Words to live by

David & Goliath

Part I

In an attempt to clear my head and get on with my life, I now endeavor to do something so pedestrian, so contrived and presumably ineffective that the word cliche hardly does it's hackneyed banality justice. I am brought low and curl over, retching out my most poison thoughts. This black bile must be purged from my system and the accompanying spasms and tears must flow in order for me to get over the loss of my girlfriend.

I have not entered anything on this blog in almost... 3 years! It seemed like such a good idea at the time and I thought it would help me become a better writer. I see now that the real benefit of it will be as the perennial "Dear diary" skreed of hope and horror. I have no idea how to start, so I will probably just throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

Here' goes:

I loved her. I really, really loved her. I miss her and yet, I hope she is suffering. I know she isn't, she is right now in the carefree honeymoon stage of her new relationship and that is of course, just grist for the mill. I am a staunch atheist who scorns all manner of superstition, religion and even people who knock on wood, but curses on her and him, may they endure a life of limp dicks, headaches and bad breath. I want the power of the main character in Like Water for Chocolate, the woman whose emotions would be transmitted through the food she prepared. A few of her tears dropped into the pot would cause the whole table of guests to be overwhelmed with melancholy. I want to drop this ache pounding in my chest in their pot, I want the anger that warms my head and keeps me awake at nights spread on their bread and I want this confusion and loneliness in every bite.

So yes, I'm bitter, even to the point where I've lost my self-deprecating humor. I have nothing witty to say, even after two months of going through this, two months of a kind of navel staring that would impress a research scientist.

Like the Bajillians before me, I just want to forget, I want my normal endorphins and opiates back. Some minute part of me wants to be happy for her, which I know would somehow release me, but there are darker, more primal forces at work here. There's the old lizard brain that doesn't know from kindness and acceptance. It wants the Juice back, it wants the elation of love and orgasm to light up the whole fucking block and remind it of carnal days gone by. Stravinski's motherfucking Rites of Spring! All it knows is flight, fight and fuck and right now we are in short supply of all three. On stage now is mister mamby-pamby pre-frontal cortex who's acting out some kind of tedious and menacing Harold Pinter play that nobody wants to watch anymore but don't dare leave the theater because it's raining outside.

I know that love is a drug, I have read the books and heard the experts. I'm sure most people, if they paid enough attention would see the parallels and give up on this notion of it being some kind of god-given transcendence from the human condition, it's not, and yet we hold infatuation to a separate set of standards, but in the same breath, I know it isn't the same. It is a drug that insures the perpetuation of the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world, the genetic code that makes more of us, the selfish gene. The mayor of your brain, pussy control! The chemicals that course through your body when it is real are the real elixir of life, our only chance at immortality. All of the arts are awash in the misery and revelation of love and to be truly in it is to have a hand in that composition. All the more reason for the personal apocalypse upon loosing it.

I know the only cure for a broken heart... Another fix. Like Peaches said, I need to 'fuck the pain away,' or I will surely implode. But who wants to fuck someone with the thousand mile stare? What is sexy about a man imagining, not sex with this prospective partner before him, but that of his ex and her douchebag boyfriend 1000 miles away. I am damaged goods and damaged goods I shall stay for some time, one foot in the here and now and the rest of me in an embrace with a ghost. But I know I must move on and move on I will, I wouldn't be writing this if I wasn't serious about kicking the habit. And even though I would throw it all away to be with her again, I know life must go on.

Lorem Ipsum unveiled

"Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?"

"But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?"

LCD Soundsystem
New York, I Love You
But you're bringing me down

New York, I Love You
But you're bringing me down

Like a rat in a cage
Pulling minimum wage

New York, I Love You
But you're bringing me down

New York, you're safer
And you're wasting my time

Our records all show
You are filthy but fine

But they shuttered your stores
When you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored
Once they'd run out of crime

New York, you're perfect
Don't please don't change a thing

Your mild billionaire mayor's
Now convinced he's a king

So the boring collect
I mean all disrespect

In the neighborhood bars
I'd once dreamt I would drink

New York, I Love You
But you're freaking me out

There's a ton of the twist
But we're fresh out of shout

Like a death in the hall
That you hear through your wall

New York, I Love You
But you're freaking me out

New York, I Love You
But you're bringing me down

New York, I Love You
But you're bringing me down

Like a death of the heart
Jesus, where do I start?

But you're still the one pool
Where I'd happily drown

And oh.. Take me off your mailing list
For kids that think it still exists
Yes, for those who think it still exists

Maybe I'm wrong
And maybe you're right
Maybe I'm wrong
And myabe you're right

Maybe you're right
Maybe I'm wrong
And just maybe you're right

And Oh..
Maybe mother told you true
And they're always be something there for you
And you'll never be alone

But maybe she's wrong
And maybe I'm right
And just maybe she's wrong

Maybe she's wrong
And maybe I'm right
And if so, is there?

How the River Bottom Nightmare Band saved Christmas

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

A snippet from The Song of Childhood (More German, Von Himmel!), egregiously and inappropriately ripped from the long and lovely soliloquy written by Peter Handke which begins Wim Wenders Wings of Desire. It makes me think about adults loosing the Christmas spirit, on this, the penultimate shopping day before the big shred. I ponder the transformation that takes place in a person (my person), from the love of anything having to do with Christmas to mistrusting the sequence of events all together. How do things go from being strange and openly beautiful to foreboding and foreign, when beauty is only a fluke and even then, only a fleeting glance. Strange beds and costly beauty.

But don't get me wrong. Certain things remain delightful, inviolable and strong: the smell of burning piñon wood coming from small houses and small chimneys, the rare treat of the Sandias cast in snowy raiment (they are), even the familiar tastes of biscochitos and tamales. These things come from less oblique sources of joy, incorruptible and simple, inexhaustible and yet never the same. Perhaps it is that slippery quality that allows them to elude my blunt scalpel of rationality and pseudo-psuedo-intellectual pride.

So, in order to intervene on my own behalf to avoid this downward slide of total Scrooge-osity, I bought myself copies of Emmit Otter's Jug Band Christmas, Scrooged with Bill Murray and have just finished downloading The Grinch who Stole Christmas and The Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Tough love indeed. I may even pop down to the store for a jug of 'nog and a pint of it's cohabiting libation. But truth be told (ad neauseum) this is a time for kids and if I ever have the chance, I would love to celebrate Christmas with all guns blazing just to see the excitement that I only faintly remember, rekindled and made fresh.

Kraut Think

Today while watching commercials devoted entirely to Christmas shopping opportunnities, I was reminded of a German phrase my ex-girlfriend taught me: Esse morgens wie ein Kaiser, mittags wie ein König, abends wie ein Bettler! It's the same in English folk wisdom, that one should eat like a king in the morning, a prince in the afternoon and a pauper at night. I think this applies very much to the traditions and bizarre rituals we have set out over the past few hundred years concerning Christmas. When we're young we can't get enough, every song, ritual and decoration holds promise and heightens expectation and the resulting post-present crash is like a small death. Then we are teenagers and know everything, we jump on the notion of it being a sham and a hoax and pride ourselves in being detached and yet we participate, hiding the signs of our enjoyment. Then as adults, its the spare and simple pleasures that really bring us joy, and I think that is a healthy progression. Gluttony begets antipathy begets harmony.

What are we without our traditions? Are we cold and empty or just free to frolick according to our own myths?

No boxes no bows, no felt-footied clothes
or the 9-year old ninja
who prowls starry-eyed through the night
no shifting of boxes or cellophane lockses
just for a sliver of sight
of that thing, that circled object of lust,
now so much Hallmark, headache and dust.

Dopa-mine

I am sitting on, or rather in, my very deep and cushy couch, slowly, molecularly sinking into it's nappy warmth. My back is facing to the west and the towering mountains that cuff this city like a fathers stern and protecting hand, jagged, strong and dusted white. It's raining quite steadily and I think, that even here in this modern, sterile loft which is so far removed from sentimentality, hearth or home, that the sound is still so soothing. A syncopated rat-tat-tat drawing my thoughts away while someone else begins to write.

I am listening to Erik Satie and the evanescent rise and fall of such beautiful melody makes me wonder what it must have been like to experience the dark delirium of an Asian opium den–a cave of the primeval mind so far removed from care or even conscience, patrons reclining like the enlightened Buddha under the nightshade of a great tree. Awake, asleep and yet aware of the imperceptibly low murmur of voices and one's own biological music. An attendant enters the chamber surreptitiously and wipes fevered sweat from my brow. Outside there is thick tropical heat, but inside it is only perceived as a tingletravelling a snake path of tiny glistening rivulets.

I try to imagine a smell like burnt rose petals and nutmeg, acrid and exotic yet somehow wholesome. The smoke, a swaying, sultry tendril of vascular blue and milky white, it dances with every breath.

Pattern without depth, motion without effort, effort without action–frozen in joy.

It's dark here but even the light of a single flickering candle or the explosion of the attendants match as he re-lights my pipe, sets off fireworks and cascades of impossible color.

Normally it would be overwhelming to have this many senses so suddenly acute, everything ballet and potency, ancient archetypes of semi-permanence, profound–each second a journey into unmeasured black. And yet, there is no apprehension or fear. It's as if a group of clamoring, conspiring courtiers had been sent away so that the king might enjoy the buffoonery of a cartwheeling fool.