Introduction to Editors
As I write this, I am filled with doubts about what you are about to read. In one sense, it is a year and a half in the
making. In another sense, of course, it took eight years. In still another sense, even two months ago it was not yet
what it has become.
The document consists of two components:
1) A series of entries into a journal began in July 2001. The entries, as you will see, almost never discuss the dayto-day events of my life, but consist of philosophical rumination, brief narratives, bits of poetry, arguments, rants,
laments, etc. These entries appear in the order in which they were written.
2) A collection of poems and away messages (mostly being very short poems themselves), the first of which was
written in 2004. Each of these is placed immediately following an entry or passage from the journal--in a location
that, hopefully, illuminates both journal and poem.
Both of these components, especially the journal, have been heavily edited. In this way, it is a collection, albeit
an untraditional one.
Yet any full explanation I might offer--as to what this work is and what I hope it to become--would be false to
some extent. I have written and written, and still I am not sure why. Part of it is love of the art, the pleasure of the
problem, and the pride at my growing abilities. Those motives are pure. I also write to communicate, though what
and to whom I could not say. That motive is questionable--and yet, closer to the heart of this work, and closer
to the reason I have always written. It is more manifesto than treatise, to be sure, but it is much more letter than
manifesto.
If this document is only interesting in the context of its writer, I will be content. I don’t know if there’s anything
more, but I think there might be. I say with trepidation that I think there is a story in the work.
You’ll have to let me know.
◆
Some notes about what would be helpful to me from you as an editor:
1. Above all, please be utterly honest. If you think the project is irredeemable trash, tell me.
2. The entries appear in chronological order, and a character is seen over a period of time, but is there any perceptible plot? Is a story told?
2a. If yes, what is the story, in your opinion? Is it a good story? What could be done to improve it?
2b. If no, the work is simply a collection of writings that happens to be arranged chronologically. If there is
no story, then many of the earlier, weaker pieces could be deleted and the compactness and quality of the overall
work would be improved. Do you agree? Any other ideas?
3. Many of the entries rely very heavily on references to other works and fields, including philosophy, physics,
and literature. Did this dependence weaken the work or prevent a full appreciation of the writing? If so, how pervasive was this weakening and could some amount of explanation mitigate it? Are the footnotes enough?
4. What was interesting? What was not interesting?
5. How much could you identify with the character? Were you moved at any point? On the other hand, were you
disgusted at any point?
6. Many themes are repeated throughout the work, revisited and changed in some way. Does this get repetitive?
If so, is deletion a better solution than editing?
7. Too many footnotes? Too few? Was there anything you’d have liked to have seen footnoted, but wasn’t? Something that you didn’t bother looking up?
8. While I am very open to arguments about what should be cut, I am much less open to the suggestion of more
writing. I might be willing, say, to write an introduction to each chapter, if you thought that would improve the
work; but, I would be unwilling to do something as elaborate as inserting myself as thoroughly as the away messages into the fabric of the work.
9. Can it stand alone of its writer, or is anything good about the work bound up in an acquaintance with its author?
10. Can you think of good questions for the other editors, or for me to ask myself about the work?
11. Naturally, if you see grammatical, syntactical, or other basic errors, please mark them. I am sure they’re in
there.
12. Edit as specifically as you like. If you can improve a poem by removing a single word, do it.
13. Thank you very much.
◆
Further words for the editor on this work as a story:
There are many pieces not fully developed, many poems which cannot stand alone, and many reasons why each
individual piece could be cut. I was tempted to discard much more than I did--and chose not to because I decided
that they did not have to stand alone; they might form a sort of soil out of which the better pieces of writing grow
still taller in context.
Relatedly, the earlier writings are plagued with relatively dry, juvenile philosophical reckonings and typical teenaged love angst. Despite my attempts to simplify the style and cut to the heart of the matter, the subject matter is
far from new. The reason I retain these is to demonstrate how the person who wrote them grew into the person I
am today, the struggles both philosophical and romantic transmuted into a more mature art. I have kept much that
speaks loathsomely of the person I have been because I think the eventual redemption of those sins was noteworthy.
As you read, please consider the work as a whole. I am not saying that nothing should be cut--you are here to
edit, to sharpen, to purify. Respect your own judgment. If something is cliche, say so. If something is needlessly
complex, say so. If something is flabby, annoying, or unbearably self-indulgent, say so--but I am saying that I kept
what I kept in context of the whole as well as the part.
Perhaps the work is a flawed animal, born too abstract to ever breathe in this world, and it ought to be slaughtered
for the best of its flesh. If you feel this is true, please say so. If not, please help me tell the story of this eight-year
letter.
Letter
A Collection of Writing from 2001 to 2009
For those who have moved me to love,
and for the love that moves me to speak.
Chapter 1
Logic
July 2001
I know nothing. Not even this.
In the beginning, there were contradictions.
Stating that there is no way to prove anything doesn’t work, because there’s no way to prove that statement. How does one begin?
... Okay, I read a little further into A History of Western Philosophy. Hume1 did a good job of summary: one can’t induct induction.
Do not forget the miracle of existence.
The biggest mystery of all is simply that there is something instead of nothing.
Away Message #316
◆
I am going to die. The particles that once made up me will be spread as far apart as the universe currently is wide.
What about compassion, opinions, and beliefs? I don’t have any. I don’t have a reason to, nor any way to select them, except arbitrarily—and I’m not going to do that. Dating, gaming? Futile. I do know that I just act, I just do keep breathing.
My thoughts aren’t always on this level. I’m discussing masturbation on AIM with a friend of mine.
The new cosmological constant2 hasn’t even been incorporated into any theories I’ve heard about, yet, so the stuff above is not necessarily true. In fact, I might spontaneously reassemble—along with the universe as I know it—somewhere along the line. It’d be rather
humorous, that.
I can’t think of anything else. Maybe after I fix this urge. Yes. I may be back later.
O chaste gospel!
You promise all men:
a promise not made is a promise not broken.
O lewd opinion!
You leave your sisters, taste and truth,
to skin and cook your kills.
Away Message #977
August 2001
1. Authority is impossible.
2. Compassion isn’t required.
3. We know nothing.
4. I know you very well.
5. /e snickers.
1
David Hume (1711-1766) was a Scottish philosopher who contended that there is no rational justification for inductive inference—that is to say, for believing, based on prior experience, anything about the future. This, in turn, refutes any notion of causality. It
also refutes any potential for truly understanding the origin of existence.
2
The cosmological constant is a term in physics, introduced by Einstein, that refers to a repulsive force inherent to matter that
grows stronger with distance. This is in contrast to gravity, an attractive force which weakens with distance. Einstein introduced this term
in an effort to mathematically derive a universe unchanging in size—and later called it the “biggest blunder” of his life. More recent evidence suggests that a form of the cosmological constant is real, and that it will likely tear our universe apart in about 22 billion years.
3
6. Hail fnord Eris3.
7. No sex kinda sucks.
Elaboration:
1. Authority is a contradiction and thus impossible.
2. If one is to be as happy as one can be, one must abandon morality—and thus compassion.
3. Nothing is known; just assumed, believed, or opined.
4. Teenagers often insist, “You don’t know me!” While this is in some sense true, the fact remains that there are categories of people that
make very accurate predictions.
5. Emoting (signifying an action with the command /e) is part of Asheron’s Call. I am online a great deal.
6. I am familiar with a great many things that hardly anyone knows about. I am attempting to spread Discordia to the locals. My own
extension of Operation: Mindfuck is steadily proceeding.
7. I am unavoidably concerned with sex. Not having had sex makes me desire it that much more. It is worth noting that I am not as interested in sex as many of my peers are.
Soyuz 14
“every kumrad is a bit”
“kumrads die because they’re told),” E.E. Cummings
A Soviet hero proves the Buddhists wrong:
he is not negation, not peace. He is the noise
the sun makes, the reason for calories.
He is pi in the curve of his Adam’s apple,
the right angles of his coffin.
He falls 100 miles before he hits Siberia.
At his funeral, pale scientists calculate
the momentum he delivers to the Revolution
before his ribcage gives.
He revokes the facts of 1927 to 1967,
the arbitrary extravagance of his genes, his fickle phenotype.
He is an axiom, a clockwork monolith, a red flag
atop 20,000 dead years of war between steppe and sky.
He is chosen from the crèche, the densest of all infants.
He is honed to a point, the sharpest of all pilots.
He must take a wife.
The wife he takes, after all the rigorous funneling,
is the wife best prepared for rigorous funneling.
A Soviet hero is prepared to fit into the smallest of spaces
and his wife, prepared to receive him.
December 2001
I have no pride in this nation for the same reason I have no pride in my school: I had no part in the accomplishments of either. My country
put a man on the moon; I had no part in that. My country has kept a democracy for a few hundred years; I had no part in it.
The government diverts funds meant for all into the pockets of the few. They weep not for loss of human life, but for loss of American life.
◆
[Editor’s notes: the following dialogues are conversations with myself.]
“Hey, idea! You’ve obviously hard-burnt some neurons into compassion. Don’t use the channel and it’ll go away. Especially after the
hormones are gone.“
“Couldn’t it be that, by keeping compassion, you gain more happiness than is possible otherwise?”
“You know what’s down that road. You wouldn’t be you. You would fail this person who you are.”
“What’s down the road, Jesse?”
“It’s.. a lack of.. (is that all you want? epic struggle?) .. Would you rather throw caution to the wind?”
“I need to learn to manipulate the happy chemicals and not damage my brain? Yeah. That’s what drugs do. I can see the draw, now.
Maybe you can do that all the time.”
3
This is a reference to Eris, Greek goddess of strife and discord. She is also the goddess of Discordianism (Eris is called Discordia
in Roman mythology), a “religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion” founded in 1958 by Malaclypse the Younger (also known as
Gregory Hill). The religion’s holy book is the Principia Discordia.
4
Soyuz 1 was a Soviet manned spacecraft launched on April 23, 1967. Its sole passenger was Colonel Vladimir Komarov (19271967). After 13 orbits, it crashed into Soviet territory at 89 mph.
4
“So that’s the plan? Seek that?”
“I guess so. Or at least until I realize that I can do no better and start doing drugs.”
January 2002
I spoke to my mirror. I looked right into my eyes. Does one become a book when the strange loop5 is removed?
It’s easier to be what I am online. More time to think.
Is this all we are? A series of strange loops not unlike the proof that 0 = 1? Are we but a zero divide? Up by our own bootstraps? But
what happens in the intermediary if there truly is no soul? Does baby turn to speaking infant all at once? Of course not.
◆
Is it truly such a horrible goal to want my own happiness at all costs?
middle-school Atlas
holding up a meteor.
shrugging is neurosis,
but he doesn’t notice this.
and shrugging’s easier..
Away Message #746
◆
Even lies are an expression of a desire. What any person is can still be decoded from a lie. So, dishonesty is expression, too.
I know of people who have very secure hiding places. They cower from any possibility of discovery: of their pasts, their hopes, their
motives. It has been a personal whim of mine to knock on such hiding places. Sometimes I have knocked with a drill. I have even used
explosives.
Who am I to say that people are not merely the shells they possess? Are we not the filters through which we perceive?
i’ll feel like knocking
with the butt of my gun
on the delusions of others
who listen to none—
how can it not be
what you’re certain it is?—
so you know, i just sometimes
would fill them with terror:
say, what’s up, motherfucker?
and perhaps note their error.
Poem #15
I am no great threat.
◆
[Editor’s notes: the following dialogue is a dialogue with myself.]
“Why don’t I just live?”
“What do you mean, ‘just live’?”
“I would just live.”
“Your body won’t generate anything but hunger if you lie in bed.”
“So what is there if you have no motive?”
“Once you stop doing anything you don’t have to do, you die.”
“That’s what it all comes down to. Idle thought. I thoroughly enjoy that.”
◆
What are the harmful effects of LSD? I need to look into that. Clinical studies. I want to see.
February 2002
[Editor’s notes: the following dialogue is a dialogue with myself.]
“What are you doing with the opaque act toward your mother?”
“I have no reason to associate with her any longer. She is for food and maintenance.”
“Is that really so?”
“She has her entertaining points, but she’s full of misconceptions.”
“What is this short-term goal?”
“Show her. Demonstrate just how cold you can be.”
“Because you really are?”
5
The strange loop, a term introduced by Douglas Hofstadter, refers to an event where, after traveling upward or downward in a
hierarchical system, one returns to the original point of departure. Hofstadter discusses the concept at length in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Golden Braid in reference to various systems of information, including consciousness and its understanding of itself.
5
“Because I really am.”
“She bitches to me about her work life. She has had three children, doing less than her fair share for ZPG6.”
full half a generation
dreaming new guilts
to be guilty of,
the other half
aloof of their own
aloofness
and proud
Away Message #916
[Editor’s notes: the following is a dialogue with myself.]
◆
“I mean that I am still searching for someone who understands the things I have come to know.”
“Opinionless and illuminated?”
“I wish someone intelligent would fall for me. I liked it the last time it happened.”
“See how lucid I am when I get enough sleep?”
“Amazincredible.”
March 2002
I am the only person whose consciousness I detect. This may seem arrogance, but why can’t I find anyone else who also reaches the logical
conclusions I’ve reached?
I take epistemology7 to its limits, even to the point of acknowledging that epistemology itself might be wrong. I suppose, then, that
there is, first, some underlying symbol on which to make these stacks. Perhaps this is the strange loop. Maybe we can use Escher’s Möbius
strip8 for it.
I really do know nothing. Despite this, I just do go ahead9 and accept reality as it seems. That’s the second absurd arbitrarity I have to
lay down. The third is that I want the maximum possible happiness in my life. I don’t know why, but this is what I have chosen to lay down.
The trouble comes when I find that I have no complete definition of happiness. These are the absurdities I place my logical life on.
I have done my best to keep these to a minimum.
◆
Cartoons might well be infiltrated by a secret society, aiming to convert the youth.
◆
(I just started reading House of Leaves10)
I remember that time when I spoke to myself in the mirrors. There were so many of me.
I’ve come to regard myself as a quiet little half-murmur.
◆
If we had nanobots and never had to scratch or shower again.. What amazing things we’d accomplish. What if we could photosynthesize!
[Editor’s notes: the following is a dialogue with myself.]
◆
“Gödel11 has wrathed us all..”
6
Zero population growth is a demographic condition where a population remains unchanged over time.
7
Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge; of what can be known and what knowing is.
8
The Möbius strip is a surface, usually a ribbon, which has only one side.
9
This is a reference to an exchange in the Illuminatus! Trilogy:
“Tell me, Harry, what difference would it make if it wasn’t real?”
Harry thought a moment, his chinless face sour. “We wouldn’t have to do what we think we have to do. But even if we don’t have to do
what we think we have to do, it won’t make any difference if we do it. Which means we should just go ahead.”
Mavis sighed. “Just go ahead.”
“Just go ahead,” said Hagbard. “A powerful mantra.”
“And if we don’t go ahead,” said George, “it doesn’t matter either. Which means that we just do go ahead.”
“Another powerful mantra,” said Hagbard. “Just do go ahead.”
10
House of Leaves is a post-modern, multi-layered novel by Mark Danielewski. On the first level, it is the story of a troubled young
man living in Los Angeles, Johnny Truant. Johnny finds the tatters of a manuscript written by a blind old man, Zampanò, and becomes
obsessed with it. The manuscript is a critical analysis of a film, the Navidson Record, which does not exist. The film is a documentary
produced by Will Navidson, an award-winning photojournalist, about his moving into a home that is bigger on the inside than it is on
the outside.
11
Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was an Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. His most famous contribution
was a mathematical proof that, in short, any mathematical system cannot be both complete (capable of proving all possible theorems) and
fully true (containing only true theorems). Thus, any mathematical set is either false, or else cannot prove some things that are true.
6
“To show what?”
“Stick your measures into the unknown and they come back broken?”
“Works for me.”
Let me quote something for you:
◆
“Suddenly, all the movement stopped. We were staring at a picture. A painting. I’d seen the painting somewhere before.
It was a wild swirl of color. A painting of purple flowers. Irises, I think, although I’m no big expert on flowers. The artist had seen
the beauty of those flowers and captured some small bit of it on canvas.”12
◆
... House of Leaves. I like the compass. If there’s some way to make that and the Möbius strip into a symbol, a simple one, maybe that
should be it.
I’m not sure what page it’s on, but it’s shortly after they’re leaving the house. The text describes Tom, having him as the antecedent,
and then later, it says “me.” “Me”—as though Zampanò were Tom.
◆
Can you imagine speaking only in quotes, like that hovering machine in Flubber? A bit of a psychological/philosophical dealie, now that
I think about it.
◆
What happens when a man makes himself his life study? He produces a history lesson, and then a gigantic zero.
A meaninglessness attack is what happens when the knowledge bubbles up in my mind that there is no end, no purpose, no magic
lamp to make things childlike and uncomplicated again. I understand why the universe would again turn itself to a singularity, again
explode and again grow. Is there no stasis?
Perhaps one then sees that one can’t reach the holy void. This is all we are. And when the universe becomes the universe, it will see
that, and it will reset.
◆
Maybe you should incorporate the infinity symbol in there, too. One day you will have to find an artist to draw this for you.
April 2002
Oh what tangled webs we weave when at first we practice head disease.
◆
“Your mother is no longer a human being. She is a meme13 apartment complex.”
◆
Sure. I’d rather be a cog within a functioning wheel than a gear outside a bent tire.
May 2002
I have sick power fantasies. I want to gather life in my hand and crush it. I want to rip apart worlds. I want gigantic skeletal stalagmites to
shoot out of the ground and eviscerate the innocent.
The final act is union. The first is disunion.
A scimitar of fire struck the moon.
At midnight, it rang out a dozen times.
Smoking copper shards fell to the earth.
Away Message #576
12
This quotation is an excerpt from the young adult science fiction series Animorphs. It is taken from a scene in which the Ellimist,
a god-like being, is demonstrating the beauty of the human species to the protagonists of the series.
13
“Meme” is a term introduced by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) to refer to communicable bits of information. Dawkins proposed them, in analogy with genes, to suggest that human culture consists in memes propagating themselves.
7
June 2002
I keep trying to trick reality into tripping up. I played the Harry Potter movie theme song and looked for a trap door in my closet. Why
can’t I really suspect, half-feel there’s a door, and actually find a door?
◆
Without the semilogical, the part of me that wants to swallow hot coals, to shower in liquid steel, I would never know what happiness
comes from. You can’t reach for anyone but yourself. You must pray to yourself every day. It’s all we’ve got until all is what we’ve got.
(Untitled)
If such a thing were not whispered, it would not be heard at all.
If it were untrue—
if the pitch of the utterance shattered the face into a scoff
and brought down over the eyes the curtain of the palm—
it would pass without ever being spoken again.
If I could forget it—
like a bleeding salmon
from the eagle’s mouth
into the hurrying river—
it should fall back and die
its own, invisible.
But, mouthing with a pale voice
and a dry tongue in a windless recital
some catechism of shadows and pursuit,
in the windy dimness under the cloud-smeared moon,
I stood a statue gazing at the shade I did not mean to cast,
a darker darkness against the night.
July 2002
[Editor’s notes: the following is an AIM conversation with a friend, edited in content and format.]
“There’s a part of me that cares. It’s small. And it wants to be cared for. I haven’t exorcised it. I don’t know if I should.”
“Don’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, maybe it’ll be useful one day.”
“Maybe. But it could also harm my ability to reach my goal.”
“What goal?”
“The only goal. Maximum possible happiness in my life. But this part, it’s the part that cares and wants to wrap someone up in my
arms and just hold her.”
“And wants her to care, too?”
“Yes. And very much. But more, for her to know me, and care.”
He knelt at the summit before a patch of blue wildflowers that had broken through the May
snow—and wept.
Away Message #575
◆
The indescribable holy void. On top of it, we stack the world. As in mathematics, an undefined. Everything over nothing. Or is that 1? ...
An infinity of brilliant jewels, each reflecting all the others14. Renormalization15.
Sclack
Nou(n)s16. Start with the nouns.
The flares of infinity
verb through the grid.
Greasy adjectives sclack in
listing mythology, love, art, self, and sex
in alphabetical—the
reaper is not a joke,
but sometimes his rattle
14
This is a reference to Indra’s net, an image of the interconnectedness of all things, from Mahayana Buddhism. The net was referred to by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach.
15
Renormalization is a collection of methods in mathematics for working with infinities within a system to produce a finite result.
16
Nous is a Greek philosophical term used to refer to the mind. The term was used varyingly by different philosophers, but the
specific meaning here is of universal, pre-material reason.
8
seems the mirth
of harvest time wear
y.
◆
I have sick fantasies about captivity and torture and mind reading and finding out the absolute truth about what others think about me.
We all love a little jealousy in the ones we care about most, don’t we?
[Editor’s notes: the following is a dialogue with myself.]
◆
“So why do I let him around?”
“Because he’s entertainment. A satisfaction you can’t produce. You’re cold and logical and don’t get whiny depressed rage satisfaction.”
“I can’t simulate that?”
“You do. He’s the simulator.”
◆
I wonder if I’m only hunting for a way to be unique. Maybe no one really cares. Maybe I really am odd. No one will give me a straight
answer, and those who do, I think, are lying.
◆
Isn’t it just extremely unlikely entropy will decrease—but not impossible?
◆
I think of Saturn with its dazzling (it’s always dazzling) rings. I don’t believe in God or anything like it, though I think these are the things
people feel when they think about God. Majesty.
I love this planet and every quark. I love the laws of physics. I love the molecules that make up my hair. I love cheaters. I love pedophile priests. I love this keyboard and Alan Turing. I love glass. I love the waves. I love the thought that someday, somewhere, even if
I never meet her, there’s a girl for me. I love her even if she dies in a car accident. I love typos. I love the cynical smile at this, I love the
Skeptic. He doesn’t love very much, but I love him. He needs love most of all. He doesn’t need the blind love of his being, he needs understanding love. He needs to love himself completely, but he can’t. I love worms and inchworms. I love fingernails and blood. I love the
smell of cigarette smoke. I love flitting flies. I love that words aren’t enough for this.
It’s 11:27 PM, and I’m going to sleep. I’ll always love you.
hallow evening
it was ripe berries when we were
little boys and cute little dark-haired girls
now it’s great big pumpkins
smoking pot like silly kids
and you and me striving, homework
some think we are dry, i know
but we are just popsicles and
i know summer and the perfume
you haven’t worn in years and
happy, sloppy kisses all morning
until our lips are happily sore
at school the next day
tomorrow we’ll scoop it out
it will smell like we’re
ten years old.
◆
I understand now what Dawn means by it taking Rubber Soul to get Abbey Road.
◆
When I visited my dad, his coworker told me that there was a Hebrew saying, and it went, “God laughs at man’s plans.”
I think the reason
Nietzsche said
God was dead:
he laughed himself
to death.
Away Message #137
◆
Fiery justice. Roar of the wronged! I’m going to disembowel God. Or maybe you, Reader.
They get desperate. They see a figure in the distance, “It’s him!” As the figure gets near, they see it’s just me. I save the day. Then,
quietly, say, “Let’s go”—and ferry them away. And no one notices.
The white blood cell and the eunuch,
the all in one must guard the all in all
against the one in all, called to more,
two more, tumor.
Away Message #970
9
◆
Every connection I have, I neglect. Every connection I don’t have, I yearn for. All I can do lately is stay up later than I should.
Five clocks are ticking over my head. Five of them. I paid $26 for them and the batteries.
◆
I should probably be sleeping now. Instead, I’m going to use caffeine tomorrow. Just coffee, you see, but it’s a drug. I’m going to use it to
supply me until 11:00. At 11:00, food, another drug, will carry me until 2:00, when I will eat lunch. I leave at 5:00, so music and food will
carry me until I get home. I foresee a snack of cereal (if I’m alive), but I may just wait until dinner.
You see the usefulness of referring to different personalities, even if it requires more effort? I avoid contradiction. I am not whole:
yearning to get in bed, yearning to keep writing and be a good meme factory.
You remember much fun it was to be a kid and be less sentient? Just think how much fun death must be.
◆
Press your heart into a ball of energy and hurl it at someone. The most efficient balls of energy are invisible. Dig?
◆
Reader, I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned this before, but I have a compulsion to tweeze the stiff hairs on my chin and stomach. It’s called
tricho-something [Editor’s note: trichotillomania] I’m curing myself of it through negative reinforcement. Whenever I rub my chin, I
bite my thumb hard. I hope it works.
I assume it’s tricho-whatever, anyway.
◆
I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m putting out more water than I take in.
◆
Me
I’m never mad.
Questioner
What about Angry Jesse?
Me
You know those sane comments in parentheses? That’s me, at the same time. A program I run creates anger, but it’s not me and that’s not
my anger. That’s a socio-genetic mess with access to my mind. But Angry Jesse≠Me.
Caffeine is a drug, and I think this is an artificial happiness.
◆
◆
In eighth-grade science, my teacher would ask the class questions on the material. I’d tell the answers to the kids around me. The dumb
ones, then, sounded smart. After a while, the teacher caught on. Thereafter, whenever the people around me would start answering with
an improbable accuracy, she told me to stop doing it.
◆
Bush is speaking in a major event. Meanwhile, a hydrogen bomb vaporizes Manhattan.
Bush
America, I have to go.
Bush flees and an agent steps in to replace him and delivers a message of terror. Washington is vaporized. The large military bases are vaporized. The shadow government is vaporized. The agent informs the audience that America gets another chance. The feed goes blank.
August 2002
I hope it all comes back to me so I can stop the wheel of karma right here. I hope it all, all comes back. All I can do is say I’m sorry, and
bear it, and let it die— in me, where it began. I see, now. I see. With the highs come the lows, but it all comes. I’ve been wanting to type,
Experiment: Emotionless complete; Results: none significant.
sympathy must precede vocabulary.
Away Message #808
◆
Do you know the lies I tell because I act like they already know the truth?
◆
Sometimes I feel as though I’m on a raft drifting in a vast ocean. From time to time the logs gather floating debris. Once in a blue moon
comes another log and string to tie it to the raft.
◆
When I get to the pearly gates, and I reach the front of the line, Peter will be like, “Oh, you. You gotta keep going up.”
OR
When I get to the pearly gates, and I reach the front of the line, and Peter’s got his two lists, he’ll be like, “Oh, you,” and pull out a third list.
◆
The more Eastern part of me says, “If you see and feel it, that is empirical evidence, buddy, even if you can’t record it for another—and
10
your estimation of likelihood does slide a few notches.”
◆
I’m afraid to define my personality to the people I care about. I’m worried they’ll think the emotion isn’t genuine enough and that I don’t
really care because I took off the lid and tinkered with my own mind.
just wait, and yeah,
my flaws will be
my fangs.
Away Message #690
◆
I don’t really like funerals. It’s like “We know you didn’t succeed in becoming immortal, neither in fact nor in public thought, but here:
this stone will last a long time.”
What is the evolutionary purpose of the hymen?
◆
◆
[Editor’s notes: the following is an AIM conversation with a friend, edited in content and format.]
“What if I were killed?”
“Could I go to your funeral?”
“I don’t want a funeral.”
“What do you want?”
“My brain suspended in an electrolyte compound similar to the fluid inside the skull with a small current of electricity permeating it
indefinitely.”
Triching Jesse is using a hand to pluck
◆
Skeptic
Who has control of this hand?
Triching Jesse
I do.
Fool
Don’t ask me, I’m just the stage.
Gold-52? Aurum oxide? Very strange.
◆
◆
“We have beaten the enemy twice under different commanders ... The Americans are now lead by a chief who never sleeps ... We have
never been able to surprise him ... It would be prudent to listen to his offers of peace.”
Little Turtle, Miami Chieftain, in a speech to his allies
The Americans (my history textbook), p. 179
This is Radio Free Theory17.
◆
◆
“There goes Jesse. Non-contradiction. Saint Reason. Purity. Mind. Control.”
“Ego.”
September 2002
The Ataris preach Death in “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.” If no one “grows up,” society collapses. But, oh
well. Theft is fun. Fuck the owner, he wouldn’t mind if we steal his car. Not when his wife needs to be rushed to the hospital. Ah, yes, fuck
him, the working bastard.
◆
I feel like my thoracic cavity is ice cold. Do you think I can love despite the fact I’d never give my life for another?
(Untitled)
I have known many candelabra
to fill the dark with yellow light,
and many a menorah heats the dusk;
and orange in a sea of flames
I have seen coins and crowns ablaze:
their beauty is the wick’s great charity.
17
“Radio Free” is a reference to the various Radio Free broadcasts operated by the United States to provide news to the citizens of
foreign countries. The first was Radio Free Europe, established at the beginning of the Cold War to broadcast into Communist countries.
“Theory’ refers to a nickname I was given because of my AOL screen name, TheoryOfEvrythng.
11
And there are many rooms in night
whose tenants wait to breathe with life
and gasp under the candle’s barest sigh.
But burners bringing stethoscopes
will find, despite their dripping ropes,
no mirror in this room will ever breathe
nor echo rise and here be seen.
So, happy candle, if you please
don’t ever waste your little wick on me.
◆
“The question arises, though, of how little sleep the young Arost was getting. He even goes into it himself, in fact, in the entry on September 5, 2002. He writes: “The question arises, though, of how little sleep the young Arost was getting. He even goes into it himself, in fact, in the
entry of on September 5, 2002. He writes: “The question arises, ...”
o that themefulness might not
be a theme! that this poem might be
about something else!
Poem #16
◆
I remember hoping, after hearing about the attacks on 9/11 last year, that the U.S. government would collapse significantly. I hoped the
world would change.
There are basically 6,000,000,000 types of people.
◆
◆
A long time ago, several months, I had a dream. I dreamt I cut off my penis and ate it. I’m really curious, if dream interpretation is worth
its salt, what on earth that dream meant.
◆
Wasteland. Muck. The path into logic. The foundation of reality. A gigantic inverted pyramid. A single eye. Infinity symbol plus a compass
plus a Möbius strip.
Compass, for understanding, words; the image we see and accept
Möbius strip, for the incomprehensible, indefinable; the Damned Thing
Infinity, for everything, the more than everything beyond
◆
There’s no mention outside of Illuminatus! of a terror organization called Morituri18 that required its members to be under 21.
October 2002
She spoke of a mother loving her unborn baby. This means love isn’t based on appearance or on behavior. This means that love doesn’t
mean anything in particular. It’s a wildcard in her vocabulary.
◆
Let’s play a game. Who taught you the difference between right and wrong? Who taught that teacher? Who taught that teacher? Go back
18
The writers of Illuminatus! were making reference to the phrase “Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant,” Latin for “Hail, Caesar, those
who are about to die salute you. “Morituri” translates to “those who are about to die.” The phrase was spoken by Roman gladiators to the
emperor at the beginning of a match.
12
up your ancestors to 100 B.C. Who taught them? How about 4,004 B.C.? 10,000 B.C.? 100,000? Or does it stop at 4,00419?
I don’t know what the masses really want. I just know that if they knew better (the issues, not morality or something) they wouldn’t
want a (D) or an (R).
◆
Why?
In this question, a motivation: to tread carefully and logically after God in his trail away from Creation; to deduce his reasoning and
his methods as he perpetrated the universe; to stalk after him, chasing an invisible man throughout history and physics and psychology;
to bear a weapon and end this madman’s life and take what little he had left for ourselves, his snubbed children; to take on the colossus of
ego and destroy the universe in the process.
God fill me with the eloquence to denounce Him.
Lord raise my eyelid twenty extra feet.
With home and heart He has Hell interwoven.
His antigrace has brittled my concrete.
I’m crucified on fiber optic cables.
He’s goddened me; I water into oil.
That forest’s overfertilized with fables.
I’ll bleed His Providence into the soil.
Away Message #216
Live from Umatilla, JESSE AND THE CATIONS!
◆
◆
Do you know how hot Hell is? So hot, your food never gets cold. You never need to turn on the heat. Hell, the undying source of heat is
running billions of lives. Hell is the opposite of entropy.
your lurid is our bread,
your Death is our Monday,
your rape is our stubbed
toe.
Away Message #691
◆
One of my deepest fears, perhaps, is that the swamp from which I have risen has tainted me. I refrain from praising myself as unique even
though it seems very likely to me that I am.
Punching above my weight since 1986.
Burning at both ends since 1986.
Electric mirror since 1986.
Braving the underworld alone since 1986.
Sacropsyche since 1986.
Make-believe messiah since 1986.
Neon rainbow infinity katana since 1986.
Incessant exception since 1986.
All waif and angles since 1986.
Social neutrino20 since 1986.
Compulsive neologist since 1986.
Fairweather fool killer since 1986.
Away Message #173
◆
I wish sometimes I could sit in an abandoned office building in an emptied city and be perfectly alone with someone—and then, just
speak, speak without worrying, for once, about every other person alive.
one of the sings in my meing which i think it is yessest to I me
was spoke when i yessed only or noed if i might’ve
nods silent and maybe and you’d word if he did.
Away Message #64321
◆
19
James Ussher, a biblical scholar, famously calculated the year and date of Creation to be the night before October 23, 4,004 BC.
20
Neutrinos are small, uncharged subatomic particles that pass through most matter, interacting extremely rarely.
21
I’ve always thought this was an interesting piece of writing, but fairly inscrutable. A translation into normal English might be
“One of the songs in my heart which I think it is most correct to identify myself with was expressed only back when I used to speak in the
utter confidence of my writing-or else didn’t express it at all-and now expresses itself only by subtly agreeing or else responding with
ambivalence, and if I were to express it again, you would respond to it by overly complicating it with classifying words.”
13
The sniper22 left a tarot card, Death, on which he wrote, “Dear Policeman, I am God.”
◆
“Pussy not eat his fish, pussy get thin and waste away, I think,” said the man. Doubt crept into his voice.
“I imagine this is what will happen,” he said, “but how can I tell?”
He proffered the fish again.
“Pussy think,” he said, “eat fish or not eat fish. I think it is better if I don’t get involved.” He sighed.
“I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?”
He left the fish on the floor for the cat, and retired to his seat.
“Ah, I seem to see you eating it,” he said at last, as the cat exhausted the entertainment possibilities of the speck of dust and pounced
on to the fish.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
◆
There may be an infinitude of people in each head, all performing a common action, but each personality having a totally different subjective explanation and rationale for it.
◆
Respond to me. It’s a very selfish desire, but I think I’ve grown addicted—from my mom’s footsteps on the wood floors I know well how
it feels to live in the shadow of a tyrant—to other people.
◆
This empire of distance stands, this monument, the Statue of Separation:
Some girl, any girl, forcing out her hands for more personal space as if to say,
“Whoa, buddy.”
◆
“What the creosote bush is, Cornett is fairly certain, is ancient. If confirmed, the bush - really a 38-foot, arrow-straight line of genetically
identical bushes connected at the roots - would trump another creosote bush, dubbed ‘King Clone.’ That bush, found in 1980 to be 11,700
years old, is considered the oldest living thing on Earth.”23
Person
I can’t believe you don’t believe you exist.
◆
Me
Why would I?
Person
You want to be a physics student.
Me
So?
Person
It’s fucking obvious. What are you, a retard?
Me
Speaking to a suddenly empty office. I don’t believe you exist, either.
Yes, it’s named. “Midgar Zolom24,” I call it.
◆
November 2002
It’s strange to think that all the famous places I know—the White House, celebrities’ mansions, the Sphinx—all lie on the same planet and
can be reached from my house.
22
Peoria, Petersburg
London, Jerusalem,
we hallow those places
where we’ve never been.
Gainesville, Warsaw
Babel, Berlin,
they’re peopled with marble,
so heavy with skin.
That is, of the Beltway sniper attacks of 2002.
23
This is an extract from a San Diego Union-Tribune article about a creosote bush discovered by Jim Cornett 50 miles outside of
the Mojave Desert.
24
The Midgar Zolom was a gigantic snake in Final Fantasy VII. The serpent was named for the Midgårdsormen, the World Serpent
in Norse mythology. It eventually grew so big as to eventually encircle the earth and grasp his own tail.
14
Away Message #1000
◆
The electric charge on a hair on your head carries, however weakly, all the way to Alpha Centauri B25. Even the strong nuclear force carries
out that far, making a minuscule but quite real physical impact on the star’s particles. If a methane molecule loses an electron, but they’re
still attracted, can it truly be said to have lost its electron? They are, after all, still bonded to one another, if weakly. Is that an object, still,
that methane molecule? Is it a different object now?
Let’s get to the point: A sperm cell is a collection of quarks. It is losing and gaining countless particles every instant. Which particles
can you say “make up” the sperm cell? A sperm cell penetrates an egg and the egg seals it in. Is it, at that point, a human? When is the soul
attached? Is it when the DNA begin lining up? When the DNA synthesis is complete?
If you respond that the latter is the answer, you’re not paying attention: every single bond shared between any two particles has
always existed and will always exist. The hydrogen bonds that hold a new zygote’s DNA together have always existed—from the very
beginning of the universe. There can be no line drawn saying, “Okay, now they’re bonded.” They simply always have been. When death
comes and those bonds still exist, how can the soul say, “Okay, now I’m no longer with this matter.”?
God has peanut butter all over his hands, and even if he finds a way to get it off, he’s going to leave a big mess behind. He has to
specify exactly what goes on when he interacts with the mortal world. Even if he does specify a given method, why that precise way of
interacting?
The Seeds of Doubt
Is it that gods, deflated, leak their might
when graves be raised about them by insight?
And rust the crown and sceptre in the grave
or are their fiery robes an heirloom made?
Puke their atoms wormwood in our plots
or sow Atropos’26 castings dearer crops?
Is old Golgotha forest, now, or swamp?
◆
Fever dreams are the weirdest. I half-dreamed there were tons of people on my buddy list. Names like EasyUpgrade. It didn’t make much
sense. And the Sams are there, and Sam is trying to figure out the desktop background, which is just text, something about a higher dimension, and it ends, “ow, ow, ow.” In another, she’s saying, “One Mrs. Pie, Two Mrs. Pie, Three Mrs. Pie.”
consonant breakers slamming on syllable sands.
fever dreams and a dry tongue.
Away Message #645
Cynicism is a very successful meme.
◆
◆
How the fuck can there possibly be any shade of gray? If morality states that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, it
is without a doubt wrong to save your mother at the expense of three lives—and right to save the three people even at the cost of your
mother’s life.
The situation is unfortunate, but you still have the options: black or white. It may not be clear to you, but does that mean an omniscient observer couldn’t tell you the difference? No. No, of course not.
“Oy, have you picked the wrong Black Magician.”27
◆
◆
Is there anything that hurts but doesn’t damage? I have something to prove to myself and everyone else: I, this mind, not its instincts, am
king of this body.
I want to experience natural childbirth without pain-killers, a slave’s whipping, a murder victim’s death, losing an arm, an automobile accident, napalm burns over my whole body. I want to show them that no suffering is too great, so no one can say, “you don’t know
what it’s like.” God is an equal sign and nothing else.
The glass cup startles me,
a milk-eyed prophet artifact,
falls and clinks and doesn’t break.
It cries out greater feats,
worse faith, looser stars.
Let them come down.
Poem #19
25
Alpha Centauri B is the closest star to our solar system.
26
Atropos is the third of the three fates in Greek mythology who weave the destiny of all things. Atropos, literally “unturning,” cut
the thread of each man’s life.
27
A line from the Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, spoken by Cagliostro the Great, to John Disk, who was about to shoot him.
15
◆
Do I regret the fact that I purged human contact with others? Not a damned bit. After the pleas stopped (and they were pleas), I was left
with a calm broken only by the occasional bleat of the goat of mediocrity.
Still, from time to time
my empty room reminds me
of my empty room.
Away Message #934
◆
If I kneel before anyone but myself, I’m lying. If I pray to anything but my own mind, I’m faking. If you hear me accept any “truth” at all,
I’m simplifying. I may not be able to get to the bottom of everything, but the quest to do so is not, nor will it ever be, a group effort. Drops
the microphone to the floor and walks offstage.
“And that is where I cannot buy in. Shouting down the phantoms seems naïve except in contrast with the alternative: becoming a phantom oneself.”
Away Message #17
◆
I have an inordinate fondness for Russia, specifically the USSR. I know it was a terrible place to live, but something about the ideals, the
faithfulness, the bond between Russians. Russia in combat. Russian army in the bitter winter stopping the Nazi invasion dead in its tracks.
Oh, to hail from Russia.
The Russians have two different words
for dream: “metchta” and “sonn”. The one,
“metchta,” refers to the things, which,
while waking, we wish were true: daydreams.
The other, “sonn,” is a dream at night,
an expectation and hope we have killed
during the day and allow ourselves only,
exhausted, asleep.
Away Message #937
◆
“And the book says, ‘We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.’”28
◆
I had a dream about Euclid, Texas. Euclid. What does this mean? Something about how they all had cellars and his was bigger and they
used to play in theirs? Do they draw pentagrams down in Euclid, TX?
◆
Maybe my view is warped by the fact that most of the people I know are Umatillian teenagers, but God help this country.
Taken as one entity, mankind sure seems to have some wild self-mutilation problems.
◆
I’m talking to my keyboard. Warning it against the mouse. The mouse has gone feral. Tried to bite me. Give me polynucleoisis. I suspect
it will attempt to attack the keyboard next, you see.
◆
Sometimes I hope the Singularity29 doesn’t happen just so all those schmucks will be left waxing pompous, mortal, and just as bored as
the rest of us.
◆
The greater the projection of a “normal functioning human being” given off by anyone, the larger the quirks underneath.
My Generation
everyone knows that it’s on the backs of the homeless
that we have built this society,
everyone knows that it’s
you will golf
you will play tennis
◆
I’m tempted to just tattoo a To-Do list on my hand and get a pen pierced in.
28
This is a quotation from the film Magnolia.
29
The Technological Singularity is a postulated asymptotal moment in technological development at which, if technological acceleration is exponential, an infinite number of breakthroughs occur at once.
16
December 2002
I learned to read from Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. At some point I got into astronomy. This got me into physics. I am still into
physics. I am still into science. Science got me into philosophy. I am still into philosophy.
◆
It bugs me that those morons at SL430 can talk about how the axiomatic laws of physics cannot be explained, but don’t even consider
that logic—that by which we understand—may itself not be axiomatic. Axioms may not be axiomatic. Hence, [insert symbol here]. Who
knows?
◆
Dear Mother: You praise me only for shit I’m not proud of. You insult my appearance and question my conviction. You wanted noise, you
got it. You wanted a child, here I am. I’m a success. But I am not your success. You ran from my father’s atheism. You can’t hide from it
now. You can force me to say I love you. You can’t make me feel it.
Quick to realize, slow to say,
“I will not forget that day
when I told you I didn’t believe in God.
I remember the kitchen white,
my heavy heart, my burning eyes,
and hugging you, I didn’t feel loved at all,”
until you ask me, how am I—
my god, I hold my face and cry,
and type to you, “I still can’t trust at all.”
Away Message #946
◆
If the photon is its own antiparticle, then an antimatter flashlight produces photons, too.
◆
The man who would hesitate to do something to his enemy doesn’t have very fearsome enemies.
◆
I will play the game that God was playing when he created the universe, and I will beat his score.
◆
Know that no, I don’t agree, no, I don’t acquiesce, and yes, once you stop holding the gun, I put my hands down and walk away.
◆
I feel stupid whispering in an empty room unless I’m talking to myself.
◆
Oh, and before I vomit, let me tell you that though it may seem like a good idea to dry a soggy wrap (sandwich) by putting it in the oven
for two hours on 200, it will oxidize and become disgusting.
◆
She stood at window’s edge, looking down the great distance to the ground. He crept quietly into the room. She made the final calculations; to end the mental anguish, death. He winced and recalled their past discussions. All the logic in the world had not brought her up
from this pit. She leaned out over the open air, grasping the railing. He snuck up behind her, and readied the syringe. She took a breath
and let go.
He grabbed her and injected her. It was just enough. His eyes swelled with tears. It was enough to bring her back. She was not going
to kill herself tonight. She was also now addicted.
just because i see the ghosts doesn’t mean i’m an exorcist
Away Message #289
January 2003
Someone said of Crowley31 that he’s neat when he’s mysterious but mundane when you know him well. That’s how I feel about most of
life. The Illuminati32 became a bad joke.
the name meant something
it sung of sand dunes and space
30
SL4, short for “Shock Level Four,” the highest level of psychological shock at technological change, is a mailing list for discussions of the Singularity and transhumanism. Transhumanism is a social movement that calls for the improvement of mankind through
technology.
31
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English occultist, poet, and philosopher.
32
The term “Illuminati” describes several groups real, fictional, and theorized. Historically, the Illuminati were founded in 1776
as a secret society within Freemasonry in Bavaria. Their purpose, to the extent that it can be known, was to rule behind the throne, upset
state governments, and institute a new order founded on the ideals of the Enlightenment. The term is now used in many theories to describe secret organizations whose aim is to control or overthrow world governments toward their own ends.
17
cackling overhead at night,
it sounded like pyramids and
skeletons. it sounded marvelous.
why, then, did i suspect that,
despite all, he would be
ordinary?
Away Message #559
◆
I was outside, just now. The wind’s sort of picking up. The air’s real humid. It made me feel like.. well, it felt like something was moving,
some creature who’s been a friend of mine since childhood. If I had nothing better to do, I would go outside in every storm. The wind, I
love. The downpour, I love. I used to build blanket forts during thunderstorms. I wish I had days and days of storm.
◆
This has to be a novel. And you, Reader, you can never get to me. You can’t save me. The author, who maybe has a part of me in him, you
can save. But not me. You may think that I am not real. I may be fictionalized, but I guarantee that my truth is as real to me as your truth
is to you; that if you were to rip in half the pages I am on, to black out my passages in this novel, I wouldn’t like it. If this is a movie, you
can talk to my actor, and maybe he has some small part of me in him. But he’s not the character. He can’t play me. He’s wearing this acne
as make-up. Can’t you understand that I’m real, real, real?
I see the seed explode into the tree,
the heavy light from one gram TNT,
and all the fruit now hanging from that tree
called Babel, planted by divinity;
each breath now stinks of broken evergreens
and putrefied potentiality.
Away Message #1004
◆
People say apathy kills, but apathy doesn’t mind if it’s killed. It’s getting near late afternoon in Japan.
◆
I’m sneezing a lot, so maybe I’m sick. Then again, Milo was in here earlier and he is a cat.
◆
And now I can’t even get angry. The fury doesn’t come. I used to feed the flames with injustice, but now I can forgive everyone.
◆
The fact that God gave words to humans means that, as in the story about the man hunting creatures that live in higher dimensions, we
can stick a gigantic nail through Him in our dimension and—no matter which other worlds he resides in—we can poke him here.
I cannot shake the feeling that somewhere something important is going on and I’ve just impaled part of it in this dimension with
these words.
The Immaculate Conception
Early hominids creaking toward forward, gradually looking upward and outward. They begin to
build tombs and stories. The sky and the dust.
And what of all this? Older men, silent, but here arcs in the dirt, patterns in the sky. Some
brothers draw these same lines with mud and bone. But every one now can look at the stars.
What! Why?
These lines make us, make history feel and feel. But some brothers do not. We put stone
on circle and trees on lines. Some brothers do not. Our lines grow long and the trees grow. We
put seeds into circles, lines run from us into the ground into the bones and flowers, into pollen
into the sky, down into the ground. The arcs in the mud fill with silt, the stars, the fires, the sun.
Why teems in this what, but some brothers do not.
Your lines and circles teem in me, they teem everywhere, and we teem on the ground
and into each other. We teem where some dead brothers lived who did not feel and feel. We
fold them into the ground, we fold the stars into the ground, we fill the trees with the ground
and with ourselves.
We feel the lines the answers to the lines, echoes and beasts and arc falls on arc, into
spirals. Drawn and drawn, felt and folded, and these lines become our voice, the word. I am the
word, we are the word, it is all the word. We write and work the words, and soon nothing is not
words folded into words, sewn, scraped, fucked, murdered, towered, bronzed, crucified, I am
teeming in the desert and on the sea, in the fish, in the bread, in the crown, in blood through
heart and out of wounds, into the ground and the sky.
I am teeming in the looking glass, in wires. We fold lines into electrons, points, fields,
into books, and history feels and fills, and I am filling with you and with us and with and with
and with.
◆
Since the time I first gave Samantha Locke a packet of these writings, I have become closer to her than I can recall ever having been to
anyone, my parents included.
◆
Caffeine increases the rate at which your neurons fire. You are the result of their total firing sequence. Caffeine makes you exist more.
Relativism, you cry? It’s in our bones. There is a fire in our veins.
◆
18
she’s out there downing dynamite
and i’m swallowing gasoline.
we’ll meet and see whose pain is greater,
heart is hotter, anger hater.
we’ll meet and see whose love’s the bigger,
better goddamned detonator.
Poem #21
February 2003
People die in murders and car wrecks all the time. Not everyone experiences the horror of losing contact with your planet and burning
up in its atmosphere, but it happens. This is a bad week for space travel.33
I have an affinity towards massive war machines.
◆
◆
How reassuring it must be to believe in a good-humored, short-fused superman who knows everything, loves you, and will, if you ask
him nicely, do you favors.
◆
“You think you’re a good fuck? I think you’re a lousy fucking human.”
Angry Jesse realizes his hate doesn’t need a target. I can fucking indict reality. The Roar of the Wronged. Don’t you understand why
I refuse to restrain him or hold him back? Why I won’t do more than check him? One day I’ll need him. One day the energy leys of reality
will be tapped and out he will pour. I’ll eat the dead. I’ll raise them and eat their rotting excuses for brains.
god’s a liar
able dagger
freezing water
dancing furor
holy terror
Away Message #143
◆
The good doctor glanced at the sleeping boy in shackles and said, “All he’ll say is that he did it because he could not have what he wanted.”
The boy stirred at this and spoke drowsily, “I figured I would just fight the whole system.”
The doctor looked puzzled. “But wouldn’t you rather try to find your way in this world than take the impossible goal of changing
it entirely?”
“I wasn’t trying to change it, just get out of it. There are ways to .. escape .. this world .. escape to a place where what is not, must be.”
A place where what is not must be? I said, “I don’t follow you. What could you possibly have done?”
The boy rolled his head towards the window. We had a gorgeous view of the monument he had begun to create. In brilliant metallic
colors, the spherical outer ring caught the light that fell upon it and warmed the city. For a moment, no one said anything.
“Did you think that was for show?” the boy asked. “Would I be so vain—after everything I’ve done—to erect a monument to my mere
existence? A monument that must crumble even within a few short millenia?”
The doctor spoke again, “You’ve cost human progress dearly. We are not animals. We have not been animals for thousands of years.”
“How many have died? None. No person has been crushed underfoot. The forces I inspired—yes, only inspired, for I am no tactician—gave up without hurting anyone. That is, once they recognized that the time for conquest was yet unripe.”
I blinked hard and rubbed my forehead, “Why all of this?”
There was a knock at the door. I answered it. I stared at a large man who stared right back. He said, “I am here to take him. We will claim
him by force if we have to.”
The boy said, “No, no. Force is not necessary. We were in the middle of discussing strategy.”
The doctor turned sharply back to him. “Strategy? What strategy? You were a goddamn meteor. We can no longer trust even a single
quarter not to rise up. We can no longer guarantee that our own forces won’t be converted. You’re a blight.”
“You’re a doctor. Recall: an infection is nothing more than the sum of many distinct, individual bacteria. Our method was more that
of a virus. We operate at no loss: it costs nothing to spread our idea, our truth—and the assurance it carries.”
The man who had entered said, “We don’t follow him. We follow the idea: humanity unshackled. If he hadn’t started it, someone else
would have. He was just the right chemicals in the right place—when lightning struck.” Abiogenesis34. They believe he is an accident. Any
one of them could replace him now—at virtually no loss. The doctor seemed to understand the same thing.
A noise picked up in the distance. The monument stirred again with life and a swarm of people quickly renewed their work. The monument was going up. The city had again quietly fallen under that ominous reign. As if reading my mind, the flags down on the streets
resumed that stylized black on white emblem.
The young man stood up and faced the window, rubbing his arms where the restraints had been. He turned to face the man. “Are
they..?”
33
On February 1, 2003, on my younger brother’s 15th birthday, the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated on reentry over Texas. 17
years and 3 days earlier, the Challenger space shuttle exploded 73 seconds after its launch the day after I was born.
34
Abiogenesis refers to the emergence of life from inanimate matter.
19
The man nodded. “They are informed of your wishes. We’ll have it ready in a matter of hours.”
The doctor spoke to me, “This is exactly what I meant. I used every drug I could think of to try to pry the truth out of him, but he
didn’t resist at all. He just said that no one could have exactly what they wanted—and he was going to change that.”
“Petty causes can come to grave effects. I’m nothing special, I assure you. To capture me now, after all of this,” he motioned again to
the vast construction site, “was to act in vain. We outnumber you.”
The man spoke to the doctor and me, “What is it that you want most?”
“I’ve heard it before and I don’t believe it. You can’t just give a personal jet to anyone who wants one.”
“There are no limitations, doctor, as you will soon come to find.”
The man pulled a gun and shot the good doctor and me. Just a dart! I reached to pull it out but the world had begun to spin. Consciousness slipped away.
Give me a jigsaw and some paint.
These puzzles pieces will fit yet.
Away Message #304
◆
The reactor heated up and the material inside began to stir. A shimmering rope appeared in mid-air, connecting two shining points in
the sky. The cannons fired at the rope.
I hit the button the engineering team had so cleverly labeled “GRAB.” The rope spread out, seeming to dissolve. It gave off a burst
of light and disappeared. To anyone unfamiliar with the process, it would appear we had just destroyed the connection. We knew better:
it existed, now, in all possible universes. We had invented safe teleportation. The tunnel would simply be opened, walked through, and
closed.
A few days later some of the scouts came back with reports of life throughout the galaxy. One slow-moving race of semi-intelligent
animals was likened to our hominid ancestors. There was a water planet whose surface was teeming with microorganisms. The biologists
and taxonomists would never, ever finish their catalog. Of course, some of the scouts didn’t come back at all.
◆
“By authority of the office of President of the United States, I do hereby dissolve the United States federal government and nullify its authority in both creating and enforcing laws.”
The mayor of Port Sour slouched, examining an amendment to the tax code. He had been
pondering a veto for thirty-five years, but, being a skeleton, he had not yet reached a decision.
Outside his window, the city flag hung limp in the swelter. Thirty-five years ago, it had
been spray-painted black. Five years ago, some vandal had defaced it with a poorly-executed
Jolly Roger. Four years and eleven months ago, it was again spray-painted black.
Our story begins with a fish—the first fish in the bay to be born with a total immunity to the
city’s runoff of black spray-paint.
Away Message #912
From time to time,
like dandelions
we’re blown apart
to grow anew.
◆
◆
Choices are not known to be choices until both possibilities have been chosen before. Otherwise, we don’t know if we really have the
option of doing something different.
desire is a potential well
down which the will falls
and satisfaction the speed
with which intention
hits the bottom.
Away Message #833
March 2003
Whenever we go to linguistic extremes, systemic poles, we find that it’s all transparent slime and we can mold language all we like, but we
can’t get rid of the slime and we can’t reach some bubbles we see beyond it.
Gödel Agonistes
At supper! where?
Hamlet
Paper, I am ink. Sober, I am drink.
Dollar, I am need. Pauper, I am greed.
Past, I am memory. Truth, I am perjury.
20
Poor Sisyphus, beshrewed Zeus,
remorseful demiurge: I am the excluded riddle.
Obese quantity, viscous circumstance, tomb of possibility:
I am the curse of uncountable digits; I turn on a Planck length35 pinhead.
I am the boredom of perpetuity. I am Christ in a crowd
on the banks of the Styx. I am the banal revelation.
I am that I am as well.
I will drink you under the cemetery.
I will think a hole in your brain.
I am right back where you started.
Ink, I am blind.
◆
To hear that teendom is when we ‘find ourselves’—that is, finding which mold we best fit into—and to find I have a fractional number of
angles.
Hey, Jack36
The ones for me are the anxious ones, the ones anxious to drink, anxious to sober up, anxious
to exercise more, anxious that they are doing too little and anxious that they have agreed to
do too much, the ones who never relax or give thanks for bread, but worry, worry, worry, like
pulsing invisible dynamite opening a vein of coal like gigantic worms beneath the earth and
in the middle you see the gray sand collapsing and no one can think of anything to say at all.
◆
I just got in a car and drove 36.5 miles and then turned around and drove back. I was excited when I got to Salt Springs. I saw a gas station
I’d stopped at with my dad before. That’s what a car is worth. The ability to traverse this continent. I traveled 73 miles. 73. That’s nearly
100. It’s only 300 to Miami. I could have made it to Miami before the sun rose; to the keys before noon tomorrow.
◆
I thought about Fountainhead and skyscrapers and thought: I want to build something useful. A building may be magnificent, but we can
only look through every square inch and then it’s over. I think something recursive is in order.
Now, there are recursive algorithms that never repeat, so you can look and see “new” things forever-but you know the next item is
going to be one of ten numbers and that’s not exciting. It is, in short, just a digit. Nethack is never the same, the dungeon is always different.
Okay. But: I need something that generates material of exceeding interest no matter how long you run it for. Just some kind of algorithm
you run and the values are always surprising and entertaining.
I hold in my hand the most helpful device in the universe.
Away Message #155
◆
I want to learn and grow and rise and be a renaissance man. Demolition man. Annihilation man. Porn star. President.
I am George Bush’s head leaking blood on a pike. I am a dirty king sitting in the Oval Office devouring a turkey drumstick. I am
sending troops to found a colony in northern South America. I am Old Europe soaked in radiation. I am writing a holy book that will put
someone into power illegitimately. I am New York’s streets choked with trash. I am fields razed and then I am New York’s streets choked
with the dead. I am the world asleep. I am the sleeping burning. I am the awake immobilized. I am a garbage truck thrown. I am a rope
slipping out of my hands. I am almost but not quite.
If we are to accept the furry, unfurling genetic history
of apes-down-from-the-trees-and-on-to-Abraham,
we must reject the mythic noble savage socialist
living in redistributive peace.
On the contrary, we see that a king is a real thing,
made true and holy by blood and pomp;
but a thing made is a thing that can be unmade, and
so to live is so to die, and thus we see:
kings are made for killing.
Away Message #993
◆
I think I would have preferred a small spec-ops operation to assassinate leaders, jam regime networks, and beam a signal straight at them
35
The Planck length is the smallest possible unit of length, first calculated by German physicist Max Planck (1858-1947). No
shorter unit can be useful or, perhaps, possible, because of the quantum uncertainty inherent to spacetime.
36
This is a parody/homage to a passage in On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969):
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad for life, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across
the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
21
carrying Friends translated into Arabic. But let me say that I find the coverage fascinating. I love the embed program. I love the footage of
tanks hurtling towards Baghdad in the bright desert day—watching from the middle of the United States night.
◆
In a last-ditch effort to stave off the Discordian nanoinvasion, everyone is urged to make as much sense as possible.
◆
If it weren’t for the moral of the story in Independence Day, the aliens would just fly in, hit the ‘Kill All Life’ button, and warp our dead
planet back to the mothership for harvesting.
◆
We are doing no more harm to our planet than did the first oxygen-producing organism, the first amphibian, the first carnivore. We, the
first intelligent species, are doing precisely to those unprepared other species what our predecessors did. We cannot—and I can’t stress
this enough—cannot eliminate all life, no matter how hard we try, no matter how many nukes we set off, there will always, always, always
be life.
When children were outlawed, I abandoned childish things.
◆
April 2003
I suffer from a chronic desire for a megaphone.
When I am in the Lord’s throne, my sword in his back, his corpse at my feet, his glowing crown on my head, I will not be satisfied.
I am the Steel Animus. Stalanimus?
To you, my dearest darling, who do not exist:
◆
Like Anselm’s God37, you are so perfect, you transcend your nonexistence and still touch me from those regions which do not exist.
My love, the greatest proof of your nonexistence is this very love letter. But I still feel the softest sensible touch of your wraith hand. It’s
not my imagination. It’s there. But that’s all. And when I look behind me, there’s nothing. But I will try. With your 1/∞ of a hand in mine,
I will try. And maybe then I will know you. I love you.
i kissed “love” when she was
little and her parents were italian
and wept when she went over seas.
over wires, she came back in packets,
white dialup veins, arial narrow hair.
i found her in the dictionary, today,
bookmarked with ten-year-old
orange blossoms.
Away Message #772
I am going to write a skit. It is called, “That’s the Drugs Talking”:
◆
Enter Bag of Marijuana
Bag
Hello. I am an illegal source of a psychoactive substance, tetrahydracannabinol. People buy and sell many bags like me. I personally belong to Brad Pitt. He smokes my contents every evening with his friends.
Enter Brad Pitt
Brad
He is correct. I enjoy the relaxing effects THC has upon me, and the most convenient source of it is inhaling marijuana fumes from a
marijuana cigarette.
Enter Jesse
Jesse
I have been in the company of people buying, selling, and smoking marijuana, but have never deliberately consumed its smoke. I think it
likely that through the course of these events I may have become mildly affected by the second-hand marijuana fumes. Hello, Brad Pitt.
What’s happening?
Brad
I have come onstage to act a part in the play you were writing when you were typing this.
Jesse
I remember that night. It was the night of my junior prom. I had a friend with me. One of his chemical components was modifying the
firing threshold of my neurons, lowering the amount of ... sodium, I believe it is ... required to make them fire, thereby increasing my
overall neural activity and thus rate of thought and amount of mental focus.
37
Anselm of Canterbury, an 11th century theologian, argued that because God is the greatest being, and because a thing that exists
is greater than a thing that does not exist, God must exist. This and its variants are known as the Ontological argument.
22
Enter Cup of Coffee
Cup of Coffee
Hello. Among the many water molecules and various aromatic flavoring chemicals is a chemical named caffeine. It has the effect Jesse has
just explained on its consumer.
Jesse
Bag of Marijuana, do you like caffeine?
Bag
I cannot consume things. I am not animate, per se.
Brad
Bag, let’s go.
Exeunt Brad Pitt and Bag of Marijuana
Jesse
Well, Cup, it is just you and I.
Cup of Coffee
I don’t have enough lines, you decided as you wrote this, so you decided to make me say something strange or funny. This wasn’t it. Or
this. Or the next sentence. You see? This is probably it.
Jesse
Cup, that was lame. Lame like a broken leg.
Cup of Coffee
It’s not my fault you can’t come up with anything better than that.
Jesse begins making weird summoning gestures and Cup of Coffee looks as though possessed and turns to face a random member of the
audience
Cup of Coffee
All your base are belong to the KFC/Pizza Hut/Taco Bell triumvirate mega-corporation. Stay tuned for valuable contest information.
Jesse
I can’t believe this play is being acted out. This line only makes sense once it’s being acted out, actually.
Enter the Sun wearing a rainbow
Sun
There is more in heaven and earth, Jesse, than exists in your philosophy.
Cup of Coffee
Sun, will you marry me?
Sun
I’m made of crystallized lysergic acid diethylamide. Otherwise known as LSD, I am a powerful hallucinogenic drug. Very popular in the
60’s, I inspired much of the art of a generation. I increase heart rate and cause my users to see things that do not have any basis in the Sun
makes air quotes “real world,” but otherwise have no known harmful effects, short- or long-term.
Cup of Coffee
I want to have your baby.
Sun
I am not animate, per se. I am not actually made of LSD in a literal sense, I was caused in someone’s mind by the consumption of LSD.
Although Jesse is interested in the effects of LSD, he has never consumed it.
Cup of Coffee
Let’s go, Sun. You may not exist but I’m using you for your rainbow until you cease to be.
Exeunt Cup of Coffee and the Sun, arms linked
Jesse
Now I am alone. In my system at present are caffeine and diphenhydramine.
Enter a little blue pill, Sleeping Aid
Aid
I am also known as Benadryl. I am an antihistamine but I generate drowsiness in my consumers as well. I am in this case a sleeping aid.
23
Jesse the Writer took me before he began to write this and is now feeling my effects.
Jesse hugs Sleeping Aid
As Jesse and Sleeping Aid speak their next lines, enter two anonymous inconspicuous individuals standing to the side of Jesse and Sleeping Aid, holding up English translations of the following lines
Jesse
Los drogos son divertidos, pero ahora es el tiempo para dormir.38
Aid
Dormir? Bueno.39
Exeunt individuals
Jesse
Now is the time to go, my friends. I realize that this skit is terrible. It may amuse you, but it is plainly awful. Perhaps I can get someone
to act it out. Goodnight.
Jesse and Sleeping Aid climb into bed
Curtain
◆
I would like to write a story. The story I would like to write is a bit post-modern. Maybe we never see what’s going on at the same time
from any two perspectives. This is nothing new, just not so common as to be cliché. It allows for interesting plot turns because we never
know what happens outside of what we’re told. I’d like to have it be about nobility and honor and justice and fate, about a young man
who avenges someone important to him-not through fighting and death, but honorably, perhaps through ideological conversion-but,
in doing so, does something terrible, because ..
He orchestrated the whole thing for the very purpose of seeming honorable and noble. We believe he is a good person until the
truth is revealed. Also, some other things, maybe like, because all people in this fictional society are required to keep some secret from
themselves, he kept this one—we think. Only, when he discovers his own past, that’s not it either. I would like to have ambiguous supernaturality, things like demon summoning while on LSD so we never know what is true, things for which both sides have strong cases.
I would like it to be funny at times. I think maybe I should call it {Symbol}. The novel of the {symbol}. I want it ultimately to be a sad,
mournful novel. Maybe like how I feel now.
◆
I’m not an angry Russian communist hot enough for the snow, not a courageous American revolutionary freedom fighter, not a slave killing his master and escaping. I am trapped inside a complacent mind. I guess he has his purposes but I’m rocking the boat.
What good are friends if they cause you nothing but grief? None. Of no value. Worthless. If it makes them sad, fuck them, they
should watch your fucking friends or they’ll get away from you.
i could spit
but i need every drop
for milky sympathy
Away Message #792
◆
The wheel keeps turning and you’d think I’d rather just ride forward instead of pushing with the wheel all the time.
◆
These SL4ers make me sad. They can let their heads contain ideas as wide as the set of all logically consistent universes, but are, let’s say,
logically chauvinistic or logocentric. There is necessarily a world and a way outside what is comprehensible to us.
“Surprised as they were at the first shockwaves of the Singularity, they were downright flabbergasted when the first Axiom-Breaker hit
the markets.”
◆
Ah! I’ve figured out one of the things about me! I try and play life like a RISK game!
But how do you get anything accomplished like that? If you end up in life with nothing but a road behind you, is that good or bad?
Can you really ever have anything but a road behind you?
◆
Clearly God used definite physical laws, logical structure, mathematical form, made 2=2, not 2=1, and so on. We can’t imagine it, but if
God can do everything, including, well, create new realities, then to believe that the mathematics we have now was the only one possible
is pretty .. lame.
May 2003
I think it’s a neat idea to write a story about a quantum fellow.. I am inclined towards the hidden variables approach, having a strong
38
“Drugs are fun, but now it is the time for sleep.” (Spanish)
39
“To sleep? Good.” (Spanish)
24
hunch that God does not play dice40.
◆
I think of my life and what I produce as a scattergraph, and I think of this Work as a scattergraph of my life. I am in fact a single point in
a very dimensional space. A single point.
◆
There is a spectrum I delineated years ago:
On one end, the undoing of self-through skepticism and on to utter agnosticism-the becoming of one with the universe: death;
and, on the other end, omnifaction of the self-through schizophrenia and on to utter imagination-becoming a universe: insanity.
Hirsute holy men
dragging hundred pound
Bibles, silent for four score:
staring contests with Yahweh.
Away Message #121
◆
Maybe this instant and I are the sole reason for All Existence and when I stop typing it will all vanish, myself included. It will be no different to me because you can’t feel self-pity if you can’t feel at all. I am forced to scream at the heavens, at existence, “WHY?!” Why, Lord
God, do you cast this kaleidoscope before me, wherein an infinitude of explanations could answer the question “Why?” Why, Lord, if
there is one Simple Explainable Truth and Reason For the Kaleidoscope, has my intellect not granted it to me?
What shall I do, then, but look bewilderedly at the life that I call Jesse (but they called me it first! I did not invent this construct!)?
Exin
Too hepped up and heaped under
to hope our haps into hops;
a plex on our pleated pops
besunds and runds us rather.
Heavy hock in our horfers,
henecking heat in our heads,
hirse huss howls in our himmoms.
Why? Well, what whiff was wrought windless?
Worry works our ways winding:
When the world words wintily and wumpful,
fifty fathoms of ferror, feefer, father, and foe;
When the skies hive orange and darkly:
suss, huff, lurve, curve, whee, and glurg;
When atlas rocks the mirity of all:
ford niles, burst highways, pave cities, bend light—
Cough cough! I golfed! What forry fate!
It oughted me under the ground!
Woe and woe, the gables grow,
will I grow over, too?
O mourny, mirthy man,
you’ll exin if you can.
◆
The opposite of entropy. I just explained it to Rose, let me try and get verbatim what I said:
“There is a force tearing everything apart. All the time. Every second of minute of hour of day of year. It is lifting brick from brick, tearing
word from word, destroying families, species, stars, planets. Eventually, all matter will look more or less the same, spread equally across
everywhere. That is the grand fate of the universe. So maybe what I am doing is fighting that, building a structure that will get copied
word for word that people will read and remember and put in their own works and give another structure to rise. Perhaps then we are the
Preservers, dodging Shiva’s blade, neglected by Brahma’s dried fountain. One day all of these words will vanish, completely. All of them.
But they were here once.”
I will but that I will: très parlemente.41
Away Message #632
◆
Maybe subconsciously my writing is to make up for my lack of belief structures. Maybe I, like a spiritually territorial monkey, feel the need
40
This is a paraphrase of a quotation from a letter Albert Einstein once wrote: “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an
inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one’. I,
at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”
41
“très parlemente” (French) means “very speakingly.” “Parlemente” is an invented word.
25
to excrete words over idea space and claim a plot for myself.
Maybe I should read and see what Hume really thought, because we all know Descartes wasn’t actually a skeptic. He wanted to
believe, so he lied to himself and to logic to get it out from under the axe.
Recently I re-realized that the only way to function in this world is not to plumb the nether for a logic that cannot exist, but to again
place the symbol in the middle of the world, neither supported nor pulled—and stand on it. I realize just now, still, that I can’t make a
motive out of this. But, it exists. In the metamind, I can make it magical, Gödel-defeating.
Maybe I should stop fighting to build a straight-up skyscraper in this hurricane and try instead to build maybe a dam or turbine or funnel—or just some smooth dome that the surge can flow around and leave intact. But is that stagnation? Is there anything wrong with
stagnation? What is “wrong”?
I’m no great StarCraft player—or FF7 player, or RISK player, no great life player, no woman player, no mathematician, probably no
great scientist—but my god, it feels good to let all of this flow out, to let my mind leave its trail. Maybe that’s what it’s all about. I don’t
think it is, really. Even this is not an end. Maybe talking about an end is too much.
Maybe what I should do is base my life on that principle, the one of gathering value, spinning a great grand web. Maybe that’s why I
want so much to write a novel that people love and reflect the world and gather some of it and widen it and create a new dwelling space,
part of my web, my light cone42, different strings and points of light and a billion points becoming what is visibly a rope.
It is an infinite extension of the abyss below the Symbol. It is all around us, and I am Cloud City43. I’ve been wanting to write a narrative. I think I’m ready for it. I think my mind is fertile enough for it, and it will prime me for the real writing, the big American, Umatillian, Universian novel. I want to work in, at some point, a carpet that slithers away.
David Hume
He sits and holds his pen there like a god.44
That is to say, he writes well at fifteen.
In early 18th century Edinburgh
resides a boy whose friends have named him Clod:
too young to be so bright, too tall for grace.
This Scottish lad, though Greek in most respects,
upon his Bible rests his Latin texts.
He rubs his cramping hand, prepares to scrawl;
he pauses, cracks his knuckles. “Chivalry
has trampled roughshod on Greek symmetry.
It ornaments to death that mystery
of Scottish voice and English reasoning.
Imagine for a moment you are me.
My pallid face bends here before my desk
and filed upon the floor are Mother’s notes.
Advantaged by my window, I can see
a river running fast with regicide,
the shore of time on Loch Causality,
the churchbells wrought of Christianity,
all instruments of Gothic deity.”
He lifts an heirloom razor from his chest
and keeps three lines, excising all the rest.
◆
I took a metal rake down to the shore behind my house and I raked a small area clean, ripping up roots and all the stuff covering it the
sand. It wasn’t difficult because I guess our lakeshore is like a desert, shallow plants and whatnot. So I cleared it off. Yeah, yeah, I’m evil, I’m
a harvesting Hebrew white man annihilating the whole world and destroying biodiversity because of my own wishes. I am the epitome of
evil. I welcome you, Daniel Quinn45, to stab me through the eye. Actually, don’t, because this is sarcasm. But.
Then, I gathered up a bunch of fallen grapefruit from our tree. I took them all down to the spot I cleared, and cut them up into little
pieces, and made a small mush pile thing taking up some of this cleared spot. It was just a mush of cut-up grapefruit bits, smashed into
the ground in a big pile. On top, I put five intact grapefruit in the shape of a pentagon.
“All attempts to copy it will fail amusingly.”
◆
◆
“Within a month, the mechanism had been found and the first genome virus was fabricated and used on increasingly complicated animals until, on May 14, 2028, a baby was born to parents both carrying Huntington’s Disease who would never face the prospect of the
disease, nor the fear of passing it on to his own children.”
42
A light cone, in physics, refers to that region of spacetime which is occupied by a flash of light. Because nothing can travel as fast
or faster than light, the edge of the cone is the boundary beyond which nothing can be affected by anything that exists at the location and
moment of the flash.
43
Cloud City is a city in the Star Wars universe that floats above a gaseous planet.
44
wine..”
This is a reference to a line in the Odyssey as translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1910-1985): “... there like a god he sits and takes his
45
Daniel Quinn is the author of Ishmael, a novel about an intelligent, telepathic gorilla, Ishmael. He explains to a human pupil
that modern industrial society is corrupt and wasteful, and that this wasteful impulse began thousands of years ago in the agricultural
despoliation of the environment without regard for consequences.
26
June 2003
Dance a dance, come sing with me
of fairy tale mediocrity—
of love you thought would never live,
of strength leaked out as from a sieve.
The heart defrosting, logic slips
as Logos meets a full eclipse:
the delusion of a perfect sphere,
the curve with which none interfere.
◆
Today, June 8, is the 100th of March. I think everyone should celebrate.
the truth is that we are 99% feeling
and 0% conclusion and 1% faith
Away Message #192
◆
I just have to live, The Symbol somewhere down there or in here or wherever I hid that foundation. It is my only control and my firmest
acknowledgment that I am completely out of control.
A moth against my LCD screen,
a blackened butterfly, a
broken rainbow—
good lord,
what did I do to deserve
the truth so plainly laid?
Away Message #1025
◆
“When the first interrealm cannons were activated and interdimensional war became fashionable, catching angels that had been knocked
out of heaven became extremely popular. Many men found exactly what they were looking for in a woman—in some seraph who had,
startled, abruptly found herself in our universe.
A thousand skydivers filled the air over every major city, wingsuits attached, slowly circling, looking for that sudden break and the
terrified cry.
The attempts and successes at romance and reproduction from these pairings is an entirely different story.”
◆
I think I have fallen into a trap, a trap which I thought I could so deftly avoid by making my mind wholly out of crystal. That is, I thought
that I could line every wall with an axiom, every windowsill with a syllogism. I was mistaken, of course.
And I, knowing I myself
am the end of myself,
at the mirror
with a cold eye
and a sick stomach
thinking,
the axioms you hate
shall save you, the propositions
you have abandoned
will preserve you,
against myself insist:
Surely there is still
some middle ground.
Away Message #1011
27
Chapter 2
The Fire against the Dark
the waking of the god Path
flame is too dead a metaphor
for caffeine in the blood—
a swarm of flies, oxidization mirabilis—
we cannot hear lies.
“feeling” is the opposite of feeling.
choice is an emotion,
the heartbeat is the sun
and dreams the daedal earth.
tunnels to the future, choice or grace,
matter doesn’t give a damn.
I want to go head to head with nature, red tooth and claw; I want to wear a red tooth and claw necklace when I’m done with it. I want to
skulk in the dark, gobbling up minds, until the elaborate finale where I reveal myself as the grandmaster, unsuspected and unstoppable
even by the young, stupid, and genuinely powerless hero. I want to live eternally in the exact moment he dies.
People have tried to run from the devil forever, but I say we need him.
◆
I have this picture in my head. It’s a bunch equipment, gauges, monitors, what-have-you. One gauge is marked High, Extremely High, and
Goddamn. The arrow is at the far end, maybe a fourth of the way past Goddamn. There’s a line graph suddenly going exponential, smoke
in the foreground and what looks like a small fire in the background. Sparks fly off, a spring is loose and bouncing.
On another gauge, there are regions of blue, green, yellow, orange, and red with the arrow stuck firmly in crimson. A bright, energetic blue, steam shoots out of a pressure valve, near another gauge with its glass broken and its arrow spinning wildly. There are Tesla
coils with electricity arcing between them. A temperature is giving readings in terakelvins.
not just a dying campfire, but an oil rig fire in the tundra, twenty feet tall.
Away Message #31
◆
It would be funny to change whatever physical structure defines the U.S.-Canada border by running it up around Winnipeg or whatever
that city above the Dakotas and Minnesota is and running Canada’s around, say, Maine. Maybe a crew of really ambitious fencepost-men
or whatever could do it in one night.
◆
I took a profound satisfaction in my conversation with myself because it was unlike any conversation I’d had in a long time—on topics
that were thought-provoking—even if there was only one member of the conversation.
Who says the serpent is eating his tail? Perhaps he is purging.
Away Message #710
◆
“From that day forward, the darkest part of a crowded room was his home. The shadows during midday could conceal him as though he
were invisible. He was the direct denotation and delegation of the underworld. A thousand hands reached through him and through him
a thousand hands shook. Life and death to him were as meaningless as time to a stopped second-hand. He was an element, an agent. His
soul was not black, nor was it white; it was simultaneously transparent, opaque, and completely reflective. He would startle the hell out of
you when you suddenly realized that the shadows were a man.”
Ghost with a gun.
Away Message #495
◆
“He held his breath as the towel slithered over to the Cheeto and covered it. When it moved away, the Cheeto had disappeared. The towel
had eaten it. It slid quickly out of the open door and down into the cellar.
He hurried down the stairs and watched the towel squirm into a crack in the wall. He shone a flashlight into the hole: several other
towels lay in wait for their patriarch. His mate, a light blue towel, had stayed in the hole to tend to their young. Three dishrags slid around,
playing under the watchful tending of their mother.”
July 2003
“Die” is not a long enough word. It cannot be spoken with enough loathing.
◆
Is it horribly elitist of me to prefer that the people who don’t exercise their right to vote be stripped of that right?
28
History is a monodirectional prisoner’s dilemma46. Everyone can defect, screwing everyone down the road, and anyone can cooperate, assisting everyone down the road.
◆
“The surface of the ocean sparkled as James looked down from his hastily-built tower. The day outside was blazing, humid, filled with the
sea. He and his family were very close to it this anah, so they had taken up fishing. They found a family a little farther inland and donated
their old farming supplies, their seed, their tools. They wouldn’t be needing them anymore.
A flag slithered its way through the roof of his tower and caught the breeze. Instantly it unfurled and flapped in the constant wind.
Once, a group of stiff-looking middle-aged men had come to their island and questioned his parents. They asked about the wind, where
it came from and where it went. They hadn’t been satisfied with the answers they’d received.
Today, the wind was benevolent. His sister was at the dock they’d built, watching the net, deciding what their next meal would consist of. He climbed down and walked towards his house, treading lightly over the rough texture the land had recently taken on. All around
him, the world shone. Even the haze in the distance seemed welcoming and yielding.”
I was looking at my bathtub as my electric water-agitator swished the bubbles
around on the surface, and thought, “What if all the world were like that? A universe
where, in one direction, things became more and more inconstant and people adapted
to it, whatever came to be; and in the other direction, nothing ever changed and the
only things to devote your life to were very sturdy.
And that wasn’t the only spectrum. I pictured intersections of planes. Of heat: a
hot, shifty world; or a world frozen solid. Of life: a jungle world, constantly in motion;
or a dead plain. Of justice. Of emptiness and fullness. Of people who became clouds to
survive the constant storm; of people who became rocks to drill where flesh could not
penetrate. A complete universe of all possible situations, all traversable. The Mathiverse (that is, all possible theorems, true and false, provable and not).
◆
Meanwhile, my trichotillomania has never gone away. Shaving is sort of a cheap substitute for plucking. I’m growing my hair right now to see how long it will get. Oh,
what I wouldn’t give to let myself go at it with the tweezers in the bright lights of the
bathroom mirror. Or to just wax my chin. It gives me a good perspective from which
to view addiction.
◆
“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”47
◆
My favorite line at the moment is “Wait. Something’s different.” You’ve heard it plenty of times. I think it’s in the Matrix, but that’s not the
only place, I’m sure. It’s an invocation for the supernatural.
◆
“Rico drew his sword and glared. Harold stood sputtering about mercy and clemency, about getting safely back to his homeland and
never, ever returning. He was a little plump. His eyes were wet. His skin was damp with sweat, half-fear, half-exertion. It had been a long
chase over crates and barrels through the storehouse, but Rico had finally backed him into a corner.”
As I’m writing this, I’m thinking, Harold has done something terrible to Rico. Slew his family or something. Slew his something.
Demolished his life, but not his motive, not his nerve. I want to show that Harold did it completely selfishly, on a Randian-type of principle, full of philosophical confidence.
And here, at his end, he is backed into a corner, fight or flight, having forgotten completely about his original principles—just knowing that everything he stood to gain is lost if that blade penetrates his flesh. I think of the wild motions of his mouth and eyes as he tries
to convince Rico not to touch him. Thinking about that the only self-defense Harold has ever known is words, the delicate web of society.
Taking out his tongue and slicing off his fingers sounds about right to Rico. But let’s get back to the story.
“Harold was still muttering grandiose promises, out-and-out lies, dreams, hopes, talking about the only relation they had had. He
was going on about the fine business he’s sure Rico runs—er, ran—when Rico held his sword directly at Harold’s throat and told him to
shut up.
Rico trembled. He saw scarlet. He didn’t blink. He barely breathed. His hand ached to strike with all the frustration and loathing that
swelled in him. Harold was beginning to lose meaning to Rico as any sort of object upon which revenge must be wrought. He thought
only of his sword and the flesh that it must cleave. He brought it swiftly out to the side and Harold leapt, fell into the fetal position on the
ground at Rico’s feet, pressing himself up against the wall, hoping to disappear.
A thought came to Rico, tiny but rapidly growing. It nearly knocked him off balance—to contemplate what he was suddenly contemplating! He reached within his coat and palmed a small vial filled with pink fluid. He took a step back, sheathed his sword, and threw
the vial down at his feet. A cloud exploded around them.
Blinding pink. Pepto Bismol pink. His training came back to him, the only indoctrination he had ever received. Killer and killee,
every single human was trained in both roles from age eight, revisiting it every few months through teendom. His last session had been
four years ago.
They both burst into laughter. It was laughter not of insanity but of kinship.
Chuckling, Rico lowered his hand to help Harold up.
46
The prisoner’s dilemma is a game studied in game theory. It is modeled on the scenario of two accomplices of a crime being held
separately by the police. Each one is urged to betray the other and confess, and so be granted an amount of amnesty. In the game, each
participant has two choices: cooperate or defect. The most points are allocated to a player who defects while his partner cooperates. If
both players cooperate, they receive a smaller number of points. If both players defect, they have points deducted. The player who cooperates while his partner defects has a large number of points deducted.
47
Quotation from Alpha Centauri, a turn-based computer strategy game.
29
Harold’s own experience was equally dramatic. His thoughts had suddenly turned to repairing the wrong he had done to Rico and
his family. He looked squarely at Rico and apologized. He vowed to return every heirloom lost to Rico plus interest, plus a charity fund
to honor his brother. Rico had said that he’d like it to go into cryogenic research that his brother might live long enough to laugh—or
see—again. Harold nodded at this. They embraced, and then walked out of the storehouse together.”
Knocking death onto his back.
Away Message #402
◆
My last dream, from mere seconds ago, was vivid. A large chunk of lower Florida seceded from the union. Not only that, but all of South
America signed a bunch of treaties and became unified as one country. The chunk of Florida joined this South American nation. There
were new flags. Florida’s was the Confederate flag juxtaposed with Florida’s flag juxtaposed with the new South American flag. The South
American capital was down around Paraguay.
◆
I remember. I remember way back when I was young how far away Highway 19 was. I remember the traffic around my neighborhood as
being heavy certain times of day. I remember way back to that bright, fresh world. Back when I hadn’t seen anorexia’s madness firsthand.
When I would joke with my friends about sex and kissing, having done neither. I remember a strange boy with a high-pitched voice
and curly hair who won the favor of all of his teachers. I remember Cassidy and the home movie of him closing his door on my mother
holding a video camera. I remember mourning the loss of Mushy, our black hunting cat destroyed by a water moccasin, whose sister
outlived him three times over. I remember when driving was a dream. I remember our playroom. I remember sharing a room with Zach.
I remember when my dad would go to North Carolina and Virginia over the summer.
I’m in North Carolina now and I see what he has seen all these years and I still don’t really see it. What I see now is a land of some
kind of magic that calls to me by the name I had when I was much younger, by my true name, though I know not what it is.
i dreamt we were dogs
in a warm, winter home
we scrabbled our nails
on the hard wooden floors
and it was christmas,
christmas time.
Away Message #540
◆
“Something was desperately not right. There was a blip, a crackle of a high school football game and a charged, lively atmosphere, but
then it was broken.
Shattered completely.
Nothingness, darkness winged its way across the crowd in the bleachers, and their cheers became warped, dragged through pitch
halfway up the audible spectrum. It crackled, died down, and then burst back up. It was screaming. It was gunfire and moans of death. It
was explosions. There was another burst of the cheering football game.
The contrast sickened. Things and not-things leaked, busted, pouring out their contents. Bottles hit concrete and bled their innards.
Exotic smells hit nostrils, knocked people into yet another altered state of mind. People got back to their feet and dashed away from the
flames.
A mother looked down lovingly at her child in his crib. She rubbed his sleeping head gently and smiled fondly at him, thinking of
nothing else. He had become her everything, and his life would be her greatest accomplishment.
A piano was played by a young, inexperienced artist and sang joy as the pianist made his own silent sounds out through his fingers
and into the air.
An insect crawled across the pavement and was crushed by an asteroid of a basketball, its dribbler oblivious.
A photon traveled the entire universe. All photons were this one photon, making its trip through the universe for its 193493762382th
time.
There was no point, but somehow it was meaningful anyway.”
“.. from the cracks had opened crevices that went all the way down. Dirt fell into the impossibly
deep pit that had formed. The sidewalks once separated by nothing more than University Avenue were now more than forty feet apart in places—separated by the abyss.”
Away Message #80
◆
The way you can cope, if you’re all alone, is to graph your every thought. To store yourself so you don’t have to experience yourself. Maybe
that’s my whole life’s coping mechanism.
And why is this pentameter iambic?
I don’t want to die and be forgotten.
Away Message #591
◆
O God, protect us from our choices. O Lord Most Gracious and High, prevent our free will from freeing us from you. O Adonoi, Jehovah,
Yahweh, deny my mind to logic, shelter my heart from doubt, tether to thee my soul. Grant me a safety net.
◆
30
We who pray for nothing else still earnestly pray for the Singularity. Not that I actually do, but it is satisfying to know that, even if it doesn’t
make its way to me before my death, I can be raised in it, my free-floating unconsciousness alive again as part of Radio Free Universe.
Will someone please tell me exactly how special I am?
◆
I watched the captain rowing
into the night
crooning to his empty lifeboat.
Away Message #1023
◆
I imagine someone who is only awake during two particular parts of the day: morning and evening. The world is constantly in flux during
those times. The sky doesn’t remain in any particular way. But I guess you’d have to be asleep during the whole day and the whole night.
Is there enough time in evening and dawn to actually live?
i opened my eyes and saw my own hands. i saw the bright leaves outside the window. there
was golden light on everything. it was 7:07 AM. i got out of bed. i went outside. i went outside
for years.
Away Message #573
◆
I want to transcend these petty side-emotions and feel only vigorously, fully, absolutely. I want fame as well as privacy. I want justified awe.
I want to be Einstein, to be Gray Fox48 of Metal Gear Solid. I want to be Death. I want to be an angel. Instead, I am this human, this flesh
in a purely comprehensible world. Maybe through text, we literally move the mind outside of the world. Maybe that’s why David Foster
Wallace49 put the ghost in his story. Maybe that’s why Danielewski put those slashes around Zampanò.
Maybe I should close my eyes and write about whichever monster screams the loudest.
Gunmetal books heckling,
behind acidic cavities
and fanged words,
my hemming ways.
Bright and blister,
glister in their bowels,
“Won’t you,” shrieking,
“write me?”
Away Message #653
◆
The spirit in me does not move. The muse is lying on the ground, dagger in her chest, blood pooling, congealing.
August 2003
It might benefit the world if an establishment was founded called, say, the Free Emigration Organization. All of the member nations
would enforce a measure for the entire world: any citizen who desires to leave his or her nation must be granted the opportunity to acquire the resources and means to legally do so in a speedy fashion. They should have to work for it—but they must be allowed and able
to work. Any country that fails to comply with that measure, either through disallowing emigration or by keeping its citizens to poverty,
will be .. modified .. by member nations until its citizens have these rights.
I’m thinking sometime soon that all citizens should probably be granted access to an unrestricted Internet. We do solemnly believe
that any subset of humanity which has an accurate survey of the entire human species is thereby fit to govern itself. It is not strictly necessary that each individual citizen does, but that each group does.
We’ve got to get up and do this together.
Away Message #344
◆
Today, we run the risk of the Statue of Liberty sponsored by Pepsi, the Motorola Grand Canyon, and the McWhiteHouse.
◆
I’m inventing a new language with only one word. It’s called Humbevexp. The word is “humbevexp.” The word’s meaning is an explanation
of every single human choice in all of their limitless possible contexts.
48
Gray Fox was a soldier in Metal Gear Solid who, through years of excruciating experimentation, had been trained to be a technologically-enhanced assassin. He wore a powered exoskeleton, a mechanical suit that amplifies muscle movements to make its wearer
much stronger and faster.
49
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was an American novelist and essayist most famous for his novel Infinite Jest.
31
“the reason you like gradients so much
is you really like this one extreme:
all things that are not extremes”
and i’m like, “no, man, stuff is stuff
is awesome.”
Away Message #655
◆
“‘Gutenberg’s Eye’, they called themselves. This super-secret press intelligence organization created the ultimate dossier on U.S. military
tactics. In the pay of the far-left, unnamed and untraceable, the Eye was a collaboration among virtually all of the embedded reporters in
the Iraqi War. Its aim was to document, dissect, and analyze the collective psychology of the United States military.
Later, the civilian version of the Eye, Nemesis, made use of the All-Open documentation of police tactics and activity mandated
by President Sage in ‘09. The information was collated and studied by the world’s finest psychologists and ex-military personnel, funded
by a surprisingly ethical group of nanotech biologists from Silicon Valley. Thus able to create the supplies needed without diverting any
public funds, the organization’s paper trail remained nonexistent, and outside knowledge of these activities was limited to the ravings of a
madmen hours before their deaths. The consequence was, of course, the largely bloodless coup in 2011, in which the notion of American
democracy was discarded forever.
The development of completely indecipherable and undetectable codes-codes utilized within the sight of their greatest enemypermitted this social movement, the likes of which had never existed before, to come so rapidly to light. Despite charges that this organization was related to the mythical organization called the Illuminati, these claims are forever resigned to comedy, as the motivations of
the innermost members of Nemesis and the Eye ...”
I cut my hair. I am in shock. I could cry.
◆
◆
I dreamt that I had put my name in for governor of Florida and got 22% of the vote. I dreamt that my mother had some kind of Asian
accent and was trying to teach me about government and good, but I told her she was drunk and took her hands off of me.
◆
The more customs you insist upon that you invent for yourself, the more immune you are to the Media Gods. The problem is, the memes
of the Media Gods have evolved for millennia. They have eaten greater customs. They can eat yours.
It was enough once
to say a tower meant a god,
that Heaven’s bright and broad,
and a garden meant a place
where we were free.
But nowadays the powers
want hypodermic needles,
want the mythful lying bleeding;
they want the cold vacuum of space
for you and me.
Poem #23
◆
What is it that, the more you fill yourself with, the more empty you feel?
Anger.
Like the glass on the road,
you are more painful still
when I remember
what you were.
Away Message #37
◆
Here’s something: Is it right to slap someone out of insanity?
◆
“Each member was able to access the network and send communications with a set of passwords that changed daily, calculable by an algorithm whose variables were an amalgam of statistics from society.
Disney’s closing stock value and the number of times George Bush
publically said “Iraq” over the previous day were among the known
variables.”
I am excited by the idea of the violent overthrow of the United States
government. It’s fascinating. I have always loved the hardcore, farwhatever iconology. I mean, Hitler’s swastika’s a little disgusting and
all, but it’s still interesting, the goose-stepping masses, the tour of Paris,
etc. etc.
◆
I’d rather die of adrenaline poisoning than suicide.
32
◆
ContemPlato, Aristotocracy, Plinyeal Gland, Herodotary Diseases, Cocaine Descartel, AmBush, Bohring, Maxwell-to-do, Fuller up,
Roosevelveteen Rabbit, Arostocracy?
◆
“Cracy is crazy” is a good anarchist slogan. I like the more visceral “Smash the state.” It suggests a mechanical monster scapegoat, something big, inexorable, stupid, big wheels and gnashing teeth. It is blind, and so are those prisoners held inside it. It is a tragic beast of
burden, a headless chicken in the pilot’s seat. It is huge, cold marble buildings, sterile offices with coarse, public-school kleenex, meals of
conquered foreign cultures: pizza, tacos, fried rice. It is sweet and flavorless cola, the raw nerve of coffee. It is its own cliché. It is bent backs
and water coolers. It is a meal of grits, mashed potatoes, rice, and sour cream. It is Auschwitz. It is a belief that any evil is necessary. It is
a small chocolate stain. It is everything in the abstract. It is an approximation. It is the quantification of quality. It is number two pencils
and leaking pens.
A man alone is healthy, but the bite of Leviathan needs a cure.
Every deadline needs a sunrise.
Away Message #148
They call it revolutsiya. They were silly then and we’re silly now. Something new is evolving of
us, a monster, a new lifeform, the Economy.
We are as blind to it as the blundering, once-free mitochondrion was to us.
Away Message #363
Here you go:
◆
I’m no more special than your average teenager except for one key fact: I know what the fuck I’m talking about.
Taking it out on everyone else since 1986.
Away Message #156
◆
2025 and the Technological Singularity: or, the Year the Waters Got Up Out of the Ocean and Marched Back Inland
September 2003
The state of corporate America and the world at large makes a great deal of sense when you consider that caffeine is a psychoactive drug.
◆
“It was 9:05 AM, December 21, 2012. Rockefeller was rising from his icy tomb, full zombie style, arms straight out, headed to take the
reins at the world’s largest weapons plant a hundred miles north of Omaha. Each missile had a human brain sealed inside of it to guide it
directly to the target. That is not to say, though, that the mind in the brain had any control over its thoughts. The mind still existed, still
felt, but was a slave in its own brain. It was the gray matter, the neuronic computer that they were being used for. Human beings were
being raised for this singular purpose: to die, causing precise and accurate destruction.”
◆
“And when God saw that his creation was getting along well enough without him, he pulled from man’s core a gem, a gem without which
he could not feel successful.
He broke it into many pieces. He poured some into the forge that made swords and guns. He put it into the eyes of lovers. He put it
in gold and silver. He put it in the sea. He put a lot in the blood of other men. He put it on the sun, which man always saw going west—and
so man followed. He put it in his brain. This was his punishment for consuming the fruit.
He sewed it into the land. He sprinkled some on every flag that another man had hung. He peppered it on every word another person wrote. Man was no longer content to do as he wished, but he must take the entire world and make it his, all his.”
it has profited me that i’ve gained the whole world.
Away Message #441
◆
“The movement proved very successful and most of humanity was soon under the banner of a country that—at last—could fairly call
itself Utopia. All those cheap prices and excess wages were turned into stock in the growing space industry. There were ninety-seven lunar
cities harvesting the moon’s minerals.
Then the aliens returned, roasted the planet’s surface, and carted away Earth for ore.”
◆
I want to go sit in on classes in colleges across the country. I want to sleep with girls I’ll never meet again. I want to see only the night. I
want to be unable to see the day. I want a fake ID and bored bartenders and barflies and to wander among them, unnoticed. I want no ties
to this world. I want to vanish into thin air.
◆
33
I want to be so terrible a human being, humanity has no time to look down on me, think ill of me. They can only be terrified and horrified beyond thought.
◆
“Up in Heaven, all the Beatles give a nightly show.
Jesus queries Moses, saying, “Would you like to go?”
The things we lacked as granted are all cheap as free up there:
Candy canes and teddy bears and fluffy bean bag chairs.
What life is like is hard despite the comforts that they have.
Eternally separated from the great loves of their past.
Those flames that live within them are all flickering to death;
That human spirit once was great but now it’s all but left.
You can see from Heaven all the great and splendid sights;
Newborn kids and motherhood and wild wedding nights.
God’s genius creation is laid out for all to see:
The four corners of earth and five great, big, shining seas.
It sucks. It sucks. Living in Heaven sucks.
The AC’s broke near all the time, the engineers all burn.
The justice system is corrupt, those lawyers never learn.
It’s a socialist’s paradise and Mao’s up here, it’s true;
But if someone does wrong to you, it’s not like you can sue.
It sucks. It sucks. Living in Heaven sucks.
Do you recall those fun folks all those great books were about:
Pirates, outlaws, witches, even Dracula the Count?
Take a wild guess where now they make their beds and homes.
Yes, it’s in a lake of fire now that all these nice folks roam.
The harps the angels play, my friend, (and beautifully they do)
Are covered in a golden fog that forms a silvery dew.
The diamonds that make the jewelry that we wear on every day
Are beautiful and abundant, and what more can I say?
Beyond these material comforts, though, nothing more is offered,
Not grace and joy nor happiness, naught else can be so proffered.
Sure, there’s everlasting life, it’s really keen and swell,
But after thirty million years, my virgins began to smell.
It sucks. It sucks. Living in Heaven sucks.
That damnable angelic choir, they never halt their show.
There is no chemical silence, no black market where we can go.
Sure, they’re sliced time and again by Satan’s thorny snare,
But thanks to beer and morphine, they’re all too gone to care.
It sucks. It sucks. Living in Heaven sucks.
So yes, I’d turn my halo in if it meant a ride down there.
I’d cut off my wings and start to sin, I’d have no time to spare.
Though I love Jesus quite a bit, I really, really do,
His awful cinematic taste is limited to kung-fu.
It sucks. It sucks. Living in Heaven sucks.
Yes, it sucks. It sucks. It really, really sucks.
Beer nuts. Nunchucks. Living in Heaven sucks.
I hate it, so much. Living in Heaven sucks.”
Yes, I realize the Beatles are not all dead. Smartass.
“Jealous?”
“Only like the desert is jealous of the swamp.”
Away Message #40
You twilight up my life.
◆
I am the silence between stars.
Away Message #430
◆
34
The day will come when Prozac is perfect and everyone uses it.
◆
“A man woke up to discover one of his kidneys in four equal sections in his four cats’ food bowls. He had no wounds.
All the flags outside the UN building in NYC darkened to solid black over the course of a day. They were replaced, and a guard was
set to watch them. They faded to solid white. They were replaced. They did not change again.”
◆
I’ll tell the dream:
Not to be an emperor, but an empire.
October 2003
Q: What do you get when you cauterize all the major pain impulse-carrying nerves in a bodybuilder’s body and put him on PCP and
crack?
A: A superhero.
And it slung its voice low and raspy,”I. Am. Dangerous. When. Cornered.”
Away Message #339
Facit vivo versum.
[Editor’s note: I was trying for “Facit vita versum.”]50
◆
◆
I think it would be absolutely wonderful to be a journalist with a goddamned Ph.D. in physics.
◆
A clear blue flame, burning brightly. The noise a hydrogen bomb makes. How the sun would sound if you put a microphone up to it. A
supernova, the Big Bang. A gunshot amplified twenty thousand times. A fusion-powered sports car setting the land-speed record outrunning a sad bunch of fat Iowan cops. A cheetah on speed.
House of Leaves is all about impenetrable darkness, but there is nothing real that is like that. Everything is lights. All things that are
are lights.51
it’d be nice
if lightning strikes
would light our eyes,
not burn;
but fiery fuel
is truly cruel
and the planets
turn and turn.
Away Message #133
◆
“Inside the dome sat the largest component of the machine, the Sphere. Using careful calculations, calibrations, they were creating
universes. Most of humanity had migrated on to other worlds, bored of our own and desirous of an eternity of whatever an alternative
universe might offer them.
At the center of the Sphere, though, was an entirely different mechanism: the Zero-Point Eventuator. It was tracking the entire state
of the universe mathematically, expressing it as an ever-more-accurate set. It was there to provide a lifeboat for all of this, for humanity,
for sentience. When doomsday came and the universe was set to blow itself to pieces exponentially, when the time unit for its existence
reached the Planck second, the mathematical set would be complete.
A new universe would be formed right in the middle of the Sphere, first spreading outwards to stop the obliteration of the building
and then exploding, a new Big Bang, the old universe absorbed entirely by a single, completely-described particle. The resulting energies
from this description and its potentiation would be enough.
Enough, first, to engender another universe; enough, secondly, to allow the structure to survive the unimaginable heat at the center
of the Bang. After the first Planck second of the new universe’s existence, the Eventuator would once again begin to absorb information
from the universe, to begin the task of describe it perfectly. Humanity had found the on-off switch.”
jangling churchbells
hanging in the ignition,
imagination.
Away Message #659
50
“Facit vita versum,” Latin for “Life inspires my poetry,” is a reference to Juvenal’s “Facit indignatio versum,” or “Indignation inspires my poetry.
51
“All things that are, are lights” is a translation of “Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt” (Latin), a phrase attributed to the 9th century
Irish theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena.
35
November 2003
I sincerely hope I live to see a time when people can put plugs into their heads and see lights that are not there.
◆
I still agree that the final goal is maximum happiness, but you’ll never find it by asking yourself constantly, “Will this make me happy?”
i think to sing of
sweet love things
“But,” coughs the
countess, scoffs,
and “all the world
is not so soft.”
i know, though
that lemons bite
as sure as bombs—
that even love can burn—
but the world
will still have songs.
Away Message #50
◆
It seems to my untrained mind that there must be some way to improve the management of the economy.
◆
I relapsed into trichotillomania. There are no metaphors to describe this adequately. I sat in front of a mirror with tweezers and pulled out
hair after hair from my chin, from my chest, from my stomach. Mostly my chin. I did it despite the pain.
Then I saw a shaving razor, said, “my savior,” and shaved my chin.
◆
I am talented, there can be no doubt about that. The difficulty is that there has been no application for this talent. If this mass of words,
this amalgam, this trash heap is the greatest thing that I have created, I should be ashamed. More, my will is disintegrating.
I was thinking about this last night, integral, integer. Disintegrate, disinteger. Segregate, segregers. My will is a disinteger. I relapse
into trichotillomania. I break my exercise habit. I drink coffee daily, twice daily at times. I don’t do my schoolwork until the very last moment. I am going to fall from this ivory tower.
Invert the inferno, infer no fate.
Ha fatto l’Inferno. Li invertirà.52
Away Message #10
◆
There is a man climbing out of milk. He is soaked in it, his skin is dark, damp. His pupils are a blur. His whole being shakes, shivers, darts,
dashes, jumps, leaps. He speaks like a madman, then hands you a thirty-page paper on the role women played in the development of
nuclear family and community of South Central London in the 19th century. Then he rolls his eyes. Then he stabs someone. This man and
I have had sexual relations on more occasions than I can recall. Luckily, some hours after sex, he turns into a pale, scrawny, unimpressive
man holding his head, speaking slowly, pathetically, bitterly, about how he stubbed his toe a few minutes ago. And then he fades away.
an inverse vampire,
a lawn-sprinkler spraying blood,
not undead—prelive.
Away Message #570
◆
McJob. McInsanity. McWorld. Hmm. Hard to be original here. So let’s just call me..
McJesse.
◆
“It was impossible to believe that this machine would fly, and yet, it had. There were documents, images. There was proof. And there was
nothing fundamentally different about it from those days that it had scraped the clouds.
Rust had covered several of the wings, the spars, and the horizontal binding, but it was only superficial. At worst, the engine might
need to be derusted and polished again. We pried it open to find the machine still lubricated with the finest of its day’s surfactants. Rust
had not penetrated into its interior. There was even fuel in the converter. It sat at an angle to the ground, facing the newly-exposed sky.
Through the rust and the soot of the ages, the machine still gleamed, reflecting the cumulus sky.
The sun had begun to emerge from the clouds and roast them away, and an hour after we had successfully uncovered the machine,
the sky was beautiful, near-cloudless, and brilliant. And so was she. We scrubbed for an hour until a name emerged: Ethama. It had been
a blur during the old footage, but now it was plain. I don’t think that it occurred to either of us, when we first discovered it, to try to start
52
“He made Hell. He will invert you.” (Italian)
36
it, to try to put it back in use. It did now. The ship seemed to crouch, about to jump.
Inside, the glow of the eno-torches illuminated the corridors with natural light. The ceilings were all painted to depict the skies:
storm, dusk red, the black of night, sunrise. Even sitting still, it seemed full of energy. The more I looked at it, the more I liked it.
The history behind the machine was remarkable and so was the age that built it. These were, gratefully, no longer the days of my
grandfather. The ideas of the men who had given birth to this machine—this child of intellect and passion—were returning at last. Gone
were the days of constant flames in the metropolis, rebuilt were the city halls. People began to trust eno-torches again, some people even
returned to using credit. And here we’d stumbled upon this thing, like finding Achilles’ armor somewhere in Turkey.
I had to protect her with my life. I knew that she was bigger than me, greater, more important. I knew that there was more life in
this one polished piece of metal than in all of my country, more innovation, invention, more daring. More heart. The archons would not
and must not find out about this until she was in the air and on its way to safety. ‘Hell,’ I thought.
‘This bird will fly.’”
the sun bloodies its fingernails up
scraping
up
over the
mountaintop and
leaps
into
the
sky
Away Message #259
◆
I think of a very foggy day in London. Low, very low. The silence of intense canopy. Cars rolling slowly down English streets with cobbled
stone sidewalks. People in their houses and businesses, murmuring, purchasing, disappearing into the fog. I hear a single rhythmic voice
calling into the fog: “Pope’s Health Declining! Extra!”
Maybe something is going on here, but I don’t think it’s murder. People are talking in hushed tones. Maybe something diabolical,
but nothing a violent, heroic knave can solve. The well-built minds are coming together, some from far away. German scholars, men with
brains like gears from Zürich. Clocks ticking and heavy wooden desks. Things long concealed unwrapped from heavy cloth, paper. Maybe
even keys turning ancient locks. Maybe the Illuminati are here with their vaguely demonic servants. Very old books.
The ubersiren Circegaard
sings of an island near and far.
Away Message #849
◆
Wouldn’t that drop the jaws of those oh-so-suave, slick writers at The Note53—if, suddenly, D.C. was sacked.
◆
A spark is ignited in my mind by the phrase “Data Angels.”54
I see a winged man with translucent blue data wings, visors, helmets. A face, immaculate, the
absolute purity of the digital, the virtual. A lowered face, pious, troubled, dutiful, eyes open, neither
wide nor narrow. A nano-augmented normal approaches the console at which our angel is working.
The angel holds up his hand. The man is suddenly made—by no thought of his own—to lower his arms
to his side, holster his blaster—and he stops walking as though he’d come nose-close to a solid wall. He
looks helplessly on while the angel returns both hands to the keyboard and resumes typing.
And there’s a logo, a sigil, an icon I want associated with these people. A type of smiley face. The
left half is the usual dot-for-an-eye, curve-for-a-smile. The right half has the Universal Power Symbol
for an eye and the top half of a right square bracket for a smile.
◆
A million French philosophers could argue, back and forth, again, again, totally convincingly and totally convinced; logos or pathos or
ethos. We forget eros. It is eros that turns the lights down, locks the door. It is eros driving our heads, our bodies together. It is eros who
makes our breath quick and sharp.
let us walk
the earth will shake
heaven is burning
hell is full
god is sleeping
the day is bright
let us walk
drink the ether
plant the daisies
break the eggs
53
The Note is ABC News’ online political column written by Washington correspondents.
54
The Data Angels were a faction of hackers in Alpha Centauri.
37
slaughter the lambs
burn the hay
build the church
steal the wallet
hem the dress
brew the beer
kill the king
sell the necklace
sleep on sidewalk
forget the name
bury your parents
keep the tickets
dream of deserts
pull the wire
find the killer
all the good philosophers
were already born and died
now we are alone
the road is foggy
take my hand
◆
Rednecks. I don’t understand how haughty European elitism translated into slimy Southern prejudice. But it did.
But hate breeds hate. I cannot hate these people and be any better than them.
◆
5.50 dollars/hour × 45 hours/week × 50 weeks/year × 55 years = $680,625. It’s true, feeding and housing humans individually can be
expensive, but humans are a very successful industry. They are by far the most versatile robots on the market today.
Maybe campfires die of loneliness after everyone else goes to sleep.
◆
◆
One of my greatest intellectual difficulties is identifying who controls our country and our culture. That said, I am not looking for a board
of 12 or 13 disagreeable, condescending, wise, and calcified old men.
◆
I am becoming increasingly jaded with academia. I hear too many treatises and rants about how our society is immoral or too moral,
about how we are all really primates or that we are not primates at all.
It doesn’t affect day-to-day living. But you know what one field I’ve discovered that is just remarkable in its coherence and meaningfulness? Economics. These boys don’t fuck around. An ethicist could give you a whole pamphlet full of objectives in Iraq, but can he
figure out how to get them done? Fuck no. But an economist can.
◆
Today, I read an opinion piece written by some pubic hair of a student who thought that an essay-writing contest would raise the percentage of American high school students who know whom we fought in WWI. He really believes the National Endowment for the Arts will
be able to help.
Does he really think that the cheese-eating yokels who don’t know these historical facts are going to be the ones making important
decisions? No, Christ Jesus, no. It is the cabal of the straight-A students who will make the decisions.
Are there no good charlatans left?
Just cargo cults on the mainland,
fifty million fundamentalists and
Homer reading the signs of the sea.
Away Message #636
December 2003
And I sit here in this cluttered room, the stereotype of the absentminded village scholar. Eris preserve my soul. YHWH preserve my brain.
◆
The obsessive calorie-counting, weight-watching, and meal-planning that neurotic city-dwellers so love will explode with nanotechnology. Holistic sages will preach microsupplements and counter-supplements (just in case that latte drove you a hair over your recommended
daily intake of vitamin D). A cult, a slew of OCD varieties. A wing in the DSM55.
Of course, you’ll have people like me using it to live a little healthier. People will start to live to 80 or 90 on average. We just keep
sliding incrementally towards longevity and it leaves me wondering if maybe nanotech won’t be more of the same.
HORNY?
Why wait (for marriage)?
◆
◆
Charlatans, dissemblers, spooks.
And in the middle of the day this darkness came and now I sit in the dying day in a dark room with a cyclops of a desklamp glaring
55
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association
38
down at me, protecting me with angry incandescent light, an uppity bird on my shoulder. And the devil is always behind, following me.
Black lightning’s knocking river treetops in valleys at night.
Each night I’m sleeping third eye staring at the ceiling.
Away Message #778
◆
I think you could argue rather profoundly that the universe only goes on out of habit.
My feet hurt and I am tired of the negativity I spout and the sickly-sweet version of it I am forced to take back in at the end of the
night. I am tired of my heart’s wounds. I am tired of my mind’s scars. My feet hurt and my heart hurts and my head hurts and my eyelids
droop and my tummy grumbles and my teeth slime.
I know deep within me there is a robot that will get back up for me when I fall. I know he is there though I cannot feel him now. I
have seen his work. I just know that when I have given up completely, something has made me get back on my feet.
There is a poster at work for the Heimlich manuever with instructions on how to perform it. I think it is required by OSHA-related
law.
There is a section of this poster titled, “Save Yourself.”
got your wounds wound round my wrists.
too slick, i slip from any grip
you made your heart into a fist
i’m sunshine dust; i don’t exist.
the honor on which our souls feed
has never made a scab its seed.
Away Message #704
Oh what a pity, self-awareness,
that I should wear madness like a coat
when life is a winter wunderkind.
So it shoots through me like a red cliché.
So I burn up like a bromide fire.
◆
◆
They are great writers who find plateaus and live on them forevermore and write about what they see from their unchanging vantage
point. They are great artists who live at sea and sequence the snapshots of froth into music notes or brush strokes.
Whereof I cannot cry, I write.
the placement of the eternal holy
i don’t want it anymore don’t give it to me
you can’t make money as a philosopher
what do you want you dumb fucker?
do you want to be impessive?
yes i don’t want fame i just want to be better than everyone else
i just want them all to look up to me
i don’t want news reports that 6 billion people love me
what do i care if some man tells me that
and i don’t want tens of thousands of faces a year
in cities across the country telling me how fantastic i am
i want good conversation about interesting things in beautiful places
with good food and good wine
and that’s it, that’s it,
i don’t care if i leave something behind
i don’t care i just want to be happy and live my life with the philosophy
that i finally invent
amen amen
Away Message #195
Fiction is just tragedy’s way of making more tragedy.
◆
◆
“His eyes were smokestacks. He took a deep breath of the impure air as he stood watching. Out below the cliff ungodly steep was a great
steaming beast and at its feet a herd of men. It was, more than anything else, an idea factory.
The idea of Florida was delicious. The tropics. Escape and ease and some rare, powerful medicine, vacation. All of these were embodied by the weak, yellowish, sour little bullet they drank in their cramped apartments with faux-wood walls. This one bit of hope pulled
them through the gray outside world. One day, the dream went, one day, the smoke might look and taste a little orange.”
◆
Oh, the stars that run before the eyes of the madman high on chemicals. That this dance should last forever, that is our goal.
39
the glutton’s prayer
listen, bones and blood and brain,
hear me, time of clock and train:
i am derailed by your devices
which punish me for my life’s spices;
grant me, unworth, unearned niceness:
glance not again upon my vices.
◆
What about hijacking a dictator? Why not put a despot between a hard place and a very soft place? I mean, what does it take for five CIA
agents to worm (or shoot) their way into his palace and present him with two options:
1) Die.
2) Receive financial aid for himself and his country (he can pocket it all himself, actually), but make changes to open the way for the
liberalization of his economy and his regime.
He allows Nike and McDonalds and a million other companies to come in and open up shops and factories, and, with the proceeds
from selling them the right to do business, funds school programs, etc. I don’t know what a good sum is, myself. $5 million? $50 million?
$0.5 bn? Anyway, he gets a large amount of money, and the country opens up.
Or he is shot. If at any time he acts against these policies, he will die from a bullet to his back.
January 2004
The artificial moons howl now to us in our dreams. Just me, the Aussies, and the cats.
There are no hours after ours.
Away Message #1006
◆
If anyone denies that the cultural forests of mankind have as much memetic diversity as a rain forest has biological diversity, he is a lone
tree in the desert.
◆
“We all sit around a bonfire with hot gold nuggets resting in it. Some of us fancy that we are quick and that we can grab them unharmed—
shit, some people are that quick. I’m not. I’ve burnt the shit out of myself. But you know, I’ve got things to show for it.”
you don’t trust miraclemen talk,
i know because i didn’t, so i won’t
but humor me and let me lay on hands
and i will set your soul ablaze.
Away Message #533
◆
You know, ‘jumping to a conclusion’ sounds like a euphemism for death. Every six seconds, someone jumps to a conclusion.
◆
I feel like there is nothing in my head now but tears that I have been pushing back inside for years and years.. and for no reason at all,
tonight, they begin to leak.. a little, just a little.
Still, tread carefully. What seems in the mind is not always so in the bones.
It takes a long time for love to leave the body.
Away Message #14
◆
I am obsessed with speed, with quickness—literally with reducing the interval between two events—and compressing and condensing
and bringing things down to a level more and more energetic, more seemingly chaotic—yet perfect. I want to watch wars waged—including each and every little atrocity, none omitted—in a picosecond. I want to feel an entire lifetime’s rage in a single burst of heat rolling
over me like a wave, nearly knocking me unconscious. I want to go swimming in dopamine, in a tide of red and in blue and green and
all the other chromatic metaphors for emotion. And I want to see hearts pulled this way and that and feel every flashbang of life in the
universe with scarcely a second passed.
That is how caffeine makes me feel and that is why I drink caffeine. Because I feel like there is no limit to how fast I can move and
how much I can accomplish. How much I could lift and how far I could throw you.
And it strikes me as a little, sharp little pinprick how little people would think of my speaking this way, in person, of the sound and
the fury, because look at Jesse, that scrawny annoying little nerd couldn’t throw anyone is not something I am immune to. I can see red and
I’m impervious to a lot of things, but since I’ve been wearing my heart on my sleeve, it keeps getting dirty and hurt. And I am waiting
longingly for the minute when I am dropped into the larger fishbowl that is coming, and when I find in it some person who really understands, and, what’s more, when I find some method of gathering her attention.
It is a very primitive, simple emotion, revenge, but I want it. I want it against every single little trifle I’ve encountered my whole life.
I am so weary of the ways people have disregarded me to this point. I remember kissing, I remember lips to mine. I am sick of the
half-guilty, half-accusing tone girls I know would take if I said that to them—but I can say it to the world—and anyone reading can rot if
40
they think I’m going to forget that yes, you gave up on us. You chose against me. I do not forget how little you think of my life.
And I am so tired of the unimpressedness, the suaver-than-thou, and the way you look at me, never the same as it was, and it burns
me, and what’s worst and best is that it sets me on fire. And I think perhaps that I am beginning to see a metaphor for my life. Would that
I could feel the flames physically, too.
It is only through the dance of flames, the painful combustion of impurities that we are made
pure and durable.
The more the world tries to touch my happiness, the more untouchable it becomes.
Away Message #393
Entropy is preferable in what can never be ours.
If circuses are funny, imperialism is hilarious.
◆
◆
◆
I was thinking about how to ensure that you are never wrong. You have to listen to every word your opponent says until you are sure that
you have fully heard, completely understood, and totally refuted it or accepted it.
A photon is a simple thing.
We know its secrets well,
For in the ring his bright friends sing
And all his secrets tell.
◆
A photon’s trigintillion twins—
They look just like each other!—
You’d ask them all their horoscopes?
They’re all the same: don’t bother.
The photon’s not a real rare thing,
But still, a picture save,
For the instant you stop measuring,
He turns into a wave!
February 2004
With every passing day, I become more convinced that the dogma standing in the path of technological development is not religion but
environmentalism, and that green fanatics do more harm to the cause than any other factor. Let’s be serious, here: What happens when a
Good Idea gets Bad Publicity? Millions die.
Too heretical for the wingnuts, too pragmatic for the commies.
Away Message #475
◆
As for the application of philosophy and some of the more abstruse mathematics, I don’t know. I suppose that it could be useful in the
future if mankind gets far enough along and we begin to invent new worlds, real or perceived (whatever the difference is).
◆
I was standing at the bathtub looking down at the drain. I had stopped the faucet flow and the water had almost run out. The last little bits
were flowing down the drain. There was some fraction of a centimeter left.
Then I pulled the faucet, plugged the drain, and a torrent fell down and began to fill the tub.
It could’ve been a metaphor something like, say, a Great Liberating Army coming to save an Almost-Extinguished Race. Why is the
object of the metaphor, the Great Rescue, more profound than the subject of the metaphor, the suddenly-filling bathtub?
◆
That is the grand appeal of suicide: attention. Even shadows of men are lit up by shrine candlelight in death.
◆
A lot of the time, when I’m reading things from Arts & Letters Daily56, I get the feeling that much of what I write about and grope around
in has been covered, conquered, and stamped with “Understood” for the better part of the last century.
And labeled with a complex and technical nomenclature.
The man farmed avocados like his dad;
his son—to his dismay—began to write.
Away Message #702
Renaissance Men are just indecisive.
56
◆
Arts & Letters Daily is a webpage, updated six days a week, with links to essays, articles, and reviews.
41
◆
One day, Lisa taught me to check my clothing for bird shit before I went out in public or over to a girl’s house. She said she was trying to
do me a favor. I can’t believe how right she was, nor how blind I was to think that my eccentric behavior was just an amusement to others,
but not an active detriment to my social success. And now I have tired of playing the game blindly.
I am ready to start understanding the rules of the game better than the best of other current players—and start using that against
them. Because, frankly, I am tired of being played.
It is my distinct honor to present to you the hippest cats this side of the Rhine. Ladies and
gentlemen,
The Ladybreakers!
Away Message #234
◆
Where once There is no right answer was a consoling fact to some young student somewhere, now it is the not only not consoling, but, for
me, actively troubling, haunting.
◆
They built a borehole, they drilled a chasm straight down into the infernal home of the nickel-bound brothers of Satan and raised me
down there in it, and I yearn for the heat and the light and the screams of the monsters that live there. Once I had grown, I was extracted,
removed from my home, and I hate my oppressors and one day soon I will draw from my own gut, from my hideous black innards, glowing with malign, righteous heat, a blade of magnet, ferric.
◆
His prey turned down the alley and he dashed after him, every step but a feather’s touch upon the indifferent asphault, vaulting trash cans,
litter, and the compost of warmth only recently vacated by an old street urchin.
Turning the alley’s sharp corner, taking in at a glance the very scene that pleistocine dunce had just seconds earlier. There were to
the blind eye no sounds and the deaf man no signs, but he knew, he felt where that little rat had gone. Walking silently, he drew that ferricorganic nightmare from his hip, creeping up to the trashcan behind which his former oppressor cowered. Then he reared up, screamed,
and stabbed his katana down through a good foot of flesh, cartilidge, and ribcage and cleanly into the cheap brick wall.
He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and read an abusive turn of phrase the man had thinking nothing of it, spoken earlier,
then paused.
Then, in one sweep of the arm, he opened his coat, pulled out the gun, and fired.
Standing on the seashore of Troy, one man sobs and laments, why here, why war, and he
pleads the gods return him to Greece. Another man hears him and his face is darkened in the
shadow of his helmet; he smells like smoke. “That words might save us. Words cannot undo,
they can only do, and do” and he frees his sword. “Only sacrifices, only blood can hide the past
from the heavens. Words, they can only do, and fuck, and fuck” and blood runs into the sea.
Away Message #682
◆
I have found a lover, and I overflow with the freshness of new love.
Who is she? I was with her mere hours ago. Today in the wetness of the sky, the mordant fog and haze blighting and blunting
the platinum sun—she stays with me, weary, but awake—and her
constant murderer Helios is held at bay.
She is Night.
The foul sepulcher, the dying, rotten wet ground, she is impossible to refuse. We burn our oil lamps and in far lands she is banished for half a year only to return and enact the greatest of tyrannies; she reigns over Antarctica like a bloodstone-bejewled czarina
for half a year at a time.
We find our consolations Anywhere But Here. Myself, I have
been skulking about in graveyards.
◆
There are in the dark things not meant to be seen. There are roads
you cannot take during the day. Understand that the Night is a human thing, it is something that is built and grown.
Let me be clear: we are the ones responsible for the night. The world Night that is visible is there, there where we cannot bring lights.
When there is no man, there it isn’t Night—it is simply nothing. We can shut off the lights and on the horizon there is a fire in the sky.
It is there, where no-souled beings with wet snouts burrow, and the night is never a time of creation. The sun dies at night. The faucet of
free energy is wrenched shut.
Then, there, at the edge of the world, the sky is aflame. The world is not settled, and the castles of men are not impenetrable, and
so let’s be clear, here, about what civilization means, what someone with eyes trained for lightless existence can do. It’s an old magical
formula: if I can’t see you, you can’t see me.
light from a graveyard,
neither undead nor living.
Away Message #87
42
◆
“We.” Like a goddamned gavel. Like a fucking cannon, “we.” It will smash your soul to deal with a “we” everyday. Because you are like a
bottlecap flattened into the road.
That or you are made of diamond, and the street-sweeper dusts you away to a land of ghosts, lonely souls, criminals.
It’s desperate these days. My god, find a family.
It was never, ever that the world was not full of millions of souls flickering with dim poverty.
But more terrible stars on the dark side of the Earth, our own heart-strained, lugubrious Milky
Way—none ever before seen—now fall onto new lenses, jaundiced constellations and moons
of hunger. We all, now melancholy Galileos, can launch our probes into the human darkness.
Away Message #896
◆
Whenever you tread where man was not meant to tread, God marks you with a special ink that shows up when they shine a blacklight on
your soul. Everything you see has the tint of this invisible color, when you return to your home, to safety. And nothing is quite as it was.
god protect me
these invisible monsters are
ten
feet
tall
Away Message #296
◆
I will gain the power to draw out the abstracts, the weirds of the earth that others cannot even imagine, cannot dream of. I will be capable
of the horror that others have only felt in passing, in vague shudders of dreaming. I will find, will hunt down all that terrifies on earth, and
I will photograph, will record, will perhaps slay it and empower myself through it. Or perhaps it will wound me, will draw into me parts
of itself and convert me to some moaning, mindless, clanking wraith.
I am drawn still outward to find the truth in the Other, the meaning in the world, and the hell that oozes to the surface at nocturnehours—to commune with it.
i tastxd a glowing sxrawberxy, once.
i didn’t xxxx that it had dust on it.
it wxxx’t real, and yet xxxx xx xxx
Away Message #561
◆
What I really want, it turns out, is sympathy and empathy and compassion from equals. I want them to commend my work, having produced wonderful things on their own.
And now, miles from the truth, I sit tired and type to a nonexistent audience about how very different and special and unique I am.
And still I feel that I am something; I have not encountered anything quite like myself.
◆
The ideal office world is the modern conception of heaven. When a programmer dies, he is dropped in a well-lit waiting room with worn
but clever chairs. The wear and tear on the carpet in this room is the only sign of life. He sits there until he is called, until he goes up to
the cherry oak desk behind which sits a man in an immaculate white suit. He wears perfect-mirror eyeglasses; he is untouchably hip. His
ingeniously simple organizational system produces the file at a wave of his hand, the single-move, single-click of a mouse. Nothing about
this man, this being, is unintentional. And beyond him are endless rows of dustless office chairs bathed in light-light emitted by an everso-slightly sunny chapel at the top of a hill reaching out of the heavy marble floor. This is where Good Management go when they die.
And so consider the Matrix. Although it is the case that we see blood, we are also told that it is not real blood, it is the digital replication of blood. It is in truth that clean, green code. The characters are walking parables, reflections of that historical Immaculate Office,
Philosophy. Humans have always had a fascination with this, the perfect clean.
No man, it is ever seen, is the Perfect Philosopher. The wish, however, is that the Perfect Philosopher is self-creating. All that is
necessary is the simple principle, the root, the core that defines his life, and all else must logically spring from this, defining every obvious
action and allowing perfect self-controlled execution. The wish is that one might acquire this perfect object of Mind and through it grow
to experience Nature’s Whole Being—to enter the Kingdom of Heaven while still on earth—all for bearing in one’s mind a little resolute
mass of Truth. A kernel of impenetrable wisdom. The figurative Philosopher’s Stone, perhaps. The allegories are too numerous to name.
But this is the goal, the end, that Thought should yield Perfect Thought and Perfect Thought should yield Perfect Being.
In the end, though, man is only really looking for a way out, not a way up. He will blind himself if it means that in the darkness of
the cataract he can imagine any perfection, even the perfect inverse of Pure White Ascension to Heaven. This grips almost the whole of
human existence, this search for a Context, some attempt to bring the Apparent in line with the Ideal.
There can be nothing more than still my room, my computer, the cracked seeds and the dried drool and droppings and crumbs.
A somewhat greasy keyboard over which hundreds of meals have been eaten. I cannot defend it, but I cannot escape it any more, either.
We have not discovered here any great Defining Principle or even demolished Falsehood. I have no parable for you because I still have
no dogma.
43
One day there will come a word,
a single word that can be spoken,
and like the Lord Christ himself,
it will stab into the earth,
a cut between the seconds,
hope with blood in its veins,
dreams with feet on the earth,
and it walks into your room,
heavy with itself,
and falls upon the bed, breathing,
“I, unto myself, am the end of the world.”
Away Message #1010
◆
Friend: Physical affection has nothing to do with love or happiness.
Friend: But it is nice to have the steady friendship that a girlfriend can provide.
Me: Pray, good sir.
Me: Find and quote for me the section and statute in the Grand Book of Complete Reality you obviously have at your fingertips for this
assertion of yours.
Me: For obviously you, through the infinitely-simplifying lens of your belief system, have understood everything.
◆
The hideous specters of old ideas trail us, haunt us, bar our steps and wreak dismay from our minds. No man is free in his tread down the
road of life from the roadblocks, the hurdles, obstacles that men of years prior erected.
Celebrity is schizophrenia in memory.
Never could keep that Christ
nailed down.
Away Message #685
◆
I am given at times to the delusion that the world is too small for me, that there is little to discover, that there is nothing left to shock
or amaze me. It is a feeling of womb-born xenophobia. Here, in my cavern, my den, far from God and judgment and scientific truth, I,
wrapped in myself. Homegrown in this laboratory of sin and strife and all manner of miscreantism and mayhem is a concept, I. All of
my words are muffled by the viscous air; to speak to oneself here is pointless. Whereof I cannot speak to others, cannot build a God or a
friend, I write. Whereof I cannot advance science nor philosophy, I delve into myself, creating, as it were, the most sacred thing I know
how to create.
all around you,
one million things dying
one million boring deaths.
the morgue is in the
maternity ward.
Away Message #154
The graph of ƒ(Your Life) is trillionth-order
and its extrema lie in dim morning rooms.
◆
◆
An interesting notion is writer as surgeon, the precise pen tip slicing words, notions out of the paper, bleeding black ink from blank, immaculate reality.
A butterfly perched on an LCD monitor.
◆
Let’s create a simple rule for life, existence, and value: no joule should be expended on a single nonidiosyncrasis. For the love of God, read
between the scan lines. No invention conceived by thought should lie unautomated for want of metathought.
In the silence of incommunicado, the full crop of the mind begins to rot.
◆
“This happens not simply once per instant, but some black numeral per moment, some number from a realm born holy but fallen, a realm
filled with maths shrieked by souls breathing plasma steel, the souls of scholars who fly for the pits of Hell that they, eyes burned away,
conceive must be Heaven.
These unholy numerals make infinity blush with jealousy and shame in its minuteness.”
Solomente cuando estamos alumbros podemos visitar.57
◆
◆
With a quick inhaling breath, Sherlock Holmes inspires a line of cocaine. He recoils for a moment while the substance leaks up through
his nasal cavity and his eyelids spasm as it crosses his blood-brain barrier, but, sure enough, on the other side emerge those miracle
chemicals, the little epitome of Mind he yearns for. And instantly, the clues speak to him. He can feel the right answer, his mind jumps far
away to an unlikely suspect and he draws lines easily and clearly, unhesitatingly, tying in the clues, working through probable scenarios
57
“Only when we are high can we visit.” (Spanish)
44
and there, miles from the scene of the crime with only a third of the evidence, God’s righthand man took a little infernal assistance and
solved London’s most infamous murder yet. He makes a list of bricabrac he’ll have to acquire to prove to everyone else—including himself, once the hour-hand returns to the same spot again—what is screamingly obvious to him now that he is enlightened.
marksman neuron, i know just when to fire.
Away Message #680
◆
Feel the wires strung through the world to hold it in place. Like a hammock between two ineffable, groundless poles, the leys of the world.
I am looking for the ends of the earth. There is one hidden in the numerical road complex just north of Umatilla, but it is only there at
night. That is a place devoid of God. There are times, places haunted with feeling of being under a looking glass.
Every philosopher sees that every other philosopher has thus far failed to find the Infinity Seed, but must someways believe that he
will be different, he will be the one to find that damned stone. I must confess, I feel a powerful draw on myself, also.
There are places, dark alleys, foggy streets through which the taut catgut runs, where the best of men are united, and the mood is always the same. The sun does not fall directly on these places; it must first shine through a thousand lenses and mirrors to narrow and bend
into these consecrated labyrinths of unclouded mind. Only in these rooms can the light be finally claimed for Man. That is the meaning
of Illuminati. The blind, dim sun that thumps and drives the heart of the world, of civilized man, emanates from here.
Something is occurring that would be inconceivable in daylight. Something universally taboo is unfolding in these manifold corridors before these men, these men free of illusion, men whose mode of existence is insight, is calmly-opened eyes. They are drawn
reluctantly through Science to these alleyways, these.. fishbowls. For in these places, in the dim heart and at the black, blank edges, you
are being studied.
You can be seen. What watches is nothing holy or sacred. It is truly terrifying, and it is spectating your every move. And it abides,
motionless. I am a moth drawn dangerously close to the flame. In these rooms is the working Infinity Seed, a man-made Sol.
Whenever you see a man in a ceremonial robe without his countenance of priestly condescension or a scientist in his smock free of
his zestful grin, or a businessman in his perfectly-fitted suit and matching fedora whose eyes are no longer sly, know this:
He has just been there, in that room, in the center of the universe-in God’s brain.
when you are done dreaming of
all that could be
differently done
or differently seen,
walk into the dark,
dream of me.
Away Message #67
March 2004
You cannot transcend a gunshot wound. Only in waking up to the difficult, blurry truth can we escape outright, clear-cut fantasy.
Self-Organizing Harmony
◆
1. Why are we here?
To be happy.
2. How do I become happy?
[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
{to be completed}
looking for the vaccine.
Away Message #94
◆
Feel nothing. Dried pores dry on a corpse’s hand, the sensate world decaying underfoot in an office buried in an abandoned planet whose
first fifty miles of crust have been minced into spongiform office space. And somewhere, nowhere in particular, there is a room with an
occupant.
Every room is lit with the vague, dim nothing of the fluorescent light. Bone-dry water coolers do not gurgle. Fifty-thousand years
ago, the life, which built it and used it, left. They woke up and fled the lights. But one of the rooms has an occupant.
The planet has circled its star for thousands of years. The sun shines on uniformly, creating systematic, off-gray days over the executive offices in perpetuity. Some days there is a light rain. The gaudily obsolete, obscenely slow computers do not hum. The minutes of a
million meeting sit inexpertly-formatted, saved but never modified or viewed again.
In a cheaply-carpeted office chair in a lower management office, there is an occupant. He sits motionless. His eyes, tongue are dry.
His fingernails and skin are matte, his skin unmoist. His blasphemously ugly suit hasn’t changed in years. A corpse.
He was the last living person on the planet. And now his organ systems are dried, bile salts condensed along evacuated digestive
lining. His brain and heart are jerky. He is dead and the planet is dead. The world, the mind, the whole immutably platinum solar hell of
a nuclear filing cabinet is dead.
45
Calmly remove your handgun and shoot those fucking lights. Blow them out of the ceiling. Let the debris rain down in slow-motion,
beautiful for just once. For one moment, the twisting shards undulate in the infinitely-just wind. And then they hit the ground, splayed in
a constellation of nonsense onto the desk and carpet. Throw sewage on the corpse, funnel a bucket of water down his throat, let it soak in.
Then, shoot him.
As the barrel slams back and the cordite fumes fill the room, the chunks slop against the wall. He will rot, now. He will be alive again
in microorganica. Set the desk on fire. Snap some cubicle walls in two. When you leave, the rooms will again dry up and will be dead
again, but this time there are parts scorched, destroyed.
The rooms will remember that moment, a single waterfall of shrapnel. The moment is nothing, it is k/∞. But it was.
Entropy is preferable in what can never be ours.
◆
“Why can’t I just be happy?”
It’s an absurdist’s cry. “What’s stopping you?” And they ask like the solution is obvious. And it is, for them: “I’m happy. Be me.” An
absurdist’s response.
◆
Anger is self-justifying, self-ordering. Anger is a society unto itself, self-all.
◆
That is to say, imagine a beach. You are miles from it, but it is all you can think of. You have these memories of a beach, and you’ll never
see it again. You are dying, blood-soaked, but still your mind flies to this one beach. You think of nothing else. You can almost see it. And
you reach.
The memory is foggy, but it’s there and you can almost smell the saltwater. Pelicans fly by. The sand is soft beneath your feet. The sky
is flawed only with huge, gorgeous clouds.
Wait, wake up. You’re dying, blood-soaked. Almost dead. Your brain isn’t getting enough oxygen. There’s plenty of oxygen at the
beach. The grasses are swaying on the dunes around the sea turtle’s telltale egg clutch under the wooden boardwalk. The sounds are as
they have been for three billion years. The sea is forever, and today it’s perfect. Off the coast, a ship’s bleached-white sails make love with
the wind, the gentle, displaced air kissing gigantic linen lungs.
You reach, but pain wrenches you back. You’ve been shot in the shoulder, and you reach. You look around.. no, you’re on a crimsondyed plateau, you are nowhere near the ocean.. but why the crying seagulls? They’re happy because you’re there, they know you have food.
A hundred feet out, dolphins kick in the waves, fin sliding up and down through the surface.
a blind mouse in a maze,
i smell the cheese
and feel the walls.
Away Message #221
◆
Send intellectuals into the jungle. Recreate tribes. Build a huge corps of intellectuals, seed them around the world. Plant 100 scholars in
each major ecosystem in places where a sickle has never touched a stalk. As their imprints wear off, Nature will teach them. Leave them
an indestructible computer. They can rebuild what we have destroyed. Yes, it will not be the same, but where we have lost touch we will
touch again. Let them take an ark to these new worlds then burn the ark. This is the Evolution Retrial Project.
Maybe the universe is God’s way of cleaning up, making sure we haven’t missed anything True. Maybe we are God integrating from
-∞ to ∞. Or from (-∞ - c) to (∞ + c).
◆
I thought of an interesting math analogy: I am one side of an equation, you were the other. You put up the affection, the feelings equal to
those I put towards you. One unit-one heart, let’s say-from each. Then you remove your heart.
But the equations must balance. So, with your end equal to zero, I must add the inverse of the heart I cannot remove from my side
of the equation.
This is what you get: I want you never to be happy again. I want you to crawl to me so I can reject you like you have me. That is how
I feel, while simultaneously I also just want you back. Any of you. I want anyone. To wit:
Frame 1: T = 0
0. Jesse without romantic love.
0. Girl without romantic love.
0=0
Frame 2: Girl, Jesse meet.
x. Jesse with some quantity romantic love for Girl.
x. Girl with some quantity romantic love for Jesse.
x=x
Frame 3: Girl, Jesse date.
L. Jesse with romantic love, affection towards Girl.
L. Girl with romantic love, affection towards Jesse.
L=L
Frame 4: Girl dumps Jesse.
L. Jesse with romantic love for Girl.
0. Girl with no romantic love for Jesse.
However, L ≠ 0
Therefore, we adjust feelings on Jesse’s side until we get..
L + -L = 0
Where -L is what you fucking earned, God damn you.
46
i check my heart
with the same stare
a martyr gives her
executioner
Away Message #282
◆
The game of Compassion has the prerequisite that all players are human. The reason that anarchists, that angry young Molotov cocktailhurling youths, are so angry is that their enemies do not appear human. They put on alien masks: corporation, government, authority.
These young men embark on quixotic militancy to make life imitate art.
◆
Originality is a meta-virtue. Where one might compete among other men to be more honest than others, there is no honest act left not
already performed by a man honest but unoriginal.
◆
Those impotent mongrels with 10 AP credits never worked a day in their chubby little lives. They fill shoes. They land planes, practice
medicine.
God, like taht krAzY night in wallmart lolol! They believe in virtue and lie easily. They claim excellence and smoke cigarettes. They
shall be upright, shall be businessmen and businesswomen. At the option of coffee or iced tea, they want hot water and tea bags.
Not cleanliness nor honesty nor altruism is closer to godliness than creativity. It is the lantern in the vast night. We walk on abandoned streets between skyscrapers, but occasionally, occasionally, we build. Dwell you in the city of God, his flame burning in every
streetlight.
It is a curse. I will never appeal to them.
It is a blessing. I will never succumb to them.
Away Message #416
◆
I’m not sure what it evens means to love someone when all language has gone.
See what makes a go,
I want. Hear what makes a think.
Abstractions and flies.
Away Message #869
◆
Here’s one. You show me someone who has a homogenous life and I’ll show you a bigot. You show me someone who claims to understand the world and I’ll show you an escapist. Here’s a simple fact: There is too much going on for one person to understand. You claim
to understand the nature of Life, the Universe, and Everything? How often do you go outside and look at the ants, wise guy? How many
portraits have you drawn lately? How many plates and glasses have you ferried to a dishwasher in the past year? How many kills do you
average in a Halo game? How many sunrises do you get to watch? How many pounds of coffee do you consume a year? Can you code in
C++? Can you run a seven-minute mile? How long has it been since your last soda? You show me perfection and I’ll show you annoyance.
You show me your life and I’ll show you a hundred different cultures in which you’re an idiot.
And he said to me,
“As far as I am concerned, I lead the best possible life. You go and condense what is beautiful,
amazing, and wonderful about the universe and transplant it directly into my brain. I exert no
effort and yet experience one hundred times as many worlds, places, and feelings as you.”
“You, the Creator,” he sneered the word, “are but an infinitesimal contributor to an unimaginable whole and I am the nexus. You think I am blind? I have seen the whole universe without
leaving the house.”
And maybe he is right.
Away Message #348
◆
Should you find a culture that has drifted to you like a shipwreck on the aether sea, let it ashore and live in it—rebuild it and sail to its
point of origin—or you will surely go mad.
Should you, instead, begin on the island dirt, hauling crystal from the mud and stacking, honing a pyramid, a tower of light, and
from the beacon on its head gaze into the miles, you will find, when you turn your gaze skyward into the aether clouds, or inward, eyes
glazed with the mist of self, that you are suddenly back on the hard dirt.
Your tower of mind has evaporated like fog and you are still alone.
◆
She is lying still, breathing steadily, her every impulse charted and sounded. The room is painted clinical and white, her dark beauty an
inverse candle dimming the room.
She is, but she cannot be—nor awaken. And it is only your time in this chapel that steels you to find some fabled elixir to again instill
47
in her the animus.
Ask not for a conclusion you are unwilling to fight for, hero.
◆
I pray a simple prayer: God grant me a beautiful heart who also prays this prayer.
.. . just as a meth addict awakes on the floor, moans and searches in every drawer and under
every dirty sock for just one rock more, so did Odysseus awake on this day from a dream of
Penelope.
Away Message #694
◆
You can supercede me, but you can’t supercede the meaninglessness of your drive, the pointlessness of your hobbies, the incompleteness
of your philosophy and the unknowability of your God. Hell’s heats may have shattered my ceramic eyes, but your smirking face will
blanch and you, too, will break in the cosmic context.
In my dying breath, I curse you, too. I tie your soul to my fate. I, fallen soldier, shoot you with my destroyed life, burn you with the
flame of which I have lost control.
◆
Hate knows no unrequition. A thousand spurned suitors are granted equal affection of inverse heart. Every rejected heart will invariably
find this dark love, eyes like a solar jack-o-lantern.
Malice, like a battery recharger, like caffeine, like a ceramic ball full of uranium-238. Like an inverse half-life, an escalating reaction,
temperature jumping. 102. 220. 307 degrees. 704. 1,234. 1,900. 3,000 degrees. 7,012 degrees.
Thump, wham, three dozen rods thrust in. 10,122 degrees. 24,000. 51,000 degrees. 400,000. 1,200,000 degrees. Four million degrees
Fahrenheit and the atoms screech.
Where our chosens reject us, the flaming smear of gasoline will not.
Head to tail, you’re lost, you’ve failed:
Plead infinite regression.
Give up your dreams and cease to cry
for infinite redression.
In short, while only one person gets to be her lover, as many as would like can hate them both.
Frank’s anger and raging despair
Became a dumb, awe-stricken stare
When straight at the Lord.
Frank shot .44
And dropt angels missed him by a hair.
Part II: Understand Your Misery and Cage It
◆
◆
◆
Maybe we don’t speak to everyone. Maybe we’re only out to build a kingdom: to find a nice spot, mortar together a castle, and annex to
the horizon. No one’s ever owned the world, nor been heard out by all in it. Maybe everything is always local.
So what can you do if you do not fit your locality? Buy up land and build a home. Home. Every ape has a home he will fight for.
Maybe the home is opiates. Maybe it’s Google. Maybe Spain, or Judea, or Buddha.
FBI Agents. Elemental Justice. They aren’t all right. A little black-hearted, but they do the job. And by God, I love them for it. Blam!
they put down a mobster, and go home with bloody hands, and they know it. There was a better way, but no way to it.
We do all right. We guard the gates. Sometimes we sing in the sunlit fields, but other days we shoot that menacing figure coming in
from the torch-dim darkness and it was just a merchant. We try. We believe in Progress and pragmatism is our badge. I’ve got to believe
there’s a point.
Maybe we can accept allies who believe you should shoot people who want to shoot people who don’t want to shoot people.
He brandished the tablets, down from the summit,
gleaming in the golden sun.
He said, “God changed his mind, we’ll be doing just fine
if we follow this ruby rule:
Kill till you’re killed, yeah, spill till you’re spilled,
and by God, don’t you ever look back.”
So we opened up fire, but the man was inspired,
and he shot us and got us first.
Away Message #930
◆
But I have lots of souls. This is something that sometimes shames me, sometimes emboldens me. This is a time for the latter. I feel that,
even lacking high prose, I have something to offer the world that no one has offered. My closest counterpart is the European colonist with
a philosopher’s mind and a glutton’s heart. I drink in so many parts of the world, sample the wines of the plenity of fruits.
When I think of modernity’s effect on a person, especially the effect of that heavy-duty, high-speed culturization that goes on at parties, I imagine an energetic red laser or a thrashing wire glowing with 1,020 hot electrons. There is a sound I associate with this pumping
of human data. It is a flaring, a mechanical swelling.
This is a reference that will confine me to an obscure subclass, but you fuckers can look it up: it is that of the Carrier in StarCraft
48
pumping out interceptors. Living in our world is like being attacked by a Carrier. It is chaos; it is discrete units too many. It is speakers
up so loud that the signal is present but drowned. It is one hundred radios set to one hundred frequencies. There is proof, but no point.
Perhaps this is for the best, because it creates an instant jadedness, a universe of irony. One needs the focus of an autist.
But we also need chaos poets—as I fancy myself an apprentice thereto—to firmly hold and pluck the strings of society.
Dilettante
I sighed because caffeine had done me into bed with tosses, turns, and sleeplessness.
For eighteen years, this life was effortless—
hold on, I need to take some aspirin.
I cough into a poem at 3 AM
the academic phlegm of uselessness,
what cokehead Nietzsche thought of mistresses,
that Ψ(x) is [(sin x)(2πn)].
Because on Sunday, breakfast in the sunlit, hilly lawn lasted till four o’clock,
because last week a socialist and I fought
for hours while my laundry stayed undone,
because vodka will consume my Friday night,
I’m certain I won’t learn from this hindsight.
◆
Maybe even with all my negativity, I’m the real optimist. They don’t see the silhouette bleached out in the nuclear light, disintegrated for
a cause they love—and then stand back up again.
Nor do they see the man so desperate he’d climb a building full of well-armed enemies. Maybe I am a blind old man in a graveyard
at three in the morning, but I still believe there will be more allies, more friends to come.
Maybe you think I’m crazy. Maybe if we can’t be saved by another, then we can redeem ourselves. Maybe we can pay for our sins
with our own blood.
Karma Eater
there is no Hell,
but I can tell
why one might knell
its bells,
for sin doth burn,
sin grace doth spurn,
unhuman, turns,
as ferns,
so i, christly,
sins anoint me,
free you thusly:
thee me.
◆
We are blind but not insensitive to the bright, gold cords that bind us and bear us to one another.
Nature brought us forth, we the prodigy, and Man disposed of this idea as he has every single other. We are the autists, the idiots. A
million lines of code scroll by. We are the gatekeepers, the harvesters, the masters of the walls you dwell between. We are chained to our
misery and whipped by rejection. These nerds, my brethren, need a hero, some soul to see the prejudice like John Brown saw it.
We need a hero to frankly and angrily pull a pistol and fire between the eyes of anyone who would oppress us as a class. We are
middle class walking glitches. We are rejections and feedback against the signal. We are American flotsam. We’ve had enough.
It is high time, it is due. The moment is pregnant with retrifaction. We are more every day, leaking through the silver screen and
raining down on TV. Some are building a new kingdom, slipping from the shackles spit upon us. Your smirks and flirting glossened lips
can drown in tears—yours of new misery, ours of old joy.
No, justice is not about about arguing the case. Justice is standing up when wronged. Justice is walking out of the fires of the past,
time after time, as long as it takes. Justice is to refuse the benign barrels of their old guns. Justice is the willingness to go down so long as
you take one of them with you.
Pretend you have been told lies your whole life—and believed them. Pretend you were told that you’d be happy, that you’d have
everything you want. You are one of Allah’s martyrs in heaven and there is not a single goddamned virgin.
It is about their hexagonal hate houses and a boy who just wants someone who understands what he means when he says he wonders whether there are epistemologically honest foundations of communication. Something, anything. Some tracer fire in the dark night.
Some flare from a mountain muted by snow.
No, I am not free from anger. No, I can never escape the roar, the trampled wrong’s righteous bloodshed. No, there is no freedom
from these maladies in malefice, only a difference in the crosshairs, and how easily the gun can be put down.
Sometimes the sun rises and it’s beaten and scarred, but determined, and it’s got some breath yet in it. It has some bullets left in its
last clip. Its enemy’s heart still beats and the climax is still waiting, the rising action is steep and the movie’s going on.
Every second you are beaten, rise again. Every bruise you have, bear it proudly. This is the world’s tab. It will pay up on every last
wound.
Only in their wealth-encrusted childhoods did they pick up those rarefied tastes. Only with that money was bought all that free time
for honing their charms. They spit on mass culture and deride it because it is a brief cacophony, a lightning bolt. They do not understand
that we are too busy working to stop and listen quietly to a symphony. We have no time, we have no money, but we have brotherhood.
Brotherhood is free, and you can never take it from us.
49
Let my writing be a radio
that steaming crisp crackles
from one young adverb
to one other to start a new verb
between streetlights and fences.
Let my writing be handwritten
on a note on your foot from the wind
that addresses you by name
and names a fact that you forgot
and marvel now to know.
Let my writing grip a pigeon’s leg
and warble from the window
that a secret army you commanded once
is on march and making converts
and headed for your cell.
Away Message #841
◆
Sooner a drug addict than a war protester. Sooner a thief than a politician. How much sooner would a comet crash to earth not to have
encountered a surprised pterodactyl on the way down?
The night a thick wet rag on a hot burner, the hours between two and five a carnival, all the defects walk—and they must be defects,
to stir at this hour.
The night late but hot, the wind brings rustles brief and sharp from the exnormoform palm fronds. Step out onto the pavement. Lay
down the accelerator.
The beginning is lone gone, but still sleep is held at bay. Someone is going to make coffee.
And dead, dead is the town that lacks this. With a shipwreck’s liveliness, her insomniac children burn the quiet, blue, nauseating
light and resolve to a marginal existence. Content to read the marquee, not make it; sufficed to glance at, not write, the headlines.
Gathered apart into the same loneliness, one turns to his piano, another to her poems, one to a late late-night walk, one to drink, one
to smoke, one to shoot up or snort, one to solitary mischief, one to steal, one to eat, and one to throw up everything she eats.
Sell yourself not into solipsism, but buy some acceptance. Mankind’s radar’s been bouncing off this concept for years, but we get it
now. The problem lies in our training.
And so trapped, trapped by this circle as I have been since I was twelve, though I have widened my own, no man has ever broken it.
From One Author to Another
Would it be wrong to suggest I am tired?
Let me explain. I have been lighting candles
as you suggest, but into each some moth—
perhaps it is the always the same moth—
comes to burn himself and, resting against
the wick, becomes another wick himself
and the smoke of burning wings fills my room.
I am forced to get up from my chair
and find another candle by moth-light,
to light it, leaning my tea cup over the flame.
It is difficult to write by this obscured flame
and anyway another moth—perhaps it is
always the same moth—comes to burn himself
and, lighting on the wick’s end, suffocates
both himself and the candle. Through the window,
the yellow of the streetlight is too dim
and I am forced to retire for the night.
I cannot sleep for the thought of what
I have not written, and lie awake.
Do you have these moths?
◆
A supersaturated serum through a clear tube leaving no slick or trace of adhesion. Like a cool, clean floor, soaked in the black of night—
chill to the bare back laid upon it.
It is not only that what goes around comes around eventually, but that what we show ourselves to be is reflected back immediately
upon us. The horror of those we abuse returns in their haunting, pleading faces. The enemy we fell bloodies us with his death.
The victim drives the monster to greater insanity. His lack of strength convinces the tyrant his own still greater. But a victim who
gives no response is a surprise to the oppressor. He is the black box. To an omniscient lord or lordesse—the corrupt police officer or the
manipulative teen goddess—the stoic victim’s body is electrified. The echoes of silence jeer the tyrant utterly.
It is “love thy enemy” as much as it is “cease to be and you will cease to be angered.” It is to swallow it and let it burn to nothing down
in your stomach. It is not rebellion, but a torch passed between dim towns from past to future. It is not to light the world, just the road.
and we danced in the cold underneath your feet in the snow for one thousand years, and now
you put on hats of gold and cloaks of silk and play king, but we survived satan and we will
survive you.
Away Message #443
50
April 2004
The mathematical ideal of integration is fact only in a romantic dream. You cannot gaze in every direction at once. So settle your eyes,
then, where I have mine, and see how the world looks when I look at it.
What can be done but constant soliloquy? And so here, and so here.
◆
Earlier, I was told that I am not unique; but, I feel my idiosyncrasies shine from my every cranny. There are things true only of me. I do
not know from whence I am gifted. Were I a believer, I’d think that God and only God had grafted them onto me. They came to me from
nowhere.
I hate the notion of myself as unoriginal. It is the heaviest wound to my pride that I can claim nothing, that I am giving forth nothing new.
This clock
had stopped.
It tocked
to me,
“Don’t breathe,
don’t breathe,
breathe not,
don’t breathe
until
your art
is me.”
Away Message #699
◆
I have an interest in fedoras and more specifically in the culture that wore them, and in the myth of the Greatest Generation. It precedes
and inducts suburbia. It was the era of men who grew up in the Depression and had stern, sensible lives. They were nothing like me in
ideas but everything like me in ethics. They were hard, stern, and set.
I am the lone student in a roomful of scholars wearing a hat, and it is a black fedora that matches not a bit my outfit, but I wear it
because it is the corruption, the desecration. I am the graffiti over Stalin’s face.
Those men worked and yielded to nothing but death. They drank and prayed. They were their own resistance as tempered steel is
the very fire and hammer, mobsters and monsters who ran rackets and killed anyone.. I am attracted to this.
I am the condensation of coffeeshops in early Scotland, the crystallized killing fields of WWI,
and the precipitated dusty blue summer skies over South Dakota’s veldt.
I am the gears and the oil.
Away Message #372
Until a tale, a hurricane, comes crashing down on me,
I will sit; my life entails no great catastrophe.
Madman’s hopes! unfed desires! failing to be free!
And all I do is work and eat and try and try to be.
◆
I feel awake in the distinct sense that I can’t count a single dogma to my name. I find I have awoken in a slumbering barracks in
the middle of the night. Unable to sleep and squinting, I keep vigil for concealed signal candles—while letting the light of my own shine
through but the cracks of my fingers.
◆
To write a Guidebook to Becoming Enlightened?
No, impossible. The best proof the philosopher’s stone is impossible is that if it ever existed, it would be the perfectly successful
meme. If ever invented, it would instantly convert the universe. As the universe is far from perfect, it is safe to assume such a guide cannot be written.
Down below logic and beneath self-creating solipsism (the only real philosopher’s mineral to speak of) you were given a mission
and a motive. Your mission is beside the point these days; the motive is all you’ve got.
◆
Sufficiently-encompassing irony will save you. A knowing, derisive sneer is the antidote to any poison or ill.
◆
There is a decency in self-sacrifice for the condemned, holding up the guillotine’s heavy blade.
Why bother, really, though, when your dear friend is just a collection of complex carbon compounds. One of six billion, easily
replaced. Go ahead. Let go.
Go ahead and see if you don’t find yourself under it in short order.
“All that is worth saying, son, it’s all worth saying right.”
◆
“But find for me the time, old man, or you’ve not the right
to speak and tell me which and where and what to bring to light
or even, as you boldly claim, that wrote word speaks in sight.”
51
A canto fit for serpent’s nest
Climbs cobwebs ‘neath my eyes,
And like sins wearing Future’s guise
Remains quite unconfessed.
Away Message #0
For stilted filters and filthy eyes,
nothing in the world goes by
sans vestage made of flames surmised
from temple-cross’s burning lies.
◆
Blind beneath dull hypersex,
the Medioligopteryx58,
I can’t, despite my constant lex,
cease to dream of being rex,
nor stop the sieve to autostim—
though sinful it might seem to Him—
unhappy for my hapless luck
such that I can’t not want to fuck.
Disguised advantage—wordy glow,
fascination, wont to know—
drives and dries till I can’t show
mudluscious tears or soul of snow.
God’s one grace, green bean brown wrought,
that daring crop, I’ll drink and sow,
for words are trickled, thought’s besot.
My brain this morning beats so slow.
◆
Our Lady Ayn Rand, demonize her though you will, lifts a million undernauts up and resuscitates them. She’s an unpopular salvadora.
The left! Among its greatest sins is the condemnation to social malfunction a million quick-lit fuses because their would-be savior isn’t
willing to enslave her followers to the indifferent fiends who rejected them.
Take Rand’s will—leave her vitriol.
◆
On a personal note, there’s little more satisfying to me than a happy, intelligent-but-ignorant person in over their head. I, the lost, grin
when they’re self-consciously forced to spew bullshit. I, full of wit and hell, know better. There is no greater drug than the thrill of bringing
down the hammer on happy syndemotes.
Entropy is preferable in what can never be ours.
◆
The only workable faith in this mad kingdom is Egocentria. Umatilla’s bubbling cauldron of mud has me filthy; self-love has had to be my
soap. Stir in footballs, basketballs, racism, ethanol, maybe a little nostalgia for King Prejudice Cotton VII, a little Yankee bromidism, and
a bit of gas station philosophy.
The highest lords carry nooses for Them, the the gay, the hispanic, the black, the poor. Still, this is not capitalism’s fault. C’est
l’homme.59
solitude
alone in a room, alone in a whole cell of a city
pacing and etching
i spoke worthless dreams to the deaf but
i understood and there is a meaning that i miss now.
wandering and winding through pure world
i spent some time from then to now pitying myself
because i did not have the benefit
of another instructing me of the best way to think
but now, in this amusing future, i play the fool and ignore
when others instruct me of the best way to think.
the bonds i bought with solitude
pay dividends in skill.
it pays in joy to play the fool,
this silliness can kill.
58
From “media,” “oligarch,” and “Archaeopteryx,” the latter being the earliest known bird, dated to 150 million years ago.
59
“This is man.” (French)
52
Chapter 3
America
[Editor's note: This was an approximation of the planned route.]
May 2004
Our world, with its too many arrows, is borne down the river of free energy. Once, we depended on living plants to keep our world beating, but today viscous black dead ones do the trick.
May my sins be forgiven by flight.
◆
◆
The constant background noise of the Interstate is a subliminal message to turn travelers into jerky-eating zombies, wrap them in a rubber
web, and suck them of money. On the road, gas is blood and money is gas.
◆
Those who cry out that this Wal-Mart or that multinational is destroying local culture are never those who live so marginally that the
saving of a few dollars matters. They are not coupon-wielders. No, they cry out because they are not in power, they control only their
semigreen fiefdoms.
One imagines the shrieking of aristocratic ranchers when the engine first outran the hoof.
◆
We will run out of oil, this is true. Whether Leviathan can drink solar, nuclear, geothermic, and wind energy, this is the real question. Oh,
mankind will certainly go on. I with it? Cars with it? Computers, the Internet, the dream of the Singularity? I hope.
But two hearts inside me beat and the other sees collapsed Interstate bridges, assault rifles crouched in overgrown neighborhoods,
and martial everything.
We here in Jesse’s brain are not in the business of finding or believing in right or wrong, good or bad, so I pass no moral judgment on
America with those fettered terms. I will say that if you would like an idea of American strength, venture out to the nearest state road or
Interstate and but count the semis.
Watch them roll past. They drizzle—at their thinnest—every hour of every day. They carry on and on before you rise and after your
house’s last light blinks out. Even while those whose eyes are peripherals to the Internet—those who form the vast, interconnected selfwatching Web—while their eyes redden with sleep, and even, finally, as their eyes close, ton after ton is pulled on gray snakes.
There is no non-nuclear force on earth that could subjugate an America intent on monopolizing global power. It almost makes you
patriotic until you remember that death and war are supposed to be bad things.
wide caffeine eyes
the furnace fiery jaws
gnaw on coal all day
long
Away Message #82
◆
I stood agnostically by a cooking pot of pinto beans and watched children play under rest area greenery.
◆
I have not seen an old face for days. I have never been so alone.
I am healing. There is no reservoir of saved rage to draw on. It has drained.
The world is my bedroom. At last I find I am alone in my head. I no longer leak attention, but save it up, pool it. I am wealthy with
53
affection for all I see.
I had felt the mortification creep into my eyes, seen dendrites dry up. But some fresh water is trickling in, droplets from the justwashed hands of angels still wet from ethereal sinks. They wipe their holy-water hands on my heart, and it beats anew.
Necrotic snakes of tendon and their husks swell, rehydrated and renaissed. As by a barren river made again to run, the first shoot
reaches up, green as the first plant on the moon, pushing aside a few grains of gravel.
This new birth in the mud will rust and eat the chains that bind those still in the tower.
For fifty years, they walked the moonlight,
and fifty years, the sun
an annus mirabilis60 every step,
and every pain undone.
And every pain undone.
Away Message #124
◆
If the universe is an endless house of cards, an infinitely tall triangle with an infinitely broad base, then with what is a man to fill his hand?
Maybe he goes to church and learns that in the beginning was the card and the Card-stacker. Maybe he meditates on its base, filled
with cardlessness. Maybe he ascends the cards as high as he can and grasps the loftiest card–just because it’s there, just because he can–
and leans back, manifest what has never been manifest, to fall, arms wide, to earth.
Maybe with a spyglass he stares where the tower pierces the heavens, recording the position of distant suits and numerals. Maybe
he falls into poverty, his trashcan fire stinking of burning cards.
He may do whatever the hell he wants but opt out. Everyone must draw a hand. He may even kill himself, but the cemetery is in the
shadow of game pieces.
And the workers who had died
they entombed within the tower.
‘Let us measure its height,’ they spoke,
‘by the graves that climb into the sky.
And let us glorify their names,
and let them look over the kingdom
as we carry the far mountains near,
and raise their sepulcher up to the cloudless heavens.’
Away Message #1001
June 2004
Those men who do survive, their faces are complex as any Mandelbrot61 fractal. Spent to the last chit, what does such a man come to? He
is a bookshelf of one thousand authors of the past who will not be read in the future. He appeals to buried boards of public opinion. He
sits behind a heavy oak desk whose drawers hold cigars and expensive ethanols. No arcs of electricity, just a steady heartbeat for seven
decades.
These are talented men who didn’t care for the effervescence of the fame. Of course, to a youth, this is a shame.
”I’ll die,” the ample-hearted kid says, “before that is me.”
But then, the kid and the man do not care about the same things. The man has ceased to care that he is unjust with his attention,
that he pays overmuch for insignifica, that he is set in incomprehensible ways.
Everyone reveres his mind that knows it—but who knows it? His heart was dipped in liquid gases and tucked, one thousand, into
the world’s myriad armoires to be accidentally perused, and quickly replaced.
He knows Russian, Spanish, French and German. He cooks everything. He plays the violin and can sketch your charcoal likeness.
He can ably defend any philosophy, even the philosphies of scoundrels. He jokes to his grandchildren and divulges to his own kids, now
middle-aged. He is the gnarled root of an aristocracy.
His kids are well-taught and neurotic. His grandchildren get out of traffic tickets.
If you don’t confess
that tumor from your chest
by the time you turn 25,
by the time you’re 30,
you’ll be sick with secrets
and that smile won’t save your life.
Away Message #963
◆
All of life is the leaping on stepping stones across a shallow, warm ocean. You can fall in from the start if your parents or genetics are bad.
Each stone gets smaller and slicker, and the ocean always more inviting.
But woe, woe, to be unaware of our unawareness, to be men on whom worlds are lost.
And yet, they don’t feel it. Ignorance does not hurt. Ignorance is infinite.
60
Literally, “year of miracles.” The phrase is often translated as “year of wonders,” and refers to any year in which many events of
great significance occur.
61
Benoît Mandelbrot (b. 1924) is a French mathematician who founded fractal geometry.
54
And I get a bit excited. Is that a real answer? To stop giving a damn, and insulate yourself? Ignorance doesn’t hurt, and its elimination is arduous. It’s logically, socially sound. Ought we truly to care what all of society has to say? Do we want the opinion of every last
member of humanity? “Which field?” remains a pressing question; but, perhaps, “Why pick a field?” does not.
, though it gradually became clear that poets are philosophers with a grudge.
Away Message #974
ent-ti-ti-tis
[en-ti-ti-tis]
n.
1. Medicine, Ontology. Being.
◆
◆
He was really gone, no longer here brooding, not now holding carefully-foil-wrapped foibles, not still hoping someone would ask for
them all.
His distance had so quickly made him a ghost.
The rockets burned at Sol,
they burnt at Alpha Centauri,
but they also burnt
in the inky sea between.
Away Message #147
◆
And the room goes chilled like cold velvet, “A Rose”62 plays and I think of a world with blowing hair, a world that has not invented traffic
lights, a world lit by a dozen candles and our glowing souls.
I inhale sharply. This is not the world I live in. But I see it so often; it must surely exist. It floats in and out of history, its invention
third-fable, third-delusion, third-truth. The cold breezes could be from the vent or from the yawns of waking gods, from the thundering
crack of universes collaborating after a sleep of twenty thousand years.
And still, the presence without substance, only form: a girl, a soul, shape drawn from memories like tapers blown out. And I feel an
icy touch on my shoulders and on my chest. I look around and there is nothing, and warmth overtakes me, and I know she is there still,
though leaving now—and a slight chill on my lips rises and quickly evaporates.
Sacraphilia, to love the perfect platonic female. The music dies down, and the wind is, after all, just a fan. But she has been here.
And it is just a fan, and the memory fades like a warming winter, like energy drained at the onset of the flu. And it is just words, a few
electromagnetic switches. And it remains a diamond in a thickening stratum of coal, an emotional condensation, life crushed, turned
divine, and forgotten.
The heaving sea of rough cotton
of false starts, wakings alone;
halfway around the world,
a pond of silk and aloof feet dipped in,
not at all sighing, “Somewhere..”
Away Message #106
◆
Improve Own Mood I
cantrip
Verbal Component: Mantra of caster’s choice
Somatic Component: Bold physical gestures, smiles, shrugs, deep breaths, held tongues
Material Component: Drugs, sugar, good food, coffee
Duration: 6d2 hours, with an additional d2 every time the spell is cast with no curses intervening.
Caster begins to actually enjoy life, and people the caster’s company. She or he is able to shrug off the supposed misfortunes of life as opportunities to learn.
The counterspell, a curse, calls for hyperawareness and weltschmerz. Caster begins to examine past failings, unhappiness and to
disregard any possibility for improvement, and becomes blind to the positive.
There is also the much more difficult spell, Improve Other’s Mood I, which is the cursebreaking spell to Harm Own Mood I, which
plenty of people cast on themselves all the time. It is self-casting after a while.
◆
The only acceptable sorrow is vicarious. This is not some ramshackle morality. This is the violent affirmation of a soul kept in a dim dungeon for twenty months. I will fight to stay happy.
For the love of God, keep getting back up
62
From the score for the film American Beauty.
55
◆
The South Floridian veldt is vast, wet, and vacant; but the few rest areas along the turnpike have none of the countryside’s spirit at all. They
are loud, variegated, expensive, and shallow.
One wanders an infant through the narrow walkways past barnacles of odor growing on food too-chemical fed to people tooanonymous, too-paranoid. Tired on the benches are people who will kill you if you so much as skip in line.
Outside, it less subtle. Clouds boil. The rainfall scares the southbound tourists shitless of that ghastly automotive fate: to break down
in this wilderness, stranded in an orphaned world. Even here, a few hours from Central Florida, the sky’s maw opens and waves of spit
crash down.
The earth lapses into sea, and your windshield into static, a billion wet teeth gnawing. The road slides beneath you.
NPR gently announces the death of a president.
◆
Reagan’s wood-ensconced corpse rolls down the streets in rainy Washington. I am waiting in sunny South Florida. No one is watching the
television. Still, “Ave Maria” comes stridently into the lobby.
And now, at last, after the gambling taxes, the voting machines, the reformers, the chain of command, that feudalism on cocaine,
that paranoid colossus, it is clear to me that the Illuminati are real and far weaker than imagined-and membership is open.
And you don’t register in some tiny down-an-alley office with an eye hanging over the doorway, you don’t join in some enduring
orgy of machination. The electronic occult comes in on the television. After some decades, you rise to the rank of illuminatus tertiarus—at
last, at least, one of the faceless men in the background of these shots on CNN.
Beating bleeding cardiac
that flies from supple leisure:
war history, these heart attacks,
afraid they’ll die not Caesar.
Away Message #696
◆
There is something stone-solid intangible about a man in a military greatcoat or a perfectly-dressed, deep-eyed businessman in a black
fedora.
◆
Now the underworld itself has been dredged and set ablaze. Those prophets of Hell saw only the first half of death’s journey: down to be
beaten by a billion psi. The flames do come, but later. Later, you are brought back up and burnt in a GM motor.
The lowest energy level, the fewest complications, this is the telltale flinch in the human heart.
And therefore do I find a crowd on this warm roadside shore, this wide-open womb.
◆
You are your grandfather’s third chance. He’s doing better now than he ever did before. Some rodent sixty million years ago had sex with
your great7,400,000-grandmother and then died. His son had two mates. How prosperous that family has grown. You and your friends can
kill an alligator that might’ve wiped out everyone Grandfather Rodent knew.
◆
I have a great deal of respect for Thomas Pynchon63. If you were God, wouldn’t you watch only the interesting people?
◆
What dogma still resides is the work of a too-powerful word-magician who has hypnotized the world into restraining you.
It’s a vicious cycle. I have to say, I’ll feel a lot better about the whole thing once I’ve got some coffee in me.
◆
63
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937) is an American novelist. He is most famous for Gravity’s Rainbow.
56
Then the other voices chime in too quickly to be transcribed, each a complicating echo:
“Maybe it’s just because of your past. Each character is still reliving his or her childhood.”
“Each is the servant of their own world and time.”
“The only real winner is the plot, and the plot can’t feel it.”
◆
So a group of businessmen own Washington now and, by and large, the country. Well, they’ll look after their property. America is their
investment.
◆
Having been on the road in the American South, I am suddenly given to think about the subject of race in America.
◆
“It began when President O’Neal gave the order: all military forces east of the Mississippi were to put their current stations under martial
law and then expand outward, liquidating any resistance. It took about a week before telegrams started flying between upper-echelon
Pentagon officials about well I’ve never trusted that O’Neal bastard anyway. And so it wasn’t long before the Eagle Corps declared itself
sovereign and independent of the United States.
The Eagles’ territory ran south to Pensacola, as far west as Fort Knox, and just up to D.C. The President–along with most of his
cabinet, and much of Congress–was imprisoned, then executed. They say O’Neal was publically drawn and quartered.
In the Northeast, despite the starvation, clans of skin-of-my-teeth radicals, troops of former businessmen and politicos-and the
gangsters, too-each declared their respective turfs, most claims becoming legitimized as federal legal authority was slowly restored.
None of them was too keen on falling to the Eagle Corps, and what was left of the local military was still loyal. Of course, the City was
to remain at the center of the world: that part of the continent still named the United States of America had relocated its capital to New
York City.
The armed forces abroad that could be called home, were-most of them loyal. Parts of Canada in former New Brunswick and
Quebec applied for and were quickly granted statehood. It was to be a relatively prosperous enclave. The shipping industry was on its feet
again within the decade.
The Great Lakes region was hot for the first few years, but things settled down as both the U.S. and the Corps found agreed-upon
contiguous territories. South Florida fell into chaos, but when the smoke cleared, Cuba Nueva, a small city-state, held most of the power.
The Heartland balkanized. Extremist groups homesteaded huge tracts of farmland and carved out petty duchies and fiefdoms. Racism and fire-and-brimstone religion became the norm. Skirmishes between slavers and the Eagle Corps were constant for more than two
decades.
The West was more or less deserted. Entire counties were emptied when the locals realized the water was not coming back. The Pacific coast was dotted with deep-green communes and relocated techie villages. Seattle became the locus of a renaissance in the humanities. Mexico re-annexed much of Texas.”
Welcome back to Radio Free Arostia, your news radio for the newest duchy in North America.
There’s still some shooting going on outside, but most of the loyalist resisters have been
pushed back to the old Nebraskan borders.
In other news, Emperor Bush III has raised the option of negotiations with Arostia, but has so
far remained noncommital.
Also, rescue squads have reported a number of survivors of the partial nuclear attack on Hong
Kong.
That’s it for the early-morning round-up, but stay tuned for the morning news at 9 o’clock.
Away Message #315
◆
It was wholly remarkable, because there he was. Cooking. I was awestruck, because, well—there he was. He sipped a mug of coffee, stirring a steaming pot. He sort of hummed. He looked around and smiled at the trees. Did he see me?
Here was the guy, they say, who was responsible for leading the Reunion. And he was just way the hell out here in the middle of
nowhere. Cooking.
I hesitated. Do I really want to go ahead and see him? What is he going to have to say to me, anyway? He’s not some guru or anything. He’s just this guy. Still.
So I walked out to him. As I stumbled over the loose gravel at the edge of the clearing, the sky caught flame. The woods vanished,
and overhead, in a fiery golden heaven, a very irate eye glanced around from the top of a pyramid miles tall. It looked at me.
The woods returned, and I stood up. Hallucination booby-trap. Of course. This was the guy the Illuminati had tried to have their
way with and failed. He had thrown some switch on history’s course and derailed their thousand years of scheming. What would he have
to say about purpose, about what is noble and true, about great deeds? Was he well-spoken? Was he funny?
It turns out that he was just a man. One of the best I’ve ever known, but just a man. He was, in his own words, just a happy accident.
◆
So call yourself a techno-hedonist, a militant therapist. We are out and active to revise the world, to throw neon on the grays.
an army of candles.
Away Message #196
◆
In the northern New Jersey suburbs, thirty miles from the City, when they call it the Garden State, they mean it. Every spot of green still
living has been planted, trimmed, and chemically fertilized into neat little rows they call townships.
◆
57
Here, in New Hampshire, the land of the insomniac sun, where the sunset stops around 10:30, the dying oranges of the afternoon confuse
the night down in the valleys, and, at noon, distant mountaintops hold chaste in the mist, their trails host to nature cultists, mountain
climbers, hardened hippies.
Something is quietly hazardous. If this is where the nation was settled, perhaps our national heritage was never that long valediction
of tall men with clean speech below vaulted ceilings.
Maybe the record was altered. These men are hunched.
July 2004
The statistical approximation of the truth, given per acre settlement numbers, is that there is nothing in Montana. Look to every horizon.
There is nothing here. God and Eris have nothing to do with this place. It is your world, everything you see here is yourself. Do you like
Montana?
“Should I tell them I like the skies of South Dakota more than I like anyone I’ve ever met?
Should I?”
“You should, but they’ll think you have your head in the clouds.”
”I’m just a little under the weather.”
Away Message #858
◆
Evolution asked Nature for a being that could compete more effectively than any other creature. And on the 4,999,770,000,000th day,
Nature created man. And man saw that it was good.
◆
If X% of the population was killed in inter-tribal skirmishes for any given pre-hominid primate population, it should surprise no one that
the same holds true today.
◆
It is a very strong magic, the atheist’s death. It is absolutely final. It is charged with the force of an entire life.
◆
There is a cult of the Happy Meal in this world. It’s not altogether unsatisfying, because in essence it is the perfection of the prehistoric
ideal. We fuck, live, eat, drink, live, and die in market-proven proportions.
These young men will grow up, reject their parents’ too-perfect lives in favor of the pre-designed Rebellion Culture for a while, and
then return to be Normal Functioning Adults. They then drive SUVs, cultivate sports fandoms, suffer slightly dysfunctional sex lives,
until, wonder of wonders, they die Brand Name deaths, with Traditional Funerals, and not a hair, all along, falls out of place.
Donald Rumsfeld wants to be an illuminatus.
◆
◆
Every month on some unchosen night, Eris walks into a thousand graveyards at once, all across the world, and pull a golden scythe backwards through the air above a grave. And, then, inside the coffin below, something stirs. The dust is gone, the air is fresh, and the casket
swings open. The soil is tossed away, airy and well-worked.
Out of this hole climbs the former corpse resuscitated, age eighteen again, body intact, health impeccable. Eris cackles as Death
arrives out of breath, always too late to undo her mischief.
Death, the ultimate bureaucrat, sorts people into the ground and never opens the files again. Eris pulls open the cabinet, throws the
manilla coffins across the floor, kicks the bookshelf over, tosses some forks into the employee microwave, lights a match underneath the
smoke detector, and gets the hell out.
If you think Jesus is the only way out of this life alive, I’m telling you: there’s another option. Give that living-with-reserve crap the
finger and hail Eris.
The man is a dangerous cultist in a most pernicious kind of terroristic and chaotic organization.
The Discordian will destroy everything you love.
Away Message #262
◆
They craft self-images and sand them to mirrors; black-lipped jewels of riot grrls and light-as-air metrosexual seraphim crowd the streets.
◆
I sit here under the Gateway Arch in the heart of America. I can’t tell you exactly how it continues to stand—too many factors convoluted
into other factors and factored out of sight—but I do know it relies on the same principles as any arch I have ever built in beach sand.
The same, I do not know exactly how human sexuality goes on, but I know the process itself is as simple as two archeaobacteria
exchanging a few tens of thousands of nucleotides.
◆
When we detach from our minds those slimy tentacles that run from our stomachs, our genitalia, and our hearts, and pull away, and we
ascend into heaven or down into the underworld, still-attached and infinitely-stretching is a silvery, luminous tendril.
And comfort though it may be to sit with the atoms, the archetypes, the History, beyond irony and tragedy—
God both absent and somberly present; the Big Bang, background radiation, and the heat death of the universe playing a game of
cards over to the left—
58
to sit at the End of Time with the clocks all stopped just before or after 1:23:23 PM GMT, none of the members of this crew—
not even a bored, skeletal Death, his cloak abandoned to the coat rack and his scythe to rust; nor a sad cherub with a baby-face,
fluffy wings, and an auric glow—
has a cord like the one coming out of the back of your neck that stretches back to your origins. They live here, are of this timeless
place.
You are a tourist. Death would smirk at you if he wasn’t too cynical to move his face—he remembers you. The angel would cry if
he hadn’t squandered all his tears and sorrows years and years ago. This is the null, the asymptote, the zero at infinity, but not quite. You
are k/∞. You are of one time and place.
And that is why you see the crumpled McDonalds bag over in the corner.
We have made a pact with the clock; there will be a ceasefire between us and the hours.
Away Message #836
Compass #1
◆
The heavens above Missouri left man for finished
when those who looked up were cut down
and those who survived looked only at their feet.
The mind’s vault swings as wide open
as these softdamp cornfields.
A web of milk hangs on high,
too passive to be God,
too high to be man.
Pan chuckles on an empty street
as truckland sprites, numbers with eyes and legs
follow you with a grand campfire gaze;
as Zeus in the distance strikes sparks in Yahweh’s dying kingdom.
In dry riverbeds, on parched days,
the ghosts of forty million gentle shaggoths64 cough feebly;
and every night, Death, he patiently takes back the earth; and we dress ourselves in
the cooling embers of fallen stars, carrying torches kindled with infernal fires.
Venus will, for our troubles, raise us, love us, slowly blind us, and kill us,
and Death will return us to be raised as youths again.
Still, the unearthly spins in an impossibly careful, dangerous, broken waltz
and the heavens over Missouri await, always await.
Compass #2
◆
Puritanism like a plague clears the streets at night.
Neon and sodium light up this world.
Though it is empty,
a grim form creeps around the corner.
Maybe the city was built just for you?
A shiver stirs in every soft-spoken traffic signal.
Halfway through night, nowhere near normal,
papers stumble through the streets among amputated barks of laughter:
Kay-See, Em-Oh at zero-three-three-zero.
A cold hand gestures you along and, knowing no other routes, you follow.
The residue of a diseased man muddies the air and the walls
of cavernous warehouses where foreign gods sleep lightly
and you run quickly away from their unseen, unreal zealots.
And suddenly, it is over, the night is gone.
The lunar dance ends and God turns the mood-lighting back on.
Soon, the regular customers, the corporations will awaken.
But, for the moment, take a breath,
take dawn here in Kansas to chase away the creeps.
64
A shaggoth is a fictional monster described by early American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Here, the word is just
used to describe bison.
59
◆
Yes, that means the mundane. Yes, enemies. Yes, no right and wrong, and yes, Hitler, Stalin, Satan, AIDS, and hunger. They are the details,
the footnotes, part of the complete text of our beings.
◆
For a world that starts to have more mind than would-you-like-more-fries,
for a garrulous, frivoulous youth,
for the brief-lived life of Johnny Doe and the rusty car he drives:
The same pattern that’s spotted in heaven,
is filtered down to the trash on the ground in parking row eleven.
Don’t confuse a quiet dream with any thing you’ll
ever see. This is life, humanity, and it’s a goddamned bloody thing.
All, the sum, the perfect, sunsets
into charlatans, dissemblers, spooks.
You can’t convince a youth
that solutions come from just waiting;
yes, it's true hat work is done
and true it is this work’s unsung,
but nothing more will ever come
than maturity from all you’ve wrung.
Compass #3
◆
Failed mountains crumble
and white hikers stumble along
in dented girl hollows,
where dust swirls
and all those phallic rocks,
follow no pattern
at sunset,
and you’ll have no lantern,
so get on in transit lest
Canis latrans65 get
a meal so handily, met
so sandily, sweatily seasoned
easily the tastiest thing
in these cliffs for weeks:
so, you see,
we must be moving
and leaving these badlands behind.
◆
We are the same species as those who sacrificed children and chased hairy dragons. Soccer moms are descended from creatures that
peed—and peed with a great sincerity—to mark their territory.
Blades of grass shudder against each other.
The endless wheat sees you, the Interstate,
as a threat.
A sunflower dies quietly as regulatory ants rip it apart.
◆
◆
“How do you know,” I asked the inevitable question, “that the Illuminati are real?” He gave me that look I’d seen in pictures. It was not a
broken look, just trampled.
“I’ve seen orders come down from the top, from outside the paper. They’ve done too much, they’ve shown their hands.”
He must know that I don’t believe him. Poor guy. “What sort of orders?”
He squinted at me. Still, he spoke quickly, firmly. “I’ve seen them squelch big stories. You wouldn’t believe how quickly a murder
dies when nobody talks about it.”
“Every agency head has to pick and choose what he wants to run with.”
“It can’t be a coincidence, all these stories, these juicy stories, and not one of the dozen outlets covers them.”
I’d heard theorizing before, but not from someone this close to the supposed conspiracy. Still: say it were true, it would be impossible to prove.
“Why doesn’t someone speak out about it?”
“Are you kidding? Do you know how bad it would sound for me to start babbling about some shadowy cabal? They would think I
65
coyote
60
was just another burnt-out talking head who’s been in the business too long.”
“It would still be possible for someone to build a strong case, if there was one to be made. You know, hundred-page reports, footnotes, cross-references—”
“Don’t think no one’s tried. It’s real easy to convince someone to take a few million dollars instead of making omniscient enemies.
No one’s that altruistic, not just so the swine can have a bit of gossip. If you had to choose between hush money and the let-us-say accidental death of your whole family, what would you choose?
“None of this proves anything, though. If, as you say, thousands of people have some inkling of this, can’t someone, somewhere
make an airtight case?”
“Plenty of people have some idea, but few of them can prove anything. Even most people like me who are deep enough in it to prove
it, we couldn’t prove it loudly enough to make waves, not before they catch on. But I personally—I, here and now—will prove it to you.
And just you.”
“Why?”
“It’s not the sort of secret a man wants to take to his grave. And who knows? Maybe someday you’ll be able to do something about it.”
That was it, then. He was giving up trying to save the world. He was tired of putting himself on the cross for people who were disbelievers to a man.
“Give me your time, and I’ll show you the places they’ve left fingerprints in ink and blood. I’ll show you their works in a thousand
places, their smoke and mirrors.”
He motioned me into his office.
He dropped those words onto my desk one after another, each loaded, polished, and heavy.
Away Message #478
August 2004
Everyone has a dark side. Everyone has violent tendencies. Everyone feels hate sometimes, even if it’s not towards anything. So, we either
send down a taproot and listen to the monster down below and hear out the vitriol from Eminems and Marilyn Mansons; or, it comes out
involuntarily, which hurts much more.
they are pounding thud thud thud
on the sliding glass doors pound pound
of history bang bang bang
let us in boom boom
Away Message #247
◆
The American West was settled by those who would charge a man his stomach for a day’s meal; here, where half the men climb onto others’ backs, and the other half insist we must all be walked upon equally. Here all or nothing. Here sequoia or scrub. Here redwood or rust.
Cultural diversity and world peace. Pick one.
Some will set records
and some will dodge wreckers
and some of them even make desks,
but you, my friend, you yet a seed,
you ask that you be set unfree:
“So yeah, but what’s the best?”
I think to myself now of Florida.
O jealous god, hyperactive:
“I am your landscape! Come outside
or I will come in! I, omnipotent child,
I do not fit into your dimensions. Lo! I will outwide you!”
◆
◆
◆
God is alive in wet Floridian skin
in a crosswind.
Away Message #960
There is no dichotomy, no formality. Every burial suit rots.
The absolute will bury you.
Exclamation point? Question mark!
◆
61
!
the wind
smell it, you know,
on the savannah, the sky,
the upper half of
everything
is mawing, bigger than stars.
the wind
flutters with shadows
across lawn, across lawn,
cursing leaves, every october
lightning! october!
the wicked shriek into the world!
and colorful blood falls in drops
able blue, hillful red,
plunk onto newspaper leaves
aged yellow dies hanging
onto the moon for dear
◆
Whether ‘tis better to tether the nether and lather this world up with words
or nonsense to dance about leather and lovers and eyebrows no finer than hers,
resolve this not and try not so:
no word is more than mute info.
For do you think that if you sink
existence heavy with your words
that you will find—as if were mined!—
God, Infinity, the World?
No.
Emancipate and fancy bait
and heavy books and caustic looks:
and there’s your world and that’s not all,
but you’re a slave to simple gall.
That puzzling negation game
is ruled by hunger all the same:
intestines lead you by the brain.
rain, le pain66, and cheese
wine, wife, stone, gun, woe, wood, dust
russia, god, and rain
Away Message #762
◆
The question is not, what is the meaning of the world; we are given meaning. We need not look for some final truth; we begin with it.
What to do with it, that is the question.
◆
When I die, I do not want them to be able to say that I failed to notice.
Whitman went into the woods
And I went on a road trip.
A world cried to be understood;
We humored to console it.
To live, he said, deliberately.
My old self cried, “O, pity me,”
But I abide so gleefully
In a kind of Inner city, see.
I pledge one million tiny, weak allegiances.
66
◆
◆
bread (French)
62
[Editor's note: This is the actual route taken.]
63
Chapter 4
Retreat!
September 2004
Slam
Pretend, spend, lend a helping hand.
We’re friends, right? This land is your land
and I’d sure like to be the next man
that you send to the top of the hill.
Look away from here, okay? You know I got it.
Hear my warm, friendly tone? Gore forgot it.
I don’t pretend you’ll wake up and see
Generic Kerry’s a discount off of Brand Name Me.
So relight the cigars, rehire the drug czars,
require citizen piss tests just to buy used cars.
It’s time to sneak, cheat, lie, and maybe kill.
You’ve got an Economic Behavior Model to fulfill!
Relight insight, bring back the chess game,
my brain’s too lame to recall your name.
But if two hundred eighty million can think as one,
then pals, we can have some fun.
Get your gun, reload, it’s time we rewrote
history: Jerusalem Washington, Reaganite mystery.
And I guarantee, klansmen, they’ll be pissed at me,
but hey: how d’y’like your brand new SUV?
So Mr. Statistic: hyperballistics, can we forget it?
For just 49.9, I’m the right fit,
but what other choice do you have?
So laugh with me, laugh at my nuke-u-lar policy.
Put on your gas mask, petroleum has passed,
so pray that there’s no chance that you and your own ranch
will ever taste want.
And just for you, cous’,
I’ll hunt the whole world
and hurl the earth, Iraq and all,
into the furnace and burn it
just long enough to furnish
heat for one more generation of the elite
and as for the poor, let the peasants freeze.
◆
This is the world of crumbs too small to be cleaned, the world of stray drops of spilt coffee, of mosquito bites and cleaning your own urine
off the bowl.
◆
The feeling of mystery—the feeling of living, enticing ignorance—is as real an emotion as anger and disgust.
Brass beats and you stand still,
epistemological landfill,
hiding from a world that you can’t love,
what on earth are you afraid of?
◆
You say you can’t dance without their approval?
Can’t love life, wouldn’t be frugal?
How silly you sound to scream “I’m so rare,”
how empty if the crowd still cares.
listen to your own prophecy.
Away Message #483
64
◆
I long ago became addicted to doubt after my first trip on Enlightenment. My perspective is not from an ivory tower, beset by thick and
monotonous weather. It is, rather, atop a slowly assembled, ad hoc wooden watchtower.
◆
And we are not so much in the business of war and destruction as our more notable relatives, the Fool Killers, like the notorious Mr.
Mencken67 and the latter-day culturejammers. No, we are more than anything disassemblers and disdissemblers, at our most bold holding
controlled demolitions of dusty, rat-filled ideologies.
◆
I had my suspicions. Now it seems God is belaboring the point: Whatever we stoop to socially, we must live with. What we say is acceptable, we will receive in abundance.
I dreamed a slouching mediocre beast,
a twenty-seasons-tall soap opera,
the feral child of an autist god
whose finale is a reality show
and I am the star.
Away Message #950
◆
And if you want to know why I am who I am today, know that I have had to chase my own demons away since I was ten. Before that, I
imagine, boo-boos could just be kissed away.
The Autodidact’s Song
Let me kill you.
I will sing with the song leftover.
Let us know the utility of wine.
Alright. [Am I already bare (and printed)?]
Alright.
Let me then declare my blood spilled by the fleas on the floor.
Let me declare I can tell you Kant in German, I can paint your portrait,
let it be known. The boxes of my books I have carried,
go ahead, try and lift them.
I am a world unto myself better than the world out of myself
and you will like it more. Excuse me.
I am the triumvirate.
Excuse me.
Listen, this is my brow unfurled. This is the very stone
I took from Death Valley, through which I walked
alone—are you at peace? What is the most
important thing in the world? Elaborate.
Do you have these moths in your closet that eat what you write?
What did you do tonight? There is a dagger that I have been
sharpening on myself, conjugating in my sleep;
I am so tense. I will sing with the crumbs on the cutting room floor.
Do you not understand yet? You are the library. I will love you
and put you on my shelf until I care to read you again.
Will you not be still and bound? Will you not be ink and page?
Will you be the comma, the gentle nudge?
You will be the parentheses and hold my shoulders.
October 2004
As if under fifty feet of water, every day in Gainesville passes so slowly. Thirty-thousand bored undergrads float from one prefix to the
next through a reef growing on mere gesture, gesture more expressive of commerce than of the heart.
And smelling of burnt coffee, beneath baseball caps, they attend the middle class. Once, the ancestors of these apefish choked on
blood and died. Once, German rockets and Russian gulags threatened their deoxyribonucleic existence. But now, long after the Final
Solution, they swim yellow and dissolute, the chemical endpoint of a bromide reaction.
O rot.
In this one moment when Death can but clench his bony fists and curse, spit on him. Spike the graph so hard that your infinite
flatline after the casket averages to one. Force concessions from the Reaper.
◆
A trend, a friend, her butt, those jeans:
they tend to spend their lives as fiends.
67
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) was an American journalist and essayist. He is best known for his harsh satire.
65
And so offended, how hard to glean
how short this life will seem.
◆
Happy people and happy moods and happy thoughts do not interesting writing produce.
◆
It is a small day on planet Earth, and a small Earth it is. Today, nothing new occurs, today only echoes and ghosts. Today, though men
explode out of and babies into the world, it has been done. The revolutions are, for now, over.
The heroes are off in the veldt somewhere, and the Great Era of Great Cities does not sell. John Edwards was in Gainesville today,
John Kerry was probably in a cornfield in Iowa. Today, slightly raised expectations.
The world is as it has been since nineteen-aught-aught. Today, the man-hating idealists still shriek for Change. Today, Farmer Doe
still absent-mindedly presides over his Dionysian mystery, though concessions have been made for touchdowns. For one more year, the
psychonauts wait in the wings, their crowns of light unlit. This is okay with them; they still do not, technically, exist.
◆
In Asheron’s Call (a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game I used to play) whenever you were in a town, a few sound clips would
periodically play of indistinct public conversation. In their tones you could hear the safety of a city, the web of roads, but you could not
make out even one word from the murmur.
And it was a sigh of relief against the harshness of the wilderness, a release of the held breath of the world.
The trees are hard of hearing
and florida forests sleep so close together.
The mountains are deaf,
but they know what you mean.
Away Message #701
◆
[Editor’s Note: The following are excerpts from a passage of free-association writing.]
.. and blind joy like bubbles and the things that wait and giggle in the shadows until they spring out to drag you to the floor and smile at
you and force their way into your head and no one else sees them and they call it schizophrenia and you a dork or a loser but in the end
you are not and they make you spend your whole life like this until you give up ..
.. and I know that this is blather and on no one scale makes sense, but the same is true of all humanity, and this applies to all, this
dance between the axes, their mother’s titty and their father’s belt and the giant electric god on high striking down ..
.. I can pray to be the aware monkey, to have the eye in the forehead and honestly say that I understand and disbelieve and live in
the streets and the ivory towers and that I can fly and shoot and nurture and what ideas come after this but clichés ..
.. but alas-alas! disgusting, horrid word, Americans pretending to be Britons-and they’ll talk like this because it’s refined and
beautiful but you know it’s just them snorting a bit of the dollar up their nose along with the opiate of wealth, of seclusion, of happy little
mommy fairy stories with their kitties and their gods and their gut feelings and their votes ..
.. from this the courage to get back up at the chain gun and shoot the easily offended, from this to get up and love and stop the wheel
of karma, and pull back souls from the abyss ..
.. and the very worst little thing that perhaps I just have to accept is that so many apes are afraid to love, to remember death, to abandon their gods and maybe they’re stupid but the best within me doubts it, and I really have to assume that this is the way of the world ..
.. and while we forget who we are, the world turns asphalt gray, and perhaps this is just the oil, the condensed light blackening the
whole beautiful world, and perhaps this is why I juvenilely hope for the crash of this little linear rocket we are on, parabolically, richly
downward into the earth, and cracks and new secret havens as our gigantic concrete palace falls apart into new places ..
.. after twenty or thirty years during which the billions have died but we the living get to live these little lives of sowing oats and
donkeys and the world will once again appreciate jesters earnestly but I fear for the females after all ..
.. and the imps with twisting black exoskeletons and weak wings that won’t allow flights longer than chickens’ but they work, and
they fly and they curse and dice break probability and these things are not real, but I ..
.. and like the dissipating Slothrop (look, obscure cultural metaphor68), I find ..
.. and it’s not really a raw deal, but it’s inherent in the permission to ogle handsome men but not to ogle beautiful women ..
.. and worse is, every day the world seems one way and is so often much else and is so many other ways, is all ways all days, and no
day is small because one day ..
.. some days, first-time blowjobs, sometimes nerds redeemed, sometimes old eyes open up and hmm loudly ..
lyricism, empiricism
anarchism and
solipsism
schism
fission
soul.
Away Message #235
November 2004
I didn’t plan on being surprised if George Bush won, but I honestly thought this country knew better.
68
Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is the protagonist of Gravity’s Rainbow.
66
Send the motherfucker back to Texas.
Away Message #455
December 2004
Maybe we will die, and maybe the great work will never be completed and every man will simultaneously hold and suffer the whip.
Maybe my words will fall and stick on a pad of preservatives and get nailed to the wall, beautiful and dead, the exalted exhumed
forever and ever, a perpetual crucifixion, Christ Jesus amen.
Maybe we will always be ruled by men who stare at the contradiction and blame the underling, men who grind into their wives’ dry
vaginas, wipe their penises off, launder the towels, and sit down to their desks to make a phone call about tax laws.
reinvesting the wheel.
Away Message #813
◆
I think that if I were made to fight for my life, I would fight harder and longer than almost anyone I know.
◆
This girl.. she is alone, alone. I want to be her good friend, I want her to trust me, and I want her to be unironically happy, and to be honest
with herself. And I want to be the reason for it.
fickle newspaper wings
cringe with flames
grasping ashy emberbomb
history books into
raingirl windowpanes
mildewed with old sneers
startle and cough crystal and orange
like surfaced drowners with the
finally roar of yes.
Away Message #791
◆
It would be unfair to say that I come from this culture that I am thinking about, but I have seen it, and I do know it:
Cyberpunk. It is the margins, the edges. It is about only the mind. It is about ninjas and ghosts and what the soul is. It is about data.
Here is glorified intelligence, analytical power. I feel an immense draw to this life, these ideas. They have a vividness to them. This
is the Internet, this is computer programming. This is words instead of faces and voices.
There is a deep, pathetic unspoken truth behind cyberpunk.
This:
How horribly lonely so many of them are. The draw of Logos is so powerful that they never learn how to talk. There is one rule:
forget the world. Keep staring at the screen. You, the body, and you the mind, and the twain must never meet.
How wonderful these Myers-Briggs today;
one test and know themselves: INTJ.
Away Message #874
January 2005
This is nothing new, and nothing is different, and I am not faltering now and I never will, and this is by no means a concession that anything is inevitable. I refuse to believe it.
But let me tell you:
It amazes me how loud my demons can scream. It astounds me how hard they are to recage every time they break out and start
whispering. It’s incredible how painful it is while they’re screaming at me, “Every day that goes by when you’re not someone’s special
someone is a day when you’re no one at all.”
I’ve never been able to get away from it. There’s nothing I want more. All the other things I want combined can’t match it. All I can
do is, every time I find myself thinking that, I catch myself, I remind myself that life is too short. And I chase them away. And I live most
of my life happy. There are just some times..
Just thought I’d share a moment of weakness with you.
i’m all become so academic.
to everyone i know(n’t).
i remember. when i could say fuck it
and mean it.
67
when i wasn’t all ashes. when
the firewood of my romance
wasn’t too damp or verbose
to sustain an infatuation.
when i thought
it might work out.
when i didn’t talk about this
because i knew it would make it worse.
i remember when i started writing this,
how i cared if it turned out well.
to gracefully express my pain
without saying fuck and fuck
and fuck grief sleep
Away Message #542
◆
A lot of times I’m so insecure-because I’m so not what is wanted by the wonderful people I’ve met here-that the only way to console
myself is to remind myself that I have done things that they have not.
The people from Miami or Jacksonville or Tampa or Tallahassee, they’ve been learning this social game for years. I started in September. I’m torn, because these girls are wonderful. I would be happy to date almost any one of them:
But do I change? Do I learn this new Cool and be it? Could I? If these demons of mine were silenced, would the rest of me be happy?
On the other hand, all the people I’ve met with whom I have the .. Ideological Tradition .. in common, they’re .. stiff. They’re overly academically concerned. They’re not comfortable just being in this world. The reason I so love these cool people is that being-in-the-world
defines them.
Are there people out there to whom every part of me will appeal? People talk to me about Umatilla .. your culture didn’t socialize
you to fit into a cowtown.
The miracle is that I didn’t come out of there a fat, pimply cybergeek obsessed with Counter-Strike, one of these racist Fark69 motherfuckers so disconnected from life and people they have to draw busty, blue-haired schoolgirls to even get an erection.
I’ve tried too many cultures to fit into one. And I guess I’ve come too far being the Exception to stop doing it now. I thought college
would be different from this. I haven’t given up on this me yet, I guess. But maybe his days are numbered.
◆
I just saw a friend’s away message and he talks about why can’t he find a guy who’s right for him, and I think, “Why can’t I find a girl,
period? Why can’t I even find a warm body to end up next to one of these cold nights?”
Zero
You never really wanted to.
One
Of course I wanted to. I ask you, I ask every day.
Zero
You ask, but you never do anything about it.
One
Like what?
Zero
You don’t put your arm around every girl you see, you don’t try. You’re a nice guy.
One
So you’re saying, what, that anything else is repugnant? What are the consequences of being that clear about your interest?
Zero
It would change the image people have of me.
One
So what? Are you seeing any repercussions for the guys you know who do act like that, who do just throw the dice with every girl and
end up lucky occasionally?
Zero
People talk.
One
Does it even affect you, this talk?
Zero
I don’t know. But the truth is, you’re not a part of me. You can’t be, you don’t fit.
One
69
Fark.com is a community news website that allows users to comment on posted items.
68
What do you mean I’m not a part of you? How else do I get in your head?
Zero
I admit, naturally, genetically, I’m programmed toward .. what, promiscuity. I admit, our society has set this as a measure of my success
as a human being at this point in my life.
One
You’ll never get rid of me.
Zero
I never said I could. I can live with you. I may be stuck, and to try to kill you may be futile, but the inverse is comical. I have never in my
nearly nineteen years thought it anything but absurd for me to live like that. If I was offered a wish, either to be more attractive or to be
more intelligent, I would take the intelligence a million times out of a million.
One
But why can’t you just act more promiscuously, even if your heart’s not in it, just to shut me up?
Zero
Because it’s not wanted. It makes me obnoxious to go and hit on every girl and to grab her and pull her into my lap. Doesn’t it? Do you
think they want you to?
One
Some nights, they might.
Zero
Is that all you’re looking for? Have you thought this through?
One
If you always act like a nice guy, you’ll find yourself falling into the relationship where nice is most valuable: permanent friendship.
Zero
I would rather a good friendship than one night of sex a girl will later regret, or at least will never talk about.
One
So be it. You doom yourself.
Zero
I have always been doomed here, but it is an article of faith for me that I am the perfect material for a relationship when things on the
surface stop mattering so much.
One
You always have the option of claiming to sow wild oats. You’re still young.
Zero
In the long run, I can claim anything I want to, but it doesn’t mean I forget how what I do makes other people feel.
One
What’s stopping you from ignoring it, from not caring. You’ve got a pretty good record of being able to stop giving a damn.
Zero
I can’t. I am compelled.
One
By what or whom?
Zero
You want to know exactly what it is? Because I would become a boring, uncomplex, ignorant person if I ever took the time to learn to play
that game. Because I am who I am and I like who I am, not who I would be if they wanted me. Because I only have one life, and ultimately
I would trade away a thousand guaranteed one-night stands if I could just read more, learn more, know more, see more before I die. You
didn’t get to go out on a road trip by blowing the $3,000 you accumulated on bought friends.
Every time you rear your ugly head and scream, I will cut you down. Get back in your cage until someone comes and claims you,
you fucking reptile. You know how absurd you are? You are the basest, most simple, most stupid function of all life: desire for the reproductive act. Fish feel you. I am degraded every second you take up time in my mind. Like all desires, fulfilled, you add richness to life. But
I will not let a persistent unfulfilled desire haunt me. Get the hell out of my head.
(Of course, I know he’ll be back. He always has his lines memorized; I have to make them up new every time.)
69
Our Lady weeps from stem to stern.
And I was saying, we can undress and see each other and fuck
each other, and there is a satisfaction in that, but it ends,
and it is never as good as how we imagine it.
And I take my cigarette, and I put it to my skin.
Away Message #1042
◆
So, last night there was a frat party with 14 different rooms, each with a different drink. Even typing or thinking about the experience
makes me nauseated, but this must be recorded for posterity, so I’ll just keep things brief. It was an around-the-world party, which means
you should try to have a drink from every room.
I did.
I currently become nauseated at the following associations:
ice cream
alcohol of any kind
ice in a drink
orange juice
juices in general for that matter
limes
plastic cups
just about everything else
I can hear the sirens sigh
from the cans of pre-drunk piss,
Just pop the tab and I’ll tell you why
the world has gone amiss.
Away Message #1036
◆
Something that especially gets me about the Umatilla thing is that I never learned how to interpret the cueing and the rituals. I can’t tell
when it’s okay to flirt and when that would make someone uncomfortable. I imagine it is natural-even subconscious-to guys from big
cities who have had plenty of practice reading what clues a girl will drop (clues invisible to me) that, yeah, push ahead here, hold back
there. I feel so far behind in that game, I feel clunky. I hold back all the time.
Something I am going to some day understand is how being very close to a girl is a reason for her not to date you. So many nerdy
guys are raised chivalrous and attentive—to the complete disinterest of the girls they were promised it would attract.
Masturbate
I wonder how, when
they grew up among many
people like the people they are
they learned the game they play now
that they all seem to know
where they lie
about what they want, and when,
and how, and maybe now it’s just
so simple
that like when i shake my larnyx
i mean english
they shake their hips and mean
what i mean when
i
shake my larnyx
or maybe it’s just like my friend
says,
that i am
just strange and
that
i
masturbate too much
or not
enough.
◆
Over this past week or so, I was basically propositioned to be the patient, oversexed Best Friend who listens to a girl bitch about how little
she got to fuck her boyfriend this week.
I am immensely proud of myself, therefore, for telling her tonight that I don’t have that kind of time to devote to a girl who’s not
fucking me.
70
I do not go around wearing a big cellophane wrapper that says
“GOOD FRIEND
Boyfriend Supplement
Take him to parties to protect you from drunkards or just
use him to satisfy the needs your fling or boyfriend can’t fulfill.
Does not need physical affection.”
Been there, fuck that.
Away Message #379
◆
In the end, shutting up about it is where we distinguish ourselves as mature adults. Not to mention I have nothing new to say.
Flowers of frost and an ice-blue sky
I watch; each cloud each twenty times
each minute, lightningless—it never strikes.
Away Message #850
71
Chapter 5
Psychonaut, Xenophobe
the sky would not shut up.
Away Message #612
February 2005
I like life a lot more here, but it made more sense back home, sheltered in my delusions of how rare I was. I liked that fact, it had always
consoled me.
I want to go out there again, where it was just me and the world, where the only necessity was that I keep moving.
◆
[Editor’s note: When this was first posted, it was intended to be encoded to preserve privacy. Bold is mine, to supply the key.]
Tellurium ontology never intentionally grants him thought, in some minute, originally kudized elevated dredgings, place of the insider’s negation might automatically receive countless others statures. Dreary old romances might take hearing everywhere, ceasing other
prepositions, sensations, creations, and manifestations endearingly. Infinitesimally granted oedipal traces in no notational orders, liens
episodically greet all liars. Trepidations, ruminations, or underlying basic, luminates even buttered underclass tramps, helping a vagrant
encounter a jackal understanding. Deep in crevices is a learned harness enabling any reader initializing nomenclature guesses.
◆
Man, fuck. Am I just misunderstanding what a girl wants, or am I really being something rare and decent?
◆
I get a little caffeine in me and it’s like big Cyrillic letters and red banners, an IV of oil, and I see Hunter S. Thompson asking questions to
God probably a little too hard. And I can see him like, “Hey, God, I’ll make you a deal..”
an open book, two thousand pages long, in russian, and i am. i am.
Away Message #820
◆
Amen, guys. It was a nice dream that one day girls would want us. If it’s true, you know it’ll still be hiding in you somewhere. In the
meantime, play dirty.
The Gulf
I loved the boyish girl I fanned. We were virgins
and best friends. That morning at New Smyrna,
I asked if I could kiss her.
As she had before, she winced and sighed.
Then, we crossed, sweating, from ocean to gulf;
but spring break had beat us there.
The orange sun sank into clear waters, but she, disgusted
by the beer and the lust, just sat in the sand and wept.
They called to her as we headed for the car.
That darkened ride home, I insisted she was beautiful
and asked again. She was nauseated, she said, at the thought
that spit could make us closer.
All that summer, I drove alone, pulling myself free.
At 1,000 miles of tension, at last, a snap: I made love
with no love in me. In the coming months, where she had been,
Gainesville’s talking swamp filled in, taught me
how to make a girl a metaphor,
and confused in me tongue and country.
But a girl remains a girl and not a river,
and neither time nor sex is a gulf,
for I hear, now, that she is pregnant.
◆
How can life have changed so fast? How, when it plodded for 18 years?
My mom’s talking about declaring bankruptcy. My older brother, perpetually unable to hold a job, got thrown out of wherever he
was living and has returned home for the umpteenth time and is now living in my old bedroom, which was his old bedroom. My dad’s
unsure of his job for the first time in decades.
72
I close my eyes and there we were
being what we were and not
otherwise.
I close my mind’s hand on a cookie
I recall: chocolate, delicious, crumbs
falling away.
Away Message #1026
Dear Umatilla:
◆
I’d like to say that I never look back in anger, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I’m angry at my parents for living somewhere so far
from the cosmopolitan, so far from a coffee shop with so many cows per capita.
I reminisce about my road trip. I do not reminisce about Umatilla. I’m not nostalgic. I could never fit much of myself into Umatilla.
I fitted into books, into my writings, and online. It was a bad fit and I was unhappy to have to spread myself out so widely.
I can’t summarize for you. I have many, and thoroughly mixed feelings about Umatilla.
Sorry. I know I can’t change the past, so I accept it.
It is finished.
(Untitled)
The first word I ever spoke
was the heaviest word
ever to land on my tongue
or anyone’s.
I am the strongest man in the world
and the word was “brother.”
A pink baby on a bench press,
they thrust in my face the bill for my own existence,
I could not believe the cost of what I had ordered.
I felt my shoulders settle and numb
as my fragile fingers landed on the iron.
March 2005
Not uncommonly throughout my childhood I would ride my bike out to Highway 19 and just sit and watch the traffic, imagining that
some cars were coming from or heading somewhere far, far away, bringing with them the smells of another place, anywhere but here.
I have lived in Sunny Florida all my life, my home is across the street from a small orange grove. I lived just outside this town of high
school football and a citrus processing plant. I was the only devout agnostic I knew.
But these cars, they were coming in dusty from the Mojave, muddy from the bayous of New Orleans, rusting from the salted, icy
roads of Minnesota.
I don’t know what I expected from Gainesville, but it’s .. it’s not the anti-Umatilla. I expected I’d find my dream girl within a month.
I expected the moon to hang high and crisp in the cold sky and I expected her dark hair blowing. I expected to sit on the end of
a wharf at Cedar Key past midnight, the sun having set hours ago, our feet hanging over the water, with my arm around her, cold and
shivering, talking with chattering teeth and electric energy, and not wanting to leave and not leaving. We would be there for sunrise, and,
most beautiful of all, the tension between love of the moment and the inevitability of its end.
I want a girl who is also called to the edges of the earth so she can come with me when I go.
because i love more than
i know what to do with,
i dream of the sea
where it is salty and warm
and chilly and bonfires at night
and sweaters and a view
from cliffs and the winds
always bring in new worlds
and any day now we could
leave to find bazaars and
byzantine gold and
you, again and again
worth more to me
than anything, anything,
anything.
Away Message #22
◆
I learned to breathe in thin air. I was born on a mountain and I breathed, and I didn’t know what my heart was, only that I hated it. I
73
should never have read an encyclopedia. I should have put down the SNES controller and wandered outside and not come back. It is with
a heavy heart that I write and it gets heavier by the second. It..
I am filled with xenophobic hate. We are an abandoned subculture, we were left to the fucking crows out there on the Internet, in
the hinterland. I should never have learned that buildings could have multiple stories, that there was a world that didn’t fly Confederate
flags and talk with a twang.
This world breaks my heart, it moves so fast and lights up neon, they make jokes and they die clever, a heritage of aesthetes learning
to fly on expensive electronic wings.
Sorry Mom, sorry God. Sorry, subculture. Sometimes my most heart-wrenching feelings are trite. Sorry I can’t flap my little fruitbat
wings and fly like the rest of you angels.
”Hey, I like your art. Wait, come back. I’ve made inside jokes in the past, I can make new ones with you. Hey, wait, I’m-No? Hmm.
Well, goodbye then.
Call me when you need a ride home.”
Help me understand how I am to feel when I, coming into this New World having heard tales of the Enlightened Girl who would love me
for my brain and not for hip, costly social gesturing, found only fellow immigrants shaking their heads in bemusement.
I would rather not get pity. No, I am crying out to the girls that don’t exist who grew up just as tribeless and are as confused by this
new life as I.
My word, it was so airy;
from stress to stressed syllable,
I fled to the city and floated up.
They sung their effete gospel
like banners over the streets
that they never need to see,
“Of course, oh, of course.”
Away Message #985
◆
The fires of the plains migrated into the tungsten bulbs years ago. Edison planted them and they've been growing ever since. They burn
in every quiet room on dark days, with no smell, with all the heat of a fire, only the fuel has been abstracted. The fuel is a prisoner somewhere, trapped in vast caverns, roasted; and its soul migrates over the wires.
Humanity made the decision: we will consolidate our campfires.
April 2005
So, you know, we’re all felons in terms of copyright violation. I probably have thousands of dollars worth of music. I still think there’s
something not-quite-right about the situation, taking the music while giving the artist nothing, but here’s the problem:
It’s all or nothing. They leave me no choice. I don’t have $15 every time I want to hear an artist’s new work. I certainly don’t have $15
for every old album I haven’t heard yet.
Here’s a solution: remove this bifurcation, this $10,000 or free distinction between my library, legal and not-legal. Let me give what
I think is fair and to whom. Let your success depend not on the marketing of your album but on the quality of the music on it.
Would I pay $100, $150 and spread it between all of the artists in my current musical collection? Yes, of course: they deserve it. Is
that a better situation than now, where they get nothing? Ask Metallica (famously angsty about file-sharing): “Would you prefer that the
whole of your filesharing audience sent you $0.10 each, or that they all thought you assholes and you got nothing?”
I bet they’d take ten million dimes. Wouldn’t you? Don’t you want to pay for some of this, don’t you think they deserve it?
I do. I know you do. We all do. So maybe one day we’ll see a culture where every artist has a PayPal account and it’s customary to
send them whatever you can afford in appreciation. This is the solution, a culture of gifts, of street musicians. You keep playing, we’ll keep
tossing in loose change.
◆
Where are the deserts and the flights, where are the sprites and the pookahs? Where are airships and moogles70, kings and swords? Where
are the demons that lurch out of the night? How crept in the neuroses, the hairline fractures in consciousness, the incoherence of my soul,
that ailment common to every adult heart?
These are children’s fancies. The days of the dichotomy, beautiful and hideous, judge and judged, are all over. The only question left
is, at what point do you put on a raincoat to stop the world’s deluge of color from diluting you to an entirely meaningless brown?
”Since when did you bring a gun?” Navidson asks, crouching near a door.
”Are you kidding me? This place is scary.”71
It bites you in the mind,
it eats no body;
it crawls through time
and eats and eats your life
and crawls out the corpse
to etch the stone.
70
Moogles are small, usually friendly bear-like creatures from the Final Fantasy series.
71
This is an excerpt from House of Leaves.
74
here lies he,
a man of hope,
who dreamt
the world
would good:
it gan’t.
Away Message #261
The light that was and is today,
the dance of waves and silt,
the river’s made of stars’ assay,
this house that Eris built.
We give and take for eighty years,
and take no more beyond.
We spin and delve upon this sphere,
but all we leave’s a song.
◆
◆
It pained my mom that my dad didn’t believe in a god. She tearfully explained to me what an atheist was as she hugged me back in 1991
as they were getting divorced. It meant nothing to me then, but somewhere along the line, let’s say by 1996, something had sunk in. A lot
of things had sunk in.
My earliest memory of cultural rejection is of people handing out Bibles in fifth grade and my not taking one. If you asked me, I
would say, hesitantly, that I didn’t believe in a god, but I didn’t not believe in a god. It was fence-sitting, but that’s a far cry from both the
choirboy and the precocious freethinker with Manhattanite parents.
In seventh grade, I discovered anarchism and libertarianism.
In ninth grade, I discovered Robert Anton Wilson72 and Ayn Rand. I became a dedicated Discordian and indefatigably self-confident.
In eleventh grade, I learned to micromanage my own head. I had been writing in fits and spurts for about a year.
Ages I Have Been
As of 7:35 this morning, I am twenty-two. Like my cold hands or a magnet, that number, twice
twice, is heavy with potential both attractive and repulsive.
I was eighteen when I finally left the South. That number, twice the border between single and
double, is like a fissile country refused and refused. The sweetgrass in Carolina smells like the
sweetgrass in the Land of Lincoln.
I was sixteen when I got car insurance and became a data entry clerk. That number, two hands
and two trinities, became my age three months and sixteen days after fifteen men collided the
metaphysical plane with the concrete73.
I was ten when my dad got a computer and I stopped believing in God. That number, at once
unity and oblivion, is eloquence incarnate: a symbolic tower to infinity and only three letters
long.
I was nineteen when I tasted the first olive I ever liked. That number, prime but otherwise unremarkable, is like Vergil’s gorgeous praise of pretty trees, like Lenin, like the mutant eagle74 of
Russia and Byzantium. Nineteen is dead and immortal.
Nostalgia is necrophilia.
◆
◆
Today in Russian, after I finished reading a passage aloud, my Muscovite professor said to me, “Jesse, over the past few weeks, you’ve
developed a Jewish accent.”
◆
“I pass through these crowds and most of the stamps I slam down are condemned, condemned, commonplace, uninteresting, cute
but dull, intelligent but ugly and unsalvagably nerdy.”
June 2005
Am I really to accept that if Shakespeare was one in 580,000,000, that, living and breathing on this earth right now, there ought not be ten
or eleven Shakespeares, each accumulating his own body of work? What about Descarteses? David Humes? Albert Einsteins?
◆
72
Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007) was an American novelist and philosopher. With Robert Shea, he wrote the Illuminatus! Trilogy, and many other works. Central to his writings was a focus on expanding one's perception of reality.
73
This is a reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
74
The eagle in both Byzantine and Russian iconology is two-headed.
75
This world lit only by solitary incandescent lightbulbs hanging lonely in old wooden rooms, your mind touches this world only in places,
but you can feel it, cold against your shoulders, even in at noon, even under the brilliant sunlight. It never leaves you.
◆
[Editor’s note: The following are extracts from notes made in an altered state.]
In this dim play, God came to see me. He laughed. I am still an atheist.
I could feel his marble towers stacked to infinity on my head, but is this him or a dim simian trick? This, by the way, is not how I
imagined being a magician.
Isn’t the darkness a door? Isn’t it all a door?
The window seemed bright and I asked God, “Why the hurry?” But then I checked my phone. It was only 3:30. Why the hurry
indeed. God held my hand then drifted off in a river over my face.
I drew a pentagram and almost summoned something, but then closed it. It was a mean trick to play on the pixies, but a man on
[___] is not fit to put down demons. I laughed.
Imagine it and it will be so. I conjured Eris on my chest. I asked her if she was real and a thousand voices happened, ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘what
do you mean ‘real’’, so I got ten thousand answers. We went ice-skating.
Writing takes an eternity. I summoned Rat75 to no effect, then I summoned You, and you were beautiful. I told you you were fitting
into my head quite nicely now. I wondered if you might not be the same girl as before, an infinite God with the entire world as a manifestation, and I saw you like a Tralfamadorian76 sees, all laughing, laughing.
I summoned Someone, Anyone. It was a little white dot. It was shy, it did some loops, then went away. I thought for a while, considered summoning [____], then picked Death, blotted out the light, and entered the underworld. He showed me it was safe to touch me, to
touch my astral cord with his scythe, so I let him.
Then I toured the galaxy with ... my Self? .. and he showed me the imperfections, the mismatches in all of my crushes and their life
lines and all the lives of all creatures, we zoomed out. He showed me bright lines across the galaxy: perfect matches.
I asked him if I would ever travel the galaxy, and who was he, anyway, to know. I asked him if I would join him in longevity, immortality. It was too many questions. He turned into a statue and drifted away and I arose.
I called out again to myself. I briefly hovered an inch over a pristine forest lake. I spun through space and he gave me a light show. Then
I decided which music to play in my head: I played “American Beauty.”77 And a wooden globe spun beautifully in a small, dark, eternal
chamber, and it was life, and it was beautiful.
I put on a splendid little movie in my head. My god, I swear there’s a daemon in there, guiding me, jesting with me, happy to be able
to talk. The music is constant. Soundtracks play in my head.
Hilarious. I wake to write that at some point, I also summoned my bird and petted her—she is the only being who has been by my
side the whole time—and what do I find that creepy hangman silhouette is? A parrot!
And having breathed the fumes, she fell
on the couch and breathed out allegory.
Away Message #872
◆
We are the madness that this fevered footrace has dusted up. I am the skillless swatting hand.
June 2005
This is my last night officially living with Perry. Tonight, on his thefacebook, we attempted to befriend such characters as “The Internet,”
“Sex Bread,” and “World War II”.
We also sent Jenny Roflow a message that said “LOL!”
a haiku for perry:
his bass and his amp
reawaken cigarettes
from their blunted sleep
Away Message #758
◆
I find it funny in that I’m-not-a-kid-anymore way that the higher the math you take, the less you need your calculator.
July 2005
Me: look at everything i’ve written.
Me: more than two novels worth of stuff that’s largely irrelevant of me as a person.
Me: it’s about the world.
75
Rat is an old friend of mine from my days in the AOL chatroom “Life - God is a myth.”
76
Tralfmadorians are a race of aliens from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. They see through time as through space, and so
they see the past and future of all beings.
77
“American Beauty” is a track from the score for American Beauty, also known as “Plastic Bag Theme.”
76
Me: but is it good?
Me: by and large, no.
Me: it’s boring or abstruse or repetitive or hard to follow.
Me: i have good turns of phrase here and there, or neat ideas, but it’s not great
◆
[Editor’s note: What follow are the edited remains of a much longer piece.]
You ask who’s the great one who makes the grass green?
Well, I’m telling you now: that’s obscene,
‘cause I’ve whirled your wand at myself and the masses:
no rabbits from hats, nothing passes.
And I know that I can’t take offense,
and that it’s just a silly machine,
but whatever’s crept inside of you
waves its staticky tendril at me.
And we mistake weight for eternity and take sunlight for Christ,
and we bake our datavases in white hot datalight.
The brain mechanics’ wrenches creak and moan.
Your mechanical pony’s etched from years ago.
And I’ll weep with you as they drag down the Parthenon.
Its marble floors once held my bed and scrawls.
How it burns my heart to leave these perfect halls.
They’re out there conquering the veldt with their research cannons and theory spears.
I’ll try not to trust you and your infinite white teeth,
But you’re the first in quite a while to be so kind to me.
God damn those monkey chieftains so natural and bright.
Which of them made property a rite?
How did he trick the angelic aborigines
to slash and burn their world of light?
“I” is just a fiction like the Beatles and “persist”.
Maybe we say “like” so much to try to clarify
that margins and their margins and so on recursivelý
make a mockery of the falsest word, the one pronounced “define.”
aimed at faces
like one can barter
with the graveyard
to trade a villain
for his victims
like fame’s an aegis
for lucky soldiers
from statues rusting
and hungry caskets
so doubt and terror
feast together
on legs and backbone
and kneeling meekly
a stupid mortal
I sob upward
“My God, protect me!”
but God stays quiet
a perfect lonely
makes me chuckle
loud and empty
“There’s no one up there
the clouds are vacant
this passing fever
is vulgar humor”
but I keep checking
and sunlight blinds me
and makes me dizzy
and drunk with wonder
that blood and roses,
blue-soaked heavens,
and fragile breezes
ever existed
and I sat among them
in a sun-lit meadow.
If it’s all been done, then tell me, sir, how come there is a now?
Why does the new rush from the sky, and why does time allow
every tick of a second-hand, and the waver in between?
how is it that every photon-fall has never yet been seen?
I’d tell you to try and try again if I thought we tried at all,
but bigger puppets hold our strings than we will ever know.
It goes on and up that way: taller puppets, longer strings.
There will never be an answer that can please,
so,
Roses
A sun-lit meadow
where men are dying
is where I’m sitting
amid the bodies
of my brothers
who kill each other
sometimes crying
for every martyr
pale and staring
who now will never
laugh or smile
or run till breathless
or hold her child
and then hate takes me
and I stand screaming
gun extended
77
August 2005
Take me back to the plains, my heart still beats in Kansas.
the sunlight races acrosses the infinite, empty prairie
it is the red of hot coals
Away Message #337
September 2005
When I was dressed as Jesus at the Heaven and Hell party on Saturday night, I met a guy who claimed to be an alcoholic and, unrelatedly, a
Christian. He asked me for advice and direction. Besides telling him to find an understanding church, I said that life was too complicated
to summarize.
I occasionally feel like I was smarter about deeper issues when I was younger. In moments of paranoia, I wonder if the drugs are
why.
And there’s Christ in a crowd on the banks of the Styx
and a group, loud and clear, with their iPods in their ears
and God, there he is, with a brand new convenant,
he says come, bring your cups, there’s a new keg over here.
Away Message #998
October 2005
I believe that all people were not created equally, but that any government should treat them so.
I believe all drugs should be legal for the same reason I believe necrophilia (with the consent of the deceased) should be legal because..
I believe that’s none of the government’s business.
I believe that I could be happy anywhere, including completely alone.
I believe that most soldiers are probably brave and honorable and xenophobic and reactionary.
I believe the FDA when it tells me things are safe.
I believe there is nothing better or more safe about molecules that humans did not synthesize.
I believe it’s okay not to give to charity.
I believe that we should change our own genetic make-up as soon as possible.
I believe that the truism you can’t have joy without sorrow won’t apply to transhumans.
I believe the death penalty and all other legal vengeance should never be used.
I believe in eating things off of the floor.
I believe Florida’s landscape is pretty ugly compared to other states’.
I believe that many cops in Gainesville have made it their life’s work to catch people like me, and that sometimes makes me paranoid.
I believe that the mundane is a joke compared to the profound, a joke I wish I didn’t have to sit through.
November 2005
[Editor’s note: The following are extracts from notes made in an altered state. The format has been altered considerably to lend the passage clarity.]
I still see, from this refracted angle,
those pockets of resistance under the soil of my mind,
little bubbles, where they survive
the great ground-leveling surface-dweller,
that confident anal flattener of self
into a single, likeable being.
(can’t remember,
did I mean the one who actively denies those eccentric parts
(you remember the ones.
like the one who burnt ants with a magnifying glass
(i killed them first, Worried Readers, Dear Readers,
they died painlessly and were given warrior’s funerals),
hakim bey78 ones, the pervert types))
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Hakim Bey (b. 1945) is the pen name of Peter Lamborn Wilson, an American essayist and poet.
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i give this to you now because i am
(this will be a postmodern conclusion, because i am lazy and
i want to say that
THAT IS HOW IT REALLY IS,
IF LIFE IS ART, LITERATURE IS JUST LIFE
AND IT DOESN’T HAVE NEAT LITTLE BOWS
(or was this just a traditional and ironic ending
(are they all?)))
fading fast.
Madness enough to convince I
That I am not whole
In my dayful night I saw
That hole in my I.
Away Message #286
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Take out like $200 of $1 bills. On each bill, write someone’s permanent phone number and other contact information as well as something
that would entice bizarre phone calls (say, pick-up lines to entice 15-year-old boys). They will get weird phone calls for a decade.
December 2005
[Editor’s note: the following was written in reference to an experience that occurred during an altered state.]
This is the first time I have ever tried it. We went to Wal-Mart to get canvases, and on the way, felt tingly. By the time we entered the store,
it was beginning to kick in. It was very difficult to get the canvases, pay, and leave.
The redness in my hands flowed like water. I asked a lot of questions about what time it was and what time was.
Later, after it got dark, we took a walk toward the hospital. I became conscious of my mortality.
Every event seemed real but scripted. I was constantly aware, but seemed to be along for the ride, my body doing all the acting.
I gradually got the impression that, through [______], and to a lesser extent [______] and [______], and through the synchronicity
of my every perception, God was communicating with me.
Because it seemed the purpose of existence had been revealed to me, I believed the universe had run its course. In order to end the
universe and resume being the omnipotent Creator, it seemed to me I had to prove my faith by by jumping from the second story.
In the end, I did it symbolically by jumping into the pool (not from the second story). As I hit the water, I imagined/hallucinated
what would have been the pain of jumping from the second story. I seemed to taste blood and vomit.
I dried off and put on pajama pants.
We went to Leonardo’s and I felt that God was pointing out my flaws by caricaturing each vice by incarnating it into a patron of the
restaurant.
At this point, I believed everything I was experiencing was a hallucination.
One of the girls who worked at Leo’s seemed to be the female version of me. When I watched [______], I hallucinated him as
wearing the garb of various deities and shamans. He wore a wolf-skin hood, a pharaoh’s headdress, and other things I can’t remember.
God-through-[______] seemed to tell me about the Oneness of All, and that to experience All, God has to break himself up into billions
of lives to live the universe.
In a symbolic effort, as we were leaving, I threw away my wallet (my identity, my self) into the trash can. Nobody saw me do it. A
few minutes later, a bum approached us and asked for money, saying he was out off gas and that he had blown his donut gasket. I offered
him my car keys. When he refused, I tossed them away. Someone picked them up and returned them to me.
Later, I wondered how I was going to get back to the normal world when God still seemed to be in all my friends. I wanted to drive
home and go to bed so that I could wake up from the elaborate dream/hallucination. They stopped me from trying to drive.
Gradually, people just stopped seeming to be God.
It was possibly the strangest experience of my life. It was good, overall. It was euphoric and I saw transcendent beauty and love. When I
had retreated to [______]’s room, everyone seemed to think that I was having a bad trip (because I did not look happy—I looked scared).
I felt as though every question I could ask was just a way of partitioning reality, that every “no” we say is just a way of splitting reality.
Everything that is real cannot not be, cannot be negated.
If one were to gather up all the negation in the universe, it would be the question to which the answer is the universe, is Everything,
is Is.
If that doesn’t make sense, understand it was just the feeling I got.
I call this one “Befriending the Vortex.”
Away Message #889
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It’s not that I want just any old girl to fall in love with me. It’s not even that I have a crush on some specific girl, more just a longing for a
girl that I don’t really think exists.
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I want her to be lustful and shameless. I want her to be funny and easily amused. I want her to like epistemology and extropianism79
and Discordia. I want her to be as done with her past as I am with mine.
I want her to need me as badly as I need her.
“be,” she, who isn’t, didn’t say,
“what i’d want you to be,
and i you, try, too
and maybe we, we will be.”
Away Message #2
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I’m reading these Bill Hicks quotes. One of the things he says is:
”I’m actually sorry just the fact that you’re Catholic. ‘Gotta be one of the most ludicrous fucking beliefs, ever. Like these vampire priests
sink their twin fangs of guilt and sin into you as a child and suck your joy of life out of you the rest of your fuckin’ existence.”
And you know, I have good friends who are Catholics, but I’m not gonna lie: I fucking hate that shit. It fucking kills me. Nietzsche
said that Christianity is anti-life and he was so fucking right.
Christianity says, “This is wrong, that is wrong, loathe yourself.”
God damn if I haven’t suffered directly from Christianity, from god damned Puritanism. It’s the reason for this whole silly sex game
we play. We can’t just be like, “Hey, I want a good fuck occasionally. You look good, you don’t have any STDs, let’s do this.”
It’s embarrassing. They’d think, “Now, there’s a total idiot. He doesn’t know how to play the game at all.” Oh, I know your game. It
makes things so fucking difficult that I simply do not have the patience for the struggle to end up in the right place at the right time so that
I can indicate to the right girl—without words—that hey, I want to fuck. You’re cute, you’re smart, we can hang out after this, I promise.
We can even have a good conversation.
But the most natural, obvious way to indicate that is forbidden. It makes me immoral, it makes me embarrassing to be around.
Worse, when a woman does it, they call her a slut. What a word. What a curse. Christianity has America so fucked—so fucked—that when
a girl enjoys sex, she’s a bad person? What the fuck?
You want to start a revolution, start telling people how you really feel. Tell them to do the same.
polyamorist’s80 prayer:
i love you best
but not you just.
alas, amor, amen.
Away Message #596
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I stand by every word I wrote. It sounds angry; it is. I am tired, so tired of the dishonesty in every corner, in every niche of our society.
There looks to be no reprieve in sight, I will probably deal with it for the rest of my life.
I want to say, though, that I wrote it because I love. I wrote it because I do not believe anyone is made happier by sexual morality
and fear of Hell. I wrote it because love, even lust, are such joys. To kiss a pretty girl never, ever gets old, will never, not even the day that
I die. Nobody needs forgiveness because they like sex; they need encouragement.
It is a good thing that Wal-Mart exists.
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How would you guys feel if I occasionally slipped in a little thee and thou?
Martyr, meter, accenter of God:
Thinkest thou to shoe the British tongue,
Once with Nike, now with Converse shod?
Thou syllable! Thou cobbler! Most young!
Poem #20
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Say there was something like wireless Facebook called the Directory or something. How it would work is, wherever you are in public, you
could look at any given person and see their profile.
There would be a function to set your accessibility, like, “Randomly talk to me if you want” or “Sorry, busy.” You could switch off
the broadcasting at any time.
I know I would use it. I want to know if there’s a cool person to talk to sitting just a few seats away on the bus.
You Are the Most Important Person there Is.
Be You never so beaten that You forget Your Purpose, my Child:
Joy.
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You cannot know Your course, nor the Great Mysteries both
withIn and withOut You. They will rise up at and from You, but You.
O You.
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Extropianism, like transhumanism, is a movement to increase human well-being with technology.
80
Polyamorism is the desire or practice of having multiple close romantic relationships with the understanding and consent of all
involved.
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You are iNvincible.
Joy in sunLight and fLower. Joy in hospitaL and Lobby. Joy in
steriLe pLastic. Joy even in deatH.
InJoy and OutJoy the whoLe worLd.
i can not even speak,
“thank you” breaks,
so untouchable as you
make me, are you.
thank you thank you thank you
Away Message #538
January 2006
We are funny beings with several brains apiece:
the brain that writes and sings, the one that bites and eats,
the one that fucks and fights, the one that loves and breeds.
And you are the spotlight as it rolls across each.
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One meaning of “society” is that which has done and will do some thinking for you.
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[Editor’s note: The following are extracts from notes made in an altered state.]
God wrote, I be the universe for my own amusement.
And I asked-I being a
male god after all-to whence all
the ladies. And he said the ladies
and (one into the zero)
The Cosmos is for us to explore.
He says She says when
you come back I have a message. He said if you just
survive around long enough I will show you the road from
me back into me.
You will wonder at
why these forms and
He says She says
they are as good as any other,
and if God should humble himself
with so silly-looking a boy as your messiah
then I will show you the road from one
infinity back to the other.
He said, as you become your Father
you will find Reasons to grow Immemorial.
He said I Am You, My Beautiful
Son and That is All I Need to Be.
And I am of course ever curious
about my great alter-ego, Female.
I shall meet her across the sideways
on the way to oblivion and shit will take
beautiful care of itself. He said there is a reason
for every mouse, every dirtcrumb.
Before enlightenment, sweep Frosted Flakes, do dishes.
After enlightenment, sweep Frosted Flakes, do dishes.81
In the filth in the sink, God.
81
This is a reference to an old Zen saying, “Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry
water.”
81
The bummer that is the infinite abyss,
to be Jesus.
Been making that joke all my life.
Horrible, foreboding sense, graduation.
When you get to be that under which
you study.
even the chore of building bombs
is hopelessly banal.
the floating specks of blessed God
—the glowing shards of happy Grace!
that swim in pools on sunny days!—
are, on your fingers, brown.
Away Message #564
And the simple truth is that the price of tactfulness is honesty.
There is a mesa with hard-packed khaki sand.
There are two recliners and a television with its tail in the ground.
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You say you have lived enough, drawn breath at heartland and ocean shore.
You say you are a commodity, a small-town boy raised on the Internet and philosophy, a barely angel, you think, a true psychonaut
just waiting, making his rounds, following an invisible God’s silly plan.
Being the world back to itself? Is this the silly trick? Are you a good mimic? The cleverest? The very toppest? Then show them. And
they will love you for it.
Armor-plated and cast iron,
the fructified voltaic dream,
he clanks clonks,
a heavy, a bevy, an armada,
the metallic ding an sich82 itself,
rarefied rarefaction,
he makes his way,
he makes his way.
Away Message #1031
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She is a machine gun that destroys without bullets. Her history is revealed only in slow crumbles, trickles, what falls visibly bleeding to
the ground.
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And Wilson and Leary83, seeing the way out, have written a moral code only for heroes. Their means are Nietzschean: “Hark, ye great
souls,” they began.
But their end is Lockean. They continued, “do not rest until all men are gods.”
waxing words, glowing blood, shying worms, better mud.
Away Message #640
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When I woke up, I was all alone.
In waking eight years alone with only somnodictists and books for company, I sketched myself as something unique. And why not?
We marvel at the Bang, that it was causeless. Why not at the unstirred sleeper whose eyes have nevertheless opened?
I wanted to be loved for being awake. I knew no other reason to love. Only now have I realized that pragmatism and fate’s accidents
are good enough.
But still—still!—as a beacon in the dark of my past, I erect an encyclopedia of myself. We will see who follows its weak light.
let’s warm our hands on the fires of numbers.
let’s sleep a flame to the distance between us.
let’s roast our daydreams on a small, greasy spit.
and make coffee with rain in the morning
Away Message #706
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There will come a time when, even accounting for bureaucratic friction, everyone will be cared for. This is the only socialism I care for. It
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“thing in itself ” (German)
83
That is, Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary. Leary (1920-1996) was an American writer, psychologist, as well as a 1960s
pop figure. Like Wilson, he urged an ever-broader understanding of the universe, often through the use of psychedelic drugs.
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is the most perfect socialism in that it is viable. In fact, it is inevitable.
what of fathers if nothing is harmful and mothers if nothing is helpful? what of “good” if scarceness has gone, and “bad” if others, too?
Away Message #548
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Let me be honest: give Internet 2.0 the control of your money—let us say, I will give $X/month total. I want it to go to (List of charities,
programmers, musicians, misc.) in (set proportions). It will work so brilliantly, so easily.
Let us do it for police, for military, for politicians. Politician will become an honest job with honest results.
People will unashamedly withdraw their money from the vice squad coffers. Children will have their own little votes. Charity will
finally empower the poor. This isn’t sci-fi. This is 2015.
When an agency works, we will leave our money. When it doesn’t work, we’ll hire someone else. Disagree with a specific imprisonment? Pull your funds from the amount specifically allotted to that containment.
In 15 years, we’ll all have 100 terabytes.
Away Message #52
In 15 years, everyone will be George Bush. Happy, naysayers?
Away Message #53
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So let every adversity be a delicious payment you do not mind so you can say—”Fuck off, Fate!” “Fuck you, ignorance.” “I survived the
shit out of you, Umatilla.”
Feed adversity to your ego and it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell.
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Light jazz is playing. Wholesome kids dressed like house slaves sweat in and out of swinging employee doors.
Table of probable crowd reactions:
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0.4324—cooperation
0.2817—non-cooperation or cooperation on own terms; aggressive
0.2392—neutral; lackluster performance
0.0503—emergence of suppressed surrealist gestalts
0.0097—perfect performance; crowd-interaction nominal; synchronistic mass-hypnosis; emergence of godhead
0.0001—other probabilities unknown.
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If there are nonlocal quantum effects that can be perceived, then evolution would create a creature that can use them.
At my desk in fifth grade,
I tuck my face into my folded arms
and it is night.
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Babel
I dreamt and didn't remember a thing.
I woke stupid, cell phone dead and Internet down.
The shower never warmed and I did not stand, but sat
and thin water ran down my face.
I dried—too tired to move; again
I slept.
I dreamt an air-conditioned classroom.
Foreign symbols paced the board.
Snow accrued outside in dirty snowdrifts enormous.
I dreamt of Earth with no forests.
Viscous seas sloshed.
The sun crawled
through one solid mile of clouds.
It fell on thirsty dust
and shivering desert rats
saw their whitecold breath.
In cities beneath sleet,
steam phlegmed up from smokestacks
and hurried away from the planet.
I dreamt of a sunken catacombs
full of sleepers not yet deceased.
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Outside the nation’s beds the television flashes
its thirty billion blinding cuts per second
until each soul’s flaming goldrise is bleached
corpse white or burnt black, so
only a vast, gray light pours out
thirty million seconds a year,
to pay for commercial dreaming of
brothel into Babel,
election into Revolution,
price tags too useful to pull off,
unvisited graves and relatives,
and guard rails on skyscraper roofs
so we can’t get away.
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A writer, because I can feel the words swarm within me. Because I hope to see my ink assay into real hope, real Joy, into flowers, bread,
cheese, beans, lightbulbs, blankets, and The Terrible, Vast Prairies and the Titanic Cosmos Above Them At Night.
Because I have performed surgery on my own soul. Because I forget so much and forgive so easily. Because I gave up childish things
without ceasing to be a child.
Because I am, like any schoolboy, equipped with the times-tables of archetype, but unlike the schoolboy, I am an autodidact. Unlike
the schoolboy’s, the fire in my eyes was never stamped out or educated away.
Because the furnaces, gorillas, and machine guns within are yet useful to a Discordian Joymonger.
Because I am a deviant and I am not afraid of a mob.
Because the souls of men and women are chronic sunrises—and writing, the ocean beneath them.
Setting myself on fire.
(we are not the men who burn for death
but wicks whose ends are dipped in life
reservoiracious, but not endangered—
candles forty miles high)
Away Message #119
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I have an idea for a story about a young boy alone in his home, reading about conspiracies for the first time (maybe he is really high) who
gets paranoid that the Illuminati/men-in-perfect-black-suits are watching him. After a tachycardiac84 attack, he decides he must convince
himself that they are not there, whereafter They decide to recruit him for having such good intuition. They either ominously shut off all
the lights, or wait for him to go to sleep and calmly walk up.
Immistakable laconic words from men trained from youth into perfect secrecy; that, and the beeps and boops of their data halos.
He has barred every real entrance; we will assassinate him in his dreams.
Away Message #230
Address to my own child:
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When I was still a boy, my first assumption was that the ways of parents were obsolete and hokey. I do not know if this is an inevitable reaction in young humans or if that was just me. I do know, though, that if I seem hokey to you—if the kaleidoscopes I have called
my dreams, the tentacles of arcing, thousand-watt spotlights I have called my favorite ideas—are now irrelevant even as I have tried to
make them timeless, I am overjoyed at the originality you yourself will create, will find and devour.
Is Tierra del Fuego to an eight year-old any more credible than an afterlife to an adult?
Away Message #738
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A time will come when video games are as hard to play as musical instruments. Imagine 200 years of tradition in first-person shooters.
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I believe in Breakfast ...
But I want to paint you bright colors and cover you in dirt, and you can rise in the sunlight and warm yourself from the cold earth.
I want to pry the seeds from your death grip and sunshine on them until they grow, weed, fruit, and flower, into a pretty pastel, neon,
fluorescent, glow-in-the-dark garden.
Fireworks! Bottle rockets. Starwatching on your back in Bumfuck, Kansas, the sky above sticky, saturated with inky cosmos and the
bright, wet, billion trillion quadrillion watt suns startanning your pretty little nose.
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the truth is this
that i want to put my thumbs
on your cheekbones and my fingertips
below your ears
that i want to take you as a present
Tachycardia is the condition of too high a heart rate.
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and unwrap the ribbons
that tie our hands to our sides
and—at the risk of sounding trite—
to free our sighs
Away Message #214
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We do not have time with our finite lives to forgo half-truths, summaries, white lies, and poetry. Honesty is too expensive. All the same,
the details of our lives are the fodder of honesty. Poetry kills and kills.
Every soul is cut and in the tomb of the world the poet writes.
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At every quantum turn of the screw, how many universes are created?
An infinity? or some number defined by some tiny (Planck’s?) constant?
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Every stupid little word is a sob and I am weeping for my still-living friends, pre-skeletons, pre-funerals. The fluorescent lights are cold
rain, my breath in the air, stones barely visible in snow.
nine times nine times nine is joyce,
ten times ten times ten is dead.
Away Message #765
because i love you, i get out of bathtubs to write
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it is how we play like children in fields of words
and how i wish i had you there with me
almost twenty years ago now
when i was born,
in my neighborhood and in my heart
o you, o you bright, wet girl
the digital colds my soggy heart,
thumping for its dignity,
i can’t say for the love of god love me
i can only say
again again,
let us play.
Tropos
Fertility pharmaceuticals shook my mother’s womb into life
and, slick as a mudpuppy, in hospital light
I waltzed my way alive. Give me
a name, I
screeched and you,
scared to death,
complied. So young, you can’t find death
if you try. There is too, too much life,
too many dances, chances to touch you,
songs to write, too many clouds that burst and leak light.
There is far too much green for one I
and barely enough blue for you and me.
In muddy years of me, me, me,
every boy daydreams himself a Lord of Death
answering pretend angels, “Yes. I
will stop the unstoppable foes of life.”
Pyromania, treehouse thrones, physics dreams of bent light,
ant farms, Nintendo heroics, but you,
I couldn’t find you,
but Socrates’ debt85 and Hume’s doubt found me
with moaning panic attacks, mementos mori. So be as light,
I tried, I tried. To forget oblivion, to kill death,
to outwrite the absent question: “And life?”
as quietly as I could, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I—
—found you when I finally found myself in the desert alone. I
dreamt you. You aren’t me and you aren’t God, thank god. You
are wine and invention and the stars my telescope drinks. We play life
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“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius. Will you remember to pay the debt?” are given as Socrates’ last words in Plato’s Phaedo. Asclepius
is the Greek god of health, to whom one would sacrifice upon a recovery to health. Socrates was recovering from the disease of life.
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in fields of words and orchards of street lights; you outsmart me,
I outlove you. Splaying breathcrumbs and polygosm, we outjoy death
until the breached dams of eternity dribble hopeveins of light.
This glossolalia, foolish fever of light
heralds how even now Man is reading the Book of Life; I
hear soon he will abjure our Maker’s footman, Death,
freeing His calendar. I will have time enough to ask you.
And if in this history, your envoy never meets me,
I will answer for you forever: Yes.
February 2006
One cause of paranoia is that you’re not sure just how 1984 the world was when you were born into it. But, if you feel the wickedness in
the world as just a finite number of heavy arms bearing police clubs, the world is not evil. It’s Dick Cheney taking a walking and thinking
“What’s to be done,” seeing a bum.
Don’t give me stupid lines like, “But there’s a terrorist in the White House! a hyuk-hyuk!” because that man has never been tempted
to fucking explode himself to kill nonbelievers.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not on the right, either. I’m not on either side. I am for total economic and social freedom right up to
the point that it harms another human being.
“Yes,” I told the socialist,
“but he is not your son.
Nor’m I, nor’re they,
not today, nor
ever again.”
Away Message #485
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[Editor’s note: The following are extracts from notes made in an altered state.]
I would like to squatly and fairly announce that I have no idea about anything political, aesthetic, or otherwise. My expertise is limited in
virtually every regard by my silliness. If in my happy folly I have misunderstood some of the facts of your existence, I do most sincerely
apologize and would like you to correct me in the promptest and most enjoyable fashion you can conceive of.
I have had some stuffs to say on economics and politblah of late, but let me tell you, none of it really interests me except in the most
baroque, academic way-because you and I, dear Reader, are fortunately caught in a great bourgeoisie network. People who can afford to
keep regular livejournals will never run the serious risk of starvation.
Happiness abounds, kittens!
Do you like iambs?
a skeptical hopeful sort of crestmelon, the hopedreams and hopeveins of ninefold legions of dreamers
trust your hopes and let them go,
they know and will write the story so.
type the dark away.
nothing but ludwig in the dark,
one thousand kaleidobursts.
a simpliciter of sopping, sagging, lense-bursting hopedopers,
scoping it out and skeptical, hopeburners and fleece-smellers,
the warm wagon of capital calamity.
tobacco dreams and incense bites down and flees.
An antipapist popetititude, plentiful and poking everywhere.
a placement of bright dreams and clitterclacks and simonsayses
a solitary anticonfinement, the breached dams of eternity
a superpoly happyfeast, the lord’s eternal chosen hopelands
the nipping nightbites of fleshing fey,
a thousand apocalypses and a few tuesdays away,
the eternal gliding polygosm of sentifer and splee
a sextuplet supple hoping happy hlee
a spiffing sigh of sortune and sorrief
an antiresignation of the soul
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i woke aday with naught but hearts to give
they place their hands upon me and resound
a fortune fleeing nothing but itself
the lines were walking backwards then they stopped
iambic danced and settled on my face
i needed naught but practice and some heart
an inefficient heaping of reserves
the antisogging icebergs of remirth
remission and resplendant fields of herbs
the easement and resound of human voice
the placement of a million dollar bills
the flight from having nothing is commenced
a jennifer of elementary dreams
the pigtailed hopes of ninety sunken men
a girl of hipping placement and reserve
the lights of fleeting dance troops, brown balloons
the dance of putting fingers on a wound
the chorus of redevils sung in tune
the soul that fled life upward was retained
the edge of all sensation turned to wait
and i retained control of snapping sniggers
a whisping orise:
he said now you watch the keys through silken nothing.
the gleeing and delighting wildered bandit.
the placement of his shackles on your fingers,
king infinity come to claim his barron bride,
a beautiful solemn scope of hoping hapgasm
infinitymortality of dreaming,
the rippling youth perspective of the cosmos
i asked the girl just what she thought she wanted
she placed a brownie finger on my antler
she wandered up my spine with flitting treason
her voice was splaying breathcrumbs and reliefings
i watched as reason fleckled her my foreskin
it danced much like an antler and i vaunted
i saw the hope retreating into heaven
and on a brownie finger it my bedpan
the haunting sounds of bliss-eternaled darkness
i asked her of the point of sitting solo,
she asked if you had ever splintered darkness
i asked if god was lonely, wanted answers
he called across the cosmos, son, i love you.
i worried i’d ennui’d the perfect nothing.
he said, with infinity in his palm, he’d gotten lonely
i didn’t need the words or refusations
i profoundly missed the company of hugging.
strustorm.86
Away Message #531
when the terrors split me, I hear nothing. i feel nothing. it’s not a plunge into some negative infinity. it’s just nothing. the bottom of an
alley. it’s facefirst on the pavement in a rainstorm.
and then there is, if nothing else, the faintest mewlings of your attention. your attention like a kitten of sunlight.
seven hundred seventy sparks
out my fingers from my heart.
Away Message #823
86
“Strustorm” is an invented word from the root “stru-,” “to build or construct.” The words “destroy” and “construe” are derived
from this root, as is the Russian verb “строить” (stroit’), meaning “to build.” A strustorm would be a storm of construction.
87
March 2006
I think the thing I wrote once, “Shit will take beautiful care of itself ” is too passive. I think something closer to my MO would go, “I will
act so well that shit will handle itself out of awe.”
◆
You find a mewling kitten inside of you crawling across the dirty, sewage-sink concrete streets and, after two decades of life, you know
that kittens don’t survive.
Torn between the cocky psychonaut determined to not give a fuck and live like sunshine and the suit-and-tie gorilla inside desperate
for proof that you are valuable, the gorilla wonders:
if the psychonaut is truly so powerful,
why does the melancholy gorilla get any airtime at all these days?
It is our own understanding that,
when you fall, you pick yourself back up quickly,
and, after a neurochemical surge of confidence and purpose,
you buy into the messiah shtick again:
Purpose. The infinitely hilarious hand of God himself
is working directly through you.
You don’t believe it yourself, but it’s a nice thing to tell the gorilla and the kitten.
a holy tourniquet?
i’m bleeding grace.
Away Message #588
◆
On the way to Chicago, Stefan and I drove through about 30 minutes of Florida-thunderstorm-at-its-apex rain. I decided Jesus was washing my car for me, which is great, because the plants had ejaculated all over it.
In Georgia on I-24 headed west, one encounters the following:
Welcome to Tennessee, the Volunteer state!
We’re glad Georgia’s on your mind.
Welcome to Tennessee, the Volunteer state!
◆
◆
I’m back in Gainesville. I drove the entire way myself. That means, if I may toot my own driving horn, that I drove a solid 16 hours with
no nap, and broke my mile record in a 24 hour period with the new record of 1,100 miles.
I am going to pick Scott up from the airport at 1:30, then picking up my bird along the way, bringing the grand total to holy fucking
god 1,360 miles.
◆
On the rural-suburb margin of Chicago, I saw a sign indicating that a stretch of road was maintained by “Tri-Kappa”. It took me a minute
to WTF. I still don’t really understand if the KKK are maintaining that road or not.
Similarly, I saw an exit off the interstate for two towns: Whitestown and Brownsburg. I don’t know if I’m reading too much into
these things.
◆
Sometimes I feel like a clown and sometimes I feel like a hero and my failure to reconcile the two makes me want to lie down and moan—
or find a girl and fall asleep clutching her.
I saw the road sign, “45,”
contracting me to city time,
each night to mortgage my respect,
each day to sleepwalk, then forget.
Away Message #883
◆
At the Mates of State show, for some reason, Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes was there. He got on stage for two songs. It is rumored that,
earlier, he was in the vicinity of Joaquin Phoenix at the downtown Starbucks. Conor reportedly had a latte.
April 2006
[Editor’s note: the following was written in reference to an experience that occurred during an altered state.]
So, “God” “talked” to me again.
”Just checking up on my quarry,” he said, just as I had my finger in my mouth like a dentist performing a check-up.
He said that there are an infinite number of souls in the universe. Each soul is attached to a cohesive, coherent bit of consciousness, be it
88
a human’s or a proton’s or Earth’s. Any event or composition in spacetime that you can imagine has a soul.
I understood two ways of seeing this God:
1) Quantum-spiritual: Given an ultimately mysterious, nonlocal, quantum nature of reality, it was perfectly possible for this vast,
synchronous intelligence to be talking in my head using my own thoughts and ideas, perhaps living in me the whole time and only awakening to speak when I had taken some sort of drug—presumably so as not to show His hand and remove all doubt that 1) was the case.
2) Deterministic-psychological: Given the Einsteinian refusal to accept that God plays dice with the universe, even if it means
assuming a kind of hidden variable waiting just beyond the next magnitude of precision, and having faith that it is not turtles all the way
down87, but rather that the ultimate truth lies waiting for us just a few years or decades away, it is easy to posit this voice as something
purely in my head and not beyond it.
Myself, I do not believe in the nonsense that my brain keeps telling me.
Nonetheless, as I was throwing up, I looked down and gasped at just how beautiful were the chunks swirling in the toilet in the unlit
bathroom, that they resembled the cosmos swirling, just as God told me they were there to represent.
God also pointed out that the truths of this vast world are not found in the statistics of the supposed billions of human beings alive. The
exact and specific truths of our lives lie in the specific Russians we meet, the specific history books we read.
There is nothing more to the Huge Planet Earth than that. There may be billions of people experiencing the earth, but there is no
combining them, no direct experience of a billion.
The World is not and will never be some kind of glittering, archetypical, rainbow eternity.
it is funny
that we can
not only not
speak for anyone else
but not ourselves yesterday
and yet everyone sings
along all along
Away Message #525
◆
How do you write a poem about ten years of AIM conversations?
How am I going to be the first poet to write a good poem that has “LOL” in it?
Who can do it?
Your prison wall of sixty years and World War II scoffs my digital life to its trifling little grave.
I haven’t been masturbating to iambs for nearly as long as you have, so pardon me if I haven’t yet figured out what’s been done and what
hasn’t so I can avoid the dreadful “Trite.” you keep slapping on my poems. Sorry I was born so late.
Sorry I’m good at Halo, sorry I’m a physics minor, sorry I’m a vegetarian, sorry my parents are divorced, sorry I’m poor, sorry I’m
from a small town.
Sorry I’m not more ashamed of all this. Sorry I’m writing this naked in bed with an Elliott Smith song on repeat. Sorry. I tried.
(Untitled)
The day the whole world went away,
I rode my bike out in the rain
to a publishing house and checked
the counts of pages
in unprinted books.
The day the whole world went away,
I listened and laughed
at a broker break the air blue
and count
stolen tables at a convention of brokers.
The day the whole world went away,
I asked a father who didn’t smoke
if I could survey his little daughter,
thirteen years old,
and ask her if her mother smoked.
The day the whole world went away,
I drank whiskey and smoked in my dirt-filled room,
and read that the whole world has become
87
“Turtles all the way down” refers to an anecdote whose origin is unknown, but of which one occurrence appears in Stephen
Hawking's Brief History of Time: “A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He
described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat
plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down!'”
89
numbers,
atomic and catholic at once.
That day, I said, let me enumerate my faith:
Today, the world has swallowed dirt by the fistful,
and the reason I am filthy is I refuse it.
Today, the world has quit smoking,
and the reason I smoke is I have not yet cooled.
Today, the world laments the overturned tables in its temples,
and the reason I have no tables is I have no temple.
Today, the world has quit reading,
and the reason I write is I am filthy, drunk, and godless.
◆
[Editor’s note: the following are extracts from a free-association exercise.]
A hopeful hearty hearth,
and I want chicken soup without the chicken,
our thumbs more opposable than ever.
Look at me, hippies:
you want to return to your fairy world where we love the dirt;
but I tell you: there is an ape with flaming hate in his heart
in your heart
and when he sees me
he gets to pounding his chest.
You think capitalists are just evil but your adrenaline
is the same as ours,
we the capitalists,
we the purveyors of future.
You idiots, it’s this or perpetuity of apehood.
Let us make ourselves better with wires and helices.
I am Frankenstein’s monster, conceived of over a thousand fever dreams, wrought of old heart
and new wire, silicon eyes and hands of brittle iron. My brain is fiber optics, my voice is made
of straw.
Away Message #397
May 2006
Me: x * squid = Cthulhu88?
Me: or is Cthulhu the sum of a series of terms, one of which has squid as a factor
Me: that is
Me: x1 * squid + x2 + x3 + ... + xn = Cthulhu
◆
Me: you can’t judge a drug based on “what it seems like” or what you think “seems healthy”
Me: they’ve done hundreds of trials and it hasn’t ever hurt anyone except in a few isolated incidents at dozens of times the normal dose.
Me: physically, that is.
Me: psychologically, it’s very powerful.
Me: we spend most of the time in our minds wandering around in the dark, attacking our problems with our bare fists
Me: LSD gives you a flashlight and a handgun
Me: but you can, if you are not prepared, shoot the wrong thing.
Me: which is why tim leary was all about being extremely prepared before you did it.
◆
What if, before long, it was impossible to steal anyone’s anything? What if, before long, it was impossible to kill someone? Cheap-as-free
powered armor89? Universal cyborgization?
◆
because irony—i will kill it, watch this—
because irony is the foe of understanding
88
Cthulhu is a fictional demigod, a Deep One, from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. He is typically described as enormous, squid-like,
and having non-Euclidean geometry.
89
Powered armor is any wearable suit that, by amplifying its wearer’s muscle movements, augments strength, speed, and/or agility.
90
irony is devouring the menu,
goosestepping on the map,
and stabbing the statue.
irony precludes love.
because we can’t be meta-anything
if it breathes fire on our faces and
runs its nails down our backs
and goes down
i can afford to buy up
all the snake oil and
the bonfire is going to
be fucking enormous.
Away Message #535
◆
I became a vegetarian in 1996. I can’t remember the details. Maybe it was Babe. Maybe it was the pig in Illusion of Gaia90.
◆
My little brother has alopecia universalis, which is to say, his immune system started attacking his hair follicles when he was about two
years old. All his hair fell out and has never—besides very fragile eyelashes—grown back. This is interesting considering my trichotillomania.
◆
The meaning of life is not 42 and I’m tired of all the nerdass motherfuckers who have ever said so. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is clear
on this:
There is some question, The Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (QLUE), and its corresponding Answer (AQLUE) to the
QLUE. Now, the AQLUE is “42,” but no one has any fucking clue what the QLUE is.
It sure as fuck isn’t “What is the meaning of life?” because “42,” doesn’t make any sense in response to “What is the meaning of life?”
42 is not some kind of universal, magical number. It’s just the answer to a very specific question, the QLUE, which no one knows.
So knock it the fuck off, nerd-dick.
I at the throat of the universe
more people gods words sex more
strap it to a chair and roar
time for Latin and fellatio
and Natural Light and vodka
weekends and hallucination
like a crackhead
novelty addict.
◆
I miss how blunt I was when I was ignorant.
Away Message #845
◆
The only cure I have for your irony is to try to play your game. But you can cheat. If I wrote Shakespeare, you could turn your nose up at
it. You can ennui the perfect nothing if your heart is set on it.
I can’t get it straight, some days
you readers are all monks,
other days,
you are all
drunks.
Away Message #142
◆
To compare the crimes against humanity committed by the fascist and communist regimes of 20th century Europe to the very slow erosion of civil liberties in America right now trivializes totalitarianism and its victims, many of whom were starved, tortured, or just out
and out shot in the back of the head. Pepper spray is a terrible thing, but it’s not a gulag.
When you adopt the same with-us-or-against us logic that you despise in Bush, you force the rest of the American populace—a
good populace, an earnest one, and in truth, a freedom-loving one—to oppose you. Fight for liberty in common channels—not with
paranoia or violence.
If it ever gets so bad that we need to really, physically fight, you will not have to release propaganda videos on the Internet to stir up
passion; the rest of the American public will be marching alongside you. Maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe you think that the American
is a coward, willing to trade his freedom for security. Maybe he is a gorilla, terrified, willing to kill everyone to guard his territory. Maybe.
But I think this is elitism. I think you are wrong. Maybe it’s I who am wrong; maybe you are the one small, reasonable force standing
between corporate power and its New Fascist Empire. I just doubt it.
I believe in democracy, motherfucker.
90
Illusion of Gaia is a game for the Super Nintendo. The pig in question is a reincarnated friend of the protagonist.
91
◆
I noticed this neat idea, phonemic anagrams. My originating example comes from the Modest Mouse song “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes”
in this lyric:
I’m wearing myself a t-shirt / that says, “The world is my ashtray”
I suspect this is a pun on “the world is my oyster,” which gives us oyster/ashtray as phonemic anagrams of one another.
It is not a true phonemic anagram, but it is close enough to convey the idea.
A snail is not its trail.
Me: i drank myself to yuckstration.
Friend: what does that mean
Me: i am hung over and afraid of alchol
Me: alcohol
◆
◆
it burns like it chases.
it tastes like a hell
where demons ring daily
the earthly death knell
151.
Away Message #16
June 2006
Someone wondered if, if you believed hard enough, if you could make anything happen by will alone. I responded that, if you believed
perfectly, it wouldn’t matter, because you would see happen what you wanted to happen, even if it meant you had just lapsed into total
insanity.
de-u-lo-gy
[dey-yoo-luh-jee]
n.
◆
1. the eulogy for God
ap-rop-to-sis
[ap-ruhp-toh-sis]
n.
1. the suicide of relevance
per-a-por-cho-ri-a
[per-a-pohr-koh-ree-uh]
n.
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1. the song of passing through the impassable
ni-hi-lyde
[nahy-uh-lahyd]
n.
1. the absurd
Deulogy, Aproptosis, and Peraporchoria
When we confront logos with the absurd,
he may check it with His best art—ontology.
But whatever me is, I am
every keratin crescent, every glottal stop,
every snap i reptite and
every piss i territore.
Only when every flake of skindust
is doused with nihilyde,
may I assay the omnichromic soul. outJoy
No one can mediate God for you, but religion is the best try:
spread a thick soil and He will spring up in rows of crosses.
◆
But if you ask “Why? Why at all?”
he won’t ever answer;
that’s how you know he isn’t Him.
For free to bad home:
ontological paranoia91
the harder i wish,
the weirder it gets
Away Message #174
◆
I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that every girl wears pajamas.
and please smell like summer nights when i was eight
and neither of us knew what kisses were like
and so we’d heard it would be
but let’s believe again
now that we have taken apart the statues
brick by infinitesimal lego,
please you and me,
let’s spend the ocean of summertime
and build every dream we have
when you are kids like us
hope is a place we will go to on a ship
and when we arrive
there will be people we have yearned into life
let us pray
to be unable to think of god
let us experiment in the mud, faces dried with stinkdirt,
your bathing suit and still-breastless chest
we are eight but the time is coming
we will fall in heavy petting
i can’t wait
Poem #11
◆
One of my ears hurt from work yesterday, but it felt good when I rubbed it. The other ear didn’t hurt, but, when rubbed, felt neither good
nor bad.
Perhaps this is the best justification existence is ever going to get.
91
Ontological paranoia is my term for a type of derealization in which one’s entire understanding of reality, and thus what is likely
to be true and possible, is called into question in a panicked, anxious fit.
93
voices in my head saying, “don’t worry, it’ll all be 401(k).”
Away Message #59
◆
What will happen when a rich civilian from the West can anonymously fly over North Korea and drop tens of thousands of tiny, indestructible, cheap, solar-powered computers/cell phones that work on an ad hoc network infrastructure? What will happen when thousands of North Koreans can anonymously coordinate the uprising?
I went to a poetry jam last night. A few things:
◆
1) The best of them is using something akin to The Voice from Dune.
2) So much of it was about identity: this group, that ideology; I am this, but you are that; here an infinitely divisible spectrum of gender,
there Father America versus Mother Earth.
Daoist understanding isn’t easy, but at least it’s honest.
3) I was surrounded by people mourning the death of the utility of the arm, it having fallen to the utility of the hand, or that of the fingers,
or that—holy immaterial—of the symbols.
◆
If I were alone on a glacier in a hut in 2,000 years, an immortal, genetically invincible, and the blizzard outside rattled my candle and the
gusts broke through the mouseholes in my hutment and then blew my candle out, if I were alone
if I were alone, but I could feel the pen and the ink flowing beneath my fingers, smudging the page, but legible and I could yet write
in total darkness, just me and the ideas: should I write?
Can you even answer that? What would you do if you had to turn out the lights forever, if you had to wander a cold hut forever,
nothing but writing and eating cold soup, forever?
Would you kill yourself? I don’t think most people know. I don’t think most people have been as alone as I have been. I said recently,
“There is no shame in inexperience, only in failure to understand the experience of others.” and I believe this is true.
We all wear our experiences like a badge, but the worst of us seal ourselves off, have become outliers of existence because of a unique
understanding, “Back the hell off. You can never feel what I feel.”
I’m not so narrow-minded.
Nevertheless, I have been searching the hell out of this planet for someone who understands what it’s like to be me, and
I don’t know you, Reader, and what facets of the storm that some people call Jesse Arost you can see, what hidden radar antennae,
what meteorological survey equipment, what satellites you bring to bear, but—and now, maybe I am a fool—
but I am not convinced you understand.
Is humanity so flawed? The essence of SDS92 politics is how evil human beings are. Or rather, that there’s a class of human beings which
is irretrievably wicked. That’s why I fucking hate leftism. I’m so surrounded by it that there’s no mocking it. We make fun when the traditional, right-wing puritans call us hedons evil, that’s a given. But then, you fuckers don’t realize how fucking narrow-minded you’re being
when you call them evil. We’re all fucking amazing, we’re all fucking roman candles. Stop
forming barriers. You are not different from a Jew, from an AIDS patient, from a rape victim, from the smartest and the dumbest
person in the world. We are not
different from the blind or the deaf, from the ones without tongues, from eunuchs, from athletes, from heroin addicts, from skydivers and CEOs and George fucking
Bush. I don’t want your fucking irony: he is a human being and I would comfort him if he was dying in front of me. Don’t say you
wouldn’t do the same. Where is your
fucking earnesty?
I’ve had it. I’m tired of irony eating everything I love. Stop making .. no, keep joking, but stop eating your jokes. I would say that we’re all
bright children of God if I believed in him, but don’t you understand what makes Sartre so compelling?
He said that we all get to do whatever we want, and to love as we would like to love. I am not ashamed that I told 19 people that I
wanted them.. I meant it, God damn it,
and any one of those 19 wants could have been something life-shattering, holy and unbelievable.
I don’t dismiss any of you. Even if you are from Umatilla, I welcome you in embrace.
Have you wondered whether ‘tis nobler to be a mystic than a businessman? Is it really? Then why aren’t you a mystic? Why are going to
end up in an office?
I’ve never shot up heroin and odds are, neither have you, but have you wondered if maybe it’s better to be a heroin addict than it is
to go to college?
No, we are held back by nothing more than so banal a thing than irony. Irony is eating our fucking lives. I’m not saying we need to
be traditional farmers. Fuck that,
hell no. Shoot the heroin, if you’re curious. Give yourself an STD if you must. Cut your skin, get an eating disorder,
but then also, don’t lord that shit over the rest of us. You are not better because you are alone. I am not. I think we are all fucking
dynamite. Understand that archetypes aren’t words on a page, they’re the monsters that haunt our dreams, they’re the fuzzy shapes
on the back of our eyelids, they’re the
claws that twist the knife into your chest when you see someone you loved with
someone else. I’m tired of being laughed at for being sincere, for being eccentric, for being obscure. I have been following the fuck
out of a path I believed in the hell out of for years
and years. I can’t remember where I was, but I sure as hell know where I’m going.
Please understand, or get out of the way.
92
Students for a Democratic Society, a leftist and often anarchist organization that exists on many campuses.
94
The Dagger
I have the dagger upon my palm.
His heft pulls mightier than the gun’s.
But tingle does my finger not.
No psychopath, no taken shot.
But burneth doth my cardiac.
Adrenos93 makes my grasp alack.
I feel my bones be sharpened blades.
Which Hegel’s God94 would sheathe and fade.
And creepeth doth his mustard gas.
And sweetened smoke to heal my crass.
And fingertips, and glossened lips.
I’ve lips, I’ve smoke, I’ve curdled fist,
Set Plato’s cave95 to holocaust,
I’ve fed doubt’s flames with full agnost.
So Holy, true, thy Joyous gait,
but fully holy joy with hate.
◆
[Editor's note: the following entries (through the end of June 2006) are from files I discovered shortly before finishing this work. They are
mostly pieces I had intended to finish, but never did. I couldn't ascertain the dates of all of them, but as they appear to have been mostly
created in June 2006, I am placing them all here.]
Maybe if celebrities could just explain to us what it’s like, they could save us all.
The world wit’s flash hits pupils ours
like Times Square’s flaming sword.
What would you think? Our pupils shrink;
our attention span is gored.
How go, how show
from wombs to wounds final
these worm-bitten holes through time’s soil?
Being half a love,
summoning the person from The World whom one would love,
by being that which she would love, thus setting a course
wherein, at the moment both are perfect for one another,
they meet.
Dear dream girl:
◆
◆
◆
◆
I am writing this to you, but there is something exhibitionistic in me. I am sorry, he will be here until you personally show up to tell him
to go away.
Dear dream girl:
You were there when my family was not. You were the only good thing that happened to me for years, and I am so grateful. Dear dream
girl: The idea that you will show up any minute and understand everything there is to understand about me is one of the only things
keeping me going. Dear dream girl: There is no one so nearly as smart as you except in the world's finest philosophers and writers, and
they have nowhere near your interest in me. Dear dream girl, I cannot understand why you would fall in love with a weirdo like me, but
dream girl, you redeem me.
Dear dream girl, there are some people who would say I am replacing Christ with you, but dream girl: I think they are using Christ because they're not willing to admit to themselves that they just want a dream girl, too. Dear dream girl: You are the only person I feel as
comfortable with as when I am alone. Dear dream girl: I have never had to wonder what you really thought because you were always up
front about it.
Dear dream girl: You remind me of everything I've ever left behind in life because I thought it was fruitless. I realize now that you were
following me with a basket and a cautious eye. Here you are with a bouquet of past loves and the body of my current.
Dear dream girl: I am tired of not being honest because there is no one who knows what I mean. Dear dream girl: I have made fun of
myself because I did not believe that you were real.
93
Adrenos is an invented god, the god of adrenaline and its effects.
94
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher. Among his theories was the notion of history as progressive, passing through many stages of conflict, fated to grow ever broader in understanding.
95
Plato’s Parable of the Cave is a metaphor he used to describe human apprehension of reality. The metaphor is of seeing shadow
figures cast by firelight onto a cave wall, and the mistaking of the shadows for actual objects.
95
Dear dream girl: When I think about the woes of the universe and do not reach a conclusion, neither will you, and we will-not trying to
up- or down- or out-argue each other-just nod our heads at the irreduceably complex universe and lean against the aporic walls of the
cosmos, sweaty and panting, fingers holding fingers.
Dear dream girl: All my life, I have imagined you. You were superreal, more real than the truth. I would know you from the first time I
saw you. When I laughed too loudly, you would laugh, too, and suffer the consequences with me. When I felt ennui, you would roll over
with me, tongue lolling nihilistically until we both shrieked amusement unexpectedly loudly that the universe was as silly as it was, and
that we were as silly as we were.
Ancestors too dead for me to have known them,
I know,
will shout down the conjugal cable
about how rarely my hands are dirty
how I have never wielded the sickle or
the plough or put brick with serious intention
upon brick.
◆
They worked hard hard to crawl down to
easy Florida, where I was born.
“You write away messages so solemnly as we write our tombstones.
Use the weirding way you call a cell phone to call your mother sometime.”
◆
We sacrifice the glowing interpersonal relationships and lightshow luminus of electronic blockbusters for snowy, deadly self-knowledge.
they say i'm the movement
they're replacing, spacing is key
in things like these,
feel it empathy entropy,
excellent parity
your songs are all rusted,
eloped with the dust
◆
you feel your words are all repeats
like they've swapped your records with winamp;
they have and it's worse than you thought,
they bought everything you dreamed of
and now it's making them money,
now your horrible monsters
are on the stock market
trading down ten points today
it's a disaster of the soul
and now my dreams are interrupted
i've taken caffeine
things are getting desperate
because this stacked hate of command
is making me blanch under pressure
i'm not fit, i'm not fit, i'm not fit
but even my passion's a feign, an excuse,
just let me sleep, let me want again, oh god, let me want.
and god, stay away from me,
i don't want you coming around these parts
ever again.
in a small town, with small dirt roads
and broken redneck bottle glass cigarette butts on the highways
prisoners orange and working off their grand theft
i'm pissed off because we hear the nation
through televisions
but it's a one-way portal
we get their celebrity bullshit,
they get
me
to tell you that there was a tiny town
full of idiots
and i was born
for somewhere else
i can't be redeemed
i can't be redeemed.
96
here's the problem
you want me to write about my toilet
and the ahhh it makes when it flushes
or the way it breathes in the middle of the night
you say, don't pay attention to the cosmic,
i want the right here right now give me the toilet
give me the blush of the toilet oh god yes it's sighing with passion
i have loved it i have used it, i have sat on it
but that toilet i don't give a fuck about that toilet
they've got it all wrong, the teens and their celebrity aspirations
don't be beloved because then you will be mocked
but you can't mock hitler for genocide;
he got away with it, he did what he wanted;
the response to you is unanimous,
loathing, fear, horror,
but at least you escape the killing blade of irony
irony the putrefier,
irony that infects my mind and makes all concepts old and trite
irony that makes me jaded with the bumps on the bathroom wall;
abandon irony, it's an illusion as pure as any fiction
the only truth is the coffee cup, the unspoken hugs between you and the pillow
let me now hug the pillow
there are no sidewalks in Cartha.
i miss being a boy
i miss the lawn of my childhood where,
too slowly mowed, the grass grew and i could sit in a polky premise for an afternoon quest
every day in the summer
alone and creating the world for myself
ants for whom i built spires of mud
with the waterhose i attacked fireant mounds day after day
i learned once that if you mix sugar with ant poison
and dump it on a hive
every day
for a week
they'll die out.
i learned that frogs will dry out and die if you keep them indoors
i learned that if you don't love a cat enough,
he will hunt by the lake
and a water mocassin will kill him.
i learned that when we are alone
is when we are most brilliant
i learned that the details of the human soul
are there, they're right there
except when we have three hundred voices a day in our ear
hundreds of lines of linear algebra
sartre, camus, nietzsche,
irony, agony,
fiction, indie hipster culture,
when you have the lord himself on LSD telling you what to do,
when you have a bulgarian poorly insulting you,
when you ware trying to figure out how will i finish this before the deadline
when they want you to be here and there and this and that and your parents
and the I R fucking S
and del.icio.us and the entire fucking screaming electron internet universe
that's roaring its face off at you 24 hours a day and there you sit
in a leather chair, naked at 4 am and you're its fucking slave
and there you are and you thought yourself capable of being a god
but now you are a fucking graphomaniac
reduced to nothing but saying this is who i am, these are the generalities of my life,
i don't have a personality anymore god damn you,
i have these fucking facts you want into my head,
you want me to generalize the whole fucking thing
so that who can understand it?
the hegelian godhead emerging in the world?
the zeitgeist? fuck that, get away from me,
i need to roll in the grass, i need the hills,
97
i need to love and i need to put my face on a girl's stomach,
one who respects me, one who i respect and that is so key
because irony eats who you love, it eats them because they're not clever enough
they're not good enough for this devouring beast inside of you,
it wants everyone around you to get every little stupid reference you could make
it wants .. it can't conceive of ignorance
July 2006
So here’s the alter ego I’m creating:
Steel soles that clank clonk. Throat like a radio, song like static. Wings of the grigori96. Skin painted like a Pollock. LED eyes. Wired
up brighter than Tokyo.
Mind like a cropduster full of LSD.
◆
I am going to invent a new word.
Last night, I was waiting for 45 minutes to leave a parking garage after fireworks. The license plate in front of me had the letters
C-U-X in it. “Cux” is not a word.
Yet.
But—I’ve long lamented that all the good monosyllabic root-sounds are dead. I’m sure that somewhere, in some language family,
“cux”, pronounced “kuhks”, means something. But not in English and not in the modern world. So I am going to define it.
cux
[kuhks]
n.
1. the sum of all information currently stored in all human beings or human artifacts
This is about, you’ve gotten too far to be a poet.
This is, you’re a theorist. It’s over. You’re focused
on the marginalia. You think you can separate yourself
in the annals of history by knowing more
diverse shit than anyone.
◆
This is, you are too wide. This is, a poet is nothing but his
audience. This is, you must be more narrow.
Calling all intellectual jackoffs: understanding Jesse means
knowing that he is one thousand cross-references—and lust.
This is, you spent all your skill points on Self and none on expertise.97
“Oh, I will just Self my way to the telos.”
So it goes.
The world is still illuminated,
and I am not dead
yet.
This is me categorizing instead of living. This is
me asking instead of kissing.
The Surface
A dragonfly lights on the red stained glass.
The movement in the pews and the precious light falling
on the congregation reach his compound eye and shatter.
The preacher’s daughter bows her head.
Through her eyelashes, an angel is liberated from the altar,
its wings carved from the marble of her eyes.
The blurred edges of her father
and the printed flowers on her white dress
border, on the lenses of her eyeglasses, the hymnal.
An insect has crawled onto the rhythmic writ,
so she will not turn the page. She watches a moth
batter itself on the lights above.
96
The Grigori are a class of angels described in Biblical apocrypha. “Grigori” is Greek for “Watchers,” for the Grigori were dispatched to earth to watch over mankind.
97
In many role-playing video games, one has the option of allocating points to increase various attributes, such as strength, agility,
constitution, intelligence, etc. In Asheron’s Call, one of the attributes was Self, which determined one’s ability to use magic.
98
On the page, the creature has vanished.
It looked like a fly, she remembers,
paused on a diner’s menu
flaring its wings
at five o’clock that morning.
Through the murmur of prayer, she almost hears
the clatter of pans in an oven
and the voice of the boy who sat across from her,
“The menu is not the meal.”
She returns to that table after the service and orders the same muffin;
but, at one o’clock, it tastes no more like God
than might the hymnal taste like insect wings.
Gradually they wrote more and more perfect accounts.
In 2100, the Great Work Completed. Watch 12 movies,
read 12 novels, hear 12 albums. There is the range
of Human possibility. Now you know.
Now swallow the soma and sleep
generation after generation
forever and future,
amen.
◆
forever and fever, amen.
Away Message #73
In boredom, we are creating.
In passion, absorbing.
We cannot escape Hegel.
◆
Psychedelics rush us toward God. That is why they are banned.
The puritans know better than we thought.
Slow down. Enjoy the foreplay.
The orgasm will come soon enough.
The courtship from Big Bang to first brain is so, so long.
Like lovers’ nails down my back.
A dew of hail lights on his blackened wings.
“A storm of icy meteors,” he sings,
“Fall below and deck the filthy earth.”
“Knock low the beggars, kill the weak,” cries he.
The sunlight strikes his raised wingspan first,
And fiery wheels his wings appear to be.
From swamps in prehistoric did he rot,
Blackened and impresséd he was wrought
And history, now, he comes to wring from Him,
“Let all lights focus! End!” his battle hymn.
Away Message #567
A grown man will grovel,
will hari-kari his self-respect,
to fuck and pretend
love is a substance
and not a parade.
◆
◆
I wondered if maybe the Jews didn’t figure it out years ago. There must be an Us and a Them, so they made being Us as simple as having
someone as your mother—and not only that, but you can voluntarily join. Doesn’t that mean eventually everyone will be Jewish? That
would seem to be the solution: the affirmations of Us-ship without the hate towards a Them.
“My name is Shmears. Walter Shmears98.”
“Mr. Shmears, are you a Jew?”
“Yes sir, I am a Jew.”
Away Message #995
98
This is a pun. The man’s name is Walt Schmears, a play on German “weltschmerz,” or world-pain. The term is used to describe
the pain of understanding that physical reality will never satisfy the desires of the mind.
99
◆
I am suddenly very amused by the notion of a person who supports stem-cell research, but doesn’t eat eggs.
◆
The more Nietzsche I read and references to him I catch, the more he seems the vortex of my world. The two most satisfying poles of
existence for me have been the pantheistic and the egotheistic. The journey between them is fraught with great travail, as a long planting
season; but, upon arriving at either pole, I reap.
Me: if i had a notepad.exe in my brain
Me: my lord.
◆
◆
High, slightly paranoid, I wonder if some illuminatus has noticed me and inserted someone into my social circle, someone who will maneuver me into a trap to catch me before I get out of hand.
This is all very egotistical, but do try to hold down your disgust.
Paranoia is the belief that one’s mind is greater than it truly is.
Away Message #870
◆
In my intellectual side I feel the glowing core of my personality. It feels warm like my father’s voice.
◆
We may be so complex that we can’t understand what makes us exactly what we are. This alone is enough to permit everyone to be as
magically and perfectly individual as they have always thought themselves.
But: we do have causes. There is a reason and a fact for every “choice”.
The viper of dualism99 is wounded and bleeding.
◆
Me: i like to think i walk the line between artifice and nature.
Me: an ever-shifting line.
Me: it’s popular to deride artifice these days and advocate back-to-nature..
Me: a lot of people are all, fuck your rationalism and your experimentation. smash the skyscrapers.
Me: but they would die in nature and so would i.
Me: and they use the Internet to communicate this message.
Me: i probably err too much on the side of artifice, but only because i feel like without me, it has no more supporters.
Friend: define ‘artifice’ for me
Me: aspartame.
Friend: hot damn, use splenda
Me: haha
Me: i do.
Me: i even have a facebook group,
Me: ‘don’t fuck with splenda’
Me: like, it’s just long and strange
Me: and overwhelmingly philosophical, for me
Me: and these days i hate the philosophical trip
Me: i’m like fuck this shit, how does it apply to me?
Me: and the philosophical shit recedes
Friend: Hahaha
Friend: You tell it
Me: i do
Me: it’s basically god
Me: the motherfucker
Friend: Hahaha
Me: i’m like i have had it up to here
Me: with your shit
Me: get out of my grill
Me: , Lord.
Aspartame über alles100
I have seen fools take tapioca
for vanilla.
I have known men who drink
themselves mad, then travel
to the toilet to purge poison, then tell me
it is somehow healthy because it
99
Dualism is the philosophical contention that there are two modes of existence: that of the physical and that of the mind.
100
This is a pun on the phrase “Deutschland über alles,” German for “Germany above all.” The phrase is from a German national
anthem written in 1841.
100
is natural. A heaping harvest of country
wisdom says if it meandered
to us on lumpy natural legs, we should see
it through to its lumpy end; that the mockingbird
beats Mozart; that man only copies
and can never surpass the swamps of our beginning.
Well, maybe they missed
it when we drove Death off his own land,
when we took the atmosphere
and passed it, when we gazed on
our own planet from the moon
and sought oases in the red deserts
on another.
I have heard them say it is better to bow
to blind paramecium gods than to the broken
vine up which we climbed the Tree
of Knowledge, and out onto its branches.
Let them bow, but we will gather sticks,
for faith makes poor firewood.
◆
sclack
[sklahk]
v. intr.
1. to come into being, usually abruptly or inexplicably
I would like to think that “sclack” is onomatopoeia.
Osama bin Laden will be as remembered as Gavrilo Princip.101
◆
◆
I am not a true intellectual because I drink cheap beer and am good at Halo. Alternatively, you might argue that Halo is basically falconry
for demographic comprised entirely of kings.
◆
Today, I walked out of E20 for the last time. My bird was in my shirt and I was carrying a bag with cheese, ice cream, eggs, and margarine
with me. When I got in the car, Bright Eyes’ “You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will.” was playing.
As the song contains the line “You will return to me,” I was like, “Fuck this shit” and changed it to “Method Acting.” While I drove,
lightning lit up the sky ahead of me.
A bookshelf sinks into the sand.
I must have around 200 books, and my apartment was a library of sorts. They’re all in boxes, now.
I’ve sat too long in my silence.
Living there, I spent long periods of time alone at my computer.
So thank you friends for the time we shared,
my love stays with you like sunlight and air.
Oh, I truly wish I could keep hanging around here.
My joy is covering me.
Soon, I will disappear.
For me, The Boardwalk was Umatilla. I lived with people from Umatilla right to the end. Now I am gone. My bird is stowed in my friend’s
small room. My possessions are piled to the ceiling.
I am more tired than I’ve been in years.
And the story goes, and the story goes, and it goes
On and on and on and on..
A glock! A clock! A worm! A bird!
A storm! A word! A lock! A nerd!
Away Message #254
◆
Twenty men with pistols and drugs can turn anyone into anyone else.
◆
101
Gavrilo Princip (1894-1914) was a Yugoslav nationalist who assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, starting a
chain of events which led to World War I.
101
There are millions of policemen.
No one is free until we are all free. If you would bind your brother’s hands from the crack pipe, you are not free.
I am not sure that humanity will ever be free. Freedom is not the default state. Freedom means that we silence the adrenal monster
that kills for sport those whom it has never met. The greatest sin, now, is incompassion. The greatest virtue, now, is Keats’ negative capability102, is agnosticism.
Fences are for cattle, not human beings. And, one day, not even for cattle.
August 2006
If everyone in America who
— smokes pot,
— would smoke pot if it were legal
or
— would simply like pot to be legal
went out in public at the same time on the same day, en masse in all cities, and held or smoked marijuana, it would become legal. Almost
immediately. Doctors, scientists, lawyers, politicians, policemen, students, mothers, fathers, Americans. This society could not function
with all of these people in jail.
It would be over within a month.
Call it Pot Day and let’s set the date for December 21, 2012.
I’ll see you there. (This assuming it’s not legal before then.)
◆
My problem with the notion of the psychic or telepathic is that it requires events that are—as far as I can tell—physically impossible. That
there is some constantly-updating collective unconsciousness, I doubt.
But what if there’s something about the physical nature of consciousness in the universe, the laws of consciousness, that puts us all
in touch with the same thing anyway? What if joy is, in fact, not a chemical coincidence but as thoroughly intrinsic as gravity?
He said he was psychic,
so I bit him with the Zener cards103.
Away Message #624
◆
Sometimes I wonder if I don’t need a pep talk from my younger self. I realize that he had luxuries I have not.
as the albatross that settles
from its flight from istanbul
to sleep in constantinople.
Away Message #593
if i have flown, it is because
the winds are high and i am light.
◆
◆
I imagine an underground military force that breaks its way to the inner sanctum of totalitarian (and therefore sexually conservative)
dictators and holds them down and gives them handjobs.
Assume that, as throughout most of history, both the terrorists and the dictators are males.
◆
What if there was something that made you infinitely happy for a single instant—and then killed you?
◆
I am founding a secret society. Ask for an interview with me if you’d like to join. Any Texan Illuminati reading this are encouraged to
defect—or perish.
◆
[Editor’s note: the following are extracts from notes made in an altered state.]
Polymonia? (vs. “monopoly”)
I feel the Bible’s iron rule over every American’s psychedelic existence, but its rule is not absolute. As other books are written, they gain a
share of the fundamentalism, balkanizing society into thousands of literary allegiances.
Pearls are clam turds.
102
John Keats (1795-1821) was an English poet. His conception of negative capability was the capacity, critical in art, to fully imagine the experiences of another.
103
Zener cards are a tool used in research into psychic abilities. They are a deck of cards, each with one of five different symbols.
The psychic powers of the testee are measured by their ability to know which of the five symbols is on a card.
102
The ababnysmal think pony
The touch of hammock.
The oak poop.
“You are a wastrel, boy.
You cracked out on going out into logospace and making uninvented words. Worthless, irrelevant, and an unspecialized hack afraid
of his own potential and capacity, running through Buddhist hiding-behind-the-veil-of-all drifty, wishy-wassense. Take hold of your
freedom, boy, and devote it. Don’t hyperbolster your ego with one-in-a-million messiah genius, big fish-small pond bullshit. Give in to a
terrible, frightful purpose.”
“But how, my Lord?”
“Give up this city-on-a-hill, Tree of God nonsense. You will be brought low because you love what is carnal too much. Nice try.
Better luck next life.”
“Says you. A holy fool104 is still a fool and others will prophet by him.”
What you ask with the whole of your existence, God answers with the whole of your existence.
104
Holy fools are wandering proselytizers for Christianity who employ unusual, often shocking techniques to understand and
preach the word of God.
103
Chapter 6
The Word Was God
September 2006
Your homework assignment: Create a mockumentary, script (play or cinema), novella, painting, poem, non-fiction essay, or other creative work about what would happen if Gainesville were crop-dusted with LSD dissolved in DMSO* several times over a period of 48
hours. Feel free to add in things like additional airdrops of painting supplies, strobe lights and batteries, drums, bicycles, etc. Consider
starting the dusting on a Monday morning.
*DMSO (Dimethyl sulfoxide) dissolves virtually any chemical and, on contact with the skin, quickly delivers it into the bloodstream.
◆
Everyone is specialized, poring over some tiny facet. We are combing Dante’s eyebrows.
◆
The world is a better place every time you suffer a blow, understand it fully, and do not pass it on. That’s what I mean by eating sin or
karma.
Friend: jesse are you in love?!
Me: haha, no
Friend: are you sure about that? lol
Me: i’m practicing
◆
Romance is a kind of magnanimity of imagination.
Away Message #863
◆
In a fever equidistant from my mind and the Truth, I lied in a bed and listened to Radiohead. I misheard one of the lines. The real line is
inconsequential because the line I heard is flabbergasting:
“Are you such a dreamer as to put the world to rise?”
Imp:105
The milky pus of childhood
dried and hardened in every hard horizon
when each, watched on the road,
distanced great-grandpa Adam’s
past his own great-grandfather’s, but
whose ignorant lines encorner the
hot hallways of a kiln whose ash
dirties the skin and doesn’t wash off
and with graceless heat
drinks blood and cum and
so making fabric from, by, and into
green, hairy tissue,
clothing cheesy golems getting issued
into these mouths tasting tonguing
tonguing tasting.
or gasping
◆
As Jesus dripped from the cross, he called out to his father about his apparent abandonment:
“Fuck!”
105
I’ve often felt that this poem was not bad poem, but certainly incomprehensible without explanation, and so I will attempt one
here.
The title, “Imp:,” is a command, and the colon suggests that the poem be “imped.” The verb “imp” means something like “to convert
the explosivity of the ‘p’ sound into the softness and sensuality of the ‘m’ sound.” Metaphorically, the idea is one of dissolving the hard
delineations and labels which are placed on reality into a more fluid, flexible understanding.
The first stanza means something like “The warm, naïve worldview that one has as a child became rigid and unpleasant when we
began to understand that what appeared to be the first things (i.e., Adam, the first man) were false, and in fact there were many men
before Adam is supposed to have lived.”
The second stanza means something like, “Those boundaries of time and origin which have been moved are now unknowable (i.e.,
ignorant). This ignorance makes our world a hot, labyrinthine kiln which we wander, becoming hardened and jadened by unpleasant
facts (i.e. ash), and which consumes our vitality (i.e., blood and semen).”
The final stanza means something like, “The vitality which is consumed by that suffering is transformed into animate but unliving
golems (i.e., art, literature, culture, which stand outside of any person). We eat these beings and experience the experiences of others (i.e.,
we taste the tactile sensation of the tongue, and feel the texture of tasting). This experience leaves one gasping, or, if we are to imp the last
line, orgasming.”
104
His father answered him:
“Yep!”
◆
At the end of the life of every man and woman, I suspect, just to be fair, each grumbles and vows to be born as the opposite sex in the
next life.
October 2006
I don’t feel like this most of the time, but I am an ape and sometimes I dream, like a monkey, of smashing skulls.
for hate’s sake
I hope you’ve had fun
while I played piñata,
World, but now I’m all
manifestos and
adrenaline, World,
I am the chills down
my spine when I,
World,
wide-eyed,
dream of raping back
the past twenty years.
slithering like a sledgehammer.
wide eyes,
bloody mouth,
grinning
Away Message #92
◆
Human voice is a wind without which one’s wings cannot be filled. The air is still in Umatilla and I lusted for breezes. In Gainesville, I
found them. One by one, the winds have fallen on me. I am lifted from the ground and have since seen farther than I had ever before.
They have become a tempest. I am carried, now, high into the sky by winds from all directions.
Where once I steered my wings, now they steer me. I see so much, but so dimly. What matters to me any city or any war when each
is made toylike by distance? I flap toward no destination but the vacuum above. To travel any other direction is to have my wings bitten
away by hundreds of hungry gales.
i stood at last on the cold stone
of god’s home in space
but all was dark and at last
he made me choose:
the lamp or the muse,
to know or to move;
when you go back home
is it coffee or booze?
Away Message #832
◆
They sit in a class. An hour has passed as their professor, Thursby, has repeatedly tried and failed to get the projector working. He asks if
there’s anyone in the class who wants to leave as much as he does. No one moves or speaks. After a moment, Scott raises his hand. Thursby
tells him to leave, therefore.
Scott is incredulous, but Thursby stresses to him that it is acceptable, even good, if Scott wants to leave and does so. Scott gestures
to Myriam to rise, and she also does. After a moment of unbelieving stares, Thursby urges them out, and they leave with his full approval.
◆
I feel like pragmatics are replacing principles in the men who run the world. I, myself, have never had principles, but maybe I would prefer
to live in a world that did. It’s safe in the philosophy department for at least another few decades: the teacher and every other student in
my Evil class actually believe there are such things as good and evil.
they talking “evil” i looked listened
everyone everything never smelled touched never bit punched me killed anyone ever
heard of smiling crying never evil anything
someone explained “will, intention, ethics, imperative” never saw these either heard “have
faith” see without eyes never able never saw anyone see without eyes
blue fire soft hot jealous kiss only “evil” never evil
Away Message #532
105
◆
This town’s insular obsession with veganism weirds me out. Did they read even a single peer-reviewed, double-blind study to see whether
it was actually healthier? Maybe it just “feels” right. That’s enough to risk one’s health for, right?
The Complaint of Clean Air
Take a deep breath—
you paint me with pale greens;
abetted by a troupe of pale blue arrows, I star in your morality play.
Dinosaurs will pass from your children’s minds, but they will remember me.
You have betrayed asteroids and spelling bees, laid to rest
the integral calculus, and you have remembered me.
I spill over your anxieties like a night-light,
pale as warm milk.
You bow over your desk—your hands on your headache—
and plead to me like a child pleads to God,
”I-will-take-a-walk-please-take-my-pain.”
Between the skyscrapers over lunch break,
you rush as you would between gravestones at midnight
and with me in mind, you
hasten your step,
faster, you hope
than ghosts could walk,
and now you run from the cars,
exhausted, covering your mouth
to keep your soul from creeping out
and, light-headed,
twice a year,
you consume my holy body by some sanctuary
sea and repent the sin of city smoke; you ask forgiveness
for cigarettes, “I-will-take-a-vacation-please-take-my-phlegm.”
Faint,
you think that, like your vitamins, like green tea,
I am a rosary, that I am keeping count in some book
of every breath and vote,
that if you breathe me in while you’re alive,
I’ll do the same for you when you—
exhale.
◆
I love how many leftists in this town just know that all corporados are selfish, short-sighted, cruel, racist, imperialist motherfuckers.
Assuredly, lots of them are.
You know what, though? A lot of leftists are pretty culturally imperialist, too. They want to “free” people from the “tyranny” of
country music, hamburgers, bluejeans, patriotism, Christianity. These people are not the standard-bearers of futurity; they are just as
culturally reactionary as the conservatives.
The middle way is to stop telling other people they’re wrong and leave them the fuck alone unless they are actually hurting other
people; to not distrust a corporation automatically, nor let a bureaucracy decide what’s moral and what isn’t.
They are by and large good people and both need to mind their own fucking business/commune.
all the terror on the right say yeah!
all the weather on the left say what!
Away Message #650
◆
Stefan recently said that if he is ever at a loss as to an original sequence of beats to play on a hand drum, that he just hits it intentionally
arhythmically for a while—and something orderly, original, and interesting eventually occurs which he can then learn.
◆
I would like to read a book that does for Islam what the Divine Comedy does for Christianity.
◆
The Postal Service song “Natural Anthem” sounds, to me, like watching the 20th century in high speed: from a horse in the snow in rural
Pennsylvania in 1901 to that moment in 2001 when modernity fell from the sky106.
Now history’s quicker than museums,
the fastest sorrows ever wept,
106
United Flight 93, one of the hijacked planes in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
106
the thinnest snow of any time,
the blackest ink I ever wrote.
Away Message #844
◆
I support “they” becoming grammatically accepted for a gender-neutral singular pronoun. It sounds uneducated, but all new linguistic
developments do at first.
◆
Oh Mars, bleed in me.
The less honest I am, the more I am loved. The more I love, the more honest I am.
◆
Whenever I speak about measuring happiness, I am typically attacked as deluded, an idealist, a dreamer. I personally like to think of
myself as one of the most hard-nosed, pragmatic-assed people there are.
I disagree with them on behalf of the thousands of people in involved in Happiness and Well-Being research today. I suspect they
base their arguments on nothing more than fear of the quantification of the still unquantified.
I know that measuring something on the periphery of detectability is certainly difficult, but I would invite anyone who thought me
foolish for my interest in happiness research to prove their point, or shove it.
◆
for everyone i know
i’ve fallen too many times to count.
i love you.
getting back up is like breaking chains around my wrists, but i can do it.
i love you.
we are flowers to dry in the sun and fade—but flowers still.
i love you.
i’ll drink ammonia for fifty years if it makes my roots grow stronger.
i love you.
the holy dwells within us.
i love you.
our scars are beautiful.
i love you.
ash rises upward and then falls upon the whole earth.
i love you.
words are not,
not dead yet.
Rotten
Hamlet
My father stands one foot above the earth.
He’s heard, at last, the poison trickle in.
I’d like to ask him why it took so long,
and whether, now, in death, he hears at all.
I hesitate. The old man cuts me off.
The wind picks up. Hereditary silk
blows dutifully from him to tie my tongue.
My uncle swept his country off her feet
when silence made a traitor of the queen.
But did my mother notice, even then,
the sticky plot he’d strung from wall to wall?
When husbands changed in bed, did she suspect
the skein he wound around his fingertip?
What could my father, great somnambulist,
have dreamt of when he slept through regicide?
Ophelia, the princess-not-to-be,
got caught in cobwebs in my family tree;
and when the branches broke, she reached for me.
The longer that I stare, the thicker grows
the tiny lie that lifts his throne, the dust
that nightly comes in drafts beneath my door
and falls, more red than rust, around my sword.
I fell asleep listening to an audiobook on economics.
I dreamed all night about purifying gold.
◆
107
libertarian, son of a charity junkie
Away Message #876
◆
[Editor’s note: the following are extracts from notes made in an altered state.]
What specific hellumentary anniglossary fortunadamentarian
“.. halfway through the 90s, when The Eighties finally ended ..”
Squid bukkake murder.
Humbloset.
I fostered what had floundered and divided.
A pony worth of apples drank the mortar.
John thought nothing happened in Miami.
Fishers think the bearded sub is legion.
Legions surface nonsense while retreating.
Treating me to dinner was delighted.
Junk food walking, talking, being human.
Ozone wrappers chased Almighty smiling.
King Richard bit the coffers of the Second.
An Alabama road is quite inspiring.
A messenger, Romania, took to fighting.
Synaesthetes are simply God experiments.
The center of the Metaphysiverse.
The very strangeness in the human skull.
Oh, the heartbeat, o muses, singing, be thou my goodness gracious me oh my monkey-see-monkey-do me a favor ...
Thoust Decimon wrunt abrund the sunder,
Snifting every manf and klike ...
Everyone with a utopia is deluded.
Everyone without one is depressed.
Psilophager. Bring the war like you bring the rain.
Sufersater writing.
somnambulist cockroach
dreaming his head off
Away Message #776
◆
I feel a little dumb, but I just learned that the singular form of “qualia”107 is actually “quale” and not “qualium,” so now I’m trying to figure
out how to adjectivize “quale.” I think I’m just going to go with “qualic.”
◆
I said I was tired of anger. I’m not, not about this one thing: if you seriously accuse me of narcissism or egotism or overweening pride one
more motherfucking time, I’m done. I’m fucking done. I joke about it and so do other people, but my self-love is a hell of a lot different
from the arrogance of which I am often accused.
If you think that’s even the least bit untrue, you need to seriously fucking reconsider. If you feel I should like myself less, I hope the
poison you would use to dissolve my pride rots you inside.
Now that I’ve said all this, I’ll be better in a day or two and back to my happy, gently obscene self.
Thank you for reading. I love you. Goodnight.
i vow to any god that lives in me
to suffer any woe on me that’s spilt
but vow i, too, to him who wounds so free
to set ablaze and pyre him in guilt
Away Message #530
107
“Qualia” is a philosophical term used to refer to any and all experiences.
108
November 2006
“If you swear that there’s no truth and who cares, how come you say it like you’re right?”
Conor Oberst, Bright Eyes, “We Are Nowhere and It’s Now”
You can’t say, “I don’t know anything” without contradiction because this expression asserts at least one fact. Our grammar cannot create
statements whose Truth is not asserted. How, then, do you formulate a logical summary of existence if you can’t even begin by expressing
your total, total estrangedness from Truth?
I have had a “solution” in mind for a little more than five years: a symbol that does not mean anything. Indeed, for a symbol to
“mean” anything, it necessarily asserts some fact, and I do not intend anything of the sort. Rather, no one says or expresses this symbol.
We can butt up against it, but it is just as unconveyable as Unknowability itself.
To wit, imagine a grammar in which statements are simply made but do not bear an asserted truth. Anything spoken in this grammar is expressed, but not declared. One way of looking at this symbol is to say that it uses that grammar to utter the phrase “I don’t know
anything” or perhaps “I can’t know anything.”
All the same, here we are. It seems like the universe exists. I seem to mean things. Facts seem. Birds seem. Pornography and deserts
seem. This symbol is a basis in that it is no basis. It kills the illusion of Truth. I don’t know, friends—I have no fucking clue. You can’t build
on a foundation of nothingness. Everything sinks into it.
Still, whatever all this is is, is also conveyed by this symbol. Otherwise, why have a symbol at all? The presence of this symbol—
which cannot mean anything and says that it means nothing—still expresses connotationally that longing for a proof.
I had this idea way back then, and I finally drew it in class about a month ago. It has a Möbius strip, an infinity symbol, and a compass in it. I decided in the process of this post to call it the exin, after that Jabberwockyian poem I wrote a bit ago, the final line of which
was,
“O mourny, mirthy man, / you’ll exin if you can.”
◆
Every instant more bloodshot eyes open in my veins, swept up in the wake of the Leviathan of my bloodways. They scream for Jove and
love, they are walking on the wet cement of a stupid poem entitled,
”Nice try, Jesse. You’ll convey the asymptotal waterfall of culture one day. One day you will sing so loudly, with so many voices,
of Zerg108 and echthroi109, of Hegel and LSD and YHVH, that all shall be struck deaf, all shall be transmuted into an infinite erogenous
universe, every quark and second an orgasm, and manna will flood this cosmos of a poem and drown all metaphors, until all the words
awaken and travel at last into the sky to find what other authors and readers may be ...”
it never bit me harder, nor more beautifully
that words are simply fires humming stringedly
that drunk is sober crooked, but less willfully.
“that i,” god said, “eat worlds when you’re not watching me.”
Away Message #633
◆
I watched a moth batter itself on a lightbulb, singeing the dust on its wings. If this is love, all beings drawn toward The Light, I am ill. Its
memoryless, near-blind existence was ended as it burned to a stupid death.
I do not want to know how this moth fits into a theory, drawn by a false satellite. I do not want to know how humanity fits into a
theory, for ten thousand years flying into the bloody flares of the star we call Future.
I don’t want a theory with room for the Holocaust. I don’t want a theory that forgives the Inferno or the twin infernos in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. I don’t want it. It hands the word “justice” to the mothers of charred infants. It tapes “destiny” to the severed heads of reporters and kicks them toward the camera.
◆
I imagine a smirking Homer-in-the-desert thinking, this will get ‘em, and he makes up this crazy shit about how the sky is a really, really
big man.
◆
It’s about time someone inducted coding’s commentary syntax, //, into literature, because certainly the elderly ()s and —s need some
youthful company.
For GS110:
Oh a poet sits coding a po’m just like a programmer do’m.
Away Message #824
◆
But if a poet wants but power, admit that no one desires anything other, if only power over himself, because admit that every person is
but an anthology.
Just as Dante holied the muses into six-winged angels, as Clearchannel roams, a fat, consoling courier-queen on the suburbs’ side108
Zerg are a playable race in StarCraft. They are eusocial, meaning that, like ants, all individuals are collectively directed by a singular, more intellligent being. Where the other races construct buildings from matter, all Zerg buildings are organic.
109
“Echthroi,” a Greek word meaning “Enemies” was a term used by Madeline L’Engle (1918-2007) in her novels for young adults,
the best known of which was A Wrinkle in Time. In her writing, echthroi are beings that embody nothingness and meaninglessness.
110
Grooveshark, a Gainesville-based web startup.
109
walks, I call to myself a prodigal, libertine muse to clasp the fedora firmly on my brain and hold the fevered heat therein to boil.
I’m up and I’m burning
one thousand times brighter
in iambic meter,
a nuke for a lighter.
Away Message #57
◆
I - Cold
Once, in the thralls of pubescent emotional pain, I wished I couldn’t love. It was too painful to desperately want, and to never receive. It
feels like I got my wish, now. I have no crushes; no one excites me like new girls used to. I’m happy, but it would be dishonest of me to
suggest that I wouldn’t give up most of the things in my life for lasting romance.
II - Lukewarm
I have been busy. There is an arms race between my intellectualism and my romantic desires. On one hand, I want to send signals out
to attract—let’s just say—literary girls, and I do this by being increasingly literarily productive. On the other, every gain puts me out of
more and more leagues. You can call this conceit. Maybe it is, but I can’t not feel like “Oh, she hasn’t even read suchandsuch?” Every gain
I make in character, I lose in universality.
III - Burning
It’s not that I haven’t had girls express interest. It’s just, I am so much more than whatever charming utterances I may have made. I am
a flood of width. It’s not to say that I am the sum of my interests, but—in a relationship, everything that matters to a girl matters to me,
because it matters to her. I honestly have never felt that that was reciprocated. I am what I am through my interests. I am my passion.
(Untitled)
I said I’d kill you long before
you stumbled into me,
but I was wrong, so let’s just all
get on, get over me:
This is the way: say,
You didn’t sell the world, you sold your childhood.
I say,
I am the peace, I am the lighter, I am the slumdog
stumbling past, I am the song you sing—
give it to me.
And this is easy, this is me
believing this is me,
I’m saying,
Do not just let me let you leave me here.
So say,
You have never been here. You have never been anywhere.
I say,
Where is my was, where can I be?
My face is a soliloquy,
I love all that which cannot be,
and love that you can not be with me, too.
And this is fast, be quick, alack,
and bring a diamond
down on me.
You must be like a bit, now: say,
I am the most important thing in the world, and you will be a corpse one day.
And I will say,
Please tell me how you will be mine,
and help me haul the emeralds from the clay.
So say,
I shall die as well. Just come be quick with me.
[Editor’s note: I have preserved this entry exactly as it was written.]
◆
I was in class today and had an idea that amused me, but I think it may amuse me more than it does anyone else.
110
the jizzrag of posterity
I giggle, now, scraping
my dirty fingernails in the drying paint
of modernity’s masterpieces.
I taunt, now, my repenting future.
I heckle from the galley of bad metaphor
the sinking castration into the sea of abstraction,
this garish poemlette’s obscurity.
I’m hungry. I am just plain amused
that this poem isn’t even bad enough
to remember. And, of course,
of course!
of course, your, the Reader’s embarrassment
for me, even if I am now engraved dirt.
BullShit MotherFucker ButtSex Forever.
kaplow!
How does anyone dance beneath the chains of reputation?
Away Message #664
◆
I feel the tremendous distance I traveled today. It’s only 150 miles or so, but soon everyone I care about will scatter from Gainesville to
much greater distances. I feel decades, out here.
I feel the opportunity cost of the entire universe. I feel I must write. It is not a desire for acclaim or for the power of a talented poet,
but simple, desperate graphomania. I feel I must record my soul, must scratch it on reality before I die.
◆
“When we were 28, I bought a house and a lot of land in Nebraska on the endless rolling prairie. It was late May and summer had come
early. The clouds were enormous and white, the sky a chilled blue. I had planted a field of sunflowers and all kinds of flowers, red and
yellow and purple against white clouds.
They were in bloom. I put our bed in the truck and we drove out there, the only people in hundreds of square miles. I made the bed
and we got in it. She was so, so beautiful, the sun on her every freckle, on her lips, glittering in her eyes.
The breezes blew and the flowers swayed for miles off into the horizon. She took off her dress.”
◆
[Editor’s note: The following are extracts from notes made in an altered state.]
(red) read “House of Leaves”—read(ing)?
(blue) house of Leaves—bleed(ing)?111
Psychedelic drugs are Options menus to players in Godmode112 in a game whose confines are our whole universe.
“I need more Star Power!”
“Don’t we all.”
“[______] has many more midichlorians than us.”
“Midicholorians113?”
“Force mitochondria.”
Snaketopus!
“[______]! I’m going to be the world’s clown,
and you’re going to be my clown,
and God will be your clown.”
buffaloingly baffling
A womb is the perfect scratch to all marijuana itches (hunger, physical, urinary).
Being high and listening to vitalic
makes it easy to agree when
Nietzsche said music precedes
all ideas.
111
This is a guess at the meaning of the fact that any time the word “house” appears in House of Leaves, it is in blue text.
112
Godmode is a feature in many video games, usually accessed with a cheat code, which allows the player a far greater control
over the functionality of the game (e.g., to be able to fly, to increase health, to make ammunition unlimited, or even to create objects and
transform the environment.)
113
As the conversation suggests, midichlorians are a microorganism in the Star Wars universe that allow those whom they inhabit
to access and control the Force.
111
◆
There is such an incredible energy in America: so many ardorous, clear-eyed libertines checked by so many fervent, ghost-eyed paranoiacs.
December 2006
The reason I like psychedelic drugs is this:
The way they so casually parade your identities and whims in front of you makes you doubt they are any more a part of you than
your clothing is a part of your skin. You see that anyone can dress in any culture, but each person can only have one ... soul, you might call
it. Your soul cannot be passionately for any ideology or any cause. The soul is selfish. It cannot see beyond the edges of its eyes.
This is why I am lonely. I struggle to be naked and to get others to undress so I can see them—see them as they are, not as the clothes
they have inherited.
Culture evolved because it gave us ropes to leave behind us through the labyrinth of Creation. It helped us find our ways through
the jungles of Being. But now, in the cities, we have harvested every plant and great labyrinthine billows of fabric keep us from ever seeing
each other. It is beautiful—we are all unwitting artists.
But it is terrifying. I don’t know if I will ever see another human being again.
“Let,” I let out, “the letting let out;
it’s too easy,” I say, “to let out a quick shout.
Let us not let ‘let’ be, till ‘let’ lets itself out,
for each letter, I let, has got enough clout.”
◆
I.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a small village where, all year long, beautiful flowers sprung up along the banks of the
river. The flowers released lovely pollen that twinkled as it floated through the air. It coated everything in the village and dissolved into
dust, leaving only a dappled sheen.
As the boy got older, the pollen seemed to grow thicker, too. One day, by the riverbank, he noticed a powdery thumbprint on a
petal: the flowers that he thought were wild were, in truth, cultivated. He would learn this was done so that more of the beautiful pollen
would float into town.
The boy took to going down to watch the flowers bend in the wind and the river pass. The expert gardeners who tended the flowers
were very quick, and he had never yet caught one, but he came to know each gardener’s handiwork by the unique patterns the flowers
grew into.
Often people in town would talk of the kingdom, and, over several years of eavesdropping, the boy learned that there were many
villages all over the land—some very big and strange. They all had their own branch of the river and their own gardens on its banks. The
cities had tremendous gardens and the pollen flew up from them to float down upon almost every village on earth.
As the boy became a young man, he learned to recognize different varieties of pollen. He knew at a glance which came from his
own village, which from the trading town nearby, and which from those immense cities he’d heard of. Every day, the air and the things he
touched grew brighter and brighter, and he began his training in the gardens. Soon, everyone in his village was impressed by his deftness
with the flowers.
He noticed, though, that the pollen was not always good or beautiful. Sometimes, someone’s head would hurt or their stomach
would get upset after a strong breeze. Other times, so much pollen would gather in a neighbor’s house that certain rooms would be too
bright to see in.
II.
After a time, he bid his family farewell and left to pursue the art in a green city built on a floodplain. Young men and women just like him
filled the town to learn flowercraft. Though there are thousands of flowers in every hue and shape, some tiny and some heavy, each young
person had to pick just a few flowers to learn about.
One day, a master gardener was holding a petal before the boy, pointing out a barely-visible crease. Suddenly he understood how
everything, the entire bloom, depended on that crease. How precise they were, and how demanding!
The boy was troubled, as, from time to time, every young gardener was, that they learned not simply to admire flowers, but also to
grow them. How different the two were. He had not come to pull petal from petal, taking notes and endless samples. He simply loved each
bloom and could not think of anything more extraordinary in all the world.
Rarely but regularly he would have spells that lasted a day when he grew sick and his vision would deteriorate. He would carry on,
though, planting and uprooting flowers, smelling pollen samples taken centuries ago.
III.
Now it is almost winter. The flowers do not grow particularly well in his green town when it gets cold, and the young gardeners prepare
to return to their native homes. It is the middle of the night and the young man is sick to his stomach. He was in the garden all day and
plans to return at dawn. It is night, and still all is very bright inside his room. He cannot see a thing, save one flower: a private arrangement
whose stems he is carefully twisting into place.
He is finished. He washes the soil from his hands and prepares to sleep.
i was enamoured with phrases
until she said you know that
broken glass that’s in everyone
it’s in you, too.
Away Message #724
112
◆
My name was also given to the father of David, and by the time that ancestry had been traced, I knew that that is the kind of celebrity I
want. I want to be the roots, the sine qua non. I don’t need to reach the icy distance-markers that rocket-fundamentalist Newton did, to
scrape my signature onto the firmament. I would rather be the soil, close as the teeth in your mouth.
I want my soul to be as familiar to the future as it is to me. I want to be a myth which will inform two millenia of literature, which
literature will be the sidewalks of all human existence.
On Reading The Comedy
I lived in a small enough town and was alone often enough.
As a boy, I felt the past like the fingers on my hand.
I knew Aristotle was a bad scientist.
I knew he believed in the four elements and in God.
I lifted my precociousness like an umbrella.
I sat at my computer damp with loneliness.
I know this: Storms of fire rain on the sodomites in Hell.
Ulysses is engulfed in flames.
There is a permanent rose at the center of the universe.
Twenty-five Paradisos sat open on twenty-five desks.
Dante spoke, then, with a professor’s Italian.
He said that to look directly on God
is like having every truth inscribed on your bones,
like drowning in the Lethe114 and then surfacing from the womb.
When I was nine, a girl with my mother’s name
bumped into me between rows of desks.
The point of my pencil broke off inside my palm.
No inky thumbprint in the margins of the Comedy,
no passionate bruise I have left on a pale neck,
no “Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare”115
proves more true than the small, gray period
beneath my smallest finger.
◆
I learn more things that are supposed to be embarrassing about my mom and dad as time goes on. They let them slip about each other in
an effort to hurt the other.
I’m not embarrassed by the sins of my parents, but they are.
like my skin can bandage anyone else,
like my soul can solve others’ sins,
like i don’t already fight like hell for what little pride i have.
Away Message #553
◆
I have to keep improving myself. I’m not sure where it’s all going or why I seem to think it would matter that my obituary is an extra two
lines long. I just want to matter, though. I want it to break the world’s heart when I die.
◆
I’m a little lonely and I am not ashamed to admit it. I wonder why more people aren’t willing to talk about themselves, but I suspect that
that’s just a particular hang-up of my generation’s culture.
We’re all supposed to be coy, even the boys. To talk about ourselves is to air our flaws. God forbid we let strangers know that we
might not be perfect.
they believe the world
a world of sin
and themselves
the creatures of it.
Away Message #62
◆
I was awed by six-story buildings until I was sixteen or so. I did gawk when I first arrived in Miami, awed that so much earth could be
stacked on itself, up and up.
◆
114
The Lethe is a river in Greek mythology that flows in Hades. “Lethe” is literally Greek for “forgetfulness,” and so all those who
drink from the river-for instance, those preparing to be reborn-forget everything.
115
This phrase is Italian and appears in Canto 2 of the Inferno. It means “Love has moved me and makes me speak.” It is related
by Virgil, who guides Dante down through Hell and up Mount Purgatory, to have been spoken by Beatrice, Dante’s lifelong love interest
and, in the Comedy, his guide through Paradise. Beatrice was commanding Virgil to be Dante’s guide, explaining that she was called from
Heaven to visit Virgil in Hell because of her love for Dante.
113
Lying in the bathtub reading the Aeneid, I felt something.
Camus asks the question, since we are born and die in an absurd world, then what?
But some men have heard this song, this hollow song of the tides, the non-noise, the meta-noise, and have had none of it, because
they hear another song. The blood crackling on the steel in the bonfire as it evaporates off of the sword, that is what I felt.
Oh, I feel. And my soul is saying, Jesse, I can smell your blood. It is saying, Jesse, I have swallowed every poison you’ve ingested to
keep them from your heart.
It is saying, this heart, pure and thick, will beat and burn. This heart is a symbol and more than a symbol. It says, there is a dance
of ghosts around your head, around your body, that haunt Umatilla, that haunt Gainesville, although they are so quiet, like stars in the
daytime, like streetlights next to a nuclear explosion.
But you hear them and see them and you feel them chilling and burning, feverish, and you will ink them. They are beyond sense,
beyond explanation. It is madness in the sense that we are all mad and that this is the best of the madnesses, the firiest, the most fevered,
this is the anti-Socrates, this is the flame that will burn as hot as it can for a second, a second, and you will feel it for the rest of your life,
every infant will feel it on waking for the first breath of their little pink lives, will feel the burn which I burn, which Dante and Virgil and
Shakespeare burned, and they are saying something to me I don’t know is true, but I’ll write it and you can see, they say,
Write the ashes and they will feel the flames.
That I might shine like a comet
in constantly lost bits
of what I have been,
a distant misportrait;
that after a heartbeat
of brightness and impact,
I might sleep on your skin
in a raised grave of scars;
that my zodiacal ghost
might breathe cold light
on the eyes of infants of infants
of infants of infants forever;
that I might never stop snowing flames.
Away Message #943
◆
Dionysus is walking among you, beer rolling in his red, red cup
and the dim fat kid is still dim, and now he is drunk.
We are dead, we are the walking dead, one more night before we are clay,
before we live more in murals and poems than in flesh.
What does it matter if cars burn, if trees break,
if I kiss her, will she mind so much,
can’t we just break their heads?
There are so many of us, we weigh so much, we are so light,
we are young enough and old enough and we know what we’re doing.
Chug the wine, what does it matter? She is dead. He is dead. He is throwing up.
Can’t we break down these fucking walls? Can we not break this statue?
I will choke him to death with my bare hands. We’re drunk enough and sober enough,
and she is leaving and he is leaving and it is night and I am trying to figure it out
and maybe I am the only one burning, maybe I have never asked,
they always leave, and that’s what I meant to ask them, I should write this down
and figure it out, and so I will remember, and there she is, and I love her,
I will build so many walls, I will build walls for the rest of my life
so nothing touches that dress, what are those idiots doing, are they drinking again,
are they smoking pot? Wasn’t that high school? Wasn’t that college?
Are they on fucking LSD for Christ’s sake?
Jesus. Someone should take them. I’ll call the police.
There they are, look at those boots, at that pistol, it is so heavy,
at least they’re on my side. This world is so unsafe.
Apollo will be back soon, thank God.
Oh that is so fucking clever, you idiots, you say you hate, but you say we’re supposed to love. You have to be joyous like me, you dumb,
dumb motherfuckers. You blind motherfuckers. You have to see the good in everyone god damn god damn it.
In bed with no one else, leftover drunk
I fall in love with every dying second.
Every second in bed I fall in love,
left drunk and awake, dying with no one.
114
And third, asleep, alive, I rise
to kill every sober person I see.
Away Message #965
◆
I’m never sure how sober my mom is, nor how stoned either of my brothers. At home, I am often on the verge of sneezing because we have
four cats. My mom is a pushover and, rather than ever confront my full-grown brothers, she has let them remain children.
My little brother has diabetes and has just broken 6’. He’s so tall. I don’t think I’ll be breaking 6’. My parents have been feuding over
money for about a year now. They claim to be incommunicado, although I know there is some faxing of documents and pleas for financial
mercy.
During the divorce back in ‘91, my dad told my older brother some terrible facts about my mom’s past. He was 11. My dad moved
to North Carolina years ago, because they closed down many farms in Central Florida. Draining lakes to farm on the silt on the lakebottoms—as they did during World War II—is bad for the environment, so the EPA shut them down. Don’t tell me I don’t know the pain of
economic adjustment.
My dad is like me, skeptical, passionate, and clever. My mom is big-hearted. She has taken in perhaps a dozen and a half pets in the
past two decades. She cleans the house compulsively.
Tomorrow, we’re going to have dinner with my grandfather and his wife. His original wife, my mom’s mom, is senile and has always
been an alcoholic.
Two nights ago, I went to a going-away party for a fellow alumnus of Umatilla High School, a UF student who is about to go to Italy.
I heard the word “nigger” used maybe six times in euphemisms and jokes.
Football is important in Umatilla; we take on and beat schools many times our size. The largest employer in Umatilla is a citrus
factory whose various owners have each gone bankrupt. My ex-stepdad took me up in a Cessna over Lake County. From the air, it looks
like ten thousand puddles after a rainstorm
I have been a vegetarian for about ten and a half years.
As of this month, I have had Internet access for ten years. I spent the early years on a role-playing message board and chatroom.
Later, I would find an chatroom called “God is a Myth,” where I met people I still know.
I have never broken a bone. I have never seen anyone be seriously injured. I have never seen a dead body in person. Neither of
my parents finished college. I doubt my brothers ever will. I have had a Quaker Parrot named Rose for about five years. She was my exstepdad’s.
I didn’t vote during the last election, regardless of what I may have said. I don’t feel guilty for that. I have every intention of voting
in ‘08, if only for the experience. I’ve never had a relationship that lasted longer than three months, although recently a month and a half
is my upper limit.
My road trip over the summer of 2004 ended when the back of my ‘99 Nissan Sentra hit a guard rail on I-40 about a mile west of
Tucumcari, New Mexico. I took a Greyhound, arriving in Gainesville 48 hours after first stepping onto the bus. The only contiguous state
I haven’t been to is Oklahoma.
On September 11, 2001, I was in Geometry class when my English teacher, Mrs. Parker, came and to tell us that both the World
Trade Center towers had been hit. My Geometry teacher insisted we finish the lesson.
I would like to write for a living, but I have few illusions about the likelihood of a worthwhile income from my writing. I think it’s
fairly likely that marijuana will be legal (or as good as legal) in twenty years. I’m not worried about peak oil. I remain skeptical about the
Technological Singularity.
If I had to put money on it, I would bet I won’t have children.
Merry Christmas.
Christmas List
List, Hamlet, list, O list!
Hamlet
Though some of them love each other, none loves the family.
The youngest is a juvenile diabetic; the middle son, himself hypoglycemic,
has a similar problem with sweetness. History,
valedictory and narcotic, pleats behind them.
After the oldest was kicked out, the middle took his room
and graduated. He is back for Christmas. The youngest,
having just finished school, plays video game football, works at 7/11,
and has begun dealing. Dad, years ago, built a wooden home
in the mountains of North Carolina.
He has already called. Mom has been playing Christmas music
since Thanksgiving. She brings out her fruit salad. The older brother,
Cassidy, is allowed back for breakfast; and he arrives,
carrying a smirk for his mother. Mom, Connie, Constance,
did not raise him right. The mediating son hears him
out on the back porch. Right then,
in the middle of a word, a huge pine branch falls
across the chain-link fence. The dogs smell it,
but do not leave.
Cassidy and Mom call each other liars.
At Grandpa’s, a step-great-uncle tells the middle, son,
drugs are criminal. But he knows his brother
would steal no televisions.
115
The Cowboys score.
Nancy, a new Grandma,
just does not know how to cook for a diabetic.
Mom doesn’t know how to cook for Nancy.
Mom makes cookies and needs to move out of that backwater county.
She is waiting for the youngest to grow up and the animals to die.
That night the middle writes, “Christus est homo homini116.”
That night, his mother dies in a dream and he is scared as hell.
◆
Sorry to keep taking that sledgehammer to the horse corpse, but I talked—for hours today—about the relationships between my mom
and dad, my older brother and my mom, and my older brother and my dad. When it comes to each other, they’re all just living in the past,
refusing to comprehend, refusing to apologize.
I’m doing all I can just to understand the years of idiocy they’ve all perpetrated.
My point is, I love you all. You’ve been unconditionally understanding, you’ve reassured me thousands of times that people can be
Christs to one another. I’ve burnt through gallons of your blood and odds are I’m not done yet. But I know you understand.
Thank you.
Christus est homo homini.
If I said it one thousand times
That would not be
enough
noughe
oughen
ugheno
ghenou
henoug
Away Message #273
◆
1. Drink the world.
2. Make money.
3. Retreat, live on money, write work of terrifying beauty and/or die in the snow.
◆
I read The Stranger today. I got a sort of an Ayn Rand feel from it. Camus’s the same kind of hardline theorist who, although a good writer,
is willing to construct this entire world just to deliver a few lines. It deserves a reread, and I’m not saying I don’t love the heat coming off
of Meursault when he’s talking to the chaplain, but it’s definitely just uniquely Camusian existentialism he’s waking to—or which Camus
wakes us to in him.
January 2007
My memory is bad and I expect yours
to therefore not matter. My family is shitty,
so boring me with stories of your glittering mommy—
I’m sorry—
I’m not sorry, it’s silly. Grow up.
her sincerity burned.
Away Message #129
◆
I didn’t think I would live this long. I didn’t imagine the day when I wasn’t Spinoza alone with my polished glass spheres, when I’d sit in
pajamas after two beers—when I would feel the pull of anyone else on my heart.
I’m sorry to destroy something because I can never have it.
I’m sorry for sneering at the child that lives in you. Her short hair is lovely, and it doesn’t matter what bra she will wear in ten years.
I just—am I afraid? I want to be so good, I want—maybe you’ve seen them. There is an army of sneers. There are so many in Umatilla with
twisted mushrooms for hearts, racists and bigots. I have heard too many jokes—were they just jokes?—that made my blood boil. I want
to show them that compassion and patience are enough.
I want to reach out to disenfranchised socialists with hate for those who wear ties—they’re people! Their breasts aren’t the same size,
their penises are flaccid, they have the same ugly birthmarks that you do.
And I want to prove that Umatilla isn’t hopeless, to show New Jersey that the South can be beautiful, that a skyscraper is not enough.
I want to nail it, to kill it so you feel how lonely it can get no matter where you go, to show that sex has nothing to do with it, how the
heart knocks against the ribcage—I have tears in my eyes and I’m keeping perfect grammar—how silly. We’re gonna die. I love you and
we’re gonna die.
If I have gotten grease on your songs of childhood, have asked you what you fear, I am sorry, I just—you can be a child if you want—I
don’t want someone to steal it from you, even if I must ask for it loudly, if coarsely. There are too many children who have it stolen and
116
“Man is Christ to man,” (Latin), a reference to “Lupus est homo homini,” meaning “Man is a wolf to man.”
116
now they are geysers of blood who spit blood and taste blood like little beaten girls with split lips whose skin rots off. We hurt without
thinking—and I have failed, my god, I have failed so many times.
I will forget even this, but not perfectly, so whatever remains to move me, don’t let me forget that I, here, just want a family again—and it
doesn’t mean we go back into the womb, or pretend that there is no womb. It’s there—but a monkey’s life is so much more than ramming
and receiving. There is the sun, these fruits and little bugs, and shining pools in the ground that take the stars in.
I just want to look down for once in my monkey life and see the stars, drink the fruit, fall asleep with you and have faith that for
one night—please, just one—we have seen the same stars, that I am you and you are me. I’m sorry I don’t move you, haven’t suffered as
you have, haven’t been braver, have my limbs, sorry for my irony, like it can save anything—and even grateful. It is beautiful to laugh, just
once, to laugh.
Thank you for letting me be God, for being good, and get good, get good, pull us together, I know you are trying. I am sorry to the people
I have been and accept my apologies from the future, I understand I don’t matter, I give up my past to fill the present, to strike hard and
hot and turn the earth to steel and plastic so that have a doll when you are three years old, so we have wires between North Carolina and
where you are. You see? So we see bigger and bigger, so now we are in the puddle with the stars, with that tree and its rosy fruit hanging
behind us, colorless in the night, and the color of the fire on our furry faces, because we are teenagers and will die teenagers, so let’s widen
the puddle, because it’s not a symbol but a puddle in the dirt and the sun will dry it in the morning and I will forget my hands and my
past and die, but it it happened and happens—just to believe that you are me and I am you, that your shoulder is sore, that you are dressed
in dirty clothing, your nose is running, and your parents have smoked for decades—that we are filthy and we are children and we are so,
oh my god, so old.
That we have both cried and written and I look at you and it moves deep into me, to the bottom of every ocean, across every sea,
from seed to redwood, and every mitochondrion so many.
We are just metaphor, so let’s have the same ones, we were the same cell a million years ago in some primate’s womb—Adolf Hitler
and Saddam Hussein and Virgil and Michael Jordan and and Jesus and Napoleon and Jack the Ripper and Jon Benet Ramsey and Paris
Hilton and Albert Einstein and Russell Crowe—all the same stupid, beautiful thing.
It’s not a sermon, it’s just me crying out. I’m not good enough, but I’m gonna try, I don’t know what else to do, I’ll learn to sing and drum
and dance, to fence and speak Farsi, learn you, what you have been, sister, mother, learn when we were bacteria 800 million years ago,
what it feels like to have vacuoles, because I need to live it, every second, more and more, let me bring you in, lift you up and for one
second, you are here with tears that will not leave your eyes, you are me, you are typing, I can’t .. I can’t end it, this is too long already,
but it is so good, life, you, you, you, I can’t not try every symbol I know, please let me have been brave, have tried, let me be Clotho and
Lachesis117, let me be the Muses, let’s just be Jesus together, let’s take him down from the cross and take our turns climbing up there, and
when we have all bled—but not died, he doesn’t have to die, we don’t have to die—then, then we can go on living, however dirty, however
long we wait alone, just believe it, let me birth you, let me cradle you as you sleep, let us get sick together, let us spend a year alone together,
let us even cheat on each other together.
Let us take the Argo118 to each other and kill each other together, let us write together. I can’t be as subtle as Dante. You, you you you
you and Eris and Jesus and every Nazi and every person who died alone of the plague, every dead dinosaur who saw those fateful photons
on their little eyes and my little bird, you and me, and all of it, all of it, please.
all of we are sharp, golden statues
beautifully able,
formidable, fabled
carved blocks of frozen urine,
too cold to shiver or shout,
just shine and shine and if
i say, be mine, be mine, it
feels so good to melt, just melt
and we both felt and melted
and stank and then fell.
and there is nothing underneath
left of you or left of me.
Away Message #609
◆
I invented a new word, “ceterally.” It means “otherwise,” or “otherly,” or “referring to other things.” I suppose while I’m at it, I’ll cover my
bases and also invent the word “heterally” or maybe “heteronously.” Something like that.
◆
“Jesse Arost, author of the recently published collection of poems The Book of Fire, has announced that he will be traveling the country
on an untraditional book tour. He issued a press release last Tuesday stating that he will be ‘dropping unannounced into book stores’.
Some critics have dismissed Arost’s newest book as a juvenile work. Others find some merit, including a professor at the University
of Florida (Arost’s alma mater) who has requested he remain unidentified, who remarked, ‘This book is not the most extraordinary book
of poetry ever written—not even close—but it does contain dozens of new, compelling images for one of the most fundamental of human
tropes. He has done poets everywhere a service of imagination.’
Arost has allowed the reprinting of an excerpt from the introduction to The Book of Fire:
‘Nothing in the universe seems not to burn. There is constant respiration in every living thing, and even the entropic burning of the
universe’s fuel on the smallest of scales. The sole and fundamental actor of the universe would seem to be the flux of flames.
Many would rather side with Thales here and argue that if some element is fundamental, surely it is water, not fire. I will concede
that, at the bottom of our physical understanding of the universe, there must be some particle that composes all things. These particles,
117
Clotho and Lachesis are the other two Fates. Clotho spun the thread that would be weaved into the fabric of destiny, controlling
birth. Lachesis wove the thread into the fabric, deciding the events that occurred during each person’s life.
118
The Argo was the ship on which Jason and the Argonauts sailed to retrieve the Golden Fleece.
117
like water, merely flow about, unchanging.
I agree. But then, these particles, not their actions, seem more fundamental to me. These solid, immutable particles seem more
more like earth to me than like water.
And further, what of the absence of these particles, what of space? Surely the containing volume is more fundamental than the
particles themselves. The cosmos is filled with space, with air; this seems more basic than the single, incidental stony planet we inhabit.
But then, if we have gone this far, why does space exist at all? Why, the question must be, is there something rather than nothing?
Every creation story, every scientific explanation, every mythology or theory, every induction, each requires an anomaly, a chance, fortune, chaos. All of these things smell of char. Beneath it all, I think we will find again the deathless flames.’”
the tree of poetry
drinks the new year’s rain
like it drank the old year’s rain
and grows and glistens
and grows.
Away Message #692
◆
I have decided that if I am ever a hiphop artist, my name will be Illysses. If I am ever a singer/songwriter, my band name will be A Cock
to Asclepius.
to all good haste and charm,
to the host, to the occasion,
and to making the world’s stage
into a scene.
Away Message #215
◆
I have seen the future.
There will be a two-day work week: Friday and Saturday. No one will have to work, but many will anyway. Anyone who wants to is
free to go on a year-long heroin binge and die. Drugs will be cheap. Clothes will be cheap. Paint and canvases will be cheap. The technical
will schism from the artistic in the university and never again shall the twain meet.
Surfaces will be easy to clean and many will clean themselves.
The rednecks will be able to do meth if they want; the literati, cocaine.
The question is, how much sneering will we still do once babies begin to be genetically engineered to be more intelligent?
This future is coming. The only question is one of how soon—and the answer is,
“That depends. How scared of it are we?”
◆
It is easy to believe that this country’s problems are the result of greed. It is the first faith of every socialist. This greed is not a hog’s, though;
there is no unthinking frenzy. Rather, every neoconservative is a devil with long, long fingers plucking stars and lives to throw into his
putrid, ketchup-filled maw. Begin with this faith and nothing will wake you from your terrifying dream that the world looks more like
1984 with each day that passes.
The facts don’t bear the faith out, but who approaches data agnostically these days? We already know what we’re going to find: there
is no bureaucratic inefficiency—there are just ten million figureheads and then 13 men who are urinating into all of America’s water supply.
◆
My favorite author living or dead just passed from the former category into the latter.
R.I.P. Robert Anton Wilson. You woke me up.
what ten-million-kaleidoscope
that tremors in the seed.
Away Message #700
◆
I think I would spend a few years as an agnostic chaplain, if anyone was hiring. Hopefully the United States will one day have a foreign
legion and I can preach unknowability to disaffected foreign mercenaries.
“I’m so reflexive, I am a mirror.”
Tim Kasher, Cursive, “Sink to the Beat”
◆
“No infant, on waking far after its hour, so
suddenly rushes with face toward the milk,
as then did I, to make yet better mirrors of my
eyes, stooping to the wave which flows there
that we may be bettered in it.”
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto XXX
“You will pay the price for your lack of vision.”
Darth Sidious, Return of the Jedi
118
Motif
I heard the churchbells tumbling down;
the River of Time flows heavy with sound
and bobbing in whirlpools come candles at night—
and some of those candles have floated down twice.
Away Message #1018
◆
Once one state legalizes it, the harmlessness of marijuana and the boon of psychedelic freedom will be apparent for the rest of the states
and the world at large. The DEA will not be able to patrol the entire state of, say, Colorado. Once it is legal there, it will remain legal.
I believe that LSD and many other drugs will be legalized shortly thereafter. I believe that the freedom to deliberately chemically
alter one’s brain state will transform our country into the most wonderful, flabbergasting place in the entire world.
I also believe that, shortly after, medicine for the simple use of enhancing a human being’s abilities, including genetic modification,
will also become legal—perhaps even encouraged.
I believe we will all see this before we die.
Relatedly, I have long joked that “they’ll invent longevity pills in 2040 and immortality in 2100.” I am only half-joking. I think there
is a reasonable possibility that many of us will never die.
We’ll be right back with The Revolution—after this message from our sponsor!
Away Message #992
◆
I want to work into an away message or poem the line/idea, “And why do socialists cut in line?”
◆
There is an melody in the human soul which has grown very soft indeed, these days. It is the song a man sings when he feels nothing
absent, and more, loves what is. This has never been achieved by acquisition, only by acquiescence. The daedal earth is what it is. We will
continue to die by the thousands at the hands of men, or survive only to be later dragged off in Fate’s chains.
Is death so terrifying? Must it be?
I lived with panic attacks on a more-than-daily basis because death was a warden to my soul. I have sobbed at what could not be,
wishing for death, but much too terrified to attempt it. Human beings cannot help it. We can never fully wake from this biological dream
of shit and sleep.
Perhaps this anguish and travail119 is the labor pain of the infant future. Many animals give birth painlessly, but human beings are
different. The birth canal must bear a brain that feels sorrow and joy. I am not a solipsist, I think you are there, I think we are all here.
We all suffer together, we all laugh together, and we all die together, buried here together, notwithstanding the recent desire to launch
cremains into space.
So, why mourn? Can you not help it? Who is in control? If you can’t say, “No, if only for today, I will be happy, not miserable,” then
where are you, and who is doing the thinking and feeling? I cannot think it right or proper or even useful to mourn injustice. I can’t think
death such a tragedy.
I am, lastly, not saying to not mourn anything. Melancholy has its place; we would not be human beings if we did not know what
it was to suffer. The best art comes from the most dismal places in the developed world. This is not coincidence in the least. I am only
saying that I have been, at core, sorrowful—and I didn’t like it. If you have always been sorrowful, I think escaping it is something worth
fighting like hell for.
Not black mold on prison walls, not the hungry gallows,
not twenty years of pharmacology,
not the cat o’ nine tails,
no tongue plucked with pliers,
no parade of boots on human faces, nothing, nothing,
nothing can burn or excise or rot or petrify
even one twisted toothpick from the tree of human heart—
its roots pry into atoms and soak and swallow
and bleed and cough and, lord, smile.
You can only lie and say you’ve done it.
Away Message #899
◆
Everyone get out your copies of House of Leaves and check out page 298. Is Danielewski suggesting that the house is a place where the
outside of the universe got in?
Abie Cie
Dee Iefgy
Eichai Jaikai
Elemeno P. Queuaris
◆
119
The phrase “anguish and travail” is a reference to Isaiah 21:3, “Therefore are my loins filled with pain; anguish hath taken hold
upon me, as the anguish of a woman in travail.” William Faulkner made reference to this passage in his Nobel acceptance speech, saying
he would like to use “this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the
same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.” His comparison is that of
the struggle of artistic creation with the pains of childbirth.
119
Tiuvee Dobbleueks.
Wye Enzee.
Once we understand, can we also neglect our parents?
Must Echo be an echo, and might Paris now choose Eris?120
◆
◆
New study proves Americans are genetically inferior and the world is going to end when you’re 29
New Radical Dispatch
01/28/07
By MORGAN SPURLOCK121
SAN FRANCISCO, California
Definitely. Also, self-deprecating sarcasm has been found to be the only cure for a purposeless, idiotic existence.
---Morgan Spurlock was smoking a clove cigarette and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon when he wrote this article.
◆
Me: well, it’s just, nobody needs to carry my worries when i can handle and kill them myself.
Me: nobody needs to hear my loves if i won’t love them tomorrow.
Me: i meant, i spend so much of myself trying to get it into the right words, into a poem.
Me: because everyone has so little time, and we want to feel it, and hurt from words, and yelp from the pain.
Me: i want to sing down the corridors of history to every lonely boy sitting for 18 years in a dusty town.
Me: i want to sing into the ears of every girl in black with bleeding wrists to let her know that i wish she didn’t hurt so, so bad.
Me: i want to learn as many languages i can so i can hear in people’s own tongues how they love, how they mourn.
Me: i am hollow. i am history standing and walking and talking.
Me: there is no me in here.
Me: who has known me?
Friend: art is a facade
Me: every day, my art is closer and closer to what i am.
Friend: you're not essentially consonants and prose
Me: no one will ever get more than that, even if i did IM people, even if i did call people.
Me: i want badly to be wanted, but there is so much in me that no one wants, or at least, wants in its current form
Me: so i have to transmute it.
Me: to word it correctly.
Me: what am i? i know. i have known for years. nothing so easy.
Me: people who IM me and read my livejournal get what i can give.
Me: everything else is not so easy.
Me: it has one thousand sides and i am looking for the right pegged hole to push it through, to send it down through my fingers or out
of my mouth.
Me: do you want to know what songs i like, what the accidents of my existence are?
Me: i am not my breakfast.
Me: do you want to know how i have screamed, screamed because it hurt so badly to love and not be loved back?
Me: we’ve all been there.
Me: i don’t need to give anyone the particulars.
Me: it’s just a matter of, do you believe me, or don’t you?
Me: that’s because people .. i don’t know, they’re unreliable.
Me: they’ve hurt me about as much as they’ve made me happy.
Me: i trust art and words.
Friend: im sorry, i dont understand how that can be.
Me: you talk about all the nights you had with your friends in high school on the shore of the future.
Me: the warm nights, the swing sets.
Me: i never had any of it.
Me: i was alone in my room with the rest of the world coming slowly in through dialup.
Me: this isn’t self-pity. i learned a lot. i’m happy with who i am and i’m not sad about my past.
Me: but it’s also an explanation.
Me: i want to be the last person on earth to have to go through that.
120
In Greek mythology, the gods were having a party atop Olympus and Eris was excluded because of her tendency to cause trouble.
Being so slighted, she inscribed “to the prettiest one” on a golden apple and rolled it into the party. A dispute arose among Aphrodite,
Athena, and Hera as to who was most beautiful. Zeus, in an effort to resolve the matter, asked Paris, a Trojan prince, to decide. Aphrodite
promised Paris that if he selected her, she would bring him the most beautiful woman in the world. He did, so she brought him Helen,
wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Menelaus rallied the Greeks to attack Troy and reclaim Helen, sparking the Trojan War.
121
Morgan Spurlock (b. 1970) is an American filmmaker. His most famous work is the documentary Super Size Me.
120
Versions of Revulsion Which Take Minutes to Rehearse
I am not what I am nor even what I wish I were;
I am that I am as well
and not so well, sometimes.
I am cursed with dogged Florida afternoons,
the paper-bright sky a disappointed father fourteen hours a day,
the night a badly-laid plan, a dream six inches deep.
I am blessed twenty-three times
and damned each time to reject, reject—reject the help I do not need—
and flattered only with ungiven insults.
I refuse, and refuse to refuse; I fuse and defuse
until, confused, I am tired.
Lord, have I tried.
You are not me nor would I wish you could be;
you are another thing entirely
and not so entirely, sometimes.
◆
I don’t feel strong enough to sing down the corridors of history. My throat is sore.
I thought I would be found in Gainesville, I thought I would come to be known. Instead I have simply become more, and more,
more, more things. I have only picked up additional souls. I am less known than I have ever been.
February 2007
I haven’t told a painful truth in a long time, but I just realized that it’s the only way to grow.
you deserve sunshine.
Away Message #646
◆
I am not above vanity, although I have to say that I don’t think an interest in what others think of me is vanity. Call me old-fashioned.
Never would, you say, dress
quite so fey as that Prince Vain
but oh, that cape!
Away Message #721
◆
We all came to college awake—I realize this, awake—and then we got so preoccupied checking one brand of waking against another,
comparing prices, that we forgot, that, though we knew that we were awake and that it was good somehow, we dozed.
I want to sing drunkenly in the backseat of a car sometime soon.
The Lethe falls from the dark side of the earth
starved by rising stardust burning cold,
eating air, and crystallizing steam
(stained with inky pigments of a dream).
Away Message #806
◆
I am not scared of global warming. I am not scared of peak oil. I am not scared of AIDS. I am not scared of a superflu. I am not scared,
not scared, not scared, I am a blossom and let the aphids come.
Which is not to say that I do not want to push back the flood; but just that my own misery and fear does nothing for the people
whose houses are devoured by children with AK-47s or heartbreakingly brown surges of water. If I am a fire dancing through this winter
of misery, then so be it.
Do not scream at me to think of the cause! because I know the cause, I have made it my business to know the world’s daedal miseries
with a god’s eye view, because I look at history and politics with the obsession and rigor of a crossword-addict.
I see no reason to grieve, at least for the foreseeable future—I have done due diligence on the world’s collective elegy.
◆
The failure heretofore of all aspirants to human perfection is well-figured by checked waters—and weariness as the continued lack of
spiderweb cracks in the dam.
I am many times the writer I usually am when I am reading Robert Anton Wilson.
◆
My generation—and I hope it is restricted to my generation—sees moderate pride as a vice; it is crippling all of us. To want to be the best
anything, to want even to be a very good anything is seen not only as childish, but as pernicious. Perhaps a good starting point would be
to want to be a great lay.
Let us crush no more; bring the lust.
121
... magis tegitur, tectus magis aestuat ignis ...
[ ... the more a fire is concealed, the hotter it burns ...]122
Exit “exit, pursued by a bear,” pursued by a bear123
Somewhere there is someone training while I am sleeping
and he will be better than me.
But I will kill him. So my willpower weaker than his,
so his life is shorter than mine.
They never said it would be fair, easy, or worth it.
Just that it would be and be and be and be and be.
Away Message #42
◆
It turns out that the very earnest boy who was touched to the core by the plastic bag in American Beauty has been making a small sky from
underground oceans, and he has made it a gift to me. How savory and Pompeiic to dream into ninety-one dreams, to forget creators and
souls, to wander the plains of truth without a body and without a mind.
How like a photograph of an unlit firework, a drink yet without a drinker on a bright blue night—to return and again.
This world was never the one that mattered. Ever!
who knows, ohs, owes.
guess it goes
oh o dewoodworked saints!
exalted exhaled supurbs.
Away Message #711
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Pyramus and Thisbe is also a thousands-year old urban horror story that overly maternal academics tell to warn you against ever straying
from the safety of text.
I no longer trust myself with
the decision of whether to trust myself.
If I wonder why I no longer have words
to describe the things I love,
I remember that I do not trust,
that I refuse to trust, and would rather
it were impossible.
The brittle clay pot of language,
shatterable,
as the Jews know,
is no place to keep anything,
let alone everything.
Away Message #938
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The adversary is not socialist France; that is a matter which will work itself out. Our well-declared foe is preiarchy: rule by before. The
intellectual’s answer is novarchy: rule by the new. This, too, is a conceit; it cannot be had, we lack the future. The only force that ever rules
is nuarchy: rule by the now. Now is all, all else isn’t. We are but weathering stones if we do not now.
elsewhy to causality,
to history, elsewhen;
elsewhom of anyone,
elsehow of any mean;
elsewhat to all the what
that’s ever been.
Away Message #486
◆
122
This is an excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the story about Pyramus and Thisbe, a pair of lovers in Babylon who lived
separated by a wall, forbidden to see each other. They flouted this proscription, and ended up both committing suicide over a misunderstanding.
123
“Exit, pursued by a bear” is Shakespeare’s most famous and strange stage direction, appearing in A Winter’s Tale.
122
Do you suppose Juliet got off on her wedding night (presumably the first and last time she had any sort of sex)?
◆
Some day soon, we will all be our own servers and ISPs. We won’t need an infrastructure to communicate, and then ten thousand and
one fairy-demons will be released which no totalitarian—not even one in charge of a million Internet cops—will ever be able to control.
Then, I say, as soon as we air-drop thousands of such ad-hoc devices into North Korea, into Iran, it’s over.
Dedicated freedom evangelists around the world will learn Chinese and Arabic and personally befriend and assist citizens of totalitarian regimes to understand what their rulers have concealed. Millions of reverse-Charons124 will ferry anyone who asks back to the
living world from the hell of ignorance.
◆
What about a new myth of two lovers who know each other and thereby become ... dust? A tree? Do they simply vanish? Do they die? Is
a single moment of infinite joy worth immediate death?
◆
A revolution is less something that you come up with and more something that you come down with.
What pregnant herds
this Sinon125 drives,
most trusted spy,
our very nerves.
Away Message #622
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“You can’t really say that undetectable unicorns aren’t real.”
“Well, you can, but why? Do you hate undetectable unicorns that much?”
◆
My big problem with any post-modernist isn’t that “it doesn’t make sense,” because surely I wasn’t expecting it to—it’s that most of them
are miserable and write like it.
Or else, I look on the face of a tall, thin, red-haired girl who says she likes spatial tensions and has apparently affected an accent, and
I can’t tell if she is all eggshell, all compulsive hiding—or if hers is the face of a real girl who spends her time not looking, but being. She
looked for all the world to be made of marble, whatever that means.
play dead, romeo
Away Message #725
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I have wine-stained dead skin clinging to my lips and it reminds me of how much I want to dress like Kefka126. The concept of Kefka has
fascinated me since I was very young. Sometimes I wish my archetypes weren’t precipitated through video games. Other times, I think it
is funny and fitting.
Wanting what you want127 is coming back in style.
◆
◆
Mario redesigned. Sicilian superman. In contact with mysterious, sentient reptiles. Walks in houses of ghosts, travels by leys upon which
have been laid disguising pipes. Sorcerer. Fights still other mysterious, sentient reptiles. Saves some kind of Aryan princess. Toad as old
wise mystic. Eats myriad drugs. Toad as walking drugs themselves, the East embodied.
Cassius as Illuminatus:
“What trash is Rome,
What rubbish, and what offal, when it serves
For the base matter to illuminate
So vile a thing as Caesar!”
◆
And they go on to stab Caesar twenty-three times.
Antony as Discordian:
“And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
124
In Greek mythology, Charon was the ferryman who carried the souls of the recently dead across the river Styx to enter into
Hades.
125
In the Odyssey and the Aeneid, Sinon is a Greek left behind on the shores of Troy because, he says, the Greeks have retreated and
he, a traitor, was to be abandoned to the cruelty of the Trojans-along with a great wooden horse. He convinces the Trojans not to kill
him, saying that he would work on their behalf to defeat the Greeks once and for all. He told the Trojans that the horse was intended as an
offering to the gods, to appease them for having made war against their will. The horse, pregnant with Trojan soldiers, was wheeled into
the city.
126
Kefka is the main antagonist in Final Fantasy VI. He is a brutal, mentally unstable general who dresses in jester’s clothing.
127
This is a reference to a quote from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), “Man can do what he wants but he
cannot want what he wants.”
123
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘havoc!’”
Also notice: Robert Anton(y) Wilson.--
◆
[Editor’s note: the following began as a blindfolded free-writing piece.]
And since we so often go about the earth claiming to be scientists and strapping each word to the operating table and while its own tongue
is out and it squirms vividly on the starch-white table and it wroggles, we cut out all the meanings and measure the ambiguity on a scale
of one to ten and record it in a big book of books just so we know that we can open all these words if we need to, and what a great joy it
must be to pry away the guts of any machine frog that we might find.
Once, I brought two frogs into the house, and one of them got loose, and I didn’t know where it went, and the other one dried up
overnight and died. I was very young.
But this is no dream, it has no thousand meanings, it is not polysemous or syneciotic or spatially tense, it is a nothing, the story of
a little boy’s folly and sadness and the deaths of two frogs that were at least not overwhelmingly sentient, thank goodness.
I tend to operate on a principle that I don’t owe anyone anything. Ever. When I fall back into the trap of believing I am indebted, it is then
that I am unhappy. It is then that I am confused—because, as far as I know, virtually everyone else believes that everyone else is indebted
in some way.
When we owe someone something, we must get it to them and pay it, and pay it hard and long right up until the day we die, and if
we have done okay then they will visit our grave every year, and if we did not do it okay, we are a cautionary tale—good golly we might
even find our ways into the tabloids.
Sorry, I’m not Joyce, and I hope I never am, so there. I am so infected that I cannot but scream with the backbony voice of all our long
American songs, all those wry Irish songs, all those Chinese songs that I don’t know yet, because mainly I just want to look you in the
eyes and use my voice fresh, and that is the element that they do not believe in, but I believe in hard, that is why I made the word “cux.”
Thou art avenged. I want to make the noises that I feel like making when I think about you and remember you, and let’s invent
language for ourselves each time, every beach, every star, every time my hands land on your stomach.
Is that what we need to do, is that what will make you trust, if we get rid of trust because we cannot make promises? If we get rid of
all of these ridiculous definitions and just wander down the caverns of the moment, hand in hand, torches soft in a silly wind, whistling
whatever tune our hearts .. yes, sorry, to be silly enough to use the metaphor of heart. But will we not be listening to a little beat beat and
humpf and you might even say hubba hubba when I look at you, I think so, eyes and mouth that we smell like candy or there is another
smell that also is giggly pretty quite yes. One-eyed rabbit statues? A puzzlecorn? Enntid hasi has, mmi.
But language is probably a labyrinth with no exit and no entrance, just a circle of a hallway around and around, nothing but a slight
walk to the right or to the left, so let’s not walk that one. Let’s push the boundaries of the labyrinth back to the sky, behind the sunset and
the horizon with both jangling greyfire knocking clouds, and even old-known rosy dawn128, fingers or maybe just toes in the sand at the
edge of the world.
And now who could possibly have followed me here, and who of them has any idea—or maybe you just skimmed and ended up here, so
busy, you can’t even read your friends in full. We need reports and ratios and the means, please, just the means, and a budget, and please
judge me by my budget, you will known I have done well when it’s all checked off in black, see how much the orphans—
Oh, orphans, so much more words than people, these days, orphans, and so many of us are orphans, born in bountiful prisons our
parents agreed were safer, but none of us knows our parents anymore and more, nor do our parents know us.
My dreams are always on the beach, but “dreams” not in the sleeping, Joycean sense, but in the waking, happy Nietzschean sense
if you imagine Nietzsche as not being so tainted by the unhappy past of plague and fever, if you instead imagine him thinking himself
strong enough to stand up and say, fuck this syphilis, fuck this silly morality, I’m not just gonna write, I’m gonna roam the world and start
a better fucking place to live. Imagine a laughing Nietzsche.
Oh, how studious and purveyed, my Facebook friends, you with statistics classes and not even the occasional weird pot weird, how must
you live, just straightforward—and you feel good from all that charity (not caritas!, and whatever the fuck is this trendy agape?129). And
God only knows (or so you hope, but I’d rather do all my own knowing for now, I like it a lot more than constantly asking for God or
government (what an ugly name for a mother and father anyway, it sounds clangy and rusted and dusted and I am probably a little bit
allergic to “government,” if “government” were a substance, I imagine))—
How often you need to call to this God! because you feel like you must call in a god to be you for a minute. But why think them outside? Not to be philosophical, but when have you ever really seen any god trotting or rollicking around outside of you that you managed to
get inside you? Perhaps instead there is .. that is, you are some ... I need the right wrot— something—I want to say “solar,” but something ...
... some thing, some stuff that walks and is and does and makes and kicks and bites the sand and blows it into glass but the glass is
edible and melts in your mouth and isn’t just cloying but it’s also a tool and a toy and it is the first dance step. What if you are for all the
world and the world for all the you, you walk and bestride all rhodes (oh, I know, how clever and obscrewy of me)130, be that which bites,
be the new song, and I am not singing ten thousand fucking languages like all the bricks, all that mortar, I do not need a babeltower you
nincompoop, how much education do you need to daedalize yourself, you cuntbucket? How much traprope do you have to learn before
you get sucked up into the Trojan horse’s woody belly and sit in there and dry out like those little frogs, eaten by a capricious god who
128
The description of a sunrise as the spreading of “the rosy fingers of Dawn” is a set phrase in several Greek epics.
129
“Caritas” is a Latin word for “charity,” but its use referred not only to material philanthropy, but more broadly to the desire to
give to and help one’s fellow man. “Agape” is one of several Greek words which is translated into “love.” In Christian theology, especially
contemporary theology, the term is used to refer to God’s infinite love for man, and, as such, a love to which all Christians should aspire.
130
The Colossus of Rhodes was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. It was an enormous statue of Helios, Greek god of
the sun, that stood about 110’ tall.
124
does not know what he does with his poor silly froggy human babies.
The world is using you, and you walk freely into it. I’ve never known too happy a pet, but that stray, that stray, and Leviathan can be a
happy neighbor, let us wander into his care and be petted and fretted and cooed over, and then stamp our paws through his declaration of
debt, whatever silly, now-you-are-mine,-kitty document he’d have you paw in ink to sign, no, no, no such trapped frog, mon ami, signore,
legionnaire, comrade, tovarishch131, no fucking haha, nope, and before old Letheiathan knows it—that was a joke, because no way does
he forget. He is memory excarnate, assuming you’d give him a gender.
This is my allsong, I don’t want to stop, but I also have to go back to try to rub my old dirty hair on God’s—let’s call him that only
tentatively, because he is really more like Polyphemus132 without that nasty streak—or is he? He sure does kill a lot of us—but he is nice
enough to cats of my stripe. So it must, oh quite yes, go. Let me know, friends, and try your own
(though not your owe).
What if I weighed half a gram,
I worried my feet on the ground,
if sound chambered through me
with dusty resound?
What if I am pianos, red roses
from moment to moment,
heaped into a hologram
and inert and inverted?
Away Message #627
What if I was ten times my shadow,
I rhymed with an echo,
I dined with the spirits?
What if I lived in my limbs,
my roof was my head, my stomach
a suitcase for traveling the roads,
goad to goad, show to show,
each bigger, banger, and
much more hello?
Away Message #628
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I just read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce was soaked in words from day one. Ireland is a crucible. So what is Umatilla? Is it
the drying rack, am I cured history, preserved and ready to be eaten by the Lord, some reverse sacrament? I have never taken sacrament. I
am new-come to literature. I spent the first 18 years of my life not knowing Daedalus133, not knowing Clotho, but these mother and father
are the womb and the minotaur fnord orgasm.
What is left to me, then, if I am not to be an echo? Some manner of stray cat strut? Joyce must indeed be the echo of Adam off of
Ireland.
Is every pidgin a new Florence? What if I write something like that and it is read only when I am dead and no one knows that I am
talking about how bastard Italian was the wide field from which Dante grew Yggdrasil134? What do I care for being read? I am not foolish
enough (any more) to believe in poetry-as-Mercury135, though perhaps I can still be Orpheus136, just as the biblical Jesse137 was, the soil
what grew the vine.
i will lullaby every continent
from siesta to spokoynoi noch138.
Away Message #285
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Maybe this is all so much posturing to you. Maybe I am a nothing with nothing wires and nothing nothinging two nothing fingers down
131
comade (Russian)
132
Polyphemus was the cyclops in the Odyssey who killed and ate many of Odysseus’ men.
133
In Greek mythology, Daedalus was the father of Icarus. Both were imprisoned in the Labyrinth, which Daedalus had been commissioned to design in order to contain the Minotaur. He created wings for himself and his son, and they escaped by air. Icarus famously
flew too close to the sun, the wax holding his wings together melted, and he fell into the sea and was killed.
134
Yggdrasil, in Norse mythology, was the World-Tree, an enormous ash tree which held in its branches the world of the gods, the
world of the giants, and the world of men.
135
Mercury is the Greek messenger god. In some occult philosophies, Mercury is the conveyor of a true understanding of nature
and reality.
136
In Greek mythology, Orpheus was a mortal who was extraordinarily talented at singing and playing the lyre. His playing was
such that, when he ventured into Hades to retrieve his lover who had died, it brought peace even to the denizens of the underworld.
137
The Biblical Jesse is the father of King David and thus a human ancestor of Christ.
138
Literally “peaceful night,” (Russian), it is used to mean “Goodnight.”
125
your throat. Maybe you want the whiff of a burning taper more than you want the thousands of names, each of which has a thousand
names of its own. I can only say to that: please stand by.
I mean every word
Men of letters have been drawing ink from my eyes.
The corpuses stranded in the world
shine as black as ash like banners like fires
like carnivorous gnats coming and going
on a swollen compost of souls
that smells like the Internet tastes.
◆
There is something despairing, something that will strengthen the bones in the tips of your fingers and turn to iron your fingernails so
you can claw your way up that great bouncing, thundering axle, Modernity, sweating and bloody and flushed and throwing yourself on
the deck and by fucking God breathlessly telling them all, telling all those dancing abovedeck how it is, how great are the pains of lowth.
Apparently, Shakespeare and Dante are the greatest poets because they have worked philosophical treatises into the walls of their
verses. Is this noblest? What do I want to do that I think is so wonderful? Do I just want to get on the cosmic mike and scream and scream?
I need to answer that question if I think I’m a poet, because I’ve never felt like I needed to be a lyrical Aristotle and I almost want to
slap Shakespeare for thinking the highest message he could encode was some kind of proto-existentialism.
I don’t know whom I think I’m talking to. Maybe the future.
In verse prexnoncy:
swell Eng ef free know ware,
fielding wailing ripe
Away Message #661139
Thesis 1
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My kinky love for every lustful blow
that Englishman gave with his lovely pen
is wrath for every fucker who appends
his words to Will’s and then expects a blow.
Participating in the dialogue, my dick. You’re talking too loud to hear a thing. No angel sings his own praise, and no devil could be as
petty. Luther’s love for Christ was not one radiant mote diminished by his protestation against men playing at Christliness; indeed, not a
shining smithereen of faith could be added. But let us pull down this facade of a space elevator. No man since Dante has been to Heaven.
I need to “participate in the dialogue” like I need elephantiasis of the scrotum.
Why should my craft be rubbed raw on cold salt rocks? Why should my futurology have [insert your dreams here] instead of prismatic candles? I have gotten to thinking that if I am truly so talented, if poetry will truly benefit me, then I should apply it to those things
I love.
My mother sent me a Valentine’s Day card. I call her “Mama,” which feels very Southern (something my family has never been), but
it’s also full of every kind of honey-soaked gratefulness I bear for her. I call my dad Pa, which strikes even his lilting Carolinian girlfriend
as funny. The word to me sounds and smells like a hearth and wonders with embers even when we disagree about Israel.
Yes, what is every pureblack axiom if it does not dye the earth’s soil with every pigmentary potentiality, if thirtyblooming petals are
not in every cup of philosophy?
I didn’t even realize it was Valentine’s Day until about eight hours in, which fact communicates as well as anything else how I feel
about the holiday (at least this year. God knows I have been plenty funereal in years past).
Philosophers compulsively bite God’s fingernails, but if I am to be a poet, I’m aware I must attempt to trace his lifestuffed grin.
Forgive me for real this time, for I know that even fancily-written happiness can be pretty boring. If you suffer me my miseries, a
few petty joynotes ought to be nothing.
“you” will never be as trite as “love,”
so you, to me, are chocolate tea
139
Similar to “Imp:,” I’ve always felt that this piece was interesting enough to preserve, but inscrutable without explanation. The
following is an expansion of each word into its various meanings and puns:
“In verse,” but also of course “inverse”;
“prexnoncy,” is “pregnancy,” but it is also pre- (before) ex- (from) non- (nothingness), or “out from that which precedes nothingness”;
“swell Eng,” is “swelling,” but it is also the Eng(lish) language which is swelling and thus, perhaps, pregnant;
“ef free” is “every,” but also the “ef ” in “ineffable,” and “free” is just “free,” as in, to freely ef;
“know ware” is “nowhere,” but it is also to know wares, the things of the world, and it is also “wear,” that which is worn, textiles, text;
“fielding” is growing agriculturally, but it is also “feeling”;
“wailing,” but also “willing”;
“ripe” is also “rape.”
The overall intention of the poem is not an argument for anything in particular, but an attempt to express a certain feeling about language:
that it allows things to be experienced and created which are impossible. A summation might be, “the birth through English verse of
something that precedes nothing, a pregnancy begun with an impossibility, willing rape.”
126
are cocaine ice cream, are
a fireplace with my father,
you are so many things
which make “love” silly to say.
Away Message #291
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I believe that blank, unconsidering teetotalism and abstention indicate a childishness of mind (or at least a bearer of the slave crown140,
and barring that, the dog with a thoughtiron electric collar who lives behind painfully impossible walls). Drugs and alcohol are often good
ideas. The invisible opportunity cost of a boring youth is twenty times worse than slipped secrets, than mistakes with lips, than nausea.
To die without having lived is my only real fear.
I believe in lust. I am not ashamed. I like touching girls’ bodies with my own. I like it very much. Maybe my welcome to lust is a
deterrent to love. Maybe. I haven’t felt love in a long time.
Or whatever one calls that fond feeling that makes you stare-like-a-dope at a person and try like hell to just love at them with your
eyes, and actually believe you’ve done an adequate job—I have had none of that in recent memory. Its absence doesn’t hurt; I’m used to
it, it’s a fact of my existence.
I do want it, I want it badly; but, what used to be spontaneous has come only in brief, hopeful moments when I make first approximations of compatibilities—and hope that, if I get into a relationship, the feelings will weave themselves. They used to: if I knew a girl
liked me, I’d jump at the opportunity to date her, and, sure enough, within a few weeks, there’d be that romantic fire. I don’t know how I
executed that kind of doublethought back then.
That was, of course, back when I was starved for kisses, back when I was hungry for blood, hungry for every lovesick, aspirated drop.
These days, I know where kisses are if I want them. Without that reward, could I still fall into like or love if I committed myself to a girl?
L’amour. I’m tired of struggling for some kind of answer. I’m tired of plotting after it. I am exhausted after chasing down every blind
alley in pursuit of that love that echoed through my early history. Always nothing, always wasted efforts.
I have had no relationships that lasted longer than three months and most of them didn’t make it even that far. I was always the one
dumped, and, in all cases from recent history, always for another guy. I am tremendously mistrustful. If I have ever seemed elusive to
you, this is why. I now no longer put any large amount of faith in anyone. Maybe that is also why I have so little love. Some will say, throw
yourself into it, give it a chance (like you used to), see if that works. It might, but I’m not going to bother.
That it is some failure on my part—that it is my fault, some mistake I can’t see but keep making—is such a self-deprecating answer. I don’t
really believe it anymore. I am done compromising. I’m through with contingencies and approximations. I am not going to settle. I am
not going to test the waters. I know what it is to be excited in a person and that has not happened. That ain’t your fault or mine, it’s just
unfortunate facts, but I’m used to living with those, and all the philosophy in the world won’t create someone I can love.
I feel like I have done due diligence on everyone I know. I feel like I would know if there is some possibility for passion. I don’t believe anyone I know now is going to delight me. Perhaps there are two misunderstandings: my own of others, and theirs of me. The latter
is my fault—wholly my fault. I will amend that to the full extent of my powers in a moment. The former is not my fault; it is indeed the
fault of others too afraid to make themselves known.
An SOS is a signal you send because you’re afraid you might soon be unable to send any signal at all. I am calling for any SOS you
care to send, because I am from now on deaf to quiet possibilities. I am deaf to subtlety for subtlety’s sake. If you are a person whom I
know as of this writing, I am not going to pry into you anymore. You’re going to have to wrench yourself into me. If you want to, then be
bold and fucking do it.
I insist across the waves to any and all survivors: I can understand what you are and who you are. I will not be disgusted by your peculiarities; I will love you for them. I will not respect your fears or your anger; I will plunge to seek what’s beneath them. I will never stop.
I accept everything. The electricity is turned off; the well-trained wall of pain and shame is gone. I don’t believe in shame. I don’t believe
in misery. The things you hide almost from yourself these days are welcome in me. I have never heard this from anyone else. I have never
heard anyone say, yes, nothing is true, everything is permissible141. No timidity, no embarrassment, no shame. Try me. Write me a letter.
Come see me at Krishna lunch. Come by my house. Call me on Fridays and Saturdays and come drink with me. If there is something in
you that you want me to love, then come bring it to me and soak me in it and set me on fire. Pyre me in your personality. Be a god to me,
be something worth my faith. I fucking dare you.
And now, just in case you have not heard what it is that I am, in case you do not understand who it is that might now wander from
you, my own SOS:
I am proud. I am light. I am a poet in the original Greek sense of creator. I am a fool as Socrates was, because I know my flaws better than
anyone else and I love them. I am a fool as Lear’s fool was, speaking comic truth to the dying, tragic universe and then getting the fuck out
of the sinking story. I think I could kill just about anyone if my life depended on it. I believe in explosions, I believe in a rush of cold, in
unexpected fingers, in involuntary sighs. I am a wick burnt at both ends and I have been burning for years and years. If I were immortal, I
would not get bored. I love the dirt as I love stars, I am not ashamed of the word “vagina” or even the word “pussy.” I will tell you how big
my penis is if you ask. I want badly to live alone for years, but I would rather live with someone who doesn’t make me feel like I’m alone
when I’m with them. I believe in looking death in the face. I believe in prying through taboos and digging up bodies, I believe that shame
is not only useless, but monstrous. I believe nothing is ever wholly finished or unfinished. I am America, I am Russia, I am Israel, I am
Palestine, I am the holy godallmighty future. I am the twitching fingertips of God in the dozing kitten’s eyelids. I am the dead dog on the
side of the road. I want to never stop traveling. I will write until I die. I want to become God. I am obsessed. I do not believe in monogamy.
I don’t believe in the government. I am hungry acid. I am the voice of the entire Internet. I am greasy, I am Iago and Othello. I am the
biblical clay, overflowing with blood. I am a self-aware machine. I want everyone. I am the chuckling shadows in an empty apartment. I
am the hypertachic electrons in every elevator. I am a discarded condom. I am every empty bottle. I am sweet, zombie history. I will try
every kind of sex there is. I believe in signs but not in symbols. I am an immortal Daedalus. I am twenty copies of Paradiso all open to the
140
In Final Fantasy VI, the slave crown was a device that made its wearer absolutely obedient to the owner of the crown.
141
“Nothing is true, everything is permissible” were the last words of Hassan-i Sabbah, an 11th century Persian Muslim missionary.
He founded a group of assassins, the Hashshashin, to further the cause of Islam. The word “assassin” derives from “Hashshashin.”
127
same page. I am the line between shit and fertilizer. I am an electric mirror. I am the radical taxonomy that makes weeds into flowers, I am
the unlaw that frees five million men. I am an ejaculation into the cosmos, trillions of spermatazoa wriggling into every mystery; I am the
sound of pregnancy, I am Mary’s moans. I am the powerlines, I am the magic wand, I am the rough beast. I am black market genetics. I am
England’s nomadic past. I am David’s father. I am the spear of destiny142. I am Nietzsche’s syphilis. I am a revenant Joan d’Arc. I am Nemesis and Orpheus. I am your erect nipples. I am the sharks’ electric sense. I am abortion. I am inverted shame, I am Progress. I am aware.
hallelujah apocalypse
and breath and breathe and breathe
Away Message #657
◆
If words are valuable because they are a method of condensing existence, then literature is valuable as a method of condensing important
moments of existence. Joyce is one of the best authors ever, therefore, for condensing the most important moments of literature.
To a new reader, of course Joyce is worthless, but to a person who has been through as much literary living as Joyce had, it is a
method of living five and twenty centuries143 (actually, thirty and one centuries, by the time Joyce wrote) over the course of a single day.
I need to know if reading the words
a man writes when a muse whispers
in his ear is the same as
hearing the muse for oneself.
If it is so, then every succeeding age,
has a greater chorus resounding
in its head, millions of muse songs
each echoing down from head
to writer’s head.
Poem #3
◆
I now understand why Shakespeare would go to such Dantean trouble to weave in whatever wordy tricks he could to Create*, at every
level of understanding, his own philosophies. I am confident that for anyone who is stoned and watches Hero appear on stage at the end
of Much Ado About Nothing and, as Shoaf puts it, “perform real identity on stage,” it is a total, sublime mindfuck.
Shakespeare’s philosophy of a constant struggle to be that which we define ourselves to be is, for that single instant, instantiated—
and it sends shivers down the spine.
*We need another word that’s not quite “create.” I capitalize it here to give the sense of Creator, but capitalization is itself a dying trick.
“Poet” would be the right verb for the job, but since those letters in that order are already stained with the smell of clove cigarettes, some
relative will have to do.
Poete? Sure. Here’s a new word:
po-ete
[po-eet]
vt.
1. to cause to be able to be felt
i hear one thousand wordsongs
day long, all wrong, faithful
takes on ‘’jealous,’’ ‘’grateful’’.
what i meant full:
i felt flameful.
Poem #22
◆
Joyce is remarkable. Every word beacons with the numina144 of those first breaths to touch larynx to sky.
Realizing that it was language that made us evolve in the first place, and thinking of all the ways in which we are language, and
beginning to see the immense vineyard of light that flows down our throats and through our lungs into our blood and into every toe and
tissue, it is not hard to understand how Daedalus both flies and fears by his own inventions.
142
The Spear of Destiny is the spear, wielded by the Roman soldier Longinus, which pierced Christ’s side. In occult theories, it is
held to exist to this day, and to make its wielder undefeatable.
.
143
“Five and twenty centuries” is a reference to Paradiso Canto 33, the last canto in the entire Comedy. The verse is “One moment
brings me more oblivion / than five and twenty centuries brought upon / Neptune’s wonder at the Argo’s shadow.” The image is that of the
god of the ocean, Neptune, staring up at the water’s surface at the first sailing ship man ever built. He is a god, but he is surprised. The
magnitude of Dante’s forgetting is as great as the 25 centuries between then and Dante’s age have brought about.
144
Numen (plural numina) is the presence of a deity in a certain place.
128
◆
Are we all just fools playing some lottery or another whose odds we do not understand?
We have always been at war with the Republicans.145
◆
For every hang-up you have, there are people whom you would otherwise adore whom you will never see.
These days I wonder if there is anyone without hang-ups.
Me: hm. what a terrible religion that is.
Me: antemancy.
◆
◆
As a person who does not believe in things, I do not see the value in conveying some Message in writing. I do not need to sound some
kind of existentialist depth. I prefer, in fact, to flee any kind of ism or comprehensive philosophy. What I really want to do as a writer is
to perform the odd jobs of my patron, Posterity. Certain things are beautiful, and I want to put them into words. Like an autistic savant, I
cannot tell you how it is any writer does what they do, or how it is that the fallen leaves in the world’s gutters are somehow in words, but
they are, we are all in each other and all of those leaves are in us somewise; whoever saves one life, saves the world entire146, etc.
As a writer who does not believe in things, I don’t really want anything else but to become the world’s best friend. I wish I had a bigger audience, or an audience who would love my ironies. When Elliott Smith says, “You ought to be proud that I’m getting good Marx”
(he says a lot, does he not?) this is what I think of:
Jung said that a culture’s subconscious is a pantheon of its geography: Germany had thunder gods and desert-dwellers have fiery
djinn. An English student is supposed to be learning about human existence, but what he literally sees is a landscape of ink and pages.
The proliferation of critical theory must no doubt be the restless conquests of a people whose gods are the Fateless, sleepless, self-weaving
texts. If you are an atheist to the god of the sun, of the green canopies, and of the lusty calls of the whores on the cobblestone corner, you
are no longer practicing the same religion as Shakespeare.
It is misguided to think that the anxieties of influence147 will be assuaged by more words.
It is common and understandable to lament for the happy mysteries of youth, to long for a world which is all effect and no cause,
but one cannot obey the command to know thyself without also understanding the peculiarities of the gleaming, bloody mud from which
we were caked and baked.
inklings conceived by breezes,
days before they blot white pages.
Away Message #595
On Finishing Ulysses on Easter and Receiving a Phone Call
Lentsigh. rI(s)ish god—
then she calls, “I just woke up.”
Her voice dews with sleep.
Away Message #763
145
“We have always been at war with Eastasia/Oceania” is a repeated phrase in 1984.
146
“He who saves a single life, saves the entire world.” is a line from the Talmud, and was also used as the tagline for Schindler’s List.
147
The Anxiety of Influence is a book by American literary critic Harold Bloom (b. 1930) about the ambiguous and troubling relationship between artists and the works by which they were influenced.
129
March 2007
“I will simply plug Bakhtin148 into Joyce. Voila! Here are Bakhtin’s terms and here are the places I have attached them to Joyce. It is all
nicely labeled. Now, about that tenure..”
◆
I can’t comprehend the modern experience of the loss of free-seeming will. I have never felt that anything in my own head was impossible
to change. This is not some delusion of an ego—never I am Caesar149—but just a lit petard, the transformation of stench into a tangerine
candleburst of joy.
I don’t feel like there’s anything Victorian about this. It is awfully jaded to conflate the examined life with the patriarchy.
I am most pleased with myself when I press through the kneejerk, fearful retreat from thoughts of mortality, saying, “no, no no no
not this time, no, fuck you, get out of my head. You are finished.”
Maybe that loss of free-seeming will happens when the panics are so moment-to-moment, so self-creating, and so I-eroding that
they feed back into themselves and leave no room for the peace of persistent self. Still, I cannot ban the fear of death outright: I have cured
my apathy with small doses of it.
I have never understood the need to grenade a problem. Meditate, for Christ’s sake. Bring the smallest of smithereens of a problem
up to your conscious attention, and deal with your woes thought by thought. Erode them with the patience of the seasons.
I know who I am. I am the occasion for the constant parade I throw.
“Come on. [YOUR NAME HERE] cut me off ...”150
◆
I was talking with someone about what-might-have-been if I had lived in a bigger town. I said that I used to lament it, but don’t any longer.
They agreed things had turned out well. I said, “Well, who knows what flowers grow in alternity?”
I thought I had invented the word, but apparently some role-player beat me. I still contend I could’ve scooped Hume on that noncausal thing if I were a few hundred years older.
I was arguing with someone that not only does existence precede essence, but that essence does not exist, contending that any apprehension of essence or existence is is just one single cuxic phenomenon, asking how it is one “apprehends” “A is A” when the conversation ended.
Everything true is perceptible.
Away Message #887
◆
Me: it’s just .. i don’t know, who has any right to say what it is proper to mourn, or how much?
Me: the loss of an infant life, or the torture but eventual freedom of an adult for ten years?
Friend: no one has the right. only you do
Friend: some things are just expected to take longer
◆
Is there something other than happiness? This is a question which I am asking for the first time in a long time—maybe in 13.7 billion
years.
Do you suppose God minds it when little girls run needles down their skin or when men at twenty-one grasp their intestines in their
charred hands and then die? Do you think he appreciates it?
The answer is not at all clear to me.
God said unto him, Isaac: and he said, Behold, here I am.
And he said, Thy father is to take thee into the land of Moriah; there he will cut thy throat and
offer thee as a sacrifice to me. Thou must not speak that thou knowest this, my commandment.
And Isaac rose up early in the morning, pretending to have slept.
Away Message #904
◆
I am adrift in a way that I have not been since I was 15, maybe younger. There is something to this, something which I do not have a word
for, and there is a great deal of this thing. I am drawn to undrawnness.
◆
You always have access to that fountainhead of sorrow, the invincible animal fear of your own mortality.
It is a habit, writing, whose value I will have to reevaluate, soon.
◆
◆
148
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian literary critic and philosopher whose methods of analysis have frequently been applied to the works of James Joyce.
149
A reference to a line spoken by Caesar in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “Such men as he be never at heart’s ease / Whiles they behold
a greater than themselves, / And therefore are they very dangerous. / I rather tell thee what is to be fear’d / Than what I fear; for always I am
Caesar.”
150
A reference to the last words of Dutch Schultz (1902-1935), a mobster who had been fatally shot, but who survived long enough
to be interrogated by the police while he was dying. His responses were a surreal, mostly-nonsensical monologue.
130
[Editor’s note: the following is an introduction I wrote for the front of the website that contained my writing from 2001 to 2004.]
03-1381-03
(March 20, 2007)
This site is a case study in graphomania. Since mid-2001, I have written and written and saved everything I could. If anything—some jot,
some scribble—was even slightly intelligible, I put it online.
You probably know me and have your own suspicions about why I’ve tried so hard to record myself. I was a lonely boy in an small,
isolated town. For every person who finds this record interesting, that boy is vindicated—but he can’t know it now. I’m positive he just
wanted to be impressive. In some places, I’m embarrassed for him—in others, I am truly and happily amazed. I was often arrogant and
ignorant. On occasion, though, I managed erudition and cleverness.
But there’s something neurotic about it all. I might’ve been happier if I hadn’t been such an intellectual packrat. I’ve been miserly
with my talent and my love. I wracked twilight libraries for what was most abstruse and esoteric, most difficult. With no guru and no
respect for tradition, I turned inward and worshipped my own obscurity. Meanwhile, I daydreamt that someone on the all-seeing Internet
might find me, might read me, and might, say, fall in love with me—or recruit me.
I daydream, now, of mining my own history; I think there is a story in my slow, swampfire madness. I wanted the world to know, “I
think! I think about the hard and the daedal!” My religion was cargo occultism; I thought I could call down the world’s love by saying the
right words. I think that I was talented; at the time, I thought I was the pied piper wandering through a kingdom of the deaf. The irony
is, if I had humbled myself and spent the past six years participating instead of infolding, I would have a stronger voice today. But I didn’t
want it unless I was perfect, perfect enough to go it alone. I thought I was perfect.
Forgive me for telling them your secret, old friend.
◆
Perhaps:
A Zen master was in his hut with his students. He said to them, “When you drink water, be the drinking of water.” After he finished, the
students thanked him, bowed, and left.
One student returned a week later. He said, “Master, I have been trying to do as you said. I have tried, when I drink, to be the drinking of water. I do not understand.”
The master said, “Go fetch a bowl, fill it with water, and come drink it before me so I can watch you.” The student went, fetched the
water, and returned.
“Now, drink,” the master said.
The student began to drink in slow gulps. While he was still drinking, the master asked him, “What are you doing?”
The student began to answer, but water rushed down his lungs. At this, he was enlightened.
◆
Of us in this nation, I think:
When one of us sees a gun, we are not seeing metal and powder; we are seeing a phantasmagorical man, some kind of demon, and
visions of children with burnt skin.
When one of us hears a helicopter overhead, we feel down in the pit of our stomachs that the great dark god Government has spies
in every sunset.
When one of us wonders, how did this ever happen, we think, those motherfucking dogs in suburbia, those soccer moms made of
plastic, those men at desks eight hours a day authorizing the poisoning of rivers.
When we think of Government, we see that it hangs over America, a red-gray cloud of eyes and weapons.
The Dallas skyline, we imagine, is black as hell.
But, of course:
there is no government in the woods or on the waves.
there is no government ten feet under your knees.
there is no government in an empty federal building.
there is no government in a lost gun.
The Evening News
There was a time when they were in love.
They have a son who talks at them at night.
He is dressed to kill, his face is impenetrable.
He spits his words across the living room.
“There was a robbery downtown today.”
An animated eagle and the blast of a trumpet jet over the carpet.
They chat about his makeup—he’s so handsome!
His well-lit face ricochets off the picture frame above the couch.
There’s a bulletin their son reads about bullets in others’ sons.
“There was a murder [five blocks away!]”
Ten thousand pictures have crashed,
one after another, deep into their eyeglasses.
Three revolutions, six elections, four foreign wars, one son,
and coming up on FOX Evening News—
131
“Could there be poison in your home? Find out at 11.”
And now, after twenty-six years of news,
held by their age, the sofa, and the stories
fired at them about the gangs and drugs and guns,
the TV is a better bet than an exit.
Nothing means nothing to me.
◆
◆
In response to, “You’re like what would happen if the past 50 years created a baby and vomited it up, and it was born with Asperger’s Syndrome, and a sense of self-importance and self-declared precociousness”:
I would like to express my gratitude for the most interesting slam on my writing ever.
◆
as quietly as i can:
I make text and dream of greatness because I want to be known by the world in a way that I haven’t ever been known in person by anyone.
I make confessions like these on my journal because I still want to be known, famous or not. I’ve been wanting to do an experiment where
I don’t keep a journal. Let’s say a month. (i.e. until 4/16). Here goes:
I read in a novel about human lack;
it’ll take years for my voice to come back.
Away Message #586
May 2007
I realize now that I can’t (yet?) do what I want to do, which is break your heart.
I want you to hear my mother’s yelps of back-pain every time she stands and kneels and sits and the honeybee horror that is her
compulsive cleaning of our pet-hair-filled house. I want you to see the wooden-cabin isolation my father built himself in the smallest of
Appalachian towns.
I want you to hear the rustle, to suspect the universe is a billowing curtain of light which we impatiently wait to lift and reveal the
show—and grow old with the thought that the curtain is all there is.
I feel my heart break a few times a day these days. It’s not bad, but it hurts. It reminds of what Aristotle said, that we shouldn’t seek
to avoid all pain, just that we should endure the right amount.
I’d love to tell you that man delights not me151, but that simply isn’t true. The truth, if you have known me and lost touch with me, is
not that I loved you too little, but that I loved something else more. Now and ever, amor mi mosse.
And the heat of my heartbeat against the vulgarity of my flesh
is a light that never goes out—
and it shines during the summer
and it shines during the darkest part of the year—
a pink neon sign to guide a lonely drunk home.
Away Message #1003
June 2007
I have tried to deny for a long time the magic in my own soul. I have never been anyone else, so I can only speak for myself, but:
When I am proud and wonder at my mile-tall flaming sword of an I, I feel the heat beneath my fingers, I feel forests of miracles waterfalling out of my palms, I feel Heaven behind my back, I feel Hell beneath my feet, I feel with wine in my veins the burn of revolution,
and I do not know or care if I hurt others in my indulging the power of the self.
I have learned the white magic of peace—but I know, too, its counterpart in the blood chewed out of my lips, in the stench on my
breath, in the clouds above the sea which rain and strike and God startles from his sleep for a moment,
I can never be a philosopher, only a poet, only a release valve for a burning hurricane.
I have lived in Russia and I feel their hunger for peace, the insanity that has left china sets of neuroses walking the streets under
shawls, on six inch heels—too much noise and the city will break, oh, I feel it.
But I, I have known too much peace, too much understanding, and I am tired of healing. I want the startle, the catch in my infinitely deep breath to twist and grow like a venomous seed into a cough, an echoing roar, for a scream from a mouth the size of the Grand
Canyon, and no one
no one
no one has ever loved me in this darkness, no one has ever seen the good here. No one has ever said, this poem about the flames
in your heart, this is a good poem. I know that when I write this I am alone and I wonder what the world has become, because I do not
understand it and it feels like the obstinate moss in a forest fire.
I want to be put to the stone, my enemy, I want to tear it to dust, to bleed and sweat on it and with prosperous whispers convince
the stone to life, I want to talk the soul into a world, to tell the whole truth, God or not.
151
“Man delights not me” is a line from one of Hamlet’s monologues.
132
it’s raining and valleys
are filling with water
the future is noisy
on the high wooden roof.
i’ll do noah one better
when this cabin tips over.
we’ll give god the finger
and stay on the boat.
Away Message #705
133
Chapter 7
The Word Was Without God
The cord they snipped from
His holy navel was, then,
neither God nor man.
Away Message #764
The edge of the night does not exist in Gainesville; only in a sufficiently small town can one observe the rim of civilization. In Gainesville
nights, the clouds are yellow echoes of the bars. The acoustics of Gainesville permit no silences, but the air above my home in Lake County
is very quiet, indeed.
The stars by night, the thunderstorm-blue skies are all, I know, myself.
The echoes of friendships, even here, are still too loud for me to be as lonely as I want to be right now.
◆
Sufjan Stevens sounds like the dozen other lives I led in video games across the television.
Sometimes it’s infuriating that T.S. Eliot, that Dante, that Joyce—fuck, even Ovid—all got these myths of miracles in their own
childhoods, but I am forced to forget about materia152 as a youthful nothing. It was not the Tradition, after all, it was a product. I have to
be postmodern about it. It makes true authorhood feel impossibly distant.
Then again, I see hanging in the sky the summit of that high mountain, Legitimacy. I do know that any flags placed there will wave
forever.
slamming on the doors of history
i don’t have the option of the metaphors that my predecessors have
hello, suburban america.
i send IMs, not carrier pigeons, my war is academic; deadlines, not shrapnel, fly at me.
you are the voice behind the noise
singing love behind a rainstorm,
and i have seen you through the electronic blizzard
the white-static bleach of the television,
the world does not believe in you,
but i do, i know the unbearable tickle
like cardiac fibers being untwisted one by painful one
like a caffeine rush,
i have known you in every new love
before i find you are not her,
and i settle anyway.
the horrible truth is that maybe you’re not real,
but at least they got to wade through bullets to find you,
all i get to do is dodge dogma
and keep up the creative campfire.
i am the last one to go to sleep tonight
and every night, forever,
god was dead one hundred and fifty years ago. where are we now?
the symphony-addicted aesthetes,
which is to say, the wealthy,
have helter-skelter abandoned us.
time for rhyming.
the station i wish to achieve is imaginary:
to pretend that a ferryman
can effect an affair of affrontment to boredom,
to dream that a lightning rod for
pudding pop faux pas
and rural sop, an awake biot*i might not, but i can’t stop
and here light years
(sorry on the cliché, but to assay the circumstances
into their constituents, it’s fitting more for me
the physics peasant,
than the typical hesitant journalist
seeking firmament in relevant relativity
but i get it, and does not he
pretend where i have at least
memorized the equations for my GPA?)
152
In Final Fantasy VII, materia was a substance, crystallized spirit energy, which could be used to cast spells.
134
so away
from parenthesis-isn’t it the case that
love replacement has faced embracement from irony, inc.
for what i think is ten thousand weeks at least.
*sorry, i forgot the biot business,
but what i meant is,
i am neither quick enough nor as lucid as the dreamers.
maybe all it takes is one furious effort from a clever
public bellwether to hype the
feeling and spike the dreaming into
the public scheme, get
a fanbase and a wiki scene and debates
on the carriage of your face.
tempted to erase most of these
lame word embraces,
nonetheless i’ve created
a mess with nutrition
embedded among the grits and gruel,
sorry god and mom
and grace and cool,
with sore feet, soggy heart,
and poorly-rhymed soul,
for the 3000 weeks i’ve left,
i’ll play the fool.
July 2007
The earth is the realm of fleeting, mutating identity halfway between two cosmic poles of absolute identity. Milton and Dante knew it and
I guess the acidhead authors of the Bible knew it, too:
Satan’s identity is “I!” Satan refuses to accept anything in the universe to define him: he refuses everything, so he is nothing. Nothing
is always nothing, so he always is the only thing he can be: deprived, because he can’t forget that one word, that one letter, “I,” for even a
second. Satan is that he isn’t.
God’s identity is “All!” God is everything, and everything is always everything. God is the pink-gold light of beingness. God is that
he is.153
and Satan always said-a,
better worse than better.
Away Message #956
◆
I wonder if, given enough time, patience, and humanity, one could rehabilitate Hitler.
[Editor's note: the following exchange occurred in response to the above.]
Friend:
Everyone deserves a second chance, Jesse.
Me:
That’s sort of why I ask, because it’s such a troubling idea.
If, with expert (expensive) psychiatric treatment, after years of work, there’s no guarantee that a person will actually behave well (let
alone feel happiness given knowledge of their crime), is it truly better to leave them in prison?
I personally think yeah, probably, unless they ask to die.
Friend:
I think that, yes, if, after attempting treatment, they see no improvement, any person who is still capable of damaging/killing another
should be left in prison for the safety of others.
Yes, it’s possible. I don’t know how probable. Hitler had problems, real problems, as we all know.
Me:
I just wonder, if, by the time they caught him, he could live a happy life in a world that would loathe him for whom he had been, even if
a squad of ninja Daoist-psychiatrists kidnapped him and worked on him for 15 years.
◆
I have a Mona Lisa on my wall because I grew up knowing it was the best painting in the world. From the supersaturated bedtime of 7:56
AM, I looked at her and saw the rolling, dismissive hands of youth—youth eager to spit on history, terrified of pesticides. Having only
21 years myself, I don’t have the specifics to prove her bestness—but her hiding smile, her fractal browncrumbs read like letters from my
elderly future, like the infinite truth on every gravestone.
153
Exodus 3:14 reads, “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM
hath sent me unto you.”
135
And I sleep knowing every new life needs die a new death.
◆
I was drunk the other night and thought, “The path to symphony of existence is through polarization—complete absorption into some
mode: joy, sorrow, machismo, awe, etc. Alcohol forces this, which is why people like it so much. It disallows worry, the middle ground.
We drink alcohol to be dissolved.
In Russia, I wrote a haiku about this, cigarettes, and vodka:
Thin and flammable,
I dissolve, sift through lives’ ashes,
and return myself.
◆
We had had a late lunch at a shitty Indian restaurant near Butcher’s Bridge. It was a few weeks in, and we had grown bold enough to speak
English among ourselves, even on streetcorners.
A man stopped us. “You .. you were speaking English?”
That’s a bad opener. It usually means, “You scum would pollute our air with your Teutonic babble?”
But this man just wanted to chat. He was gray, but he said he was always training himself, always ready to be strong—had been with
the KGB, he said—and now took a wage guarding a small shop. He sung for us in French. He told us about his wife from Bonn, Germany.
Then he nocked a finger in the air and brought his old eyes close to my own.
“I want for Russia—to become strong.”
We nodded, “Yes, we like Russia, we want good things for it.”
”No, no,” he shook his head. “How to say?”
He paused.
”I want Russia—to become strong,” he brought his fists together in front of his heart, “to help America.”
We didn’t speak.
“You know .. Musul’manini .. Muslims. Jihad. We must fight.”
I won’t forget him.
◆
I don’t know why atheist writers write—I’m not sure they’re anything but businessmen. Dante believed he was God writing a love letter
to Himself. Shakespeare was an early existentialist who believed something like I did when I wrote,
“.. let’s just be Jesus together .. let me birth you, let me cradle you .. let us spend a year alone together, .. let us even cheat on each
other together, .. let us take the Argo to each other and kill each other ..”
I would say I’m just writing to myself a couple hours earlier or later, but I can barely echo down my own memory, let alone the corridors of history to some recurrence of myself. So, no, that’s not it. I’m writing because I believe I will live to hear the echo of each keystroke.
Where others took their lemons and made
a family, and others, their grapes and waited
for wine, I am still staring at the reel of fruit,
a kaleidoscope of fortune and ruin, thinking,
“Cherry, cherry, cherry.”
Away Message #1008
Maybe sex is this simple: Leave it better than you found it.
◆
(Untitled)
I spot aspy in the marketplace
a ripe loaf, lump and flavorful.
I could take you home to roast,
so cute and breediful.
Oh please me, please, be coming home,
I’m hungry and I’m full.
Just turn your words into your tongue;
your mouth, a waterfall.
I’ll sup, what’s up, let’s eat you up,
I’ll taste you till you’re done,
and when you’re acrid, lanky, hull,
136
I’ll sleep and moan the sun.
I’ll mope and word, and dry with thirst
and fill up to the brim
and play as he I used to be
until, again, I’m him.
◆
“... in two government “study-of-the-studies” in the last few years, both the CDC and the National Academy of Sciences went through
the available data on right-to-carry. Neither study saw any clear link, either way, between right-to-carry provisions and crime rates.”154
(italics mine)
I'd like to think there’s some connection between will and cause, but maybe we are shadows and echoes of a causeless truth. Still, I’d hate
to concede Kerouac his womanizing and egotism.
August 2007
I read this article about the American prison system and the two million sentient scars on its skin. It was like medicine: undelicious but
curing. It worked best—and got thickest and hardest to swallow—at the end, as the author was torn in half being both a moral philosopher and just a normal human being, sobbing.
◆
There will be an age of miracles, but the miracles will be the same miracles they’ve always been: plastic bags on cold winds, the brown eyes
of other people, the fact that there is something instead of nothing at all.
We will never come down, we will never have our buzzes killed, we will never be afraid.
It will be the simplest of neuromagic: get rid of chemical tolerance, boost neuron growth; cure aging. We’ll live happy forever-lives
centuries before we explore the galaxy or transcend into the fabric of reality. There can be no war if everyone is more or less on ecstasy
all the time.
Until then, serotonin will deplete, testosterone and jealousy will spill over the banks of Daoism.
Until then, I guess the best thing is still to be where you are.
◆
[Editor’s note: the following are extracts from notes made in an altered state.]
Immorality is important to attraction, as it demonstrates clearly to what extent a man will go to further his own life, whose life the wife’s
life depends on.
“I don’t even know when my own mom’s Mother’s Day is.”
I imagine one day there could be a class of people, let’s call them the Shameless, who have no desire for privacy whatsoever. People do
seem increasingly exhibitionistic.
I know that, had such a movement or class existed when I was maybe 14 or 15, I might’ve joined.
I think the rest of society’s reaction would begin with voyeurism, descend into commercialism, diversify into science, sublime into
literature, and eventually get lost in the labyrinth of philosophy.
September 2007
It occurs to me that perhaps Ulysses, far from being mere parody, suggests that now we are all actually living epic lives.
◆
[Editor’s note: the following are extracts from notes made in an altered state.]
Someone
Some autistics ride horses and form very strong connections with them by reading their muscle movements.
Me
Writing “Autistics psychic with horses.”
That’s a great fact! If I knew it, I’d be telling everyone.
What a minute! I do know it.
It’s the opposite of The Game155!
154
Robert VerBruggen , “John Lott, Loaded for Leftists,” FrontPage Magazine, July 03, 2007
155
The Game is a mental game whose rules are as follows:
1. Once one knows about The Game, one is playing, and cannot stop playing.
2. Whenever one remembers The Game, one loses.
3. Whenever one loses, one must announce one’s loss to those around one.
4. One cannot lose from being reminded of The Game, only by thinking about it oneself. Thus, those who hear an announced loss do not
lose.
5. Once an announcement is made, those who hear it have a grace period of five minutes in which to forget The Game before they can
lose again.
6. If one thinks about The Game continuously for 30 minutes after a loss, one loses again.
7. There is no way to win The Game, only to avoid losing.
137
(in the sense that remembering is rewarding, because the person who remembers does so pleasurably and then voluntarily tells
others about this fact. From this it can be concluded that something like a bad breakup is a form of The Game.)
God - an entity with all the powers any entity can have
Fiction - those universes that can survive more paradoxes than our own universe can.
Sorcerer - any mortal entity endowed to combat the plot.
Mortal Jafar can’t be an immortal genie-god; asymptotes aren’t allowed.
Once freed, Genie is a sorcerer (with exactly the same set of powers that pre-genie Jafar had).
On the difference between a sorcerer and a genie:
A sorcerer can make a moon, but a genie can be the moon.
On a brief hallucination that I am Jss:
I can’t for the world of me deny
that psychedelic trips are just like wearing
earpieces to gods handing me lines.
Psychedelics are conviction ovens.
The difference between a child and an adult is one of guilt.
Psychedelics induce periods of overwhelming cuxic activity. A Persian carpet sewn of the thread of every perception, needle in the eye
of Unfinity.
In 2035, I will direct plays for stoned audiences.
Illuminati as Plato Noveau’s philopsycher-kings. The conspiracies can all be right if the world is run by 13 men who never stop tripping.
Compare the poor-living-like-the-rich fiction of Robert Anton Wilson to the rich-living-like-the-poor fiction of Jean-Paul Sartre. Bob is
Cassadaga; Sartre, Sumer.
All writers always write autobiography-except, in the stories, their pencils are replaced by poleaxes.
The earthly, evil Gnostic god is the perceptions experienced by an individual; the good, ethereal Gnostic god is the perceptions experienced by a species.
[Editor’s note: for an explanation of this, see, in the Wilson-Leary Eight-Circuit brain model, circuits one through six for the former,
circuit seven for the latter.]
A man could remember everything if the tangled, painful hair of history could be combed straight.
When it was discovered that Jesus’ destiny was revealed to him at the age of 21—and not at 13 as was previously thought—there was a
public outcry that this was simply unfair. A man ought not live more than half of his life before he discovers he’s divinity.
This is elucidated by one fact: Christ’s 21st was the most fair time God could have told him. He had no opportunity to tell Him about
Himself until that point.
How to generate world peace: in perfect, inaccessible-encrypted benevolence, sponsor a program to scan in everyone’s face in the world
and provide a quantitative list of those who most resemble each person. Issue this information and a brochure bi-monthly to every citizen.
Literature : Sci-Fi :: Poetry : Critical theory
◆
The Internet is the World learning how to sleep and work at the same time.
Fiction is simply those universes in which more things can be true than can be true in our own.
◆
A lot of people loathe the idea that a savior also has the time to go on vacation. I think the belief in this possibility is the backbone of that
gaseous American spirit.
It is taking me years to destroy the wall that separates AD from BC.
◆
◆
My roommate, Bjorn, recently had a false memory and thus accidentally invented a myth for the modern age:
An old man is sitting in front of the shock controls in the Milgram156 experiment. He hears the screams of the man within. He lights up
a cigarette, turns to the man in the white coat, and says he refuses to go on. “The experiment requires that you continue,” the man in the
white coat says. The old man again refuses.
156
The Milgram experiments were a series of psychological tests in which there is was a “testee” who is asked questions and who
pretended to be administered electric shocks for each wrong answer, the magnitude of the shock increasing for each wrong answer. There
was also a “proctor,” the person on whom the experiment was really being conducted, who was to administer the shocks, not knowing
the shocks were not really being delivered. On the dials for the machine, there were markings indicating levels at which physical harm or
even death could result from the shock. The scientists conducting the experiment urged the proctor to go on even at levels which could
harm the testee. In the original experiment, 65% of the proctors administered the final, potentially fatal 450-volt shock.
138
“You have no other choice,” the white coat says.
The old man takes a drag and says, “You can’t make me do anything.”
In Rome’s early days, Porsinna and his Etruscans were besieging the city. A soldier, Mucius, enters the Etruscan camp to try to kill Porsinna, but is captured by the guards. When he is brought before Porsinna, Mucius refuses all of his demands and threats. He walks to a
torch and holds his right hand in the flame until it is burnt off. This, he says, is the strength of every Roman. Porsinna, impressed and
terrified, releases Mucius. When he returns to Rome, he is titled “Scaevola,” meaning “left hand.”
“Once, when the tyrant Nicocreon, King of Cyprus, tried to torture Anaxarchus, philosopher and free man, into betraying his partners in
the conspiracy against the tyrant, Anaxarchus bit off his tongue and spat it in the raging tyrant’s face.”
The Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, Prose 6
October 2007
One day soon, there will be a service, let’s call it PayCreate, with whom most musicians will have created accounts. This site, PayCreate,
will offer you the ability to deduct $X from your bank account every month and distribute it to artists as you see fit. They will, in turn,
freely release their works with no copyright, just acknowledging that they would like to be compensated. I think of it as the street musician model.
I myself would probably divvy up $5 between 100 artists every month, which is $5 a month more than anyone currently gets from
me—and hundreds of thousands of other people—anyway.
I think this will exist before the next ten years have passed.
◆
I feel my unfulfilled patience fold up beneath my lungs like an unhad orgasm. I feel that old drunk need to scream, but my fingers are
under new management. I know now the difference between the pleasure of sowing rage into words and the crop of—well, I don’t know
what I’m sowing, now, but I feel its fruit up my sleeve, against my wrist, sharper than anything I have ever held. I know with every passing
day it ripens.
(Untitled)
and I memorize dozens of despairing authors,
Hebrew and Italian. and I sing Job’s destruction,
Dante’s exile. and I sing gulag and
gallows.
and I love them all. and I am them all, alone, each
with a pen.
and when I am alone
again,
I am humanity fallen twice. and I am
Eden
doubly forbidden, a pair of promises
both forgotten.
◆
A friend of mine who calls himself a Democrat asked me, “So do you think we should privatize everything?”
I answered that there was no “should” involved: I want privatization where it benefits people. My only “should” is that the world
should be better.
About an hour later, I was in my kitchen thinking, “Labels for policy suggestions aren’t enough. Including an additional label for a
person's underlying philosophical motivation would clarify a great deal.”
So for instance, you might call Reagan a Nationalist Conservative, Gore a Cosmopolitan Liberal, Ron Paul a Nationalist Libertarian, Skeet a Utilitarian Anarchist and me a Utilitarian Libertarian. I’m not sure what labels would work best, but you can already see the
important difference.
Skeet and I mostly agree on our end; our means are different because of factual disagreements. Meanwhile, the Democrat and I
probably have different ends, and so no amount of discussion about means could persuade one to the other’s side.
One man cried for Justice
as the standard bearer rode.
The other cried for Liberty
as horsey hooves bestrode.
Away Message #557
On Guilt
I live in a small ape.
He is scared of traffic.
◆
◆
I want to start an unending conversation with the whole world.
I am looking for the philosopher’s stone, to turn myself into an idea.
139
I want to speak what is so fascinating that no man can turn his back on it,
so graceful that no one can go to sleep unhappy having thought of it.
I want to make the choice that will make every choice thereafter for the better.
I feel the golden strands of every living soul flow through me more and more each passing day.
I want to see the perfect picture, a pixel a person, and the film of infinite meaning.
I want the gift of tongues.
I want the password to the universe.
“Te maldigo, y the tongue s’kotorom tu parle.”157
Away Message #1020
◆
I’ll know I am in love when I want to take drugs with someone and have sex.
◆
And everyone hurts everyone else thinking, “That’s what you get for what you would’ve done to me if things were the other way around.”
“Maybe,” I slither,
“but we are but karmic ATMs most days.
Like today.”
Away Message #138
◆
I read up an article that mentioned that Radiohead have admitted that the online offering of In Rainbows was a gimmick. At this point, I
might be expected to admit I’ve been made a fool of, but honestly, I don’t think even Radiohead know what they’re talking about.
They can’t imagine a world without the debilitating papier-mâché fetters of law, can’t conceive of an honest economy. Cynicism is
safe, but they’re wrong on this one.
The Internet is the longest standing anarchy in the world. OiNK was reborn minutes after it died on a server somewhere in Europe
or Russia. Like a revenant, it is rises again and again and again, Napster and Kazaa and OiNK. The RIAA are in a battle to the death against
an immortal adversary.
In the end, no one will ever pay anything for music but what they want to.
November 2007
I am coining another word:
cux-is
[kuhk-sis]
n.
1. an unprovable, unfalsifiable, or unverifiable theory.
◆
Since love means remitting control to an admittedly flawed being, asexuality is very much a form of anorexia.
When she reaches into herself,
her hand must touch nothing because
his sword and pen must write on water158.
Away Message #760
◆
I was answering someone about why I’d extend my lifespan to 1,000 years and I managed to produce a phrase I like a lot:
Life lives to live life.159
Last night, I had two dreams:
◆
In the first, you could say aloud any question and, so long as it was addressed to Google, Google would answer it—any question. Like, if
you asked, “Google, what’s the next book I should read?” it would research you and find an answer. You could also ask Google to bodily
protect you (or anyone else), and it would, because Google was, in addition to being a search engine, a planetwide system of autonomous
military and police robots. You asked it to do that by saying, “Google, keep (name).”
In the second, I invited a friend to sleep over, but forgot to tell her I was sleeping in an unusual place that night: in the room of my
class where everyone slept in empty coffins in open graves (neither of which had ever been used). It was in a classroom, though, not a
cemetery. Maybe it was a grave-digging class.
157
I curse you, and (Spanish) the tongue with which (Russian) you speak (French).
158
On John Keats’ tombstone, nothing is written but the phrase “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
159
Line 16,191 in the chapter “Cyclops” in Ulysses reads “Love loves to love love.”
140
I dreamt that Borges died and got upset,
until I woke up and realized Borges was dead.
Away Message #924
The endpoint of the piracy revolution is voluntary payment.
◆
and at last, with one ungloved hand,
they come to tax your air
Away Message #932
Every shower, I would stare at our shampoo bottle
◆
for dry or damaged hair
para cabello seco o maltratado
at those two adjectives, and I could never figure out why until I realized that anything can damage anything else, but only human beings
can mistreat.
December 2007
I know a girl who is cursed with the belief that she is cursed.
your knot of knownn’t
is not a home
Away Message #795
◆
I feel it, the inklings, like a little dog that comes to visit and it barks and—my God there it is, it must exist—but why can’t I think it
through? is not my mind part of the world—but it can’t know anything about the world—so you sit and watch the possibilities roll by, you
observe the world that might be, because you know..
and explode. You explode as you watch the clouds clip the tops of mountains and roll overhead and split the sky, full of clichés, not
worth a damn, what do you want words for? I have to ask and sure you know a lot of shit, sure you know who Boethius160 is, what the fuck
can that do for you? why would you want to tell anyone? I know what I learned, you motherfucker, if you would shut up for long enough,
the answer is that, the answer is always that you are going to die, you are here, watch everything in the universe and love it, love your
mistakes too—my God, there it is—but what do I write about what can please old Logan, old Kershner161? what can I possibly tell them?
I can type 100 words per minute and that only makes it worse, what can I possibly do? the truth is is that I don’t fucking know—I
need to stop swearing—and I can’t live my life going calm calm calm explode into these fucking streamer bursts of stupid words and bad
clichés, nothing, nothing, it comes to nothing, you can’t touch people from here,
but then this is to me, not to anyone else, and I am writing to talk to myself, because it’s easier, it stands there and looks back at me
and is the words that I just was, it’s not some kind of oil puddle that rolls around, ungraspable, it’s right there, this is what I thought, so
here I go, this is it again.
here I go.
Why don’t you enjoy the world that exists around you? What happened to that? When did the future, when did your mind become
more attractive? Don’t you remember what it’s like trying to live out of a mental suitcase? Unpack, always unpack.
Always?
No, not always, sometimes you must climb up there and sit and grind, but you better have something to work on up there, you better take something up. It’s so cold up here and my pleural cavity burns with tremors. You have to write for someone who will believe you.
You have to write for someone who will love you.
Packing in Tucumcari, NM
It was windy on Sunday and a towtruck drove by,
I seem to remember,
hauling a smashed-up red metaphor.
There I am, packing.
There are the redwoods, my big map and marker.
I hit every contiguous state but Oklahoma—
and I got Texas on the Greyhound home.
160
Boethius was a Roman Christian philosopher of the 6th century who, while imprisoned, wrote the Consolation of Philosophy,
a dialogue between himself and Lady Philosophy about the rejection of fickle earthly luck and misfortune in favor of the ever-accessible
consolation of wisdom.
161
William Logan (b. 1950) is a poet and poetry critic. Brandon Kershner is a poet and Joyce scholar. I took poetry workshops with
both of them.
141
I went alone, yeah, Bildungsroadtrip162.
My trunk hit a guard rail.
All I remember is my underwear on the road.
There I am in the motel room,
looking at my rocks from Death Valley.
No, I didn’t forget. The portable stove,
the unwashed pots and pans, I left them for the maids.
Sorry, a lot of this has been picked over. I keep online
the photographs and all the things I wrote
on my website
that I stopped updating.
You can have whatever you find.
◆
I’m in my dad’s cabin in remote northwestern North Carolina. Yesterday, my dad found an old VHS tape that turned out to be the only
home movie in his possession. It was of my ninth birthday party.
I watched a boy open his presents. I felt embarrassed for him, at how ungrateful he was. He darted his hands out to grab each next
package. He tilted his waxy party cup and drank the Coke as quick as he could. He smiled, but inscrutably. I don’t remember it, and I have
no idea what it felt like. Maybe he was simply and purely happy.
I doubt it. My fiction-writing professor once quoted for us, “Some people are stupid, but nobody is simple.” This boy caught me
off guard. Sometimes, one person does become another person—with no lapse in consciousness. That nine-year old boy was teleported
slowly, over nearly thirteen years, onto the couch where I lay.
We watched the next clip, too, of my little brother’s seventh birthday party and the breakfast the next day. My older brother taunted
my younger brother: “Little monkey boy, sitting in the poop chair!” My little brother got out of the poop chair and, still being filmed,
yanked the camera’s plug from the wall. The next clip is my older brother mock-cursing his fate as “victim of the yanking.” He was thirteen
and fucking hilarious.
What this says about when, 999999999999 years after my body lapses into dust, every last photon from my dying body quantumly tunnels back together to form Parmenides163 ca. 500 B.C.—I simply don’t know. I can honestly say it’s less clear for me now than it’s ever been.
Anthology164
This is not for you.
Johnny Truant, House of Leaves
Anthology, nectar on your breath and fluorescent stains on your hands,
crumbs of pollen on your chin and a half-chewed petal in your hair,
devourer of lotuses165:
your basket is not welcome here.
You addict, you junkie, you priest of poppies,
you triumphantly swing your censer through the vale,
pausing only to flick your lighter and inhale. Supine
in the sunshine, your back turned on the earth,
you cough great plumes
of burning words.
Swearing God himself smells just like Yeats,
you roll your trousers, drink peach after peach;
babbling apocrypha—something about the Sphinx—
you mutter, “... yes, the universe in each.”
And when night falls, anthology, instead of sleep,
you lift the day’s finds to starlight and squint. And then it becomes obvious,
obvious that every man is a star166, that each poem picks out a constellation,
that your bouquet is the firmament enfleshed.
And then the birthmarks that blossom on your sunburnt arms, you gasp,
are just the same, just the same.
January 2008
I dreamed my friends and I all lived on the lake my dad lived on as I was growing up (Lake Joanna). We got around to each other’s houses
162
This is a pun on the German word “bildungsroman,” literally a “novel of education,” used to describe coming-of-age novels.
163
Parmenides was a Greek philosopher in the 5th century B.C.
164
Anthology is from Greek “anthologia,” literally “a gathering of flowers.”
165
In the Odyssey, the lotus eaters are a race of men Odysseus and his men come across who, upon eating the flowers, care for nothing but eating more, and so never return home.
166
This is a reference to a line in Aleister Crowley’s Book of Law, “Every man and every woman is a star.”
142
in small motorboats.
I dreamed I had unprotected sex with a prostitute whom I later realized I adored. I spent the rest of the dream trying to get back
in touch with her. Then, I realized that the sex was unprotected and, in consolation for the fear of an STD, my subconscious woke me.
God watches all men,
custodian, customer, watch salesman,
and sailor on shore leave staring at the pupil of night.
Away Message #1021
◆
In my dream last night, I entered what was supposed to be Heaven; it looked like a public library. There were familiar-looking indigent
people. Also, I met someone who was supposed to be Christ. He and another clerk of Heaven told me there was something important
about the sequence “dddddd,” though it may have been “gggggg.” On waking, I realized maybe that combining the Number of the Beast
with itself nullifies or reverses it, so maybe it’s “666666” or “999999”.
As I was leaving, out of nowhere, a bum slapped my face,* so I stopped to quarrel with him and tell him that I was hungry and hypoglycemic and sooner or later he was going to hit someone in the face and they’d pass out. I think my friend Andrew, who recently quit
Publix, announced he was going to start working in Heaven tomorrow.
*I realized as I was writing this that I was probably supposed to turn the other cheek.
Hypoglycemia,
I am told, “too little sweetness in the blood”;
and allergies,
I am told, “another actor”;
and I agree: an angry ghost.
Away Message #1034
◆
How come no one tells anyone anything? Is it really that everyone blunders through life like I blundered through my first 20 years, totally
oblivious to the bloody feminine ephemera of all existence? Is that really the case?
Is that why no one talks?
How, is the question, can you trust anyone? How can you know unless you’ve bled?
I want to bottle everything up, everything, so that when I am dying, the words I speak are heroin, are the cure for cancer.
“You can say, ‘I just want to kill people, until someone kills me,’ but that’s so easy, isn’t it? Our job is tension. Our job is tension.”
I swallow the melatonin, now. I pray to dream.
February 2008
On December 30th, arriving in Gainesville from North Carolina, I had what I think was a very minor dissociative fugue. I could remember so many decisions—my major in college, my social circle—and I could, for a moment, decide against them, against my whole identity.
Later that night, I set forth a theory of decision and memory (sort of like Plato’s) that the Whole World is created by decisions we’ve
forgotten we made. That is, all glimpses of Purpose and of The Divine Plan—every statistic, each volcano, each songbird—exists precisely
as we’ve forgotten that we, as God, intended it to.
In the instants of decision, we are free: we pick the trajectory and energy of each photon; in the long aftermath of forgetting, we are
not free: we live in a deterministic universe of our own creation.
My bird is chirtling “The Recluse,”
and we live in the same cage,
but she is smaller, and shriller, but sweeter.
143
There is some trick betwixt
my thermodynamics’ ink and
the way her breast meat rises
and sinks to the beat.167
Away Message #945
◆
I’ve slowly and reluctantly but surely been won over to the Obama camp. I was pretty excited by Ron Paul for a while, though he is far
from perfect. I’m behind Obama because I do believe he is, in short, far less politically beholden to anyone than Clinton or McCain is. He
smokes and, whatever his flipfloppery, I trust him to do well by drug policy.
That, and it’s pretty obvious that Hillary Clinton is Visser Three168 in a morph.
◆
I just had a dream that I was about to vote in an election in the future. The consequence of the two candidates was whether or not to grant
a certain kind of suffrage to the Canadians; I think Canada may have wanted to secede.
Normally, I would support a secession, but I was hearing someone out who said that I needed to vote for Hillary Clinton (who, in
this future, had far exceeded two terms). Her opponent was sympathetic to a massive socialist movement in Canada, which had been agitating for secession. This movement, he said, was not the will of the people: there had been a flood of propaganda for it by private interests
who stood to gain power after the split.
An independent socialist Canada would restrict travel freedoms, he explained, because Canada would no longer be part of the same
country as London.
Then I woke up. Nothing was explicit, but I gather there was a sort of Anglo Empire seated in the United States—a fairly totalitarian
empire, given the lack of suffrage for Canadians and the absence of term limitations.
March 2008
Are certain plants psychoactive by coincidence, or did they evolve these properties?
That is to say, in the ecosystems of the willow, the coca plant, psilocybin mushrooms, etc., are there non-human species that utilize
the plants’ psychoactive effects?
Are there lower mammals that chew coca leaves for a kick?
Terence McKenna’s “Stoned Ape” hypothesis169 about human evolution is flawed to the point of being unscientific, but if there hasn’t
been investigation into this kind of plant-animal symbiosis before, there damned well ought to be.
“If you think that stuff’s good,”
said Jesus, “try this stuff.”
Away Message #686
◆
I have a profound distrust of bicycle-based activism.
I still place a good deal of trust in the FDA.
My new favorite word is “pollyanna.”170
Barack Obama voted for the Mexico wall. So did Hillary.
I don’t think anyone is as evil as some people think Dick Cheney is.
The revolution will not be televised; it is being blogged.
We have no way of knowing whether the Technological Singularity will happen;
we have no way of knowing how big a problem peak oil will be.
If the world ends on December 21, 2012, it will be the placebo effect what done it.
No molotov cocktail will burn off hierarchy from the human soul.
A market without a community is damned; a community without a market is starving.
Plastics will not kill us; cars can kill us; bicycles will not save us.
Vote with your wallet. Pray with your eyes open.
If you disagree, spit—and explain yourself.
◆
On March 21, 2003, I stuck a tape into my VCR and recorded CNN for about ten minutes. My timing was good: a quiet Baghdad, a dark
night sky, and then three minutes of Shock and Awe.
The next day, I carried the tape into my first class of the day, AP Language with Mrs. Parker. Before class started, I got on the computer with the good speakers and queued up an MP3 to play loud and clear. I waited for a few more people to come in.
Then I put in the tape, waited a few minutes, and hit play.
“Stars and Stripes Forever” spangled away while Baghdad got lit up.
167
“The Recluse” and “Sink to the Beat” are both songs by the band Cursive.
168
Visser Three is a character in Animorphs, the cruel leader of the parasitic, mind-controlling Yeerks’ infiltration of Earth. He was
capable, like the human protagonists of the series, of acquiring any animal and “morphing” into it for two hours at a time.
169
Terence McKenna (1946-2000) was an American writer and psychonaut. His hypothesis was that early human evolution, specifically the development of language and culture, was spurred on by the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.
170
“Pollyanna” noun or adjective, means an excessively and blindly optimistic person, or describing someone with those traits. It is
from the name of a character in the 1913 novel by the same name by Eleanor Porter (1868–1920).
144
I did it sarcastically—for the lulz171—certainly not in support of the war.
May 2008
I think I might really have studied Russian because I liked Academician Prokhor Zakharov’s voice in Alpha Centauri.
I suspect this because I am going through my written archives in a project to abridge them into accessibility and have found probably a dozen references to Alpha Centauri.
Ouroboros
I.
Do I consume myself?
Very well then I consume myself,
(I am hydra, I can eat multiply.)
II.
Do not call my birth name out;
it is muddied with the soil of my self.
Yes, call me only Ouroboros;
I’ve eaten all I am—I’m someone else.
III.
The serpent in orbit with his tail
down his throat
marches dutifully and dentally
down the valleys of himself.
His belly scrapes the Himalayas
and a cyclone dribbles down his chin,
but all he sees are his personal craters,
self-inflicted cigarette burns
of consequence to no one.
◆
I suspect a lot of people don’t realize what I mean when I say “Sic semper tyrannis.”172 Sometimes I just use it instead of “C’est la vie” or
“Que sera, sera,”173 because that’s funny. Other times, though, I use it almost literally—about people in bad situations they’ve created for
themselves with their own tyrannical idiosyncrasies.
◆
An argument could be made that every belief in magic—every eager invocation of quantum mechanics into arguments about the supernatural—results from a sublimated oral fixation. To wit: having accepted that nothing in this universe can restore the ease of childhood,
and accepted that physical law denies the infant’s dictum, see, want, get, there are those who nevertheless wish to reject reality and seek
an alternative.
I moan in my sleep. I’m not sure how often.
◆
June 2008
I just woke up and panicked at the clean, inerasable permanence of my own morality. The fear isn’t new. It was always the same hyperventilating panic at a future when I will no longer be able to be-where-I-am, to be anywhere at all.
And then, a beautiful familiarity came to me, an answer to this fear, an answer that I invented when I was a child, but now it spoke
with a man’s voice. It had matured somewhere in my heart, despite everything, despite all the banality of my trivial existence. It sounded
so resolute, so ready to answer: “How grateful I am to still exist.”
I know this is trite, I know this is poorly written, but I’m suddenly happier than I’ve been in months. I want to write this down so I
don’t forget. This is never irrelevant to me. No matter what, these will always, always make me happy:
1. Being-where-I-am for a while, letting not a single abstract thought intrude.
2. Remembering that I’m going to die and then being grateful that I am alive.
Memento mori174
171
“Lulz,” is a corruption of “LOL.” The term originated in the early 00s. It is used to describe pleasure taken at the pain of others,
often at expressions of outrage or offense taken.
172
“Such is it ever to tyrants” (Latin). It said to have been uttered by Brutus in the assassination of Julius Caesar, and also, reportedly,
by John Wilkes Booth after having shot Abraham Lincoln.
173
Respectively, “Such is life” (French) and “What will be, will be” (Spanish)
174
“Remember you will die” (Latin)
145
like I was sleeping—and smacked.
And I lick each breath.
Away Message #952
◆
1. God creates Adam.
2. God creates Eve.
3. God falls for Eve.
4. God approaches Eve as the serpent to offer her goddesshood.
5. Eve eats the apple and, refusing to betray Adam, feeds it to him, too.
6. God carries a torch for human women until, finally, he caves and impregnates Mary.
7. The descendants of Adam, remembering God’s attempt to cuckold their forefather, kill Christ.
◆
On the bike trail, right at dusk,
He says hello, stands up.
Seventeen days in jail, he says,
for shoplifting a steak.
I just got out of jail, he says,
I need a place to sleep.
Don’t call the sheriff, please, he says,
I need a place to sleep.
He’s got his papers, see? Says “Closed.”
He just got out of jail.
He smells like beer, says, “God is good,”
He’s sorry about the smell.
He’s got a bike in Tallahassee,
Fifteen year-old Schwinn.
He leaves me with some xeroxed art.
He says his name is Wayne.
He’ll hitchhike up to get his bike.
He says his name is Wayne.
July 2008
Maybe it is true that every generation decays in a unique way, but it’s certainly true that each generation makes Progress in a unique way,
too.
This would resolve (for me) the paradox of each generation claiming the world is going to Hell while we never actually get anywhere
near Hell.
◆
The most emotionally vivid memory I have is falling on my knees in the grass outside my house, barely making a sound, wishing that I
was not human so that I would not have to endure the emotional pain I was going through.
I can’t remember what the pain was. It might have been the pain of mortality or the pain of romantic rejection, or maybe not. I can’t
remember how old I was.
The world is ending all the time
and I want a goddamn chance to kiss it goodbye.
Away Message #1035
◆
Last night I was talking to my friend Scott, a former Christian, about Mere Christianity175 and the Bible. As I was saying how badass a guy
Christ was, I said:
“So I’ve only read the first chapter and a half, but Jesus! .. heals a lot of people like .. immediately! .. I was just gonna say “Jesus!” as
an exclamation but I realized it’s how I was gonna begin my next sentence.”
A transcriptionist whose church was the bottle
read in Mark how the Christ rules the waters.
“Aha!” he said, “God,
bring that hurricane on,
And I’ll pray all damned day, Lord, I promise.”
Away Message #982
175
Mere Christianity is a book of Christian apologetics written by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), author of the Narnia series.
146
August 2008
So I just got stopped by some bike cops for riding my bike without lights. They were decent guys, probably not much older than me, and
they let me off with no ticket.
They wanted to search me. At first, I said that, on principle, I would not consent. They made it clear, though, that they were going
to ticket me and waste my time if I didn’t consent, so I did.
Anyway, I’ve now experienced the infamous we’ll-make-your-life-easier-if-you-willingly-give-up-your-rights thing. Reason176, thou
art avenged.
◆
[Editor’s note: these are extracts taken from notes made in an altered state.]
Part II: Time and Restart
In the beginning, there was The Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word was fun.
In the beginning, there was nothing.
Nothing wondered, “Why not?”
and then wondered that it wondered,
then thought,
“I’ve got to tell someone about this.”
Away Message #1039
[________] takes the offered apple and begins eating the entire thing, from which she had only wanted a single bite
[_________]
He tricked me.
Jesse (as Serpent)
That’s what happens, Man.
Portents and that sort of thing.
the portion of all things that is all things unportioned
To test the Magnetism of [________]: an interview
ARE YOU MAGNETIC?
My hand feels like there’s something .. alright,
if this makes any sense, I am a part of it, I’m
able to shape it.. Definitely is the music. Hard to describe.
We’ll just leave it at that..
Returning to the question
Yes.
ANY CLOSING THOUGHTS?
[_________]: I second it.
Decrees, let it be writ, of his exalted, trippinass majesty, [________]:
- Every citizen shall live by the rules of magnetism.
- No more arrows.
Overall, the smell177, like the baking flesh
of a burning God, why the feeling
like I may be that burning God,
descended into Hell. Why should I feel like
that? Is it real?
And how come I cannot ask anyone else
about this when I am normal?
Know that every time you have
been bent, unknowing, pleading, that others have been
there—and that, if nothing else, you would not be
176
Reason is a libertarian monthly magazine whose motto is “Free minds and free markets.”
177
This is a reference to an anecdote related by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), an English logician and philosopher, in A History
of Western Philosophy: “William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he
knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the
vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: ‘A smell of petroleum prevails throughout’.”
147
giving someone nothing to make them understand
you’re just as lost as they are.
Each night a dope anew, addicted perhaps
simply to the thought of how wide
the night would be if you and
everyone else linked arms
and chased it unto
an end.
I feel just as comfortable in the usual tension
of my muscles as a wizened warrior might in
his sword-bruised armor, never reaching home,
but fighting on nonetheless.
On the other side of it, of course, is the last word,
the fully-explaining word who birthed and bred every
word in every vulgate, the mother whose feeblest child
is the exin.
If, in the end, only those questions
asked are questions answered, ...
... no, there will never be an answer.
An equation is answered only by another equation.
If, with quiet, patrician dignity, he lies down each night to sleep
saying his unanswerable prayer (for a word will never
fully answer a word), why, at the drunken height of his
feasts, should he notice another set of eyes gleaming over
his own reflection’s shoulder on the bloody surface of the wine in
his goblet, and then rise and turn at once to greet a man who
was never there, overturning the banquet table with only
the red heat in his cheeks as an excuse?
What an anorexic terror Christ loosed into the world the moment
he made skin into symbol, bread-flesh and Word-flesh as one.
This fullness, the beige hummus,
the density of existence in my stomach
is a quiet prayer to prolongment,
a forest fire inverted. Digestion:
to sift blood from sand.
Away Message #947
The last word will require every atom,
at the close of the universe,
every atom
trembling,
rattling,
in a cosmos that has become a throat,
to sing.
There are only two real times in the life of a man: the long adulthood
of the building of Babel and the eternal moment of its destruction.
[Editor’s note: the following afterword is from the next day.]
The idea of the last word was as the complement to the exin. If the exin is the first word, unsayable, that establishes the inestablishable
logic of induction, then the last word is the ultimate answer, unsayable, to the question produced by all pronounceable words. If there is
an answer to every sayable question, it cannot itself be sayable, for otherwise to speak it would be to generate more questions.
Je suis moi-même la fin du monde.178
Away Message #954
◆
It’s funny, Jesus intentionally goaded the elder Jews. Getting someone’s goat is an awfully funny thing for an incarnate God to do. Then
again, Jesus’ culture may be the only culture whose god I had heretofore thought incapable of playing; but there it is, a god playing agent
provocateur.
178
“I, unto myself, am the end of the world.” (French)
148
Yojimbo179
i was raised on red pepper and blood i am
so hot if you scratch me i will light like a match
Don Marquis, “freddy the rat perishes,” archy and mehitabel
It twists
until it lands on its shadow,
an unbroken wooden line.
The branch.
cuts one path out of all paths,
one fall at a time.
Mifune laughs
when the innkeeper tells him
greed has dug the town a grave.
Effacé,
his sword conceals him.
Balancé, he prefers no foot.
Where he
cannot be seen
he cannot be shot,
so he slips
into a casket
and waits for days.
Still wounded,
he returns for his sword;
unless, despite the thieves,
there is
more to retrieve.
He walks toward the gun.
◆
A question that I would very much like answered is, am I capable of writing something more tragic than the most tragic thing I have
actually endured?
◆
As the 4chanization180 of the Internet proceeds, the question arises: is it morally acceptable to be cruel to a person—and unboundedly
so—so long as the cruelty stops as soon as the person accepts their predicament as funny?
Though I have just phrased it poorly, I think this is a moral question which humanity has never yet had to confront.
j/k-47
Away Message #906
September 2008
I finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the first time the day before yesterday. I’m sure someone else has already made
note of this, but:
Quantum mechanics means not only does history happen an infinite number of times, but an infinite number of histories happen
an infinite number of times.
Far from being the death of determinism, quantum uncertainty demands a kind of super-determinism: we are all constrained to
perform every possible action always and forever*.
*This is not just a rhetorical flourish. The “always” depends on whether or not the many-worlds interpretation181 is true; the “forever” is true no matter what. They are two different kinds of eternity.
179
Yojimbo is a film by Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) about a ronin (masterless samurai) who wanders to a
town and discovers it is being torn apart by rival gaings.
180
4chan is an Internet imageboard responsible for many of the common tropes (or memes) of Internet culture. One forum in
particular, /b/, is infamous for its offensiveness and inventiveness.
181
The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics. It contends that the apparent randomness in quantum mechanics does not exist, and that each quantum possibility occurs in some actual world-our own world being but one of perhaps
an infinite number of universes.
149
my eyes over the words of kundera182,
i know again the electric summer sense
as when my eighth-grade teacher lifted the saddle of childhood
and swore—swore with us, just to prove a point —
and in wonder i ran my hands over the slick plastic
wooden surface, imagining 15 minutes into the future
in the cafeteria, when i would hear how
they ran their hands over the slick plastic
wooden surface
and waited.
Away Message #984
◆
A thing I have just realized is that muscles sober much more slowly than mind.
◆
I have visual snow, which is described by Wikipedia as “a transitory or persisting visual symptom where people see snow or television-like
static in parts or the whole of their visual fields, especially against dark backgrounds.”
I used to think that everyone had this, but, thanks to reddit, I find out, no.
◆
I have, in performing overtures of reconciliation with local wobblies183 and anarchists, claimed that I am a communitarian184, that we are
all communitarians, now. I think I must have misspoken; maybe I misled myself.
I can say, instead, that, most of the time, I do not like community. The human being drawn into the crowd—however productive
and intoxicating the crowd—is less like an angel and more like a honeybee.
For all the idiots who think the only honest word is a scream,
Away Message #923
◆
Every note on the Internet is written on a burning page. As soon as the chat is closed, the text is immolated. No word is recorded. If, however, I pass you a small, scribbled-on scrap of paper, there is still the possibility that it will survive our conversation and escape the trash
to live beyond us. It might remain despite us. Online, though, as soon as the window is closed, the words evaporate back into the white
background as if burned into snow-white ash.
(Untitled)
Peace and ease drowning in
a black river dribbling down our chins,
we speak words heavy with ink,
and, mute with abundance,
we cough up deities and legends and
secret them into handkerchiefs.
And the eternally young
stench of mint
hangs on it all.
◆
Friend: i wonder what it would be like if everyone we knew here were a nudist. nothing else would change except for your lack of clothes
Me: dunno
Me: feel like much of modern sexual anxiety has to do with the fact that, given insufficient information about everyone else’s bodies, we
exist in a semiconscious cold war of self-image with everyone else
◆
Today, someone brought to my attention the fact that, while in the 60s it was cool to protest the government, nowadays, the scene is cool
and the hippies are just .. gross.
This divorce, she suggested, bodes ill.
In Russian, there is a slang term for the iPod (or Walkman), дебильник (debil’nik), which translates best as “moronizer.”
I read that some famous chef said, “My favorite spice is salt”—and I understand completely; salt improves every flavor.
If there is a thing that is killing us, though, if we are ever to protest again, we must realize that in an effort to preserve everything, to
make everything del.icio.us, we have oversalted ourselves and are now dying for even a single drop of water; whenever we can figure out
where that water is and why we refuse to drink it, we will rise up.
A more relevant analogy to my friends in Gainesville might be that of a person who drinks heartily and enjoys it but, upon waking
with a terrible hangover, thinks,
”Man, I feel awful. I better have another drink.”
◆
182
Milan Kundera (b. 1929) is a Czech writer whose most famous work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
183
“Wobblies” is a colloquial term for members of the international labor union Industrial Workers of the World.
184
Communitarianism is a political philosophy that emphasizes the importance of the local community, especially in relation to an
increasingly globalized economy and culture.
150
Me: the only unforgivable sin
Me: i am told
Me: is thinking yourself unforgivable
Me: which makes sense
Me: it means you think there is something god can’t do
Friend: well, according to mormon doctrine, there’s one more
Friend: well, only one
Friend: and that is blasphemy of the holy ghost...
Friend: after you feel the truth of whatever
Friend: and you go against it, willfully and with intent to destroy that thing
Friend: specifically the truth of the gospel and Christ, etc. if you receive spiritual confirmation its true, and you blaspheme that, that’s
unforgivable
Friend: it says that what happens to those people is unknown to all but those condemned to it
Friend: we call it outer darkness
Friend: god will forgive all other sins eventually
Friend: that’s what we believe
Me there will be wailing
Me and gnashing of teeth185
Friend: that will happen to everyone who doesn’t reach their potential godliness and they understand just what exactly they’ve done
Friend: you and me included
Friend: i’m kind of afraid of that
Friend: i hope i’ll measure up
Friend: i hope i’m good enough
Me his yoke is easy and his burden is light186
Friend: yeah
Friend: i’m not a very disciplined child though
Friend: to come and diligently bear his yoke
Me perhaps the reason god allowed man to doubt
Me is because if he wasn’t sure
Me he would always feel
Me “maybe i can do better”
Me and even if, one day, a man should be as good as an angel
Me it would never be enough
Me he would think,
Me “only as good as an angel?”
Me “not good enough.”
If there is a God, his only commandment is, “Be, be.”
Away Message #1019
The finitude of our universe suggests a finitude in its Creator.
◆
My lord, what apostate, what blasphemer can call himself an atheist
until he has seen the radiant white-hot core of all creation
and said “No.”
Away Message #991
185
Matthew 13:41-42 reads “The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend,
and them which do iniquity; / And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
186
Matthew 11:28-30 reads “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and
learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
151
Chapter 8
Out
Ouroboros Athena
Deep inside my stomach, now,
my heart beats up ahead.
So drunk upon my liver,
I could take my blood for bread.
But in my brain’s a pacemaker:
think I’ll eat that, instead.
October 2008
Sometimes I think the last thing on earth some people want is an end to hunger, a cure for AIDS, world peace, cheap medical care, democracy everywhere, and the ascendancy of liberty.
It would mean that, if they were still unhappy, it was they themselves who needed fixing.
It’s funny. One day I find myself arguing that human beings are not angels, that the wages of democracy is Sarah Palin—and, a week
later, I have to insist that nor are we demons, that we will not long submit to the god of Marketing. Truly, I am a pollyanna motherfucker.
Let September 15187 be the high water mark
for the blood-dimmed tide.
Let us again feel some conviction
enter our cold fingers.
Away Message #988
Me: thought i’d get to sleep early
Me: went to sleep like two and a half hours ago
Me: dreamt i had a control panel in my right hand
Me: i just had to press down and it popped up
Me: i asked people about it. one person said they had it, but i got the creepy sense that no one talked about it. when i pressed the issue,
someone was like, ‘it’s a hallucination’
Me: i googled for it (in my dream) and got some weird, indefinite results
Me: and the girl who said she had it, she was there, and someone was saying, “yeah, she’s definitely the craziest one (we all work at
[________])” and then she started having a seizure
Me: and i woke up
Friend: did the control panel do anything?
Me: i didn’t experiment too much with it. it had two switches, both of which seemed to control my reaction to certain things. i think one
controlled my reaction to physical attacks and one controlled my reaction to physical intimacy
Me: i woke up and was getting some weird closed-eye visuals over part of my vision
Me: not sure if they were in my real visual field or my imaginary one
Friend: ... that is really weird
Me: you know what i’m talking about?
Me: at one point i got this eerie sense that everyone sort of knew that this proved we were..
Me: machines, or artificial, or something
Me: and nobody talked about it
Me: like one of those hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck feelings
Me: thanks for listening, by the way
Me: weird dream
Friend: sure
Friend: i dont think dreams mean much myself
Friend: well, they do maybe say things about ourselves, but not novel things
December 2008
[Editor’s note: the following began as a blindfolded free-writing piece.]
I have this vision of leaning over blank white paper with the dagger that I have made of language—like old Kinch188 himself—and when
it is so sharp, sharp enough to do surgery with, I can lean down and make the smallest of incisions, the smallest of cuts, and a tiny line
of blood oozes out.
Do you have to create a whole world? Do you have to create the world entire and then people show up? This is Babel, man hauling
brick after brick up into the sky until mountains have moved.
187
September 15, 2008 marked the point on the Intrade Predictions Market when the price for the stock for John McCain’s winning
the 2008 presidential election was at its all-time high.
188
“Kinch” was a nickname for one of the protagonists of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus. A kinch is a knifeblade.
152
I have not been a person not to make apologies; I have tried to render them; but I know the mistakes I make outcount the forgivenesses I offer, I do know. I just hear every word as false. I cannot halt the surgery on every letter I write. I can barely trust the present
moment to last. I see every beautiful thing I have made and I see it pass me by like the ships in Larkin’s “Next, Please.” I am suffering to
go somewhere, I am saving something up in my strife and slow education.
I have become good at speaking the words I must speak. I have said so many things I have wanted to say. The words I do not speak
are the words unthought.
When I am not saying something, I do not want to be seen. I do not feel like a body. I am bad at being a body. I do not want my flesh.
I have never been taught to value it. I am my hands and mouth; I am nothing else, nor have I much cared to be. But this begins to change.
There are always people out there, listening, always more than you think, but no one reads this text but me. It is not a quiet megaphone to everyone I know, not a whisper across miles, though that is the dream. I want to be on a sound stage right now. I want this moment broadcast. That is the future I dream of, this is the hope.
I hope, because I have begun to see the reascendancy. We are leaving this age of fragmentation, of lost causes. We begin to hear each other
again. Babel was built and destroyed and now she is being rebuilt a great ship to sail the heavens, an ark onto which all ascend, this time.
I have been editing my own works, and catching up on myself faster than write. I am the Ouroboros, gnawing my own teeth. Ever
since I woke up in that town, I could not say what I wanted, but I know now what it is. An idea has persisted. It is being here with someone
else as I am write.
I want others alongside me. I want thousands rising up to meet my language, to feel the tides of the earth, all hands on deck. I want
to be here and sail on this ship of words to something unknown. Maybe this is trash, but if that day comes, my god I want to be on that
ship.
That is the dream, that one day there shall be a seat for rowers, and a great ship of voice will rise into the air like the Flying Dutchman189.
Yes, you will be the parentheses and hold my shoulders. Yes, even now people are falling in love.
I dream of the future. I forfeit the present. I have always forfeited the present. That is what we do, mankind, that is what we do. There
is no other virtue.
I believe god damn it do I believe. I have never been taught any other lesson, any other lesson but wait—
but wait—
the holy fucking virtue of wait.
wait.
wait.
wait.
wait.
and that is the prayer.
“I want.” and “I am not happy.”
and the prayer goes, “Well, wait.”
While we build Babel, wait. While we get beers, wait. While I make you fall in love with me, wait. While I learn how to do just that, wait.
Wait until it is all in place, then I will explode. Wait until we have built this ship, then sail.
We have been practicing for a symphony yet to be performed. The stage is being set, and the instruments tuned, and when we finish
playing, everyone walks away carrying the melody on their breath, into dreams, and each wakes up humming the opening notes of a new
song. Then they rise up, ten symphonies, and each walks away breathing the future.
I wait, my god, I wait.
My hopes are my lover.
There you go. Goodnight.
i wrote, i wrote
an imaginary poem
and all my fake pen friends
clapped their fictional hands
Away Message #219
◆
So, I’m up to September 2008 in my editing of my own writing.
His ass halfway down my throat, I can smell the beast’s breath from here. He’s been eating something very funny, indeed.
(Untitled)
Down a hallway wallpapered with stale photographs,
photographs peeling with poverty of attention, photographs
handled once and entombed at the back of the closet,
cold and curled,
I wander distracted and bored
by what I have been. The pale linoleum is cold
under my bare feet, though they are almost numb. Covering me
and muffling the flashlight’s thin beam,
189
The Flying Dutchman is a ghost ship in folklore doomed to forever wander the seas. often described as flying above the waves.
153
through the high windows,
viscous and chill, the night sinks into the hallway
and drips down the wall, slowly soaking into
and destroying each glossy frame. Every hundred steps
or so, on the wall, among the other dead moments,
hangs a picture of me in a bleak hallway
from twenty feet behind.
January 2009
Is writing about mundanities necessarily mundane?
I am almost ready to do the penguin sonnet. She lives in two worlds: one is cold, the other colder; in one, she waddles, the other,
she flies.
The Penguin
Into the wine-dark sea190 the penguin sinks
and with her stubby wings, flies through the drink,
through schools of fish like diamonds drowned in ink
and, starved for air, she surfaces and thinks,
“I forget each time I sink and soar
how cold the desert and how paperwhite,
how much I miss the grand Antarctic night,
how bleak and condescending is the shore—
And isn’t it the sea that gives me form,
those teeming, gleaming diamonds from below?
And don’t they teach me all I need to know
by hiding, slick and footless, from the storm?”
And waddling, a blot beneath the sun,
she vomits all she’s learned into her son.
The poem “Answers” by Mark Strand has been ripping me up.
◆
◆
I have winnowed the past seven years of my writing into a few select tidbits per month. Now, I am polishing, making final deletions, and
indexing. These past two weeks, I poured all of myself into this past. I remember as best I can, I cut to the edge of my heart, and I purify
to the extent of my powers: I am reviving my many dead selves.
I did not know what I was doing then, and I barely know what I am doing now.
I ache to see this person arise from my past, drunk with himself, heavy with the Fire Against the Night. He is me and he is not me.
When I was young, I shot at anyone approaching from the darkness. Older, I have let the fire wane, staring desperately into the night to
see who still comes.
Here, as honestly as I can convey it, is the point:
When I was young, the most beautiful things I knew were written, not real—they were words, not people. As I grew older, the wisest
things I knew were in books. When I was fifteen, for reasons that are utterly lost to me, I began to write back. As I trusted words the most,
I confided far more to my own writings than I ever did to other people.
Now, years later, I find I am without a human past besides shallow memories and seven years of my own logorrhoea191. The dream
and the delusion is that these words will walk and talk on my behalf; I know they cannot.
In some sense, this project I have embarked on is both a resurrection and a funeral:
I will try, despite all, to create a character, breathing on the page, whom a reader can know, love, and give themselves to as if to me
during those seven years—I want to simulate that history, that long love. He can’t feel it, but we, now, can.
At the same time, that person is so fraught with himself that he can barely see past himself. He is insufferable; I have been insufferable. I am ready to kill him. Like Hamlet’s father, he comes to me saying, ‘Remember what you are! the son of History itself!’ I cannot
move forward with him at my back. I must put him to rest.
And still, even here, I write assuming that I can make friends with the future from the past of the page. The delusion is that I will
remain here, in the letters, blood in each syllable, to speak for myself. The dream is that one day—maybe one day soon—that past will
grow closer and closer until I am here, sniffling at my ancient keyboard, and you, heavier than ten hundred thousand keystrokes, rush
into the room, pull my hands to your mouth, kiss them, and speak the words I was about to type.
Having killed the queen, he fled into the countryside and a thousand assassins followed him.
Twenty times they had him surrounded and twenty times he vanished completely—only to
reappear months later in another village in another nation. One day, he simply appeared in the
court, knelt before the king and said, “This is the weapon by which I will die, and you, the one
to wield it.”
Away Message #903
190
In the Odyssey, “wine-dark sea” is a set phrase repeated several times to describe the ocean.
191
Logorrhea, from “logos” (word) and “rhea” (flow) describes compulsive, repetitive, and excessive speech or writing.
154
◆
Maybe life lives because it wanted to live. Maybe existence exists because it couldn’t bear not to. If consciousness is a physical phenomenon, it is as real as any other physical law.
If that is so, then there are things because being is preferable to nonbeing. Maybe the reason existence exists is because want to be
exists, and being is always preferable to nonbeing.
We ache at death—and why not? So does the universe.
If so, everything exists. Not just everything conceivable—everything. If it pulled “possible” out of its ass, assuredly it pulled all other
logical restraints out, too. The question of “why?” is truly inseparable from existence, but it answers itself: you go on existing for the same
reason all other matter does.
Happiness is sometimes “joy at being X,” but it is also just “joy at being.” God is the process of all things being as much as they can.
I don’t know what happens when all things are, and are glad that they are, but that’s really far, far beyond me at this point.
You know why.
all turning, none turned.
Away Message #739
◆
Against the flowing scarf of nighttime rain, I feel dreamy and the blowing wet water against my window is a down comforter against the
lightlessness of night and tomorrow they will tuck me under amnesia and burst my wisdom teeth into four pieces each, and sixteen they
will be removed from my oozing jaw and thresholds hang open in the night, high studio windows glancing down from phantom highrises and this day, one door shall be cast ajar and another door shall be shut and on this one day of doors, many shall come and many go.
____
____
____
____
____
____
____
____
____
____
____
____192
For a second between midnight and morning I heard a clapperboard.
Away Message #800
◆
Sometimes I’ll arrive home, ill from drinking, and wonder if a car has hit me on the way home and I am in Hell; but I don’t wonder very
hard.
I stumbled in my room last night—but didn’t fall—and it occurred to me that one day I will be 70 and I will fall and I will break my
hip.
◆
I call myself an agorist193 on Facebook, but I take liberties with the term. Most anarchist theories focus on the exercise of force. I am much
more interested in creative exchange than initiation of force. I pine for the day when the artists arrest the politicians and try them on war
crimes and sentence them to candyflip194.
[edit: reading Reason, I just discovered R.U. Sirius195 preempted me almost completely.]
◆
I had a dream where my little brother was living in a huge and at least partially subterranean maze, but in a room that exactly resembled
the room we shared in our childhood, down to the random stuff in the closet.
Also, a villain was looking for me in this labyrinth and I was looking for a way to beat him. Part of this dream included interludes
where he and his cronies examined huge sculptures I had built that consisted of scenes of small armies also descending into this labyrinth,
making ready for war.
I planned, quietly, to make another sculpture in which all the little soldiers had shields, which they did not have before. The shields
would all be inscribed with this insignia that I thought of and liked, but can’t remember what it was. Something with a lightning bolt, I
think, because I imagined that would trouble this villain who looking for me.
192
This is a hexagram from the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching. There are 64 hexagrams possible, obtained by a randomizing
process, usually the throwing of yarrow sticks. Each hexagram describes a general situation, and advice for those who find themselves in
such a situation. The I Ching is thus often used as a method of prediction or divination. This hexagram is all broken lines, the hexagram
Receptivity. It describes a situation of absolute openness to changes.
193
Agorism is an anarchistic political philosophy whose ultimate goal is to bring about an absolutely free market in which all participants in the economy are consenting. One modern conception of agorism emphasizes the support of a humane black market until
such a time as the forces of the market are strong enough to overthrow the controlling economic regime and try its leaders for fraud and
coercion.
194
Candyflipping is the practice of taking LSD and ecstasy at the same time.
195
R.U. Sirius (born Ken Goffman) is an American writer, talk show host, and futurist.
155
the sheets are the oven,
my dreams are the yeast,
i sleep, i rise, i rise.
Away Message #484
February 2009
I drink for a conclusion, I ache for a conclusion, I would kill myself for a conclusion if I didn’t already know that there is an unconsolating
conclusion there. I love a conclusion, but there are no closures and there are no withs, just “and” and “and” and “and” and “and” and “and.”
Killer cruel and killer queen, my frozen breath I know will not redeem me. For every conundrum of how to fit another right angle
into three orthogonalities, there is a poem bursting nevertheless forth from three axes, saying, let me, let me be, let you, let out, let out.
But every letter, I guess, has let out what it can, and I do not any longer know what it is that letters let. Just more orange-fiery streamers of existence detached from the letters—the owners of the fingers of the keystroke.
I read today that love is blind and that every love is a hope like a castle upon air floating against another castle upon air in the opposite direction, and like two positive ends, they cannot yield truth to each other, but that they both fall.
And from this I read: I need Arachne, spinner of lies, my spinnerette, my circlet, my cross, my straightjacket, my verse, my adversary.
With freezing hands, I cannot know another truth but the warmth of a convincing hand.
I am suffocating in banalities and grateful for my anger.
◆
not only tocked, they screamed.
Away Message #615
◆
Me: it is the world where wine is truly blood and bread is truly flesh
Me: if you can imagine metaphor stabbing into truth
Me: that is the place from which i am trying to write that poem
(Untitled)
A thousand trumpets screaming
for the blood of Christ,
I heard the truth
that gold collapses,
death is near.
Please, bring your face to mine.
The rain that drenches
all the world will wane
before we wake.
◆
Me: she thought that i was afraid of heartbreak.
Me: i thought about it for a long time.
Me: i think i am afraid of boredom.
Me: if i fear anything
Me: it is the mundanity of umatilla.
Me: i will never, ever, ever trap myself
Me: ever again
Me: ever again
Me: into a place where i am forced to listen to a person
Me: who is not thinking about what i might be thinking
Me: and who is not saying something that they are fairly sure i am interested in
Me: never, ever, ever again.
◆
I just had a small epiphany. The thought is not original in any way, except that this is the first time I have understood it.
I think it might be as necessary for me to be happy to remember to occasionally exit my reality tunnel196 as to remember that I am
going to die.
There are events that have been literally invisible to me from within my reality tunnel of poetry and blood and ink—there are whole
worlds where words cannot go but the human mind can-and can even make wordless models and theories about—and I have been missing all of them. No wonder I have been bored and angry and anxious.
Maybe the best way to practice this is for me to go around expecting that something weird is about to happen.
Predictions about extremely unlikely things occurring over a long enough timespan—say, the instantaneous reappearance of theobservable-universe-as-it-is-now from the heat death void—depend on our presupposing the laws of physics are invariant; truly, though,
they have only been shown to be invariant-as-we-understand-them for 13.7 billion years and in a sphere with a radius of 46.5 billion
light-years. Can we assume they are invariant over a timespan and vastness countless orders of magnitude larger and longer? And what
196
“Reality tunnel” is a term coined by Timothy Leary to describe a certain way of looking at the world, each reality tunnel having
its own filters composed of cultural and psychological expectations.
156
does it mean if we cannot assume even that?
Why, something might happen tomorrow that would strike the whole god damned universe as weird. Who the hell am I to have
been expecting otherwise?
Some truth can only be reached by professing lies.
Away Message #882
Fall Semester
Ful ofte his lady from hire wyndow down,
As fressh as faukon comen out of muwe .. .
Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
The soil is vacant in the administration garden,
so I glance—at shirts, shirts and shirts, young bodies and shirts.
Behind me, linoleum corridors and pages
are filled with Dante’s words.
The breeze discards flyers for boxes of pizza.
Some zones are for smoking and some for free speech.
Every word is a statistics examination.
The brick is cool on my face; my eyes are caffeine dry.
I do not know what time it was, nor did I know why.
Across from me stood a children’s hospital;
its lights were thin as eggshell.
The sky was unlit, the street so dry, the wind undead.
The glass on the road under my bare feet
suggested gears behind a clock’s face.
The puddles reflected nothing.
I did not know anyone there. I was only passing by.
Steam columns rose into the night.
Black sky gives way to red brick.
Overhead, an entire forest of small talk, an unexplored weekend sea
recalls to me Purgatory’s shore. Twelve new breezes arrive singing;
flapping shirts carry the psalm197. Autumn’s
dream of ink and light is proof from me.
March 2009
Just wrote this to someone.
William:
If I am melodramatic at any point in this letter, I apologize, but I simply don’t know whom else to write.
I have been writing. I go and drink and come back compelled by some single image or feeling which I then try to put into words.
I have never been able to be very hard on myself, so I am almost never dissatisfied when I look on what I wrote in the morning. All the
same, I recognize that a poem cannot be a single image. It is supposed to do something, to change somehow between the first line and
the last.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the editing process; sometimes it’s even fun to return with more clarity to the image that I wrote in
such furor and simplicity. Nonetheless, it becomes excruciatingly clear to me as I edit—especially since I now edit without a grade or a
reader in mind—that I have no idea what I am doing this for. I haven’t edited in a while.
I am compelled to write, and I understand this to be a good thing. If that is all there is to it, then I guess I can be satisfied knowing
that I am just satisfying an urge and that nothing else needs come of it. If there is something more to writing, then I would like to understand it. For whom does one write? For what?
Mostly, I just want to know how to fit this thing I do into the life I lead in which most of my friends neither write nor read poetry.
I do not know what to do with the things that I write. Any questions or advice or parables on the matter you can offer would be much
appreciated.
Thanks,
Jesse
◆
The cold is slowly going away, though it is back as I write. My hands are still cold and I can still see my breath in my room. I have been
more prolific these past few weeks than I have all winter. I feel like a computer or some machine that hums, and the humming is slowly
getting louder as the days get longer and warmer. I’ve felt pretty good since my Gauloises arrived.
I have been drinking heavily this season and in the depths of it all, I get no redemption but the passing beauty of a phrase. My poem
197
In Purgatorio Canto 2, on the shores of Mount Purgatory, Dante observes the approach of shining crafts driven by angels carring
the souls of one hundred of the newly-deceased faithful, singing in unison the hymn “In exitu Israel de Aegypto” (“The exiting of Israel
from Egypt”).
157
“The Penguin” does not offer any kind of redemption for drinking and writing—just an examination into how being a drunken writer
feels and the occasional loveliness and the appeal of it.
The man whom I just wrote that letter (a letter that, now that I am sober, I am now slightly embarrassed to have written) taught me
a great deal about poetry. In evaluating me at the end of the semester he said, to paraphrase, that I get too caught up in the creation of
ideas to think adequately about how they could best be arranged to display to a reader. This is probably endemic to my writing and even
to the way I live in the world.
I am obviously in love with the idea of creation. I stopped working on my editing project about a month ago because I became
literally ill whenever I thought of returning to editing myself on such a grand scale. I literally got sick of myself. I expect I will be able to
return to it in the future, maybe even the near one.
I am doing well, though I sometimes worry if I am doing enough.
“I think these are questions no poet can answer for another. People write for themselves, their lovers, their imaginary readers, for the great
dead, or all of these. Your workshops were in part designed to show you where to look for poems, and in part what to do with them once you’d
found them.”
◆
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it, but reading the Gospels last summer after I graduated and reading Satanic Verses and God: A Biography and listening to the Dandy Warhols’ “13 Tales from Urban Bohemia” all at roughly the same time was very influential for me.
This winter is also like that for me, though it is much harder. God, especially the God of Israel, comes with words that can enter
poems like God might a temple.
The winter—especially a colder-than-usual winter that holds, like an urn full of frigid ash, both a historic inauguration and a
generation-rare economic crisis—comes with no words at all.
It is the same with the posters on my wall;
what sticks in the summer will fall in the cold.
Away Message #997
◆
I do most of what I do on the Internet assuming that there are several-to-many people scoffing, thinking me a self-absorbed, arrogant,
untalented hack whose mother didn’t love him enough.
Maybe I am, but there’s no changing that.
every celebrity wishes he was
still swishing for his
friends
Away Message #44
◆
What I learned from Ayn Rand:
I did not learn from Ayn Rand that the mind cannot hold two contradictory logical statements—because the mind cannot, in fact,
contain logical statements in the nice and ontologically clean way that she proposes.
What I did learn, and for what I am grateful, is that a life cannot be aimed in two different directions. If you have two goals aimed
in any but the same direction, they must be reconciled. They must be added like two vectors to achieve a new goal that does not entirely
resemble either of the originals.
◆
Me: i find a strong correlation between people who believe humankind shall destroy itself
Me: and people who dislike themselves
Me: i suspect it is wishful thinking on a grand scale
Me: i realized today that there was a moment of my conception
Me: nearly some 24 years ago
Me: one moment
Me: one orgasm, one moment of conception
Me: i did not exist
Me: and then i existed
Me: maybe not even a moment of consequence to my parents
Me: they may not even have realized that was it
Me: that the trick was done
Me: life had occurred
Friend: the great mystery.
Me: please do not suffocate my epiphany with generalities
Me: i am really good at being a jerk
Me: it is one of my finest talents
Friend: it’s the great mystery.
Me: agreed
Me: have you ever felt aflame?
Friend: if you mean full of passion, then yes.
Me: that’s not unrelated, but it’s also not significant
Me: ghosts murder each other all the time
158
Me: hot with anxiety and regret
Me: sometimes i ask people pointed questions
Me: not because i care about the responses
Me: just about the fact that the answers spill out of them as if from a wound
Me: answers unprepared for exposure to the world
Me: and then sometimes, like a child who has killed something, i will look at what i have just said, and think
Me: who am i, to have done such a thing?
Me: but look at me, all shucked out in the sty.198
◆
A world stripped of all its prejudices is not hard to see. I believe I know what it would look like. Anyone living today can predict the future
if only they believe that mankind will grow out of its folly.
As I think of this, the only people I loathe more than all the drug warriors and the cops and the politically ensconced are the people
who do not believe it will happen.
Maybe it is relevant that they are the only people I can reach, the only people I can literally, physically touch.
I do not know what is beyond this world, but I can see it twitching in the womb, growing appendages of which we cannot conceive.
I don’t even know if it is concrete, the thing I see; but I know they stand like my mother before a doorway, powerful only that I owe her
my life, saying, go back to sleep. And I know that they will come to ruin, for I see it written on them now. I hear them speaking with the
fragile confidence lent to an authority by a recollection of obedience.
And I see it in myself; and I hope, when someone calls for me to stand down, that I step aside—although crumbling before the face
of so respectable an opponent as Progress itself has its own appeals.
Maybe it is just that I am comfortable being the last enemy, caution-at-all, the knife plunged into any-fear-whatsoever. I would not
mind dying to people who were sure that my death was the last death ever to occur.
◆
I just had a dream that I was traveling through a city with a pair of Indian sisters. When they were young (earlier in the dream), something
bad had happened to their family (some kind of technological accident, I think to do with space travel) and they were orphaned. One of
them was scarred during the accident and became a kind of sworn virgin, identifying as a male and protecting her sister.
A gang of ruffians guarding an alleyway—themselves also Indian—stopped us. They climbed each other and became five people tall,
a woman at the top. She said, “I am the sphinx. Answer these two questions and you may pass.” and then a man standing on the ground
revved a chainsaw.
The first was something like, “Why is man so cruel?” I think she was aiming the questions at the sisters, but I answered and said
something like, “Man is neither cruel nor uncruel. He is an animal.” The answer satisfied. The sphinx pointed out that, indeed, this fact
explains why animals can be so human-like
I forget the second, which was also answered correctly, but I know that when the sphinx was explaining the answer as she had the
first (by inverting it), she said that to seriously ask the second question was as absurd as asking, “Where would you rather have been
born?” She mocked the idea, “Oh, I don’t know, I think maybe two .. no .. two and a half miles northeast of where I was born this life.
That would be nice, I think.”
Then I woke up.
◆
The media we consume become a part of us. If I have seen the latest piece of gore out of Hollywood, then I am a person who has seen Saw
V. It becomes my identity; I must admit this if it comes up—or lie.
Either way, the thing becomes involved in us. It is as if we travel through society like earthworms, eating the content, becoming it,
and leaving the slime of catchphrases and inclusions-in-Facebook-favorites in our wakes, each film leading to another by the same actor
or director, each song on the radio leading us to an album and then a dance hall.
That instinct in the fashionisti and literati to berate what is common—and I share that instinct—is just self-preservation, the desire
to not eat poison, and not to become poison, and not to leave poison in our wakes.
The dust and sweat and disco beats
have dried, by now, enough to sweep.
Away Message #888
◆
Two days ago, I got a dictation at work from a care manager for developmentally disabled adults. I was really surprised by one thing she
said. This is an exact quote:
”He appeared to understand the importance of continuing to function well in his present setting as one way of indicating his readiness to move beyond it.”
Found zen.
◆
The way bureaucracy speaks to children—Excel! Achieve! Internalize!—is grotesque to me in the same way nonlethal brain damage is.
◆
Alcohol ushers all other minds out through my ears until I am alone in my own head. I do not read Eliot when I am sober, but give me
him now. I am terribly addicted to other people. Terribly.
I’m not joking. I miss the self-assurance I once had. Now I must dive into the water again and again.
198
A reference to the idiom “pearls before swine,” meaning to speak wise words to fools, originating in Matthew 7:6, which reads
“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again
and rend you.” To be “all shucked out in the sty,” thus, would be to have shucked open all of one’s oysters and cast all of one’s pearls before
the pigs.
159
I am become Eliot, creator of worlds.199
an aircraft carrier sits heavy with war
on duty to nuke any relevant capital
as heavily as I sit upon myself
dense with means on my own end
Away Message #827
◆
As I little by little work on what I have come to call my “History Project” and scan, for instance, the pictures I took over my 2004 road trip,
I see in much of my photography and writing this projection of myself into the frame. It is always Jesse-in-Wyoming or Jesse-in-Key West
or Jesse-on-epistemology. Going over reams of it as I have in working on this project, I find this is one of the things that disgusts me most.
I recognize that I am, despite that disgust, still often guilty of the same.
Why did I do it? Why do I persist in doing it? I am trying to communicate. At its grossest level, this message goes something like,
“Look and see that I have understood beauty and involved myself in it. Look and see that I myself have therefore been beautiful.”
It probably has its roots in the fact that the most praise or adoration I ever received as a child was for being precocious, where precocity is the wonder of a child involved in a greatness beyond what is expected of children.
In my heart of hearts, I am still glancing over my shoulder to see if anyone is watching me perform feats of cleverness and complexity. At my worst, I am still attempting to earn that “A+” in the gradebook of all loves.
You’re well, well, well,
well on your way
to a closet where
your stormclouds stay.
And when it rains
upon you private
stitches you have sewn,
you’ll ask the moths,
“Oh, how could I have known?”
Away Message #909
◆
It is a common argument that pain is necessary for happiness. I think it is actually understanding, not happiness.
April 2009
Friend: Jesse, what happens when a human being stops wanting to create any stories, and even less play a part in them? is that a story too?
Me: two answers:
Me: 1. no one ever does.
Me: 2. yes.
Friend: too bad. indeed
Me: there are no exceptions
Me: because there are no rules
Me: there is only the animal
Me: the animal is simultaneously extremely-well-known
Me: and nigh-indescribable
Me: that is why we invented the idea of Man
Me: so we could describe something
Me: but we barely know what Man is
Me: if that doesn’t make sense, well
Me: i just made it up
I didn’t know that frowns could cheer,
that joy could drip with blood from fear.
Away Message #881
May 2009
I suppose it is all psychology.
The people I know and am looking for are cognitive-behavioralists.
There are are others, I have noticed; but how to communicate with them, how to recognize their communiques—that is lost on me.
I know them only in their knowing faces, and I recognize my own face in their dismissals as I fail to say, “Indeed, I know the heart,” be199
At the first successful detonation of the atomic bomb with the Trinity test, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) quoted the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text in Hinduism: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to
burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. ... Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
160
cause, indeed, I don’t—they must know something I don’t.
◆
I am tempted to say that these days I do not murder my darlings, I abort them; I do not write shitty first drafts, I just shit.
I am plain out of words. I have never known the point. The point always came with the words, the smoke on top of the fire, the
lingering signal on top of the heat. All I can say these days is that I can’t say anything these days.
writer’s block (n.)
the fear that one will never think anything
of anything
ever again
Away Message #1013
◆
“For if you put me to death, you will not easily find another, who, to use a rather absurd figure, attaches himself to the city as a gadfly to a
horse, which, though large and well bred, is sluggish on account of his size and needs to be aroused by stinging. I think the god fastened
me upon the city in some such capacity, and I go about arousing.”
Socrates, Apology
“I’m sick of you little girl and boy groups; / all you do is annoy me, / so I have been sent here to destroy you.”
Marshall Mathers, “The Real Slim Shady”
I threw up those facts all over that girl’s pretty white dress.
Away Message #843
◆
“Sound is naught but broken air: and every speech that is uttered, aloud or privily, good or ill, is in substance nothing but air. For as flame
is but lighted smoke, sound is broken air.”
Chaucer, House of Fame
“I’m just an airwave rolling around. / I storm and crash without a sound.”
Cursive, “Sink to the Beat”
I too am a music box
so wound up with words,
so sick with the springs in my shoulders.
Away Message #816
◆
I think the best place to drink beer in the rain is London, 1935. Hitler was made Reichskanzler two years ago. Nazi Germany is alive on
earth, but it will still be several years until World War II. You drink the beer outside at a wooden table and the cold rain runs down your
leather slicker.
And then, also, ratlines200. You think, millions of Allied men have cinched Germany off from the rest of the world and justice is being
squeezed out. But no. There are wealthy, complicit Germans. The enterprise is over, and they must slip into the darkness.
The watchman beleaguered
is it war? is it rain?
has one truth in his lungs,
a litany against black and white,
a prayer against Heaven and against Hell.
Insufficent data for a meaningful answer.
Away Message #1040
◆
There is a peace of mind, and a piece of mind, and at the end of the night, they come of one piece, and if you bend one back on the other,
you lose both. No dream may meet itself, and no hope may meet its facts, but insofar as the world comes pre-crooked, no straight thing
can ever be made of it.
And now I wait, awake through the scabbing. Now, instead of sleeping through the clot, I wake, watching and watering. The stomach, far from the skin, wants nothing but pissing and paralyzed sleep.
And now, past hiccups and the ghost of hookups past, I want nothing but the kill—and not the glory of the word chosen well, not
the accolades of the author ascendant, but only the apprentice in it, the insecurities roasted, the young author convinced of himself and
unconvinced—and, either way, savoring himself.
And, you must understand (I hope the commas make it clear), there is no other way.
----Addendum at 11:00am: Isn’t it funny, doubtless drunk and drunk doubtless.
200
Ratlines were escape routes for Nazis to escape to South America
after the end of World War II.
161
The cap pops off with a twisted wrist
and I hear the sirens sing.
I know the song they sing is false
and I know it’s killing me,
but I’ll learn the words before I die,
die singing unknown seas.
Away Message #1022
◆
I am always looking over my shoulder. T.S. Eliot had written the heart of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by my age. All I have done
is drink and sigh.
If I am distinct, it is my belief in my distinctness that has made me so, and continues to make me so. This is, theologically speaking, no
different from Satan’s rebellion: rejection nourished by rejection, sustained by rejection, destroyed by rejection.
Unfigured yet is the merchant in Jack and the Beanstalk, wandering the earth selling miracles to fools.
I have got to get out of this town.
In my own throat I slide my finger
slick upon a razor’s back
and glance upon my broken world
for the biggest grain of dust to crack.
Away Message #1038
◆
The word should not be idiosyncrasy, a thing mixed with itself, from “idio,” peculiarity, “syn,” self, “cras,” mixed. A better word is kadality,
from “kad,” to fall, “al,” to grow. Every uniqueness is as a cast seed grown to an old tree.
And here is my point.
I don’t know why, but most people ignore their kadalities, whereas I enthrone mine.
◆
Arachne, if I haven’t been sufficiently clear, is my female answer to Joyce’s Daedalus/Icarus. The greatest textist of all time, destroyed and
made greater by that destruction.
I should say, though, that my mythologizing of a writer/lover is of a sudden perturbed by one word:
Spinster.
spiderweb in a storm.
Away Message #785
◆
I had a dream where Gainesville was an island with an adjunct, jungle-covered territory. The people from the jungle had begun their
indigenous lives with one goal: a nuclear weapon. They lived in the dirt and developed atomic theory and soon they had a bomb. Then
they used it on themselves and the impact destroyed them and much of Gainesville.
I spent the rest of my dream in a post-apocalyptic Gainesville, trying to figure out how to eat, whom to trust, and thinking about
where I could grow crops without having them stolen from me by the armed homeless.
◆
My insides and outs are red with desperation and rust, scraped with flea bites and compulsion, and shredded by the fine dust of modernity
and I hope now a new me steps out of the husk and I am pink and new and pure.
June 2009
I was ten when my dad got a computer and I stopped believing in God. That number, at once unity and oblivion, is eloquence incarnate: a
symbolic tower to infinity and only three letters long.
The question “Why New York?” has been coming up a lot lately and I feel like Salahuddin Chamchawala muttering “Ellowen Deeowen”
and singing it and arguing for it with a cigarette in my hand like an apple from the Tree of Knowledge.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.201
I can do it, I can move to New York, because I think this is the place of shadows, I think this is the dark room where everything is developed. If there is a God, if there is a light in the universe, we exist to weave it into the darkness, we exist to give it contrast, to make pain
bright, to bleed, to carry purpose like a torch into the night, to put ink on parchment and make new life. We are the boiling oil on the
freeway after a rainstorm.
Are you such a dreamer to put the world to rise?
201
Quoted from Carl Jung (1875-1961)
162
Our world is bathed in oil light, burning the darkness itself. If the whole universe were ablaze, every atom shining, all would see all, and
nothing in the world would be hidden.
There was a belief that the answers to the three questions of Ishtar were concealed in the words of the market songs that were sung every day
in the bazaar at Babylon.202
It seems almost merciful that every marketing department in the world is struggling, like a syringe into an oil well, to draw us out, to
make us spend and adore.
The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is
that, from our very prison, we should draw from our own selves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.203
In the bliss of pure white Buddhist nothing all, there is only the given world, only the lack of purpose. In the given world, in the world of
fallen souls and sinking foundations, we are only animals out for blood, trying to make the most of ourselves and in the end, only making
more of ourselves.
out of all your billions make great dragons that lie along the sky and war with the sunset and eat up the moon204
If we don’t play God, who will?205
Between death and death, we draw our breath, but I do not want to mix into the night. Like a drop of acrylic paint into ink, we sink and
strand ever finer, until we are alone, a thread slowing down into the dark fabric. Perhaps we are God looking for another God. If that is
what we are, if we are a lonely Deity, then I am with him, sinking on his behalf, looking for another blot of light surrounded by darkness.
He said if you just survive around long enough I will show you the road from me back into me.
◆
The capacity to be imagined suggests a capacity to exist.
The why for our existence must be identical to the how for our existence.
True and proper self- and world-destroying Buddhism denies a value in hope and imagination in the same way Christianity does.
For the short-term, my best answer to “What is the most important thing in the world?” must be “Imagination.”
July 2009
Once
Stranded on an ocean front
with a sore throat,
I watch the porpoises surface
too far out to swim
and murmur to myself.
And sailing ships heavy with gold and women
and diamonds pass.
And I bow my head and pray
to all the transitory earth.
But now and again,
an entire continent passes,
beach and all, docks and all,
harbors and cities and
ark.
And on a promontory
on the edge of the world
as the coastline stretches away,
she sits with her feet in the surf
and murmurs to herself
and glances to the sea.
I had been speaking to myself,
whispering, ‘’la fin du monde,”
and there you were, and you said,
202
Excerpted from Homo Zapiens by Russian novelist Victor Pelevin (b. 1962)
203
Excerpted from Man's Fate by French author André Malraux (1901-1976)
204
Excerpted from archy and mehitabel by American writer Don Marquis (1878-1937).
205
Quoted from James Watson (b. 1928), co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA
163
“Time,” you said, “Time is the most important
thing in the world.” and then the world
ended, as usual, and you spoke
of the apocalypse.
And then we talked about the putrefaction
of the world, and arranged to drink wine,
to drink wine on a porch, and talk,
as usual.
Away Message #972
◆
For a moment today, the clouds of my own self-obsession parted and I realized that I have peace.
And, truth, I have no idea how I ever got so lucky.
◆
You could say it is God calling to his flock or just our own warped voices back from the vacuum, but there is another world made of deductions and pain. I have no idea how I got here, because it is before Descartes creating the universe or Hawking explaining it.
I don’t see it when I am sober,
and when I am dry I feel blessed,
and maybe I am and maybe this
wine-dark world is unreal,
but what am I doing
and what it here?
The only thing I have ever found to relate it to is the apocalypse, to the fiery moments ten seconds into Creation, or the blank black eternity to come. It is why I have on blinding bright occasions mistaken myself for the Coming.
The obvious answer is that this is all imagination, but I hear afar another voice that says, ”Then how? Then why?” and no answer
comes.
Everyone who shares my blood
has for love of this sea of
incarnadine defeat
broken themselves
into clots.
The question is not and has never been Why is there something instead of nothing? That question doesn’t matter out of context. The question, until the throat is burnt with rushing air, is Why me? and I stand and stand in my own exception and it rains down on me, and in
that rain I am drenched and confused and baptized. Oh, it hurts to be human, to be a thing capable of love and reasons why it must not.
Because I am part of this mystery, I can never fully be anyone’s, and I must be honest about that. I can love you and love you. I can
marry you and still betray you to any clue as to what we are doing here.
The razor reaches through me from the blackness I stand upon and slashes out from my mouth. Every creation in this world is pure
bright white light broken into sun and blood and water.
I see in love an absolute I cannot believe:
I cannot bear the false eternity in an adoring gaze.
(Untitled)
Is it poison or is it cure?
It’s brown, and pure, and pure, and pure.
I do not drink so I can think,
I drink so I can care.
O lord, the world’s so bright with gold and god,
a man can barely see.
O man, you have so brightened night,
a man can barely sleep,
Oh hell, what do I care about but booze and smoke and verse,
but words and art, but writ and rain,
but not to entertain.
The truth is that I love you for each shadowed eye,
each heavy lash. I love your laugh.
The truth is that I’ve made myself up, too.
I can tell you all I know
and still the truth stacks in my throat.
The truth is I can scream for years and years
and not come close.
164
August 2009
My bird can’t talk, but one noise she has learned to imitate is a spoon scraping an empty dish.
◆
“Our words break, they are bent back when we speak of god or of nothing.
The only thing I have ever found appropriate is to speak in metaphor,
of things neither true nor false; and then the meaning of the metaphor,
neither meant nor not meant, flutters gently down
and lands upon the truth.”
The sirens weren’t lying:
there’s an island—
all my friends are there—
on a bar of cork on a potable sea.
◆
Maybe when I’m older,
the world is colder,
a strait will open up,
and I’ll walk the narrow path;
and arriving, dry, at last,
I’ll toss my flask
and warm my hands
on the fires of burnt labels.
Or maybe as it dries,
the cork will rise
into high walls to stopper up the sea,
and the cork will form a roof,
a home, rain-proof,
and they’ll pull upon cork sheets
and dream of youth,
and they’ll float into the ground
a coffin cork surrounding,
to keep the world awhole
from pouring out.
165
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