With my eyes closed, laying on two shirts spread out on the grass, I can feel the breeze blowing over my shirtless torso and tousling my hair. The warming sun colors my closed eyelids an orange-pink, the smell of cut grass abounds, the wind whistles. The sensations are so sensually pleasant, that it’s almost possible to ignore the chain-link fence, topped all around with countless outstretched, razorwire Slinky’s. For one hour a day the divide between here and there dissolves so that it’s difficult to discern the difference. These past few days I’ve felt better than I have in months, maybe years. A few difficult decisions, now decided, and the whole world has become a better place. And though I may eventually come to regret what these have wrought, their sum effect cannot possibly be as bad as things have been since that night of the epiphany, now almost three years past, that soon-to-be-famous moment of existential angst.
Be quiet
Closed eyes are elusive as a villain. They hate you. Your eyes want your eyes open. They want you to beg for mercy. There are things you can do to shut their mouth, but in the long run are not in anyone’s best interest.
Turn off the lights and count down from 100. I can never get to 80. The lovers I’ve loved the most are like magic. Sleep is easy and something to want. The pillow is a soporific. There is no countdown when you love what you are, or at least what you’re being. There is no number high enough for me.
It would be hard to sleep for fifteen days. I’ve tried. My record staying up is seven. I was hearing music that wasn’t playing.
The mind is a strange thing. Terrible and beautiful. Everyone knows the audacious tries that the mind will do when it’s asked. Unfortunately, many have seen the mind crumble. I used to read these books about spirit, and the conclusion was that mind is physiological. You break the mind, and you break thought. Spirit, if it exists, has to go beyond the physical. What makes me? What makes you you?
Being awake is why there can never be quiet.
Apophenia revisited
Apophenia. That is the human tendency toward connection of unrelated phenomena where none exists. Toward creating patterns, even when none really exists. Trying to bring order to chaos perhaps is what separates us from being an animal. I suppose there are other things, but other primates don’t seem much concerned with the correlation versus causation debate. Bonobos will go down on each other, and chimpanzees will rip your face off, but neither group seems too concerned with voting districts or feminism.
The rate of divorce in Maine correlates almost perfectly with the rate of consumption of margarine in the rest of the country. And that’s not even the strangest example of almost perfect correlation. The number of letters in the winning word of the national spelling bee and people killed by venomous spiders. Almost perfectly the same. The point of talking about this? Many people find a cause and effect here. Don’t eat margarine or your cousin in Maine gets a divorce? Her marriage is doomed. Don’t spell long words, or you might kill someone with a spider bite.
These examples are ridiculous. Life is ridiculous. And the same impetus that suggests to a certain element that mass killings or 9/11 or Kennedy assassinations happened for a larger purpose, will also suggest this ridiculousness. It’s part of the human condition. These patterns that exist or don’t, that are recognized or not, that are true or false. To anyone that believes them, they are as real as God, or as oxygen in the air, or as subatomic truth or infrared light. The argument, of course, is just because it cannot be sensed, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A negative proof shifts the burden, right or wrong, to the skeptic. And a lack of evidence becomes a virtue, not a deficit.
I think we all know better. I do.
Tampa General
Back in 2012, I was dead for 12 hours in Tampa, at Tampa General. Not dead really. If you’re alive now you were never actually dead. Unresponsive and with no ID, they cut my only pants off. I was minutes from not waking up. I woke with a foley coming out of me and an urge to urinate. I pulled at the tube.
“No, you don’t want to pull that out.”
“Where are my pants?”
“They had to cut them off. Don’t pull that out. I promise you’re not going to like it.” I pull it out. He’s right. Fire shoots up and down my penis with every breath. Still no urine.
“I need pants.”
“What?”
“What day is it?”
“Tuesday. You came on Sunday.”
“Fuck. I need pants.” Breathe. It’s only time. It’s supposed to go by. “I need pants.”
“You can’t leave.”
“I’m leaving. I need pants.”
“You’ll be leaving AMA.”
“I don’t care what I am. I don’t know where I am. I need pants.”
And this is how I ended up in New Port Richey. I suppose I should have been scared of alligators or snakes, even wandering, hungry pumas existed in the vicinity. But I grabbed some half-length blue scrubs, took an actual piss, walked to Target and bought some sweatpants and a bottle of wine (no vodka at Target in Florida), then crawled into the woods.
The weird part is that this actually happened. Florida incites the crazy, and at this point of my life I didn’t need incitation.
The whole point of this story is not my past insanity or the consequences of mainlining fifths of vodka straight to your esophagus after missing your Greyhound to Sarasota. My point was, in my customary roundabout way, about death, or near-death. For me, there was no white light. There was nothing. And then there was the monitor’s beeping representation of my tachycardic heartbeat as my eyes opened. I’m super convinced when you’re gone that’s it. This experience convinced me. It wasn’t sad. I didn’t feel sad. It was nothing. Like the 14 billion years or so before my third birthday and conscious memory. It was just nothing.
My mom hates stories like this.
Hopkins
I was flailing and was destructively apathetic about collateral damage. If I was in pain, then I didn’t care if everyone involved, and anyone standing too closely, was as well. Which, of course, is such an immature attitude that I’m embarrassed to admit that for several hours (and by hours, I mean years, mean life) I acted within that context.
Instant karma
Be here to love, otherwise everything is speculation. I’m not here to be angry, though given the right circumstance I can usually be counted on to be so. Old behavior is extrapolated into guesses about what will happen. Vague memories have a way of becoming hard truth. Everyone knows what happened, but everyone knows differently, passionately. There are no witnesses that have actually seen anything except what they’ve heard. Credibility is a measure more valuable than a credit score. It means more than the truth.
Nothing happens without an equal and opposite reaction. Lies beget lies. Sorrow makes thing sad. Revenge makes retaliation inevitable. I’m not interested in propagating any of that. I realize my choices might put me in the background for now. I’ve never stayed there before. Why would I?
What’s happening outside is not an ever after. Things will get worse before they get better. But things will change.
It always has a way of coming around.
Fibonacci
F_{n} = F_{n-1} + F_{n-2}
Tell me how connected the numbers three and five are. Closer than you and I ever were. On so many levels, by so many definitions. I dabble in these things. The truth in numbers. The truth in big and small. Quantum theory makes more sense to me than any catechism ever did. Fibonacci sequences seem to predict much more than mere numbers. This is beyond a set of fun puzzles to solve, but rather seem to be the key to something more real than the first ridiculous miracle at Canaa. With the exceptions of 1, 8 and 144, every Fibonacci number has a prime factor that is not a factor of any smaller Fibonacci number. I find this to be far more miraculous than alleged water into wine. That seems like a myth told in the parlance of the times in which it was written.
But the sequence has always been the same; it exists independent of time or even consciousness. The numbers keep getting bigger and never repeat, and you, like the Earth as I blast into space, keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Jolene
So it happened on one of those days when we weren’t really together. Nowadays, that was almost every day. And the calculus of our expected fidelity was never quite calculated anyway. But there was a new glint of something in the reflection of the sun on one of those days. That’s the point, I mean. It only happened because it was one of those days.
I had drinks with a Bumble or Hinge named Jolene, and the first thing I thought to myself, was that she was nothing like the song. Nonetheless, when she spoke, I found myself enjoying listening to her. Maybe the Ray LaMontagne version. That might actually be the perfect allusion, though I always hate when writers I like make allusions to songs I’ve never heard. It is, in fact, how I learned about Nina Simone when I was 15, so there’s that. Always exceptions.
Long way down
The ledge. I remember talking you down from there once or twice. That might be the difference between you and me. You came down.
I’m not quite sure if I enjoy the sweaty-palm excitement of maybe almost falling. More likely the culprit is complacency. A person can get used to almost anything. And after this much time, one might wonder if I didn’t prefer the heights.
It sure does seem a long way down though.
Ways back
Love to me is a filter. Love to me says, “Baby, just shut your mouth.” You and I have come to separate visions of the same truth. You are trying to find peace. I am trying to provoke it.
I was your lifeline out, and you were mine back in, and that was okay. And now it’s not. It’s about as far away from okay as you can stand.