Happy birthday

Happy birthday, Leah.

A dream - persistant evil

A nightmare. A really long, really bad one.

There was an evil thing, an essence of badness and ill will that pervaded everything. A vague, undefined presence of extreme malevolence. There was no help to resist it and no defense against it, and it was doing horrible things to people. This formless, persistent evil is a recurring theme in my dreams.

We were all afraid and coming together as a group to feel safer. It was myself, Matt, mom, Chey, grandma, Ed, dad, Glenna, Laine, and several friends and other familiar people. We were all walking single file up a stairway to an upper floor that had rows of seats, like the balcony of a court room. When we got up there, I sat next to grandma and sidled up really close to her. The girl in line behind me sat next to me. We were all squeezed in together on those benches as close as we could to each other for comfort. I put my arm around the girl next to me and held her tightly. I was a little uncomfortable holding this girl as closely as I did, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was alright, because we were all terrified.

It was gray and overcast outside. Empty cars lined the street of a small town business district and everything was still. I came upon one car with an occupant who was frantically trying to start it. He was having no luck, and was plainly terrified. He was a big man of about fifty, wearing a short sleeved business shirt that was tucked in over a substantial mid-section, with a pair of no nonsense black framed glasses perched on a sweaty, jowly face that jiggled as he struggled with the ignition. Then, without warning, he just came apart. His body separated into these little shiny, wet globules of semi-translucent fleshy matter. They all collapsed down into the seat and onto the floorboards, scattering and rolling every which way. The evil had done that to him.

Lots of other people suffered their own individually different and horrible transformations into insensate and purposeless forms of abominable insults to nature. They were crafted prisons of awful putrid chaos and suffering, pure manifestations of the will of pristine evil. Infinite hopelessness is what it felt like, to know that these things had happened to people. Back in the upstairs room we huddled together more closely in terror.

I could see downstairs that someone was vying for our attention. It was a woman with a harp and an accordion. She was a part of the evil, and she was going to play the evil for us on her instruments and she wanted our attention focused on her. People began to chatter nervously and a general panic ensured, but it was a still kind of panic as nobody moved. We all just waited for the evil to start flowing into our ears. I thought to myself, during this portion of existence comprised of palpable horror, what it would be like for someone who was deaf or blind or who otherwise lacked the physical means to sense the evil. I could only imagine that it would be even more horrible to have the evil seeping directly into their minds, skipping the nervous system outright, and just boring right through the skin and muscle and bone, right into the brain and heart. How horrifying that would be.

This segment passed, and a feeling of hope returned. People were out and about and gathering the broken and scattered pieces of cursed flesh, in all their torturous and unholy forms. There was hope that these people could be 'reconstituted', and brought back from their suffering. We piled all of the fleshy globules that we could find of that particular person back onto the front seat of the car, and he reformed in a reverse of the event which had torn him apart. He was whole, except that his flesh had an ashy, gray pallor, and it was missing from his head. The reformed dead man held a wadded up glob of skin and hair, which he pulled down over the bloody musculature of his head and face, and reverted to a look of dead normalcy. We asked if he was ok, and he assured us that he was, but he wasn't. He was dead.

I was in the back seat of that car, and we drove down the streets of that dead town. All of the other animated dead were there too, driving or walking or otherwise going about their business. An exuberant young girl in the front seat was turned around to face me, with her arms resting on the top of the seat back. She was joyfully explaining all of this to me and trying to communicate a sense of how wonderful it all was. "But this is horrible," I said, "that these people are animating their dead bodies from hell," to which the little girl replied, "No, this is the will of god. It's the miracle of resurrection." My mind quailed at this blatant lie, and I could only mutter to myself, no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no

I was back in the house again, and we were all downstairs, waiting for the evil to do whatever it was going to do to us. I watched but was only vaguely aware of something horrible happening to a friend of mine. We all accepted it as inevitable, and I stood with the girl I'd been sitting next to, and we held each other tightly.

At the end of it all, I managed to utter a prayer of desperation:

"Oh you wretched and perverse spirits, your presence has been felt and your power made known. Now I command you, in the name of the eternal Lord who made you and cast you from the heights of heaven, to cease from this disturbance!"

Then, with the intent of driving away the evil, I hauled a huge dry, rotting log over to a bonfire, and several others helped me to toss the heavy thing into the flames.

What happened?

Life got better once before.  Once, when I thought it was over and there wasn't anything more except for the wait, it surprised me and exploded and knocked the end way over the horizon, beyond view.  That was so weird.  And so unexpected.  But what the fuck is happening now?  I guess it's the same thing, or a similar thing, as what was happening before.  Right now, it seems like there isn't anything in the future, except for a slow decline into a continuous painful event, which gets deeper and deeper, until the pain becomes fatal.  I can't kill myself.  I just flat out can't do that.  What would that be like though?  Thinking about it makes my head hurt.  It's almost worse this time, because before, I had no idea that life was going to pick me up and turn me around.  Now that I have the memory of that happening, I can't just live inside of an ignorant despair.  Now I gotta keep thinking, all the time, what if it gets better again?  That's even worse than being completely hopeless.  It's a continuous 'what if what if what if what if', all the time.  It's like staying awake on Christmas Eve, and being so hopeful and anticipating something wonderful, except that there isn't any reason for being hopeful that anything wonderful will ever happen.  How can I sit here and say to myself, 'Ash, remember last time, how it was so hopeless, and you'd accepted it and didn't give a shit, but then life exploded in your face like a nuclear magnolia blossom?  Remember that?  Will that happen again? 
WTF was that all about the first time?  It's like... it's like it sucks.  That's what its like.  What happened?  I must have missed the part where everything went to hell in a handbasket.  I didn't wanna go there.  No wonder I missed it.

More of the same

When I hear a certain song, it makes me grimace. My lip curls up on one side of my face, almost as if I had tasted something bad. A disgusted snarl is probably a good description. It's one half of a frown, the bottom half... and left that way, it would just mean frustrated and pissed off.

But I can feel my eyes and my forehead clench up into an expression that is more grief than pissed. On either side of my eyes, near my temple on both sides, the muscles contract inward. The part of my upper lip directly under my nose scrunches up, almost as if it were trying to push my eyes closed. It definitely feels like a struggle between these two muscle groups; the ones at the top of my face and the ones at the bottom, as if this were a natural reflex to stop tears from coming out. Grief stricken on top and pissed off on the bottom and shoved together violently, like two magnets trying to repel each other and held together that way forcibly.

Its a feeling of extreme anguish. Its extreme emotion. A really hard, shiny, glossy pain; a beautiful bright and reflective pain that attracts with a compelling force. An irresistible force, like gravity when it crushes.

What? Why does it do that? What purpose does that serve, that kind of emotional reaction? Is that nature's way of thinning out the herd, by nurturing suicidal tendencies through beautiful pain?

Sadness

Here is a feeling of truth.  I have an extreme sadness.  I'm surrounded by people, good people who care.  I'm alone inside myself.  A sadness is debilitating, paralyzing, and it insinuates itself into my cells, from the inside out.  It's a thing that makes me very tired.  I'm so tired of it.  I wish I could peel myself open with a scalpel, layer by layer, and scrape out this disease with a paring knife.  It's so heavy and demanding.  I feel like once it turns me gray all the way through, I'll just switch off like a blown fuse.  Maybe a loud pop first. 

Going forth I feel things

Going forth I feel things, I get these feelings, these familiar feelings. That's what links all of them, that they are familiar. They can be lonely dark full of despair sad stagnant but all familiar, and all attractive. All of these feelings, that's what makes them the same, all linked together they're familiar and attractive. They draw me down into the shadows, dark places that I can see into that hide more mist shrouded apathetic and comfortable dangers which I'm afraid to approach. Like dreams. It's all like a dream, like that dream you remembered in a song that made you cry and despair and was oh so comfortable. I can't get away from that dream thing, the whole aspect of it, it's like a dream. It's like a dream. It feels like a dream it's like I'm in a dream all the time. When I feel like this, it's like it's like that, it's a feeling of foreverness and heavy like gravity, of being drawn into the foreverness, gravity, of being pulled into it, the heavy feeling of sinking into the never forever. It's it's it's I'm afraid of it. But but it's but I'm it's I'm pulled to it into it pulled in falling in I'm I'm in love in love in love in love with it.

A comfortable hell

I pass by a row of houses on a street in a neighborhood. Several of them aren't lit, and they seem abandoned, and they mostly just form big dark shapes. There's one that's lit, however, and it's a long one, with two front porches - one at each end. There are waist high wooden rails enclosing these little porches, and the porch lights are turned on. The rest of the house in between the two porches is lit by a dim backscatter, and there are a few darkened windows. My imagination takes over and I can see inside that house. I know what it's like in there... not necessarily the precise layout, but I know the feel of it. I've been in that house before, in a dream. I can feel it. It's an attractive feeling, one that I wouldn't mind dwelling inside of for an eon or two. That stagnant, warm, all encompassing embrace of apathetic comfort. Something about it is rotten, but I don't mind.

There's another house that isn't lit at all. It's another long one, set about 50 feet back from the road by a dark, wide lawn. There's a lamp post standing there at the top of a brief series of steps with an accompanying hand rail, and there's a sidewalk that continues on up to the house. The lamp is one of those old style street lamps which are made to look like they're supposed to burn gas. It's a tall, black lamp, and it only casts a dim light, as if it were on its last leg and about to go out. There is a huge, round tree situated off to the far right. There's only a vague outline delineating it from the sky, causing it to look like its just growing out of the side of the house. I can feel the dream memory of this house too... but somehow I know, without actually knowing, that I've never been inside of this one. All of the dark energy surrounding this house is focused right here on the steps, with the railing and the black lamp. I'd have to wait here for a long time before I could go inside. I'd sit right here, at the foot of these steps, under the wan light of this dark lamp and wait... forever dreaming about walking up that long, infinite walkway, and into darkness.

There was one area where a house was supposed to be, but wasn't. It was just a black expanse, with a copse of trees to either side. I could see the remains of a broken, crumbling foundation, and beyond that, just inky dark. I stood there and regarded it for several minutes, waiting for some kind of feeling to identify it to me. I never felt anything though, except for an urge to get away from it, which I did. Quickly.

This is that dreamy feeling; the one I've talked about before and keep trying to describe. It's a lumbering, smothering tide... foamy and soporific, and pulsating with a long, slow feeling of lethargy. It's just a feeling, but it's also a thing... dead and heavy, like a sticky black steepness, accompanied by the stench of slowly undulating moments that pass unnoticed inside of a comfortable hell.

Pain shaker (good name for a band)

Everybody feels pain, right?  I'm pretty sure we all do... but I think you can break that normal variety of common pain up into little pieces, and depending on how you add them up and put them back together, you'll get different flavors. 

For instance - pain can taste good sometimes.  Kind of like how nobody ever notices that carbonation actually hurts like a bitch.  Why do we do that?  Think about it.  Drinking a Coke hurts, so why do billions of people do it and come back for more?  Huh?  Why is that?  Are we all just stupid, deep down? 

And slurpees hurt, too.  I'd even venture to say that brain freeze is probably the most agonizing thing you can experience as a result of just going about your regular old uninteresting daily business.  I had one today, and it was just about the most agonizing thing that I've ever felt, and I'm not exaggerating.  The pain was debilitating. I was at work, and I had to stop what I was doing right then and there and just wait for the unbearable, excruciating agony to pass.   The customer at my register thought I was having a seizure, and was on the verge of dialing 911. That's how bad this stupid brain freeze thing hurt.  After it was over though, I took another long slurp of slurpee.  Am I retarded?  Seriously, am I?

And then there's spicy food. Chili peppers and wasabi, and what not.  That stuff hurts! Why do we do it? Why do we put fire in our mouths, and enjoy it?  It makes me think about that movie, K-Pax, and how Proat described the physical act of sex for his species as an overwhelming feeling of nausea, accompanied by the sensation of having your nuts squeezed in a vice while being rolled around in corroded alien sauerkraut.  When you think about it though, is that really all that different from putting a hot poker in your mouth and enjoying it?

So anyway. When I started writing this I was feeling pretty depressed, and my intention was to prepare this elaborate and profound exposition on the delicate subject of personal pain, seasoned with a dash of self pity to make it serious, and definitely not a joke.  But then the lid came off of whatever shaker it was that I was shaking, and this thing happened instead.

Befuddlementedness

Occasionally something happens to me that causes me to question my sanity with actual bona-fide fear. An event occurs which escapes the parameters within which I define reality.  You know, common sense reference points.  Things you rely on, that you can count on, like... the Sun will rise, the Sun will set, there is oxygen in the air, the moon is up there going around the earth, I have a job, I know people, my mom loves me. Things like that. Things that are facts.

Then a thing happens that throws all of that right out the window. Just tosses all of that away like a piece of paper thrown out the car window, like it weren't never worth anything at all.  Your sanity.  Tosses your sanity out the window.  My sanity.  I guess that's what I'm getting at.  So here's what happened:

Tonight I got off work and I walked up to Albertson's to buy these steaks that they have on special.  They're buy 2 get 1 free, which is crazy, but they keep doing it, so I don't know... I guess they're crazy, so I keep going up there after work and buying them.  It's like the recent gas prices.  I never thought they would go below 3 dollars again, but here they are, below 3 dollars.  I guess the whole world is crazy, which is kind of what I'm getting at with this.  Anyway, back on track.

I bought the crazy steaks with the crazy prices at the crazy store, and I walked my crazy feet across the crazy highway to the crazy Racetrack convenience store.  What with everything being crazy and all, I did this crazy thing and went inside and bought a crazy bottle of crazy water.  Then I left.  With the water.  Right?  You'd think that's what would have happened, right?  That after doing that crazy thing; buying that crazy bottle of water and all, that I would then do this crazy thing, like... that I would actually leave the store with the water?  And that there wouldn't be anything crazy about it at all?  Huh?  Right?

So here's what happened. Again.  By the way, it may seem like I'm building up to some really big thing, but I'm really not. I mean, at the time it seemed completely insane to me - like it really was a really big thing, what with 'big' meaning 'insane', you know - and I still think that it was, but in hindsight it doesn't seem that way.  I mean, in retrospect it would seem to me that it wouldn't seem like a really big insane thing to someone that I might be telling this to, right?  Like, it seems that it would seem to be a big deal to me, but not to you, right?  If I put myself in your shoes?  Do you get it?  That is, what I'm getting at?   Do you get that?  Right!  ANYWAY!

So... so.  So what the heck does so mean, anyway?  What is that?  Why does it seem natural to continue an interrupted thought by re-introducing it with the word 'so'?  Is it just a sign of insecurity, like 'like'?  Or, you know... like, 'you know'?  I mean... aw crap.  Isn't 'I mean' one, too?  Anyway.  Hells bells. That's one too.  Isn't it?  Isn't 'anyway' another one?  Yeesh... whatever.  You know, 'whatever' is probably even another frikin' one, come to think of it... you know?  And you know another thing?  Fuck it, I'm tired.

So anyway!  I bought this bottle of water, and after I'd walked about a hundred yards away from the store, I decided that I wanted a drink.  And since I'd just purchased a bottle of water not a minute and a half ago, I figured that I would just take me a nice drink out of it... only.  Only, you see... only there weren't no bottle of water...! 

? thought I, as I rummaged through my plastic bag - the exact same plastic bag inside of which I had fully expected my bottle of water to be contained.  However, this was not the case, as it was not there.  I realize that it's strange that I should wax eloquent over such a seemingly trivial matter, but unusual events compel me to do so.  Allow me reiterate, as this is a fairly important observance - THE BOTTLE OF WATER WAS NOT THERE. 

The bottle of water - the one i had just purchased - was not in my plastic bag.  I looked inside of it and all through it... up, down, left, right, forward, backward, inside, outside, between, betwixt and behind, before during and after.  I retraced my steps to the store, and back again to the place where I'd first noticed that the bottle of water was missing... twice. I rummaged through my bag again.  You know, that plastic bag I was just going on about.  I went through it the same way, again.  I mean, there ain't a whole lot of real estate inside a plastic bag for a bottle of water to take up residence, you know?  Well, continuing under the assumption that I am a relatively sane person with no legitimate reason to fabricate a story about whatever this is going to turn out to be about, I'll continue. 

So (there's that word again), having searched for the bottle of water that I had just purchased only minutes before, and having come up empty handed, I was understandably befuddled, now wasn't I?  Certainly.  I had just purchased a bottle of water, but I didn't have the bottle of water.  I'd searched well for that bottler of water, high and low, but I still didn't have that bottle of water.  Anyone would have been befuddled.  I was legitimately befuddled as I retraced my steps to the store, and it was in this state of befuddlementness that I finally decided to go back inside and ask the clerk if I had even left the store with the dang thing in my possession in the first place, as this often happens at the 7-Eleven where I work.  I had high hopes, but to my dismay, the clerk seemed to be similarly befuddleded.  So, despondent, I thanked him, and as I was turning to leave, the clerk said, "Hey, just grab you another one.  No biggie."

Wow.  Incredible!  I thanked the guy - the clerk - my hero, over and over again, thinking about how rare it is that we'll run across an authentic human being during the normal course of events throughout the day, like this one, and how it kind of sucks that my default reaction when it actually does happen is to be amazed.  I kept thinking that though, that it was just incredible, and I kept thanking the guy as I walked out, and thinking, and thanking... and thinking.

Do you want to take a wild, random guess as to what happened next?  Do you?  Go on, I dare you.  Take a guess.  Come on, guess!  Guess!  Never mind.  As I was putting the bottle of water in my plastic bag, I saw a bottle of water in my plastic bag.

The stupidest thing you've ever heard, ever.

I see freshly mown grass, where it wasn't the last time. I see a little dog on a porch, being very still. I see a couple ride by on bicycles. I see the guy take a look back at me after they've passed by. I hear something explode. Way off in the distance. I don't know what it is, but I guess it could have been fireworks, or a gun, or maybe even a bomb... but not thunder.

I pass by insanely familiar sights. I try to open a pack of cigarettes with one hand, and it frustrates me, and then I feel like my awareness is unlocked. Just because of that little thing - that little episode with the cigarettes. I understand that my equation is unbalanced, and that there is more sad than joy in my particular situation, and that I'm starving for beauty. Then I realize that took too long to say, and that the beauty of it was lost, because it became too personal. Beauty should never be personal.

I said that like it was some kind of nugget of wisdom, didn't I? What the fuck do I know? I walk down this same path every day, every night. The same one, over and over. Every day every afternoon every night every day every noon night day night and stuff. And again. I do this over and over and over and over. Do you want to know what it feels like? It's like this. Imagine that you have a red hot poker shoved up your rectum, and it hurts, but it's also funny at the same time. The reason why it hurts is obvious, but the reason why its funny is pretty personal. Or vice-versa. Whatever. Who cares? That part is different for all of us. Are you getting it? Are you relating to this in any way? If you are, then that feeling of a red-hot poker up your ass might actually mean something. That's funny, right? But damn don't it hurt.

Anywho. A lot of things are like that. A lot of things try to mean something, which kicks ass because that in itself means something; that things just kind of want to do that naturally... to have meaning. That's one thing that rules about being awake. So if you're ever being tortured, try to remember that. I don't know if it will help, but ask yourself this (while the torturing is happening) - would you rather be a nothingness, or would you rather be a potential for joy, pain, beauty, despair, and stuff, with the possibility of being extinguished always ever present? If you're ever being tortured, that is... that's when you'd ask yourself that. I guess it all depends on what you think is interesting.

But horror exists at the same time. Horror is an undefeatable injustice, and it's always right there, and its always ready. Like quicksand... or what I imagine quicksand to be. That seems like it might be a little bit too commonly vague, actually. I'm trying to describe the feelings I have as they occur, but by the time I think of the words for them, the feelings have passed by. And then I have to try to remember what it felt like, and I try to describe the feeling based on that memory...

And then I walk a little further, and I vegetate a little more, and my stupid cabbage brain remembers that people are afraid of me. I'm just a small person, with a bag, and a light, and a cabbage, at night. And people get freaked the fuck out by me. They don't understand that I would try to save a life if I could. That I would do a good thing to check an act of evil, if it was right there in front of us. That I'm in the light and I'm a good guy, and that I'm carrying the fire.  Even though I'm an asshole. They don't understand that. They're afraid. I understand the fear, but it still hurts that they are afraid of me. Heck, I'd give one of my kidneys to save anybody's life if I could. I'd do whatever I could to help anybody, even though I'm an asshole. Assholes can be good guys, too. Look at Han Solo.

It's amazing how we don't concern ourselves with each other. What's really weird, and what really sucks, and what's weirdly and sucky, is realizing a thing like that because you're in the middle of it. For example...

I'm a self-aware bottom feeder with a galaxy-sized ego, capable of swallowing the concept of 'screw it' in 13 dimensions, which hurts pretty bad. But in my defense... just being alive hurts Ok? We breathe oxygen, and we need it to live, but it's corrosive and it hurts. I forgot where I read that, but it's true. It has something to do with free radicals, or rust, or something. Anyway. Trust me. Oxygen is corrosive, and it's killing us. We are all like crack babies, except we're born oxygen babies. Isn't that the stupidest thing you've ever heard, ever?

Little pieces of life

Sometimes it feels like I can only live my life in little snatches. Little tidbits of beauty, or meaning, which are a part of something which has motivations beyond my own. These little pieces of life are only available to me in special circumstances, and now that I've recently become aware of them, they seem like they are elusive. I never used to look for them, but once I realized that this phenomenon was a recurring thing that had an indescribable meaning, it got weaker, and it stopped happening so much.

I used to get filled up with it on my nightly walks. I guess that's why I started doing this so much, all of this walking at night. I think I may have described a little too much of it, or I've given too much of it away, and it doesn't want me anymore.

Lately these walks of mine are tired, empty, gray things. I don't know what to do now. Maybe it's just that I've walked everywhere there is to walk here and didn't, and there isn't any more prize or magic or life in it. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's just all too familiar now, and I've drained all of the stuff out of things here. It feels like it's all dead now. Everything feels dead now.

What is a word

Intimate is such a delicate word, isn't it? No hard consonants, no long, obnoxious vowels. The sound of the word seems intrinsic to its meaning. It's a soft word that rolls off of the tongue and dissolves like cotton candy in the air. It's such a fragile word... an almost perfect ononmatopoeia for the concept of vulnerable trust; exposed and defenseless.

What is a word, anyway?

That's like saying why do people ask questions, or...

After giving it quite a bit of thought, I arrived at this description of what a word actually is:

The thoughtful essence of a thing.

Or... The attempt to describe, or translate the essence of a thing by condensing it into terms which are, by necessity, finite and truncated in order to fit within the local structure of language...

...an abstract essence which, by....

...is made more accessible as a concept... and more manageable as...

...has been made manageable by reduction to finite terms, in order to more easily fit into the structure of...

Words are extremely limited and simplified descriptions of abstract ideas, condensed to the simplest finite terms which, due to the limitations of language...

A word is an abstract idea contained within simple boundaries consisting of...

...an abstract idea which is given meaning in finite terms in order to contain it and to separate it from other bounded, word-like ideas.

Yeesh. What the heck just happened?

Alone. Not the definition, but the simple expression of a few bits of information. Hollow sound that feels like an endless, empty tunnel. It has just enough structure to thoroughly describe the concept of isolation, and...

...just enough substance to build an echo around...

...the yearning for the simplest, most basic compliment to define it.

I feel so far away from everything, especially.

A frightening thing

Tonight after work I was walking. Very slowly. And at one point I was getting pretty far away from myself. Far away from what it was like to be me. Stepping outside of myself. And almost escaping myself. That happened for a good long while. Hours at least. I got lost on a real country road. Miles away. Really. It was wonderful. I had to use an electric map to get back. Before that happened a cop found me. He made a thing clear to me. That walking. At night. On a public road. Is deviant behavior. It's threatening behavior. It's suspicious behavior. People don't like it. They don't want me to do it. They will try to stop me from doing it. They will get others to help them. This was made clear to me. I am not. One of you. It is not okay. To be me. This was made clear. 

During and around all of this a seemingly interminable period went by. I wound up in Denton again near where I started from. Walking close to the store and away. And I see headlights forming around me. So I move over to the right onto the sidewalk. To give them room to go by. The headlights don't go by but they fade away. I keep walking. Then they come back. I keep walking some more but they don't go away again. They stay with me. So I stopped. I stopped and stood there motionless. Waiting for the headlights to go by. They never went by. They just stayed there shining on me and I stood still. Shining on my back as I stood there. Motionless. 

About a minute went by. Finally I turned around. I stood there turned around and looked at the car that was there. Shining its lights on me. It didn't move. I didn't move. I stood there looking at it for a while. Another minute of silent standing went by. About fifteen feet separated me from the car. I was on the sidewalk. The car was pulled over to the side of the road. I took two steps toward the car and it sped away. It sped away instantly like a bat out of hell. Like a frightened thing. Am I a frightening thing?

The awfulest horriblest thing

I feel sick. I feel like everything around me is just this thick stuff... like the volume of space that I move through is made out of some kind of transparent, suffocating yuck. I'm nauseous and I want to throw up, but its all up in my windpipe and down in my lungs, and into my stomach, and its like I'm embedded in jello; without any flavor or nourishment or purpose, except to just make things slow and difficult and awful.

Where did this stuff come from? This is bad with a purpose. To hurt and injure, and to wound... deep down. This ain't like looking at a rock and imagining that you could carve it into something nice. This ain't even like just looking at a rock because it's a rock. This is like looking at a rock and knowing that it wants to dash your brains in as hard as it can. This is the essence of evil expressed as a fractal. It's pure malice; intricate and infinite. It's not like a corrupted thing around me... it is corruption itself that I slog through every day and that I am smothered by every night, as it slowly insinuates itself into my pores. It's the thing that is inspiring me right now to describe it in such detail and with such passion. It's the stuff I'm inside of that is trying to remake me out of it, so that I'll disappear inside of it and never know that I was ever a thing apart and separate from it. It doesn't want to corrupt me - it wants to disappear me inside of it. So that I become corruption.

Isn't all of that just the awfulest thing to think, and to write down, and to publish publicly, for everyone to see and know? Isn't that just the horriblest thing for someone to have inside, and to acknowledge? It's a slimy, malignant, vicious and repugnant thing that slips through my mind as if it were in my hands. As I pull it up to the surface of my awareness, I can feel long, stringy pieces of it - cancerous tumors which are forced to function as veins and arteries, filled with putrid, rotten puss blood shit - pop and break and spew as they are exposed and die. And then it all just turns to ash and dust.

An excessively deliberate lack of purpose.

It's 7:00 am and I just got home after an eternity of walking around after work and thinking about the people I've loved who have killed themselves, and how much I've thought about taking an exit stage left, and how much I still think about it, and how much more thinking I would have to do about it to actually bring me to that point. Sometimes I think I can see that point pretty clearly, but most of the time it's well hidden. When I see it clearly, I slow down. I think I move in slow motion... breathing, thoughts, movement, decisions, processing information, making choices, all of that just kind of grinds down until every thought and action seems excessively deliberate, but with no purpose at all. Deliberately purposeless. Weird, huh?

So, I walked into the house at about 6:50 and I felt like a used up, wrinkled old motile turd, ready to fall down somewhere and just disappear from this thing called being awake for an extremely long time. My sister Chey was up and getting ready for work. I hugged her and said goodnight, and said to her, "I think there's hope for everybody, no matter what. Even the ones who killed themselves." It was such a strange thing for me to say, especially in that it seemed deliberately purposeful.

You know what I love more than anything?

You know what I love more than anything? I mean, really really love, more than anything in the whole wide wonderful world? Well, I'll tell ya. It's walking for miles and miles with a half collapsed umbrella in a torrential downpour while getting blinded by lightening and scared shitless and deaf by the thunder while trying to watch a movie on a tablet and covered in mud up to the knees and getting splashed by a cop as he drives past and almost flipping him off but realizing it was a cop just in time and deciding not to flip him off and then arriving at the house and after getting somewhat dry and comfy and situated using all the ice to make a great big refreshing satisfying awesome glass of ice water and then knocking it off of the dresser and soaking the floor and settling for a lukewarm glass of water and then going to sleep with the soothing, relaxing sound of thunder and rain. That's awesome.

Trans-Dimensional Hilarity

Let's see if I can describe what it looks like, and how it feels. The moon is about 37 degrees above the southern horizon, and it's full. The rest of the sky is completely clear; there are no clouds at all. Oh, and its 2:50 in the morning. I'm on Bonnie Brae, walking south, and there is a heck of a lot of stupid traffic. Why? Why are all of these cars with people in them out and about this late? Don't they know that I hold the sole power of attorney and exclusive ownership rights regarding and pertaining to all nighttime extracurricular privileges, and that they are BREAKING THE LAW by violating my own personal zones of exclusion? How could anyone not be aware of this? I mean, I don't walk on their front lawns during the day, I don't stand in their bathrooms with them while they are taking a dump, and I don't forcibly insert myself into the passenger seats of their vehicles every single time they make a milk run - grocery run - cigarette run - beer run - drug run - automatic weapons run - or just an old fashioned hit and run. You will never see me interrupting anyone involved in any of those activities, so what makes it okay for anyone to pull those very same shenanigans on me, simply because I'm walking at 3 o'clock in the morning?

Oh, and by the way, I frikin' hate hate HATE loud motorcycles. And I know that there's such a thing as a motorcycle muffler, by the way. I can't think of a single, solitary reason why a motorcycle should be so purposefully and obnoxiously noisy, other than the extremely likely possibility that a certain prevalent breed of motorcycle pilot possesses a sadistic desire to inflict maximum annoyance to any person or thing which happens to exist outside and/or in the immediate vicinity of their own self established ego boundaries.

Okay, now that all the birching and whining is out of the way... what I originally wanted to say was, wouldn't it be weird if, while I was walking along and typing this in the dark, if all of the air just disappeared

Sorry, but there went another frikin' stupid ass loud noisy f'ing worthless piece of shit motorcycle, right then, just then. We hates them.

And then a bicycle just rode by, just a couple of feet away from me, and scared the shit out of me, just like that guy did an hour or two ago! WTF? Oh, but that was when I was walking and recording the talking thing with a kind of video thing. I guess you wouldn't know about it unless you saw it on my YouTube channel. I haven't uploaded it yet. Anywho.

Screw it, whatever it was I was going to say. I hope all of the air gets sucked up by interdimensional beings who are squashing our universe in between two other universes which are made entirely out of an infinite amount of naked singularity in order to generate a fourteen billion light years wide Casimir Effect to establish a vacuum vacuum which sucks up our vacuum into another bigger vacuum which will turn our entire cosmos into a single, vast region of negatively curved space-time, populated by an equally infinite amount of exotic, degenerate matter of negative mass, in effect repurposing all of existence into a thirteen dimensional FTL spambot with the intended side effect of first annoying and then enslaving entropy after a period of 999^999^99999 years and driving the 2nd, 3rd, and 7th dimensions insane, just for the fun of it, and ensuring the ensuance of trams-dimensional hilarity on an infinite scale.

A dream - The end

Nuclear war was imminent, and Leah had been sent back to Denton to get her affairs in order before going back the monastery to await the development of events.  Matt and I were at the house packing, and Leah was there to say good bye to me.  I was in denial that any bombs would fall, even though we had heard on the radio that there had already been several cities around the world that had been destroyed.  I knew this, but I said out loud that I didn't believe it.  I didn't want to leave.  Matt was urging me to hurry, and I was putting on my boots and lacing them up.  I began to grow very afraid, and I found myself wondering if it would hurt more when the bombs landed since it was cold outside, and whether or not it would make a difference if it was summer instead of winter.  Leah told me that she had been instructed to get back as soon as possible and not to become distracted, and I panicked and reached out for her, and she was there, and she grabbed my hands and pulled me out the door.  Then I was in a car with Matt and Leah, and I could feel my mom's presence but I don't think she was there... but I cried out for her, and said "I'm scared mom!" and she said, "Leah's there for you, she's there, she didn't leave.  Hold on to her." And I reached out, but I felt like I was blind, and I couldn't see, but she was there, and she put her arms around me and we sat there together in the car, in the dark, holding each other.

Little blue fowers.

This is how I feel when I hear this:

A bad feeling starts to well up inside of me, down in the center of me. Like a spring bubbling up, but black instead of clear. It continues to fill up my insides, until a sadness starts to leak out of my eyes and my nose, and I feel like I'm drowning in it The awful, horrible, beautiful melancholy which is this sound pulls me toward it. I feel like I'm attracted to it, but that's a lie because it's pulling me. And I feel so stupid for being sad, because the feelings that these sounds evoke in me seem so familiar and beautiful, but my sadness is a dull monochrome compared to it, in the truth of things where nothing is hidden. And I'm colorless and embarrassed and I despair.

Taking a dump at 32000 feet.

Have you ever watched a plane fly over, late at night and during the small hours when nobody around you is awake, and imagined what was going on up there in that little tiny improbable capsule of comfort, isolated and exposed? You can probably assume that at least the pilot and the copilot are awake and busy talking to air traffic control and getting ready to land that thing. And there are probably at least one or two passengers either jibber jabbering away about something or another, or maybe reading a book or watching the last few minutes of the in flight movie, or fiddling around with their phones, or doing something else to occupy the time, like sleeping or just sitting there being quietly terrified, which is normally what I'm doing when I'm up there in the sky in a plane, a gazillion inches above the ground and rapidly losing altitude.

Or maybe somebody is simply taking a dump up there in the sky. Just think about that for a minute. Out of all the billions and billions of people who have ever lived and died on planet earth during the last several hundred thousand years - since there was even such a thing as people - only we few who have been alive during the last 50 or so years since planes with communal lavatories have been regularly criss-crossing the skies can claim the distinction of positively having been very nearly or possibly even exactly underneath a mile-high crap as it was being taken. I mean, it's simply an inevitable statistic that a dump has been had by someone, or more likely several somebody's, directly above your location at some specific point in your life. Probably many specific points.

So that's what I find myself frequently thinking about at times like these, at night, when I'm out walking and observing and soaking up the probabilistic expressions of quantum fluctuations as collapsing wave forms. What's going on up there right now above our heads in those hundreds, or even thousands of big, hollow lozenges that are constantly sailing through the skies at ludicrous speeds and getting ready to not explode upon impact at Love Field, DFW, or maybe even the Denton Airport?

Is that weird? Not that all of those thousands of mid-air loafs are being pinched every single day... no. What I mean is, is it weird that I even think about it at all? Is that weird? Am I weird... e.g. defective, and/or deformed? Mentally, that is? Has my fragile little mind been warped by 43 incessant years of jury-rigged jihad by the tin-hat terrorists?

I don't know, but it keeps me up at nights. See what I mean? It's 4 o'clock am (4:23 now) and I've been thinking about this since at least 12:30.

The despair of failing to deal with the failure of dealing with despair.

When I'm all filled up with anxiety, I gasp with short, staccato exhalations, like some kind of dysfunctional panic attack. This is the way I express despair, by puking up oxygen. Why is that the overriding motivator in my life? Despair? It's very uncomfortable and I don't like it. I assume that there are some people whose lives average out on the right hand side of zero. Right? That's true, right?

The me I sense inside of myself is a misshapen caricature of something that used to be, or might have been, or could have been good at some point in somebody's memory. What is this ongoing thing that's happening with my being awake time? It feels like I'm surrounded by a polluted cloud of defective potentials, continually collapsing like an elaborately set up domino fall which leads straight to hell. Is this all my fault, that I don't know how to be strong, or just ain't strong enough to figure out how? I don't like it and I don't want it, but it sure feels like I'm stuck with it, so is that my fault?

I know that these are terrible things to think. But I have this compulsion to express myself, and when I start up that machine, this is the stuff that comes out. This ugly thing that I've just written is the common denominator by which the moments of my life are divisible.

As an alternative, I could either lie or just write nothing at all.

On the bright side, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have to be this way... but that's kind of like saying, "I'm pretty sure there's a million dollars in gold buried somewhere."

The abiding sadness

Earlier tonight I went outside to smoke a cigarette.  This, after spending most of the day inside and in bed, idly watching crap on youtube and thinking about how much church I've been missing, and regretting the heck out of it.  And being tired, just so tired and not up to anything.  I use that as my excuse for neglecting that which is the most important, my spiritual health; as I am too tired to think of anything else that might be more accurate.  I console myself with the knowledge that I'll make it up in the future, when I live close by again, if ever... and that I'll even go to church in the morning.  But I know that by then I'll be too tired. 

Anyway.

I stepped outside at about 7:30 and sat down and lit up a smoke and loaded up my e-book on my phone and commenced to reading of True Grit.  I didn't even know it was in my e-library.  I ran across it yesterday and started reading, and it's a helluva good book, by the way.  So, as I was getting settled, I looked up and was suddenly and forcefully cognizant of the living evening as it passed through and around things such as the sky, the clouds, the grass and the leaves, and the tree branches and the air, and myself.  Even in the dead things, like the painted wooden and artificial structures of the houses, and the hard substance of the pavement, and the scattered gravel.  I got up and wandered in a kind of daze over to the road and did a slow 360, looking at everything and mesmerized by the beauty of it all.  You'd never realize that there are so many colors of green until you have the knowledge battered into your eyeballs, which is what it felt like to me.  Getting battered by beauty comes somewhat close to almost describing the feeling of wonder, but to attempt to go further would almost feel like an insult to the plain and simple truth of it.  So I'll just say that at the time, I felt overwhelmed by the simple feeling of the moment and the fact that I was imbedded in it, in this one, particular coordinate of ongoing existence, and that I had the senses to absorb the information which describes it, and that I was this thing which could soak it up and turn it into a sensual phenomenon that my body and soul could recognize as beautiful.

I stood there inside it for as long as it took to finish my cigarette, and then I walked back into the dark house.  Upon leaving that moment behind, I immediately felt a strong sense of regret and remorse for just being away from it, and separated from all of that which I had just witnessed.  And I realized that, even though my heart can break for the beauty of the world, and I can marvel at the miracle that I am this persistent witness to it, I despair at my awareness that none of that wonder has ever touched the deep, abiding horror which occupies the roots of my soul and stagnates there, and it doesn't quell the abiding sadness.  This puzzles me quite a bit.

1:08 am

It's 1:08 technically, the a.m. part.

Okay, running commentary. It's starting to rain now. For a good long while, it just threatened, with lightning and a few little drops.

Haha, okay. It looks like another false alarm.

What's up with all the traffic at 1:15 a.m., anyway?

So that pre-rain smell is happening pretty good right now, and yowza wowza, dadgum but that lightning is bright... it's blinding.

Okay, its raining now, but still kind of wimpy like. I seriously hope I don't get struck.

Uh... I don't know why I felt the need to qualify that with a 'seriously'. Or why I had to even mention it to begin with. Of course I don't want to get struck by lightning. But maybe I do, huh? Maybe? What if getting struck by lightning gives me super powers? What then? Do I still want to get struck by lightning? Do I, or do I not want to get struck by lightning? It's a tough question.

Its 1:28 a.m. now and rain. Lightning, too. Now the rain is just a couple of plitter platters on my umbrella, so I'm closing it. I don't have to worry about spider webs.

Uh oh, now it's coming down again. Whoops, and it's also 1:42. Dang. This ain't exactly the most comfy I've ever been, you know. What the 'ef am I doing out here anyway? Yeesh. I must be retarded. Oh yeah, that's it. Man, am I stupid.

Emergency, emergency.

Well, that just happened. It was a bona-fide emergency, and it just happened. And I actually had to deal with it. Just now, you know. And now that it's resolved, it's done. But I'm not going to say what it was, because its too hard to explain. And it's raining, and right now I have feelings of hatred surging through my uncertainty principles.

Okay, this is what happened. No, never mind... anyway, it were just this thing, you know? So anyway, just forget about it. I've already forgotten about it.

So, what happened was this... aw, for Pete's sake! I already forgot about it! What's wrong with you?

Now my phone is getting a little wet on the inside, because a couple of months ago I bit down on the front glass part pretty hard with my teeth while I was trying to unlock the side door, and it cracked the screen, and so now the wet can get in. Who would'a thunk that would happen?

But it did.

2:15 a.m.

A dream - Missed the train

I had to catch a train at 11:28, and it was already 11:00, and I was supposed to meet Jennifer at this coffeshop/bookstore to hang out before I left.  I looked around and saw that I wasn't even packed yet, but I went ahead and started walking to meet up with her.  I was late getting there, as I was supposed to be there around 10:30, and I didn't see her anywhere, but the door guy said that she was waiting for me in the back where all the regulars hang out.  So I went through the store, and on the way to the back, I passed someone who I thought was Jennifer.  I looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back, nervously, and kept walking.  I turned and started to follow her, and she looked me in the eye and I got a good look at her, and I saw that it wasn't her.  She said, "Sorry man, I got nothing for you!" and hurried away, afraid that I was going to accost her.  I said, "Oh, it's just that you look just like somebody I know..."  but she had already gone.  I examined myself mentally to see if I really presented a threatening image.  I decided that I didn't, and that the girl was just weird.  So I got to the back room, and Jennifer was there, lying on this big mattress/sofa thing with a bunch of other people.  Jennifer looked up and waved me over, and I kind of picked my way through and over the mattress thing to get to her, stepping over people and items and books and stuff.  I got there and plopped down right next to her, and my arm naturally went around her shoulder as I settled down, but not purposefully.  I just seemed natural for it to fall there.  I hurriedly removed it, because her boyfriend is super sensitive, and I didn't want to upset him.  He wasn't there though... so I looked at Jennifer and said, "My train is about to leave, like... right now!" And she laughed and said "You don't have to go anywhere, you can just stay here with me!" And I looked at my watch and saw that it was 11:30, and that she was right, because I had missed my train.

Down the hall

It's been, what... 49 months I guess, and for the most part the pain has been relegated to an obscure closet, way way down the hall and locked up tight, with the lights unscrewed.  I can even forget it's there most of the time.  Sometimes I'll become aware of it though.  Something at work will remind me of her, or I'll run across a memento from back then, or I'll just see that Pantocrator icon she gave me and I'll realize that I've only thought that I'd forgotten.  I realize it's unlikely that we'll ever see or hear from each other again, and it seems to me that I've pretty much come to terms with that... but I'll never, ever forget, and I'll love her, more and more it seems, every day until my life reaches its final moment.  Weird, that.  Normally I'd have been totally fallen back out of love by now for two or three years.  Anywho.  That's that, I guess.  Time for beddy-bye.

Just frikin' super cool.

Wow... the most amazing thing happened today at work. I can still hardly believe it. I don't think I've ever been so completely discombobulated as I was today, when I had the flummox forcibly ejected right out of my brain by a fistful of unexpected, unfettered flabbergast. So this is what happened:

There's this regular customer who has been coming into the store for years. His name is Travis Lee, and I've known him as a close acquaintance for most of that time, as he comes into the store several times a week.  So, today when he was in the store, Jennifer complemented him on this really cool, bizarro alien octopus thing he had tattooed on his shoulder. I expressed my appreciation along with Jennifer, for It was indeed a pretty cool tattoo, and I asked him what the story was with that thing, to which he replied that his dad was a science fiction author, and that it was inspired by something he had written.

This of course is piqued my interest, so I asked if his dad had anything published, expecting the answer to be either no, or that he was self published with only a few dozen or maybe a hundred or so copies of whatever mediocre novel it was that he had written ... so when Travis replied that yes, his dad was published, and in fact was the author of several works which had spent several months each on the New York Times bestseller list...

...this was about the time that my jaw began to come unhinged, as I just kind of stood there staring into space, wondering vaguely who this kids dad was while he stood there, smiling and obviously waiting for me to take a guess. Finally he said, "My dad has co-authored several books with Arthur C Clarke."

He had barely uttered the last syllable when I blurted out, "No fucking way (pardon my French), your dad is Gentry Lee?!" followed by several back and forths consisting of no way, yes way, holy shit, yup, wow, I can't believe it, yep, it's true, wow, yup, and all this time I never even knew, yup, it's pretty crazy huh, which went on for a good two or three minutes, with me reaching over the counter and pumping his hand up and down like a lunatic.

Now, I realize that most people reading this have never even heard of or know who Gentry Lee is or what he even does, with no idea that in the world of science fiction authors he is a major player; one of those rare heavy hitters who actually, really did experience the privilege of co-authoring several books with Arthur C Clarke himself, the man who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama, along with a myriad of other classic science fiction books throughout his decades-spanning career. Oh, and he also came up with the idea for communication satellites.

So, suddenly finding out that this guy who I have known as a fairly close acquaintance for the past several years is, and has been all along, the son of Gentry Lee, a science fiction author with who's works I have been intimately acquainted and have respected for the past 25 years, was probably the biggest surprising shock that I've ever experienced, ever. At least, I can't think of anything else that has completely knocked me out of my socks like that.

Connections

I'm always making friends at work and losing them.  It's a process, like a chunk of life shaped like a rotating drum, with new friends rolling up as the old ones vanish underneath.  I've made friends... good friends, the best friends I've ever had.  And then they go away, and I never see them again.  They're all gone.  They've all passed through my life over the past seven years like a story that wrote itself as it rolled across a cylindrical platen, and then disappeared when the paper ran out.  A phenomenon of fluctuating friendships.

Now there's Jennifer.  We talk a lot about everything, stuff that neither one of us would probably ever tell anyone else..  I don't know where she finds that trust in me.  A couple of  months ago I was walking down Hickory toward all of the bars on Fry Street.  I had my nose down in a book, as usual, so I didn't see the shape that was barreling toward me until the last minute.  It was Jennifer.  She'd been hanging out at one of the bars and had spotted me as I approached, and before I knew it, I was on the receiving end of a full speed tackle hug.  I don't know if I've ever been tackle hugged before, but that kind of thing elicits a feeling which is sort of indescribable.  The feeling you get when you're accepted, and liked, and included in someone's list of things that matter.  That somebody is really aware of you.  It felt like... instant joy, maybe?

Then there are the ones that are gone.  Olivia told me that she loved me more times than I can remember, and I have no idea why.  She's gone now... where to, and doing what, I have no idea.  Matt was always trying to get me to hit the bars with him.  A few times I did, and I'd almost forgotten what it was like to have a good bud to share drinks with and talk with, the way guys talk to one another, but he's been gone for almost a year now.  I saw him a week ago before he left for North Dakota, of all places.  He gave me a hug and said goodbye, and I almost got choked up.  Brittney helped me so much when I first got back from Alaska and was just a complete wreck with a broken heart.  And Leah... Leah's gone.  I'm still somewhat discombobulated about that.  I haven't seen her or spoken to her since October of 2011, since she up and left, to go live at a monastery.  Can you believe that?  It's like something out of a badly written movie.  How the heck does that happen in real life?  Man falls in love.  Woman leaves man.  Man howls ceaselessly in anguish.  Woman runs away to monastery in order to escape the noise.  That actually, really happened, and now this person who was once my best friend - the center of my life, around which all of my thoughts and actions revolved - this woman who I was in love with, who I still love as much as I ever did, now is just somebody that I used to know a few years ago.  It's a hard concept to grasp, that a thing such as this can actually happen in real life, to real people. It's just... incredible.

These people have all consistently brought me into their trusting folds, and I'm always kind of flabbergasted that they do.  They've all, every one of them, reached out with emotional bonding irons to forge a connection between us that always hurts when the time inevitably comes to wrench it loose.  Jennifer will leave eventually, too.  I wonder who will be next?  I wonder if my emotions will eventually break from all the cracks, like metal fatigue, that have formed as a result of so many connections having been made and broken, made and broken, made and broken, made and broken, made and broken... again and again and again.

Ki-Ki

I've got the sweetest ki-ki-meow in the world. Every night when I get home and every morning (or afternoon) when I wake up, he runs into my room and hops up on the bed, meowing his little ki-ki head off, and hops up on the bed and snuggles up right next to me. A rare kitty, one that's actually more like a dog than a cat. His name is Shady Cat, but he answers to meow.

The smell of the universe

Today I was feeling very depressed, all day long. I... for a little while, more than I usually am. Anyway. It was really busy today at work and I didn't get everything done that I wanted to, even though I stayed for an extra hour. I just felt overwhelmed with the regular workload I usually deal with, and gave up without a fuss at about 1 o'clock.

It's the see-through top layer of life, what we call real life, the conscious, awake part that seems important, which seeps into my pores and permeates my body with poison and dilutes my soul and spreads it thin. It seemed especially sticky today though, and I left the store fed up with how thick it felt... not wanting to be fed in any direction, or to be aware of any feeling which described the quagmire.

That's a good word for the thick, interminable stuck thing which occurs between sleeps... quagmire. Just looking at that word makes me feel like my tongue is going to tie up in knots and die trying to say it. It's the perfect word to describe what awakeness feels like to me most of the time.

And that's how I felt tonight, when I left the store. Stuck in the thickness of the quagmire, and just wanting to be out of it for a little while before bed. So I left work tonight, dissatisfied but relieved, and I turned off my brain except for the music part and the walking part, and the subconscious part that processes random craziness.

I had this crazy crazy crazy epiphany tonight, and I'm not sure if I can remember exactly what it was about, but I'll try to right now. It had to do with this music I was listening to, a British band called Doves. It's that rare type of music, which is made out of and resides at a certain level of good, that fools your awareness into noticing and recognizing a single moment, and then immediately taking that advantage to bludgeon it into that rare state of clarity and happiness. You know, that one.

So that's what happened tonight. The music pierced that vulnerable part of my facade which I always keep facing towards all physical phenomena, and I found my whole self being swept away, all of it. This is the point where all of that thing occurred. Should I try to describe all of that thing? Okay, I'll make a half assed go at it.

All that thing was a feeling of the present moment, and the music inside of it, with me mixed up in there somewhere, going on and on and on, but not even lasting an instant... Outside of time, I guess, is the only way to sort of bullshit my way around what that feeling means, because it's actually pretty much impossible to describe it.

Here's another way to describe what it wasn't not like - try to imagine actually being a song. That's what you are, a song. A piece of music. A whole bunch of notes, all existing together and making this sound which is beautiful, and that's what you are. But do you only exist whenever those notes are reverberating as waves through a medium? What is that song as it is being physically played? Does it still exist afterward? What is music anyway? What am I, that I recognize music?

Well, I realized that music is this thing that exists outside of time, and that it is just like anything that means anything at all. Everything that has meaning exists for ever and lasts forever, because how else could it not? Those were kind-of, sort-of the thoughts that were going through my head about two hours ago. And for that brief, one moment out of a million moments, I felt like I belonged. That I was natural, and that I was okay.

And right at the peak of that feeling, right when it was really really kicking in, this cat. This cat came slithering up out of the shadows. This cat was making a beeline for me, with just about all the purpose that a cat can muster... but that never happens. That isn't supposed to happen. Cats don't act like that, especially stranger cats. If they did, I wouldn't have given two and a half hoots. Cats don't happen like that. Not to me... not when I'm out walking, anyway. Stranger cats just don't come shunting toward me along purposeful, predetermined paths.

What it felt like, was... this cat, which exists in this perfect state of nature, only ever doing what it is supposed to and meant to do, homed in on my moment of clarity.

This stranger cat just up and appeared out of the zilch and entangled my quanta with its q-bits, and for about a minute it seemed as though I thought that I knew what a moment was. That cat.

And that's all. The universe smells pretty good right now, so I'm going to go to sleep.

Doubt

This here, what I'm about to inflict upon whoever happens to read it, is for any atheists or agnostics... and for me, the constant doubter. But before I proceed, I'd like to establish a common denominator or something. You know - a place from which to firmly ground this fountain of bullshit that I've long espoused, upon which I'm about to embark.

But first... this just happened, and I gotta mention it. I'm walking, and it's dark, but there's some city light reflecting off of the low cloud layer. And as I'm walking and composing this story, I see to my immediate right, not ten feet away, on the other side of this barbed wire fence which I hadn't previously noticed, a miniature white horse galloping full speed, right past me, as if that were the most normal thing in the world to see at 4:30 a.m. on N. Locust in Denton, Texas. So, yeah. That just happened.

Anywho, what was I talking about?

Oh yeah. Ain't consciousness and awareness just really f'd up? Its like... you know, just think about it. This whole self-contained aliveness thing, this first person perspective we all have of piloting these meat machines from inside our own personal bone canisters, like H.G. Wells's Martians tromping around, ensconced in the hoods of their fighting machines, clumsily stomping this way and that way, observing and thinking and doing and trying to figure things out and be happy as we stomp around - amateur pilots at the helm of these miraculous organic engines - trying to connect and communicate and discover some kind of meaning to existence, but mostly just being giant douche bags to each other and to everything around us.

I digress, though - what I originally was saying was this: just take a look at existence around you. It doesn't have to be a long examination... just a brief glance. Life everywhere, right? Or the product of life? And not just life, but other things; all of which are held together by this ubiquitous 'thing' called the strong nuclear force, and another thing - a reality bending something or another called 'gravity' - which occurs as a result of the existence of every single thing, now and forever. And with all of this going on, the circumstance which describes the end result of trillions of different combinations of the raw materials comprising the universe agree with a particular outcome which can only be described by life itself.

Now, with all of that craziness actually being a real thing, how can anyone conclude that it is all a result of the completely random and unconscious processes of nature, which also happen to follow some arbitrary laws which ARE, for supposedly no reason at all? Man. Man, oh man. Sometimes it's the easiest thing in the world to have faith.

This is what I find myself thinking when I'm having doubts about God. It always serves to kick my mental ass and spiritual health back into gear.

Another right this minute minute

Right now it's like a dream. Right now, right this minute. It's more like the memory of a dream, actually...
That's so weird, how I get these feelings. It's surreal, like this moment is a page out of a children's book. Not a book written for children by grown ups... this is more like a story that has sprung straight out of the mind of a child who has yet to develop the idea of a reality that's more than a few minutes to either side of now; where the substrate of existence is so simple that concepts like good and evil can find nothing tangible upon which to take root. There is only the pure interest of being, and a strong will to continue being, according to the natural rules of movement along the zeroth dimension of the absurd simplicity of now.

Dang, don't I turn into a convoluted windbag when I start thinking about stuff.

13 dimensional string theory, God, and quantum music.

Have you ever been so emotionally moved by a piece of music that you wished it were possible to actually BE the music? To somehow exist as the actual notes and chords and harmonies and melodies, with the entire song comprising your life, with the beginning as your birth and the end, your death? Even if it's just a short song, or just a piece of a song.

I've got a theory as to what music really is. You know how music is made out of math, basically, and how the universe is also made out of math, which - functioning as math does - is essentially just a description of vibrations? And how musical notes are simply the atoms and molecules, which together and in abundance make up a medium which can vibrate at certain frequencies, and how those very atoms are, according to 13 dimensional string theory, actually, at their most basic and fundamental level, individual pieces of the very essence of space-time vibrating at different frequencies, with specific frequencies describing the specific bosons and force carriers which comprise all forms of matter and energy, which in essence means that (I just saw a shooting star, by the way) the fabric of creation can be accurately described as, and in fact is, the penultimate musical instrument, with the laws of physics as the musical theory, and matter and energy as the notes, and the struggle of order against entropy as the time signature, and the galaxies, stars, planets, and all related macro and micro phenomena as the theme, and with life as the complex and interwoven melodies which bind it all together and give it meaning, with God as the composer and conductor?

So, what music is - that stuff we actually create with our minds and hear with our ears - is the expression of ourselves in God's image, as we were made. It's an essential part of communion with God, which is why we feel such joy and ecstasy when we hear it and write it and play it and sing it... it's just that most of us have forgotten what it's for, and what that feeling means.

Some time passes

There's too much beauty out here, and too much reality for it to exist inside of. I know, I know... I keep going on about how beautiful it is; the beauty of the night, ad infinum, ad nauseum. But think about it for minute. What's so good about it? What exactly is it that is so inspiring that when I'm out in it, I feel compelled to express the experience for the purpose of sharing it with other people? What is it that's so good to see or experience that it requires tired legs, a mustache covered in frozen snot, a lack of sleep, and a concatenation of bored cops who wanna play 'tag, you're it, baggy eyes' with me?

Or what's so bad about it, for that matter? There is a little bit of bad mixed in sometimes, as a result of having almost eight thousand miles of rock existing there between myself and the life giving photons of the Sun. Is that a problem for anyone else, or just me? Anywho. So mostly the bad is contrived... but however it got there, there it is, exactly undeniable, and being undeniably bad.

But. The bad is necessary, because to really appreciate a whole lotta good, I mean like... the whole lotta good that I've come to expect every now and then from the extraordinary banality of simple awareness, then there ain't no getting away from the fact that, from a human perspective, that whole entire experience of good would be meaningless without something for it to contrast against, like all that bad I was just going on about.

(some time passes)

Well, I never got around to describing all of those things that actually make me Feel, because I got caught up in the details of describing a whole bunch of whatever that I was busy experiencing, and then I must have decided that the experiencing was more interesting than the describing. I remember how it felt though; that thing I originally was wanting to communicate. And... okay. Time to lapse into unconsciousness for a little while. I'll dream about that thing here in a few minutes. I can't wait!

Lost in Denton

Tonight a cop followed me around for a little while. They do that occasionally, because I guess it's their duty or something. After all, it is night time, and I'm supposed to be asleep, not out lurking around in the shadows. Do I sound bitter? Well, maybe a little. Yeah, I understand... it's their job, and some people do wait until night to do their lurking and to pull their shenanigans, but the jackboot flashlight interrogation routine gets old after about the umpteenth time.

So anyway. I was walking north on Bonnie Brae, and I was almost to the loop, when I noticed a car sitting at a junction about a quarter mile south of me. I stopped and watched it for a good five minutes, and then it turned north and started coming toward me. As it passed by, I saw it was the cop. Yeesh. So I started walking again, and then I saw him turn around. On his way back he stopped, so I stopped too. It was the same old rigmarole... "Good evening, is everything okay, what are you doing, where are you going, where do you live, why are you out so late, what kind of lunatic goes hiking out in bum-fucked Egypt at 3:00 am just for kicks, and what exactly is your deal, anyway?" Once he was satisfied that I posed no threat, I was free to go on my merry way.

After that, I decided to take a shortcut home through a field. I got lost. Can you believe that? I got lost in the wilderness, in the middle of Denton. Eventually I ran across a creek, so I followed that until I came to an apartment complex. And do you want to know which apartment complex, out of the gazillion and one apartment complexes in Denton? It was the one on Joyce Lane, where Leah used to live; the one that I'd been to a gazillion and two times. Ain't that a kick in the head.

So anywho and stuff. G'night.

The Truth About Toad Licking

This was written back in '96 when I lived in Austin.

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Toad Licking

You've probably heard about 'toad licking'. Go out into the woods, find a stream, find a toad, lick it, and ta-da! La-La land. Well, it's not EXACTLY like that... although, finding mushrooms is ALMOST like that, except you don't go into the woods, you go into a pasture, and instead of finding a stream, you find a pile of cow flop... but that's another subject. But anyway, back to the toad thing.

First of all, if you do happen to find the right toad, it wouldn't be a good idea to lick it. The stuff that 'gets you off' is actually venom. The frog secretes the stuff when it gets agitated, such as when a predator is about to gobble it down. As soon as the wolf or gila monster or whatever puts the thing in it's mouth, it spits it out, because the venom tastes like ca-ca. But a human, however... a human dedicated to catching a buzz will go ahead and lick the toad, because he's got a new-fangled cerebral cortex that suppresses his natural instincts for long term survival in favor of his need for instant gratification. So before you go stuffing toads in your mouth, here's a few things you should know.

The toad's venom is concentrated on the surface of it's skin, and that's why licking is dangerous. Smoking it is a different story, however. The toxic ingredient in toad venom is called bufotenine, which is burned off while smoking. After the toxic stuff is gone, what's left is the hallucinogen 5-MeO-DMT. THIS is what sends you to never-never land. The only toad known to contain 5-MeO-DMT in it's venom is Bufo Alvaris, also called the Colorado River Toad. It is found in the Southwestern portions of the U.S., usually along the Colorado River in Southern Arizona, California, and Northern New Mexico. 5-MeO-DMT is classified as an unscheduled substance, which means that it is legal to posess... but B. Alvarus venom also contains bufotenine, which is scheduled, so you are hereby warned of all the cop crap.

B. Alvarus is a very large, squat toad with smooth, leathery, greenish-grey skin with tannish underparts. It has several round warts on the body, and four large parotid glands found where the hind-leg meets the body and also above the ear membranes. They can grow up to 9 inches long, but they usually range between 4 and 9 inches. If you ever do actually have one of these greeblies in your hands, be very careful, because as I stated earlier, it secretes venom when agitated, so wear gloves or something and don't rub your eyes or any other orafice on your body after handling it.

In order to get a smokeable sample, put the toad on a piece of glass (a pyrex baking dish works well) and rub the parotid glands behind it's eyes. This will irritate the toad, and it will secrete a milky fluid. Once there is a goodly amount of it, let it evaporate to a crystal and then scrape it with a razor blade. Put it in a glass pipe, and then SHMOKE IT!


These are the commonly reported (generic) effects

Coming on INSTANLY, you will feel a buzzing head-rush and notice a profound change in light and color perceptions. Acute closed-eye visual hallucinations are commonly reported. Effects last for 5 to 15 minutes, falling off rapidly. WARNING: Venom smokers may experience dizziness and/or heart palpitations. If this occurs, breathe slowly and deeply until the effect fades.

Here is a first hand account by Yours Truly

A friend of mine mailed me a sample of this stuff, and included was a note that read 'have a nice time'. I had no idea what this 5-MeO-DMT stuff was, and expected some kind of a mellow buzz akin to marijuana. So, confidently, I loaded the stuff into a pipe, sat back in my lounge chair, and prepared to chill out. Two seconds after I had inhaled my first (and only) hit, the room exploded. When I say that, I mean... it EXPLODED. Everything came apart like a puzzle, but the pieces were still next to each other, like it had only come apart at the seams but hadn't scattered to the four winds. It was an extreme, instant rush; VERY INTENSE. I gripped the arms of the chair I was sitting in like I was on a roller-coaster, and looked over at my lifelong buddy Clintmonstah, and his face flew into 5 different parts. Actually, it was his face, reproduced 5 times, hovering around the central image of his REAL face. I can remember saying something like "oh shit, this is heavy", and then Clint left the room, knowing that something SERIOUS was going on. What followed after that is very hard to recall, because it seemed like a VERY long time passed... a lot longer than the 5 minutes that actually passed in reality between the time when Clint left the room and when he came back. When Clint came back in the room, I was starting to chill out a little, but during those 5 minutes, I was somewhere else. Where, I do not know. Not only was I someWHERE else, I was someWHEN else too. I could have lived an entire lifetime in those 5 minutes, because it seemed like an eternity had passed. Time lost all meaning. EVERYTHING lost all meaning. I was in limbo for those 5 minutes. But I finally came back... and had a frame of reference again! I exhaled in relief. After that, things calmed down, until the effects were completely gone. The entire episode lasted for about 30 minutes from the time I inhaled to the time I was totally back in reality. And what a journey it was...

If you've ever done acid or mushrooms, then imagine the heaviest trip you've ever had magnified about 100 times. That is what it's like when you inhale about 5 milligrams (the recommended dose) of 5-MeO-DMT. And it's instant, not like the slow, gradual coming on when you take an acid hit or eat a shroom. So if you ever have a chance to smoke some 5-MeO-DMT, now you know what you're in for, unlike poor naive me who was expecting a mellow buzz in my comfortable lounge chair in my air-conditioned apartment. But, it's definitely worth the trip, even if you take it only once.

The process of wenting

Tonight I couldn't wait to get off work so I could go out on a walking adventure. The wind was at zero, the moon was almost full, it was luxuriously cold, and I had a full charge on my tablet, my phone, and my mobile hotspot. Baby, I was ready to go, as Republica said back in '96. They were ready to go too, standing on the rooftops and shouting it out... but that was almost 20 years ago, so I don't know if they're still ready to go, or if they already went, or if they just gave up. I didn't stick around to find out; I went ahead and went.

After all these years I'm still in the process of wenting, I guess, even as I type this, and I'm still wondering where my went is going to wind up... although I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter, because we are all eventually going to wind up up as old farts anyway. Right now I'm still a relatively fresh fart, but I can feel the oldness coming on, and I'm sure it will be here before I even know it.

I don't necessarily mind becoming an old fart, but dang... those ripe ones can really really really really really stink. That's the only thing that worries me... the smell. I hope I don't smell too horrible when I'm a ripe old fart.

Anyway. I think I kind of ruined the mood when I started talking about farts. My original intent was to attempt to describe the indescribable beauty of the night which surrounded me tonight - that's a weird sentence - but I wound up talking about farts somehow. Not that a fart doesn't contain it's own inherent beauty. A fart can be quite a lovely thing! For example - imagine a life without farts. And while you're imagining that, try to imagine that you are appreciating something lovely, after holding in a couple of years worth of farts. I can practically guarantee you that nothing will seem lovely to you after a couple of years of cooking up a crock pot full of pressurized farts... except maybe an actual free-floating fart.

So where was I? Oh yes. Tonight. Dang, it sure was pretty tonight. That's all I really wanted to say, I think. If I could go back and do it again, I would have written more about the awesome beauty and less about the farts. I guess I could go back and do it again, but no.

Anywho. I'ma bed now.

More shenanigans at work.

The store got robbed tonight. The owner wasn't here at the time, but we all looked at the video; me, my coworker, the owner, and the cops, so we all had a pretty good idea of what the guy looked like by the time we were ready to open the store back up. Then afterward - and this is the essence of irony - the owner was driving around town to see if he could spot the guy just by chance, and he sure did, at a deli on Carroll. He called the cops and they promptly showed up and nabbed him. So, the guy who robbed us was found by the owner of the store, who wasn't even here when the robbery took place, and he was caught just two hours after the fact.

Gasping choking dying

Oh man, that was just awful. I was starting to panic, I was starting to think that I was really going to die. Why does there have to be such a horrific panic response to a lack of oxygen? I mean, I can understand the purpose of pain, to warn you away from danger. In most cases, removing oneself from a source of pain is fairly simple. Stop doing the thing that hurts. However, this "I can't breathe, oh please God, I don't wanna die in agonizing mortal terror!" bullshit is going overboard. I mean, how often do we run across a lack of oxygen in our daily lives? Do we really need such an agonizing warning? Wouldn't common sense and a level of pain equivalent to, let's say... a stubbed toe, be sufficient? Is it really necessary to be forced to discover a reality shattering epiphany regarding our mortality?

Why am I griping and carrying on like this? Well, what happened was this. Tonight, just a few minutes ago, on my way home from the Shmelvin-Elvin, I was just a-walking along, minding my own business, chewing on a malted milk ball (you know, Whoppers) and watching a movie on my tablet, when I almost freaking died. I must have inhaled just a tiny bit of whopper saliva, because suddenly my throat was closed and I couldn't pull any air into my lungs at all. I would take a little tiny breath, and I would get a little bit of air, but whenever I tried to pull in a good breath, my throat would close and all I could do was make this terrifying wheezing sound. This went on for about three minutes. Long enough for me to scan my surroundings, scope out the nearby houses, gauge their distances, calculate whether or not I had enough oxygen in my lungs to make it to the front door of the closest one, realize I wouldn't have any breath left at all to shout, and maybe not even enough to knock or kick, and that I would likely die right there, tonight, on some strangers doorstep, wheezing and gasping, and experiencing the worst death possible, short of being burned alive.

It took me about a minute to realize that short breaths were the key. Oh man, damn, those sixty seconds sucked. Just the memory of it is almost enough to bring back the actual feeling of suffocating. What a great memory! I'm sure that I will reflect upon it with nostalgia in the years to come... that is, if I don't suffocate to death before I get the chance. So... short breaths. After another minute or so I was able to get about half of a good breath, and my panic started to subside. And after another couple of minutes, I was fairly sure that I was going to live.

I'm pretty scared now. It was a lot like those times whenever I've woken up in the middle of the night feeling like I was suffocating, except that this time it went on for about four times longer. So, this sucks. My own saliva can kill me anytime it wants to. Just any old time at all. Asleep or awake, it doesn't matter. I really don't like this new 'random possibility of death' thing that's going on in my life lately.

time-like entropy

Everything feels like a dream right now. Everywhere I look, I can't help but to imagine myself, or an alternate version of myself, existing in conjunction and in some variant way with whatever happens to live in my field of view - trees and houses, sidewalk and sky, dirt and moonlight; the muffled sound of a distant conversation, and footsteps; a barking dog. I'm imagining myself embedded within the swath of influence that these things have shaped and formed as the phenomenon of existence flows over, across, and around them... like a glacier of time-like entropy winding a path of consequences through a mountain range of causal events; splitting and merging and splitting, and merging again. And I'm aware of how magical it feels to be both an old friend and a complete stranger to myself.

Dang. I sure as heck don't know where all that came from.