Perseverence
How do Masked Man? Are you drifting away from us?
Nah. Just been busy.
With what Masked Man? What has been keeping you so busy?
Oh well I’ll tell you.
Monday
Slept in my Sundaybestclothes, woke up misused and drunk next to a pointy-faced woman and felt immediately discouraged by this beginning, as I do about most beginnings because of miserable past experiences on other nights in other cities in other lives.
Hovered over a tightwire 40stories up to make it 2 blocks down the sidewalk where an Irish bar awaited. Damp and languid odors, reeks of mildew. Stared at the racks of alcohol like the first lines of tired articles in old library newspapers, everything blurred.
“I have to work in 4 hours,” I told the tender.
“Our real needs are obscured by our fears,” she said.
Violet shadows under my eyes I watch the accountants twitter along on their morning courses, squacking into sunrise cellphones to the weekend exiles on different planes. Office life begins. I dust my monitor for 4 hours. Then lunch. Cigarette and beer. I shouldn’t drink beer when I have to go back to work, but fuck it. Broadshouldered guys talking about basketball brackets.
“Well, sometimes luck’s a part of it,” one of them says. And I think, yes.
Driving home for the last time with the Dude amidst a fountain blast of dissonance and feedback across the car stereo. Music. We keep it loud to fight off the tedium of elliptical lane-lines crawling slowly past the cars that go nowhere in rushhour idleness, sun-slathered highway dancing in the shadow of the big trucks as they heavy rumble.
“The sun is spinning, right?”
“Sure.”
“Like a centrifuge, and so heat and light could just spillages spiring out from it going too fast?”
“Slacker, the sun is giant explosion. It’s ricochet.” The Dude sees the universe in a serious of strained metaphors relating everything to firearms.
Get back from an evening run, find the Dude packing up the last of his boxes. Order a pizza, garlic twists, side of ranch, 2 litre Root Beer.
Think about going back to school.
Masturbate
Tuesday
10 AM
With the day off from work I sleep in until
11 AM
Answer emails from girls. Sample: How comes all you ever talks about is sex? Or: Go fuck yourself!
Sample answers: Sex is my pro forma subject matter. Sex is life. Sex is what you do when you meet someone. When you fight. When you make up. When you leave. Sex is survival. Now excuse me while I go masturbate.
Masturbate
12
Lunch
Watching VHS Taped reruns of Northern Exposure and thinking of Nietzsche. “Every commitment is a narrowing, and when that commitment fails, you have to get back to a larger base and have the strength to hold to it. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say “This is what I need.” ”
MasturMasturbatebate
I remember a kid in high school we used to pick on because he submitted an anonymous question in health class reading: “Is it alright if a person masturbates 13 times a day?” We recognized his tiny dark handwriting and thought it hilarious but now I’m starting the understand the underlying fear of the query.
Life is boring. We need loud music and sex to fill in the gaps.
And cigarettes.
And alcohol.
Justice is also a woman, but she is blind.
Tyranny is a man. Figures. He repells the elements he cannot understand or see the value of, and then lady liberty asks for them, “give me your tired, your poor huddled masses…”
Saw Watchmen
Walked home in the dark, thinking of the latent psychology behind the concept of streetlights. I cross to a well-lit side and feel, somehow, safer than when I was in the dark. Nothing has changed, but I can feel my heartrate drop when I am “safe” in the light, and dip slowly in the blinding dissolve of panic when I have unlit dark blocks to traverse.
Decide to call a girl to keep me company but we end up having a fight.
“What do you want?”
“Truth.”
“What you do you want from me?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s bullshit. Why did you call?”
“I dunno. I was just looking for answers.”
“You haven't been looking for answers in a long time. You've just been looking for a reflection of your own ideas. Confirmations of your pre-conclusions.”
Wednesday
Saw my own hands for the first time all day slipping into a pair of dishwashers gloves and thought. Hands.
Saw a bird flying in tandem with its flock outside my kitchen window and thought. Birds. Going home.
I have no reason to live anymore. I see all of the shape and shake of things but feel none of the contour and tremor. I’ll keep doing it anyway, of course. Living. They that say life is beautiful. And like most beautiful things it is pointless.
My Boss got laid off.
My Boss’s boss got laid off.
Thinking about how the chain of command in corporate structure model separates two sets of individuals from each other but also keeps them inexorably linked. A horde of workers in disparate locations on one end of the spectrum, and a boardroom full of moneyed executive brains at the other.
In between there is space.
Began working on an outline for a bit of Science Fiction wherein future budget cuts terminate the galactic terminus link between Earth and one of its colonies millions of light years away, a colony who now has to communicate to Earth via a new space station that is in charge of hundreds of other colonies, and knows none of them by name. How lonely.
Drove alone through toll plaza
The Dude is gone. House to myself.
Masturbate
Read Hugh MacDiarmid poems: “The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want only for my part
the little white rose of
It smalls sharp and sweet,
and breaks the heart.”
Consider going back to school; in
Painting. Rather, trying to paint.
I like how variations of color are referred to as shades, shades, like blinds from one singular source of light.
When I finished there was nothing that I felt very strongly about so I threw it all away. Beauty is truth and truth hurts, and if you don’t feel it its nothing. I am not a painter. I am not a writer. I am nothing. Yet.
Speculate the prospects of a career in masturbation.
Thursday
Back into the office fray, swivel chair beyond the veils, under florescent lights for another day. Flash, another morning gone.
11 AM
Trying to sleep with my eyes open. Writing a story of reminiscence:
I knew a trucker once when I was a kid. He had hairy ape arms and thick Neanderthal eyebrows that stared out past too few stops along the way of an endless road spent hauling loads from one city to another, one warehouse to another, and it paid for him to have a family. Three girls. For years he drove away from them and drove back ,alternating all the while between peppermint candies and cigarettes. Ashing out the window, tossing clear plastic wrappers out there as well. Thousands of miles of wrapper trails and butts following him wherever he went, which in the end was to an early heart attack and a tiny grave.
10 New friend requests on Myspace. Am I really this popular or am I just a magnet for spam?
Feeling guilty for not writing any new blogs. Start a new one called “I want to be what it is” Interrupted by:
Phone call from an old friend who knew me before I wore all these masks.
The past, there's so much more of it than the present. Well, about as much as the future, I'd expect. Maybe not. Reading through old blog entries and discovering a sharp divide between the life I thought I was living and the life I have heretofore led.
I thought I was carving out a path for myself when I was actually digging myself a hole.
I don’t want to be in a place in 5 years where I think back to this time where no one saw the worth in me because my name wasn’t attached to a school, and I stopped seeing any worth either.
Update my Facebook status:
Pick an image, like a Group of Seven sunrise crusty fingerpainted with the golds and oranges dovetailing over the dividing line of a black-as-night horizon line. Then put it in a new gallery opening on a weeknight and shine a retreated light on it from above.
That is how I feel.
No one ever comments on my Facebook status. I swear, there are groups on Facebook devoted to people who are too cool to be my friends. I only have like 5. Although, the existence of my page is masked. Much like my life. I like that.
Feeling lonely reckless and longing for adventure, I got really high and ate an entire Family Pack of Cheezits. So full I could barely breathe.
Watched The Office and 30Rock and Grey’s Anatomy while drinking straight out of a bottle of vodka, running my fingers over the skin on my face as if there is years of junk piled there between my pores and I am slowly scraping it out, its not enough to drink alone and high at home so I put on pants and a clean mask and a denim jacket and some loafers and take to the streets around 10, outside hearing the music of a thousand households, sound without meaning and the swaying limbs of a willow tree look like lunging men in shadow, leaves and flowers showering onto the garbage-lined sidewalk like God’s bad idea of what a forest floor should look like, the longhaired neighbor’s son sitting in his well-lit garage fixing a car part propped up by Iron Maiden, a hunkered down bar emerged from the bottom of the hill and a restless shadow standing outside the fire-red door asking “Heya slim! Yagotta seegarett onya?” while inside the ruddy faced white haired barkeep stared at me staring at myself eye to hazy eye in the mirror feeling sweaty and childish and ordering a beer, gnarled hands and wild eyebrows rough and ready pouring and me yelling at him not to take it out from under the tap until “Every! Last! Drop! Na— Bu—Th— Ye— Do— Ok” and then I turned and saw a ruddy girl playing a lousy game of pool and saw enough of myself in her that I walked over and looked her straight into the yellow eyes and handed her my beer and got myself another one, introductions make amateur psychologists out of everyone and she saw right away that I am nothing and have no great skills toward making a living and my life lies somewhere inside my colored words but aparently this seemed attractive to her, probably in its easy attainability and so we went out together and smoked and cursed the system and praised the dawn, I kissed her cherry lips and put my hand against her back and felt her animal impulse to rise into that hand and against the indent of my hip and then, in a moment of sudden clarity backed away, “let’s not let this get ugly. It’s just gentleness and kindness shining though now,” I said and she protested and I left, thinking it the better part of valor, and awoke
Friday
Feeling empty in substance and solid in ignorance and unable to write anything.
Smoke break.
Shit break
Building origami monsters to decorate my workstation, drawing little masks on their faces.
“So no one will recognize them,” the giant asks.
“No, so everyone will know they are mine.”
“It’s weird that most people wear masks to hide their identities but you don’t.”
“Oh crap,” I sighed.
Text messages asking me to come out tonite. Sure I’ll come out tonight.
I’m going to hell. The world is a sea of ambitious riptides and I sit chain smoking on a gorgeous Friday night listening to college radio.
“This concludes your ten minutes of punk music. Fourteen songs,” she said with wearied collegiate disdain, “if there’s one thing I like about punk artists its their ability to be concise.”
Ha!
More texts messages. “When are you gunna come out?”
“Tonite.”
Didn’t go out.
Saturday
Glorious spring morning full of wafting humorous airs of Mother Nature’s erogenous zones. And a baby wails within the squalid cold confines of a sunburnt trailer, garden fighting its disorderly way through the wretched clasps of winter’s oppressive tyranny out front. And a woman, pink, so blonde she looked like she just stepped out of the sun and buxom, barefoot, in a blue-as-baby dress, comes out into the day carrying bags of trash. Her pale footsteps along the sun warmed path young, maybe twenty, but eyes down-turned and probably as old as the first blinking disappointment of all of life oh so many eons ago. Hollow caves where nothing or no one lives anymore.
At the airport. Young mother holding her toddler son to the runway-facing glass.
“See the plane?”
“Yeeah!”
“That’s a big one! See it moving?”
“Without us? WITHOUT us?”
“Where is it going?”
“I— I d’know!”
“I don’t know either!”
Embrace the mystery, I think.
Decide not to get on a flight after all. Light a cigarette but don’t smoke it. Pull out a pen but write nothing.
Saw another blonde. Too many blondes. Why do the fair-haired ones get so oversexed?
5PM
Life is boring without smoking. Without drinking. Without sex.
10PM
Woke up from a nap and went out for a walk. Three missed phone calls. When did I get so emo? Deleting unsent draft text-messages from my phone. Sample: I get so dark trying to keep you bright. I get so low trying to keep you high.
Sunday
So early its still dark out. The faintest dream of dawn on the milky horizon
Seeking in bygone darkness certain pale glimmers of hope.
The church looked big on the outside but it was twice as large from within, ancient voices singing wayward songs telling primal stories as old as story-telling. All this light and darkness, deep and shallow, noise and silence, boredom and action, heaven and hell bullshit, why can’t we have both at once? Shades of gray.
But that’s just one week Masked Man? What happened to the rest?
I couldn’t say. I guess I was persevering.
Labels: dream big, dream logic, heroes of primal might and ancient power, hive boxes, irish eyes, marry the past and the present, prize sow, rhodopsin, toga boy, toll plaza, two-winged preacher
posted by DMM at 3/30/2009 03:26:00 PM
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