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The secret

If it were possible would it matter? One of my favorite books is “Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.” In it, he begs a magician for another chance to live his life. And then proceeds to make every single mistake he made the first time until he finds himself with the magician again. He has an epiphany. He is on a wheel, that keeps spinning and returns him to the same place.

It’s by P.D. Ouspensky. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s not a big deal, hardly anyone has. But he writes about the secret. Not the bullshit prosperity gospel that brings you everything you think you want just because you believe it will. But the one that recognizes how people act. Realistically and metaphorically we live on a wheel. And it is the rare individual who even recognizes that. The few that can see the wheel and render its truths are defied, like Jesus or Siddhartha. It just doesn’t happen that often. And when it does, you know.

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Against all odds

In terms of evolution, ants are very successful. So were dinosaurs. So are crocodiles. Bacteria are absolutely the apex. Humans are an anomaly. The fact that I care what you think? The cosmic or even geologic odds that this might happen are statistically zero. I’m feeling how Iʻm feeling against all odds, against the concept of odds. So there’s that. Short version: you can’t possibly empathize, but I’m not making up how I feel.

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Paraffin

Put your hand 3/4 of an inch above the flame of a candle. Immediately, it hurts. Don’t move. Watch the burned wax turn black to paraffin. Its melting point is only 99 Fahrenheit. less than half a degree above your “normal.” More like urine than lava. Then, it stops burning. Black tendrils. It turns out what hurts is subjective. This is a metaphor.

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Lick the bottom

You have to lick the bottom, so you know what it tastes like. You have to lose a lot, maybe everything, to know what you had meant anything at all. This existential struggle? Everyone goes through this, some just can’t articulate it. Who with a contemplative mind has not contemplated forever? Who hasn’t feared the idea? How many ants or roaches did you kill this year? What do you think their afterlife fate is? What do you think yours is?

I used to go to parties and realize what hour it was, and realize there were only so many hours left to try to have fun. That’s how I’ve been looking at life lately. If I’m lucky, I have 30 years left, and that’s far less than I’ve already been here. Are you ready? I’m not.

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Inherent conflict

How do you finish telling a story when you can only think fifteen seconds at a time? How do you create a narrative when three minutes of contemplation is exhausting? These are rhetorical questions when I’m lucky. Writers write, right? But what if writing, what if every thought, is embroiled? I have no third act, and I don’t know if I ever will. I can’t get past the conflict. The conflict defines how I live; it defines who I am right now, who I’ve been for a while. The conflict or nothing is how I feel.

I saw an old friend last night and he was in chains over how he felt about a relationship he was in. I felt like I was in a zoo, watching something that had no personal resonance. I told him I was the same way for a while, after the last time, but after what happened, I decided to turn it off, and so I did. With me, it’s always been all or nothing. And for six years now, I have chosen nothing. I have broken the alternative so many times that it might not be an option to go back. I can tell the story, but I can’t live it anymore. Too many things get broken.

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Solopsism revisited

I can trace back every anxiety and the majority of bad feelings in the last eight years to one source. Every time I drank too much, dissociated, or quit, I had one thing burrowed in my mind. Everything I was most scared of has happened. In every instance where the choice was binary, me or the other, the other was chosen. Everything I have explicitly asked for was consistently denied. This is true as recently as last night.

The consolation is that there is nothing left to fear. There is not much else to try. There is nothing left to lose.

And for all this, I am never spent. I wake up every morning still breathing, my heart still beating. The embers of forsaken ambition not related to you still smolder in my damp mornings. There is something else, and perhaps there always was.

A weird version of solipsism, at least in the universe of us. I am the only thing I can be sure exists.

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I donʻt have a third act

The third act of a story is defined by resolution. The arc of a story is usually quite predictable. Now, what I do when I’m telling a story is take what happens prior to where a third act is supposed to be and pull it down. Further and further until you cannot bare to look. It’s beyond even the macabre interest in an accident scene. We dissolve into what we were, and I dissolve into the pain of these characters, but we rarely have an inkling of what we could become.

The second act creates the problem to solve. There is no third act in my story because I don’t have any solutions. It keeps happening and happening. And no one is wrong. And there’s no escape. There is no plan B. This is just how it is. Worse. This is who you are, who I am. Everyone taps out. Everyone begs with clasped fists. No one is spared. And everything burns. And every tap and clasp will be remembered but ignored.

I feel like my writing is more cubic Picasso or like Mondrian’s evolution from landscapes to lines than Renaissance detail. It’s arrogant to say but I see The Guernica when I close my eyes after finishing a good paragraph. I know I can do it because I’ve seen it. And I’ve always been more interested in the reduction of forms than layers of perfect replication.

I’m writing about a fictional character, can’t you tell?

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Four horseman revisited

There are four horsemen of the apocalypse: Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death. Do you know what pestilence means? Hideous infectious disease. Pestilence was first called Conquest. I don’t know the philosophical implications of that, but I think it’s funny.

You would think Death would get the black horse, and you would be wrong. That belongs to Famine. Death rides the pale horse. Pestilence on white and War on red makes way more sense. I love to read things I don’t believe and know them better than people who do. Cherubs aren’t fat little babies, they’re three-headed monsters with heads of a lion, eagle, and human. Angels don’t have wings. And the only time the devil manifests in the world as a tangible creature is as a serpent to Eve in Genesis. No horns, no red suit, no pitchfork. Usually just a disembodied voice. #smallpoxblanket #dismemberinglahui #alohabetrayed

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Random email

“The recurring presence of drama in my life recently is evidence of my complicity in its creation. And when it already exists I’m just as likely to aggravate it as I am to defuse it. Whatever is actually happening, I’m too close to having developed a meaningful insight yet. But on a visceral level, I can tell you that whatever the cause, the symptoms are painful and I hate the way it feels.”
“Are you really emailing that to me at work?”
“You’re missing the point.”

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Assholes that are sometimes heroes

Life doesn’t just happen. We choose our own realities. How we act and what we believe are ultimately choices. There are a million ways life can happen. We don’t just make one choice to be a hero or an asshole. We make little choices every second of every day. And a few years of those million little million choices make you an asshole or a hero. Most of us are c students and we fall in between. Heroes that are sometimes assholes. More often we’re assholes that are sometimes heroes.