cannot remember all of what Henry said. I tried to be present in the conversation, rather than just trying to remember. But I do wish to record a few certain things he said that really struck me.

I explained to him that I was a writer and that I knew what he meant about how you can’t be too willy-nilly when you’re getting down your first draft because then you will create a mountainous task for yourself when it comes time to edit. The closer you can get it on the first draft, the more time you can spend getting it even closer during editing. Of course, this is balanced with not being so focused on getting your inspiration crammed so perfectly into what you preconceive as the proper form that you end up choking the energy and vibrancy that gave life to the work in the first place. We agreed there is a balance between form and energy, structure and chaos.

I also told him that sometimes I have an experience and become frustrated when I struggle to write it such that it is equal to the beauty, sadness, joy, brilliance, or whatever I am feeling so greatly myself because I wish for others to feel it too, via my writing, but I know they will not be able to if I cannot fit the writing within a tight enough pipe that it gets to them like a firehose.

And that is really what we were getting at. I may be putting it in different words but I can feel now, writing it, the same as I did an hour ago, talking to Henry about it, so here it is. There is a dichotomy. Many analogies demonstrate it clearly—solid and fluid, structure and chaos, form and energy, wind and tunnel. Let’s use solid and fluid—water in a hose, to be precise. The water is the energy. The hose is the form. Making art is the process of turning on the water and having it flow through the hose.

The water is what the artist feels. It is the emotion, idea, or inspiration. It gets into the artist. A painter beholds a nature landscape. A dancer is filled with potential energy for movement. A comedy writer overhears a funny conversation.

But does the artist have a hose? Does the painter have a keen painter’s eye to see the colors in the autumn leaves and choose the corresponding colors from his palette? Has the dancer trained and flexed her muscles so that her body is capable of the great leap to which her spirit aspires? Does the writer have the skill to translate the elusive rhythm of spoken comedy to the written word?

This is not the kind of hose that can be bought at the hardware store. It is more than just the painter’s brush, the dancer’s body, or the writer’s pen. It is the craft itself.

Many times I have been overflowing with water that I cannot force into my hose; in other words, I am overwhelmed with an experience that I cannot write. I can write some of it, but there are holes in my hose. There are holes because my craft is still of an amateur. My vocabulary has not expanded to the far reaches of the language. I have not read enough to gather a sufficient stylistic inventory. My words don’t sing in perfect harmony with the music of language.

The water wells up in me and I drown in the ecstasy on which I am already drunk and would readily pour out into the glasses of others so that they could be drunk with me. But my hose is holey and all that comes out the other end is a dribble. I cannot spray out of myself strong enough for my readers to be dancing in the water as in a sprinkler during a hot summer day.

On this, Henry gave me advice. He said that my experiences as a young man are ephemeral and I need to freeze them while I can. That means writing down my experiences with the writing skill that I now possess. As I grow as a writer, my craft will develop. Then I can return to my earlier works and raise them to the level of my heightened craft. Henry said that he had done this with sketches from his younger years.

A text from Henry the next morning (07/05/21) at 3:51am:

I can see the distant bay but I cannot touch it or use any other senses to flesh its reality. My awareness of rests on its image in my mind. Without embodiment, reality drifts into fantasm. “Feeling of reality” (referring to a term used by Andre Gide) is a little litmus strip one end is informed by all the senses and is rooted and the other has less sensation and is more ethereal and seems fantastic.

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Ménage à trois

We met one of the three right away. We had just gotten to the condo, walked out onto the balcony, and talked about how great it was to be back, when she climbed up the pillar and across the branch-thatched roof of the balcony down and in front of ours. Gary seemed to know her, but he told us later that he had only met her earlier that day. David and I were surprised. The climb she made was not a safe one. Before she had swung her other leg over the iron fence and put both feet down on our balcony, she was already talking a mile a minute. She was high on coke, she hadn’t slept much the night before, and her other two friends were taking a nap in the condo below us.

Gary invited her and her friends to play volleyball on the beach with us that evening at 6. She said they would come and then she climbed back down.

She was late to volleyball. We waited for her and her friends by the fountain. She leaned over the railing on the third floor and said that they were coming, they were just going to be another two or three minutes.

Later that night, we got back from dinner and sat on our balcony. We sat there for an hour and talked and drank water. Then, around ten at night, we heard her voice, “Friends? Are you up there?” We said something to let her know that we were. And up she climbed.

She was even more drunk than she had been before. She talked. Then she swung her leg over the iron fence and stepped out onto the thatched roof. Ron was there. She slipped. We heard her squeal. I distinctly remember hearing one of the small branches snap in half. And then the smack of bare skin hitting glazed ceramic tile.

Originally written: Wednesday, May 26, 2021, 1:34 PM

Posted on by Cole

Jido

Was a drummer
I locked eyes with
Whose band played
On the open roof
Of the restaurant
During dinner

Afterward
He was outside
Drinking a beer
And smoking a cigarette

My friend nudged me
To say hi to him
Which is how
I learned his name

My Spanish was bad
And his English
Was just good enough
To ask me
If I liked music
I said yes
And then I said sí
He asked if I played an instrument
I said no

But wish that I could have said yes
So that we would have had
Something to talk about
Though I wouldn’t have been able
To express myself anyways

So we shared a brief
Mostly-wordless moment
After the sun had gone down
In the street of Cabo

He drank his bottled beer
Leaning against the wall
Outside of the restaurant
Waiting for his band to go back on

And I, full from dinner
With my hands in my pockets
Feeling much less talented
Than the man I was admiring

He wasn’t even aware
Of how perfectly himself
He was being

May 31, 2021 at 04:23PM

Posted on by Cole

Peter

I stood on the balcony
With my new friend Peter
Who was about twice my age
We had just gotten back from dinner
And were starting our evening drinking
He started to talk about how
He was old
And I was young and full of energy
I asked him
What he meant by energy
And he pointed out at all the lights,
Boats, roofs, roads, water
And asked me
What do you see out there?
I said I saw lights,
Boats, roofs, roads, water
He waited patiently
Like a teacher
For the right answer
He said there are protons and electrons
It’s all energy
And that was his point
Which I did not completely understand
But then again, I did, somewhat

May 31, 2021 at 11:32AM

Posted on by Cole

Marcos

Talking to the restaurant owner
From Germany
Who made his way over to the U.S.
At some point
And sold automation technology
To auto companies
Even though baking
Was always his passion
He would take the executives
Of these auto companies
Out to dinner
At the nicest restaurants
And that is where Marcos told himself
He would open his own restaurant
Someday
It started as a bakery
And then expanded to
A dinner menu
I got the chicken
With brussel sprouts and pumpkin purée
The chicken was perfect
But the brussel sprouts were undercooked
I wasn’t going to tell him
Because you don’t tell strangers
What’s wrong with
What they love
But he told me his story
And I told him I believed in him
And thought his restaurant would be big
And then we weren’t strangers anymore
And so I told him
The brussel sprouts were undercooked
And he shook my hand
And said he would tell the chef

May 28, 2021 at 09:31PM

Posted on by Cole

Coming to America

Arsenio made us our
Margaritas
With tamarind and jalapeño
And brought them
To the frontside
Of the infinity pool
Where we had our chins
Resting in our forearms
Talking about how
It’s easy to be
In the present moment
When nothing else seems
Like it could be any better
Arsenio
Told us about how
He went to the states
When he was fourteen
To Santa María
His uncle
Who was a coyote
Took him walking
Through the desert
From ensanada
Across the border
There was a fence
But there was a hole dug
Underneath the fence
Like little animals
Dig
He said
When he couldn’t translate
What he meant
By the hole under the fence

May 28, 2021 at 02:47PM

Posted on by Cole

Lunch with my grandparents

I was sitting on the back porch having lunch with my grandparents. My grandma and grandpa were sitting in chairs next to each other, across the table from me.

It was the day after Easter. The buds of the first leaves were starting to show on the trees in the backyard.

“Those are farm trees, the ones that grow the hedge apples,” my grandma said.

“I have a list that’s 17 pages long, and you know what …” and I already knew by the tone of his voice that there was a characteristic grandpa-joke coming, “It’s single-spaced!”

“Hah!” He laughed like he always did.

“I’ve got to change the oil in the car,” said grandpa.

“That should be at the top of the list,” said grandma.

“I know it. And I’ve got to put another coat of paint on the door,” said grandpa.

“Well that should be toward the bottom of the list,” said grandma.

“Well, no, it’s at the top of my list,” said grandpa.

“The sun is starting to come over the house now,” said grandma.

“I’m gonna go get the umbrella,” said grandpa. And off he went.

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How he walked

He walked like he was going somewhere. Not like anybody was watching, or at least not like he had an awareness that anybody was. He didn’t have his shoulders thrown back or his chest puffed out. He wasn’t too serious neither. Not like a businessman with a briefcase, leaning forward and walking fast like he was late to a meeting. Not like he had all the time in the world. Not a slow stroll to enjoy the scenery. He had somewhere to be, I’m sure of it, just from watching the way he walked. And what’s more, I knew he believed in where he was going. He wasn’t going because someone told him to or because he had to. He was going for his own reasons. If you asked him, he could explain it to you, but he wouldn’t be able to explain it, at least not well enough for you to understand completely. His reasons were inevitably his own. And so he walked. His strides were even, each as long as was comfortably possible for his body. His shoulders were not hunched or thrown back. They were square and set perpendicular to his path. His gaze was forward, not looking much side to side, except for when crossing the street. He walked like this, on the sidewalk, on a Saturday morning. And I watched for not more than five seconds, and I knew that he was going somewhere.

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A transient walks by

A transient walks by a restaurant with outdoor dining. He shuffles his feet. His pants sag. A folded newspaper hangs out of his back pocket. A jazz band stands by, holding their instruments idly, in between songs. Seven or eight tables are set up outside of the restaurant. People are eating and talking at their tables. Forks can be heard clinking on plates. The transient starts to shout, something indiscernible. People stop what they’re doing and stare at the transient, as he stands there on the sidewalk. He looks at one table in particular, and continues to shout. Nobody does or says anything. Forks have stopped clinking. The transient stands there. For a moment, there is silence, other than the street noise—cars passing by. Then he continues to shuffle his feet, moving on down the sidewalk. The band picks up their instruments and continues on to the next song. Forks resume clinking on plates.

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Krys says nice

Driving to the airport on our way to pick up Marta. Krys is driving. He has his hand out the window, letting the wind pass between his fingers. The sky is a light blue. The gradient grows lighter toward the sun, high in the sky. We come to a stop. Krys looks out the window, exhales, and says, “Nice.” Seamus looks at Krys from the passenger seat and asks, “What?” Krys responds, “All of it.” We all laugh, and quickly express our emphatic agreement. It is all very nice.

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John and the coffee pot

John stands in front of the coffee machine. Connor asks him what is wrong. He explains that he can’t figure out how to turn off the ‘Clean’ function. He says, “I need coffee to figure out how to fix the coffee machine.” We laugh.

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The Fish Man

Or maybe, it is like a side show I once saw at the circus. “The Fish Man,” they called him. I watched the man in the human-sized fish tank. He even swam like a fish. The tank was small, but he managed all sorts of aquatic maneuvers. Bending his back and kicking the water with flipper-like feet, he could swim circles round and round in the tank. It even seemed that he had webbing between his fingers and his toes (but that could have been makeup and prosthetics).

I read the plaque nailed to the top of a stake that was driven into the wet ground in front of the tank. The plaque read thus:

“Behold the Fish Man. He was not born this way. He chose to become like a fish. Some rumors say that he once told his mother while taking a bath that he preferred it underwater. He began learning to hold his breath. At first, like any person, he could only hold his breath for sixty seconds. Over the years, spending all his time underwater, the Fish Man learned, by various unknown methods, to hold his breath for longer and longer. Today, the Fish Man only comes out of water once in the morning and once in the evening. He sleeps at the bottom of the same tank that you see him in now.”

At the time, I didn’t for a second believe it. I figured there must be some invisible breathing tube worked into the tank, and by some sleight of hand, or sleight of swim, the Fish Man was able to take a breath from the tube as he completed one of his back-bending flip maneuvers. I watched him for a while but couldn’t catch a moment where the Fish Man seemed to do anything like breathing through an invisible tube.

I couldn’t help but wonder to myself what it had been like for the Fish Man to learn to hold his breath. Even if it was a sham, he probably had some talents for holding his breath underwater.

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Backstage

Backstage wasn’t usually this quiet. Not completely silent, of course. You could still hear the opener thudding through the walls of the dressing room.

As soon as they had the bandmates pushed out and the door closed behind them, she had his shirt off. There was a ferocious banging on the door. They ignored it. Then it came even louder, threatening to knock the door out of its frame, and a voice screaming from the other side, “Jackie!”

He unclenched her grip from around the back of his neck, turned, and opened the door just a crack, through which the sound of the opener forced its way in, vocals wailing and bass thumping.

Travis, his drummer, was standing there with his forearm resting on the frame and his head against his rest, annoyed, like he’d been through this a hundred times.

“Can you at least hand me the bottle of booze off the table there, mate?”

“Anything else?” Jackie said, sarcastically, handing him the bottle.

“Oh yea, can I bum a cigarette?” Travis said with an open-mouthed grin that revealed a gap in his two front teeth.

Jackie slammed the door in his face.

“Okay, where were we?” Jackie said turning on his heel and waking over to the couch that was missing a cushion where she was lounging, like she felt right at home.

She was looking at him. He walked over and put both hands under her cheek bones. She pushed him away, and kept looking at him, at his torso.

“What? What’s wrong? Is it my tattoos? The devil on there doesn’t mean nothing. It’s just an old band I was with …”

“No, it’s not that,” she interrupted him.

“Oh,” he smiled. “It’s just because I’m so devilishly handsome?” He said this with the best London accent he could manage. His bandmates were actually born and raised in London but Jackie was just a tourist there when they all met. Most of their fans didn’t actually know that. He figured he could fool this one.

“No, it’s not that either.”

“What is it then?” He asked, now a little alarmed, hoping she wasn’t crazy. About to ask him if they would ever see each other again.

“You’re so … so skinny.”

He laughed. “What do you expect? I’m a rockstar. I eat more drugs than food.”

After they were finished. Jackie walked right out onto stage holding her hand. He didn’t think anything of it. He didn’t care. The magazines would write about it for weeks, “Who’s Jackie’s mystery girl?” And a feminine silhouette on the cover with a question mark in place of a face. The truth was, there were many faces that could have replaced that question mark.

He walked right out onto the front of the stage and held her hand as one of the security guards helped her down into the front row.

After the show, he looked for her. He really did. He tried to catch her face in the crowd all the way through their last song. He worried about it in the tour bus on the way to the hotel.

Then Travis handed him a bottle. A new bottle, full again. Jackie took a drink and forgot.

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A man with hands

Looking out the window

At a man on the sidewalk

Who speaks

So much with his hands

I wonder

Being unable to hear

If he is using

Any words at all

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Couple walking

A smiling

Mustached man

Holding hands

With a beautiful girl

He’s telling a joke

One hand in his pocket

She’s laughing

Trying to keep up

As they walk

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Old man

Looking through

A restaurant window

I saw an old man

Using a magnifying glass

To look at a menu

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Watch man

Whereas I once

Would have rather

Left it at home

Preferring to be a boy

Ignorant of that number

To which the hand points;

I have since become

A watched man

Watching all the time

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Broken wheelchair

I saw a man
On the sidewalk
Laying on his side
Beside
A broken wheelchair

One wheel
Was detached
And he was tinkering
With the part
Of the chair
Where
The wheel connects

One of his feet
In a cast
Was laid out
Far enough
Into the bike lane
That bikers
Had to swerve
To avoid

All considered
He did not seem
As stressed
As I would presume
Of a man
In a wheelchair
That is missing
One of two wheels

Tinkering
With the wheel
With the same disinterest
That one would surf
Channels on the TV
In their own home

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getting older

on a stool at the coffee shop

sharing a wooden table

with an older man

next to me

drumming my fingers

and bobbing my head to music

he glances sideways

disapprovingly

he cannot take away

my energy

other than

by my becoming

him someday

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too shy

a poem i write

while sitting next to

a lady on the plane

as her and i both

admire the sunset

at six in the evening

landing in san francisco

i think of showing

the poem to her

but decide not to

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a nice man

a nice man

from colorado

sits next to me

on the plane

says he can’t

stand the broncos

but can’t root

for his chiefs

on account of

his denver friends

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transient

a transient sits

on a brick bench

elbows on his knees

leaned forward

rocking

back and forth

with a hat held

by the brim

in both hands

upturned

shaking it

for money

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young man in the morning

a young man

downtown

in the morning

leaned against

a fire hydrant

curbside

with feet

on the street

and right hand

holding left forearm

and left forearm

holding a cigarette

chewing gum

looking up

at the building tops

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old man

an old man

with a gray mustache

and glasses

eats a biscuit

and drinks a coffee

by the window

picking up crumbs

delicately, slowly

between his fingers

holding

a cup still steaming

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transient

a transient

sitting against

the store wall

flicks

a cigarette butt

still smoking

impressively far

—a futile display

of rage

against everything

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cigarette

how a cigarette

hangs

not yet lit

stuck

to the upper lip

resting

on the bottom

pointed down

looking cool

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pink robe lady

the same old lady

in the pink robe

crouches every morning

in front of the yellow

metal newsstand

reading front page headlines

through the glass door

that you must pay a quarter

in order to open

crouching there reading

for a few minutes

the full front page

and then walking away

maybe to find a quarter

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tag along

tip toe tag along

prancing praying

you don’t get caught

doing exactly what

everyone else does

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zuma beach

at the zuma beach, we ask the parking attendant if she has a map. she doesn’t speak english very well. she says, no, just beach.

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busy man

like a man used to

the chore

of having multiple people

need his attention

he deals with each

in turn

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naked baby (7/3/2019)

naked baby looks like all the life I ever wanted wasted lotion skin and shampooed hair curly dark on Carmel shoulders back rib bone showing through bend over breasts dressed in curls collarbone framing small neck holding throat hands twisting hair

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in it right now

We’re just in it right now, I say out loud, sitting on the couch, next to her in bed. This is the moment for sure, I say. This, right now? She asks. Certainly, I say. Thinking of what all will come and wondering if we’ve really reached the peak.

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beautiful girl

a girl

wearing a white top

and pink pants

a gold watch

two inch heels

leaning back

with her coffee

on a bench

she smiles

at me

i hope

i smile back

she looks away

beautiful

banal i know

but god

so beautiful

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z-man

my friend zack is currently a couch-surfing musician. he said, “i go through moments of creativity then moments of reality.” he goes through moments of binge-drinking and then crazy sprints of health.

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Sidewalk pirate

I watched a man with an eyepatch light a cigarette as he walked on the sidewalk. The sun was setting so I could see the light illuminate his good eye.

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Some people and not others

Standing in line at a coffee shop, I watch the barista take orders and talk to customers. Her hair is dyed electric yellow and she has her septum pierced. Her eyes are glossed over like she might be high. She is perfect to me, in this moment on a Saturday morning when everyone is still a little sleepy and waiting for their coffee. She is not really that attractive. In fact, she looks like a boy, round in the face, and dresses like one too, with a long-sleeve cotton button-up. Still, I wouldn’t take anyone else in the world in her place right now.

It makes me think about our standards for people. We require them to be sexually attractive or economically productive or otherwise useful to us in order to deem them worthy of our approval or admiration. I wonder what would happen without those standards. I wonder what would a human being turn out to be. If we could be whatever we wanted, err, not even “wanted,” because that want is subjected to those standards.

So what I really wonder is what a human would be if we could be whatever, whatever at all. For one generation, it would be a fantastic display of art. But then for the next, sexual selection would be all disordered and economic progress might stall and even violence might break out. So the price we pay for our safety, progress, and order is to select some people and not others. On the whole, everyone seems satisfied enough with this. As for me and a few others, I want to run around congratulating and complimenting and loving those others.

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Most excited I ever was

Like those times of my childhood when I lived with my grandparents in the summer and I had nothing to do but lay out in the sun on their back porch, dreaming easily and worrying only about what I was going to do with my friends that night—that’s the most excited I ever was.

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A leaf in the wind

I live these lives that all of a sudden pick up their own Will. From the new place and people, their motivations and the motivations of nature take over. The weather will do what it will do. The molecules in the air will do what they will. My friends will gently and kindly push me along in the direction that the group is already moving. So I get picked up like a leaf in the wind and it requires nothing of me at all expect that I do not resist. before I know it I’m part of the mob that moves on its own; the universal Will is supplanted in place of my own.

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I left one morning

I left one morning with nowhere to go so that on every street corner there was no motive for me in any direction and I went until I ended up wherever and it was dark and I was hungry so I had to figure out what to eat and where to sleep for the night.

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Homeless poet

The homeless man says, “The first part is you have to go somewhere that knows.” That’s all he said, to nobody, as people passed by on the street, nobody listening. I think to myself, is there any difference between my poetry and the ramblings of this homeless man? I don’t think there is, really.

The homeless man speaking poetry all day and nobody listens. Maybe he was a poet with a home at one point. Still a poet now but without a home. Maybe one of the best ever. Maybe he was too good and his poetry consumed him along with the drugs. No one will ever know, because nobody listens.

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Safe balance

Always a balance, he says, so that he can escape either way. Waiting, watching, somewhere ambiguously in the middle—the safest place to be.

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The social man

The social man, seen to be with people. I wonder why they love him. Why they hang on his arms and laugh at his jokes. whether it is superficial or genuine; either is good enough reason apparently. The lights get bright and conversation gets louder when he walks into the room; they either want to impress him subtly or to get his attention outright. The social man is attractive, if only by virtue of being attractive to others. If seen alone, it would ruin his whole persona.

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The aesthetic of having things

The aesthetic of having things: I am attracted to a person, a man especially, who seems to generally have things—things which we need, in particular. For example, when we are hungry and he says, “Ah, here have a piece of fruit.” Or when there is something to be paid for and he steps forward with money as if his pockets are full of it. Or anything at all where something is sought after that I or everyone we’re with would otherwise have to go out and get ourselves and he says, no matter what it is, “Ah, yes, here you go, no worries.” And never expects repayment.

Aesthetically, he is seen to carry things that he owns, like a backpack on his shoulders, the coat he was supposedly wearing at one point now in his hand, glasses on top of his head that serve a dual purpose to keep his hair out of his eyes. He is a demigod working towards either omnipotence or omnipresence—I am not sure whether it is power or presence that his possessions convey; either, godly in some way.

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Big decisions

I remember right after we graduated we were most of us on the fence with our decisions. We could have done one thing just as easily as several others. Some decided right away and started. Others took a couple months. But almost everyone I know decided on something eventually.

And now, almost a couple years later, a lot of us are doing those things we decided on, and they’ve now taken up big parts of our lives. Seeing as most of us are in our early twenties, then what we’ve done since graduation is a tenth of each of us.

It makes me think of how important those decisions are. In the moment they seem just like waking up and having breakfast. What’s subtle is they change the course of everything for really no good reason at all in the sense that we could have picked something else and it would have been just the same now.

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A feeling of connectedness

I asked F, “What’s it like when you get deeper in your meditations?”

“I sort of dissolve,” F said. “It’s more of a lack of me. A feeling of connectedness that exists all around me.”

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My Mother Was An Artist

My mother was an artist. In her hometown she got sick and went to see the medicine woman in the fields. The medicine woman was there and my mother’s mother was still alive and she knelt there in the fields among rows of other people that had passed on. They all knelt down in the dirt on a sunny day. Here they came to life again, in the medicine woman’s field.

My mom was sick. You only went to see the medicine woman when you were already sick. If you were healthy, the dead would make you sick anyway. When you were sick already, it didn’t matter. My mother held me in her arms. I was sick too. I was a baby too young to remember this story.

My mother knelt in the field next to her mother, my grandma. My grandma knelt there in the dirt looking very somber and worn down by being in the sun all day. My grandma held a baby boy also. He was my mother’s baby brother, John. He would have been my uncle had he not died before he was one year old.

My mother knelt next to my grandmother and communicated via the medicine woman. My grandma whispered to the medicine woman and the medicine woman turned and translated to my mother. My grandmother, via the medicine woman, told my mother that she was proud of her. She also said, holding dead baby John in her arms, that I looked to be very healthy. I was a little younger than one year old at the time, just like dead baby John.

The medicine woman said that it was time for us to go. This did not phase my grandmother. She knew that it was as things must be. She maintained her same somber disposition. Her golden cheeks eternally tanned by the sun of the dead. She whispered one last thing to the medicine woman and the medicine woman turned to my mother and told her, “She wants you to know that she loves you.” My mother cried a single tear in the soil of the dead. Then the medicine woman said that we really must go.

She led us away from my mother and through rows of other dead people kneeling in the soil. We came out of the rows and reached a road and departed from the dead. In the real world, the fields of the dead were a gift shop filled with pictures. There were many aisles of framed pictures of deceased loved ones. They hung on the artificial walls like books sorted in the shelves at a library.

The medicine woman told my mother, earlier this morning I sold the first one of your mother’s pictures. She only has four photos left now and then she will move on from the fields and rejoin the sun.

Thank you, my mom said to the medicine woman, putting her hand on the woman’s shoulder. I will come back and see her again once more before she passes on. I will have one more question to ask her. Well, why did you not ask her today? asked the medicine woman. Because I don’t know the question yet, replied my mom.

The medicine woman smiled and said that she understood. With me as a baby still in her arms my mother said goodbye to the medicine woman and left the fields of the dead, or in reality, a picture gift shop where souls waited in purgatory to pass on into the sun.

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Creation story

The Will has to be individuated into an ego in order for effects to be realized in space and time.

The Self could not get to a goal as it was, because it is not the nature of the Self to act. The Self just was and nothing necessarily needed to be done.

The creation story begins when all of a sudden there was something to be done. And the Self created mankind, beings capable of doing. He gifted unto them fragments of the Will subjected to time and space—thus mankind is striving after what the Self needed us to achieve but couldn’t on His own.

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More to lose

The more safe and secure I got, things got less flexible. I lost hope for potentiality. My art suffered. The more I was given, the less I was willing to give up. As I was happier, I was less likely to up and leave for something else. I had more to lose.

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Conversation with M

“What inspired it?” M asked.

“Nothing really,” I said. “Just thought of it in the barber shop one day. And finally got the time to finish it today.”

“I wish I had that kind of imagination.”

“It’s a weird thing. I didn’t used to. When I was good at math and remembering stuff. Now my head’s so empty. So there’s more room. Less room in your lawyer brain.”

“Your head is not empty,” she kindly assured me.

It was useless to argue with her.

“I start school tomorrow. So even less room,” she said.

“Are you excited to meet your classmates?” I asked.

“Only because it is new and refreshing.”

“Isn’t that why we do anything?”

“Oh I don’t know about that, people find comfort in routine and familiarity.”

Again, there was no point in arguing with her.

“You’re right,” I said.

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The Little Ant: A Short Story

The little ant couldn’t remember how he had gotten lost. He was in the middle of an expanse with no sense of direction. The ground under his feet was hard. He had nothing with him other than the grain of rice that he held in his mandibles. He had no thoughts in his head other than delivering the grain of rice to the colony. It was so peculiar, the little ant thought to himself, that he could not remember anything from before. He could not remember the queen, not specifically at least. He could not remember what she looked like, only that he did in fact have a queen. He could not remember his brothers or the tunnels inside the ant hill, only that he did in fact have a home and the colony was waiting for him and depending on him to deliver the grain of rice.

The first few seconds, which are whole days in ant time, the ant spent in despair. “How did this happen to me?” he asked himself over and over again. He felt disconnected, alone, and purposeless. The colony is the reason to live for an ant. Without his queen and worker brothers, the ant felt no energy for life. But he still had the grain of rice in his mandibles. He had a duty to the colony, he remembered. Thus concluded his period of despair and reintroduced to the little ant the resolve that is customary for his kind.

He was hungry. He thought of taking a little bite from the grain of rice. No he could not, he told himself. It was for the colony. The colony needed it more than he did.

The little ant looked around to see in what direction he might start to search for the colony. He was in a foreign place, or at least a place that he did not remember. In all directions, it was only flat and there was nothing noticeable to be seen. The little ant realized there was nothing that would tell him which direction to choose. He picked up the grain of rice with his mandibles and started off in the direction that he was already facing.

It was many minutes that the little ant marched straight in the same direction. He was careful to pay attention to the movements of his legs. Because he had no information neither from his sight nor from the smell of the colony, he had to be careful this his steps on the left and right sides were equal, to guarantee that he moved forward in the same straight line. He was also counting the number of steps that he took to know exactly how far he had traveled.

If he did not find anything in this direction, he would turn around and walk back in the exact same direction from where he came. He reasoned to himself that he could not be far from the colony. He did not want to risk marching off in the wrong direction, away from the colony. He planned to set out on equidistant paths from the center where he started. This would allow him to cover the most ground, closest to where he began.

There were occasionally long ropes scattered on the hard floor. The little ant dared not leave his track to examine them until he came across one of the ropes in his path. It was not a rope, but a strand of hair. It was much longer than ant hair. He wondered to what kind of beast such a long hair could belong. He wondered if such a beast had anything to do with his separation from the colony. The little ant felt a sudden fear for the colony. He hoped they were safe from this great beast. He stepped over the hair and shuddered as he did. He continued on the same path, keeping his left and right steps equal.

The little ant had no way of keeping track of time other than the steps he had counted. He had taken twenty-five-thousand-six-hundred-and-twenty-eight steps. He had not stopped other than to briefly examine the strand of hair from the great beast. The little ant wondered to himself how many steps he would take before he would turn around and retrace his steps backwards. He cursed his predicament for he had no sense of how large was this vast expanse that he was in. If he only knew, then he could determine how far he needed to travel in each direction. The best he could do was to guess.

The ant was now more hungry than he was before. Time would become a factor unless he found something else to eat. He would dare not take even the smallest bite from the grain of rice. The rice was for the colony. There was no purpose in him even returning to the colony if he did not bring the grain of rice.

When the little ant reached fifty-thousand steps, he turned around. He was very careful when he turned. He composed himself and stood straight as an arrow in the direction that he was facing. He took note of the position of his body. He would do it in two movements, he decided. The first would be a quarter-turn to his right. He would then make a second quarter-turn to complete a one-hundred-and-eighty degree-turn so that he would be facing, hopefully, in the exact direction from which he came. He cursed himself for not marking the spot from which he had originally departed. He could have carved a large “X” in the floor with his mandible. Now he had no way of knowing if the measurements and count for his steps were accurate. He would have to trust them. He had no choice.

The ant started his fifty-thousand-step journey. He crossed the large strand of hair at roughly the same step, which was a good sign that he was on the right track. When the ant counted his fifty-thousandth step, he started the count over. He was now tracing new steps.

When the ant was a third of the way into his journey in the second direction, there was all of a sudden a great shadow cast over the whole of the expanse for as far as the little ant could see in any direction. Instinctually, the little ant dropped the grain of rice from his mandibles and did his best to crawl atop it and cover it with his body (the grain of rice was several times the size of the little ant). Just as quickly as it had come, the shadow passed and the light from an unknown source returned to the whole landscape. The little ant shuddered. What was that? He wondered to himself. Did it have anything to do with the giant strands of hair that were scattered all around? Did the shadow belong to the great beast?

The little ant stood immobilized for some time. What would he do if confronted with such a large beast? He did not know, he told himself. There was only one thing he could do. He picked up the grain of rice in his mandibles. Before he began again, he realized that he might have lost his direction slightly after having thrown his body on top of the grain of rice and losing his footing as a result. There was nothing he could do about it now. He reset his track as best he could and took a step to continue on.

Nothing occupied the little ant’s mind other than the count of his steps and the soft embrace with which he gripped the grain of rice in between his jaws. He started to feel a kinship with the rice. At first he scolded himself for giving into delirium. He longed for the companionship of his brother ants and his queen. It was not for an ant to be alone. Still, even as he admonished himself, he could not help but feel connected to the grain of rice. At times, he swore that he could feel a soft rhythm like a heartbeat against his mandibles. It was only the vibrations from his steps, he told himself. Grains of rice did not have heartbeats.

He had now gone more than forty-thousand steps in this second direction. He was twice as hungry as before. He started to feel a weakness in his legs and mandibles but dared not pay attention to this. He was still likely very far from the colony. He did not even know anything about where he was. The most frightening thought crept into his mind, the colony might be no more.

After all, he did not remember anything. How could he be so sure that he even had a colony? The little ant shook his head, trying to shake out these thoughts. He admonished himself two-fold: for having thoughts in the first place, and for not keeping his head straight and rigid in the interest of staying on the path.

There was no productive outcome of thoughts like these, he reminded himself. The only productive thoughts led to action in the service of the colony. Any thoughts that led to either inaction or action not in service of the colony were thoughts not to be had. The little ant marched on, recommitted to his steps and maintaining the posture of his mandibles, even though the joints of his jaw had started to ache severely—the ant didn’t think of this.

At precisely forty-four-thousand-five-hundred-and-eighty-six steps, there was another shadow. This shadow was different, however. It was static and non-moving, not like the beast’s. The little ant set down the grain of rice carefully to get a better look. In the distance there was a vague color not like the hazy blur of nothingness. It was a wall! He could not see the ceiling but he knew it was a wall. The little ant did not know how he knew this, or from where he had learned the concept of a “room.” But he knew it, as sure as he believed that he had come from a colony.

The wood inside of a wall would provide an ideal home for a colony. The little ant contained his excitement and reminded himself to focus on only two things: counting his steps and holding the grain of rice in his mandibles.

The little ant passed fifty-thousand steps in this second direction. According to the plan, he should have turned around. However, finding the wall justified an update to the plan—the little ant reasoned with himself.

At sixty-three-thousand-one-hundred-and-twenty-nine steps, the little ant stopped with the grain of rice against the wooden, painted-white floorboard of the wall. The little ant didn’t move. He surveyed to the left and the right, along the floorboard. To the right, the floorboard appeared to go on out of sight, undisturbed. To the left, there was a part where the head of a nail protruded from the floorboard and it looked as if the board was pulled slightly away from the wall. Maybe there was an opening where he could get in, the little ant said to himself.

The risk of exploring the possible opening was that the little ant would have to abandon the rigid structure of his exploration. He could not, however, pass up this opportunity to explore the opening. He resolved to measure, as best he could, the angle at which he now faced the floorboard. The little ant determined it was about sixty-degrees with respect to the floorboard to his right, and therefore one-hundred-and-twenty degrees with respect to the floorboard to his left.

It was becoming difficult for the little ant to remember all these numbers. He made it easier for himself by dispensing with all the other superfluous pieces of information in his mind which were not essential to bringing the grain of rice to the colony. He systematically disposed of any emotions and any ideas about where he had come from.

Then, returning his mind to the numbers, the little ant realized, if the room was rectangular (he seemed to recall that most rooms were), the line along which the little ant had explored thus far, which ran exactly one-hundred-and-thirteen-thousand-one-hundred-and-twenty-nine steps, was diagonal with respect to the walls of the room. This being the case, the little ant imagined he might amend his plan and, instead of returning back to the center where he would continue in a third direction, he would search along this floorboard until he found a corner of the room. The chances were greater, he reasoned, that he would find a corner if he followed the board to the left. If he found a corner, he could make estimates for the size and the shape of the room, given the measurements he already had. This was assuming, of course, that he would not find the colony behind the opening between the floorboard and the wall.

All this, the little ant thought of, while still standing motionless facing the floorboard with the grain of rice pinched gently in between his mandibles, careful not to adjust even slightly his exact position until he was sure that he had all the measurements he needed. He was sure now. He turned to his left and started to move carefully along the floorboard towards the protruding nail which the little ant assumed would mark an opening to the interior of the wall.

At only two-hundred-and-forty-seven steps from where he had first faced the floorboard, the little ant came to the protruding nail. There was indeed a small opening between the board and the wall where the paint was chipped away. It was roughly the width of three little ants. Peering into the opening, it was like a long dark cave. The little ant was afraid. He dispensed with this emotion as superfluous. The colony might be at the end of this cave, the little ant told himself. He adjusted the grain of rice in between his mandibles, made his way into the cave, and started leftward.

It was dark. There was a thin ray of light that seeped in between the top of the floorboard and the wall. This ray illumined only a small part of the little ant’s path inside the cave. He relied mostly on the sense of the board to his left and the wall to his right, as he occasionally bumped into either side with the grain of rice. The little ant was very sorry to the grain of rice each time that this happened. He tried with all his strength and concentration to avoid these bumps but he had become very hungry and weak as a result. He occasionally faltered to either side as his legs had begun to fail.

After seventy-four steps from the opening of the floorboard, faintly at first, then louder; the little ant could hear a bustle up ahead. At first he was excited. It’s the colony! He told himself. The end of his journey is near! The little ant marched forward with a newfound exuberance and strength. He craned his neck and hoisted the grain of rice high. He thought of seeing the queen and his brothers.

Then the little ant’s exuberant march slowed. He listened closer to the bustle and his stomach turned. He listened to the heavy steps and their rhythm. They were not like ant steps. They were heavy and spaced out. This was something bigger than an ant.

The little ant stopped and stared as deep into the cave as he could. Whatever it was was coming closer, straight towards the little ant, and fast. The little ant took a step backwards, and then another. By the time the hairy fangs became visible in the thin ray of light, the little ant was moving backwards as fast as his legs would carry him. He could have moved faster if he dropped the grain of rice, but he dared not. The spider was very fast and closing the distance between them.

In his mind the little ant displaced his fear and counted his steps backward. Twenty-five … fifteen … five … Just as the ant whipped his backside to the left where he knew he would find the opening, the spider lunged forward and snapped his fangs after the little ant.

Outside the cave, bathed in light, the little ant laid on his back inviting in air through his spiracles. For a brief moment the ant allowed horror at the spider to take the place of his concern for the grain of rice. When he realized the grain was no longer clenched between his mandibles, the ant jumped to his feet only to find that there was something very wrong with one of his front legs. As he tried to support himself, he fell forward onto his right mandible. The spider had severed his right front leg at the joint. A clear liquid seeped out from where the little ant’s leg was detached.

This injury, however, was secondary to his concern for the grain of rice. He looked around, ignoring the pain in his leg. Luckily, the grain was beyond the opening in the floorboard. The little ant limped over and picked up the grain with his mandibles.

The little ant felt his pain only insofar as he needed it to assess his ability to carry on. Combined with his hunger, the loss of blood was now weakening the little ant significantly. He would carry on. There was nothing else to do. With the grain of rice securely in his jaws, the little ant limped along the floorboard in the leftward direction (relative to where he had first faced the board). The little ant shuddered to think that the spider was just on the other side of the board. He could not get out, the little ant told himself. The opening was too small. Besides, he could not think of that. He had to continue on in this direction no matter what.

The little ant carried on. He continued to count his steps. It helped him to ignore the pain in his leg. This would be the last segment of his journey, the little ant knew. He would not be able to return to the center and continue his systematic exploration.

The little ant thought of nothing. He did not even process the information that came in through his eyes. He did not smell. He did not think of anything other than the count of his steps, and increasing the number by moving forward. All the while, clear liquid seeped from his leg.

He carried on like this, until step thirty-thousand-seven-hundred-and thirty-eight since the opening in the floorboard, the little ant ran headlong into another wall. He had reached the corner! Though the little ant could not spare any energy for excitement.

He craned his neck upward and started to climb. Normally, the little ant could have climbed the wall vertically. Impaired as he was without the full function of his right front leg, he was forced to crawl up the corner with his right shoulder relying on one of the walls for support. With his neck craned back as far as possible, he could just barely keep the grain of rice in his mandibles from scraping against the wall. Like this, the little ant climbed.

At several points, he stopped to rest, focusing all his strength on the grip of his claws that held him to the wall. He feared if he did not do this occasionally, he would fall backwards. How high the little ant climbed did not matter, he had no room left in his mind for the fear of his own death. He could not even remember the numbers anymore, not the angles nor the steps he had taken. That was all beside the point now.

The stops for rest grew more frequent until with every step the little ant feared he might let go. Then the wall that made up the left half of the corner, gave way to a countertop. The little ant scrambled onto this flat surface, thankful for the ground to rest his tired legs and the space to adjust his craned neck. The ant rested, with the grain of rice clenched in his mandibles. He would die with the grain of rice in his jaws, he told himself. He felt that death was near.

The little ant got up to his feet. The clear liquid had stopped seeping from his front leg. The little ant wondered if he had any blood left. He wondered if he had already died and he was now just hallucinating. The little ant looked around at what lay on the countertop. He did not recognize anything. The shampoo bottles and electric razors made no sense to him. They were all merely objects that were not his colony, and therefore meaningless.

It was towards the end for the ant. He knew this. His eyes were starting to dim. For the first time in his long journey, the little ant started to lose hope. He knew he only had the energy for a short distance. He crawled towards the row of hair product cans. He stumbled and fell every two or three steps. He made his way behind the cans and laid down on his back. How long he spent like this he did not know. There was almost no light left in the world.

The little ant had been unconscious for some time when he woke with a start. There was another ant leaning over him. The little ant thought that he was seeing himself. It was his spirit, the little ant told himself. His spirit spoke to him. It said, “Well done, brother.” The spirit ant touched his mandibles to the little ant’s. The little ant felt the mandibles. This was not a spirit ant, the little ant realized.

He heard other voices. He turned his head slowly with what little strength he had left. There were a dozen or so ants. The little ant breathed a sigh of relief. He leaned his head back. They were talking about a great beast. Many ants were lost. These were among the few survivors.

With what little strength he had, the little ant opened his eyes. There was another ant leaning over him, assessing him, clicking his mandibles in thought. He watched this ant look away at the others and shake his head. This ant too touched his mandibles to the little ant’s.

The brother ant came back; he seemed to be the leader of the survivors. “I brought the grain of rice,” the little ant said to him, “for the colony.” He took a shallow breath with great effort

The brother ant looked at the little ant, confused. “What do you mean?” asked the brother ant.

“The grain of rice,” whispered the little ant. “I brought it … food … for the colony.”

The brother ant laughed. “That is not a grain of rice, brother! That is an egg. And not just any egg, brother. It is a queen egg.”

The little ant was overcome with warm rapture. He asked himself, how had he not known? But then again, how could he have? He had never before seen a queen egg.

While the little ant was thinking to himself and remembering the encounter with the spider and the climb up the cliff face and how he could have lost the queen egg. He silently thanked the almighty for granting him the strength to deliver the queen egg back to the colony.

The brother ant continued, “We lost our queen in the battle with the great beast. Without her, we were all prepared to die soon. Without a reason to live, we had thought of throwing ourselves from the cliff here. You have delivered life and purpose to us, brother. We will rebuild a new colony for the new queen.”

The rest of the ants gathered around the little ant. An ant much larger and stronger than the little ant now carried the queen egg in his mandibles. The rest of the ants clicked their mandibles in  honor of the little ant. “Sleep now, brother. You have done your duty to the colony.” The little ant relaxed his mandibles and leaned his head back and went to sleep.

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The hours before

Remember when it was quiet. When you came over and I was cooking. You were sitting on the couch. I poured you a drink. It was simple and slow. I asked you about your day and you made a joke.

That hour or so, maybe less than that, when it was just you and me. It fills up with anticipation for the night. It fills up with anxiety about the silence. It fills up with things other than peace if you let it.

But now that we’re in bed in the morning, and we try to remember the night, it’s easy to overlook the subtle acceleration. When A came over and started to play his music and the volume got a little louder. Then K came over and we danced and moved a little faster. And then E and J came over and by then the night was really a big boulder tumbling down the hill.

To really savor it, I don’t know if it’s possible without slowing down. But at least to remember how it started so slow, makes the fast rush of the out of control night just that much sweeter.

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Glue

I go to this other world, I’m addicted to it. So that the real journey and true test of my life is making the journey back. The other world is toxic in the most sweet way. It is entropy and chaos. It is also creativity and love. I know it will kill me someday. The length of my lifetime will be determined by how many return journeys I can make.

When I return back to reality, the real reality that I have learned to stop calling “real,” or at least not any more “real” than my beloved other world. But this reality, of names and concepts, is what sustains my physical body. The principal commodity in this reality is a very certain kind of glue that keeps all my molecules together and maintains the cohesion of my sense of self. I huff on this glue, walking in straight lines on the sidewalk, learning and obeying the laws of nature, being careful and avoiding danger, eating and sleeping enough. I huff and huff until I’m strong and together enough to travel. At which point I step off the sidewalk and the earth tips upside down so I fall through gravity into outer space.

Out here, in my beloved other world, which I should stop calling “other” if I have stopped calling reality “real,” a new creative force pulls me in all directions. It is only the glue that keeps me together. I revel in being stretched, and right before my molecules are spread over the entire universe, right before I achieve omnipresence and thus make permanently impossible the return journey to the reality of sidewalks and safety. That is when, with all my strength, I pull myself together and return.

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My father built this house

I was making breakfast in the morning. A long-haired man put his hand harshly on my shoulder. I turned around and grabbed his wrist. I said to him, “My father built this house.”

He said to me, “My Native American ancestors nourished the tree and stone this house is built with.”

I was taken aback, not expecting this. I said, “Well, I guess we’re even then.”

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Master

I focused on my breathing. I became impatient and asked my Master, “Is it time to turn my mind to my problems?”

Master said, “No, focus on your breathing.”

“I am ready,” I said.

“Why do you think so?” Master asked.

I thought to myself. I considered my problems, but I had no solutions. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

“You are not ready. You are impatient,” Master said. “You cannot solve your problems with the same mind you had before, one which could not solve your problems. Focus on your breathing.”

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Play your role

You have to pick a part. Imagine a play. Now imagine a character without lines or stage cues. What would she do? She wouldn’t know what to say or where to stand. And the audience would get upset. They would say, who is this fool on stage? Gone with them! And on with the play! If everyone else is going to play their role, and we’ve agreed to be organized, we must play our roles too.

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All the lives in one city at one time

Imagine all the different lives in just one city. I stand on my balcony at nine o’clock at night and look towards downtown. The dressed-up and cute, young couple having a date night at a nice French restaurant. The crowd at a concert jumping up and down for the headlining act. Another couple, they decided to stay in their apartment and make love. A homeless man inside his tent in a back alley digging for the last crumbs in an empty chip bag. A lonely elderly woman watching television and dreading meeting her friends for tea in the morning. A family finishing up dinner and cleaning the dishes. In the next hour, some people will die, and others will be born. All these different lives, at the same time, all in one city.

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The little ant

The little ant couldn’t remember how he had gotten lost. He was in the middle of an expanse with no sense of direction. The ground under his feet was hard. He had nothing with him other than the grain of rice on his back. He had no thoughts in his head other than delivering the grain of rice to the colony. It was so peculiar, the little ant thought to himself, that he could not remember anything from before. He could not remember the queen, not specifically at least. He could not remember what she looked like, only that he did in fact have a queen. He could not remember his brothers or the tunnels inside the ant hill, only that he did in fact have a home and the colony was waiting for him and depending on him to deliver the grain of rice.

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Mrs. Miller

I was always coming up the elevator when Mrs. Miller was coming down. My day was coming to an end and hers was just beginning. Sometimes when I’d be leaving for work in the morning I’d see her coming back. Just before the sunrise. She’d stay out all night and dance and party with whoever would pay her bar tab. So it was only some mornings that I saw her coming home and I’d smile at her and she’d smile back.

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Ping pong dream

In a dream, I played ping pong against a formidable opponent. I had played against this opponent many times before in practice and we were a good match. This game was for competition in an arena in front of many people.

When I stepped into the arena, I noticed immediately that one thing was different: the table was slanted at a forty-five degree angle. I played from the side of the table that was on higher ground. It was my serve to begin. I lost four of the first five points. Then it was my opponent’s serve. I lost the next two points. I threw up my hands in disgust. I shouted to the crowd. They were all children, sitting cross-legged and watching curiously like they were in school.

I shouted, “Why can I not beat this opponent? Who I have beaten before. Did he know ahead of time that the table would be slanted? And practiced beforehand.”

“No!” all the students said in unison.

“Because he is a more experienced player than me?” I shouted again.

“No!” all the students said in unison again.

“Why then?” I shouted back.

Then from the crowd, appeared an old sage, and he said to me, “It is because you are not a good leader.”

I was confused and silent.

“You must care for the bunny, before you get the bunny,” said the old sage [this is the only part of the dream I cannot remember word-for-word, it was something about a bunny, something that surprised me].

I had a feeling of deja-vu, like I had heard that before.

“What text does that come from?” I asked the children.

They all thought about it. One boy raised his hand and answered, “The Dhammapada.”

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Ego death by travel

You strip away everything external about you—leave the town where you grew up, make new friends other than your classmates and workmates, sweat or freeze in a new climate, see new scenery, grow your hair out, wear different clothes, and speak another language.

All of a sudden, one night in some far-off country you’ll get back from the bars and look yourself in the mirror in your dingy hotel room with a roof that leaks and say, who am I? And after a brief period of panic, you’ll discover that there’s something buried deeper that’s been there all along but you had to sift through all the muck. And what you find there, deep inside, that’s you.

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Body modification

Tattoos, piercings, and eccentric fashion are marks of free will. The most base body modification is none at all. Think of how a man would appear naturally, like an animal, with unkempt hair and long fingernails and naked. There is no choice at all in the natural appearance. Man appears as nature determines.

Next, think of man in society. He looks around him and sees how everyone else looks and for the most part dresses and grooms himself to not look any different, or at least not different enough to attract attention. Businessmen in suits, for example. In this case, man appears as society determines. In both these cases, natural and social, man does not himself necessarily choose how he appears.

It is only in the third case, that man chooses for himself how he will appear, makes his body like a painter’s canvas, and creates himself as art, such that his aesthetic appearance aligns with his metaphysical beliefs.

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Weekends

The workweek became like a fast before each weekend binge. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I went to the gym. Tuesdays and Thursdays I ran. I ate healthy, mostly fruits and vegetables, oats for breakfast, fish for protein, and no red meats.

I meditated in the mornings and said prayers of gratitude at night. I breathed through my nose and slept on my back. In the office, I sat at my desk looking at my computer screen, thinking of the weekend. I wrote notes to myself as I pretended to work.

I didn’t think about Hannah anymore. I considered maybe I had only wanted her out of boredom in the office. Now with my new life, her and everyone else in the office seemed inconsequential. I thought of quitting, of course. But I realized I needed it. I needed the structure and the time to decompress.

The weekends bursted at the seams. We lived until we almost lost control. Monday morning was when I pieced it all together. I could lose myself completely on the weekends, like an astronaut in outer space. As long as I had my tether and oxygen line connecting me back to the space station. I could float off without worry and explore because I knew I could return to the sober, structured and healthy week.

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Determinism

In a hotel in Farmington, Missouri, after swimming in the pool outside and having a breath-holding competition with my brothers, we come inside and see a small statue of a Catholic saint. I recognized it because I’d seen statues like it growing up. I recognized the woolen brown robes with the ropes at the waist and the bald head on top with hair on the sides. Only as I describe it now do I recall that the statue must have been a saint of the Franciscan order. But more than that, I write this because I am continually shocked by how people are inevitably products of their time and place.

First, I think of where I grew up. People are conservative and Catholic mostly because they were born in northeastern Kansas in the late twentieth century. I couldn’t have had this thought early in my life, because I myself was a product of the only time and place I’d ever known. When I traveled, I saw different places and cultures and read their histories to imagine different times. And those places have statues too, but instead of Franciscan monks, they are Buddhas or political leaders or animal idols.

The people I met while traveling were, almost without exception, consistent with the presumed effects of their respective times and places. This makes me wonder: who are the people that resist their time and place? And what are they determined by? These people who look for influence outside of what they are born into. Maybe they are born into the wrong environment, so they rebel against it and travel and explore until they find the right time and place. For the people who cannot access the time and place their heart desires, do they travel and search to no avail and then die feeling lost?

Are there some who exist who do not feel comfortable in any time and place, because it is so human, so physical and base? Are these demigods and prophets, or maybe even real and actual gods, or small slices of actual gods. I know I shouldn’t, but I am inclined to think less of people who are determined by their time and place. I think they are lazy and lack agency in their own lives. I think they float along like a piece of driftwood in the river and never really do anything but get pushed along by the current in whatever way. I think some very successful and famous people have even existed this way. And they were applauded and respected for doing nothing but floating along, just the same as other unsuccessful and poor and wretched people who have been punished and thrown out for the same exact spatiotemporal forces that aided the more fortunate.

The great irony is that, as you might have already assumed from my writing, I consider myself to be one who lives free of determinism, or at least rages against it the best I can, when in reality I am mostly likely determined just like everyone else. Even all my raging for freedom is likely determined. So that all my raging that I find so romantic and noble is no different from the determined lazy bum that never does anything in life and always takes the easy way out and even steals and kills. If he is determined by the same forces, he and I are the same, no matter what I achieve.

No different than a tree will grow tall when planted in good soil and watered, and a plant without will not. But is this any fault of the plant without? That it has not grown tall. And a star shooting in dark space at the edge of the galaxy will not light any planet. While our sun brings life and activity to so many creatures. But is this any fault of the distant shooting star? This starts to raise the question: how are we valuing these beings?

How are we determining that one is successful, right, and good while the other is failed, wrong, and bad. For the stars, for example, I’ve arbitrarily valued them based on the light they give to living beings, but is this an objectively true way to value a star? And for the trees, we value them by how tall they’ve grown, but is this an objectively true way to value a tree? And humans, we value based on wealth and fame, but is this an objectively true way to value humans?

This is another argument for why the study of aesthetics is more interesting to me than the study of ethics, because all value judgments reduce to non-truth claims. So not only are living creatures seemingly not responsible for the their choices and values that result from their determined conditions (except for those godlike humans who seem to have gained control of their own will), but even the values that do result from determined conditions, if we were to judge them and ascribe their good or evil to an agent, we have no standards for what is good or evil.

So this is my argument for art, for aesthetics over ethics. Because life is like a film or a game, where we can experience and appreciate and express gratitude and enjoy, but as far as responsibility and justice and morality—these all arise artificially, mostly via social controls, from our base needs for survival.

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Characters

It’s therapeutic, too. Because I forget so much, and sometimes feel guilty about it. Growing up going to school and studying for exams it was always so important that I remembered what I had learned. It was often the students that could remember the most that did the best on exams. I wanted to be a good student so I would take my study guides everywhere with me, reading them over and over, not paying attention at all to where I was or who I was with. It can become the same way with maintaining your identity. If you are constantly worried about who you are, and making it seem like you are this person, then all the new inputs from your present cannot get in and flow through and affect you.

Like Borges said, “One publishes a book to forget it.” I write my characters to forget them. I used to think so utilitarian about my experiences and worry about how they were adding to I-at-large, the holistic concept I had of myself. I worried when I got so deeply involved in something and “forgot who I was.” Like a Western-colonial-capitalist, I was trying to swell, get bigger, have more. I wanted each book, memory, skill, experience to be an addition to my sum. But my natural capacities for memory were slightly-above-average at best and worsening all the while due to my drug habits. So I was working so hard to add what I would shortly lose anyway as it would simply be forgotten or else displaced by whatever else I would add. The things I remember best are whatever I’m presently experiencing.

Writing my characters allowed me to deposit my memories somewhere outside of myself. I could forget them and not feel guilty about losing them forever. So now I am more comfortable as just a conduit of the present. I put it down on paper and send it wherever it needs to go, which is sometimes the waste basket, but even then I don’t have to carry it with me, weighing me down. I’m lighter and empty for new and full experiences.

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Context

Part of me wants you to just come right out and say it. But then I don’t believe you unless you’ve given me some context. So a story needs themes and characters. Just themes is non-humanist. Just characters is base.

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Chasing after the great book

I am chasing after the great book. I wonder about what the world would be if Homer or Aquinas or Voltaire or Hemingway had not written. And I am arrogant enough to wonder to myself, what if the great book is within me? And who am I to thieve the world of it and not pull it out of myself. Miles I have to go, indeed!

I am still catching up to the greats. I can feel myself understanding more of Nietzsche. Even writing some of his ideas, only to discover that he had already written them before. I read Nietzsche and discover what I have only fumbled with in my own mind, articulated so clearly!

Yet I have one advantage: I have come after these great minds. I have the distinct advantage of being born at such a time that it is possible for me to read them, as well as the greats before them. Whereas they only had the advantage of reading their own predecessors. So if we assume that at least some knowledge is passed along and built upon in human history, then I have just slightly more intellectual wealth to draw from. Thank god it has been recorded! And woe for what has not.

And I cannot skip ahead. There are still things that can only be understood in the present lifetime, things that must be felt and seen and experienced in the real present. So that it is not possible just to read the last great and understand everything. Still I must read everything. So in this way I have a disadvantage, or, a greater challenge rather! In that I have more to read, more greats before me than had Nietzsche, owing to the addition of the few greats after his lifetime and before mine.

Tragic, that it is necessarily an individual endeavor. For even if I do write the great book that I am chasing after. It will only contain a fraction of the truths. The other truths must already be present in the heart of the reader. So that the great book that I hope to write is really only the key to a larger enigma. The key alone is a beautiful work of art. Like looking upon the peak of a tall mountain. But only the actual climb partaken in, only therein does the whole truth reveal itself.

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Ubermensch

What if the ubermensch is she who understands higher truths yet understands that her role in all of existence is lesser? So she has to play the role the best she can, even though she knows the higher truth and that this life is just a spatiotemporal slice of the whole, but still her place is here and now. Like having the mind and soul of a god, but still the body of a human. Could the human form even contain that.

Per usual, Nietzsche precedes me and articulates this better than I can in The Birth of Tragedy:

“Suppose a human being has thus put his ear, as it were, to the heart chamber of the world will and felt the roaring desire for existence pouring from there into all the veins of the world, as a thundering current or as the gentlest brook, dissolving into a mist—how could he fail to break suddenly? How could he endure to perceive the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the “wide space of the world night,” enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual, without inexorably fleeing toward his primordial home, as he hears this shepherd’s dance of metaphysics? But if such a work could nevertheless be perceived as a whole, without denial of individual existence; if such a creation could be created without smashing its creator—whence do we take the solution of such a contradiction?”

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Practical and abstract truths

Practical truths are the truths from this world and abstract truths are the truths from other worlds. Practical truths are popular among the majority for their applicability to our first plane physical world to which most humans are still evolutionarily addicted.

And abstract truths are popular with the minority devout religious, drug addicts, hermits, scholars and philosophers—wise men that rise up and out of the physical plane in this one world where we presently live and up through the mental and spiritual planes to discover the other worlds. In these other worlds, abstract truths are the fundamental principles of life.

These wise men, who have traveled to other worlds in their minds and souls, they must first have experienced something in the physical world to allow them to rise up. They may have encountered mind-altering drugs or many years of formal education or devout religious meditation—anything that would have given them access to the second mental plane and the third spiritual plane and these “other worlds.”

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The Chameleon

The Chameleon was born in India. His father was a tradesman and his mother was a servant. He had one brother who was a troubled child and went to jail at age fourteen for murder. The Chameleon became a Buddhist monk. He achieved nirvana at age sixteen, on the same day that his younger brother committed murder. Some people in the village said that the soul of his brother’s victim inhabited his body after he reached nirvana. It is possible that many souls entered the Chameleon’s body that day.

It was expected that when the Chameleon came down from the mountains, his nirvana would mark a point of departure from the world. This has always been the case for Enlightened ones before. For the Chameleon, however, his nirvana marked a point of deeper entry into the world. He became curious about all the lives ever lived. He spoke with the old wise men about it. They were deeply unsettled.

In a discussion with one old wise man in particular, the old sage said that he believed the Chameleon had not completed the nirvana, but had stopped just before, right when he experienced the potential power of the Enlightened one, and then stopped himself just short of the permanent break with his worldly senses. The Chameleon was power-hungry—the old sage did not say this, but he believed it and kept it quietly to himself.

The Chameleon decided he would set out to travel the world, unknown to all those around him. He would take on different disguises, some said he even changed his physical appearance. And he changed his mannerisms and emotions and mind in order to become as many people as he possibly could, assuming their identities completely.

The center point of the wheel where the spokes of all other identities connect. At one point on the outer rim, the Chameleon only knew himself. He could see the points to his left and right, but he could not understand them. And the points on the other side of the wheel, he could not even see. When he experienced nirvana, he entered into the center of the wheel, from here he could become anyone, moving freely from the center to points on the outer rim, where the One true identity experiences time and space in different individuated bodily forms in the physical world.

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Gang gang gang

A group of pseudo-intellectual and affluent types who go gallivanting around without any sort of a moral compass.

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People

I was bored of normal people. People who knew they weren’t spectacular. I wanted to achieve something, anything, just so I could break through to the group of people who had done something and were proud of it and knew who they were and were happy to be among people like themselves.

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Destination: Spain

I left San Francisco when I was doing just fine in the ways of money and moving up in the world and all the other things you would expect of a working young yuppie in America. But it was time that I make some progress of my own in the ways that my books told me were classically important, rather than just what was going on at the time and what everyone else was doing. So I set out for Spain.

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Desire

There are two types of qualities in others that I desire: ones which I want for myself, and ones which I only admire. I befriend those who have the former, and copy their traits. I court those who have the latter, and love them apart from myself.

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Chocolates

I sat on the couch and held my drink with one hand and sketched with the other. She laid on the bed with her head hanging over the side and her hair almost touching the floor. The shades were open but the sun had almost entirely gone down behind the downtown skyline. Music played. It was barely lighted in the room. We were high from the chocolates we ate an hour before.

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Honeymooner

I live a life of novelty. I cannot rest. Anything good I have is soon gone, by my own doing. I am a honeymooner. I eventually push away what doesn’t have the quality I desire most of all: being for the first time.

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Lover

With a lover, I go farther in walks of life I would not tread alone: up at night beyond exhaustion; out in the city dancing styles I don’t know; in conversation for longer than I spend thinking to myself; and, of course, deeper in love—with someone other than myself.

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Sonoma

On a wooded deck by the pool, I hold a glass of chilled rosé and Uri rolls a spliff. I stand up and take my glass to walk around the pool and step off the deck down onto the grass that has overgrown the vineyard.

The grapes were infected by a germ the past year, but it is the middle of March in Sonoma and the other vineyards too are barren at this time of year, leaving behind short tree trunks with their top branches sawed off at the bases where they curl around the wires and would otherwise grow upward and bear grapes, but instead are cut short and look like gnarled menorahs—treacherous, if not for the beauty that surrounded the off-season trees on all sides. Nothing but shades of green on all sides, freckled with all colors of various flowers. The rows of another vineyard drawn into the hillside across the gravel road by which we had arrived.

My eyes taking in all this, with my fingers holding onto the same wires which the grape tree fingers would hold in season and had already held in seasons before. I thought to myself, ah, what a life of a grape tree in Sonoma.

And I kept holding onto the wire and looking upon the hillside across the road until some time had passed and I feared my toes might take root and my hairs grow into vines along the wires so I turned to step back onto the deck and resume conversation with Uri.

He had finished with the spliff. He handed it to me already burning. I pressed it in between my lips and inhaled deeply, looking back at where I stood in the vineyard. I held the smoke in my chest and wanted to choke; I was not usually keen to add tobacco into my joints, precisely to avoid the burn that I now felt in my lungs. But Uri preferred them this way and I liked Uri more than I didn’t like tobacco. I pursed my lips around the spliff and inhaled once more, then handed it back to Uri and exhaled deeply into the day and the hillside and closing my eyes to memorize it.

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Saturday morning

We lay in bed on a Saturday morning in San Francisco. Heat creeps through the cracks in the doors and windows as summer has just barely made itself known, still behind the mask of a March spring that stares back the foggy and rainy winter months.

Laying side by side, our arms barely touching, and looking out of our own eyes. Our bellies rise and fall at a perfectly mismatched rhythm—hers, at its fullest when mine is exhaled, and mine inhaled when hers has released.

These mornings, I have time to wonder. And not only time, but courage, laying next to her. My thoughts are of adventures and possibilities, all dressed in happiness and ecstasy. This, freed from the anxieties of corners and code and other certainties in a weekday world. I wonder about where we will go today, what we will achieve. With all the means in our pockets and handfuls of ends to choose from.

I wonder if we might take the ferry across the bay to Sausalito. Or drive across the bridge and climb Mount Tam. Or even find a corner of a coffee shop to pour our adventures and possibilities onto paper and canvas—thus to have literature and painting as mediums of our ecstasy, just the same as we would have played them out in reality.

I wonder, as she reads a book of poetry that she has picked off the bookshelf at the foot of my bed. I smile to myself, so deeply satisfied to be with someone who will pick up a book to read as I write. I should not form my beloved in the shape of my own desires but sometimes I cannot help it.

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Lifetime

I tell the artist she has a time limit to write me a poem.

She says, “I’m an artist. I don’t work on a time limit.”

I say, “You have a lifetime. You’re always working on a time limit.”

Then she looked as if she would cry. But I could see her realize she didn’t have time. She dried her eyes and started to write furiously.

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Flashing lights

In the crowd, I face the stage. She faces me, with her eyes closed. She opens her eyes. 

I ask, “What are you looking at?”

She says, “Just you.”

I ask, “What do I look like?”

She says, “Flashing lights.”

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She

She has the strength to weaken me, and the weakness to strengthen.

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Antelope Island

On Antelope Island, we park the car on the side of the road, get out, and run the plains like natives.

An island of plains, surrounded on all sides by water, and the water, surrounded by mountains. In the center of the island, the plains fold up into the hills, and the hills into snow-capped peaks.

At the foot of the peaks begins a much more vertical climb. Slipping on piles of broken and jagged black rocks, some of which get displaced and tumble down, and enlist some others in their fall.

At some parts, we must really hug tight to the mountain face, and dig our toes into the dirt and snow, and balance with our hands.

At the jagged top, we set into meditation to claim the peace we came for. I am first to settle in, laying on my back and starting to breathe. Brother stays standing for a little while longer to take in the glassy water and snowy mountains around us. Then, he too, lays down to settle in.

On our own in the beginning. I meditate on the scenery, opening my eyes to see the blue and cool landscape, then closing them to remember it.

Brother meditates on something else, until I start to make my breathing louder and vibrate in my deeper throat. Brother joins. We are not exactly in tandem; his breaths are longer than mine. We add to the volume, especially when our vibrations overlap.

We grow louder and louder and start to sings in a low and deep mountain tone. Brother instructs me to bring the white energy down through myself and into the earth. When we open our eyes, it has begun to snow.

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Squaa

Foreign to the rest of the world, was our whole manner of living—reading, writing, consuming, creating, thinking, talking, training, exercising, sitting in meditation, learning new skills, cooking meals, learning new languages.

We all were fierce competitive scholars and athletes for no reason other than we enjoyed it and it made our lives better and reached our relationships to higher levels. We woke up every morning going after all of it in a different way, without being confined to the downtrodden channels.

We had each already before pursued this manner of living alone. The relationships, however, are essential. You can not maximize a man’s potential without involving his social persuasion.

A result of our having higher desires, but also higher abilities to satisfy them. A positive feedback loop, where our desires motivate forming new abilities, which in turn allow us to satisfy higher desires, and so on.

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Artist

I really do believe if I were just slightly more attractive to the world, I wouldn’t be so interested in art and counter-culture. At some point I realized that even though I was good at their game, I was never going to be the best. Because I wasn’t born with perfectly straight teeth to just the right family. So at some point I said forget it, and started to build my own worlds.

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American hero

I’m an American; I speak English. Yes, I want to learn other languages and move to Europe, but I am who I am and need to start owning it. Instead of seeing all the heroes of other categories and wanting to be in that category for the sake of the hero, I need to own my own category and take the spot of an original hero.

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Characters

I have to go out and meet my characters before I can write them, or I will write them all from within myself.

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My name is

My name is. I walk through this field. It is dusk, and I will walk until I can’t, touching cat tails with my palms and then lay down to sleep.

It’s been three years since I left. I barely remember why anymore. But so much has happened since then that it doesn’t really matter.

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Games

I play games with my mind. Young and western, a student of philosophy in particular, my physical self is pushed forward by my mental. Running on the treadmill, I chase after a goal: a certain distance in a certain time. Until I realize I can certainly achieve it; in fact, I am almost there, and my body is not tired yet.

So I reset the goal, and reset my mind to push my body to chase after it. My body knows no better; it forgets completely the former goal, though admittedly more tired than the start, it chases after the new goal with the same ardor as the original. But now my mind has caught on to what may be an infinite regression of goals, so O focus it on a drishti: a paint speck on the wall, and just watch it and listen to my breath, and avoid looking at the numbers for distance and time on the treadmill.

For my whole young life, I asked why. I would stop in my tracks and ask why and not keep on going until I was satisfied with the answer. So you can see why it was a problem when at some point in college I asked my philosophy professor why and he told me for the first time that there may not be a why and that was the first answer that stopped me in my tracks instead of starting me going again.

And ever since then I’ve been playing these mind games, inventing up answers and getting along that way until my mind figures out the trick and wants to ask why. Only I find fewer and fewer who can provide an answer of any decency. Most of the time they have not asked enough why’s themselves. And so I am stuck answering my own why’s but most of the time I don’t have any reasonable answer so I just invent up a new game to get me along for a while.

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Doer

My friend who has done so much says to me, “You have not seen enough.”

Before I can respond, our ascetic friend interjects to ask the doer, “Have you considered there are things which you may have overlooked?”

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Relationship

I, for maybe the first time, am experiencing what it is for a relationship to actually develop, as opposed to up and leaving the whole route at any sharp turn and picking up again on a new road with a new person.

I am seeing and feeling what it is for a relationship to have a life of its own and grow to become even a third separate entity from her and I, like a spirit or soul with its own personality and tastes and talents—we are more than ourselves when we are together, each of us growing to accommodate and nurture not only our selves, but also each other, as well as the third newborn relationship itself.

At junctures and bumpy patches, I stay in it and watch it swell as emotion is added and carefully point all this energy in a loving and positive direction that is a circle that flows between us, from my soul, through the third, to her and back, through the third again, to me. This, as opposed to up and moving on at the sign of first swelling; rather than maturity and molding and feeding what we have, instead breaking off, myself alone, to chase after novelty and a new sensation. But this is different.

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Vacillate

Schopenhauer says we vacillate between distress and boredom. I think of this when deciding whether to move to Monterrey Bay and live a quite life by the ocean, hiking occasionally and thinking and reading, but also risking boredom and lack of inspiration. Or, to stay in San Francisco among so many people and new ideas and work and energy, but risking distress and the occasional anxiety. Of course, it would seem there is a balance between the two, which is why we drive back and forth on the pacific coast highway.

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Smoke

El and I smoke in the hotel bathroom. We dash ash on the sill and blow smoke out the open window and laugh.

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Lines

She said she likes to be drunk and let the lines flow. Watching the way she danced and thinking about her past, she had all the qualities of a beautiful woman with a fun and free spirit and I wondered about the men that had wanted her before me.

Laying in bed that night she says she has always liked men like me who had lines that she could play within. For a while, she said, she thought she didn’t need any lines at all, but then realized with complete freedom and no boundaries she might accidentally cut her arms and let all the blood flow out or run into traffic whether it was moving or not or fall off a cliff no matter if it was tall enough to die from the fall.

Alone, she had to worry about these things. With a lined man, he held out his arms for her to lean against and bounce between, but never having to worry much about boundaries so that she was free just to flow and dance about.

In the same way, I, the lined man, am free to smile and laugh when I’m with her. Her falling in love in high culture, and I falling in love back, in need of a little levity and fairytale to inspire my philosophy and science.

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Italy

To get into a situation like in Southern Italy on an eternally sunny day so that you could just read and write and play and listen to music in the most lazy yet intellectual mood.

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Andy

I know a guy Andy who really doesn’t care. Even on days when he’s really looking swell, I tell him, but he doesn’t care enough to repeat the look. Even if the whole world told him, the next day he’d wear the same clothes he would have worn anyway.

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Oliver

Blake was surprised by Oliver’s response.

“Don’t you want to have friends?” Blake asked.

“Unless you are a young beautiful woman,” Oliver started coldly, “I really want nothing to do with you; unless you are a young handsome man also after women, then I would enjoy to learn your skills and be your comrade in the chase.”

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Her

And once I see her it all comes back. I want to impress her, tell her, show her. We sit down. I smile. The novelty is my favorite part; that again, all within the possibility of the next few hours, I can meet a whole new soul. I wonder: what does she do, what does she love, what does she cry about, how does she look naked, will she come home with me. And I have to start delicately, asking simple questions first and smiling.

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Blake and Ish

Ish was always singing, most of the time with her headphones in her ears, singing along to whatever music she was listening to. For most people this is impossible because they need to hear their own voice to regulate their own pitch.

But Ish explained it to me once—like a painter who only needs to look at the blank canvas once and the palette of colors in his hand once, and then can close his eyes and paint the whole painting, his hand so trained in muscle memory and exactitude moving back and forth between palette and canvas, so that at the end he opens his eyes for only the second time and sees the whole masterpiece—so too with Ish and her singing with her headphones in her ears.

She didn’t need to hear her own voice; she only needed to hear the pitch and rhythm, and then she could keep up recreating it only using her feelings of the vibrations inside her head and chest. And the whole time looking like a dancer, swaying back and forth so that her long black dreads were reaching down to her waist and swinging slowly side to side.

When they first met, Blake couldn’t stand Ish’s singing. When Em introduced Ish to the group, they sat in the coffee shop and Blake, as usual, set his current volumes of interest on the table and read a few pages and then picked up his pen to write and then read some more and picked up his pen again, and he usually went on like this all morning until they left the coffee shop for lunch.

But with Ish there on this particular day when she started to sing Blake looked up from his work and just stared at her for some time with his brow furrowed but Ish couldn’t notice because she had her eyes closed with her headphones in her ears and was just swinging her long black braided hair side to side.

Blake looked back down to his work and tried to keep on reading and writing but he couldn’t and you could tell because he pushed his chair back from the desk and stood up and walked over to where Ish was standing, swaying and signing.

He tapped her on the arm and said directly, “Could you please stop?”

Ish looked at Em, her being the one that had invited Ish along. Em smiled nodded back in Ish’s direction as if giving her the approval for whatever Ish would say or do anyway.

Ish looked back at Blake and took one earphone out of her left ear and said innocently, “Stop what?” And she swayed a little bit as she said it so that her hair swung from one side of her waist to the other.

“Stop singing please. I can’t concentrate on my work with you singing like that.”

“Oh, my apologies, yes of course I can stop. I didn’t know it was distracting you.”

Blake showed her a smile and turned to go back to his desk but before he could turn all the way around Ish said, “But only if you stop scratching with your pen and turning those pages. It throws off my rhythm.”

Blake was taken aback. Em was smiling noticeably in the corner, pretending to listen to what Oliver was saying to her but really she was just watching Blake and Ish.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t stop reading and writing.”

“Well, why not?” Ish asked resuming her innocent tone.

“Because that’s what I do; I read and write,” Blake responded defiantly.

“Of course. Then I’m sure you can understand that singing is what I do,” Ish said this a little more directly and stern without so much innocence.

Blake was silent and just looked at her, not just frustrated as before; still frustrated, but now with respect. He turned and went back to his desk and picked up his pen. Ish put her earphone back in her left ear and kept on singing. Em watched as Blake’s pen paused for a second as Ish started singing again, but then Blake went on writing and Ish went on singing, and they both went on for the rest of the morning. And right before they left for lunch Em could have sworn she saw Blake’s foot tapping along to Ish’s singing.

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Blueberry

She hands me a small chocolate-covered blueberry. I eat it. It tastes more like my Grandma’s sofa than a blueberry. I like the taste though. I walk and wonder about these artists. How they always seemed to have a group of friends around them that influenced their work. How sometimes, a work I look at and say anybody could have created this, and other times I look at a work and say only this one individual in all of human history could have created this.

She is extremely perceptive. We each are timid about saying that a work is too minimal or, god forbid, that it is not “good.” For example, there is one work of art that was just blank—three canvases on the wall, all of them just blank. She says maybe this is just an exhibit that hasn’t been set up yet, or the artist hasn’t been here to create it yet. But then we read the little placard on the wall and it says something like “blank painting” for the title. It explains the artist wanted to show a work of art that displayed all the “opportunity” of blankness.

The exhibit is closing so we go down the elevator and before leaving find one last work of art—a giant rusted steel maze with walls at least fifty feet tall and slanted sideways. We start to walk through and soon don’t know where in the maze we are, but continue to walk along the same path assuming it must lead to the end. I feel safe with two walls on either side of me and no option other than the path in front of me and her in the path in front of me so I’m walking after her. Finally we emerge from the steel maze and I ask her, “Are you hungry?”

We walk, arm in arm, it’s a little cold outside. We walk into the restaurant. We ask the hostess for a table for two. The hostess tells us the wait will be 15 minutes. She says she’s going to use the bathroom. I sit down in a chair to wait for her. I wait for a few minutes and really start to feel the blueberry then.

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Leader

It is very difficult for any leader to be anti-structure, having been deemed a leader by said structure.

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Crooked Jaw

Most of the time I am changing. This way, in a professional setting, wearing a suit, shaking hands, and smiling. That way, writing on Saturday morning, frowning, one hand of fingers in my hair, forehead in my palm, and the other hand holding a cup of coffee, haggard, bags under my eyes, trying to get it out of my mind and onto the page. This way, for my girlfriend. That way, for my mother.

Except for my crooked jaw, which stays the same always. Because the doctor told me they’d have to basically saw off my teeth from the whole top half of my face, sawing right under my nose straight back to my ears, and then move my whole jaw two inches forward and drill it back into my face with screws that will be permanent and set off the metal detectors at the airport. And so I said, no that’s okay. My crooked jaw can stay the same.

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Gun

It was dark in the alley, he had the gun low pointed at my chest. He wasn’t even holding it right, kind of side ways and scared. I put both hands over his, holding the gun and raised the barrel and pressed it to my forehead.

Click.

Click. Click. Click.

He pulled the trigger once, to my surprise. I didn’t think he would. Then he pulled it three more times. Thank god I pressed the safety button when I put my hands on his.

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Hike

How many deaths have been caused by a surreal misunderstanding of reality? The mountains pinch away into one point as I hallucinate. 

These woods give me energy to write. I feel my mind overwhelmed, begin to worry, then redirect my thoughts to writing. As my friends capture the moments in photos, I capture them in words. 

The energy of nature fills me and I empty it back out. It fills me to the brim and I spill over. I give the energy back. After all, I am a vessel. 

Let myself teem with it. My body is weak for the strength of my soul. 

The mountains clearing up. Nah, just rolling in a new face. Like the mountains change cloud cover, I change my guise.

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Orthodoxy

You can create your own orthodoxy. Look and say these are the facts of the thing and from such one-time facts follow these all-time principles. Only a half-man is forced to follow the orthodoxy of tradition; he has not spent enough time paying attention himself. If he had, he would have realized that all the facts are contained in one moment of space and time, one consciousness—His own.

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Old man

On the way home,
I walk on the sidewalk
behind an old man
and go at his pace
to see what it'll be like.
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Sculptor

He said it was necessary that he became like them before he could sculpt the world. A sculptor can only create the object with a great amount of personal skill and time alone. But the object always has a subject. And he cannot possibly know what it looks like without subjecting himself to the subject which he must remember when creating the object alone.

He gets into it and soaks it up, then goes away to render it in his art form. Before he must come back again to get more. He must be alone and away from it all to create, but only after being deeply with and part of everything.

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Solitude

Only in solitude can one encounter the clarity of oneself, and it is this richness which one has to offer the community.

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Alone

Whenever I get away from it all and spend time alone and just be quiet and content, I feel like a little kid gotten into something I should not’ve. Even alone, I feel like they can see it in my eyes and smell it on my breath when I return.

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Someone else

I wonder about what keeps me from waking up tomorrow and becoming someone completely different: moving to the other side of the world and changing my name.

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Loner

The key to being alone is to be like a homebody; just as a homebody prefers their own abode to anywhere else in the world, so too does a loner prefer his own body and mind to most others most the time.

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Leper

Any man alone, even a socialite, looks like a leper, without a partner, to invoke his social qualities.

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The Artist

Her artistic life, she can only live one day a week; and spends the other six days getting ready for it.

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Cut

A couple of years ago I made an incision but couldn’t cut all the way through and so left just a perforated line; today, I cut all the way through.

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Anxiety

I drink coffee in the morning and write poetry and get so worked up and anxious and have a panic attack and think of so much at once that I’m thinking of nothing at all just feeling a great worry and so think to myself about my artist friend who after a day of creating has real men in her real bed and so think to myself: I just need to fisticuff tonight and I’ll feel better.

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Her

There once was only I and everything else. Now there is only me and Her; she is everything else.

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Curious child

Just like my child body, my child mind used to run all over as fast as it could in and out of smaller spaces and up and down big spaces; now my older mind, like my older body, conserves its energy—sitting on the shore with binoculars watching ships, waiting for one with treasure and worth the swim before I neatly undress and efficiently swim out. Only some ships keep their treasure beneath the deck, and those are the ships I boarded when I was young. Creativity is surreal. When I was younger, I created, because nothing was too surreal to inhibit my chasing after it. Now, I conserve my energy and err toward real pursuits.

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Free train

Are you really free? Do you remember boarding this train? Did you choose it?

Does it not bother you a little that your political views align exactly with where you come from? And that your natural abilities are from your parents?

Does it not make you a little dubious as to who invented you? Don’t you want to invent yourself? Or are you fine to merely board the train and watch the pretty views out the window?

For me, I want to build the train, the track, and the whole planet it’s tracked on.

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Needing nothing

I wake up with my best friend and make breakfast. We party all day in the forest. In the morning it is clear and sunny and at night it is dark and foggy. We eat. We are tired. On our way home, I think I am needing nothing. When my best friend leaves I set on the edge of my bed and wonder what to do. I am tired but not sleepy. I look at some things. I read a little. I live a whole lifetime in a day. Accidentally, I fall asleep. I wake new and with refreshed needs. I get out of bed curious about my new life and the change of scenery.

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The same sureness

For a while when I was young in the time between after I gained my intellect and before now, I was depressed. Because I learned enough to believe that truth was important. But began to doubt the truths I had from before.

See, before I was just a physical young boy and went with my instincts. As I learned, sometimes a thought overwhelmed my instinct. The only trouble was that there were so many thoughts, all of which did not agree with each other. At least my instincts were consistent.

So before I learned, I was happy. And after, I was troubled. But now, I have found consistency in some thoughts, like love and balance, and I am happy again. So that now I feel the same sureness of my boyhood.

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Characters

I spent time avoiding my art and living other lives; but I do not regret it because I got to know my characters.

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Chameleon

I am obsessed with living other people’s lives, not playing pretend and dressing up, but actually taking on their abilities and emotions.

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Built for war

There were not any good wars for me to go off and join, the greatest problem I’ve ever had is that everything’s been solved already.

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Run

He ran all over the city to find it, then couldn’t run fast enough home once he had gotten it. The kind of thing he had been running after all over the world for some time. In his head he couldn’t quite tell if it was the right one, but he wouldn’t know for sure until he got it down on paper.

He was running with Peter and he said to him, “Pete, I need you to remember a sentence.”

“O-kay.” Peter said with a breath in between.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Amid uncertainty … “

Pete repeated it back to him.

“That’s right.”

“I like it.”

Max liked it too. It sounded good out loud.

“Amid uncertainty, rather than say I am nothing, I would like to say that I am everything. but perhaps that is just the God in me.”

Max ran until he couldn’t, and then he ran more. He had to get back to his desk to write down that sentence. He wasn’t sure if it was quite right. But then again he wasn’t even sure if it was the sort of thing that could be right, or if it even was the type of thing that could be said. Or, if it was the type of thing that someone just holds within them, that drives them forward. It could fill up the world, refusing ephemeral words, but embracing with all joy the cycle of life that never ends.

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Pronouns

Don’t be distant from my “I.” It is only the slice of god closest to my own eyes and ears.

I, you and the other pronouns are just parts of a whole that exist in a place where the word “part” doesn’t make any sense.

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Cog

I met this guy named Tommy. He said, “Let me guess, you’re from the midwest.” And later in the conversation he said, “Also, are you in sales?” This made me quite smug. It lets me know I’m playing my role well.

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Poem titles

I thought I’d remove the titles of each poem before I published this, but when I did the poems weren’t the same, especially the ones that are only one sentence. Which made me think there is something important about a title, like when you decide to read a book you make a judgment about its contents based in large part on its title, along with some other content on the front and back covers. You have an expectation about what the book will contain like a sign above a doorway that says “welcome home” or “please take off your shoes.” And so I decided to leave the titles because it makes for a dynamic micro-experience of each poem, splitting the reader into two of herself, one who reads the title and sets an expectation in her mind and the other who reads the poem and wrestles with her former self if it is not what she expected or feels smug consonance with her former self. And so I decided to leave the titles.

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Second derivative experience

Sometimes it seems like I’m not paying attention, but this is because in addition to experiencing I am also focused on being conscious—experiencing the experience.

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Mirror mistake

In the gym today my vision panned in the mirror from one dude’s reflection to another dude’s, and I said to myself that first dude looks lazy and the second dude looks like a douche.

Only the second dude was myself and I didn’t recognize myself until after I’d judged myself.

And the surprise at having judged myself made me think: in a more metaphorical sense, I am also that first dude I judged.

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I am tree

My legs are roots and my toes are its nodes; my arms are branches and my hands are leaves. The tree draws energy through its roots from the water and nutrients in the soil and through its leaves from the sun in the sky. The tree takes in this energy to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen and give us humans life. I want to be like a tree. Open to the energies that flow through me from below and above, in order to cycle this energy and produce good for the world.

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Others

To write characters other than yourself you must get out there and meet them, unless you write a whole world of you—this is a good strategy for your personal journal, but not for a book that will be published.

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Born for war

I was born for war, not peace; for the higher values of bravery and honor, not smiles and niceties.

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Tabula rasa

He was a blank state, only ever what was flowing through him at the time. He didn’t really have much time to think about past and future as he was always so filled up with the present. He was so curious that the greatest good for him was just to experience. Just to live.

A mirror that remembered. He wasn’t so much himself as he was a mirror that remembered. It’s just that he would rather experience someone else, and so he built himself up to attract others; he was handsome because he liked to see beauty, and smart because he liked to hear intelligence.

But when it came time to decide what to show back to them, he was only ever a chameleon, or a mirror that talked like a parrot.

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Murderess

She took her lips off mine and pressed me down beneath the surface of the water. I opened my eyes and could still see her muddled figure. Even her washed form was beautiful, still conveyed to me my memories of her. I laid there, holding my breath, peaceful as long as I was still seeing her above the water. I thought she would soon let me up to kiss her again, but she held me pressed there, and I smiled then, been happy to die by her hands looking at her face. I didn’t resist, and opened my mouth to let the water in—then I woke.

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Portfolio of selves

I am, at any one time, “acting” as one of my characters. I am always “the Writer,” the prime mover of my portfolio of selves, the initial cause of behavioral effects. All that remains is whether I myself am “the Writer.” Or if you and I share the same writer; and if, after all, God is our writer. In case She is, we might question our free will, but that is by the by.

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The Chameleon

Now the Writer considers if one student was the whole, a studier of everything; across time, a renaissance man, with all these studies within him, but at once more like a chameleon, able to blend in with any field. And would this chameleon not grow large as a dragon, swelling with all of his environment, or does he merely contain the facade of each identity within him, or does he actually become the green frog, the yellow canary, the blue bluebird, or is he always merely the chameleon, not an actual shape-shifter, but only a master of disguise changing his mask?

The chameleon who changes his color with his surroundings, what color is the chameleon if there were no colors, would the chameleon cease to exist? Or would the chameleon take on the color of nothingness? Or would the Chameleon remember his past colors and put one on despite it serving no purpose to blend into a background of nothingness. How pathetic is my attempt at resisting conditioning, if even my resistance itself is a product of conditioning?

Is the Writer the Chameleon, with only guises. Or is he God, with all of it within him?

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Masochism

The philosopher, having arrived at a nihilist amorality, thought to do nothing. He lost his taste and thus his hunger. He discovered that freedom is not what he desired. True freedom came from bondage. That is when he realized masochism. It is not so much a love for pain, as love was the farthest thing from his present position. And even pleasure to him was also nonsense. But so absurd the world had become that he only wanted to feel, and even for all his thorough scrubbing, his need to survive still barely remained alive, and awakened when he pressed the knife to his palm, and felt a sting that was neither good or bad, and felt the witness come forth from the sting.

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Scrubbed clean

As I traveled and learned and empathized with others completely different from he who was myself, I felt my identity breaking out of the bourgeois and capitalist America in which I was raised. Thinking of all the possibilities of historical worlds and classical ideas and alternative lives other than a high-paying occupation and a happy family.

All the antecedents had been slowly wiggled loose by an amorality and released from my identity, and now there was nothing left.

Finally, I have reached its end, broken it open and everything has rushed out. There is no more. I am scrubbed clean. I am released from myself.

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Time

I make noises. I live so I write. Each day is a song.  It’s tempo and pitch, it can be slowed down and sped up, harmonized or made dissonant. One note, many unison intervals, is not music. Or is it? Is not diversity necessary for music, but too much diversity is too dissonant.

I wake now with the morning birds, only this is a long morning and I have hours to go before I wake, and then I will have miles to go before I sleep, only to again have hours before wake. I do believe I can slow down time. These last few weeks have been very slow. Like if you watch the clock it ticks drudgingly, knowing it is being scrutinized and cannot cut corners.

I watch these days and I feel that I live whole lifetimes before I sleep, and when I watch my breath before I close my eyes, I wonder if I might not be so sad that they not open again, if not for all the joy and wonder I feel when they do, as I am provided with a whole new world and a fresh set of rules to set out to play again, and I am once more an awe and energy child in the morning, a hungry young man before lunch, a man in long and committed love in the afternoon, and elderly in the night, breathing slow, content anytime now to close my eyes and contribute my energy back to the dark, so that it may brighten the light for those who remain behind.

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Writer and artist

The writer and the artist lay together.

She asks him, “What is it like when you create?”

“It is like this.” He kisses her shoulder.

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The artist

The artist tells me that she has to travel to another world anytime she creates, and it makes her sick, like home sickness; when she travels to that other world of genuine creation, she misses the world of custom and past history of proven correlation in which we are accustomed to living. So quickly she rings up a man to have in her bed to feel his real body, or meets her real friends to have real conversation about real things, or to grab handfuls of the real grass and smell the real trees—letting her real body experience the real world that someone else created, vacationing from playing god herself. But this is only the halfway solution for an artist, she tells me.

The greatest pleasure is the combination of the two worlds, instead of fleeing her created world to return to the real world, the inhabitants of the real world come to her created world to live in it for a while and it becomes real for them. Then she transcends from a halfway human to a full god, a world creator. And she delights in her own reality substantiated by those who come to live in it. But of course she cannot live in her own world; she prefers to live in His just as much as they prefer to live in Hers. But she must still create, because she is an artist and could not do anything else.

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Eclectic

They don’t understand the artistic amorality of an eclectic, I’m not inconsistent or haphazard but aware of the lack of reasons to choose and unwilling to feign an identity that only comes from conditioning. They traded their free will for an identity, even if the only free will to maintain was a certain randomness.

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Critic

Is the critic made successful by his understanding of the tastes of the masses? Why then is he not a successful creator?

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Weather

I want a season: anything other than the one I currently have. When it is hot, I want cold. When it is dry, I want rain. Even non-weather would make me want for the extremes. I want an oscillation on my watch. I want to control the weather.

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Sound writer

I am a writer because I am an ideator, and English is my primary language for communicating ideas, as opposed to Spanish or French, or even math or music. English words are how I primarily map my experiences and thoughts; if I mapped in a different language, I would record in a different language.

Why do the sounds of our language not match the sounds of the things which they describe? Because surely not all things make sounds? Not even are all things objects in the physical sense. What sound does ‘science’ make?

Do we use words to describe music because they are our closest communicable comparison, or because music is the fundamental of language?

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History

As a post-industrial American, I thought of history as increasing linearly, until the exponential bend in the graph at 1750. Wealth, technology, investment, consumption—marketable values were the only y-value my bourgeois working mind perceived. I realized history was cyclical when I realized the y-axis is not static. I read Socrates and listened to classical Waltz and asked myself: have we progressed? Or just pursued contemporary brilliance? Expanding contemporary brilliance of the time. Though any one modern man struggles to remember to reach the heights of a Renaissance man. He is enamored with what modern fashions applaud.

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A classic identity

Timeless and spaceless, not shaped passively by the physical skin tone, natural talents, and brain size, nor the surrounding parents, religion and culture, but rather intentionally by all of it at once.

In one time, an Easterner and Westerner, but also both over past times, and even future times. As is most truly human, with access to the experience of all who have ever lived and all who will, and even those who will not but could have.

One achieves this inwardly by openness, contemplation and understanding of potentialities; but of course one self is limited. The wider human experience comes through others, especially via empathy.

A power to understand perspectives not rendered to the sensory body and mind in the present time and place. Investing deeply in present relationships, also traveling to meet different people, and reading to meet different characters, and using these to imagine characters who don’t exist, and maybe even create them for others to empathize with and thus continue to expand humanity.

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Our Ford

Ford as our second god, father of economies of scale, he who invented such that we no longer need to work to live. Our first God gave us our biological life. Our Ford gave us our human lives.

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Washed

The old ascetic floats for the first time: “I have washed my vessel clean. Only the present world moves in and out of me. I am only ever at once: memory meeting present experience. My memories too washed clean, reft of their morals and baptized in their original nature as past presents.”

Time remains a human crutch to wobble on in order. Like Hume says of cause and effect and the creation of custom, so too is a present utterly nonsensical without past or future, having come from nothing and going thereafter to nothing.

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The Loop

And my connection to the world returns. Bradford says we draw energy up through our feet. A joy from connection: tethered and latched onto nature and others. To feel the flow of give and receive.

Rand’s isolationist selfishness creates a circular loop entirely within myself.

That loop is a very healthy thing if some parts of it are in you and some are out: love, knowledge, strength, energy all flow into you and back out to the universe. In the healthiest relationships, whatever is passed along is improved by each node on the loop so that with each complete circle the energy is improved and improved.

Closed within myself, if one node trends in a bad direction, and then the next node, and all of a sudden it is hard for any one node to return the loop to a higher level.

Outside of me, however, are many strong nodes to replenish myself, that allow me to catch my breath to improve my own nodes and contribute again to the improving loop between myself, others and nature.

Just now, music and a smile outside the elevator—two higher outsides nodes, and all of a sudden my desire to write returns so that I might contribute positively again to the loop.

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Ink

His name was Ink. He took a job thinking he could melt into the mold. At least until his other energies subsided. Two years later, he felt them still. Curious, he stood on his windowsill and leapt to reverse trapeze a telephone line. The world chewed up the mold and welcomed back his energies.

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