Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Slow and Quick

My death was slow and quick.

A bullet inside the arm, through the vein, into the bloodstream

It climaxed my partner.

She was ready for anything, ready for sobriety

Monogamy, family.

She was ready for betrayal

Fallacies, deceit, pain.

Murder, she was ready for murder.

A bullet inside the arm, up into the vein

A vein so large, green, protruding from the skin

The bullet became the vein’s, the vein’s own.

It swam, swam around inside the vein.

The bullet did spirals, loops, handstands

And all sorts of underwater acrobatic maneuvers.

The death was slow and quick.

Monday, March 21, 2011

The Treatise

We cannot perceive infinity. The word itself is a definition by exclusion, "not"finite tells us nothing about what it is, only what it is not. People cite objects against this such as the Mobius strip; a single sided object with only one boundary component which has no definite end or beginning. This is a two dimensional infinite, which can be perceived in a three dimensional perception. With this logic, to perceive a three dimensional infinity, we must be able to perceive in a fourth dimension, which none of us as finite beings may do. We are constrained by time.

Since our reality is dependent on our perception, (i.e. those things which we cannot perceive we have no evidence for the existence of) I postulate that even though it is possible that such infinites may exist, they are imperceptible to finite beings, and as such are not part of our reality, as are their effects and abilities beyond the laws of physics (I use this as a generic term, including all the laws of matter and their principles in our universe.) If you accept this as all those intelligent enough should, you may also see that the idea of an omnipotent is not only pointless and impossible, but demeaning as the idea that we are subservient to something non-existent and non-effectual to us as a species.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Paradox Infinatum

I have been having this thought process, circling about again and again. My whole life I have followed, the ideal of acumen of knowledge as the paramount, the only path to redemption and joy. However, I know thermodynamics, entropy; the truth that all things be moving from organized and useful to disorganized and useless...

When I look at children, they have it. The joy at every moment, the exploration, the curiosity, the smile at even their truths being shown to be blatant false. They know nothing...

I sell them skis.

I teach them how to use them and I feel a hollow rot, that I am not bettering them by influencing their knowledge, but robbing them of purebred perfection in innocence.

Please... Tell me... How do we overcome this? With little exception, knowledge, and more importantly, true knowledge brings the pain of knowing that what has been learned has passed and cannot be reattained or re-initiated.

I suppose that is the paradox, being finite. All matter has memory, even metal has grain and will flex back to where it was, in attempt to return to the past... even at inanimate. So does that mean that knowledge is nothing? Only pain?

What then is purpose, what objective are we to find in life? If we are better at birth then at death, what can be done? Reproduce? Only to bring an offspring into this dimly lit corridor which we call time and life?

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Blue Bus

In the spirit of Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx and other Western Genre writers, this story is haunted by incomplete short sentences.

“Ape shit Paul! Get me a drink you rat bastard!”

It was 3:30 in the afternoon and Dr. Everett Tanner was sitting on a barstool alone with his loose button down shirt draped over his back pockets. His grey suit jacket balled up on the bar counter. Swaying in a drunken fervor, his torso and upper body rotated, imitating a hula-hoop motion with the hips locked solidly on the stool. Dr. Everett Tanner was an anthropologist. However, somewhere along the twenty years of his tenure in the profession, he became troublingly unhappy about the morals of the job. The job being the research of “lesser developed” cultures. His superior and editor instructed him countless times saying,

“Find the Orientals hidden deep in the bush”.

The “bush” meant anywhere exotic like South America, Indonesia, India, Africa, and Pueblo, New Mexico in this particular assignment’s case. “Orientals” meant,

“anyone not of Western European descent and white. You know this Tanner, so why do you keep asking me what oriental refers to? Stay off the damn liquor will you? You do great work and I’d hate to lose you.”

The “great work” his superior and editor referred to, is researching and documenting different cultural traditions for text books. The only catch to this line of work is that the editor and the book company don’t care how factual this information is, as long as their company has exclusive information on these cultures.

“Say, I’m supposed to be meeting a friend here, Paul would you let me know when he gets here?”

Paul the bartender poured Dr. Tanner a bourbon whiskey slowly, focusing on the dark colored liquid. He held is tongue as he always did with Dr. Tanner. This was achieved easier by not looking at Everett’s swollen, unshaven and reddened face. Paul raised his chin and directed Everett to a man standing in the doorway of the bar.

“The man you looking for Indian?”

“Native American Paul, we call them Native Americans now.”

Grey hair and a sterile gaze was the object of Dr. Tanner’s attention. The man walking towards him stood upright with dark skin stretched tight over his face and hands. His shirt was a faded plaid and covered his arms. A vest of bones covered his chest and stomach. As the man came closer to the bar, Dr. Tanner became nervous. The man’s eyes penetrated Tanner’s, they were steady, unmoving, confident and searching.

“Hello sir, my name is Dr. Everett Tanner. You are the Shaman by the name of Philip Looking Bird aren’t you?”

“Shaman? That is a word and label created by white people using the English language.”

“Well I’m sorry then-“

“Ha, I’m just fucking with you, of course I’m a shaman. Isn’t that why you wanted to meet me to discuss my culture and ceremonies?”

“Yes of course, I work for the textbook company-“

“I don’t give a shit who you work for. As long as you have the hundred-fifty dollars we are all in the clear.”

Tanner confusedly scratched his neck and took a drink of bourbon. The shaman lacked pride for his trade, for his culture. Tanner wondered if he was just looking for money, no regard for the cultural image to be portrayed in textbooks. Tanner cleared his throat.

“Ah, you do understand this is a prestigious opportunity to share your heritage with the rest of the world.”

“Fuck your statement, you’re going to rape any information I give you so why try to look prestigious. I know how your textbooks work. The information is ambiguous and altered. The white man has raped everything from our culture, including the facts about them.”

Tanner was caught off guard. The Shaman spoke multitudes of relevance. He ordered another drink. The Shaman’s words struck chords on Tanner’s emotions. He had to get them straight. He had to remove himself from this Shaman who spoke eternal truths.

“Then why are you here Mr. Looking Bird?”

“I’m here for you, to gaze into your soul, to alter your perceptions, to change your life. I could care less about what you write though.”

“What? I’m confused.”

“Look if you want to learn about my culture, about my magic, then meet me at the back of the blue bus.”

The Shaman turned and headed for the door.

“What? That’s insane, how do I find this blue bus? Those are the most ambiguous directions ever.”

Phillip Looking Bird stopped and faced Everett.

“That is the point. You have fear and regret in your eyes. This is a spiritual journey for you. You must journey where your soul takes you to find this bus.”

With those words he walked out the door and disappeared into the crowd of people on the street. Everett stumble-rushed out into the blinding light on the street of Pueblo.

The next day hung over and slightly sober, Dr. Tanner boarded a plane for his home in Vancouver. In the air, Dr. Tanner was disturbed when he caught sight of a flight attendant’s hands. She had massive hands, fingers masculine and thick, much bigger than Everett’s hands. The way she handled canned cola made him jump.

“Ahhuhh! Those are quite the set of hands you’ve got there.”

“Would you like anything to drink sir?

“Hmm? Yes yes, make it a tequila and gentle please. Gentle.”

She took offense to his squeamish behavior. He thought her hands were unnervingly powerful. He whispered to his seat neighbor.

“Those powerful hands frighten the best and bravest you know.”

Her fingers were long, meaty, with stout hairs covering the knuckles. The entire flight Dr. Tanner made terrified faces when the flight attendant passed by. She realized this. She was extremely self-conscious of her hands. When the plane landed in Vancouver, she phoned her male lover who drives a taxi. Time to exact revenge. The taxi driver kept an eye out for Tanner, a conspicuous drunk in a wrinkled grey suit. Tanner walked out of the terminal with a bag tucked under his arm walking as if he was crossing a balance beam in aerobics.

Very little coercion was needed to get Everett into the man’s taxi. The driver invited him in for a ride. Everett figured this was part of his spiritual journey the Shaman had destined upon him.

“So you’re afraid of big hands huh?”

“Wha? Oh yes, terribly frightening, especially on a female. So do you know where any blue busses are located around here?”

“Funny you should say that, I’m taking you to one right now.”

With those words, the small faded yellow taxi jerked to a stop and the driver whipped around with brass knuckles in hand. A blow. Another. A third. Painful unconsciousness that dares you to wake up.

Dr. Tanner resurfaced sitting in the driver’s seat of a rusted red Ford in a grassy field where moisture beaded off of the grass blades. The sky hung low with impenetrable clouds. Sitting in front of him was a blue painted school bus. Blue the color of the ocean. Blue that is deep, dark, full of echoes. Dr. Tanner babied his face. His cheek was throbbing. His teeth hurt to close his mouth and his jaw felt dislocated.

“God damn these people with large hands.”

He wondered if this was the location the Shaman had told him to meet, if this was the location for his spiritual journey.

Out of the car and inside the bus was a different realm. The bus was a decaying petri dish.

“Experiments have gone on here, I’m sure of it.”

No longer a transport for children, this bus was blue and rotting, not likely to be driven off the field. The ceiling of the interior was shedding cream flakes and blue flakes. Holes created a permeable layer which dew drops took advantage of and entered the vessel. Big black bold letters in uppercase yelled, “WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW”. They slanted up, vertical, horizontal, slope down. The words followed any and every direction. The ragged seats smelled of mildew and gave the appearance of a snake molting. Old rotten blankets dug in and formed mounds on the floor. The checkered and faded quilt patterns dissolved and conglomerated together.

Everett stood inside the bus apprehensively. He waited for the Shaman to step inside or at least show a sign. Twenty minutes went by and nothing happened, another twenty minutes and still no signs. Tanner thought to himself,

“Shaman’s are intermediaries between the gods and humans. So why did he dupe me into searching for a bus that I somehow was knocked unconscious and placed at? Fuck this.”

Dr. Tanner jumped down from the back door of the bus out into the field. He wondered about transportation back into the city. He wondered if he was still in Vancouver limits.

“Fuck this! Intermediary to God?”

The bottle was his God. He was a firm believer in the powers and mysticism of alcohol: the power to dull his brain past recollection of his job. The mysticism? The mysticism was that drank every day despite pained headaches and nausea that followed like clockwork. Alcohol can be cruel and disorienting. He thought those two things to be the most constant characteristics of God, the best intermediary to God.He saw no sign of a Shaman and disappointedly walked down a dirt road that led to an interstate highway.

Arriving at his loft in the Vancouver city limits, he rewarded himself with a glass of bourbon for his fruitful efforts in learning Shamanistic culture. He learned that Looking Bird’s culture didn’t want to be identified with western white culture. But how would he put this in his information report? His editor wanted progress. Everett gave the company and editor what they wanted. He understood that the public wouldn’t understand the truth. A culture wouldn’t want to be recognized or understood by American and Western European empires. Everett gave the company and editor what they desired. A ten page write up was turned in with false contents of the interview along with false rituals. There was no mention of the blue bus.

“Good work, this is exactly what the company was looking for.”

“You know it’s far from the truth.”

“What are you talking about? Look you’ve had a rough research trip. You were hit in the face for Christ-sakes. Why don’t take the rest of the day off. Where is that bar that you’re a regular at? Why don’t you head down there and celebrate this great research?”

He was told that his efforts would penetrate a new textbook in the form of three sentences. Inexact and indignant with bloody rape read by five hundred students of a community college’s anthropology class.

Monday, March 14, 2011

A Fantastic Argument at a Bar

It's not that I don't want to be with you, to love you, I just... I mean I am with him, and I am committed. I wish I wasn't, but I feel like that's the responsible, the correct thing to do; be faithful.
If it is that you are interested in me and I am wanting of you, than I should say that is a movement between us and that there is no reason I would let a convention of social reason come damage its character.
Are you making an argument for cheating as an object of beauty?
I am an anarchist at my core. I feel inherent to resist all those things which have been told to me not to do. To act without experience is only a way to travel paths already traveled, or to be directed to those in others' wishful favor. You will never be unique without failure. I say to you now as my purpose that I am a soldier for the angel of joy. I am militant for her, and I will not hurt you for I have invested no more than kindness and you expect nothing more, you demand no other advantage over me.

Sunshine

I've had a lot of interesting contemplations about responsibility, sexuality, and the anti-darwinistically oriented decisions of my life, and I would like to illustrate some of them-


I thought of her in that place, the soft smell of her. The smell of the earth after the rain, as if the nose were both buried deep, and floating amongst the clouds. I thought of her because of the warm color of the cooling grass and the sun's still inescapable warm glow. That was the smell I loved most, and sometimes it made me taste lavender when I thought of loving her; but she was not here. She had left for Africa, and I knew she would not think to return for some lost image in my mind. It was not something I had asked for.

We were speeding across the tollway, heading towards the airport. She was sitting next to me in the front seat. Her name was Jess, she was not the woman I was dreaming of. I could remember meeting her, through my roommate. He had told me that she was a nice girl, and that she liked music and many of the things we were interested in. We had been in the cafeteria, and a group of us five had sat at a table next to hers. She was sitting with her dormmate, we had all just moved in. They were alone and she had a lonely look on her tender features. I went over to them, without even thinking, and I asked if they would like to join us for the meal.

After that we were good friends, and she asked me infrequently to give her rides in my car to retrieve things from Denver or places to distant to walk. She was an intelligent girl, she had seen a good portion of the world, traveling, attending concerts and festivals where she had lived before. I enjoyed listening to someone who seemed to share my curiosity and intellectual approach of contemplation.

Her friends were coming in, visiting from North Carolina. It was exciting for her, she had found it hard to fit in, and old companions seemed a welcome interlude to the voracious social atmosphere. I was smiling, it was warm enough outside, and the windows were down. It was the early fall, and I think she was smiling too. She must have been, there was laughter in the car, and I we were talking about relationships in a calm and friendly sort of way.

There was banter about experiencing beyond the traditional relationship destined to end short of late mid life. We shot back and forth a few values and things we had found in our varying histories, then she asked me calmly, “Do you ever think you'd like to have children?”

The sun skimmed over the windscreen, leaving strange organic blots in my vision from the reflection. I looked over, and the seatbelt was pressing softly into the thin, starchy fabric of her furled, white nylon shirt. I could smell the sun pulling the rain up from the evening before, and the bright world was almost palpably alive.

I had never thought about her as the girl who was sitting next to me, only as another intelligent friend. There though, streaking down the privately owned roadway, not too hot, not too cold, her hair danced with the wind and made me smile, “I don't know, I suppose it would be cool. At least to try and teach someone everything they will need for the rest of their life. So, I guess, yeah, I would like to have some kids running around at some point when I'm too worn out to do it myself.”

There was a keenness, a sharpness of the words in the yellow light. The wind ran through the cabin of the car, and shot out the back windows, after being splayed out flat on the back windscreen. I felt so mortal, because I understood that this moment was so sublime. I accepted it's beauty with a rising warmth of the chest, and I realized it could not have been more perfect, because we would never live that moment again. The moment of breath in the conversation, it was lost to the wind, and my words, “What about you Jess?”

She squinted a little, as the light which had impacted me ran over her form. There was not the joy in her answer that I had instilled in mine, and it made me feel foolish. Her words cut the cords hanging up my hopes of a naïve dream, “...Well, I have Crohn's disease.” This I knew, and I nodded to her more stern words. Then she finished, “It's hereditary, you know.”

Suddenly the warm sunshine seemed out of play, and the personal nature of what she said to me then took away my focus from the wind screaming in her hair. I watched her face, not the road, “Oh, yeah...”

There was an awkwardness, because she had not anticipated the impact of what she said. The comment ran through my mind, and I thought about where I had begun to go wrong. The hyper-aggressive immune disorder, then the diabetes, then the kidney issues, then the blood clots and the liver... Most of it was or might have been from the coding of my body. She spoke up loud though, to avoid the somber, tearful moment she saw coming, “I just don't think, I mean I know I couldn't pass on something like that to another person. Not in good knowing of it, could I give a life of pain like mine to anyone else, much less someone I loved.”

That was when I knew, I changed the subject. It hit me hard, in the chest, like all the sunlight had been balled up, and pulled out with the wind. It was like my heart was moving with them, being drawn out of the car, and left there with the glowing warmth and playful hair. I knew suddenly, that all of my antics and attempts, the most cruel against my morality were the sexual. I realized that even one mistake in loving, might lead to a disastrous destruction of a human over a lifetime which would undoubtedly end much like mine. I smiled back at her, and said, “I understand....” then I paused for a moment, and acting forgetful asked the names of the girls we were picking up.

She never knew what it was that she did to me there, could not have anticipated the meaning her words put against my mind. It was a cold thing to do to a man, but it was a true thing, and I understand now that there was nothing more loving than that.

Crossing the Continental Divide

A short nonfiction from a few years back-


You were comfortable there, your head resting on the side of my chest behind your silky black ball of pulled up hair. Small snores, puffs of breath snuck from your mouth every other moment. There was not a rise or fall. Instead a gentle tightness, stretching against my side and chest as your body grabbed for air, waned and waxed. With it, came a soft, glowing warmth perfumed behind only the cloth my shirt.

The other hand, rested softly on the other side of my flat polyester chest. Thats why you laid against me there on the couch, you were too warm. Nearly naked, the blanket tossed off of nearly everything. I could see the long, shimmering lines of your legs, and just the side of your soft white underwear wrapped around them. You grabbed me because you knew I would be cold, and you could get rid of just a little bit of that warmth.

You made a soft sound, and moved your head, trying to rearrange my ribs and flesh. You did it tender, and I wondered why I couldn't kiss you. You did something to me there, that was wondrous. Feeling the heat running from your body into mine, clutched in your grasp, it was all worth it. The trip, crossing the continental divide, to have more machines stuck into me. Even the laughter of friends, the bright lights and shot glasses seemed small. But that... The dim light of the movie on the television, the scattered shadows, and your almost knotted hair pressed against me.

That was the closest I have ever felt to another human.

Your fingers tightened, dreaming of something worth grabbing. Oh what was a man to wonder of there, one who has no more dreams left. I could see your hair, floating in the wind, frail form of shoulders not far behind. I imagined putting your lips against mine softly, and smiled as I stopped keeping you cool.

Then the needle attached to the device ran against my hip bone, and I felt queasy. My body screamed to itself, there is something invading! I pushed it down though, and listened to you snoring again, and that was when the last trace of sexuality slipped away from my fingers.

Problem Description

Hey everyone, Mr. Blakeslee invited me to come on board and share some of my philosophical and micro fiche writing as well as some of my poetic and creative endeavors. I'll start with something recent, and hopefully understandably composed-


My generation is lost... to the music, to the drugs, to the hopings for a war or challenge that will find us needing it and ready. We must unite, we must find a common ground for which to make a calling for our species of. This is intellectual evolution, and at a cry unheard by Darwin, we shall evolve by Any Means necessary. If you are searching for something higher, I say there is nothing, and I offer the truth of it to you freely as it should be between all of us. The ontological argument offers a definition for God: A being greater than which nothing can be imagined. But I say this is wrong, for plurality and specialization masters singularity and unifaction in both complexity and beauty. First you must think, and should have an intellectual basis for all things you do or do not do. You must think and realize that your imagination is dependent on your perception. You cannot dream of being in more than one moment at once. We master this perception, this experiencing and dialogging of life as the miracle of memory. That is as close as you get, reliving a moment while in the current one. So too do we all share something, as a species, as members of the human condition, trapped complex enough to understand infinity, but unable to perceive beyond our finite bonds. So together it is us, as a communion of sacred sight, that rule as divine over our reality, over our perception. Look at your brothers, your sisters, and applaud in them their freedom to choose, because it is what makes this living unique. It is what makes their living unique, and their perceiving of it a fresh contribution to what we are to make of ourselves into better or worse.