Q) A: Despair, get used to it

The good women have got to do what the good women have got to do. I was weak and I was stupid.
The worst crimes are committed by those who are trying to punish themselves.  They tempt fate because they’re scared to be direct. 
We keep giving the world a chance to have at us.  Searching for psychic reconciliation. 

I hate waking up to this.
This isn’t war it’s commerce. This isn’t identity it’s salesmanship.  Where are the real monsters?
I close my eyes, you laugh.  The solace of martyrdom, set off on her own.  The torment of the crowd, together panicked burning. 
Newspaper, hand me last year’s crossword! Let us enunciate the syllables of our parents’ virtues. Let us close the door and put our books back on our shelves.
Let us whisper “More” and “Harder” like that in the frontseat again. My subtler points are best impressed with your subtler points.
Those that are lost in your anger.  Impossibly.  I dream life were eternal every morning as the aching sun rises over the hill
  and every night it gets quietly dark which makes me positively shake.   
Rage, what we desire is space.  Sigh, what we desire is hot and primal. 
I am like smoke hovering in an exhalated curve, if it could remain there forever, smoking.  No, slowly the smoke dissipates in the distance. 
It is quietly agonizingly dark. 
I think of you no more. I think of you one more time.

I hypothesize interesting experiences cease once I forget about them.  I forget in the mornings when I get in line like a sleepy slackjaw.
I hypothesize somewhere tonight adjacent or nearly touching my simple impotent reality is a discrete orgy.
Tonight is so far away.  I already forget what happened last night.  The news graphs out loud. 
I silently protest macropolitics by skipping breakfast.  I adhere to postjudicial situationism by continuing to live with myself. 
I’m afraid to be happy because I’m afraid to appear that I’m not afraid to be happy.
I’m afraid that sounds like a really lame excuse to not try and remain status quo.
I don’t feel the same as yesterday. I can't get up in the morning unless I get off. Doesn’t everyone get off by coming around to what they mean?
Writing wordless pleas in the pleasing colours of your eyes.
Our consumer exchange society demands going to work each day but only suggests buying you flowers.
Begrudingly I open the door. Sunlight hits the floor and I think about you.
I’m afraid you’ll need to define "random aporiae" for me.

You see we don’t see eye to eye. My reality moves at a different speed than your reality, and this is wearing my empathy thin and your heart out.
Somewhere on the wordless edge I am rocking out, doing everything wrong.  Sorting out the palette into categorical themotions.
I reason away my actions in a sea of irrationality. I think glory is a kind of tide. I think my past is everything I failed to be. 
Something for the cat to piss on in the corner.  I don’t miss the feelings I had back then. 
After waiting for the late news to tear me apart I love going to the supermarket and getting lost in the aisles.  The I’ll’s.  The Eye’ll’s. 
 The whole universe is a story I tell.  Turn the page, a new color. 
My own simulacrum sensations coming out surrounded by dairy products and crackers and you and I. 
Racing carts in this remembered hope and possibility.  Everything is of course nothing. 
But let us suspend the so-often suspected bulletins and surrender to the unexpected.  This just in, again. 
An evening so full of little conscious sensations like the melancholy of the surrounding streets beyond the parking lot, where we drive and listen.
I regret already something beyond those streets, beyond the trees’ tallest branches, where the old stars are again coming out like an old old story.
I’m trying to forget.  God got lonely with his themes and colors and created man.

I think so long as words come when I call I’ll be okay.
 I am told me that "oleaginous" is the right word, but innappropriate.  My stringy hands running through her hair on the pillow.
 Stop.  Please start all over again.  "Like the time…"
 Stop.  The mind, like a politician, can play dirty.
I think God is a poet.  Those pale stars are just bones in their embryonic molding, reaching out and yet to connect.
The beautiful pre-skeleton of the universe.   Everything will come together, all light will touch and hold us up, a bright big ball.
The Light of all colours in the fucking darkness.
But until then we go home alone and put away the groceries, and grasp and ponder. The lights out, the door closed. The future is a memory.
Nothing remains except what I tell you she tells me. "Because" I wrote, I said nothing.

I cultivate anger in the greenhouse.  I dissent from life and I am proud of it. The flowers love to listen to me talk I tell them to tell me.

The world is defined by its loudest voices, some of which are quiet looks.  Systems of government are thin air and reminiscence. 
Collective thought is an abyss, I drop my quarter in the slot and feel my mortality.
Winking old men punishing criminals who have committed no crimes have committed crimes.  We punish ourselves indirectly, our motives vague.
Where did organizations come from?  Their history is not who they are! Dear author, these characters are poorly defined.  Please revise.
 We starve for answers amidst the newsfeed.  More deaths in the middle.  Nations destroying nations.
Order a sandwich with lots and lots of meat.  Out the window of the café everyone shimmies and blurs in unison. 
We and the world are superfluous mysteries. I write in color and order tea remembering that you are now unreal. 
What’re flowers?  Why didn’t I get them?
My punishment has stretched from the past and spilled onto the present.  Tea rings on white doily.

My God she wrote in color. My God we say everything. My God I am. My God fine.
Who the fuck knows what my sentence meant.

Maybe you were wrong to say that.
Maybe you thought that I forgot that we talked about making mix CDs and putting them on park benches, dedicated to make believe lovers.
 Former selves and dead rock stars, a testament to us, with a link to our site.
Maybe this sounds familiar.
Maybe we should resurrect the yellow peril.
Maybe love is a rumor going around the social circles we share.  Maybe the red scare.
Maybe enthusiasm and sincerity are only for the young.
 Maybe the demented.
 Soldiers coming home.  Voices rising up and striking.  Prices going up.  Job growth going down.
 Now I am unshaven like the famous man.  Anxiety and luxury is where the continent starts.
Maybe vibrating legs are coming at me! Maybe we’ll never get there unless I lie and tell you a story about getting there. 
 Vast are the fringes we inhabit.
Maybe whisper it, maybe grunt it. Maybe I ought to take a cold shower.

As we go, we grow, searching for psychic reconciliation we die with change. We can be anything in death, spare anything in change.
Until then all understandings are usually probably misunderstandings.  You didn’t love me.  You did.  You are unreal.  Really, you were.

Common sense is vague and compounds the colour of the meaning.  Transcends sentence structure, blur it all together: Datelines.  Nightlines. 
My future is our past which is your Protean present.
To change the future I have to recollect the past and remix it into a portrait of all that I am.
Some that I am:
I am consistently glad that unlike other impulses I cannot justify reprimanding my adrenaline.
I write and I wait, Why, did the chicken cross the road to get to the other fucking side?  I hope to find out what's there.
I comic strip,  -- depersonalized & refetishized -- and my body is a news paper header, a thin blue line parenthetically-distanced from emotionformation.
With no focal summit, no staunch outlook. A faded photograph that triggers in you some roaring vision. 
The puzzle being comprised of pieces of loneliness, and the knowledge that there is more to you than there was.

Throw obscenities out the window telepathically.  If only my eyes were black, gray, yellow, then I would do something with myself this afternoon. 
On the contrary I am bored and alone.  Alright, I have the pollutive sky.  Cursing the lousy sunset.
Like the weather report I tell the truth and scare away all our shared friends.  Fuck like a hyacinth to make my forebears happy.
Envy others who are happy and hate myself for envying others who are happy, and afraid to hate myself, which is not the most radical fear.
I hate it when others are trying to cheer me up and I'm afraid this means there is something wrong with me.  Of course, there is.  But what?

Here we are in a poem brought to you by the people who brought you the people who brought you.  Say the name!  Say the name!
I keep waiting for them to tell me that I lost you.  Other deaths from the front.  Abdications and elections. 
Fire spilling out in all the corners of the screen.  Bit bought by bit.  Door to the world, dreams are coming. 
Mention how brightly my eyes shone as I awaited justice.  I turn out the lights late. I sleep with your hips sometimes.
I am a time traveler anticipating fame.  I am shame and disradiant disaster. I need to obsess less over the concept Of self:

You made me come in 3 dimensions. Your panties told me they prefer the spin cycle. Your breath is all I want to hear. You can't be trusted!
I can't believe you ----------------!  I thought I knew you, I guess I never knew you, maybe that’s why you went off and -----------------!

One can only laugh.  Laughter is a great reprieve for memory.  Isn't it?  My God I’m shaking, still waiting to end up back where I started. 
I re-read what happened as it scrolls past the bottom at the top of each hour. 
Since then your words are explosions that blow apart the floating doors I’m tenaciously clinging to—
 --never was such succinct disintegration so pleasant—-
Are countries really countries?  Are my impressions all of what exists or is there another region?
What was God reading to the good lady before he hovered over her waters and made her belly glow?

"Cacoethes" I read is the irresistible urge or desire to do something inadvisable. What triumph is there in private credence?
Happiness would kill me.  Fuck it.  The world is a stillife painting of me blowing smoke at the mirror naked.   
Your smile is a disease.  My awkward grin is an idea waiting in the wings.  Such intimate disasters tonight. 
A car strays from the highway and is thrown into the lifeless bloody ditch where they suffer,
  listening to the slight white noise of the radio feed them unnecessary adjectives like an unpleasant daydream.
Placate me a moment and remain very quiet and still and unfasten me from my name in your mind. 
Let’s uncouple effects from intention, straddle concepts withour notions of regret. The more alive I feel the brighter coloured my words. 
Come here and fucking don't tell me to wake up this is my dream and I'll wake when when I damn well please now come here.  Come here.  Come here.

Fuck.
I hate waking up to this.

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

1AM

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.

6:30AM

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.

4PM

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.

7PM

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.

10PM

Think about going back to school.

10:03PM

Masturbate

Tuesday

10 AM

With the day off from work I sleep in until 9:30 then masturbate.

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.

11:30AM

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.” ”

2:30

MasturMasturbatebate

3PM

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.

Liberty. Such a frighteningly openminded concept. Its no wonder she is portrayed as a woman. Men must choose one point and go after it singlemindedly. Only a woman could understand the logic of wanting two opposing things at the same time and going after both.

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…”

7PM

Saw Watchmen

11PM

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.

11:15PM

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

6AM

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.

8AM

My Boss got laid off.

8:15 AM

My Boss’s boss got laid off.

Noon

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.

4PM

Drove alone through toll plaza

5PM

The Dude is gone. House to myself.

6PM

Masturbate

7PM

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 Scotland.
It smalls sharp and sweet,
and breaks the heart.”

7:30PM

Consider going back to school; in Scotland!
8PM

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.

11PM

Speculate the prospects of a career in masturbation.

Thursday

7AM

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.

1PM

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:

2PM

Phone call from an old friend who knew me before I wore all these masks.

3PM

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.

4:30PM

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.

5PM

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.

8PM

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

7AM

Feeling empty in substance and solid in ignorance and unable to write anything.

8AM

Smoke break.

9AM

Shit break

10AM

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.

5PM

Text messages asking me to come out tonite. Sure I’ll come out tonight.

6PM

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.”

11:45 PM

Didn’t go out.

Saturday

9AM

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.

11AM

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.

1PM

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.