I remember the honeysuckle sweet smell of our pillow whispering slumber melodies ever and on, languid dizzy nightdreaming tangled skin weaving, an ocean of upswelling pheremone fountains and peeling paint in new places at night.  Road trip car naps early morning frosted sunrise, red cotton dresses and lover's spit.  Fever wrapped and unfolding together, the taste of metal in my mouth biking home at dawn.  The first time, back in your parents' living room and hands held all of my feelings flow as a sweet confession; birthday dinner wine stains and I had to choose you and I was down on one knee, choosing; it was so long ago like yesterday I was taken into the ladies circle while your attendants made flowers in my hair and the world still smelled of your cotton curling heart shape.  How delicate and loving and waiting you were while I shed held tears and sprouted my worth under your leading hand and oh yes the staring contests I could always win because I had a secret and you wouldn't believe me when I told you but later we felt our hearts beating and it was not romantic but simply very real and wonderful.

God!  What beautiful dreams for a poor boy, mercifully wrapped in goddess' glorious manifest manifold.  May ever she sweep me up again, ashen and aching for a soft place to land.

oh, hello hello again

friend 

sit at my typewriter with a bit of ham to bandy about.  lol.  excuse this mess my deer. correct me if i'm wrong but weren't you here before with the others?  TOAST is my forte on thissaterday 

collectivist thou shalt be shivered skapeth mine atrocious pendant.  fortified goats milk on wednesdays.  salad days on fridays.  tun off spellcheck with all the other metronomic digitalations.  magnetic hamster wheel you, curses and spite oh friday night fright night. 

ugh, such a fill I've had so early this day.  dream another dream maybe, slide around another upstream.  cargo holds carry me a bit shallow,, let's have it up up up now, up up up!  

and believe you me i could go on all day like this one.

I feel this way.

Am I too old for new friends?

Is there no hope for the humans?

My heart swells and bursts,

there is something it wants

but it doesn't understand.

I want to see you

I want you to see me

but I don't know what I mean

everything I lay my eyes on

seems a madness to me

To touch and to talk

to close the gap between

what exactly is it that I'm wanting?

I know only the lonely sojourn

from the alone to the alone

Won't you come into this place?

I am occupying a solitary space

I am surrounded but stranded

My heart still empty handed

Pinned to a world burning.

schizo journal excerpts

 

pssh, men...

For a while now I've been deeply unsettled by something Terence Mckenna said: intelligence can't be trusted with the monkeys because we're basically scum.  Most of our angelic aspirations are eclipsed by backstabbing, power-grabbing, betrayal, infidelity, you know the list.  We're in possession of this extraordinary imagination and spiritual consciousness or whatever you want to call it but our behavior for the most part is driven by giddy, mischievous self-absorbed pleasure seeking.  I certainly notice this about myself at times when I can honestly reflect on my life.  For all of my idealism and intellectual blah blah blah, deep down I'm basically trying to get laid, tear some shit up and find a free lunch.  Viewing the human race this way has caused a major roadblock to any idea I have of a better future for the planet.

Well, I think I may have figured it out the flaw in my thinking: what if it's not monkeys who are scum but just men?  This morning my wife and I were talking about all the various issues surrounding procreation and our differing opinions about our own future- I want more kids, she doesn't.  I kept expressing that I just wanted my feelings about it to be known; I have no illusion that it is in any way my decision.  In fact, it's not enough to say that having children isn't JUST the man's decision; in fact, I think men should have nothing to do with it whatsoever.  Women should make all the decisions about offspring in council with their mothers, sisters, grandmothers, etc. and just call in a man whenever they need his genetic material.  I basically have this view of male-ness in general, that we are drone workers; all direction and vision of families /  society should be made by women.  

So it is actually appropriate that men are scum; we're not actually scum, we just shouldn't be let anywhere near the controls.  We're like monkeys let loose in the laboratory.  We don't really know what the stakes are or how to work anything, we're just going to tear the place up.  We are too stupid, too simple.  This is how we should be, just don't give us any real power or authority.  Male-ness consists in doing assigned tasks, followed by some nice food and drink; we're also ready to give our genetic material to pretty much anyone who wants it.   This is how I feel about myself as I get older, despite my extreme intellectual bent; give me a moderately difficult task, give me chicken and beer, put me in bed, the end.  For god's sake, don't give me any power, I would destroy the place!  I would cause so much pain to people if I were allowed to run amuck and indulge in my own hare-brained scheming.  Well, look around- this is exactly what is going on in the world.  The whole planet has spiraled into directionless catastrophe under the direction of the brainless male drones.

I'm aware of how brutally I'm just smashing all the rules of progressive thought here- first of all, by giving such defined gender roles.  Well, I don't know what to say about that.  Maybe the reason we are so hesitant to assign gender roles is because we are so profoundly alienated from what they really are, so we rightly exercise extreme caution.  I'm pretty sure that the real nature and weight of feminine power is so suppressed by the long history of patriarchy that even the most de-programmed women are scarcely in possession of 10% of it.  This is an intuition my wife experienced while giving birth- there's a whole world of power and energy under the surface that has been so thoroughly cut off that most women are barely aware of it.  Hey, she said it, not me.  But I think she's right.

I'm also painting a picture of women as being perfect, as if they are in no way motivated by selfish pleasure-seeking.  Well, I don't really have any place to say what it's like to be a woman.  I assume that any self-absorption on the part of women is just an accident of having male-ness grafted onto them by patriarchy, which only persists by suppressing and perverting female wisdom and power.  I assume women are naturally perfect beings… so sue me, hahaha.

What I'm actually suggesting are extreme gender roles.  Woman as lord and master, man as servant... well, let's say well-rewarded servant.  As far as I can work out, that is what would really make everyone happiest.  I'm certainly not talking about equality, which tends to be the general best-case consensus in progressive, eco-feminist conversations- "we don't want female dominance, just balance."    Good lord, no!  Don't let the men have any decision-making power; send them out into the hallway, for good. I'm certainly not saying that men can't be as creative as women or as passionate or as loving or as intellectual; we just can't have our hands on the wheel; we're not cut out for it.    I'm telling you- we don't really want control.  We're perfectly miserable having to run this show, just too ashamed and bull-headed to admit it.  

liberation

What do I want?  I want to be free.  I don't know what that looks like but I know that this ain't it.  Can you be free in this life?  Or is that the fundamental illusion that keeps us pinned to the karmic wheel?  Is the only freedom in death?  That would suggest the best course in life would be an ascetic, yogic style of purification and preparation for final rites.  Cast off from this temporal life, you know, the entire trip of eastern civilization, turning away from all of this Maya.  I don't know, I've spent a lot of time following that idea, half-heartedly of course…. it's hard to stick with it unless you really have death fully in mind, all the time, overshadowing everything.  Otherwise you end up feeling that you are just letting your life slip away, which is exactly what you're doing of course.

Maybe that view is the ultimate deception?  All culture stemming from the 60's would say so.  Live life now, this is all there is, be wild.  That's the freedom of Hunter Thompson and Keith Richards.  You know, I've done that too but also half-heartedly.  I've gotten a lot of good out of it.  Certainly got a lot of misery and headaches too.  Besides, it's terribly expensive, which explains the culture of Lawyers Guns and Money that grew out of the 60's-style freedom.  It also requires a very harsh, atheistic, chaotic cosmology that in no way seems to correspond with what you feel when you are really connected to nature.  It also creates this never-ending need to escape, which is such an obvious male thing that it makes me cringe to think I could participate in it.  My rule tends to be- if it's what men do, it must be wrong!  The 60's acid nihilism is total male-dominator style dressed up as feminism, which makes it all the more appalling.

That Dionysian, no-thought-for-the-future thing is the way of the bottle, of staying up all night and talking, talking, talking, of dissipation and rebellion, of infidelity, of self-absorption.  In Christian terms, it's the devil.  As usual, this makes me feel very conflicted- on the one hand, I feel that all Christian metaphor systems must be basically correct; on the other, the pagan in me feels exactly the opposite.  This is one of the big issues that I can never make heads or tails of.  

I don't know, maybe both views are wrong and there is no freedom to be attained.  There's just…. this.  I don't know what this is but freedom, it ain't.  Freedom from what?  From social constraints?  You could defect, lots of people do but I'm not sure they have achieved a sense of liberation.  The nature of being human seems to mean having some kind of chain around your soul that you can't shrug off by changing your external circumstances; you are just as likely to achieve liberation in a jail cell, a car accident, an ashram, a nudist colony, a convent, a wine bar, or just sitting on a cushion for years and years and years.

Maybe the problem is that both paths tend to become forms of self-absorption, which is the real prison.  If I spend all my time meditating and fasting and purifying, I tend to increase the distance between myself and others, become ungrounded and judgmental.  If I spend all my time reveling and rebelling, I tend to lose sight of the interests of those around me and my goal becomes my own hedonic pleasure, which is a never-ending spiral.  Maybe that's not true of either path…. it's so hard to really see clearly when you are being self-absorbed.  One thing looks like another all the time.  And that is the damned problem with this stupid life, always casting you one way then another, all in ignorance, vanity!  Which makes the case for the acid-nihilism party-on thing.  

No matter what I do or have done in my life, what completely divergent strategies I follow, everything is always half freedom and half slavery, half heaven and half hell.  So then the question is- why get out of bed?  Why leave home?  Why grow as a person?  The ratio of heaven and hell is immutable and you're gonna get both no matter what.  That's what I truly feel; surely it can't be right.  That's what people call "depression".  Of course, when you feel that way, non-depression seems like what people call "self-deception".  

sisyphus, again

As far as I can work out, life is actually a sort of dream written in some hyperspatial dimension outside of time that you can only view in its entirely upon death…. well, my metaphysics may not be perfectly sound there but that's not the point.  The point is that life is not what it seems to be: accidental.  It's all heavily scripted and most of the choices you make are illusory.  I notice that no matter how I struggle and veer, I am always stuck with a very particular set of problems surrounding the relations of certain recurring characters that embody certain moral truths.  The tests are always the same, no matter how they are projected onto others.  And I keep failing the test.  I'm stuck in it as if I'm being punished.

It can go on for years sometimes- the light seemingly just around the corner when suddenly you realize all progress was a delusion and nothing has changed, the situations are just as sticky, the set of problems inside you and around you are immutable.  Lots of work, all in vain.  Sisyphus as the foundational myth of human existence.  Desolation.  Exhaustion.  Hopelesness.  So depressing, I know… what, you never feel these things??  

It's just so disappointing to feel that the franco-existentialist view of life is the most accurate one.  I never see it that way for long- life cranks up again and I march again to the beat of ideals and hope in a better life, an improved self with a more perfect heart learning to love more fully.  But the inevitable sense of feeling trapped inside a tragedy returns, always with a much more devastating sense of clarity than what I felt in the interim.  Am I depressed?  Or is this really how it is?  The question plagues me daily.  I resist it but it feels like the truth.  At least, it feels the same way it feels when you know, deep down, that you are resisting the truth.