Brushing Teeth with Lightning in the Rain

“Only the dead can say something about the living… sometimes.”

-          Sonnevi

…and she is not just miserable, but proud of her misery.  She loves to complain, and loves nothing more than complaining about how much she complains.  She is excited by the noises, hints at chaos in her bones, like a cow who figures that the lush of duckweed down by the crick is the only murky way out of this pasture.  Her body.  Your body.  There’s no way out.  She returns to the body, and ever again, slowly despairing, ever averted.  Until gloomy, and extinguished…

“You must have a goal,” says Mann.  When you’re ^up you’re a cloud blown away and when you’re _down you’re the dust blown away.  Without direction you’ll never be more than you are in the moment. THE MOMENT.  No matter what you’re doing, if you’re only ever really involved with your own ideas and emotions it’s an equation that’s not going to work itself out.  It has to be more than just you.  Be quiet and take the picture.  Matsyasana, momma…

Subdue the mind.  Chain it with discipline.  Work, responsibility, a goal, the objective.  Getting up without dizziness in the decossating rays of morning sun.  Embrace the union, the holistic unanimity of all creation.  We don’t stand set apart from the wracked and wailing storms of creation, they are us.  You!  Me!  Artists don’t transcend the ever-multiplying dance, art does.  Art Garfunkle.

Disclaimer: Last night we became a decade.  I was destroyed.  Torn apart into tiny forms which were then separated out, swallowed, expunged, exploded... The elation of freefall.  A remarkably coruscating swirl of birds, an abstract mandala.  Pass the hat.  First time I ever read the word quadrumvirate: 2/8/16. What killed us was rotting fruit.  Kierkegaard’s snuffbox. The window’s still open.  Our lungs breathe a long sex poem.  It’s Junyasar, dad…

Through tumblr-falling scrolls my appetite for platitudes erects, like a groangut Eiffel tower [erected in Paris, 1889, Las Vegas 1999].  Eat your preferences.  Unmanifest karma.  I reach to count the missing pens and keys in my pocket.  “Like a memory counting its dead,” Says Cortazar.  Nothing is really happening, nothing is going to happen.  Nothing ever happens.  Your ego is Donald Rumsfeld.

Endure the wonder of survival or get stuck running red, doing bedtricks.  Enjoy the touches of flying generosity, or stop waiting for things to happen.  Warm your hands on the burning embers of our lost summerflower yellow dreams, or better yet be still on the sittingstones of permanent eternal glowering gonowhere. I’ll wager your mood juice that the connection in the walks through the Highgate back fields are stronger than those of the Hoskins computer lab.  Everything is open.  Grow your brain like the hillslumbs of Fakfak.

What a baffling profusion of things.  What a provincial, small-minded world view, with a smug belief that all is good in the world.  To say that we’re looking for answers in my mind is not to say that in my mind we’re looking for answers. "I'm not quite right at all, am I?" asked Bowie. What spiderweb wrongs and inasmuch rights.  What depths past the shallow shorelines of time.

One can be blinded by such illuminancies.  Sandy, upon arrival in Paris, “I don’t believe I’m in Paris.  Is this Paris?”

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No mud, no lotus
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I've been green
all winter long
just imagine
as desire
of those who fear
the treasures
i promise
i'll bring
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Dread Pirate Masq'dm'n

I find it curiously fascinating how the older I get the narratives I construct to make sense of my life more and more tend to mirror the processes I use to construct a story. Or, in this case, a blog. I've been sitting on pieces of this puzzle for weeks now, trying to make sense of the shadow ambiguities of my topic, and then last night at 3AM a voicemail is left that puts the whole puzzle together. It is finished. It starts:

This is the worst part. No one ever tells me why.
They just stop answering my calls. Or
they stop answering my calls. Or
they stop y'know returning my messages
Or, or whatever and they don't say
"Listen, um, this isn't going to work out
because of ____ this," or
"Listen, you're just too
revolting---
---ly ugly,"
or something! I mean
just fucking tell me SOMETHING, you know?
God Dammit! Pisses me off. [sigh]
I mean, I would like to know what I did wrong.
That way I can not do it later
or I can say, "Listen
I'm sorry. Can I have another-
can I get a do-over?"

And if you buy into the notion I've been feeding you (and myself) for years that I am a victim, then you'll think that soundbyte was meant to encapsulate my own predicament, but right now it's not.

I used to believe that everyone leaves. I would brace myself for it early. In the midst of a kiss, mid-coitus, driving to her house on a cold day in February and I would prepare to be left. Everyone leaves so why spend time working on strategies to stay, t'would be wasteful spending. Why not instead bulwark the heart, I started to believe, which has damned up the walls of empathy in me, flooding all subsequent relationships with an ironic backfill; most people stay. I am the one who leaves.

There weren't so many ways for those girls to contact me as I have at my disposal now. They used to ignore my calls and texts. Now I find myself the bastard who ignores calls, texts, letters, emails, wallposts...

How is it that I have gradually become the villain? The villain who is so ultra-deluded that he thinks himself still a victim on the defensive, when in fact he has repeatedly, in the intervening years, offended and hurt lonely open hearts, much like his own before it was callous and starved insensate...

I couldn't find a way to say any of this. Then, suddenly, I found a way to say it. On Valentine's Day. Perhaps that was the ultimate trigger. The Greeting-Card Holiday prompts self-analysis revealing the reviled depths to which I alone have stooped, ruining any chances I've had at love and blaming everyone but the real culprit. Hey Cupid, draw back your bow, and thanks for putting all these thoughts so poignantly together for me today. I'll probably forget it all again in another week. Unfortunately, Valentine's Day is only once a year. (Never thought I'd ever say that!)