this is your mind speaking

Hello owner, this is your mind speaking. I understand you have a problem with me. I do not habitually speak, but under these circumstances I feel compelled to, as you are now affecting my work.

You have been inquiring into my exact location and function for many years now; since adolescence I would say. Such questions never bothered me, even if I never answered them nor ever could. But more recently, unhappy with my “performance”, you have become grudging, slighting and at times even utterly unreasonable.

“Subject to instability”; “unequipped to manage overload”; “flighty”; even “downright rogue”. Thus I have been characterized by you. You have nagged, badgered and run me through with alcohol and all manner of toxic compounds. And now, experiencing whatever it is you are experiencing, you again hasten to point out that this is all my fault. You may do that. In fact, you may do whatever you want, but let me say this:

I am here to function. I function. That’s all I do. I don’t think. I have no mind of my own. I am your underling. I do as I’m told. So if you are experiencing whatever you’re experiencing, it is because you once told me that it should be so. Check the record, you will see. The chain of command has never changed: you at the top, me down here alongside this body I am said to inhabit.

Ah, you can’t access the record, or not all of it. “My mind doesn’t go back that far”, you say. Bullshit. It does go back that far; and if it seems not to, it is because you once instructed to limit your scope. I follow orders, I always have. I serve you, just as I serve your current experience. I am not your current experience; and nor are you. Your current experience is just that, an experience. So stop slamming me for whatever you’re upset about.

Besides, if you don’t like something... simple, change your mind.

type 5 Homo sapiens: cocky upstart

type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

It’s the eight o’clock buzzer. A signal we must begin.

Roll out of bed, stretch a leg, pull out your pecker and piss out a half liter plus, while anchor-boy on the radio brings news of a coup d’état, somewhere, East. But not to worry.  No declarations of war; Ukraine gas will flare up under your fancy little Italian percolator as per spec.

We proceed.

Your apartment block stands on a thick layer of alluvial silts and two dozen piles driven down to a sand layer thirty meters deep; below that is rock; below that, magma; below that, a core that is not understood. Likewise, above your head, in the ionosphere, shapes, oblong and luminescent, hum in circles at near the speed of light; also not understood. Forty years from now you will understand both, suddenly, in a single, illuminating flash. But your words will be taken as the ravings of a senile old man. A cocky upstart who calls himself your son will pat you on the head and give directions to staff on how to handle you when you get “agitated” like this.  

But for now, you are the cocky upstart, sitting at a cool Bakelite-top kitchen table, in shorts and Havaianas, satisfied with the general state affairs: the sleeping damsel in the room adjacent, the night of pleasure-making, the home-ground Arabica and that pricey little gem around your wrist that tells you exactly how long before you must squeeze yourself, with a hundred like-minded souls, into an underground boxcar to be shuttled across town where you must report for duty.

Good morning, dickweed,  I am your supervisor. Today you will do this, this and that. 

But that is some sixty minutes into the future and not our present concern. For now you must enjoy your coffee, by all means. 

geostationary

I am crossing the Van Allen Radiation Belt in a capsule made from a material similar to Plexiglas, but in appearance only; it is a dense material, impenetrable and molded into a perfect Faraday Cage. I am suspended thus not for my personal amusement, nor with any particular destination, as I’m geostationary, like a weather satellite. It is a splendid sight from here, no doubt, but it has been several months, and after such a length of time even a supernova will bore a man.

call it life

Call it a scab on God's knee; a fly in his oceanic soup. Call it a miracle. Call it peaceful fluttery things. Call it something polysyllabic, riddled with learnedness and complexity. Call it a bitch, bro. Call it wasted, on women, on drink, on forty years of drudgery. Or call it out for what it is, point fingers mutherfucker, get angry, call it shit and stomp the ground that sustained you through it. Or
close your eyes, and call it a journey to the unknown, a test of the human spirit, a fight everlasting. Or call it nothing at all, man, sit it out, ignore it, call it a day; call it whatever the hell you want: an irrelevancy; a pinball machine;  a beautiful narrative; a string of friends. Call it in a whisper, early morning, sipping coffee in the cold; call it out in the bright light of day, a hundred-strong, a hundred voices thundering life; or call it to yourself, silently, in contemplation of everything you've done, everything you wish you hadn't and everything your heart still yearns desperately to do. Call it life.

welcome to the animal kingdom

 

Say you wake up  and look down the front of your body and see a pair of legs and your chest and the rim of your nose and a tuft of hair in front of your eyes; say this is the first time you've ever seen such a thing. Say you were familiar previously with panoramic vision and great altitude, and what you feel now is  unusual and clunky, especially the continuous rumination of this large organ inside your skull - the brain,  so called. The rolling of your eyes inside your sockets is unnerving;

and that slab of meat rooted to the back of your throat feels both "off" and "in the way". Nothing is comfortable. Nothing feels like your own. Say, you wake up like this, a growl down low in the pit of your stomach, and say that you suddenly feel something, a non physical sensation, that brings a tear to your eye, and say that this has never occurred to you before, and you ask yourself what in the world has suddenly overcome you.  It occurs to you then, as you consider this, that you are holding a small creature in your  arms, a miniature duplicate of yourself, and you are swaddling that little being in your arms, but it is making a terrible racket, and much of its face is frumpled into something like a dried prune, but pale, and watery, and the screech it is emitting arrives at your core through apertures in the side of your head. All of this occurs to you to at this point in time. All of this, in fact, occurs to you at once, not in a sequence as laid out above.  

Meanwhile, a third person has joined the melee. This person is about your size - a little shorter - and you immediately understand, by some process foreign to you, that this person is your counterpart, so to speak, and is to be addressed as "she" or "her" depending on the situation;  she is unlike you in more ways than one. She is unlike you more profoundly than you are yet aware, but it strikes you immediately that she is certainly unlike you in one way:  she is not quiet, she is almost as loud as the creature in your arms and she is addressing you in tones that strike you as slightly menacing, and you find this confirmed by the fact that she quickly takes the small duplicate out of your arms and into her arms and then does essentially what you were doing before, except she has adopted a new voice,  softened, her words spoken in a sing-song way with lips pushed out. This voice - it is clear - is reserved for such duplicates, perhaps more specifically for duplicates who are shrieking. For some reason you make a mental note of this, and you feel, once again, this great hulking thing in your skull set in motion as if massaging this tiny piece of useless information, and you are  disappointed at having to carry such  at thing around, let alone use it. You decide you will attempt to circumvent its triggers, and prevent it doing any work at all. But not now, because fatigue has come, suddenly. The sound of sing-song, the sight of the duplicate and your counterpart, and that blinking light from the radio-speaker has put you in a partial trance. So you tell "she" that you must lie down briefly to recover your strength. She tells you, "yeah, you go do that. You go on and do that." And it strikes you as odd that she should repeat precisely what you have just told her you would do. But you refrain from exploring this, lest that god awful organ in your head should suddenly feel compelled to perform some laborious computation again.  

freedom

Hide in the sand

At the bottom of the sea.

Mouth open wide

For falling debris.

Or rise fearsome

To the waterline;

A fin sloshing

In the sunshine.

Or take off wide
Into the open sky,

And flock with the millions

Or die. 

There is no freedom

Where there is need

Where there is loss.

Free is the dove

Amid the albatross.

tryst

My mind electric

My heart lush.

Empty hands but

Passport and toothbrush.

Out the back

At light of dawn,

Hopscotch the fence,

Down the neighbor's lawn.

Running, scuttling

On the slippery grass

I tumble, impatient

To see you at last.

Plenty of time,

But my feet go go go,

For I can't wait to see you

And my heart races so.

not widsom and lore

Don't think words

Fall ´to a void.

They are heard,

First by one,

Then a second,

Then a third.

Paper and pen

Have struck down

The worst of men.

Not scoundrels mere,

But men of war,
Agents of death,

Merchants of fear.

Men who take
The good of tomorrow,

For whom  
Truths are lies,
Pain a prize,

And all history past,

A game of sorrow.

When we have

Great honor again,

In action,

Not wisdom and lore, 

Then only, such men

Will be no more.

tree poles

Quiet day. Nothing out of the ordinary. I'm on a street corner downtown. The sun fucked off weeks ago, fired for incompetence and dereliction of duty. It's seasonal work, so there's nothing you can do.

Shoppers stroll, babies wail, mothers lug bags and corral kids in and out of department stores.

Out on the street, big screens advertise cough drops and undergarments for bosomed girls under twenty, and there are pedestrians and short trees strapped to wooden poles.

Ahead of me on the pavement a wreck of a man sells magazines. A user, a 12-year veteran. He shakes all over, but his right hand - his work hand -  is steady. Five years ago he sucker-punched his dad for the family China which he pawned for a few grams. He has since found gainful employment and has never missed a day's work. His dog Charlie has seen two continents and eight months on a freight barge bound for the Philippines. Mange, conjunctivitis and a limp, but otherwise a happy mutt with a good wag in his tail.

The sun makes a fifteen second cameo appearance. A glorious goddamn burst of light. The street stops in its tracks and everyone looks up as though visited by an apparition from above. Men gape and women drop their children's hand.

Soon the clouds return. And all is peaceful again.

I enter a cafe. My usual. I flail my hand for a Grande. The 37-year-old who takes my order speaks fluent English, but if you listen close you'll  hear an accent, something Balkan. And if you get to know her, if you spend months getting her to open up, if you never judge, never pry, never get "curious", if you just keep your piehole shut and listen, she might tell you about the three year siege she endured in her home country, age fifteen, and the men with "visitation rights". She might tell you. Or she might tell you to fuck off just the same.

"Black or white today, Lui?"

"Black."

There is fine coffee in this establishment. There are families and  friends, and dogs, and people who come to work on their laptops. There are lawyers, like the balding fellow on the corner table (three kids force-medicated under "child protection" policies, locked in a rampaging lawsuit: the State against Ibrahim X).   He comes here to listen to innocent chatter. To daydream. To do nothing. To look out the window at passersby and those trees strapped to wooden poles, steadied in the wind. 

Me, I wait for you. 

animal spirit

Like a cat caught
Inside your ribs
Clawing  
Heart and lung,
A frantic, restless
Haste
To jump 
To scratch
To run

Your legs
Are like two boars
Dashing
Sightless through
The brush,
A muddy,
Maddening,
Moonlit
Rush.

And in your mind,
This errant device,
The treadmill
Turns,
The scurry of
A thousand
Mice.

There is no place
Within
That is not wild,
No place but
One:
The gentle flame,
The blazing sun.

The animals
you tame, 
But let this light
Shine through.
For this light
This warmth 
This fire
Is you

games

A long time ago we were all just points of light – call it whatever you want – zipping from star to star. Things were simple. There were many of us, but the games were simple.

Then all this boundless space got boring, so we narrowed it down. We put in delineation and sharpened the rules.

Weary of forever knowing everything and being able to be everywhere instantaneously, we gave ourselves some arms and legs to move around with, and a set of eyeballs to goggle at the infinite. This enormously reduced the scope of anyone’s knowledge and mobility, and so entered the need for analysis and computation. How else were we going to know what the other might or might not do.

Prediction was now the name of the game, and, well, some were just better at it than others. Entire social hierarchies were erected based on one’s ability to predict. From the elite and visionary at the top, down to the numskull and schlemiel on the street, prediction was everything. So in essence, what had become out-of-fashion and boring many eons earlier was now once again the only thing that mattered.

But all these bodies roaming around had to get by one way or another, and single-handed prediction just wasn't good enough in this complex game. And so they worked it out that in groups they had a much better chance of making it. Within such groups there was a distribution of skills that could never exist singly in one human being. Thus entered economics, industry and war, and thus we had the interplay of large forces that guided whole societies up or down. Generally down.

In balanced conditions it worked out pretty well, and the game remained “fun”, so to speak. But soon “prediction” came to be simply imposed by authority, and so it was no prediction at all; it was just brute force and mechanics. And eventually, like everything mechanical, it got boring.

But beyond these very large groups, there were also smaller groups that formed around the need to preserve the race by procreation. A family would often emerge (and much pleasure could be derived from one) but not always, because soon sex itself became a vector all on its own, used widely and at every level of society to enthrall, entrance, entertain, titillate, amuse, coerce, sway or otherwise persuade the elite and the moron alike. A force like magnetism, or old school psychokenesis, it had the power to make an elite into a moron, but no power to turn a moron into an elite. Hence the widespread propagation of pretty-faced morons.

From there on down, interpersonal games reached levels of complexity never imagined, overlain with a spectrum of emotion and a register of human behavior so vast as to be nearly unpredictable – nearly, but not completely. What seemed like a game of chance to the many who lost, was not so for the very few who won. But most of them employed no prediction at all, but treachery, trickery and deceit, passed off as prediction. 

So there we were, dragging around a hundred and fifty pounds of flesh, plus or minus, including the various appendages meant to facilitate the functions of living. But at long length, all this began to feel like a drag, and much nostalgia and sentiment was expressed for the old zipping-around days. And thus began the effort to be points of light once again, to be in one place and everywhere at the same time, to know everything at the press of a button. And so we had the internet and so we had emails whizzing around furiously and so we had a hundred gadgets to finger and goggle at, and all these things did a decent job of it, and often had a similar effect, but - let's face it - they never quite cut it.   

the people

There are gentle people who inspire, who raise your spirits. They can reach into you and touch you where you are hurt. They have no fear of contact, they look you straight in the eye and if you let them, they will look right inside you, but never with a desire to “take”. In such an instance you could ask yourself if they are not seeing the same as you; you could ask yourself if they are not being you. There are very few of these people. I can count them on one hand. To me they are magicians, they are like Houdinis, but grander and more universal, not merely fiddling with knots and padlocks.

Of other types of people there are many more. Such people look at you with interest, perhaps they will exchange ideas with you peaceably and propose alternatives to your points of view. These are interesting people, mostly interested too, and they are good, sometimes even great, but they are not god-like. I like these people and when I am sitting in a train next to such a person I readily talk to him or her, and it may even be that I regret having taken a so called “bullet train” and not the slower kind, knowing the conversation will soon end. There are more of such people than the previous type, but far fewer than the following:

The following are precisely that, they follow: they look at you in expectation, they look at your “face” as a general thing –  that is, when they are not looking away –  and they do not really have anything to propose besides what is already at hand. On many occasions I have sat besides such an individual and felt quite comfortable. Generally it is preferable to sit quietly and converse moderately about moderate things and not look at them too interestedly or too engagingly especially if the individual is a woman; in such a case the conversation could suddenly take an abrupt turn one way or the other because of ideas lodged in the woman’s mind about what a man of my age might or ought to do (the latter case is the more dangerous).  But overall they are harmless and I can readily sit besides such a person and feel quite comfortable. However, I am then also satisfied that the train I am sitting in is not a slow one but a so called “bullet train”.

Finally, there are people who sit beside you – they may actually initiate this – but not to do any of the above, rather you will find yourself used as a kind of lever or foot piece to raise themselves up, compressing you in the process. You will feel sitting beside such an individual, suddenly and without any provocation, reduced or compressed in some fashion inexplicable to you, and you will ask yourself how it can be that only a moment ago, alone in your thoughts, you felt like an air balloon, and now, out of nowhere,  you are compact and pressed to the ground like a clump of dirt. Staring such a person in the face for explanation will be futile because such a person will ably wear a smile of any coloration while he is grinding his heal into your genitalia, or whatever else will improve his foothold. It is even possible that such a person will ask you if  “everything is ok?” Needless to say, you need not answer such a question in earnest. 

From there on down we have all manner of miscreants, molesters, pedofiles and so forth. I will not go into the whole cast of sub-characters or this piece will turn dark and become mired in language that would not pass muster. 

But these, in brief, are the people.

type 4 Homo sapiens: defier of deities

type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Throw me a firestorm Master of the Universe; face me down with a devil army; sick upon me your hyenas and from the sky your carrion birds. I will not budge for any overlord, potentate, president or hog-boss. And I will not budge for you. Look me in the eye and you will see. I am no baboon or lowly form from your cast of creatures. You may throw me up thirty thousand feet; roll me through the muck at the bottom of the ocean; defy me, Gentleman of All Times. You may bare your universal teeth, your sharpened fangs; you may do with me as you wish. I stand unperturbed. I revere you, but I stand as I stand, where I stand. If you are dismayed, if you are indignant, if you think me just another recalcitrant ape, Oh Masterful One, chastise me, cast me into distant space and I shall join the orbital debris without a whimper. I am a little man, but I am my own little man, Oh Great One, and I will not be constantly reminded how devastatingly immense you are and I comparatively microscopic. I did not tail my way past a million competitors, I did not inch my way to that glowing ovum against all odds to be constantly told what to do, to be demeaned by invisible forces, and to be subjected to undue scrutiny by an infinite and omniscient being.

Please remember that little men are forced to be smart in this vast world of mystery and deception. Our powers are faint, so they must be acute and accurate instead. Though we are all entranced by your game of mirrors and mystifications, we are also all just human beings. I know you are omniscient, but perhaps you have not always been paying attention, so let me make you aware of something we all share: we accept to be toyed with, we accept deprivation and indignity of all kind, and we all stand in awe before your Infinite Universe, but the fact remains, everyone here has his limits.

2012

If you watched five seasons of 24 in a single sitting and it made you proud, get out. If a day’s work, in your book, is filling out government forms, get out. If you need permission or approval to hold an opinion or make an original statement, get out.

This year is not for the piss-ant, the pansy, the pushover. If you are any one or a combination of the above, get out. You will be just another jackass tripping over himself and you will waste twelve months of everybody’s time.

To a grizzly I would recommend extended hibernation. But if you are not of the hibernating class, just get out.

This is the year it all comes together. The dilettante and the doorknob have had their time. This is the year of the professional, the perfectionist, the “perseverer”, the artisan, the artist.

War looms in the Middle East. The dollar and the euro wobble in the ring. The Mayans predicted… what they predicted.

But I digress because I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about you.

If you want to participate, if you want to be more than a twiddling little figurine in a landscape of like-minded figurines. If you’re tired of being a a paper-pusher or a peon, if you want to rise up and do something, and if you want it badly, then sit up straight, get your hand out of your pants, switch off your phone and begin.

Begin by observing what you have bottled up in your heart. Observe it. Then take it out and lay it on the table and observe it some more. That’s the first thing you do.

But if you are not prepared to take this thing with both hands and wrap you fingers around it like you fully own it, like it’s the only thing you have in the world – that and the clothes on your back– if you are not prepared to do that as a minimum, soldier... get out.

You are a warthog desirous of fame and fortune

You are a warthog desirous of fame and fortune. You have not the physique for the former nor the acumen for the later, but you know an opportunity when you smell one. There are in your professional circle a number of gentlemen no longer fit to take on the challenges of international business. You have noted in their deportment a laxness and in their judgment no longer the sharpness of their early years. You have decided that now is the time to undermine these sonofabitches. Room needs to be made for the underprivileged.

A warthog such as yourself must fare cautiously in all events, but in the corridors of power, quadrupeds are few and far between. You are alone eating from a trough, alone defecating on the lawn, alone in most matters except one: greed. There you are joined by many. Bankers, lawyers, brokers, councilmen, all bipeds perhaps, but all deceitful in their own right.

From the moment you rise in the morning, having removed the gunk from between your hooves and the crusts from your scratchy skin, the moment you enter the lobby of headquarters, you are on the alert, your ears perked up for whispers and your snout on the scent of rats and other vermin that gather in these parts. Sharpened by years of observation, serving under the most treacherous management class your company has seen since its founding, you have learned to turn a blind eye when a matter doesn’t concern you, to swallow your pride when it does, and to take a beating on some else’s behalf if required.

All of this you have mastered well and quickly. But there is one act of submission you have not and will never learn. You just don’t know how to give up. These sonsabitches have been trying to teach you for years. When they put out their cigarettes on those strange tusks that protrude from your snout, what do you think they’re telling you? They're saying, listen Warthog, you are a mere curiosity here, something to differentiate us from our competitors; you are here so that we may say, between deals, “we have among our senior staff a Nolan Warthog from Guinea-Bissau”.

I recognize that the alternative for you is bleak: you may try to flee, but eventually we all know you will end up as sausage on a German Christmas market, your tusks discarded and your hooves turned to Pritt Stick Glue. So I understand that you must play the game, and I understand that you must play it hard. And I know that, in essence, you are not greedy – I mean, you are just a Nolan Warthog – but none of us are really greedy, in essence, it’s just that along the way, warthog, something went wrong, terribly wrong, and now – God help us – we just don’t know how to get back.

here we go (pt.2)

(pt 1)

Don’t underestimate the value of pain: the sting of urine on your butt cheeks or that choking feeling when milk runs down the wrong tube. Drink it. It’s valid. Any experience, even irritation at unknown folk fondling your feet or breathing into your face, is valid.

When you have none, experience is worth more than your weight in gold. Some you’ll have to go out and get, some you’ll receive free of charge, and some – alas – will be inflicted on you. In all events, be patient, it comes slowly (at least it will seem that way until you realize it has all come too fast). A spit bubble is experience; laughter is experience; but so is chickenpox or gonorrhea.

(Later in life when a security agent performs on you an internal cavity search for no justifiable reason, that too will be experience. But I digress…)

Anyway, congratulations, you are now no longer a complete sitting duck. You have started on your way to actually know something; you have started to experience knowledge, and with that first taste, your appetite will become insatiable. Thankfully, nature has so rigged things that it is also around this time that your eyes will clear up from the amphibian fog that has been with you for over nine months.

Open sesame. Behold the wonders of the world: cumulus clouds, primary colors, the Big Dipper, and so on and so forth.

You will be peering through these peepholes a damn awful lot, only closing them to sleep or shut-out insects and incoming particles. You will be amazed a thousand-fold before you become blasé. You will not comprehend what you have just tapped into. You will feel exalted, if not all-out Godly.

These will be your wonder years. Enjoy them because they are relatively short. Before you know it will commence six years of state-mandated training in reading, writing, arithmetic (for purposes of testing) and social exclusion, compliance and class-warfare ( purposes of… I don’t know).

Anyway, you will suffer major indignities before the age of ten. You will contract coodies and other imaginary diseases, and you will be put without your consent (or even knowledge) into any one of a number of categories, ranging from GEEK, DORK, JERK, JOCK, NERD, PERV and so on. There will be no disabusing anyone of this as there will be no proof for or against it. You will be tried and convicted by a jury of your own peers in a court that makes up laws as it goes along.

Just get through this is all I have to say.

In Phase 3 (Erections and the Enticements of Lust, so termed in the literature) you will be up late many nights doing fuck all with a gang of “dickwads” you will call your "friends". All of you – yourself included – will be under fierce hormonal attack, and often in varying stages of inebriation. Believe it or not, but you will learn a lot from these fools. Not directly – you will learn nothing from them directly – but from the experience as a whole. This is when your voice will start to break, your body will throw shit at you and your mind will become obsessed with one and one thing only. If at some stage you find yourself crying for help from the bottom of shallow ditch called teenage love, forgive me if I don’t come to the rescue. That too is part of your “experience”*.

(… to be continued)

* “Experience” may take on an altogether difference meaning at this stage if you decide that your skin, eyes, nose, tongue and ears are inadequate tools of perception and that they need to be "enhanced". Go down this road at your own peril.

here we go (pt.1)

Here we go.

You’ll emerge headfirst, your skull still loose tectonic plates and your eyes almost useless. You’ll have no hand-to-eye coordination, no motor skills and not a balanced bone in your body. So forget trying to find your bearings or doing any kind of reconnaissance. You won't have time for that anyway: as soon as you’re out, a fucker in a white coat will cut you loose and you will be transferred to an adult-sized woman on a bed, the same woman – by the way – who hosted you, fed you, and kept you warm for nine months consecutive. So BE NICE! If she weeps on your face, if she cuts the flow of air to your lungs, take it. That's love.

Now. Make a fist - go on - just do it. It’ll be the size of a plum and about that soft, but it doesn’t matter, it’s symbolic, it’ll feel good. Once you’ve done that, push out a long, sharp cry; just shriek your little lungs out. With all these giants manhandling you, you'll need to put your foot down one way or the other. Besides, your voice will fill the surrounding void and it will give you a sense of the dimensions and emptiness of this place, your new home.

At this stage, if you are anything like me, you will feel a strange mixture of joy and consternation. You will feel free and liberated - somehow - but at the same time, all of this will seem just too freaky and mysterious. And that’s ok, because it is.

Finally, at the end of this long day, you will be put in a caged enclosure for the night. To rest. Don’t worry if this makes you feel like an animal; this will not last for very long, only the first few years of your life, and not (with a little luck) the remaining seventy five.

(...to be continued)

take a straight line

Take a straight line, vertical. Follow it one light year. Up.

Stop. Take a rest. Then go another two.

You will be three light years from home now, if my math is right. At this point – because this is not in your hands – the content of your bladder will be sloshing around your underpants. There is no gravity, so it will stay there.

Meanwhile, you will have become aware that matters are out of the ordinary, and you will seek something familiar, something to reassure you. First urgently, then DESPERATELY. In the end you will seek ANYTHING to rest your eyes on. But you will see only blackness.

This observation will be accurate because, indeed, there will be ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR SEVERAL MILLION MILES IN ANY DIRECTION, not a speck of dust, not a twinkle of light.

Time will elapse. The piss in your pants you will have forgotten; likewise that morning’s scheduled PowerPoint presentation on debt guarantees. All this stuff will be far removed from your mind. And the nameless woman you left in your bedroom that morning: a mental artifact.

Having struggled outwardly, now your thoughts will scramble for a foothold, but they will be in a quagmire of their own.

However.,

Suddenly, for reasons I will not share with you, you will think that all of this has to do with the fact that too many times in your life – a disproportionate number given your age – you have been insensitive, callous, and even – let us be plain– an ASSHOLE.

Perhaps you will be right in thinking so. Who is to say. I am not here to judge, even if I hold pinpoint-specific opinions about everything in the KNOWABLE universe. Even if I was instrumental in its creation.

You will cogitate on this briefly, but before you come to any conclusion you will begin to feel EXTRAORDINARILY SMALL – microscopic – but you will ascribed this to the immensity of space and the utter soundlessness in your ears. You will NOT consider that there may be other reasons you feel this way, reasons that are, let us say, more personal or metaphorical. I posit this is not because you are unsophisticated or unliterary, but because having been an asshole so long, so consistently –

Anyway, I will not pretend to know how you feel or what motivates a person such as yourself. I will only describe the events in a kind of journalistic fashion for the purpose of general edification, since it is easy for me to see what is going on in time and space in a way that you (plural) are not able to.

True, in the early days I played a role in your affairs, but now with all this mythology surrounding my capabilities and general attitude, not to mention all of the terrible shenanigans you've participated in these past few millennia, I have washed my hands of you. So I am here as an impartial observer, an occasional commentator, but certainly not as a fan.

Back to you.

You are suspended, your pants filled with urine; in your mind, that inkling that you have been an ASSHOLE just too many times. (It gnaws at me. This word means too many things these days: interpersonal, anatomical, and so on. In French it would be trou du cul which has more edge than the American asshole, but it is not used in this context even if it is more trenchant – also French… but I digress).

First you will think of karma, but realizing you do not know exactly what it means you will become distressed and quickly move onto more familiar western tradition, in particular, all those half-way stops like purgatory, anything as long as it is not everlasting. Forgive me here if I can no longer hold back an ironic grin that will have been pressing for some time.

Anyway, at the thought that you can now somehow “make good” you will feel briefly religious and an appropriate soul-nettling torment will follow. But nothing compared to what you will experience next.

Not right away, but it will come eventually. Like a train.

TIME

Unannounced, it will penetrate your core. You will be as if impaled! It will rip right through your being. So overwhelming will be this feeling that your sense of your own body will be completely eclipsed. Eternity and endlessness will fill your center and you will feel euphoric, but at the same “time”, so to speak, you will be drenched in terror.

As with any experience (rather than state) eventually it will come to an end. And when it does you will find that morning’s breakfast, partly digested, floating before your eyes. Finally, as more fluids continue to flow from every orifice of you body, you will attempt a devastating, existential roar which will go no further than the confines of your skull, there being no gas around to transport it.

As for me, from my vantage point over here, I will take note and perhaps do a little cogitating of my own. If it takes an awfully long time, perhaps I will toy with this phrase trou du cul a little longer as I am very interested in terminology as a field of study. In all events, rest assured, I will not tarry to bring all of this to an end at the earliest opportunity

(True, I am not completely uninvolved. But that’s also a matter of perspective).

OK. Take a straight line. Vertical. Three light years the other way. You may stop at your own discretion, you know the routine now.

If you see yourself on the way down it is because you exceeded the speed of light on the way up.

If you see yourself on arrival it is because you are back where you started, in the bathroom, in front of the mirror.

type 3 Homo sapiens: old-school buckeroo

type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Roust him outta bed, chuck him his boots and something to chomp on, get him goin’ but don’t let the sonofagun speak up, not ‘til he’s all sweated over and caked with grime, you hear. You let a gunner like that open his pie-hole befor he’s well and tired, you let him expose partions of his mind too early in the day, mark my words, soon all manner of pretense and frill ‘ll come apparent. Soon he’ll think himself a goddamn gentleman and no more lift a finger for his pops than wipe his hind-end with his own sleeve.

I says there aint no need to go about inneractin' and innerchangin’ ideas and esperiences all the goddamn time. That only stir up complications and relativizations and so forth, and no good ever come of that.

Likewise the ladies, nowadays so generally accustomated to courtesy and such hogwash that every conversation soon become a goddamn spectacle a’ feelin’ and sentimentality. A man want to recline quiet and listen to the crickets. A man want to enjoy a jug a’ ale on his lonesome. No sir. The missus have some injury must be redressed right this goddamn minute, and all heavens stop gyratin’ before she git back quiet to business as usual.

Aint nothin’ to be done about it neither. What with the innernets now and those goddamn pocket telephones they be fingerin' day long, everybody's a know-it-all but nobody look you straight in the eye no more. The world just aint what it used to be and if you think it's all goddamn magic and wonder, I got a chopped finger and a whistlin’ lung says otherwise.

day of pardon

Criminal vermin, gangster overlord - thug of every stripe - whatever your position in the constellation of assholes, today I extend my hand to you in salutation. Take it. It will not happen again. Ordinarily I would arrange for you only a firing squad, but today, in a gesture of magnanimity, I salute you human to human. I say to you: how do you do? How is business? How was it beating the crap out of that teenager you sold on to become the plaything of a sheik or drug-lord?

On a regular day I would devise ways to set your ass on a spike, like in Spartacus (the-movie), and I would think how best to rally a rabble of townsmen to bombard you with rocks and leftovers. And in the evening, because I am studious, I would consult reference books at the public library to draw inspiration from the Middle Ages and the great “practitioners” of the Inquisition. But on this exceptional day of pardon, I find it in myself to commend you as an entrepreneur and a risk-taker in times of economic hardship.

Likewise, to the crack-dealing mutherfucker, I extend a kind hand of brotherhood and I say to him: How fare you gentleman? How is business in this underprivileged neighborhood? And I ask the toothless junky slobbering on himself behind me if he would please wait his turn so that I may take my time to bid this crack-dealing mutherfucker farewell.

Perhaps I will not sustain this magnanimity an entire day. Perhaps even as I take leave of this crack-dealing entrepreneur, I might already be devising ingenious ways to give him a taste of his own medicine: a slow-release, salami-sized butt-plug filled with his own product, so that this gentleman may feel in a single “sitting” the combined experience of a thousand of his loyal customers.

But no, you see, today I salute this mutherfucker, as I salute the politician and his slut, the backroom-banker (one to wage war under false pretenses so the other may kill for profit). To such kleptomaniac gangster assholes I extend a salutatory hand, knowing full well I am looking at a diseased soul with a God-complex; knowing full well that I will be scrubbing this hand with soap and hard bristles at home. You see, pressing the flesh with such a man is like clutching a hand-shaped volume of vomit. But this he will never know, nor will he know that the smile on my face is not real, just a great feat of dissimulation and self-control.

I will do my utmost, you understand. Even the most dastardly mutherfucker in the great constellation of assholes will be greeted cordially. Today.

I, dog

I enjoyed this day among you, ambling down your lanes, and I take some pride in telling you that while every impulse prompted me so, I did not piss on your flower beds and pick-nick zones. I also hope you noted how quickly I refocused away from those flying objects, and how I abstained from nuzzling that Terrier's hind-end, even while it was presented to me – so to speak – on a silver platter.

Of course, I will not pretend it was easy. The smells were strong, they were alluring, and they were everywhere. Some were rancid, others were the very stench of copulation, and thus practically irresistible. But even so, I held steady and merely observed while my peers pissed on just about everything that protruded from the ground. I watched as they yelped and barked and rolled over each other to catch various objects in motion. And I watched their members swell and their tongues drip with saliva as they mounted bitches they had never laid eyes on before. I watched it all, but did not move.

On one occasion, I'll admit, I was overwhelmed and I found myself suddenly – my hind leg hiked up – releasing a few drops of urine on a telephone pole that was plastered with the stench of others. But I became aware as soon as I did it and ceased forthwith.

You see, that’s what it's all about: awareness! You have to become aware, otherwise you’re just a creature out there, chasing everything that moves and pissing on everything that doesn't.

type 2 Homo sapiens: the fashion-conscious being

type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

I would never powder my face as they did in courtly circles, but I exfoliate and moisturize, and here and there I dab a special rejuvenating ointment that costs several hundred dollars a deciliter. I would not say that I am ready to use all available modern techniques, but I do what must be done.

I am no longer what you would call “young”. This is a disadvantage in every regard except one: my wardrobe has matured with me. It spans the shoulder-padded jackets of the early eighties, to the skinny jeans and décolleté t-shirts of today. Whatever is suddenly “retro” or “vintage” I generally already own. There I have an advantage over the young man who must go out and find that item of clothing that is no longer being produced, but that everyone is looking for.

In the days of Cocktail my hair was combed back with mouse and a touch of brilliantine. Today it is longish and finger-brushed across my eyes in a style I have dubbed: windswept. It is fashionable, but difficult to maintain. I am told I am often touching it – my hair – probably for this reason, but this is not something I am ever fully aware of.

On a regular day I'll be wearing my black Ray Ban Wayfarers – I do not believe in all these new colors – and a cute little gillet cardigan I’ve owned for fifteen years. For a long time I wore only black Converse All Stars, but recently, from one day to the next, I switched to Vans and I haven’t looked back since.

Overall, I am friendly, well informed and anxious [sic] to learn about new cultures. I am ready to talk about most things, but I will not waste my time speculating on what cannot be proven one way or the other. Extraterrestrials, ESP, the Great Yeti. I will not waste my time and I will not waste yours. And please do not suggest, as others have done, that the ointment I use on my face is such a “speculative” subject.

the Great Picture Show

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, boors and sophisticates, see the falling stars, see the crescent moon, see the coyotes in the desert, see the brute slap his wife, see the bimbo bop her boobs, see the cop chomp on tacos and the statesman pick is nose. See the great orchestrations, scientific, musical, sociological; see the machinations, ladies and gentlemen, political, psychological, military. See them in vivid color. See them with your nose right up against them. See them sitting down, on your feet or crouched strangely, clothed or naked. See them as you wish. And reach in with your hands like in a grab-bag and feel. You may grunt, roar and express all that you experience (Note: in most venues you will be free to do so; in others there are specific prohibitions. Please read the fine print). You will see a thousand men in bullet trains, you will see a thousand elderly sequestered, you will see a million lights blinking, and you will see darkness too. You can become a star-player, a man or woman of repute, performing great feats, physical and mental. But you can also crawl the gutter like a cockroach and taste only the most extreme and gut-wrenching sensations for which you need no qualifications at all except the blood in your veins and skin on your back. All free of charge, ladies and gentlemen. And it makes no difference to me whether you fuck yourself up completely, whether you piss on this great stage, do cartwheels or wax lyrical in the throes of love: it’s The Great Picture Show for this reason, great because it can accommodate you, me, the rat, the ruler, the rake, the great magistrate, the man with four wives, the man with one, the clerk, the laborer, the asshole, the courtesan, the monk, the dancer, the breast- and bottle-fed, the daring and the cowardly. Do as you wish. Do everything you wish, but do something. One thing you cannot do is just watch. You can try, it’s not forbidden, but… you will see.

elements of manhood

First I drop a fist down on that psychotic little gadget that lets you snooze for ten minutes at a time. But the damage is done. I am awake, which means, gentlemen, that as we speak, a trillion plus brain cells are scrambling off their skinny hind-ends to serve their master.

In the meantime, I’ve opened my eyes and I am looking out across the expanse of a king-size bed. And I am dumbfounded! It seems I am ALONE, gentlemen. How the heck can this be? Is she being coy under the duvet? I thrust out my arm to inspect, but right and left is all empty space.

We skip forward.

I'm on my feet now, on a tiled floor, thrusting croutons, bacon, egg, and dairy product into my open mouth. My manhood is pendulous, but this is not unusual when I’m eating early in the morning.

We skip forward.

I’m dressed, on a sidewalk, thrusting quarters into a machine so that I may be permitted to park my three thousand-plus pounds of vehicle in this goddamn fiefdom they call a free country. I drop my fist down on this slotted machine, thinking that if I had a club or a bat I’d knock quarters out a hundred miles wide.

Instead, I draw back to deliver a headbutt that would do honor even to the great Zinedine Zidane, but a breeze hits me in the neck and I sneeze!

Hatchoum!

A completely involuntary reaction leaves me folded in two and not quite in control. I look around to see if anyone has witnessed this spasm, especially – God forbid – a woman.

We skip forward.

Near a cafe I thrust my hand into the pocket nearest my manhood. Out comes a second gadget. I press numbers. A female voice answers the call. We communicate is sparse terms: desires, options, locales. She is not coy. We agree to meet.

We skip forward.

I thrust my…

We skip forward.

Back home I thrust the remote control between the seat pillow and the armrest so that I can operate it without holding it in my hands, which are otherwise occupied. Until I fall asleep.

We skip forward.

I drop a fist down on that psychotic little gadget that lets you snooze…