An Inhuman Condition

Most people waste their lives collecting commodities and idling as if that’s all there is to life. But life is much more complicated, more faceted. Having a mass of body parts doesn’t make a person – there is animation in it, electricity. The house, family, school, job, obligations – those are just insignificant particulars. Those meaningless things disappear eventually into dust. But a real spark – a bud on the edge of destruction – could flicker into nothingness in an instant. The fragile energy of the spark is what life truly is.  It is beautiful and sad and perpetually now, existing exclusively in the present. Life is something only the creative soul with its beating heart can embrace.

Jake spent his youth unwittingly searching for a spark. He saw through the veils and understood that titles and possessions weren’t a life. He had foresworn material culture and rebelled against it. His existence was one flask-of-Jack, punk-rock, cigarette-burning-before-it-faded-away moment at a time. Like many in his generation, he lacked the mental programming for hope and future thought. Instead of simply abandoning the old, pointless rules and rituals of his parents, he disowned those of his generation as well. Like many of his peers who understood even a little, he spiraled into apathy.

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“This is my doing. It’s me, and I accept that. Sartre said our actions and decisions make us, and this war is mine. It’s inside me now, and I own that. The world, my isolation – it’s my fault. I’m not saying I caused the political bullshit, but it’s like the pieces of a puzzle. You start with these odd, disconnected bits and assemble the corners, work along the border and fill in the middle from there. At some point you should start to see what the photo is, but I didn’t. There was no box; it was all blurred. I never even finished the damn thing, but they saw the entire picture first. Envisioned and given life through my work, there was no way to unsee it, and then they remade whole, damn planet in my image.

Looking back I feel like a naïve child. When they started using DNA to manufacture microprocessors, I should have made the leap. When we tagged ourselves with radio-frequency chips in the name of healthcare, people should have filled the streets in anger, but instead it was all a convenience. We were coddled at every step with the cushy blanket of progress. We dumped ourselves to the Internet, gave it our thoughts, wants, emotions – we became it. We reinvented ourselves as pixels communicating at unprecedented speeds. From the server room to the home then the coffee shop and the pocket, the next logical step was under the skin.

With rampant dematerialization and convergence giving us smaller computers, the lines blurred between our devices. The desktop was a TV, the laptop made phone calls, the cellular phone checked email and our TVs browsed the Internet. People carried a record store’s worth of music on something the size of a cigarette pack – a library of books the size of just one. We could buy any novel, song or movie in the world and have it on a gadget in our pocket within minutes. It was the fastest and most effortless form of consumption our species invented – the Internet. Once the ones and zeros made their way into every home in the country, there was no coming back. The ease of consumption consumed us all.”

Cras Populus Ero Machina
Attenuator Zero

I’ve finished the script to Bear and Bear, P.I. finally. Artist and I have it in a state we’re happy with, and if all is going well he should have some thumbnails for my perusal soon. Whenever I get some pixels from the project, I will finally do something with our website BearPI.com beyond displaying the number pi. I’m sure anyone reading this is aware of the poster on CockTracy.com, but in the event some unknown stranger makes it here, I want that stranger to see Artist’s cock in all it’s colored splendor.

I’m about 3,500 words into a new short story that will require much editing before I put it here. I need more time or less distraction to get writing, webstuffs and maybe even some submitting to publishers finished.

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So it looks like I’ve finally migrated everything over to my shiny domain. I am now hosted, and all is well in the world. I’m (hopefully) finishing a script in the next few days and will begin generating new content for the site.

Until then friends,
Bears

Have you ever been overtaken with an insane, lustful rage? It’s the whiskey-in-hand, we-can’t-work-things-out, why-can’t-I-tell-her-how-I-feel, what-the-fuck-is-so-difficult-about-this-shit, burning-through-cigarettes kind of madness. It’s the sort of rage that leaves you pacing back and forth in the kitchen, thinking fake conversations in your head while your eyes just burn into nothing in particular. You just mumble things here and there thinking you’re an idiot and occasionally blurt out a coherent “fuck” or “damn it.” You only stop to pour your blessed whiskey into a shot glass, highball or mixing cup – whatever is clean at the moment. For whatever reason you feel trapped in that instant with nothing else in the world – it’s just you, the anger and the whiskey.

Now picture all of that, the ping-ponging, the muttering, the burning eyes, but without the alcohol. Picture instead that instead of a chilled, caramel-colored beverage, you’ve chosen a loaf of bread and a stick of butter as the outlet of your frustration.

You untwist the little tie or pull off that plastic square thing almost breaking it in half (which happens even in normal operating conditions I must add), and you tear into that loaf of bread piece by flaky piece. You have your knife and you viciously slice into that stick of soft butter over and over again, smearing it across the bread. All the while you seethe and pace and think “what the fuck” as you bite off a piece of bread and continue on your way. Picture doing this for twenty minutes.

That was my Sunday night.

I didn’t write it into my calendar. I didn’t need to finish the loaf before it all went moldy. I wasn’t even that hungry. I thought to myself: “I should go find a snack and make some coffee.” It was that innocent. I get the coffee brewing. I start peering into the fridge, and while I’m in there something just snaps. It was this out-of-nowhere, visceral, what-the-fuck-is-so-goddamned-wrong-with-me outburst.

I’ve been single for a few months now, nothing major mind you, but I think it’s starting to take its toll. Couple that with coming out of an on-again, fuck-off-again relationship. Couple that with having contact with the ex again. Couple that with realizing how it will never work between the two of us. Couple that with having no real prospects and being complete shit at meeting women. When you put that all together, you can see why it might be maddening. But bread and butter?

I can’t justify it. There’s nothing about the bread that held any particular sentiment. I’m not some closet bread fetishist. It was just stupid happenstance.

Although I think I had better figure out this relationship bullshit soon before I find myself pouting over some chips and salsa.

It’s the time of night when everyone is a little lonely. The smooth jazz plays over cooling coffee while my books sit aloft. The rap and tap of rain sings in rhythm while my cigarette burns bright, and I find myself missing you.

What do we do when love is gone? We scratch, thrash and lunge about trying to build ourselves anew. Every destructive impulse of man can be found among this reconstructive raucous as we tear down and remodel, birth and demolish. We are Shiva wedged under Kali’s flailing arms, and no piece comes without its price.

When two people entwine their lives, untying knots is always the hardest part. Ridding, removing and reconciling loss are guaranteed to hurt. Every faded picture, dusty memento and scrap of the other is rent across raw skin seething, burning from within.

But healthy relationships aren’t meant to end, and the nagging truth of knowing it’s all for the best might be the most disappointing part.

She was everything. I made her that and built all the now-fallen walls around us. It’s something I must own, hold and never let go. My ruined city is slowly coming back together. The bricks won’t go back the way they used to, and I know I couldn’t make them fit if I tried. For everything I’ve lost, some new gain must be made. Possibility is a perfect parting gift, and what is made here will have to weather a while. It’s my duty to keep building until nothing is missing and nothing can be taken.

This is the night in which I’ve awoken in the life I’ve made. It’s not too bad here among the lonely jazz and benevolent brew awaiting my lips’ return. The soft whisper of longing concern for some unforeseen connection still holds my wakefulness, but I would try to sleep if this night seemed like it could hold a few dreams.

Dearest Amber,

Your minuet breath still lingers resounding through my ears. I long for the tender touch of your legs entwined with mine. I miss feeling the slight rise and fall of your chest in my arms – sliding my fingers across your sound and sleeping stomach hesitating just a moment to circle your belly button. The taste of your skin, the ever-youthful joy of your smile, the life immortalized in your quiet eyes – those soft, hazel prisms – all of you will reside in me ever thus.

I remember the days when we were the world – forsaking sleep to sit together in urgent ambling through our verbal rambling. We lived entire lives inside those moments. Idling with you was my most pressing passion.

You are responsible for the vast expanse of my emotions from blissful happiness to harrowing sadness.

Watching you kill yourself with determination of your life’s work, seeing the way your beauty and tenderness has been overwritten with decay, watching the world rob away your sunshine ounce by ounce with every day – these things I can no longer do. I have held together the past year for you – to try and help you get back that piece, the essence of the thing that is you. But it seems now that it was lost before either of us ever really noticed it was missing. One cannot hold a wilted flower in winter and forever insist it is still the vibrant, myriad effluvia of spring.

And that’s why I’m going, now. I’m leaving to be with the eternal YOU – the one we can never hold or touch or taste again in this life no matter how hard we try or how determined we are to hold on.

Goodbye my love.
Res ipsa loquitur.

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I’ve been reading Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen, and it has been pretty dry. But this conversation I read last night is quite good. I thought I’d share.

“‘The donkey pulled the cart. It thought it was pulling the cart heavenwards, and soon it would reach paradise, where there were no loads to carry, evergreen pastures, and the beasts of prey were friendly companions. But gradually the donkey realized that heaven was drawing no nearer, it grew tired, and the hay of religion no longer induced it to step out bravely. So lest the cart come to a halt, the donkey’s hunger was switched to an earthly paradise, a socialist park where all donkeys will be equal, the whip will be abolished, where there will be lighter loads and improved fodder, but then the road to this Eden turns out to be just as long, the end is just as far off, and the donkey becomes stubborn again. But in fact, he was wearing blinkers the whole time, so that he never realized he was going round and round, and that he wasn’t pulling a cart but a carousel, and perhaps all we are is a sideshow on the fairground of the gods, and at the end of their day out, the gods have forgotten to tidy the carousel away, and the donkey is still pulling it, only the gods have forgotten all about us.’

He said: ‘Then you live in a world without meaning.’

I said: ‘Yes. But does everything have to have meaning?’

He said: ‘If I thought as you do, I would kill myself.’

I cried: ‘What for? I’ll be dead soon enough anyway, and believe me, while I’m not greatly impressed by life, I dread the idea of being dead. So why should I kill myself? Now, if I was like you, and thought of suicide as a sin, that would mean there was a hereafter! The real inducement to leave this world is a belief in the beyond. If I don’t believe in heaven or hell, then I must try to find a little happiness here, a little joy here, beauty and pleasure all here. For me there is no other place, no other time. Here and now are the only possibility for me. And the temptation to kill myself is just a trap someone’s set for me. Now who set it? If the trap is there, the trapper won’t be far off. Then doubt sets in. The unbeliever’s doubt in his unbelief is at least as terrible as the doubt of the believer. We all of us doubt. Don’t tell me you don’t doubt. You’d be lying. In the three-dimensional cage we perceive with our senses, there is room for only doubt. Surely everyone feels the presence of a wall, I mean some kind of barrier that separates us from an inaccessible region that may be very close, just next to us, maybe inside us, and if we could find a door to this other domain, a crack in the wall, then we would have a completely different view of ourselves and our lives. Perhaps it would be awful. Perhaps it would be unbearable. The legend says that when we behold the truth, we turn to stone. I’d like to see the unveiled picture, even if I turn into a pillar. But perhaps even that wouldn’t be the truth, and behind the picture that petrifies me there would be other pictures, other veils, still more baffling, still more inaccessible, perhaps even still more terrible, and I would have turned to stone, and still not really seen anything. There is something that is invisible to us, alongside the world and our lives. But what?’

‘You are looking for God not in His house, you are looking for him in dead ends,’ said Adolf.

‘If God exists, He will also live in dead ends,’ I said.”

His bright face fell, fading to a partial frown. The weight of unspoken sentiment dragged his cheeks from their elated pedestals – pillars on which they stood drugged from the nostalgic encounter. As they sat silent, his mind flipped through the scrapbook of their moments and memories only to find the numerous hurt personified in its final pages. This slow dissent into the past’s faded pictures staggered his thoughts with its thunderous conclusion. This gradual forward reminiscence and his merry mood guised the facts, blurred the content of the thing so much that his surroundings were uncomfortable and alien when he abruptly awoke. He was akin to a boiling shellfish slowly simmering to the final choke of its death concealed behind a comforting curtain. The thing had become real again too quickly and too fully for him to brace against the fall; he was stripped bare amongst his own thoughts and once again vulnerable to their venom.

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