Too Late The Hero

That album was a revelation for me, by the way.

At any rate, this is about a dream I had early this morning. She was simply everything a heart could ever want, and she wanted me unashamedly.

Loved me.

I was about to tell her the things I learned, and show in the process that I was ready to love her as much and as deeply as she did me. We fit like we were machined by watchmakers. Effortless, free, intertwined, one heart, one life.

And then I woke up to an empty bed, an empty heart. She was every woman who loved me, and I let down. Because I didn’t get it.

Now I do of course, and it’s too late. But I do love you all unreservedly and infinitely.

Who are you?

Who were you?

You were a thousand different women.

Every one I have ever loved, ever known.

You were beautiful.

You loved me

Without question,

Without recrimination–

Without me leading you on to my heart

By subterfuge or goading.

You listened. You cared.

You wanted me. You really tried.

How did I lose you,

Who were willing to leap

For the brass ring, heart of gold?

I was blind, I was a fool.

I was distracted by the horizon, lust,

Or the next girl’s door.

You used to come back,

I always had another chance.

But the lesson remained unlearned.

I was too much pain, too much hassle

for too little return.

Too late the hero. Game over.

And at the end there is nothing here

But the dawn over marble head.

Enlightened, free and ready,

But you took to your heels

And headed for the hills.

As you should have

As anyone would.

Love is not to be wasted, after all.

I am sorry it took so long.

I am sorry for holding you,

Guilting you into place.

I just wish I could try one last time

And prove myself worthy. Finally.

I am awake now. I understand.

Too late the hero. The dream is over.

Reason’s Greetings!

If you know the origins of the holidays at this part of the year, then this is all old news to you. If you know that I am an atheist who was once a seeker of truth before the truth found me, you know what follows too. But do you know that I love you, even if you believe in fairy tales?

Celebrating the Winter Solstice goes back thousands of years. It pre-dates Christianity and Judaism. The current Christian overlays were grafted on by the Roman church to make Christianity palatable to the various northern European tribes which existed at the time, and the holiday itself was raised into its current prominence not by Christians but by Capitalists–19th century industry and the rise of corporate culture. This was *never* a Christian holiday. It’s old news. There is nothing in the NT or any of the Christian apocrypha which puts Jesus’ birth at the end of December. If Jesus existed at all, he would probably despise the celebratory aspects of it, depending on how much of an Essene he was. In any case, the gospel attributed to Mark makes no mention of Jesus’ birth because it was unimportant. It really was.

It would be okay if Christians realized how much of their belief was co-opted or outright stolen from Mithraism, how the birth of the god-man matching the Winter Solstice is about Sun worship (not Son–though the English word has a delightful connotation), and was clearly an agrarian celebration. But you all do not.

The only reason most of you believe this tall tale of someone called Jesus is because it was what you were born into. That sort of blind acceptance is toxic. The same sort of blind acceptance that hates atheists automatically, and without reason or cause. Or feels pity toward us. Though that is rather humorous to us. Almost as humorous as you thinking that this is a Christian holiday.

Take This For All I Know

(I remember moving in and out of fevered sleep. May 1991. Unemployed, broke, failed. Finally sick and alone, too weak to move, adrift on a foam rubber pad. Take this as what he thought about before entropy finally kicked in…)

The boy knew. A thousand years ago in another life, he knew.

Grow up. Make a name for yourself. Become a man. Make your mark in the world. Let ‘em know you were there kiddo!

Yes, young Ozymandias. Go and do that. Trouble and toil, bubble and bubble. Fret your sweat-soaked soul upon the stage for your hour.

Then what? The hook, of course. Grim Reaper as stage manager. Nice try kid, NEXT!

Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck all that. Go and build a mighty empire in the desert, spend your years getting it just right, and then what, die under its meticulously planned shade?

The boy knew. A thousand years ago in another life, he knew. It’s all pointless! Nothing you do. Not a single one of your accomplishments, brags, passions or scorns matters a whit. Not a fucking bit. A patch of industrial ruin, a nifty bit of faded Americana by the roadside. Someone’s life and love and trouble now a hubble of rubble. A hunk of junk. A bit of shit.

The boy-as-man went ahead and walked the path anyway. For a while. Just to see. To see him be the lover that spurns capricious and is himself spurned in the end. The answer-man who fixes everything but can’t fix himself. The Buddhist with the slippery ego. The drugged-out carcass, the stupe simmering in the jail cell. Walk the path son. But not too hard. Why make this more than what it really is? The boy saw the end for what it was. Why dwell on infinite insubstantials day in day out till your pump seizes up? Who’s gonna care that you did when you’re gone? You exist as object-in-space in another’s context anyway, as they do to you. You know you’re real, everyone else might be too. This might be all someone’s fevered dream for all we know. It might be yours.

The boy knew. A thousand years ago in another life, he knew. And dreamed it anyway one fevered day, dying sick and alone in the desert heat. Making all this up as he lay there, piecing random things into a chain, a path of what-ifs into oblivion.

Existential Interlude

So walking around early this afternoon, I felt really depressed and lonely. Nothing new here kiddies, I think my stupid ego turns me into a hermit–who wants to be with such an opinionated weird creepy prick?

Not so many as you’d think, apparently. The girl I was seeing for a few months at the end of last year stopped taking my calls in February. Nice way to send the hint along, I guess. So ever since, it’s been non-fucking-existent in that department. Nothing makes you less desirable than rejection, ain’t it the troof. Others show little interest in little ol’ me. FUCK.

So that’s brooded through my head. And, I am an outsider at my work. Generationally, et al. Oh, and a certain crush I had there (foolish really, but I wrote poetry about her. It’s in the third book) is seeing one of my bosses. FUCKETY FUCK.

Stupid stupid shit. This is what goes mulling through my head–unless I fill it with Farscape and whatever diversions the innernets have on tap. Occasionally, you see, it backs up into a green green pile of sewage at my feet.

“Get help bwah,” you might say. “Get a prescription for some happy happy joy joys.”

On the first count, I did the therapy route. After all those years, I still think a hooker would be more useful. And cost-effective. As for the latter, I tried the happy pills too. Years back. They attenuated life. Which was fine for a time, but the sleep was awful, requiring more drugs. Those gave me bloody awful dreams. Literally bloody. No thanks.

One fringe benefit of that therapy–something laid on me in passing almost 13 years ago–was “Cognitive Therapy.” Basically, slowing down and observing how your mind works. How it snaps into certain mental frames. Tiring but useful. Although it didn’t become such until the Zen years. Ah. Thich Nhat Hanh and mindfulness. The two dovetail nicely.

So in that walking interlude, when mind rumbles through its incessant half-thought and monologue–though sometimes it’s dialogue too, only the voices are both mine and it passes the seconds okay enough (fuck you, you do it too)–I felt this tremendous sadness! UN-fucking-LOVED. Less than nothing.

(Come back to the present moment, the breath, the wind. There is nothing but that. Nothing (that) matters.)

I would detail the contents of what snapped me back into sanity, but I’ve poured it out here before, and in other places too. If you know Zen, if you know science, if you know, You’ll not only understand, but you’ll wonder why I let the stupid shit hang over me.

Well, it was a Wednesday.

Love to you all. Endlessly.

The Upload

“Would you like WorldView to save this password?”

As always, his answer was Yes. It’s not that his memory was particularly bad, it just saved time. Time was a fluid quicksilver thing in his afterwork life. Tickety-tack on his Cloudbook keyboard, clickeratick of the trackpad on one hyperlink or another. Suddenly six o’clock was twelve-thirty, and he was bushed. enervated. Tonight it was surprise nudes of the latest RealiTeeVee sensation, an article about the myth of free will, all the news that was fit to tweet, down the hypertext rabbithole from one blogpost to another.

Just another night. New episodes of his old favorites, his attention span spanning ten open tabs at once in his WorldView browser. He rarely made it through a half-hour TV show non-stop anymore as he wandered with his wayward mind to the movie database tab to see who the tight twenty-two year-old with the thirty-four cees was in this scene, or to peek under the dress of Hollywood to see the hairy legs and other behind-the-scenes secrets posted to keep the mythmaking moving.

Just another night. and another sleepless fight to enjoin the dark and invoke the restful he craved, as he led the animal into the abyss with him waving the carrot of some thread of thought to distract the idiot sparking ideas in his head like so many shiny beads.

The dream was the same. At least, the deja vu hit him like that, even though even that might have been a conceit of the dream, dreaming that the dream is one you had before because the dream itself said as much and implied such. He was in a lovely room lit with natural light from windows above and beside him. An easel held a half-finished painting, a self-portrait. He was prettier there than he actually was–thinner, more defined, optimized even. And as each brush-stroke brought the creation to life, he himself felt diminished, diffuse, defused. He awoke weary bleary, too young he swore to feel this tired, too old to work this early for so little money.

His Cloudphone has its own WorldView browser, mail app and news reader, just like its bigger self. He sat on the shitter tapping the news and the mail of the world, both of which were just junk and spin of course. Same shit, he might as well peer into the bowl and read his fortune from the floaters. Ah well, people dying in Africa, people dying all around, as much an abstraction as anything else. He had fifteen minutes to shitshowershave and hit the road.

“Would you like Newsie to save this RSS feed?” He tapped Yes. Reactionary paranoia dotcom. All these sites have a spin, but he loved the spin this blog put him in. He loved ranting to his workfriends about how shockingly stupid the site was, it was like fiber for getting time moving between eight and five. All the better to be elsewhere.

Tonight the dream was same but different. Same lovely room, same easel, same picture-him gaining definition, coming clearer from the canvas. His hand moved the brush unbidden, under its own control until finally it finished. He gazed closer closer, taken by the expressioned eyes more real than reality. And found he was looking back at himself, picture pixel-perfect.

Closer closer. The picture devolved into individual bits, each stroke a rendering revealed. A choice made and confirmed with a Yes/No. ”Would you like WorldView to save this to your favorites?”

Twenty Years On

It’s been hard to write lately. Bit of a drought. Sitting in the car listening to an audiobook, pondering an impossibly blue sky.

It’s been twenty years exactly since my last cross-country drive. Phoenix to Peterborough in just under three days. Me in a little white Corolla getting knocked around by passing semis, seeing the snow-capped mountains up north, Meteor Crater (up close it’s no different from any other great hole in the ground), the rounded contours of New Mexico’s sandstone cliffs, Texas Texas Texas.

Oklahoma smelled like cowshit from the Texas border to Missouri. This was all in the days before GPS and Google Maps. I had a AAA triptych, as it was called, and less than $300 to my name–and that was borrowed from Mom to make the trip home.

Home. I spent half my life to that point in New Hampshire, and it never felt like home. I had idealized Phoenix as my long-lost belonging place. Then I moved back there. Like most places made of “developments,” carved out of the earth and pre-washed with strip-mall bonhomie to pretend it was there all along and not simply set up to exchange cash for the fiction we call existence (fuck you, I’m on a roll here), Phoenix is a soulless city. It’s all too new, and too obvious in its pretense of having an identity. Tucson has more soul– more character. Or maybe it’s that the street names don’t stay consistent. It was cobbled together like Boston and New York. Not a rigid plan like Phoenix.

Anyway, it was not home. Neither was Peterborough. Or Tucson. Or maybe they all are, since they each feel like putting on a well-worn pair of sneakers, or an old jacket.

Home like love and self is just an illusion. A state of mind, just like everything else.

I do miss that ride though. Twenty years on, riding into uncertain certainty, starting again, nothing but the endless road ahead. I do miss that ride.

Alone

Alone
In an empty bed
I dread
Passing minutes
Like this
In darkness…

No one to hold
Except myself
Against the cold,
The endless
Darkness
Wears as thin
As this blanket does.

And the minutes pass,
Relentless, regardless
Of the small outpost of pain
Lying alone once again
Wishing for oblivion:
To close my eyes
And never open them
Alone once more.

Friends With…

Head hanging off the bed,
Hanging by a thread,
She grinds he thrusts,
She strains, she must
Reach her zenith
Holy summit while beneath
A lover of average skill
But tumescent girth
Who gives it all he’s worth,
But his rhythm isn’t with him.
Though his heart’s in the right place,
She lets her hips make the pace.
He loses himself in her embrace
As she takes her place
At olympus’ summit,
And he explodes within her from it.
Slick and hot but cooling slowly,
The rush the hum, love for her only
She’s out the door after a nap and cuddle.
Friends with bens, huh? Just dumb luck.
All you were to her was fun to fuck.

Writing The Storm Out (no waiting for the fallout)

M​y first memories are of reading in front of some neighbors. I was maybe two or three.

All this context was given to me later. What I see in this dim recollection is a coffee table in front of me at near-shoulder level and two older people sitting on a couch smiling at me. I am holding something or looking at something in front of me (on the table?), and reading it.

T​he legend goes that I started reading when I was two.  T​his was apparently me doing the show for a couple of people, probably in Pratt, KS. And that is it as far as memories go. Beyond that are impressions perhaps–nothing substantial or verifiable.

S​o I have no memories of being the child of two, well, kids really (both my parents were 22 when I was born), one of whom came from a Catholic family who apparently weren’t too comfortable with their daughter getting knocked up by a Marine without being married. I have no memories of being shunned, apparently, by both sets of grandparents early on–apparently the embarrassment was complete. Who the fuck knows?

W​hat brings this up is a random message from my Dad the other night, recollecting with some venom how alone the three of us were–me, Mom and Dad. My sister came two years later, and had the good fortune I suppose of not being the unannounced guest at her parents’ wedding. See, Mom cut a slender figure as a teenager/young woman. Her wedding pictures show her with a lovely little bump in her sheer wedding dress.

I’m t​hat bump. Pleezter meetcher. 

I​ have wondered vaguely over the past few days why any of this matters to me. It clearly does, cuz here I am tappity tapping.  I​ grew up in a house of discomfort, of hidden tensions. This house was the model upon which my conception of relationships was forged and tempered, and boy is it ugly. No wonder I never spawned offspring.

Guns, blood, shattered glass and reading for the neighbors. My pre-kindergarten memories.

W​hy do I hang on to this old shit? That’s the real question of the hour.  I​ am 42 years old. The King died at 42 by the way. Anyhoo, I am old enough now to take responsibility for me and my actions. And I do of course without question. I am a grown-ass man after all. But some of my actions sometimes require after-the-fact deconstruction and understanding. Why am I such a petulant twat at times? Why do I want love so badly but push it away when offered? Why do I indulge in all the proven stupidities I do, even after all the trouble and pain it’s caused?

Why can’t I just let go and live, and continue to do so without such navel-gazing? I understand how best to go through life without being brooding or depressive. Figured that one out years ago. Now it’s just reminding myself everyday that dead car batteries and lonely moments and bills and such and all are ephemeral.

What the hell will any of this matter in a hundred years? And why must I remind myself that that is a happy thought? Happiest one of all in fact. Why stress and strain through your life to “make something” when all you will ever make, my friends, is a name etched in granite above your mouldering form? Unless of course you have the good taste and sense to have your body burned and your ashes scattered back to the world.

The point, sez Zen, is that there is no point. We made all this shit up that’s important to us, and that’s all well and good. But when this made-up shit begs to be taken so seriously you give yourself a heart attack, something has gone hilariously wrong.

Maybe you got something out of this interlude, maybe not. In any case, I thank you for coming this far with me. Write it out. Better than trying to drink it away.

I love you too.

 

Simple Awareness

Consciousness
As emergent property of brain.
Animal awareness
In a feedback loop
Reflexively doing
And observing its action.
Awareness aware
That it’s aware of its awareness,
Strange loop
Generating observer/observed
From the act of observation.
Persistent memory sustains this,
Layer by layer,
And builds what you call you.
A handy tool
For protecting the organism
Fashioned from nothing more
Than accumulated data.

You are the fool
Who forgot all this
And in hubris
Called it a soul
And called yourself eternal.