Here and Now

I should really open the window and air out all this cigarette and weed smoke. But this a/c is just barely combating the setting sunshine pouring through these dirty blindless windows. The big box fan humming away underneath my windowsill helps a bit, but I don't like the way it blows around these piles of books and papers littering my floor, or the Blackbeard flag hanging from the wall opposing me.
I should really get a chair. The way my back is resting on this under-inflated air-mattress that takes up a good forty percent of the room is less than pleasing, to say the least. But its such a pain in the ass trying to inflate this ungodly large bed (in an ungodly small room) with nothing but a manual bike pump. As I sit on the carpeted floor of my room, pecking away at my keyboard, I take a drink from an almost cold beer and replace on the floor beside me, my pipe, ashtray, cigarettes, lighter, and cellphone...the necessities. The beer helps to combat this humidity and stagnant almost cold air.
When I stand up, there will be grass clippings stuck to the back of my extended legs, all the way up to the ass of my pants. Its a little hard to see the layer of grass that follows me from work back home and upstairs to my room everyday because of the similar green it shares with my carpet, but walk on it barefoot and you can feel it. Look on your socks and you can see it.
I really should clean this place up. I would unpack the rest of my stuff from those cardboard apple boxes sitting in the corner next to the bookshelf, but where the hell to? One corner is already devoted to this unnecessarily large bed, another to cardboard boxes, dvds, and the empty cd cases leftover from a stolen book of cd's, a shoebox full of my important financial papers (student loan overdue, overdrafts, debts, and the occasional confirmation number from a payment made), and my bookshelf.
Which happens to be filling quite well. I had to sell a good portion of my collection a few months back to stay afloat, but with working two jobs and one of them being by a used book store, its growing and evolving. I can honestly say that I am not trying to create a visually impressive collection though, I just really like to read.
The Blackbeard flag hangs between this corner of literature and the next corner: a sewing table posing as a desk.
The desk is entirely wood and well constructed. You can tell someone put a good deal of time into it, and I only wish I had a better use for it. I have a desk in my room, but no chair. Therefore, even though I call it my desk, and that is even though I only call it a desk in the first place, it mostly serves the same purpose as any other horizontal surface to me: it prevents things from falling. My desk keeps gravity at bay for empty beers, pocket knives, a picture of Shadow, some pictures of friends from years past, an unplugged alarm clock, a broken pipe, a rolling machine...I could keep going but I suppose “refuse” about sums it up. Except for the photos, of course.
I had almost forgotten my box of photos. I horde photographs. Most of them are my own, snapshots of a family of four in California, a family of four plus one dog in Overland Park, pictures me and my brother and my dad, or me and my brother and my mom, my 16th birthday party, Japan, then Maui. There would be a 35mm camera in my room if I hadn't gotten it stolen on Maui. I hold on to pictures of my parents before my brother and I were ever born. One of my personal favorites is my dad, no older than 25, standing on the side of the highway in front of a sign for the town of Tightwad, flipping off the camera.
Anyways. The empty space beneath my desk is the area I like to call “Billy's Shit”. Billy's Shit is the leftover random items left behind by room's last rent-payer, Billy. When I look at this area, I see no individual items. Its a solid mass, an intertwining, enmeshing, somewhat cube shaped pure abstraction of items.
A few small high school print making pieces adorn the walls along with my flag, a Ralph Steadman poster, and some empty canvas bags that used to hold 50 lbs of green coffee beans before we roasted them at my evening coffee shop job. I am astounded to find that there are no cobwebs in my room. Maybe its the way my walls bend inward about five feet up from the baseboards at a forty-five degree angle and then flatten to form a ceiling parallel to the carpet, giving the room a trapezoidal shape. Maybe spiders hate trapezoids.
My room is clutter. Its slightly overwhelming, but at the same time this is my clutter. There is a certain comfort to be found in that. I couldn't really say I cherish most of these things, besides the photographs and a handful of books, but all these individual items in this mess of a room together create a picture of who I am. Looking back, I am not necessarily proud of this picture, but it's mine.

Cheers to Kansas City

Disinterested , disaffected adolescents idolozing demons
Pentagrams and crucifixes six six sixs
Pent up rage at distant church steeples
Wishing lightning bolts at angels so said steeples topple

Drug dealers doling dope in dimes
Its a life style baby no emotion no excuses
Its a get by life through guile and guns
Keep us fucked up, keep us thinking this is fun

Dissatisfied drunks dropping out of school
Discombobulated drunks dropping off of porches
Like live fast, die young dreams to fruition
Like I've seen the best minds of my generation...

A city lacking substance, a scene lacking cause
Pentagrams and pot, beers and bongs
Spray paint, crumbling curb, twisted tweaker, vulgar bum, stray cat, and a blood smear
Stay not or you will rot like abandon hope all ye who enter here
A city mind numbing, back breaking, drunk biking, blacked out then sleeping
strung out and hungover, bummed out and looked over
Bracing themselves for another night drunk over

Down by Law(s of Nature)

aka "New twists on old ramblings"

“It's gone on like this, for three years I guess.
We're drunk all the time, and our lives are a mess.”
-Mountain Goats

Grandparents drown in nostalgia, wondering where their heros went, while kids drown in drugs trying to keep up with their heroes. Dad is stranded in an ocean of debt, treading water, while mom dives and searches for the bottom after the sinking of their marital maritime vessel. Her lung compacity is astounding. She holds her breath and swims down and down. Down through Zoloft, through t.v., pop culture, debt, and her son. Always and forever downward. The son will be gone soon though. He has given up on money, pop culture, television, Zoloft, divorce, marriage, heros, parents, and grandparents. His faith remain in drugs, beer, sex, doomed relationships, and the friends that make it all possible.

Paint a rose on my nose and hand me my rightful crown. I'm the King of the Pits and I can't be usurped. Ruling over my kingdom of the disowned tar-eyed citizens with utter apathy, nothing will change. If it did we'd be refugees and somehow worse-off than before. How do you kill a hermit? Banish them to society.

While I'm at...

Grant me the slumber time contentment
that escapes me in the day
And the waking hour happiness
that we all deserve

Sitting outside the Half & Half cafe, just off the Damen stop in Chicago. Drinking a red-eye, coffee and espresso in one glorious cup of pick-me up, and its the first thing I've been able to buy myself for a week. Seeing this city without a pot to piss in, a window to throw it out, or a single dollar to pay the fine for improper disposal of waste has convinced never to move here.
As I sit contemplating the events that lead me here I look up from my cup to see a male to female transvestite walking by, designer from head to toe, the clothes and the body, heading toward the train stop. Some fixed-gear freaks sitting next to me, surrounded by mirror images of himself: chrome bags, tight shirts, and rolled pants, ventures to call out to him/her "What up, man?" I couldn't help but smile to myself at his impeccable execution, both consanants of his accusation drawn out by a fraction of a second and the slightest increase in pitch on the n made sure no one could miss the attack. His goony friends began to chuckle and without missing a beat, niether startling nor turning to face her attacker, she began to give a Vogue worthy strut down the strip of crumbling concrete that was her runway. As she reached the stairs leading up to the trainstop, she pirouetted in true supermodel fashion before continuing up the stairs. If it was an afterthought or the finale of her original master defense plan I couldn't say, but half through her ascent she stopped, turned the group as I observed from my cooling cup of coffee, and her hands grasped the sides of her skin-tight black shirt. The hands, still gripping, began to move toward the sky and the shirt followed, exposing a chiseled six-pack, ribs visible beneath the skin but not so much as to look unhealthy, and as we watched wondering when this display would have run its course, the shirt continued up until her too perfect breasts failed to drop from beneath the shirt but revealed themselves, too proud and too full of silicone, too big and too firm, to us and the laughter of the gear-heads stopped, jaws dropped, and she walked off to finish her day a winner.

Neither Accepting Nor Rejecting

Jiddu Krishnamurti, born in Colonial India to a Brahmin family and raised by Charles Webster Leadbeater of the Theosophical Society, rejected his pampered upbringing after he experienced what he later called "the process". The Theosophical Society had expected Krishnamurti to fulfill the role of a long-awaited World Teacher and had groomed him from childhood specifically for this role. At the age of 27 Krishnamurti began to experience a feeling of immense pain in his neck accompanied by a hard swelling. His symptoms worsened from day to day, coming to include delirious ramblings, loss of appetite, and others until he appeared to fall into unconsciousness, although Krishnamurti recounts that he was fully cognizant during this time. This first experience of "the process" was followed by a sense of "immense peace", and a recounting of having experienced divine bliss. His experience of the process would happen on an almost nightly basis for the next two months, and intermittently from then on. Krishnamurti's experience proved to be a spiritual happening all his own; a path to some sort of enlightenment taught to him by neither theosophists, priests, nor gurus. To be taught of spiritual matters and paths to higher consciousness by a society ones whole life and to then experience one never mentioned by them must have been jarring to say the least.
Because of this, Krishnamurti chose the dissolution of the Order of the Star, a branch of the Theosophical Society created in his honor stating that the moment a person chooses to follow another on their path to mental and spiritual freedom they have ceased to follow the Truth.

Yesterday morning, while pouring boiling water on my coffee, the kettle's stream found its way from the french press holding my coffee grounds to my right hand holding the press. I heard the hiss of hot on cold and imitated it with a sharp inhalation, "Tsssss," before I realized what had just happened. Whether I muttered "fuck" or saw the already reddening skin of my hand first I could not say, but immediately afterward my mind slipped into a sort of meditation whose source I cannot readily identify, but that has been my reaction to pain for quite some time.
To say that I began to concentrate on the pain comes close to summing up this meditation, but it does not capture the true essence of it. As the hue of my burnt skin continued to darken, rather than letting pain overwhelm rationality, I found myself looking at the skin, watching its transformation and by caressing it with my left thumb felt its rough texture become smooth. More importantly though, as the red turned to maroon turned to rust, I set my awareness not on the pain, but on the sensation of pain; on the relationship between skin, nerves, brain, and the communication occurring between the three, telling me to hurt. After about a half minute of simply observing the pain, it began to become just another feeling, neither enjoyable or not.
I convinced myself of nothing, not trying to brain wash myself into believing this tingling that should have seared felt good and not trying to ignore the screaming voice of a million years of instinct urging me to recoil from pain. In this space between acceptance of my pain and denial, there was solace. There was a calm set aside from the judgement of my physical feelings. It was a somewhat eerie calm. The coffee steeped in its water unaffected, my roommates slept in their beds undisturbed, and the world moved on unaware of my pain and unaware of my accomplishment.
It was in this silence that a quote that had sat at the back of my mind for weeks, thrusting itself into my consciousness in between thoughts, made yet another appearance. When the words to a song could not be recalled, there it was. When my worst depressions overwhelmed me with embittered thoughts and gave me but one second of silence before starting on a new barrage, there it was. When things were alright and when things were fucked, this riddle of a quote would baffle the extent of logical dissection and its optimistic mystery would pull me through with its simplicity.


During a brief period of free time a few weeks earlier I had found myself watching videos of speeches given by one J. Krishnamurti, having remembered the name after watching Zeitgeist: Addendum which included a brief audio clip from one of his many lectures. After his dissolution of the Order of the Star, Krishnamurti continued his lecture tours but his focus changed to radical new topics. In his eyes, the only remedy for the problems of humanity was a revolution of the mind. The world could not attain any sort of lasting peace until its population saw past its own governments, religions, nationalities, and the infinite boundaries that they separate one another by. This change was not something that could be brought about from the outside though. It was a process each individual must undergo by dealing with their own mental hang-ups. In order to save the world, we must save our minds. When asked how a person could begin to do such a thing, his response was that we must view ourselves "neither accepting nor rejecting."
Neither accepting nor rejecting. We live our whole lives seeing things from our own perspective both physically and mentally. We have two eyes converting images into electrical impulses interpreted by our minds to tell us whats happening, and more importantly we have a self-conscious telling us what to think about it. This is how its been our whole lives. Everything impulse physical and mental is either accepted, thought to be good, moral, beautiful, tasty, or rejected, thought to be bad, amoral, ugly, or disgusting. So as great as it sounds to say that all you have to do is neither accept nor reject, just how in the fuck does one go about doing so?

And as I sipped my coffee, rubbed my right hand with left thumb, and let that phrase reverberate through my mind "Neither accepting nor rejecting. Accepting nor rejecting. Neither..Nor rejecting..Neither nor." I could almost feel the connection, as my synapses fired and a million neurons that had always longed to touch made that ecstatic bond. A feeling is a feeling is a feeling. An affectation of one of your physical senses is a sensation, an affectation of your mind is an emotion, but we use the same word for both interchangeably. They are feelings. I do not believe it is a shortcoming or failure of the English language that a feeling can be used describe something both concrete and abstract.
To think about it now, the whole experience forms a logical progression explaining beyond a doubt that indeed, there is an invisible disease largely unknown to us festering in our individual minds and as our consciousness collectively. It is every time you are unsatisfied with your reflection, every time you hate yourself for your bank account, every time you regret your past, every time you fear the future, every word you've never said and all the ones you wish you hadn't. When you want your mortal coil to reach its end now, and when you're more than willing to cut it yourself please remember that it is not really you. There is a plague on our emotions. These emotions that have tinted everything we experience are not entirely ours. This sickness twists them to its will, and the only way to remove the sickness is to step back from our emotions long enough to see it growing there.
When you see it it will be a sickening green, gleaming with slime and pulsing to your own heart beat. The veins thinly veiled beneath its thin outer membrane bulge and trace million paths, all leading to nothing but misery.
And even then you must neither accept it nor reject it, and through this ambivalence you will rob it of its power and watch it unlatch itself, fall to the floor, and give one slight quiver of a death rattle before it dies.

"An old dream is dead and a new one is being born, as a flower that pushes through the solid earth. A new vision is coming into being and a greater consciousness is being unfolded...A new strength, born of suffering, is pulsating in the veins and a new sympathy and understanding is being born of past suffering - a greater desire to see others suffer less, and, if they must suffer, to see that they bear it nobly and come out of it without too many scars. I have wept, but I do not want others to weep; but if they do, I know what it means."
Krishnamurti writing in the bulletin of the Order of the Star (The Herald of the Star, January 1926, published in London).

April Showers

There's dark clouds creeping over the city right now. Everything is turning gray, but for some reason it doesn't depress me like it did. It has been maybe two weeks, but these same clouds two weeks ago would have driven me up the stairs and to the bottom of many cans. Packs of cigarettes would tremble in my presence, aware of their inevitable immolation. The gray would have its way with me.
But, having survived yet another winter of discontent, having weathered the storm, having survived the part of me that wants myself destroyed, I see can finally see that the other colors aren't really getting grayed out. The green of grass and trees and the yellow strip of a no parking area along the curb become if anything more vibrant. There's nothing visually appealing about concrete and asphalt, but these creeping clouds turn the sunlight silver and it saturates these fields of suburban sprawl and I find them...tolerable.

Gotta go to work, work all day
It keeps me busy, prevents me from spending terribly too much money, and I'm finally get back in shape. The weather does affect (effect?) my mood quite a bit, but the horrible truth of the matter is that money does so too, and probably even more. When I'm poor, I can hardly find the motivation to do anything. Just..sit here a bit more, should I try to go hang out, find out if the roommates are home, clean myself? No. I'll just..sit here a bit more.
I'm telling myself that working outdoors is whats improving my spirits and I know that it's partially true. But the horrible, awful, depressing in itself truth is that money has such a strangle-hold on my emotions that I revert to thirteen every time I'm running short on money. Text-book depression.

Gotta go to work indeed, time to make the coffee.

Oh to be the life of the party
The big cheese, cock of the walk
Listen to my stories
Speaking skills impecable

Oh to be extroverted
Crazy and flirtatious
Listen to my voice
So loud you can't help it

Oh to be sweet
A dear, a doll
Listen to me
I'll swoon you in a heartbeat

Oh to be confident
Sincere, honest
Listen to what I say
Because it comes from the heart


I know I fucked it up. I had my fair chance. But every time I tried to come clean to you, the words stuck in my throat and resulted in an uncomfortable coughing fit. A sidelong glance at you, caught in the act, resulting in a careful investigation of my shoes. My knees point toward you, hands yearn to move just a few...more...inches. It always ends in paralysis. I would tell you how I feel, but my tongue would turn to stone; my hand would finally grasp yours, but its tendons become taught; my legs would span those last few inches and touch yours if those last few inches weren't so fucking far. Yes, we are friends. Great friends. And it's great having you for a friend. I'm perfectly...content. But to be content is to settle for less than say: happy, marvelous, fantastic.
I've settled for content for so long, and now I know its secret. Contention is the opiate of the masses. We settle for being content and tell ourselves it's good enough. Sure, things aren't great but we get by. We're content. It's just good enough. But I want to be ecstatic. Like when my day has been shit and we sit and talk until six in the morning. It's ecstasy to me. I love your intelligence, your less than perfect past, your ability to make do, your love of books, your smile, your eyes, your style, and as a result..or rather as a culmination of this and more..I love being with you.

I hate that I fumble my words around you. I hate it when I mistake actors in front of you and when I can't think of the book I want you to know about. I hate knowing that I'm not an idiot and knowing I make an ass of myself in front of you constantly. I hate how fucking self-conscious you make me. I hate that I can't picture myself ever having your confidence. I hate myself for writing these things I'll never say to you.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it