It’s been a few days since I been out the house. But now I have to go to work.
I’m so hungry I’m shaking. All I’m eating is cereal.
The trees look nice outside. If I got a tattoo, I would get one of a tree.
You ever heard this song? It’s good. Da da da. Da da duh. You’ll love it.
I remember when I used to dread and now those days seem as far from me as tomorrow, both receding in directions that would be opposite if opposites had any meaning in the midst of infinity. I don’t feel happy or sad or cold or hot; I’m not in the mood to write or to do things or to leave things undone. Moods and feelings seem far away, too, and I just thought that maybe the black hole of narcissism that a lot of us talk about isn’t what I am, but rather where I am. Maybe I was outside all along, writing that it seemed like a black hole of narcissism on some days, some days like a black hole of despair, dread, meaninglessness and other times like other black holes of other emotional materials, while in fact what it is, is a black hole, and all those things were my own projections. Now I have passed the event horizon and whatever that increasingly foreign version of myself believed it to be, it is not, because it…is nothing at all.
All we can do is hope to remember that these times come often enough not to dread their demise but seldom enough to take note of the pleasure they afford us.
For the last hour and a half I have done nothing. I have tried writing on paper. I wrote some shit about how life was crazy and I signed my name ten or fifteen times. I drew a picture of a box and then I drew a picture of a guy doing a back flip and a bunch of people looking on with different expressions on their faces.
It’s getting close to an hour to go until 9 and I already feel useless. I thought I should maybe just do more of the fiction exercises, but then I didn’t want to overdo it. I don’t know why.
Then I started to wonder if I was just bad at writing. Maybe I should be doing something else. But I guess the point is that if I do want to do something else I’ll need money and education so I guess I am doing right by making money and reading. I guess I could do without the perennial ulcer about whether or not I am wasting time.
I don’t know guys I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. We’re not going to be okay.
We’re going to be fine. We’re going to be not fine not good not great but dead we’re going to be a living sensation a free sense of boredom and an overwrought frock black speckled coat with orange flag braided into our hair and we’re going to laugh with the wind like Pocahontas on Tuesday and we’re going to use things devices stencils forms patterns and recipes to make jokes and we’re going to entertain people and have empathy for no one and we’re going to take a nap when it suits us because what the hell else are we doing at this point and anyway our wife is not going to answer our text about whether or not we should defrost the meat and anyway we couldn’t give a good god damn and the cat probably knows how to live and it is sleeping too and why why why stay awake and why not give this…
You know I just realized that the only thing I care about is making money. I’m a god damned hack writer who just wants to make money. I’m a hack human being who just wants a lot of money so I can go away in the woods but the funny thing is if I had money I wouldn’t do that I would probably just want more money. Fuck this is a real bitch this is a real problem I am in trouble shit fuck asshole mother of God in the firmament with cloud scented daisies I’ve got to get the fuck out of here.
I just want a lot of money and some good friends and nothing to do any more I want to be dead just divorced from the earth on some ethereal plane I’m a consumer of information and feelings and attention I’m a perfect capitalist I’m fucked fucked fucked what am I going to do?
I probably wouldn’t want more money I would just want more nothing I would just exist I have no existence the only thing I like to do is drink alcohol and put things in my mouth just taste things taste that I don’t even care about eating I just want to read and watch TV and listen to music at the same time and get paid for it and everybody leave me alone but also adore me and think I’m the best in the world the best the best the best in the world what the fuck fuck this shit Christ what a bitch I wish I was a fucking cat.
I wish I was a fucking cat that had a place to live. That had someone to care for it and didn’t eat things that smelled like fish and didn’t eat at all just ate real fish like a fresh piece of fish like I was the king of the fucking cats. I wish I was the king of the cats and I lived in a box that was nothing and I had nothing to think or care about or love or nothing I wish my whole body was asleep and numb and dreaming and the dream was of nothing and I never had to wake up.
Hmm maybe I am full of bullshit. Sometimes I really do feel like that, well, like right now for example. But sometimes I care about things, and well actually I always care about people, what they think of me, if they like me, if they are happy or dying or throwing up now and laters. No but really I care about shit, right I care about shit sometimes I care about something. Sometimes I don’t feel like I want nothingness. Sometimes I watch the movie Braveheart and I think I wish I could do that or I watch Gladiator or Spartacus or Lord of the Rings you know I’d like to cut people in half with a sword and jump across a lake of fire. I’d like to not do anything of that nature because swords are heavy and it will probably be raining in hell anyway, who wants to go out there? I want to sit at home drinking and listen to a song I’ve heard a billion and twelve times before and no one writes any more songs and tells me about them and no one talks to me but everyone loves me and wants to talk to me but I say to them I do not want to talk to you because I am too drunk to care about you and I only care about myself and anyway I am a nothing and so is life so leave me alone please thanks anyway I am a considerate person you know? Fuck what are you still doing here, I would say to them, I would say nothing to them I would leave them alone in that dread place with the flowery wall paper and the shadowy eyes casting into the rafters like a meal made for two on a but fuck I don’t even understand any of that what am I trying to say? Why am I writing this shit down well because it counts I guess.
If you keep writing the same thing over and over it counts and maybe later you won’t feel this way at all and maybe later you can oh you know what I always forget about is sex until the end and I say something about sucking a dick and I remember that I would like to have sex with a lot of different people one after the other and see them later and they would say, “Hey that time we had sex was the best thing that ever happened to me. But it’s ok that you don’t want to see me ever again or whatever, or if you do, you know, I won’t bore you with nothingness or weigh you down with the admission that I am a suicidal maniac with only one string left attaching me to the world and it’s you…hey, you know what” and they would be saying things like that to me and I would nod and smile because I would already be having sex with someone else and I would be drinking at the same time and listening to my favorite song and I would be the hero of my favorite book while also someone was filming but it wasn’t a porno it was the greatest movie since the invention of movies and someone would walk up to me afterwards and shake my hand and say I was Charlie Chaplin only better and they would say I could meet him if I wanted to because he was looking to drink with someone and I would go meet him at Rick’s bar in Casablanca and Yo Yo Ma would play us some tin pan alley ragtime and maybe if you just kept writing bullshit it would count.
I guess if there’s nothing better to do you can just try and psycho analyze yourself by writing down whatever dumb thing you think about fuck it why not.
I realized that most of the writing I have done was never in pursuit of a story. It was just whatever was on the top of my head. And I thought to myself while I wrote it, “This is great. I am writing. Maybe tomorrow I will look at all of this and pull it together and synthesize it and make a story out of this. This is gold.” And then I never thought about it again until one day five years later i look at it and I think “damn I was really going somewhere with this. This is genius. I should totally try to write a story because I am obviously good at it.” And then I sit down and try to write something else because why would I go and revisit my own vomit.
Yeah I should stop trying to make money fuck it what am I going to do when I get it nothing pay credit cards and student loans and life insurance premiums fuck it all fuck it all why am I even saving money when Adam Smith said I shouldn’t and there are restaurants to go to and why do I need a buffer and why do I need anything I think…
I think I’ll have a drink before I go out tonight. Because people there you have it we are going out tonight.
Sometimes I treat the keyboard like an instrument. I don’t care about the words on the page I just want to hear the keys click. So maybe I’ll never be a writer. Maybe I’ll be a typer. A new kind of artist. The words don’t matter. The substance, the art, isn’t in the writing, the rhythm of the writing, the style, the subject. The art is in how fast it gets written. How it sounded when it was written. The art is that anyone could actually think about themselves this much. The art is fuck the art fuck the world fuck me fuck it’s like I wish I knew some kind of myth that I could relate this too I wish…
I wish I had a classical education, like John Milton. He died blind and penniless and it took him a lifetime to finally shut the hell up and write Paradise Lost. William Blake did the same thing and if they had ever met Pocahontas they would have pulled some Joseph Conrad shit and bit her ear.
You know, yesterday this girl asked me where I wanted to get punched and I responded automatically, “Right in the ear.” And she thought that it was a hilarious answer. She did not pick up on the fact that it was pulled straight from Fight Club. And I know damn well she has seen that movie. So I can’t figure that shit out even a little…
But anyway. I wish I knew some kind of myth I could relate this to. Not for me, but rather, for you. For some Rhodes Scholar who would read it and say holy fuck this guy is the new James Joyce. And the bullshit is I haven’t even read James Joyce because I was too busy reading Catch-22 for the fifteenth time. There is nothing and that is nothing and then you are dead.
Sometimes I wake up and sometimes. Sometimes I feel like there are things to be done, ways to get where you want to go. I always know that life is suffering that nothing is anything. I always know that the goal of life is not to be happy. That the goal of life is not to be comfortable. That comfort is deceiving and even debilitating. But in the end…today, which is the end of my existence, I realize that it didn’t matter to begin with. Nothing did. Nothing that happened before now made a difference, and I spent it all having a god damned ulcer, and I didn’t read any James Joyce.
And the funny thing about that, mother fuckers, is that I’ve never even had an ulcer. You might think I was some kind of Woody Allen psychotic, but I’m not. I just walk around like the Big Lebowski or something. People like me. I mean they really fucking like me, you know, shit, of course they do. That’s my only goal in life. Fuck if I was failing at that…
But how am I not failing at that when I am failing at making any kind of reasonable money. And by reasonable money I mean enough money to buy an impoverished nation. And by impoverished nation I am making a subtle reference to my soul, to America, to the United Bullshit of the Universe, to humanity. And by impoverished I am making a subtle reference to imps, especially Mephistopheles, and the realization that everything is meaningless, and without the tacked on happy ending, and by tacked on I mean it’s time to get down to brass tacks, and by that I mean, how much for the monkey? And by that I mean, Hunter Thompson probably died an unhappy bastard, too. But at least he did things. I am afraid to even drink enough alcohol to get addicted. I haven’t published a single thing, the bastard.
The devil.
And by saying “The Devil” like that I am referencing Hunter S Thompson but also Dostoevsky. The Deuce. In some cultures they call the devil the rag man. My uncle used to go around yelling at the kids, “Rag man!” and wiping their face with a dirty rag he wiped the table with. I don’t even need to quantify that shit. You understand. You’re damned right you understand.
Stevie Ray Vaughan used to sing a song about the crossroads, and he had to, because every blues artist must. And in some cultures the devil was…
It doesn’t really matter. Because without the devil there is nothing. Without Loki the norsemen were a boring bunch. Odin had nothing to do. And the whole thing comes down to trying to connect yourself with a larger context.
Incidentally, I hate everything.
I am like a black hole, and like a black hole I wasn’t always this way. I start life as a large star, I exploded like a supernova, but slowly I am condensing back into myself, sucking in whatever I can, I’m like a black hole but only to myself, because everyone knows…because I know everyone, am everyone and nothing and a nothing of nothingness and nothing will ever get out except radio waves out one side and the other and a bunch of bullshit, because even that…
Rag man. That shit was disturbing and I told my parents about that being another name for the devil and I don’t even know how I found that out since there was no internet.
Yes, just a bunch of typing just typing typing typing typing and typing typing typing and you ever read something that was just typed and you knew it and Charles Dickens was something like that and sometimes…
Have you ever thought about becoming a comedian maybe you could make money maybe people would like you then only they wouldn’t and Joan Rivers would show up to your funeral and she would have been disappointed in you but you just kept…typing typing typing.
Hey I don’t know man sounds like you’re a sick sick man with no friends and no family and no money and no love and no anything is what it sounds like but since I know you I know that you do things like cut your toenails once in a while and you fold laundry and wash dishes so you’re really not all that special, my friend, and you couldn’t even get banned from the daily post so…I really don’t know why you spend all this time typing it really…well it really just isn’t helping. It really just wastes time, a whole lot of time, and time is something you can’t waste.
I don’t understand why I have such an inordinate amount of respect for time. If I am just waiting for death…really there is no point in not wasting time. I am more and more like Dunbar, the character in Catch-22, every day. I do things I don’t like so that time will seem longer, so that my life will seem longer. Because, as he says in the book, what else is there? I don’t know. I don’t fucking know, alright? I don’t know I don’t know typing typing fuck.
Hey man why don’t you just suck a dick and shut up already. Hey that’s an idea I could become a prostitute. Gay people find me attractive. I knew this one guy who got approached by a guy who said he would pay him to let him suck his dick. I just wonder how much he would have paid. Then I could dispense with this writing shit. Watch TV all day get drunk and then I would have really depressing true stories to tell people about my life and the state of my soul. Maybe if I had watched my friends and relatives systematically destroyed by disease and wars and my own skin had been set on fire and I walked the earth scaring children and all of that then I wouldn’t be so bored and nothing.
Hell I could even watch TV while getting paid to get my dick sucked and then I could even not be wasting precious precious fucking time. I could save time for later so I could hate myself for wasting it when it finally showed up.
Well, shit, I have to go now. Things to do. Dicks to suck.
This has been fun.
My memories of the good old days were way back when I cared about school and believed in God and loved my parents and everyone thought I was going to be a success one day and I wore big glasses and a stupid sweater and everyone in class didn’t hate me for it and I cried all the time for whatever reason any reason and eventually everyone stopped liking me so I stopped liking class but at the time it was all good and especially teachers liked me, too. I was about six then.
Then another time I liked was when I went to France using student loans and I woke up in a cold ass room by an annoying ass kid who would steal all my euro-change before yelling at me to wake up and then I took a cold ass shower and dried off with stiff ass cold towels and go downstairs and take a shit and go out to the kitchen and drink thick coffee that my cold ass host mother would make for me with cream and eat fresh bread and cold butter and then I’d leave and eat a clementine on the walk to school in the cold cold ass wind and at night I would hold my future wife’s hand and not drink anything because I still believed in God.
Another time was when I was shit wasted every night at the restaurant in DC listening to The National until 2 AM and buying yellow American Spirits with my boss’s money and staring at the wall and finishing bottles of Catoctin Creek whiskey and forgetting what day it was and walking home with one shoe and stopping for early breakfast in Adams Morgan and back to work at the coffee shop at six in the morning with my good friend and listening to George Thorogood and every day monotonous madness and no one could stop it because I didn’t believe in God any more.
It’s the entire horn section of the once great Chickasaw Falls marching band outside playing the collected works of Miles Davis’s hapless widow (who, claiming to be possessed by the spirit of her late husband, refused to stop composing polka choruses until she dropped dead twelve long days after Davis’s own tragic death). It’s that at nine in the morning on a sad Tuesday in Brooklyn.
When a friend comes to town for only a short time and you don’t have a real career and you don’t have kids, you put your life on hold until they leave. If your friend is at all interested in your life, you have some time to think about the damn thing with a little more perspective than usual.
Well, such a thing has happened to me these last two days. It is interesting that an entire life can seem so fraught with things to do and then one can decide to stop doing those things and experience no immediate consequences. I remember one time my little brother brought me an Xbox to play with and I put everything on hold (and, as I was planning a wedding and working two jobs there was a lot to put on hold) and even skipped meals and personal hygiene whenever I could (whenever my wife wouldn’t notice) to play that damn game. There was minor backlash after two weeks of being absorbed in that alternative reality, but not as much as i had imagined.
It makes me wonder if the stress I put on myself to “be productive” in day to day life is justified, healthy, or useful. I guess that depends on your definition of useful, and for me I guess I am still too immature to stop taking things to their philosophical nadir, and so my definition of useful is anything that makes me feel good right now (since we could die any second and even if we don’t the universe is expanding in all directions at once so anyway we are getting less and less prominent in the world and to begin with we weren’t even at the level of ants on a galactic leaf).
Ain’t it funny when you discover that he wasn’t really where it’s at?
Ah shit, I’ve had too much to drink and it was so nice outside today, and this morning I posted about calories and got more views than I got in months, and almost beat my record, which isn’t so impressive really anyway, but fuck you for thinking that, you bastards.
But anyway, fuck the microverse, I’m going to eat fried chicken and lose the robots in the wake of a thousand dumb experiments, and conceal the whole thing in a grocery bag made for two.
Seriously, though, in the end we’re all just paper-mache that your little brother brought back in the Winnebago that he bought in Canada for a half penny and a smile and a proper donut, the kind with the several light speed dynamos that were illegal in that time of the month for ladies of your stature. And then, like Lot’s daughters, you realized the folly of your ways and sucked the dicks of angels, and tried for the life of you to get rid of your tuberculosis cough, and in the end you switched internet providers and called it a night. A cold, hapless night where the reindeer bayed at your front door and left you nasty messes, and ate the chains from your porch swing, and forever grounded your soul.
And then Tupac came to town and really felt what he was saying, and once in a while, well, the fort Breys windy what ankle trapezoids came through and swept the Oscars.
My brother is a conspiracy theorist. One of the things they like to talk about, conspiracy theorists I have known, is how the ubermen are trying to distract us from their strategies and plots and such by giving us what they like to call “bread and circuses.” This is from a Juvenal quote talking about Rome:
…Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses…
The quote is so widely known among true believers that “bread and circuses” is just thrown around without any reference to the first part of the quote. It just obviously means trivial things that shouldn’t be as important as civic duty and getting to the real bottom of our situation, the situation of humanity slowly being subjugated. Well it is taking a long time for these fuckers to subjugate us to any real purpose. What have these bastards gained as of yet? Power over an unruly bunch of weirdos who don’t pay tribute or even properly fear them? And how long have they been at it? Doesn’t seem like much fun.
Bread and circuses on the other hand, that seems like the real fun. They’re putting on these shows to distract us and we’re lapping it up, because who wouldn’t? I’m sure these Illuminati motherfuckers are pissed that no one is putting on circuses for them. I would be.
Shit what else is there to do but be entertained? I’m talking about a rich society, like the United States or Western Europe or China, places where you don’t have to worry about eating. Once humans got the whole eating thing figured out, well what else is there for a life to do? That’s the problem with life, if we think about it from an evolutionary standpoint. All life seems to want to perpetuate life. The way to do that is to live long enough to reproduce. The way to live a long time is to be good at getting something to eat.
Well once we figured out how to do that well of course we’re bored as shit and depressed. I’ve got food all over this house and I’m bored with all of it. I could go outside and eat a five course meal out of the nearest trash can. Mother fuckers ain’t got to strain the brain around here to eat. So you get entertainment. Something’s got to distract you from the fact that there’s nothing to do but wait for death.
At least I don’t believe in eternal life any more. That would be true hell. Can you imagine, billions of billions of years go by and you’re sitting around thinking god damn, well I guess I’ve done just about everything I can think of. Good thing I have as much time to do nothing as I started with. A trillion years later you’re like fuck it dude I wish I could just go to sleep and not wake up.
Life is just tiresome. That was the biggest thing that scared me when I was a Christian. I just would think about the fact that I would always be alive and it would scare the shit out of me. It’s not the idea of having to live every day, because you can just do that day to day and not think about it, it’s just the concept of eternity that scared me. Humans just lack the capacity to comprehend eternity at this point. My parents thought I was crazy for fearing eternal life. My sister told me that she just couldn’t comprehend dying, nothingness, so eternal life just made sense to her. But that’s only the opposite side of the same coin. Nothing and eternity are two concepts of which our brains have no experience.
But I guess if I had the perfect day, and I could just do that for eternity, it just wouldn’t occur to me that I was living forever. The perfect day would be something like…
My body is nineteen years old, but I know everything that an eighty year old knows. I don’t want to know what a 90 year old knows because that’s what made Odin hang himself. I wake up because the sun is so bright in the window I can’t sleep in any more. I go outside and it’s slightly chilly, with the promise of getting warmer soon, but not hot. You know that palpable sense of electricity, excitement that you sometimes get in the morning, of if you’re like me, you remember it from that one time when you were a kid.
I get in a convertible muscle car that’s just parked in the driveway and maybe my best friend is there, in the house somewhere. We both slept in our clothes because we had a perfect day yesterday and were too drunk to change. But that perfect day is just a memory, it never really happened, because tonight we’re not going to do that, we just talk about what happened and it was so funny and awesome.
And we drive to a basketball court and we play basketball all day and we win. And then we drive with a bunch of people to some restaurant or a diner and we eat. And then we go back and play ultimate frisbee somewhere and we really really win this time. And then we just sit down when it gets dark. And we start drinking right there and it’s so nice out that we just want to laugh and laugh and that’s what we do. And we drink and laugh and think about what we’re going to do tomorrow. And we talk about what we did last night, but we didn’t really do anything last night but this, but we have different memories about what we did so it doesn’t seem like we’re living the same perfect day every day, and we talk about those memories and what we plan to do, even though we’ll never have to do it. And then we fall asleep there on the grass and no bugs crawl on our face. And in the morning we wake up at home in exactly the same way and we do the same thing, but we don’t remember it that way.
I could live like that forever I guess, but obviously that’s cheating, since we would have no real notion of the passing of time, since time is a construct of memory (if not in most ways, definitely in some ways). Memory is the key to everything. To life and our experience of it and what we believe. It’s the foundation of life. Without memory there is no life. Without someone to talk about your shared memories with, or preferably a lot of people with diverse shared memories, life is dismal.
But anyway, back to the conspiracy theorists. I wish to hell the god damn Illuminati would get on their shit and really take fully over the whole world and just churn out seven hour long Mad Men episodes and give us food for free. They can have all the military command and legions and high civic offices or whatever the hell else they want, my soul, fuck it, just give me something to watch and something to eat.
Oh yes. Three hours. Straight. Unintended. Just sat down to GF’s computer to write and there was a tab open to Buzzfeed.com. I just had to read this list. Then that list and another fucking list for three fucking hours! Shit!
I did read some interesting articles. On from Esquire all about Ashton Kutcher. And another in The Atlantic all about rich girls and their husbands. And no matter how funny my writing is I’ll probably never laugh at it like I did when I saw this.
And that’s a real bitch. How am I going to be out here trying to be entertaining when there are websites like Buzzfeed everywhere, and The Atlantic and Esquire are posting their articles for free?
Damn it. We’re all writers now. There isn’t just a pile of books somewhere out there that we wish we had all the time in the world to read. Now there’s a whole damn internet that one day of could take us a hundred years to read. And that’s if there wasn’t any dishes to wash in between articles.
Of course we just have to remember that we can’t do everything. To just enjoy the things that we do. Well, shit. It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to get caught in the maelstrom of interesting things. The whole world is the Party of Special Things to Do.
But I’ve been sitting in this chair for three hours and that’s proven to cause all kinds of shit that’s related to early death and permanent discomfort.
And the longer I sit the harder it is to get up. And the more the confusion and cloudiness returns. I have all kinds of stuff to eat in the fridge, but it’s so far away from this chair and my portal, my rectangle full of the whole god damn world.
So much entertainment can be got for free. You don’t even have to pay for internet. You could just go to the library where you’re surrounded by a universe of information that you’ll never make a dent in. Son of a bitch it all feels like so much nothing.
Live for yourself
You will die in vain
Live for others
You will live again
But this is one twisted kingdom of Jah, so who knows if we can even trust that. Damn it.
Pay no mind, it’s only me feeling like a frenetic jumble of synapses all melting slowly into an oversized overstuffed recliner.
It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey. I could see that it was all going to be one big saga of the mist. “Whooee!” yelled Dean. “Here we go!” And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Hell yeah, they knew time. And we know time. And I know I’ve got nine minutes until I really should start getting these V-Day preparations out of the way.
Yes these days really are passing quite strangely, what with this new way of perceiving them as transient, rather than “every morning a little birth, every night a little death,” which is a quote from somewhere I forget.
It is drizzling and mysterious in my head. One big saga of mist, it has been. But we’re all delighted, and the confusion and nonsense of the night before is behind us, and somewhere far ahead of us in the same sense, and all there is left to do is to move.
Time comes and time goes and everything really is strange and wild. The night comes but it is gone in the morning, only to come back again. It is nothing. It is physics. But anyhow it’s all vanished into so much soreness in the legs.
And so will pass the night ahead of us, since already it is behind us.
Buy the ticket, take the ride. As hideous as it is, I, too, have found it to be true.
To move, to move, to be in motion, that’s what time is, that’s how time goes, and that’s how we avoid time, and though we can never be friends, we can wave as we pass on the street.
Anyone's Ghost 