sisters and brothers

On this day, your day of birth, you are zero and have no life. I do not mean this ironically. It’s just numbers. You have not lived a day and thus you have no life. Others around you have lived, but this does not make them superior. On the contrary, they look at you with hope and wonder, convinced you will not fuck up as they have. For this reason and this reason alone - at this particular point in history - you are superior.

Do not let it get to your head, though, little man. It’s just the current state of their thinking. Your whole life will be about what you think and what other people think, not what is. You think you have entered a world of things; you have not. You have entered a world of opinions and considerations.

Welcome

Case in point: the big tall guy, a gentleman in all outward appearance, is in his mind a cripple, barely kept up by a matrix of internalized excuses and justifications. Look at his eye, there you will see a dull flicker. You see that? You don’t want that. That’s your dad. Nice guy, but you don’t want that.

That small dude opposite, that’s your brother. He will show you the ropes. He’s a mischievous little rascal with a weird sense of humor, but his heart’s in the right place. He will always mean you well. Follow him. One day, you will wake up, your throat tied in a knot, your insides near collapse, and your mind scattered to the wind. He will be there. He will hold you up. Follow him.

But do not concern yourself with this now. For the time being you will get acquainted with the basics: light, color, touch, smell and such things, and this will be more than you can handle. Plus you will be assaulted with needs that were hitherto addressed through automaticities. Those days are over amigo. You will need to speak your mind now. Start exercising your vocal cords. Do not be shy or your needs will not be met. For this you will mostly be dealing with her. You cannot see her because you are a lying on top of her, but that is your mother. No further comment. I’ll let you discover her on your own.

As for me -  a final word -  I too look at you with hope and wonder, but with one difference: I know you will fuck up. And when you do - let me tell you this now in case I forget later - you can count on me, little brother.

I am your older sister. Welcome home.

type 6 Homo sapiens: the perfect being

type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 

You are in your thirties. You traveled the globe. You bungee jumped. You studied abroad. You are well educated. You are a professional and your prospects are good. You know how to enjoy yourself and you are considered good company. To all outward appearances you are an accomplished and sociable individual. Not just to outward appearances, you are accomplished and you are sociable. You are the type of human being many would like to be: fun, enthusiastic, traveled, smart but not burdensomely.

Plus you have a keen sense of style and you go out of your way to find just that item, that purse, that necklace, that thing that looks good with this, this and that, and you wear those things in the right manner, that is to say, you do not overdress, you do not underdress, you dress just right. You are entirely balanced. You are the type of human being everyone dreams of being. You have that mix of humility and outgoingness that everyone desires. What more could you possibly desire? You have this human being shit down to perfection. You do not err. You do not dwell on dull or ponderous subjects, you do not touch on matters that may offend, dismay or put someone on the spot. This makes you highly appreciated. You have no enemies. You are kind and gentle. What more do you want? You are perfect. You are the kind of human being every human being wants to be and should be. There should be no other type of human being. You are it. There should be no departure from your sense of humility and outgoingness and festiveness, your non-confrontational style. Things would be fun. Life would be fun. There would be no wars. You are someone people admire. You are a standard. No one ever doubts your intentions are good. You are intentions are good. You are in many ways a perfect being. The perfect being. You radiate this perfection. You traveled the globe. You studied abroad. You bungee jumped.  You have that mix of humility and outgoingness that everyone desires.

What are your thoughts?

2014

We are a pinpoint  in an expanse that is a hundred thousand light-years wide. It is only an expanse because it is studded with stars we can see, but beyond these stars there is so much more space it numbs the mind.

This year, as every year, we orbited one star. Just once.

What you have done (or not done) during this period probably means a lot to you. Perhaps you are pondering this right now. Perhaps you have done nothing else but ponder this for days. Perhaps you are saying to yourself that you should have done more, lived more, loved more, spoken your heart, reached out to her or to him, broken some habits and started new ones, and so on and so on. Or perhaps you are sitting back in the satisfaction of a job well done;  or you are a list-maker and you are not interested in looking back at all, only in itemizing what is yet to come.

Most likely, though, you are not perplexed at the fact that you are a four-limbed creature with limited electromagnetic perception, fully dependent on an organic pump circulating five or so liters of blood;  and you are not pounded with anxiety at the terrifying vastness of space.

You’re not. Because life is much more interesting than any of that.

Because your inner world is much more interesting than any of that. It is bigger than any terrifying vastness. No measure can circumscribe it. No one thought can encapsulate it. Your ideas can be boundless or they can fit on the head of a pin. Any limitation, any boundary is your own, placed there by your own hand, kept there by your own hand.

Just our luck then, for the hand that puts up walls can also remove them.  

I wish you all a year of greatness and wonder, where your inner world is lit up far and wide, and your outer world reflects it with all the light and beauty life has to offer.

Lui Labas

the wall

Never let it appear that something bothers you. Never let on that you have fire burning in your gut. Be rebellious, but only about such causes that make you seem correct and “right”. You may look into your backyard or your neighbor’s, but do not look inside yourself. Do not look there. There is nothing to see. Likewise do not express thoughts that might distress others, prompting them to look inside themselves. Do not do it.  Generally, try not to say anything at all. You may speak, of course, but do not actually say anything. Maintain a semblance. In time, this status quo will solidify and therein you will carve out a life.

This is how it’s done.

You shall not hold thoughts that are contrary to those held by your friends and consort. If such thoughts should ever possess you, should you ever feel a yearning of a kind, like a desperate desire to know, then quell that feeling!  You must not pursue such things. If you choose to do so anyway - mark my words -  you will hit a wall. Behind that wall you will not find your feel-good causes and there will be no moral high ground from which to look down on whatever has struck your indignation today: political injustice; sexism; religion; whatever.

Embrace your causes. They are harmless. None of them threaten your aspirations or the way you live. None of them threaten anything at all. They will help define your identity and give you a sense of meaning. And this is fine. Do whatever you need to do, but turn your back on that wall. Do not go to it. Do not ask questions. Do not speculate or wonder about it. Do not let your mind wander; keep it in check and under control by whatever means available, legal or otherwise. All answers will be provided to you through a stream of data, figures, charts and info-graphs from a variety of news outlets. You may choose which ones you prefer. Some are conservative, some cool, some scientific, some reactionary, some radical. Pick your flavor; it doesn’t matter. They will tell you what is real, what is not, what should be spurned or ridiculed, and what you should be concerned about. There is no further information needed. It will satisfy you of your correctness, and that is all that matters.

Should you at any point become curious about the wall, should you ever start to ask yourself if perhaps you should have explored it, put your ear to it, or actually scaled the fucking thing;  if such an urge should take hold of you, do not go there. Do not do it. Do not ask questions. Do not speculate or wonder about it. It will probably be too late anyway; you will be so entrenched in the life you spent years carving out that there will be no respectable and justifiable way to undertake such a venture, not without casting off - in practical terms - your life, its trappings, and all its associations and dependencies,  and you will not wish to do that. You would sooner die.  Instead, every now and again you will perform an act of generosity and selflessness which will give you a sense of the Greater Good, and perhaps - should you have a need for such a thing -  a Higher Order. And this is fine.

Do not worry, you will be able to do this for many years. There will be a myriad distractions. You will not be without entertainment. If you are lucky, you will fall in love - there is no more comprehensive distraction -  if you are luckier still, she will love you back, and it is even possible you will build your life on these emotions. But emotions are quicksand. They draw you in, then they shift and change, and suddenly they are not what they once were. But you will recover from this quickly, you will be consoled and distracted, and life will continue. And this is fine

However, there will come a time when, from out of nowhere, from a point somewhere in the galaxy, a bullet will be heading your way. Perhaps it will not hit you directly, perhaps it will hit someone or something near to you, but this bullet will come. And when this bullet hits, life will collapse upon itself, props will come down, lights will crash to the ground, and suddenly you will find yourself in front of that wall again. 

The wall has come to me, you will think. But you will be wrong. The wall has not come to you. The wall has always been there. 

Do not panic. Proceed as usual. Do not try to scale the wall. Do not look up. Do not ask questions.  Do not speculate or wonder about it. Hang up new lights, shine them down around yourself and the wall will fade into the penumbra. Now let the curtains fall and I promise you the wall be out of sight for good.

Do not try anything fancy. Just do as I say and life will treat you well.

gallant spirit

gallant spirit I
gallant spirit II
gallant spirit III
gallant spirit IV

You are about to become a biped. For the first few years you will be swaddled and cuddled, and trundled around in a special cart by a larger biped. The whole thing will seem illusory, but soon the sounds you’ll have been hearing will start to register. And then everything will change.

No, these are not sounds you are hearing, these are thoughts you are receiving. How shall I say - you are receiving these as concepts, but this is not how they do it down there. These tricksters emit sounds, you understand, every sounds is like a symbol which designates something. It’s a complicated system and you will never really get used to it. Some words mean several things and you will have to always be aware of context. Bipeds are crazy about their “context”. There must be some logical progression in what you say, you cannot just jump from one thing to the next like you are doing now; don’t do that down there, you’ll be marginalized.

Also, if you navigate ten, twenty days on foot, depending on where you are, the sounds you emitted before your departure will be meaningless to the populations present. Do not then be tempted to communicate as we do here; no one does that there, except the rare few, but they are considered “illegitimate” bipeds and are generally studied as specimens or used as weapons.

Gallant spirit, venture forth, I will not stop you. I hope you like confined spaces, you will be in one for nearly three hundred days. Granted it will not be uncomfortable, a watery pod inside a grown counterpart biped, but you will be tumbled about and you will not know where you are. I understand you are looking for an adventure, but there are other adventures than navigating and maintaining a biped figurine for eighty odd years. There are beautiful places and beautiful bipeds, but there is plenty of sickness and violence down there too. Anyway, I think you’ve made up your mind. I wish you luck. Choose wisely. I cannot retrieve you once you have gone. You will suffer a kind of strange amnesia. I will not be able to reach you. You will experience me as thoughts of your own, and they will just confuse you, so I will keep quiet.

Beware of assholes, backbiters and the types we have around here too that suck the life energy out of you in broad daylight. The kind that stand around smiling like supernovas while they suck the lifeblood out your system. Such cocksuckers abound down there. Careful of such predators. They will be bipeds like you. It will not be written anywhere on their person. You will have to be alert.

At their current level of development you will have no meaningful intercourse with quadrupeds unless you venture into the wild. You can get one on a leash, but you will have to navigate it daily and pick up its excrements off the pavement. I trust you will not find this interesting. By the way, careful with your use of words (like I said) one word can have several meanings.

I am thankful that I am no longer among them, although I do miss it sometimes. I miss going out with my band of bipeds. Lifelong vagrants, and all of them unwitting telepaths. They would have hurled themselves into the deepest abyss to taste the unknown. They would have been marauders out here in space, but constrained as biped figurines they did what they could. I miss those nights roving the streets in search of “female” bipeds. You will experience that too. These are your counterparts, the female bipeds. They look similar but are functionally different and emotionally resonant to you. You will wish to penetrate these counterparts. They will capture you, little man, beware. They can be wonderful, but they can also create emotional bogs you can get stuck in. Beware your step. These counterparts are more dangerous than the hairiest quadruped in the wild. You can sink into an emotional bog and come out a wasted figurine, your mind washed out as if it sustained moderate but prolonged electrocution.

You are puzzled, and you want me to explain? “Fuck you”. You will be puzzled your whole life, so get you used it. You are startled by my harsh attitude? I’m just getting you ready, gallant spirit. “Fuck you” is a common term of aggression. I’m getting you ready for “down there”.

Now, you want an adventure, you will get one, but only if you make it an adventure. You can also get bogged in one of the many systems. There are plenty of systems that facilitate the upkeep of your figurine - food, shelter, that kind of crap. You will be involved in this, there is almost no way to escape it. These systems are devised “by the people”, “for the good of the people” . You will hear stuff like this. The people saying it will generally be servants from one of many central governing systems. The whole place is rigged up with symbols and intricate systems for the upkeep of your figurine and the preservation of the systems and the figurines managing them. Of course you can also sit in one of these systems and get comfortable. You can eat, sleep and watch screens that show figurines in various dramatic contexts. You can die an old man watching such screens. Of course, if you want to sit in a system you will have to “work” in such a system too; this means you will be inserted into one of the production cycles. Your prestige as a figurine will not be determined by your creativity or the radiance of your being, but by your standing in one of the production structures. The further you get from the actual production, the higher your standing. This is interesting. And you will receive rewards for this in the form of “money”, a fiat energy exchange unit. You know what that is, we’ve talked about this. This is a funny little scam. Do not get involved in it beyond superficial transactions, it will fuck you. Do not let it orient your decisions. In the extreme, when money and power start to mean the same thing, your figurine will become "important" and it will need to be protected by other figurines and it will be chauffeured around and it will be offered paid counterparts to penetrate at will. Don’t do it. It is an entirely unrewarding strategy and no kind of worthwhile adventure.

Of course - before I forget - the circle is not complete without offspring. You will produce offspring. What is offspring? Gallant spirit, I will explain. Offspring is a new figurine, emitted from a counterpart after she has been penetrated by you. You will see how that works. You don’t need to understand now. It will happen almost outside your volition - what I mean is, no one will need to explain it to you - you will understand.

Your “free will” will be the same as it is now, it’s just that you will experience it differently. You will experience it as a miniaturized and rather desperate and functional affair because you will be so engrossed with the upkeep of your figurine, or you will be bogged down in a system or an emotional resonance or a production cycle or some such thing. Your “ free will” will feel like a quaint little thing. But don’t be alarmed, the symbols will guide you.

Enough.

Gallant spirit, I wish you a marvellous journey. I hope to see you eighty years from now. A final note of caution: many have become so engrossed in the “adventure” they have forgotten where they come from. Others have been thrown into a bog by a cocksucker and have become so entangled in their minds. Others have chosen a counterpart that lords it over them and they have become slaves, bogged in the emotional resonance. But there are other things too. Too many. Some just like eating, and all they think about is ingesting food: couscous, flapjacks, strawberry tarts. There are hundred of reasons to get bogged down. Take it as an adventure. Bogs are part of the adventure. Navigate your figurine. Resonate emotionally. Penetrate with caution. Dip into the production cycle. Partake of money. Enjoy friendships (that is my recommendation!). You may even taste of prestige, and enjoy the hallucinogen of power. But whatever you do, gallant spirit - and this is all I ask of you - never ever permit yourself to forget who you are.

ultimate thing

The ultimate thing, the thing that lies behind all things. That thing without legs, without body, without mind, always ahead of you, always faster, always on the move. The ultimate thing. 

From time to time, out of the darkness, in a still moment, it will turn around and whispers to you, it will say, ‘Now, my friend, now is the time.’ And perhaps you will hear it, and act. Or perhaps not.

And sometimes it may even stop dead in its tracks, the ultimate thing. You can miss this easily and glide right past, unaware. Or you can collide with it head-on and sink right into it; and then the day-to-day mechanics fall away from under you, and there you are in the middle of this thing, the ultimate thing, neither happy nor upset, neither this nor that, just there, as vast as you ever were, as though in the middle of an engulfing fire. 

And it is then that you realize it is no thing at all, this ultimate thing, it’s just you.

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)