Champ

I sat and strummed my fingers on the wheel of my car at the red while the ambulance glided down the road which bordered the hospital. The red and blue lights above the rear doors were flashing but no siren sounded because it was late and people were trying to sleep. It was half past ten on a Friday night. The hospital sat on a hill just down from a complex of rambling houses that hugged the headland off into the distance. The sky, like a big dilated pupil, seemed intent on consuming everything and the only ones who resisting it, that is, those who stayed out for what ever reason, seemed to consciously resist in their every movement.

I thought of all the people who were asleep at the hospital, and whether they were asleep because they were tired of because they had been drugged. Then I thought of a character in one of my friend's short stories, Champ, who thought the only way to resist death was to drive away from it as fast as he could. He was one of the more likable characters my friend created--most of them were spiteful and cruel. Champ had a lot of faith in the goodness of people so he was a recurrent and necessary foil in my friend's writing. My friend, J. found he had trouble developing stories without Champ because the characters he'd paint would never reveal their characters through gestures, instead affecting courtesy and deference at all times, with only the most minor lapses. Champ would be oblivious to all the cues and bywords and subterfuges and would just smile and frown and give himself away. He was a model of vulturability, and unwittingly so. He was always tragically credulous, and the people whom he trusted and loved all secretly delighted at his folly.

The light went green eventually and I stepped on the gas pedal slowly. I was low on petrol and popped it into neutral as I hit the crests of hills. I had thought much of J.'s stories in the past, but sitting in my car, looking up at that stolid old grey building full of death and disease and little alters for the Gen X's, I felt inexplicably sorry for Champ, the quixotic dunce.

There was something so heart retching about a man attempting to evade death with his car. His girlfriend would always be in the passenger seat because she didn't have her own car nor much to do with her time. She would yawn and tell him he didn't know which direction death was chasing him from and that because she loved him, because she knew death (her father had died when she was young) and because she was the best girlfriend in the world she would direct him to safety. Champ had this strange way of agreeing with every crazy thing she proposed without a thought like she was the delphic oracle crossed with a GPS, when really she was just bored and got a kick out of scaring Champ into loving her.

In spite of Champ's ridiculous belief in his girlfriend's supernatural ability to evade death he was by no means stupid. He was an extremely bright man. He had all the trappings of an intellectual, with dirty long hair, glasses and a backpack full of books of widely differing themes. He was a devout atheist, but would rarely talk about his beliefs, or most anything for that matter, but instead would let his eyes dart from place to place, constantly surveying and empiricising. His unmistakable brilliance was precisely what made his religious devotion to his girlfriend so remarkable and so tragic. It wasn't so much that he believed in her capacity to anticipate death as he believed in her, period. Having analysed the entire world and discovery too many flaws, both structural and superficial, to speak of, he sought refuge from evaluation in her. She was something he could bring himself to believe in wholly and without discrimination.

I pulled into the driveway and took my iPod out of the fm tuner. I realized that I hadn't listened to any music on the drive home which is rare. I got wrapped up in thinking about ambulances and Champ.

After an 8 hour shift, there is very little in my head that is even remotely worthy of being distilled into prose fiction. Some jobs just sit on your neck.

I read something on the net about writing a list of 10 things you know to be true. I found the author's list terribly plain and self-evident, but accord is to be expected between people who compulsively write lists. So here it is. I will try not to regurgitate Alan Watts.

1. People who need teachers will never truly learn
2. Almost everyone is compensating for something or trying to fill some void
3. Our tendency to view our actions in light of their consequences has transformed the mundane and trivial into de facto guilty pleasures
4. Most humans cannot disassociate pleasure and pain from happiness and sadness
5. Olfactory sensation is the most intense of the five senses; A blocked nose is a small tragedy
6. Drugs are to happiness as music played through speakers is to music
7. Progress is not an end in itself
8. Every person personifies one mood
9. Good brandy shouldn't be wasted on dying heroes
10. The only way to permanently change yourself is to reorder your surroundings; Post-it notes, Feng shui etc.

There was this lecture in the basement that I was told to attend. Failure to do so would result in a fail mark and complete annihilation so I was eager to at least sign my name on the roll before I walked out into the sumptuous summer air full of scent and lawn grass. The lecture was on 'How to stop shaking your limbs uncontrollably.' First, an extremely dignified old man walked self-possesedly onto a stage which was only one foot in height. I felt that the diminutive stage was a lesson in itself, how one needed only to be slightly elevated above the rest to have a listenership. The man walked up to the lectern on which sat a pitcher of water and, in a gesture which seemed grotesque because of how harshly it called one's first impression of the gentleman into question, drank the entire two liters of water with no breaths to punctuate it. Some of it spilled onto his three-piece suit, leaving a dark, inexorable stain which shone in the harsh light of the lecture hall like a gold medal.

People cheered the man on as he drank the enormous pitcher dry, but when he finished, having not even swallowed the last mouthful of the pitcher, he demanded that they stop. His imperative shout was muffled by the water which sprayed not just the front row but the entire lecture hall. They looked at him as though to say 'we thought you were doing it to impress us and earn our respect'. To be fair, every lecturer does this in one way or another--stilted, half-hearted recitations of outdated jokes, pointless antidotes, shameful self-citations. It is a perfectly understandable thing to do, given that the more respect one has the fewer disruptions they are forced to deal with. But this, the water episode, was something of an entirely different order. One student, whose haughty, pronounced chin and alternative trappings had earned him the position of emissary, asked why the lecture was so thirsty. The lecturer seemed positively enraged.'From giving it to your mother in every position she was familiar with, but I suspect, from the way her suggestions descended into domestic wares such as were in the immediate viscinity of the sexual acts, she was simply making most of them up.'

The student, whose expression had previously been smug and self-righteous, transformed fluidly into hatred. His hand began to shake as though he was writing an academic complaint in the plain air. But he did not give any retort, knowing it was expected of him, and simply walked out of the lecture hall.

'That', the lecturer said, blared even, pointing to the still swinging door the delegate had just exited the lecture through, 'is the reason I drank the fucking pitcher.' He looked briefly at his notes, as though the lecture had already started and he had already lost his cue. Then, as loudly and as forcefully, 'to get rid of pretentious pricks like that young man with the sexually deviant mother. He believed himself to be unique and insightful, not realizing that they are literally hundreds just like him walking around, testament to how much of a slut his mother must have been.' He paused and again examined his notes, checking to see if he had forgotten anything essential. Realising that he had, he added conclusively, in a comically moralistic tone 'but she was as stupid as she was sexually lascivious for not practicing birth control'.

The students stared at him astounded. Some smiled insolently, some, especially the females, were outraged by his chauvinism. Their expressions demanded some explanation, but he gave them none. All sat in silence, shivering wet from the water that had only minutes ago been literally spat at them. But none got up to leave. They were all so very absorbed in the acrimonious lecturer, a welcome change from the skin-filled suits who jabbered on all day about acronyms and Harvard in-text citation.

After several minutes, the lecture took up a piece of chalk and began to write on the board. What he wrote was the rules for his lecture. Rule number one was a negatively phrased proposition, 'Do not be pretentious', which he repeated and underlined violently. 'Do not be COMPLACENT!'. He continued, 'I shouldn't even have to say this because it is so fucking obvious, but one gets an education because one is anxious about the fact that one doesn't possess the necessary skills to make MONEY!'. When he said money he opened his wallet and pulled out about nine crisp hundred dollar bills. Then he pointed at them and repeated the word 'MONEY!'. 'This is what I want you to learn today. Not how to make it, but the fact that it exists. It's not what Mr. Marx would call 'surplus value' (when he said this his inflection betrayed utter disdain). It's not an artefact sitting limply in a museum because a piece of plexi because if it were the curator would have stolen it to finance his mortgage because 'curators' (again the inflection dripping with resentment) make DICK. They get off a 16 hour shift only to walk to an intersection with a cardboard sign that says 'will talk about the mesozoic era or some stupid shit like that for food'.

He stole a laboured breath. His pneumatic barrel chest inflated and deflated with such rapidity and force that it appeared fit to burst. This wasn't a man who talked because he had tenure and a reputation for making noises. This was a man who talked because he believed in something, even if that something wasn't in the prescribed course material. Even if it had nothing to do with academia.

From this point in the lecture I couldn't give you an accurate account of how the rest of the class felt about this man because I wasn't paying attention. I was fixated on this man, this luminary, who was like an explorer hacking his way through dense low-hanging jungles of political correctness.

"I will tell you right now that my lectures won't have a single second of theory. Oh, you will be assessed at the end of the semester. One exam, 100% weighted. And I will mark them diligently because i'm fucking ace at marking papers. But don't bother coming to your assigned tutes because I won't be there. Don't send me emails either because I won't read them. If you want assistance, ask professor Google."

"I will be spending every minute of these two hour lectures degrading you, calling you a piece of shit with no prospects nor hope of survival, bloody foetuses rolling around in recycling bins, enveloping yourselves in the travel section of last weekend's paper."

'There are moments when I try to do everything in double speed and I only make twice as many mistakes and little progress.'
'You should do everything in half-speed and see where that gets you.'
'I've tried that, too. It doesn't work. I am just conscious of the fact that I am working in half speed and because I am distracted I make very little progress.'
'What is progress, anyway?'
'I'll tell you what it isn't. It isn't doing things in half speed.'
'I had a Christian Studies teacher who was a complete lunatic. Not because he was a Christian necessarily, but because everything he did was with this scary blind energy. Blind energy. He had no control over what his arms were doing and his arms had no control over what his fingers were doing and everything was just writhing and squirming and expanding and contracting and it scared the hell out of me.'

Indigenous self-empowerment

The problem with indigenous lobbying is that it requires indigens to unite under a common cause. The indigenous, when denoting comparatively primitive social models, are a group 'frozen in time', and as such have not moved past small tribal units. Clearly larger populations require more administrative work and more social organisation than small intimate units, and one might even propose that rapid population growth reflects an institutionalisation of birth and death. As most indigenous cultures are parochial, decentralised and nomadic, there is a natural struggle against, or active resistance against, homogenisation. Their failure to organise makes them redundant in the political arena.

Good brandy ought not be wasted on dying heroes

its great t have knowledge
but its not great to be great
unless you know it
and one only knows greatness by expressing
it trough acts to others and themselves

Pause for effect

There are some who pause for effect
and others who talk in unbroken, free-flowing sentences
for effect
do not listen to the smooth talkers, because what they have to say
are not words, but memories

There's too much to tell you all. I say this because I sometimes think about the past, but what I mean to say is that 'the past' as I remember it has a terrible dissonance when the memories you collect start competing with each other. There is this sense that every individual memory you still have is at arms with all the others, just trying to find some common theme to explain their existence.

I have become instantly certain of my imminent death at the merciless hand of coronary artery disease, and the rate of my typing this letter has slowed as a result of intermittent breaks to check my own vital signs. My chest feels like it's going cold and I am more conscious of the dull ringing in my ears, the one that never goes away unless you drown it out with loud music. They say the developers of the first iPod cut a deal with the Ear Doctors Union of America. Under the terms of the contract, Apple would increase the max volume of the device to an obscenely high decibel count in exchange for a lucrative sum. It makes me angry, but as the Evangelical musician/millionaire assures me of, is that they will answer to God for blowing out the eardrums of millions.

I feel a strong urge to write something of substance before I pass out from this deliberative state. I will begin now, but I will stop if it becomes trite.

The train left the station several hours ago, and it is already not long until we shall be in the big city. We fall asleep ruefully, awkwardly rushed and contorted, often in middle of the carriages. We became obstacles to anyone wishing to move around without restraint, as one so often yearns to do on a voyage. I find one of the worst things about being an adult is not having an excuse for acting out on airplanes, looking in the bathroom mirror at that decrepit figure and not even being allowed to yell out how much it fucking sucks. That just makes it suck more.

Like every other time i've caught the train to the big city, I am awoken by the irridescent glow of the buildings in the distance, each driven into the coastline like darts landing on different indicators of value. The irridescent glow of the buildings in the distance makes me fancy that the train line is is a tiny blood vessel in the eye of the dormant giant Urbania, a lazy brute constituted almost entirely of bottleshops and cement. I wind down the window, inviting in thick wisps of smoke from the engine room of the train. This annoys my compatriots greatly, but I see it as an important submission to the ever-present coarseness and flippancy of the big city. The smoke fills the cabin and the Winter air makes everyone's teeth rattle in chorus with the shrill train on the tracks.

I arrive in the city with my friends and one suggests we all pay a visit to someone he knows in the area. I express disinterest, imagining an apartment practically identical--furniture and all--to the cabin of the train, but add that he should come out and show us around. 'A local will able to things about this city that we as tourists would otherwise never be allowed to see, and will never so much as notice in our own lives, where we get on much as likepeople do', I would say, being of the opinion that locals, acting in any capacity, are indispensable. I am hardly of the opinion that you should accost and pester locals in the hope that they will strike at you and spit a word at you that doesn't mean anything, that you might recount it to people as one of the memorable moments of the trip. Instead, just enjoy the locals like a theatregoer enjoys the escape from their lives to watch actors pretend to act out their own. And while their problems will seem mundane, the tragecy will not be something you can set your watch to as in the final act of a tragedy, their unwinding is acted out before you in every moment. The bus driver sweating a puddle and having his arms pulled around by the steering wheel as he navigates through the trafficjaded student thinking only of future eminence, wearing a blindfold of anticipation as the world goes by. The affected disinterest in the boundless the beauty of their city never fails to depress me.

I am woken from momentary stupor by what appears to be a party. I don't see anyone that I know and begin to panic, so I breath in semi-quavers and calmly towards the bowl of fruit punch that sits half empty on the table, orange wedges floating around like unused inflatable pool toys. 'I wasn't expecting to see you here', I hear from behind me spoken incredulously, and turn around. It's Urilla, a girl I know from university; I sometimes bump into her at the coffee stand, and perhaps for this reason she has always struck me as a person who needs coffee to affect interest, in people and ideas.
'I don't know how I got here', I reply.
'I saw you come in an hour ago with a group of people. Since then you've kind of just been here'. This is, at least, my best guess at what she said. The music bounces off the walls of the apartment like a caged animal. She asks if I want to go for a walk with her.
'Somewhere quiet', she says. I nod my head ironically, almost begrudgingly, as though i'm not suffering even more than she is.

Walking to the door, I take the opportunity to appraise Urilla. She is pale and strikingly beautiful, in an aenemic sort of way, but everything else about her attempts to conceal her attractiveness as though it were a burden. Her black hair hangs over her eyes like decaying flower petals, and it looks as though she has not removed her eyemakeup since she first applied it as a teenager. Nonetheless, as we walk to the door every guy on the room gets the same idea--that he might win her over by treating her a little nicer than she treats herself, which is not at all.

END

The tourist represents a state of being in which I becomes overwhelmed by all the different ways of handling this situation--freedom from employment, physical freedom, from the people you know, and the places you frequent. Some tourists can't handle freedom that isn't ideological, freedom you can touch and know to be present in yourself. I hold out my hand in front of me and make basic some gestures, clenching my fist, counting to ten on my fingers, the same gestures I saw being made by an amputee with his bionic hand on television.

To truly enjoy himself, the tourist must not spend a second of his time on the phone to his loved ones giving stock of all the exciting activities which gave shape to his day. He must positively disassociate telephones and computers with people. They say the adoration of portraits and artistic likenesses represents a tragic flaw in the human species. By 'they', I am referring of course to the people who are able to imagine their idols in non-physical or semi-physical form, like justice or adventure. With this group the tourist is affiliated.

The image of the tourist himself changes depending on who you're talking to; the traveller is only one of the possible identities of the tourist. The insatiable traveller sometimes sees a dramatic shift in his own personality when he is travelling. He sleeps with a few women, more perhaps than he would have living at home, and arrives at the asinine opinion that he doesn't want to go back to the way things were before the departure date of his return ticket.

He travels relentlessly all throughout his life, but never actually discovers that he was unhappy with it. This was incidently the reason developed a partiality to his travel self over his unhappy life self, as most people with unhappy lives do. When the traveller runs out of money he is forced to return home, where he has a monumental decision about his identity waiting for him: select a reason you will endure a life you otherwise wouldn't endure living. It seems awfully melodramatic, but this is honestly what the traveller contemplates when faced with the mundanity of a normal life.

One option, the more popular option, is to work for a living like my parents did. The colonist fills his timetable with engagements and disavows travel for distracting him from the 'important things in life'. Really he has come to know the only important thing in life, attempting to align your everyday lifestyle as closely as possible to that of the luxurant traveller, who uses money instead of opportunism to gain enjoyment. He is horribly lazy and gives his credit card to anyone willing to subordinate themselves to him in any way that he wishes. Fortunately there are billion dollar industries set up solely to contain him like a dam contains water. In doing so they keep him and his kind away from the rest of us, for he is insufferable and wholly incapable of conversation.

Fantasize about quitting your job on a whim and backpacking for years, but never ever actually do it

The first thing I have discovered and the first thing worth discovering about travel is what people see in it. I have ridden this train with my family many times and every time I discovered to my delight that they are much more affable when they take time away from their lives. I came to the naive conclusion that 'life' was good, but that they lacked scenery and perhaps culture, two things I have since become reliant on.

'Holiday life' was just us taking advantage of our ability to fly around the world, or rather that is how I saw it at the time. I have no doubt that even from that young age I had some rudimentary understanding of money, how it is possible to make lofty assumptions of a person's wealth by the car that they drove and the clothes that they worth, and that money was roughly equivalent to enjoyment. Perhaps I hadn't yet learned that it must be exchanged for hours of your life, but if someone had told me this I would only have been more excited, possessing a fortune of the stuff myself.

I turn into the The tourist looks back on the variable formula for holiday enjoyment with regret.

Seeing the world from behind the veil of self-awareness

The trees swayed violently in a single direction and gave the impression that they were hairs on a human head being combed by a rushed barber. It was not a time to leave the house, the wind was so strong; the people feared leaving the houses, and so they became swollen with people who lit fires inside of them. They lit fires and they brooded as people often do in the home. Some were forced to interact with their families--in the room where the fireplace was. Some just chose to lie naked on their heated tile floors. They gradually repaired the family's structure while rubbing their hands together and breathing into the space between them.

You know how you can sometimes tell a person's car from their personality? In my experience I find you will only have success with certain types of people, but when you meet one such person you will be so struck by the resemblance of car to human being that you float thereafter in this strange dematerialised state where every human has a corresponding car, and that person's choice of car is paramount to their grown and achieving self-actualisation. Do you remember where you were as a kid when you first realised that different kinds of people drove different cars? It is such an important lesson that i'm sure any official first realisation would disappoint you. These days the parents are desperate for their kids to learn this lesson so that they shut up and sit silently in some sort of reverence. Some guy realised one day that TV is the only thing in which kids will sit quietly in front of and invented headrest TV. From then on, their kids were enchanted with the things that really had only become enchanting because of adding TV to them. So enchanted that they never spoke of it, but simply understood. Cars with TVs in them are way better than cars absent of TVs entirely. Who wants to be bored when Spongebob is on all damn day.

Returning to the paramount aim of humanity. It is one of two things: Finding a car that perfectly suits your personality, or using your car to define your personality. It's this strange chimerical hybridisation of car and human. You might not realise at the time that you are being moved in a direction that is infact, 'wrong', or simply one on which you hadn't planned on being. I am quite simply astounded by the fact that these walkways are not used more extensively. You could imagine one carrying a certain high class of graduates up to the clouds on the steepest incline imaginable, as steep as Everest, and them just standing there disenchantedly, like they were glued to it.

Those moving walkway, the purpose of which is essentially the same as the plane you are catching, as well as the taxi you have signalled down before you've even landed. You 'voluntarily' leave your arm up in vague hope it will impart a threatening message to fellow passengers--that you will not be beaten to the first taxicab. 'Not in this city, sister'. The agressive commuter dimeanour will not work to your favour; you will recieve your baggage in order, and of this order you may never truely know. It is an order that knows to plant drugs in the bag that looks the most granola, and one we have all at least once imagined, especially if we happen to have had china or glass, or god forbid, a bottle of wine, in our bags. The image is one of pure mirth, like they're making it a competition who can be the most negligent with customers' bags. Fucking bag people, throwing around my bag and screaming boy howdy when they hear something break.

There is no formal order, or if there is, it's probably better to just presume there isn't so that you may successfuly dam the rivers of rage that will spill onto the buffed marble airport floor when you happen to be one of people left waiting for their bag at the carousel for longer than fifteen minutes. Or if you're a melancholic person, you might haplessly wonder what you have done to anger the baggage arbitrator so. There has been a misdeed or a transgressive act, of this everyone is agreed. But how far back are we talking? And who is it that get's to decide how far back we're talking, anyway? We are all that person at one time or another, as though this was some great philosophical statement--nobody gets through life without their bag being one of the last ones out of the carosel. To wear a grimace while everyone else goes to the terminal McDonalds to spend quality time WITH the grimace. whose bag was at the very back, unimaginably confined (you start to moralise as thoughit were a living thing and not just a capsule for storing your travel possessions. To passers by who are in no mood to hear it, they exclaim how I will not be getting into the first taxi on the rank, so that I may sit comfortably for the next half hour as though you were paying for your transport in the form of not standing up.

A broken down jeep in was discovered in Ancient Rome

They found the strangest things in the most public places.
They found a broken down jeep in Ancient Rome
this shiny new thing that glinted on the horizon
and sat in park, so stubbornly out of place
like it ought to have been on a rested incline
as a feature in some game show
and they didn't know a thing about this car
they called it a commanded box of steel
they didn't know that Jeep meant general purpose vehicle
or that it was an SUV
and that people from our time bought them because they wanted to
be prepared for purposes most fuel efficient vehicles couldn't handle
purposes most of them would never really need
like off-road, skidding and four wheel driving and listening to music
travelling at the speed of
chariots on crack
The jeep made things pretty bad pretty early
they got the motor to run
and decoded basic English, finding it suspiciously redolent
of their own
in order to read the owner's manual in the glovebox
the part most of us ridicule for even having to explain
'Fill the gas tank (picture bellow) with petroleum'
but that great endevour met a great wall
and the greatest philosophers
politicians and alchemists looked embarassing trying to figure out
how to work the damned thing
And the man who finally suggested that the 'gas tank'
must be filled with a liquid fuel
went on to be proclaimed
a god among men
And the man who extracted the fabled fuel from the gas tank
without damaging the vehicle (there was one political faction
who wished to destroy and incinerate the machine without caring to preserve or study it, and yet another who wished to leave it in it's place without studying it,
saying that they themselves would not contemplate destroying the machine
fearing their legacy to be one of ignomitity if they did)
And the man who


and, by some miracle of inspiration,
replicated

Keep it down

Today has been about
keeping my thoughts and liquor down
breathing as though air were a scarce commodity
damage control of the mind
be still, and remember that you are a person
who doesn't hold anyone's hair back
True, she is
a tiger in a nursery
brutal without ever meaning to be
but not evil, never evil

One to nine

The other day an old friend from high school
comes to my house
a sad character with whom
I hadn't heard from
since graduation
and would you believe
that after all these years
the first thing he says to me is
that he's too drunk to stand up
so we sit down awkwardly and he starts talking about this
and that, until finally he admits that
He has fallen into a sorry state of disrepair
he is a morbid caricature of his former self
There are large gaping holes in his stomach
something, I observe, has been eating away at him for years
‘Do you think I will ever be able to get my life together?’
is all he asks, then just stares and awaits my honest
reply, for I was always someone he could trust to give
him my honest opinion
he might as well have handed me a gavel
I didn’t answer him
I just told him about these concrete statues I once saw
at a bus stop in Portland
like me they were sullen, waiting for the bus
that had not come;
one man was scratching his concrete head over a
sudoku
in the back of his concrete newspaper
another was frozen in the act of lighting a concrete cigarette
and years later,
when I went back to that place
they were all still there
every one of them
waiting
for the bus
for the nicotine hit
for all the numbers to align
from one to nine

the colonist and the native

In my experience, the interplay of love and sex is extremely one-sided. It is like when the Colonist tells the Native to sit down and speak the language of business, that is, the language we believe to be universal. ‘This is some fine soil you’ve got here’, he says, taking up a handful of dirt and appraising it as a jeweller would a zirconium. He conducts himself coolly, without giving away his intentions, much like a collector considering an item for his already extensive collection. ‘What say we make a deal: a nation’s worth of this terrific, cultivatable stuff in exchange for more liquor than your virgin liver can handle!’. And when that pen is placed in her hand and she takes her first deep swig of brandy, she might be forgiven for thinking that she’s just duped this delightfully naive dandy for all he’s got. ‘Dirt for liquor!’, she will exclaim, blurt out as it were, once the liquor has rendered her thoughts as transparent as the bottle she drinks from, ‘what a one-sided exchange!’. And the Colonist chuckles quietly to himself.‘Indeed’, he will say with an affected, car salesman grin.

Faux flowers

The flowers in my house are changed often
And at great expense but
I have no trouble telling what’s real from what’s fake:
Flowers, even the ones in full bloom, are not without their
Imperfections
browning, fraying edges which
Remind you that they will soon be
Replaced.
A flower that gets watered and preened is real
Just like a dog that walks on it’s hind legs is real
Accept, for the moment, that they are there,
Poised and perfect
But always remember that some manicured hand has gone to
great lengths
to make you itch to reach out and touch them
Just to make sure

Runway

This weight fell on me
like an airplane onto a runway
I could see it coming
but when it happened
it was louder than a bomb
in my head
 

Spice

Years ago, I read of a man who left his house to collect the morning paper, only to find a basket, made entirely of crystal, sitting unambiguously on his doorstep. The article’s lead paragraph described the basket, its preliminary appraisal, listed its exorbitant net worth, and then finally, in a vague, tersely written sentence, described the basket’s contents: a red, palm-sized brick of what appeared to be grain and plant roots, which crumbled at the slightest touch. The contents of the basket were not mentioned again in the article.

At the time that the man, a fifty-three year old clerk, made his fortuitous discovery, he was deeply in credit card debt and on the brink of divorce, two interlocking tragedies made worse by the fact that he could not see them as two separate manners, one demanding strength and insistence, the other vulnerability and patience; as different from one another as cutting down a tree is from amputating an arm. For this hapless man, this man of quiet desperation, the worst feeling of all was seeing that stack of envelopes on his front doorstep, his divorce folded twice in order to fit inside the envelope, a document to which he must accede, and for which he must sign the same signature he gives to VISA. But on this golden morning, the envelopes that once abounded at his doorstep were gone, vanished, into the vague disconsolation of the past, and in its place a priceless hand basket of pure crystal. He fell to pieces at the sight of the enormous glistening basket. Sunken-shouldered and prostrate as though relieved of an enormous burden, he prayed incessantly to a God in whom he did not believe, because he knew the envelopes would never return. His marriage was saved.

I didn’t think anything of this story at the time; I saw it as a poor attempt at human interest, or allegory, or both; but over the next few weeks these articles kept resurfacing in the media, stories of ruined men finding crystal baskets by accident, and delighting at their own good fortune.

Forensic scientists and horticulturists had no record of the substance that was found inside these baskets, always the same seven inch long, five inch wide red brick. When at last they agreed to classify it as a spice, it was only to bring the months of obstreperous disagreement to a respectable conclusion. To speak freely, things as simple as classifying a new substance into an the existing taxonomy of data always seemed to drag on. It happens whenever a stagnant discipline happens upon the unknown; the men of science ramble on and on out of fear—a crippling fear of appearing unqualified and hackneyed in the eyes of their peers by defying the natural order of chapters in their coauthored textbooks, for only source of validation men of science need or want comes from other men of science. Nonetheless, everyone was captivated and, for the most part, baffled, by this exotic and previously unclassified substance—only the frail-minded scholars affected disinterest, fearing that opening their mouths on the subject would expose the gaps in their classical education as quickly as the ones in their teeth.

By the time horticulturists amended their textbooks so as to include the spice’s name and picture, it was promptly forgotten. It was not until years later, when it was flagged by a reputed medical journal flagged for its acute psychoactive properties, that the spice reached the acme of it’s popularity.

The journal related the story of a man in South America who murdered another man and then his own family. He was tried by the state, whereupon the following was discerned: The accused, a former general, had found a crystal basket in the courtyard of his modest, agrarian home. At the time there was a terrible, persistent drought in the region, and dying, drooping black flowers partially concealed the basket from view. When he discovered it, the man brought the crystal basket, empty, as it was discovered in cross questioning, to the victim, a successful merchant in the province, with the intention of pawning it for grain. The accused decided to sell the basket to this man, his prideful family beginning to feel the oppressive pitch of hunger, which they associated with working class destitution. They began to loath the accused for what they saw as his failure to provide for them.

it was said to induce in users an avid belief in their own immortality, one so intense that it could turn a timid, lower management type into a revolutionary. ‘drove’ scores of people to senseless murder.


or at least this was the belief held by the chaste, puritanical members of society who spoke of spice as a great, unprecedented evil
“What horrors will befall a nation in which every man fancies himself a Napoleon?”
it was my belief at the time that the explosion in spice’s popularity was fueled by those evangelists who, in their attempts to blame the spice for society’s ills, undermined human agency altogether, that is to say, brought the capacity of man to exercise moderation and judgment in to question

Then followed the inevitable backlash: a roaring deluge of passive protest by the self- Ritcheous left, likewise elevating spice to this idealistic platform, into something more important than it actually was. They took spice and turned it into a design on a mass-produced, slim-fit 100% cotton t-shirt. For these mislead youths substance abuse became a symbol of personal liberty.

Because it was undetectable, and betrayed no outward
signs of intoxication, the user was often the only one aware of his own
mental state. I used spice, in a ‘safe place’ and recorded the event on my phone. I have no memory of how I reacted to it, but the video shows me staring at the people around me with an alarmed look on my face, the way …first thoughts of immortality were as follows…

“everyone is about to die Why is it all still business as usual for them? I feel so much pity for them all as a whole, but as it stands I am incapable of feeling any empathy for them individually”

the crime and suicides did peak
and naturally, the spice did become a convenient device for
prosecutors whenever they were unable to isolate mens rea
every single toe-tagged doe in the morgue
became another victim of the will to power
a wife might find wake up to find her husband had hanged himself overnight
an unfinished glass of rye, no coaster, sitting on his desk
and she would get angry and refuse to read his note, so insistent
that he hadn’t learned of her infidelity,
“It was that cursed spice, a veritable scourge of the Earth”

nobody knows exactly why some people felt the urge to
kill other people when they were on spice,

most people had used spice at least once, they might have been
preparing for a job interview, an important sports game,
a major exam; the spice obliterated any thoughts or feelings
which might distract or otherwise inhibit a person from realising
the potential of their actions
However, what I found worthy of note was the difference
in how I imagined the future as a shapeless mass
where all of sources of uncertainty would fuse together
like hundreds of small cracks in a window pane
each crack a vector pointing to a contortion of the present
where everyone has two unique aspects and you spend
your time just staring greedily at the world around you
trying to see everything from the most gratifying angle

At first I only used spice to understand what exactly
drove my friends and family to murder;
But I grew to need it, like everyone else
Funerals were an ordeal if I wasn’t on spice
and there were so many funerals back then
it seemed like every other day I would hear about
a friend from high school
executing his entire family and then himself


When under the influence of spice,
the immortality often spoke of
is not so much a refusal of death so much as an end to anticipation
You stop envisaging the future as significantly worse than the present
I remember thinking that no matter what happened to me
in that uncharted wasteland of the future
my heart would still beat