Please Don't Go.

I'm sorry Jasmine. i really am. I've been lying to you. Nothing's been okay. But for some reason I can't tell you shit sometimes. I just can't.

I wrote these to Kelley, and I'm writing them to you:

I'm stressing about housing at Humboldt. Apparently it's really impacted and I get second priority under the people already there (this makes sense, but it sucks cock that they don't have to worry and here I am worrying my face off and smoking myself stupid waiting for the package to arrive with my registration info and my housing info and my God). maybe I shouldn't go. I've actually begun enjoying Cal State San Bernardino lately. Seeing you and being late to work. Smoking and talking with Bradley (camaraderie in the cancer sticks). But maybe I'm not stressin about meeting people for once being I know I won't see'em ever again. I smoked almost a whole pack today. I'm beginning to feel depressed again. I'm really hungry. I want to hang myself with an extension cord from the rafters above my patio. I can't do it. I need to know I have purpose. I don't have one. Nothing to live for. All the good ones are taken. I don't know how much of this you're gonna get. I can't sleep, someone wake me up. I hope I'm not already dead.

I don't know how much longer I can believe in God. He's been gone or I've been gone fro so long. According to my pastor, I should have a consistent place where I find God, but that's always been in the loving arms of another. And it's been so long. It's been so long. It's been so long. Please don't worry about me, I should be fine by morning (maybe sunrise, since it's already 430AM). I don't know if I'm gonna sleep tonight. Call it a watching. Call it a lost faith. I can't see myself believing that christdied for my sins. Every time I say it I feel dirty. Where has he gone where has he gone where has he gone. I'm going to have a smoke (I only got through half of it. Even the one shining light of nicotine that has given me strength for the past two weeks can't seem to push me away from the echelon I seem to be fading into.)

I don't want to die. Alone. I don't want to be alone. I can't seem to find God in anything I ever fucking do. He's no longer there when I pray, and the wisdom of the bible doesn't make any sense when it's all so linear and one-life-to-live while I've come to see everything as a cyclical still-life, where we churn on forever, seeing the same things recur and ebb and recur and ebb before we die to be reborn. The crux of the matter is what we don't remember from our first years. What seems to be the crux of the matter is what everyone thinks will happen when we die. I hate to say it, as a "Christian," but I just don't fucking know anymore. I have lost ten ounces of faith. And that's why, Kelley, I seem to be okay with liking you: I've lost what used to drag us apart. I've lost God. The tether seems to have been cut loose after I've been out among the waters for so long, trying to grab the rope and pull myself back. I can't find back. I can't find forward. I'm so goddam alone. The Weather Channel is on mute, I'm glad it's no longer hurricane season. I was at band camp when Katrina hit New Orleans. And now everyone forgets the devastation. Will everyone forget my devastation?

Where is God? Where is divinity? What is it, who is He but a figment of my imagination? Where am I to go but into the soil and churned back one day to be among the leaves. No matter dissolves. But maybe that ethereal idea of a soul does. God where are you I am here. God where are you. Did I come to the wrong address? I've been waiting out in the cold without a coat for a year now. Where are you where have you gone?


I feel more and more that my religion is more like The Cask of Amontillado than a faith. I am constantly drawing myself into the wine chambers with the thoughts of great Amontillado during carnival season, denouncing that my peer has any right to be judging such a great drink while all the while I am walking myself into the chasm where I will be buried alive with the bones of ancestors.

But this is Beckett. It starts over again, and we never really die. We just suffer and suffer and suffer and loathe and sulk and plea and deny and wonder where is GODot?!

Or this is Kafka. And we sink. And things get eternally worse. Things will get eternally worse.

Maybe I am already buried alive?
Maybe things are at their worst?
I am a liar, a scam, and a phony. I am alone in the most beligerant world. I want to one day be dust in a new star. What were visions of heaven but hallucinations? What was Revelation but a hallucination by an old man in exile? What was Christ but Criss Angel? I feel none of Christ's blood in me. The father and I are not one. Where is HE. I am here, and I was groping in the blinding darkness, but you've given me NOTHING. I have what I've always had. And now I'm growing tired of you giving me jack-fucking-shit but taking everything away from me.

Fuck you, I guess you can pray for me.

Fuck me, I guess I can--

Please Don't go. I'm sorry I didn't write. When I was supposed to. write. mi
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Baby with a Cross to bear.

I told Kelley I was gonna quit. I want to. It doesn't circulate my blood right.

But at 145 this morning, not 4 hours after telling her I was done for good, I was sitting there with a Marlboro 27 burning into Che's face (a bad ass ash tray my sister got in Spain. I'm now using it to its orginal intent...). I hate it. But I have no accountability. No oneI see every day to smell me and say "You fucking dolt."

With each puff, I'm killing myself. With each puff, I'm degrading myself, changing my neurochemistry, making it harder for myself to quit when I inevitably have to in a few years so I can a good roll model.

I had the epiphany today, I'm going to be a youth pastor. And youth pastor don't kill themselves with Cancer Sticks. Shit shit shit. Youth pastors also don't curse.

Lauren tells me that tobacco is a terrible industry, that prides itself on killing people. But, if I'm to believe as Jasmine believes, that animals are equal with humans, then the tobacco industry is no worse than the Meat industry. And I've conceded to them my whole life. The vegetable industry is probably just as bad. And so is McDonald's. Eat that shit every day and it will kill you.

So you pick your battles. I'm a fucking idiot. This year has been a wash.

I started drinking January 1st, had my first drink on new year's eve. I had my first cigarette while drunk about four or five months ago. You see how this is all steamrolling?

But I've been stressed out over a girl. And the last time I was this in love and this scared of dying alone and this scared of never being with her, I stopped eating, dropped 50 pounds or so, and didn't get over it for two years. Which would I prefer? I ain't blamin' either of these girls for neither of my stupid-fucking-decisions.

(Both of you, and I think you both know who you are, know that I do not ever ever ever blame you for anything I ever did. They're my actions. I'm the Cunt.)

So who am I blaming if not them? Myself. I blame myself for taking a two-week high-school relationship too hard, I blame myself for taking on loving a girl who I had no hope with from the start. I blame myself.

And that makes me want to smoke even more. It makes me want to smoke two packs a day and never ever eat again. I hate myself and my weakness. I hate the fact that I am a weak-willed cunt who never has seen the light of day. I blame myself for hating myself. I hate how cyclical life is, manifesting itself again and again, I'm afraid I will be reborn into this life again, I am afraid that I won't remember any of my stupid fucking decisions in this life.

I want God back. I want him to come back. I've done all I can and he's nowhere near me anymore. I need God Back. DO YOU HEAR ME GOD!? This isn't the end. It gets worse.

I need to go to bed. I need God to find me. I'll keep plowing, but he will turn the soil. This is a drought, but I have faith that the RAIN will come. And everything will be okay.

It only makes me cranky.

I shouldn't be dating right now, I'm leaving... but there always seem to be something that hinders my search to deny my seeking...

And it's generally a someone...

which is weird, on the whole, becaues I am very picky when it comes to women, I've decided, even though I'm not when it comes to how beautiful and wonderful they are as beings. I'm picky because of my two most important things: Sex and religion. I realized, with the help of Alycia, that I need a girl who's ontologically and theologically parallel to what I believe, so that instead of butting heads on the issues of divinity and sanctificaion every night before burning down into lustful, passionate hate-sex on our honeymoon, we can actually love each other. I believe that a relationship should exist within the scope and wingspan of God Almighty. If I were to be dating a non-christian girl, I realized (and should've known all along) that we would be away from Him. And I've been away from Him for far too long.

But Christians are so easy to come by, they're a quarter of the population of the Earth, apparently. And that's where the second standard comes into play, because if a girl is a Christian virgin, then that means she actually cherishes her beliefs and values her, well, values. Sex is the highest passion between two souls (Faith is the highest passion of a single soul), and I believe that it is a passion that can only be met between a man and a wife. I've been asked if it seems scary to do that, to have Sex with one woman for your entire life. And my response is, generally, "Yea, well, it's still Sex." And I'm willing to bet that the 1000th time with my future and always wife will be better than my 1000th woman (I'm looking at you, Gene Simmons, for confirmation) and the whole idea that that rests upon is love. The idea that love in the wingspan of God will be the solid bedrock of all nights of great Sex, disappointing Sex, average Sex, and baby-makin' Sex, instead of having the bedrock being lust-fulfillment and pleasure.

The problem I find with premarital Sex likes in the idea that once the penis goes in, it never really comes out. Once two bodies are made one, they're never really detached from that other person. Our souls are a little like fly paper in that, once that great region of love is reached with a person, we are stuck with them, onto them, within them. And, so, to escape that, you lose a leg. And so the next person you have sex with gets a one-legged fly. Continue this process, and you are eventually a decrepit soul with nothing but your genitals left. And no girl, really, just wants a penis. And guys think they just want a vagina. But we all really want emotions and passion and legs and arms and touch and taste and smell and full-bodied connection (I hope). Not just connection with the vulva or the testes or the clitoris.

And that's what I want to give to my wife on my wedding night. I will give to her, lay down on her fly paper my arms and legs and feet and hands and head and tongue and heart and eyes and nose and mouth and teeth and lungs and kidneys. I will lay those at her feet and say, "I give you all of this. You caught me. I am wholly, and fully, yours."

And I really doubt that a non-virgin girl would understand that concept. And, even if she did,
I still wouldn't have all of her. She'd be missing a leg, while I would be whole, and there would be a gap between us. And I would feel intimidated. And we couldn't be together because I'd always wonder if I'm taking her places her other partner(s) have or taking her nowhere in comparison. And then that would probably cause perennial Whiskey Dick.

But, apparently, this is all pussy-talk and if I were a real 19-year-old college student, I would have at least gotten head by now. At least.

Don't be afraid of persecution, don't be afraid of despondency because you haven't found another who feels the same way. We'll all find that someone who will give themselves fully to us on our flypaper wedding bed. And it'll be "whoa baby...like Charles Bronson in the Great Escape."

Selfish Manifesto

JP asked me to write him something explaining myself, this is what I came up with.

--

I was born and bred in the amniotic fluid of cynicism, liberalism and passivism. Taught to have an open mind and not to take anything at face value. Have no trust until your heart is completely within the idea and without doubt. Complete the theosophy only if it is completeable.

Christ is the center of everything I think of and every conjecture I pull out of my ass. Christ as the God of Man of God because I am a Man of God of Man. I and the Father are one. I really believe I am enlightened to point of non-existance. To the point that nihilistic malcontention actually makes sense. My parents bred all of these things in me.

I am crazy. I am bipolar. I credit this to being why I am fearless in thought, because you can't be afraid of bullet trains as a blind man. We are blind.

At the same time, I simply am. Perfectly forever, I am. I am I am I am iam. I think that what I was raised to do was love what I like and hate what I must but always have an open mind to different ideologies, theologies, and idiosyncrasies. Pull from everything for all things are beautiful since all things are from God. All the saddest things contain all the most beautiful things as well as all the most beautiful things contain the saddest things. Life is cyclical. I AM.

I try and guide my fucked-up self by this verse: "Therefore, go: get your countrymen in Exile and say to them, 'Thus Says the LORD,' whether they listen or fail to listen." Ezekiel 3:11. It's the OT equivalent of Christ's commission of Matthew 28. Making disciples. But you always must realize that there will be those who will never listen. And you must shake the dust from your feet. But you must push forth to get the exiles and turn them around from head to foot from heart to soul. Believe in God. Trust in God. Know in God. Be with God.

And music, be it secular or Christian, blasphemous or sodomous, is the sinew and the string that hold the ventricles of the heart together, that mend the souls irreparable parts, that tie the lobes together. Music creates the waves to make us feel human. Without music, there is no soul. Without rhythm (aleatoric or symphonic), there is no life, there is merely silence and stagnance. But... silence is its own music. We can't escape the beauty of our most sordid thoughts. Believe in God.

Have faith in Man but never trust it lest the aforementioned prerequisites are in place, of course. Souls are all connected, we are all connected, our sins are everyone's. Christ died for everyone's unifying sin. We are all serial killers and rapists and pedophiles and perverts and racists. We are all lovers and fighters and supporters. We are one. We are each other. Christ died for all of it so we could within the breadth and cover of his silver wings that protect us from Satan's ineffable savvy beckoning. We will all sin. We must all forgive.

We must be humble, we mustn't demand recognition. I was raised to do good whilst flying under the radar--create the tireless chugging ideology of goodness without recognition because being known destroys everything. Be without megalomania. Know yourself, know your God, may it be enough for enlightenment.

Believe in God. The universe tends to unfold as it should.

It's a birthday party!

I just completed the greatest weekend so far in my short and ill-remembered life. JP, Jasmine, Bradley and I hung out on Friday night, going to a hookah bar for no reason save to have somewhere to sit and talk for a few hours. Sitting there, sometimes smoking, and talking about Devendra Banhart and movies and music and how much the three boys hate Joy Division and JP's blossoming college experience, I was entranced with complete peace. I was completely at peace. This is a feeling that is rare within me because, as JP describes it, I am convinced that everything will turn out okay but, since it's not okay right now, I'm generally very negative involvling the temporal. So for me to be without negativity was something I wasn't expecting for awhile.

But it happened again the next night. We all went to Jasmine's house and then to a park where we sat around and talked about nothing for three hours. I just--it was the best weekend ever. It was reassuring and it was fun and it was interesting and it was loud and it was funny. I had a great weekend and I hope you all feel the same.

Nothing you can say can't be done.

My sister is in England, I am at home. And I am jealous. Of course I am. The only time I've ever been out of the ountry was when we trekked from Seattle up to Vancouver once when I was a freshman in High School. At the same time, I don't know if world travel affects me very much. I don't know if I really want to travel the world, if I really want to see it. I do but I don't for some reason. Maybe it's because I have a slight fear of flight.

I'm writing this without my glasses on, the screen is about three feet away, and I can't see a word of what I'm typing. I'm glad I learned how to instinct-type because otherwise, I wouldn't be able to write in this situation. It kind of sucks hwo bad my eyes are. Especially when I take my glsses off. It's so hard to find them again when everything blends together. I can't discern between colors at times, I can't see smaller objects within larger ones, so if my glasses were on a black shirt, I'd have a hard time seeing them. Everything kind of bleeds together. It's not the best.

I want to become something more. I want to be transformed. I was watching John Safran vs. God today and he, as a Jewish man, tried to join the KKK. That wasn't the interesting part, for me, though it was rather interesting how militant the group is. The interesting part to me was that, when they showed their altar, it had a bible open to Romans 12, a sword and an American Flag draped over it. Romans 12 is the chapter I memorized one summer during a summer camp. Funny how normal Christians and KKK Christians are under the same rules for living. Somehow, for some reason, I don't think they're following those rules very well. I mean, c'mon, they're a paramilitary racist group. And I'm just a dude, trying to offer my body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

find yourself.

--

So I just recently watched the movie I Heart Huckbees, a movie about existential detectives and Jude Law being an all around dick. I must say, it wasn't very good. It was billed as a comedy, and it had its moments, but it really wasn't very funny. At points, it seemed like it was trying to hard to be quirky what with all the choppy editing and funky pieces of screen floating around. Overall, though, it was just faux philosophical and didn't answer any questions the movie proposed. I don't know, maybe I'm jaded towards the whole idea of philosophy ever since the major didn't work out.

Under the gun gun gun

I think it's getting better, but it has a cycle. I've been able to fall asleep at 11 or 12 the past few nights. The problem is that I tend to wake up again at about 215-245, struggling with two things: a deep hunger and a full bladder. I know that if I don't move, I could probably fall back asleep. However, I also know that I just may wet the bed. Totally not cool since I'm 19 (for the record, I haven't wet the bed since the fifth grade when I went through a rash of it that I thought were wet dreams.) and that's something for kids.

And I've never been able to sleep on an empty stomach. So I get up and I pee off my patio in the backyard since it's closer than the bathroom, and then I eat something. And then, oh shit, it's my morning ritual at 230 in the morning. I'm wide awake. I don't know what to do. I turn on the TV and try and sink way deep into the couch, letting whatever's on sooth me to sleep. But I just ate something. And it's digesting. So I can't sleep for at least twenty minutes. And after 20 minutes, I'm suddenly engaged with what's on the TV. Dammit.

I turn the TV off and go up to bed, by this time, 330, my dad's awake and is getting ready for work. We say a few words, so I really get into bed at around 345. I read a little bit from whatever book I'm trying to read but will probably never finish, then turn off the light and stare at the ceiling until about 5, at which point I'm fed up with the whole bloated concept of mystic war puppets (something I'm apt to think about), or worrying about my friends or worrying about meeting people.

I'll get over it. I'm gonna go back to staring at the ceiling.

--

Wild and virulent like the children of two manic children. The tome of a thousand aged caveats, all ignored, and now given merit vis-a-vis their proven rightness. Oh tired divinity, giveth me thy cross. Let me walk. Let me churn. It's always midnight in the Ozarks. If only time could stop for me. For only a moment. So I could gather myself, know your name, and press on towards you as my goal against whim and will and way.

Perhaps. But maybe not. I can't offer any certainty save that which has tightened my chest. I will pray for you often and think of you always.

Brand New Waves of Sordid Oncology

It's 330. I just cleaned up dog shit in my dining room. This is probably the best time to do it, because you're only downstairs for a bowl of cereal when, bam!, you're shocked into having a ZipLoc baggy inside out on your hand while you hold stinky, warm, clay-paste. Then, next thing you know, you're grabbing your dog by the collar and stickin' her face in it. They know they've done something wrong and you have to shove them an inch from their sin. Next thing you know, your hands are clean, your happily stuffed full of mini wheats, and your dog loves you like you're a God again.

It's amazing how similar this situation is to how God is with our sin. Our conscience, AKA the holy spirit, shoves our nose in our dirty deeds (not done dirt cheap, ACDC), and tells us to not do it again, sternly, even though my conscience and I both know that it's a pit we fall into when we have no other options. And then we're both back to happily loving each. A dog can't hold its crap for 43 hours straight, we can't go 24 hours without doing something crappy. A dog's gotta deuce, we've gotta sin. We're inherently evil creatures.

And I think that's how God atones our sins: with an inside-out ZipLoc baggy that he tosses into the toilet, never to be seen again. And the cycle starts over. Luckily, there's no human pound where gods take their followers when they've been consistently bad and they just can't keep them in their temple. That would suck.

[A refrain from quoting Edie and the New Bohemians]

At some points, threre will always be doubt. At others, there will always be malice. I am awake, my feet are cold.

there seems to be some sort of erhereal disconnect between me and my inspiration. See, I know life is more well than unwell because i feel no underlying sense of worry or spite or unrequited love sick blues to drive these musings. All I've got is this:

I'm so insanely content with life right now I almost want to laugh in its face!

Except for the fact that the Dodgers aren't going to make the playoffs, but who didn't see that one coming?

Rain like Crickets, make the noise.

Complacency.

I feel stricken by the ghosts of seven different past lives, streaking across the sky until tomorrow's dawn. Having had written correspondence with Jesus Christ to boost my faith, I know this is true. I know you are true. I know that I need to read more than the occassional sports article and short story if I want to become a serious fiction writer. Maybe I'm not meant for fiction, I've hypothesized that before. I know: I was meant for the stage. That's the title of a Decemberists' song I don't ever remember hearing.

Contrition. Contention.

Deep down, glottal feelings in my throat. Real ugly nasty. Things will be okay. One can only hope for the best between two or more souls. We are one within the shells of many. That's what unity is.

We move out, we move upward. I am gone away from here, forewarned and unrequited. Take care of my sisters old boys.

My ears aren't ringing. You aren't thinking about me.

My last quarter at CSUSB has started. I feel no sense of sadness, no sense of "maybe I shouldn't be leaving," not a bit of a doubt. I just feel ready for this quarter to be over so I can go up to NorCal and freeze my ass off on the beautiful Redwood Coast.

Give me sanctity, give me peace.

Those are my feet. Like Quentin Tarantino, but less into them, I like feet for some reason. I think for me, the attraction is within how ugly they are and how much people hate them even though they're in our top 10 necessary body parts (top four limbs, for sure.).

Anyway, I just wanted to play with uploading a picture. However, this post does differ from others in two ways: 1) I'm not laying in my bed, doing this from my laptop, falling asleep and letting the folly of thought overtake me; and 2) look at what time I posted this. Now, look at the times for the other posts. See something? This is the earliest one of the last ten or so. I start school tomorrow, I gotta get my whore ass ready to go to bed before 5AM. Don't call it insomnia, don't call it a worry, it's just me being me.

I burned my thumb on the iron the other day. It's a rough spot that's healing. If I had a picture of that, I'd post it too.

The Dodgers' playoff hopes are officially moot. Grady Little even said so himself, and that's just not allowed. You don't write off your own team until you've officially been knocked out. That's just not logical. That's just not nice to your players making a combined 100 million dollars. Give them some hope for their money.

I actually had a moment tonight where I had to tell myself that baseball is just a game. It was when Broxton, for the second night in a row, gave up a homerun to Matt Holliday, who, actually, is a great young player and I'm afraid of the Rockies in the years to come.

I switched my bio class with a photography class. Gonna take it easy this last quarter before I get my ass kicked in the cold. Go Lumberjacks!

I never loved nobody fully.

As I sit here, listening to my dog bark downstairs, waking up my sister, I can't help but reflect upon this great big collapse that I'm busy recovering from that happened throughout the last three years.

I think it started the moment Alycia broke up with me. I took it as if she had left me at the altar even though we had only been dating for two weeks. She left me in disarray for no apparent reason other than I was way too creepily into her and I couldn't understand that it was just plain weird for that to be.

That year, 2004, was a downward spiral. I was transmuting all of my feelings onto another girl, Katelyn Duffy, who I don't think I ever really liked. But, she was blonde and she was christian and I was crazy--she was my surrogate. And I could never understand why she didn't want to date me. Until the other day when the "Holy Shit, I never realized this even though it's so goddam obvious that I should have realized this" moment happened: what kind of girl would want to date a guy who's madly in love with another girl, of which she knows the ENTIRE situation and how crazy I am about her and about everything else. I am stupid. Or at least was. Hindsight is 20\20, right?

Anyway, by the end of 2004, I was diagnosed bi-polar.

(( and I know that all of this is shit you don't care to hear about, but whatever. I was on meds, finally, and was ready for my senior year. ))

My senior year was basically a plateau for this whole collapse. I had a girlfriend, so shit couldn't be too bad for me. But it was, all the same, because of my feelings for this girl in marching band. Because of Kailee, I couldn't ever fully commit to Kaitlyn. She's why I broke up with a girl who was mad about me on the day of prom (yea, I know, dick move on my part). I thought that I could regain some sort of relationship like Kailee and I had had near the end of 2004, right before I was diagnosed and medicated. The funny thing, here, too, is that, since I could never actually talk to Kailee (don't ask why, I had some sort of ultra-broke-down-sad-ass notion that she was way up in the echelon of sacred-goddesses, and thus could not be spoken to about anything. I think I just wanted to revere her), I always ended up transmuting those feelings onto her best friend, Christina, who I don't know if I ever really liked, but at least she was more human in my mind and thus easier to talk to. So the only girl I had actually expressed my feelings rightly to, and had success with it, was Kaitlyn.

And, by September 2006, I was using Kaitlyn for my own lust and private adoration. Trying to get my fill. I think that, when I realized this and broke up with her for the final time, was the edge and bottom of the collapse. Of my collapse.

And for about a year I floundered at the bottom, not doing much, not surrendering much, just kind of... at the bottom of this big cavernous valley which I had unwillingly, but divinely and unavoidably, climbed down into. And now I'm on the opposite side of this big great valley, having meandered across the bottom of it, climbing out the other end toward normality. I'm ready for it, I've seen the greatest of the lowest, and I'm working on getting my God and my sanity back.

The day I got my letter of acceptance from Humboldt was the first day I started up the opposite side of the valley, when things started looking up for me, y'know? I'm so tired of everyone knowing me. I've had my years of thick-headed, shit-for-brains, dense-ass, stupidity, and now I'm ready for my less-naive self to takehold of my feelings for one girl and actually use them on that same girl, and not on some other surrogate that's never quite the same because no two people are the same (we're like snowflakes, really. We all seem the same at the beginning, until you survey us under a microscope and we're really not all the same because I have a crevice and a turn where you have a dash and a point. Then you look a little deeper, and see atoms, and realize that we're really all the same, no matter where God folded me and cut me with scissors and paper [a vaguely worded allusion the those snowflakes we'd made as kids around Christmas time to decorate the classroom with]). We are all beautiful, we are all serial killers. Moby thinks we are all made of stars.

So, I'm climbing out, I guess. I know now that the stories I wrote in 2004 are shitty. I know now that I put Katelyn and David and everyone else who was ever close to me in 2004-early 2005 through way too much shit to even be apologized for, though I would in a heartbeat if I felt it were something that could actually be forgiven. It can't be forgiven. I can't be forgiven for what I've done to you. I can't be forgiven by you. It's too big for mortals to actually let go of all that crap. It's only for me and Jesus to sort out. And we've got a shit-ton to sort out, it seems. But we also have a lot of time to sort it out as He and I have this big long hike in front of us. I'm glad he can make rocks give us water because damn am I thirsty. But, yea, he's like the accountant that has to sort through a closet-full of unorganized paperwork to figure out why I got a $100,000 tax return even though I haven't paid my taxes in 6 years and 7 moons. Once again, another convoluted analogy.

Anyway, God is love and I am at Peace.

Eyes were made to cry during her birthing a child.

I feel sick. My stomach feels "wrapped in bailing wire." I'm sick of my soul being sodomized by cynicism and irony. I want my G-D back. I believe in him yet he feels so far away... Like a deity that left and can't be grasped onto.

I'm sick of loneliness. With G-d and JP so far away, I feel like parts of my soul have up and gone away for the winter months amongst the southern flightless birds. It's not queer to miss my best friends. I still have Jasmine, and I love you to death, but I'm so scared of G-d or JP never coming back the same. Being different. Changing the good parts, the warm parts, the sacred parts. I know all of G-d is sacred.

Must I, really, be brave in these the waning months of autumnal change and discomfort?

Jesus is my G-d is my Holy Ghost that haunts the weeds behind my house to scare me awake amongst the night and to keep me safe.

I feel the anguished Autumnal blues coming on--and the season hasn't even started yet.

A Juggernaut heart. And a Japanese car.

This is something that I struggle with concerning Christianity: everything on Earth, all matter, never breaks down. It simply reappears in a new form, molds and becomes something else. Gets new life breathed into it. I was talking to someone about this once and they mentioned that any one of a trillion people could have a part of Abraham Lincoln in them. All matter is eternal. Is our eternal life to be recycled among the Earth going to from sand to sea to rock to ridge? If that is the case, then isn't this simply an Eastern thought of cyclical still-life reviving itself? How does that fit into the "one life to live?" Is it that our metaphysical, our souls, are singular and made of something other than matter? Or do our souls simply not exist? Is the soul simply a manifestation to give us hope that there's something not so evil inside of us? I don't know, that's why I'm asking you. If parts of me, one day, will be soaking in the dirt, becoming new parts of newer things--if my atoms and my electrons are constantly shifting--then how can I affirm that this is my one life, how can I affirm that I go to heaven and not simply begin sifting back through the dirt until I manifest again?

I've brought this up before, the lessons that God could teach a soul through reincarnation. For example, if a soul (not a person: a person is the soul's shell. Think of us as horseshoe crabs, I guess. We shed our shells and find a bigger one.) has problems with patience, wouldn't it be a great big beautiful exercise in patience if God made the soul come back as a Redwood tree, one that lives for a thousand years and is stagnant, unmoving, and simply reaching higher and higher? Or what if he wanted to teach vain souls a lesson by making them come back as pigs?

Are our souls eternal? If they are not, then how is there a heaven? If they are, then how is there a heaven beyond the eternal that is already on this Earth? Even when the Earth disintegrates, or gets consumed by the sun, or gets blown to bits by our own hands, the matter will still exist, and we will float all over space.

Oh my God, how can one life of a billion heartbeats be all there is?! I just don't understand!

I went to bed. Read Matthew 11. Jumped ahead to 14. Started reading 6 parables starting with "The Kingdom of Heaven is like..." I caught a second wind. I made a new logo for this site, deciding that two logos both utilizing a sketch or painting by Salvador Dali were indicative of a bygone fetish. Reload enough and you'll see the new one. It was going to have a superimposed image of Charles Bukowski's ugly ass face. But I'm so goddam rusty at photoshopping that I couldn't get it right. I got frustrated. I made this one. I like it. It's got John Fahey driving a car towards hell. And the Daniel Johnston frog on his roof. And a lyric from a song that you should know. If you don't, ask me. Or type it into google. School has yet to start. I miss my friend Kelley. I haven't seen her in two weeks. I don't really miss JP yet. I should consider starting. I won't see him for at least a month or more. For the first time in two years. I applied for housing, I think I want to live in the Academic Area. In Cypress. They have some badass dorm setups, it seems. I'm gonna live in a suite, sharing a common area with 7-10 people, and a room with 1 person. That should be bitchin'. I want to be an underscore.

Fine purveyors of:

___________
(noun)

Transcendental, Mudslung, Heroless Blues.

Notes:

Listening to John Fahey makes you want to add the word blues to the end of every thing you write blues.

I got accepted as a transfer student to Humboldt for the Spring 2008 Semester. Instruction begins January 22nd. I'm excited.

Meat:

I watched the first Michel Gondry\Charlie Kaufman vehicle last night (The second being the epiphanical Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) entitled Human Nature. In typical Kaufman style, it's a fucked up script about a woman with a hormone problem that causes her to have hair all over her body like a man which causes her to shun society and live among the wilderness naked for many years. There, she becomes a nature writer and ascertains enough money to get her hair electrically removed by Tina from Do the Right Thing (Thank God for the left nipple...). Through her, she meets a man who's legally blind with a small penis who she falls in love with despite his severe OCD. They both just want love. Meanwhile, they go for a nature hike and discover a man who was raised by an ape who the man, played by Tim Robbins, insists on turning into an ultra-civilized being (he's always trying to train mice to have table manners, a funny aside to the story). During these trials, Robbins' character falls for his French Secretary, and the ape-man, named Puff, sees their first sexual encounter. Immediately he's fucked up. This is subsequently followed by a falling out between the hairy woman (played by Patricia Arquette) and Robbins' character and Puff. Success and wilderness abound.

Apparently, this movie was supposed to raise philosophical questions about nurture versus nature, but, to me, it was just a typical love quadrangle story that just happened to involved some ultra-quirky characters (much like all of Kaufman's works) and it seems to fall short. His writing and scripting is definitely exonerated when you put Gondry's magical touch on it all. That man has an eye and a knack for making things look downright-fucking-pretty in the most cartoonish, arealistic-but-really-hyper-realistic sense. I can't recommend the movie though, because it dragged on for far too long, and definitely sagged under its supposed weight.

I have seen three (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Human Nature) of Charlie Kaufman's five (Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) movies, and I have to say that he is an auteur for the weird shit. I don't think anyone can consistently devise strange-ass characters as well as he can and then consistently get directors that can fully realize the quirks he wants conveyed. Gondry definitely has Kaufman's number since Gondry, as evidenced in his writing-debut The Science of Sleep, is also into creating weird-as-shit characters.

"Stephane, what do you want me to do?"

"I don't know, maybe play with my hair for a little bit."

Potatoes:

I hate potatoes.

You're so money.

I finally got around to watching two movies that've been on my to-watch list tonight: The Outlaw Josey Wales and Swingers.

Josey Wales is a western with Clint Eastwood where he gets betrayed multiple times and then becomes an outlaw, leaving a trail of bodies everywhere he goes. He was an ultimate badass. Gets his house burned down and cries vengeance on the Union--who then force the rest of his gang to surrender. The story's steeped in mutiny, and he takes care of it the only way Western Clint Eastwood can: with more bullets than words. Everyone wants him dead, and he's having none of it. Ultimate badass, I'm telling you.

Odd though, the problem that I had with this movie was the score. It felt way too melodramatic, as if it were for a good vs. evil western and not a vengeance western. It also sounded like the skeleton of all action-film-scores to come after it. Minor trifles. Clint Eastwood fucking rules.

--

Swingers is the story about a guy getting over a girl who he was with for 6 years. She broke up with him, he moved to LA to become a comic even though his character's not very funny. This movie made me want to live in Los Angeles for the rest of my life in hopes of meeting a Heather-Graham-type-girl from across the bar who suffers from all the same woes. It was a great portrait of a guy who's absolutely crushed by a girl and coming to terms with the fact that she's never going to call and that he just needs to get over her. He tries and tries and tries. It's sad at points watching him struggle with the awkward moments of trying to meet a girl while still acting like he's talking to his ex-girlfriend as if he's trying to, through his words, transmute his ex into the girl at the bar. It's relatively sad and deprecated, but still a good movie. Ends well enough to make you leave feeling well.

TCSM, bitches!

I'm probably going to spoil the whole fucking movie for you if you haven't seen it already. Just putting it out there.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from 1974 has been on my mind all day and night since watching it last night on Netflix' Watch Now feature--something that was much more convenient and of much higher quality than I expected. I was expecting something much more similar to its 2003 remake starring Jessica Biel et al, yet what I encountered was something much more organic and true to form as a horror film.

But the odd thing was that, by about 45 minutes in, I hadn't had one scare, I hadn't seen Leatherface, I just knew that something was ultra-fucking-wrong with ultra-fucking-everything. This vibe was especially rampant when they pick up the crazy-fucking-hitchhiker who takes the invalid's knife and cuts his hand open, has a conversation about bashing cow skulls at the slaughterhouse, and making head cheese by using the boiled flesh of a cow's head. That's not scary, that's just fucked up. And it adds something. We now know the locals are fucking crazy.

Because of all of this, we can tell that this movie is seriously based in ambience and atmosphere, that this is all to enhance the scares, the jolts and the terror to come. The opening credit roll is shown over what looks like Corona blasts from the sun that are discolored, precluded by a short narration about the events which unfold, making this opening narration akin to a Greek Chorus telling you what's going to happen and basically saying, "These people you will hang out with for the next hour and a half are completely, and utterly, fucked. Have fun!" During that opening credits roll, there's a typical news report speaking of a Cholera outbreak and oil fires and sweltering heat and shit shit shit. It all adds up to an experience.

So we had tension, but no scares. And by the poster featuring Leatherface wielding a chainsaw over his head, I wanted scares. And at about 45 minutes I was ready to turn this movie off and go to bed--and then it happened. We see one of the kids go over to the house with his girlfriend after the creek bed is all dried up to ask for gasoline since they're going to be needing some to get their asses home. He knocks and no one answers. He knocks again, nothing. He must have knocked on that screen door about five times, figuring that backwoods hicks have got nothing better to do than sit around at home or run around in the scary ass woods around the house. With this in mind, he opens the screen door to knock on the front door, which opens up when he hits it. Oh goody. With the door open, he peeks inside and sees a drab, desolate house with tons of bones everywhere, and one wall behind a door jamb painted blood red, with cow skulls and other bones on it. He calls to his lady to check this out, and he, now thinking no one is home, ventures into the house while she stays on the bench.

The moment he crosses the door jamb towards the red wall and skulls, he is fucking NAILED over the head with a hammer. After 45 minutes of slow, angering explication--tense-ass fucking atmosphere--we are hit over the head by a sledge hammer and catapulted into an insane second half of people getting knocked and maimed and chased down.

But here's the thing. Holy shit: there's very little blood, and very little gore. Unlike today's horror films that try to make us squeam as well as scream, we are treated to a horror film that has some of its most graphic moments (aside from someone getting pancaked by a semi) obstructed by other objects. In the 2003 remake, we saw people get hung on meat hooks at least twice, and, this time, the one time it happens, it's obstructed by the table where the guy who got his head bashed is laying, about to be chopped to bits.

By the time there's only one person left, we learn some things: the crazy-ass hitchhiker is Leatherface's brother; the owner of the gas station is their father; and they have a grandpa who used to be the best killer around, according to them (we see him in his flaccid phase, can't hold a hammer); and the barbecue at the father's gas station is probably cannibal-cue.

This movie is fucking crazy. The 70's were fucking crazy. The girl who plays the character Laurie got her hand cut open because they couldn't get the blood bag to work. The actor who played the hitchhiker said that filming this was worse than being in Vietnam. I'm serious.

I never want to go to Texas again.

Cock-eyed Vindication?

I think I have writers' ADD. I can't seem to completely round things out, as in create something with some sort of legitimacy. I try, but I always fear that things go on too long. You know how it is. And I'm not good at coming up with titles. That's another problem. Oh, and writing about random shit like this for all of your life will get you nowhere.

I've reading this guy's movie reviews lately, and they make me want three things: to not have writers' ADD, to be ultra-vulgar, and to see 10,000 fucking movies and all their terrible-ass sequels. Jesus. What a man.

3:10 to Yuma comes out this weekend. I'm excited. I fucking love Westerns, where moral ambiguity is as rampant as the dust storms. And yet I haven't seen Once Upon a Time in the West, or the Outlaw Josey Wales. I hate myself.

One of my biggest fears in life: being convoluted. Seriously, it scares me more than spiders or death.

Follow the Lynx.

Transparency, divinity, wasting air space and committing cardinal sins. Run away with you towards the night. Been here before. Committing cardinal sins. Man I love to eat.

Something's gone awry. I can feel it. I can sense it. Youknow who you are you know i am who I was twenty years ago when we first met, as X found Y and conniption was born of all things small above below ma non troppo. But, more or less, I mean nothing and do not exist.

There's another new one below this one. It's a little bit better.

Bed time. Craziness. NyQuil. I think in terms of divinity. I am divine, you are divine, you are beautiful, you are my love, I am your keeper.

All at once, I amazed with myself. I put so much weight on finding love, and yet I'm such a cynic concerning it at the same time. Love is just a chance meeting of two people who are ultra-compatible. That's pessimistic, but I think it's true. I put so much weight on this chance meeting and yet I can't make the chance happen. Strange how paradoxical I can be at times. Or hypocritical. But I really think that hypocrisy is a natural progression of thought most of the time. Telling someone not to do something then realizing it's not all that bad. It's natural. Life ebbs and flows and a person's views and actions are more than likely going to do the same. Y'dig?

"Why don't you write a song about this? You can call it, 'I got punched in the face for sticking my nose in other people's business."

"Sounds like a country song."

Great night for insomnia

There was a lunar eclipse. We actually got use out of our telescope. I would have missed it had I been like any sane person and been asleep at 4 in the morning. Instead, I got to run around my house in my pajamas with a telescope. It was exciting. And the telescope must be made of aluminum because damn was it light.

It was basically a great moment in an otherwise shitty day. And I say shitty in the most literal sense. I awoke at around 8 or 9 in the morning feeling completely constipated, with my stomach feeling like a cow's when you need to stab it to alleviate the bloating. I wanted to stab myself to get the shit out it was so bad. Instead, I gagged myself into the bathtub, vomit that even looked like shit. I was surprised, and said to myself upon that observation, "Golly, there must be a lot in there." At this point I was being a little baby, wailing for my mom to do something because I was completely immobilized. So she brought me water and I drank it and tried to throw up again. No dice. Instead, I sat there, hearing the squeaks of immovable feces caught in some serious LA traffic in my large intestines.

At least I had a stroke of genius. I asked my mom if we had any castor oil, something no sane person should ever do except in the worst of circumstances. Castor oil is the king of laxatives, giving no remorse to the taker. I took two teaspoons of that, stumbled toward my phone and called my work, telling'em in one of the most distraught voices I've ever heard come out of me, "I think I ate something rancid and I really don't feel good, so I won't be able to make it into work." I had the afternoon off to shit myself to death. I then waddled into my mom's bed for some reason, the only one I can assume is because it's closer to the ground and easier to get in\out of. And because it's cooler in there.

I had forgotten to turn off my work alarm for 2 PM, but, once it went off and I awoke, we were off to the races. The shit races. I sat down and what couldn't happen this morning happened in bulk. It's like getting turned away from a fancy restaurant with small portions and then getting into Costco. It wasn't a gerbil-pellet-shit-fest. This was some serious shit. That castor oil tasted bad for a reason: because it's Satan's laxative. Between the hours of 2 and 730PM, I lost about three pounds, and read about a chapter of America: The Book, a funny, but arduous history book by the "Daily Show" writers. I felt completely wiped out.

I fell asleep at about 8PM, and you'd think I'd have slept straight through with the kind of sick day I had. Instead, I woke up at 2AM and finished watching the Dodger game (They won, Derek Lowe's "stuff" wasn't his best, though. Dickhead gave up three homeruns in six innings of work).

So I'm gonna now go to bed, rate some songs on my iPod (it's actually a lot of fun to comprise "Smart Playlists" of your three, four, and five star songs and then listen to just the songs you absolutely love or just kind of like.), wake up at noon, go the gym, try and gain some of this fucking weight back as muscle (instead of shit stuck in my intestines), go to work, then go out on the town.

I love you all. And I'm sorry if this was absolutely gross. Wait a second, no I ain't. Misery is hilarity!

A fifth to the commonwealth, the rest to the track!

I always thought it was interesting that baseball commentators, as well as players, constantly refer to a pitcher as having "good stuff." Now, that may not seem like proper grammar, but I think it exemplifies what makes baseball, a sport that lasts 3 and a half hours with the ball in play for an average of 12 minutes, fun to watch and keep up on: it's the elusiveness of what makes a player so great. That's why steroids suck, because they give an answer. A player either has it or he doesn't. On a given night, a player can be off or on...

And the pitcher's "stuff" can be anything from his flawless mechanics to his delivery to his mental\emotional toughness to his lucky jock. The season is so goddam long that it tests the endurance of its players more than a sport like football (specifically, the NFL, I dig NCAA) where cocky-ass jocks run out on a field once a week and give each other concussions, then go back and pump iron for a week, practice practice practice, then do it again. In baseball, the only time you have to practice is before a game since for the next three nights you're playing one team, then you're travelling across the country, and playing another team.

Every sport is hard, but baseball is hard without a lot of strategy and with a high-sense of enigma and intangibility. I can dig it.

--

I'm supposed to be hearing back from Humboldt in a few days\weeks as to whether or not I made their transfer cut. Pray for me. This is something we need.

--

I've been working out, and so maybe I'll be sexy one day and not just "cute after two weeks of knowing him."

--

A lot of the blogs where it seems like I'm talking to someone, referring to a "you," are really conversations with myself. I'm an asshole, I will be my own demise. BUT! I believe in you.

I am late for the sky.

run with me and chase the leaves--This was once spoken of a great altered composer to be once for all time I know your name, come away come away to be waltzed around in circled triplets until we are dizzy and drunk and beaten stolid red stoic crimson stalwart hues of one only color to show new wounds within our toes. What we create is what we've never meant to be but at the same all we've ever wanted to die to love to scream to be eaten by the vultures above our rotting corpse now rooted in the place we died where we will meander if purgatory or ghosts allow us to believe in them... I am driftwood and come along the journey of what we once were i know we once worked in tandem before there was a burst a stress a panic a mood that fell apart i know we were once a one and not a two connected by sinews and ventricles, arteries the great highway across the soul like a concrete gash crossing the gap to be my own way to be away from myself for once wish to tear apart my insides and be left bereft with only one seamless personality and no mood swings the guillotine (was anyone around to remember that phrase? Maybe I can start reusing shitty one-liners from three years ago when you wasn't famous) I am away around away away away below the water up above the trees fucking in the canopies around the sinews shaking my head as to how I got so caught in this batshit ideal of why I once was nothing but here today am something more than most but yet less than all as if the world revolves around myself or at least I think it should even in my own lackluster coherence. Tell the world of what you are because there will be days when they won't know will want to know and you won't secede your answers villains in shame of all the wrongs you've committed against those rhythms that turned our toes red all those long days ago on the gravelly beaches we once knew where the rocks were soft and the waters were calm and we could call each other by pounding rocks against our heads to bleed as a signal up in smoke. I know your name, you across the gap--it's not my own yet it is my own because you are my own. A simple belief and that's something I know for sure but amidst this the waking fey, I can only sense the things that make things skip jump granulate the finality of what was could be i know you want to be with me but there's the greatest soul divide between us that i've created but i know it will one day be repaired....... one day i will be whole.

We just have to wait a little bit longer, I think.

Crown of Storms

A wiggle. Awoken with a shudder. I am your own demise. There is belief in the deep-down gone-awry things of the soul. Only for good luck. I've grown tired of you.

I once had a dream that a girl had Beethoven's 5th as her ringtone. And it gave me a migraine. I woke up with a migraine. The sometimes-synergy of dream and reality is strange.

One time, in high school, my alarm didn't go off for school. So, instead (and by some divine power), my cat took a piss on my backpack instead to wake me up. What a helpful jackass. My other cat used to wake me up when I'd normally get up. She'd be in a panic because I wasn't petting her. She's still like that... Just, she sleeps in the garage now because we have dogs.

In no point within my memory have I ever liked bananas. Or Potatoes. Or Corn. Because I wasn't getting enough potassium during water polo, my mom gave me handfuls of potassium pills. And I never cramped up.

Make connections, you'll need to build a bridge later.

And I need help with mine.

He was sitting and waiting on the porch for something. Forgetting words as he wrote in the dark, dropping letters as one would carelessly drop a pen. Calling him outward. This is the greatest commission. I am your Babel. Keep me safe.

I put my hands away.

I think I wasn't made for this world--the 9-5, the in-out-in-out and the litany of lethargic days that blend together to form thirty years of your life.

"Well, then, start writing, asshole."

Yea, I wish it was that easy. I've been postponing it. I'm lazy. I'm big on laziness. Because I'm afraid of commitment in the strangest, inopportune ways.

Dear Kaitlyn, I think I was afraid of what I told you I was afraid of because I find myself running stalwart parallels with the protagonist from High Fidelity. Records, pop music, misery, trials of love and seperation... And that was exemplified by the relationship I was afraid ours would turn into. But that was long ago, I'm afraid.

Here is your beginning:

"Gone all starry eyed, he awoke in a stupor. Believability is fallability. He too often thought in aphorisms instead of textures or shapes. Pithy statements are, if you were to give a shape, round at best. Spherical and applicable to far too many people to be one person's thoughts. But that's what they were: rounded off at the edges and severely altruistic. He had no character and he suffered because of it. He was white as snow in dress and complexion. He seemed to walk in a daze, sifting through doorways as if he were the sand among gold dust, going on without any sort of color or complication.

"Until she arrived..."

I'm intrigued. But then my obvious pessimism plays into my ontology: why is she arriving? Are we going to have another stupid romantic comedy on our hands? Is tragedy all I'm good for?

Oh, the ending to that beginning is that he kills himself. She finds him surrounded by a pool of what looks like white paint, but it's really his blood. Upon closer inspection, it's more like infected milk, because specks of she (her color being a deep, deep, sodomizing green) within his blood.

She is never heard from again. And the color is removed from the wheel.

I believe in you.

Thinking Outrageously.

God creates missions. I am going nowhere. Today there will be no tomorrow. I am alone for once to see your shining face, but i haven't laid periphory on you in years. Come on down to the shores of Babylon and sense the echoes out among the trees more than you'll ever know...

The birds will flutter up among the echelon, and we will sit down below on the rocky bank, in the shade of the trees so large and covered in moss. We will sit on our asses and hold hands and joke. It will be cool, it will be October. I'm not sure yet if I will be in love with you, but this day will definitely make its case. Plead guilty, I can sense the night coming in. We better get going, the leaves are getting restless.

By the warmth, I will kiss you for the first time in years it will seem, but it will really only have been months.

Like a sonnet, you will be ten more lines closer to my heart. Lines afraid lines divided lines remissed. I can feel your beauty as I swat the mosquitoes away on the porch. They will drive us inside. We will sit upon the rug and look at old photo albums.

I'm afraid of you that this will never happen. I am the Empty Garlic. Filled with hope. Forget about the odd-times ahead, I have hope ahead of what was once my own grace. Give me grace, I think. I am caught, meat-hooked on single-lined allusions and aphorisms.

But I can sense it all, I can smell the trees... They aren't pine but they sure sense that they know who they. All those rings, all those years stagnated.

And the saints will stave off the rest while we are indoors, away from the divinity of the land. This is a calling.

I can fear the Lord. but I fear love more. I fear women.

So I think that things will have to change between you and I. I don't think I can be as close to you. You scare me, make me nervous. I wish it wasn't so. I'm afraid of you, though, and your undercutting comments. Because my heart is too warm to be filled with the ice of your thoughts.

I am. Am I reciprocated. Things are generally unknown, but I know that now.

I and the Father are one.

Cinder Smoking.

Seemingly bereft, beleaguered, with anger from the outset. Enough with the saints to bring out the dead with their stiff and bandaged fingers, their popped and erudescent flanges. Concubine, ursine. I am the all told among the different ones below your feet, the worms that turn the Earth for no good reason other than that's what they know how to do. Went to college to properly turn the Earth below us and around us. That's why we aren't floating off into space, why we have days, because the worms keep the world turning.

But that is only one part of the multiplying occupation that is fey beyond comparison. We sit in our chairs and contemplate another sort of life while others and I are among the con--

Oh my God. I have no idea how to write anymore. Is this a limbo period where all within my style changes? I don't want to just use big words, but, at the same time, I don't know where to go when the rhythm sags off below the echelon--

nippted figures below our waist, tugging at our hearts to find the last one. I am your own found among the finders. Come away with me to find a new dawn, I think that's what we're supposed to do. I'm no longer sure what is red. I'm no longer sure how to think about you--

I think I'm losing it.... It it it. The motive, the passion, the complacency. The killing I am among the rushes. Don't lose it. Always keep a little in reserve. You'll know it because you'll feel it--where the nerves and the sinews end and my relationship with you begins. Darling. Among the amazed I am yours for all time.

It's been nearly two weeks since I last got a decent night's sleep. If I go to bed before 5AM, like tonight, I wake up at 2-230 with an insatiable hunger. If I go to bed at 5AM, my entire fucking day is ruined.

And that's how it's been for the past two weeks, my sleep pattern has been completely fucked up. I'm ready to buy a bottle of Nyquil for emergency cases. This just plain sucks.

Quick--not the usual

I planted rows of peas, by the first week of July I should've come up to my knees but they were maybe ankle high

I've been reflecting on love lately, and I've come to this: if we are to believe what the scriptures say (we really should), then God is love. If God is love, then God embodies all characteristics of one in love with something, right?

And someone in love is, in regards to the other person, ranged in their emotions--all within the typical arch of humanity. Now, it has been stated by both myself and others that we should not place human characteristics on God because he's above all things human and is simply pure existence. However, if he is just pure existence, then how can he have emotion? How can he smite and bring wrath upons the 12 Tribes without emotion?

From this, we can easily establish that since God has shown typical human emotions such as jealousy and rage and kindness and forgiveness, we can therefore say that God is something of a superman, as any Nietzchean would describe it--God is what we are but all things in their perfect sense. His forgiveness is perfect. His rage is perfect. Everything about him is perfect, but he also exudes human emotion. That's why Christ the deity was also Jesus the human who wept.

As a result, it is therefore absurd for a person to say that God is completely mean and cannot be a loving God. They say, "He's judgmental," and deny their faith. However, in love, are we not judgmental when what we want is best for our lovers even though they choose to go astray, making us angry? God is showing nothing but love to the Israelites in this situation.

They say, "God's a killer, he didn't have to kill all the [insert name of people decimated in Old Testament]. Hasn't he ever heard of diplomacy?" This one is rather tricky. However, I would argue that, in those times, as well as these times, coming into a foreign land and saying, "Could you please hand it over because our God [at this they may stop and say, "One God? How narrowminded of you!] said it was our land of milk and honey." Diplomacy doesn't work in a takeover. God said, "Take it as yours, leave nothing," and the Israelites did as they were told.

We could definitely look at this sexually, this whole murder thing because sex and murder are relatives of trust. Think of it this way: we allow our chosen lovers (within or without wedlock) to ravage our virgin skin and take from us all that was once all we were. However, in this sort of death, we become one with the person more and more, trusting that they are the one to be your companion for eternity. This is God saying, "Pillage my land," and the Israelites doing as they're told, trusting that their God won't leave them in a motel room on the road to Vegas where he promised they'd elope but really just was dragging you along to ditch you in Memphis where he was meeting up with his mistress.

God could have fooled us, said that the Land of Milk and Honey was everything that man would ever need, then turned around and showed the truth that was really the Sahara fucking Desert where nothing survives. It's all about trust. Killing is a trust exercise in God's eyes. It's like that whole, "Fall backwards into my arms," but instead it's, "Kill 100,000 Phillistines."

Therefore, God is simply the holistic embodiment of love. What we do out of love is broadened outwards towards the scope of God where 1000 years is like a day.

Then there's always the, "That was the Old Covenent God. Jesus is the lamb, the New Covenent." Yea, I still think that's bullshit... and for another time.

John Henry

Reset the counter, it's become aleatoric.

I could have sworn I knew your name, that I trusted you, that we were once alone together on the beach holding back the waves with all the might of 1000 children's addled, scraggly, nightmares. We were sickly, we were tired. We were tried and true and sovereign.

I am the sickest.

You can't become another twang upon the grass, scratching and itching after rolling down the hill as if you're covered in bees.

Seeping into the night of a million.


Quantity. Push everything out there into the echelon. Pleasure. I am yours for all time.

Saw them shake like Wind on Rushes.

It began in the car, was interrupted by four phone calls, an almost-alarm, a call-on, and a call-off. It last almost six hours.

It wasn't a nap. It was a supernap.

And I am now aflurry with restlessness because I got a usual night's sleep between 2 and 8 PM.

Restless and suddenly I'm ensconced in two seperate conversations while writing on a machine--all three (four if you include listening to Belle and Sebastian) activities I couldn't be doing at this moment 20 years ago--hell, 10 years ago. Welcome to the 00's.

--

It's strange I don't question my faith, become agnostic, or completely drive away from the church because I seem to always have some sort of problem with it. Be it chauvinism, not full-fledged Calvinism (always forgetting about predestination), or anything else. However, I suppose that these problems are not inherent problems with my faith, which is fully Calvinist and relatively open to new-osity, but rather problems with the church, which I am fully critical of and knowledgable of their faux infallibility.

The underlying premise of my theosophy is John 4:8, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." and Phillipians 3:10-12, "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me." I have a purpose and I press on so as to takehold of it. Whatever it is.

You are the sovereign.

Then to Lebanon... Oh God... The flashing at night, the sirens grow and grow and grow....

""

And I groan.

Here, check this,

“In an age where passion has been done away with for the sake of science he easily foresees his fate—in an age where an author who wants readers must be careful to write in a way that he can comfortably be leafed through during the after-dinner nap, and be sure to present himself to the world like the polite gardener’s boy in the Advertiser who, hat in hand and with good references from his previous place of employment, recommends himself to a much esteemed public. He foresees his fate will be to be completely ignored; has a dreadful foreboding that the scourge of jealous criticism will more than once make itself felt; and shudders at what terrifies him even more, that some enterprising recorder […] will slice him into sections.”
Respectfully,
Johannes de Silentio.


I guess I’m here to justify my friend’s work—something that is not an easy task, I think. What follows is didactic and loud and boisterous, bogged down with lyricism and convoluted by ethereal dream logic, all of which is buoyed by the Inland Empire’s drab scenery and bullshit weather.

You may read it, put it down, try and read it again, then say, “Step off your goddam pulpit!” But, really, I can guarantee you that he didn’t mean it that way. He was thinking of you when he wrote it, at least in a round-about way. I was in communication with him when he was writing it, and he said, “I’ve been thinking of the readers. I think they can go to hell.” This is a personal book by a personal person. If you meet the author, he will be shy and nothing like the narrator, despite the fact that 25% (or more…I’m not sure anymore…) of this book is true.

The guilty parties need not worry, he means all the best.

The readers need not worry, because it all makes sense when you take and take and take from the book as he desires you to do. This is a book of passion, this is a book of emotion, this is a book of the great I AM. I think that’s the only way to describe it. A book of God’s dreams and one man’s fear.

I don’t want you to slice him into sections, like a whore, and give him to the 12 tribes of Israel for sanctification. He is already sanctified in the eyes of God. I want you to take everything with grains of beautiful sugar and salt, knowing that it does all make sense, and that the great Idea that is DEATH WALKS IN THE EAST RIVER VALLEY has a purpose beyond sounding pretentious and esoteric.

In a letter he wrote me once, he stated that, “This is a book of God, about God, and for God. I want this book to emote people into belief, into doubt, into something! Everyone is so fucking A.D.D. these days; I want to slow them down; I want to show them the beauty in the mundane, the trials in the slavery, and the greatness of not man, but of themselves. Greatness through value by God. That is my ultimate purpose, I think.”

If you’re A.D.D., take your Ritalin and settle in. If you’re an average American, turn off your T.V. and lose some goddam weight. But, no, read this book.

In truth, I really think he just wants you to believe in God…

But that’s just me. Of his real motives, I could never actually tell you about those.

Johnathan Roberts,
Hollywood and La Cienega, 1979

DEATH WALKS IN THE EAST RIVER VALLEY will never be finished. I lost the map and I am embarrassed. But you are my beloved.

I am alive for now for ever for all time among you all my beautiful

Lately, since July 27th when my aunt died, I've wondered why I'm not bereft of happiness, why I'm not completely filled with anguish. I've tried to place it in the pocket of "I didn't know her very well," but I had to quickly remove it because I realized that that is not why I am seemingly apathetic towards the death of one hell of a woman. I realized how I feel about death, and how it became solidified.

Death is an illusion. We live on far longer than our hollow grave of a body would like to think. Our bodies are so fragile, like a lamp being shipped, that the packing peanuts are soon to give and we are soon to break. It's obvious. It's unavoidable. That's obvious.

It's also obvious that we live on far beyond what our body says is our life. Our soul, our reputation, live on in the words and actions of the others we have influenced, the others who took from us the good which we held and melded it with the good of others (as well as the caveats of miscreants) to create the next person. And suddenly it trickles into generations--our influence is diluted, sure, but it is ours, and we are forever within this good Earth. People have searched for the tree of life, when in truth we are the tree of life, our branches stretching out among the reeds to hug along the river.

And that is evolution.

And this is why our relationships and our loves must hinder more on emotion and soul & spirit as opposed to physical attraction. Our bodies are finite and crumbling and fragile by the day while our soul lives on among the rushes among our memories that meet on the porch near the fireflies and bats at dusk. If a relationship is merely the husk of lust, what is it that beneath but blackened and burnt corn that is nothingness when you die? I want the husk to, when I perish, to reveal corn so yellow and so delicious that people will remember me and my lover as the greatest cob ever to be passed among the mouths of this goddam forest.

--

And this whole thing brought up another odd theological question: Why must I include heaven in all talk of death? What if I don't believe that we should focus so much on the afterlife, as if religion is a crutch for our fear of death more than it is a faith and a passion? Why was I so compelled to say that our souls and inspirations live on while our spirits dance and praise Him in heaven when it was not a part nor a participle nor a precept of the above thought? It's as if I have to inject Western Christian Apocalyptics into everything I touch involving God.

Life is everything, make it the best you can for Him. And he will understand all your efforts as your spirit drifts up above you eternal soul above your addled and rotting body.

This is Dementia?

It's time to go.

Let's go.

Grown among the wheat only to be taken at harvest. Oh how the weeds so much the same. Much the temptress grown between.

And place your feet in the sand. I don't need to be carried.

Women and Children first.

Laugh until my head comes off.

--

I feel kind of hollow right now... I think it's because I'm at such a crossroads in my life... All waiting for a letter. I applied to Humboldt and I don't know if I'm gonna get in. So I'm worried about all of that and it all hinges on a letter in a mailbox that may not come until mid-September. And so I want to find a new job but can't, I want to move but can't, and it all becomes a sort of loss-quality derivative.

The rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops the rain drops.... We're not scaremongering this is really happening take the money run take the money run....

Well enough. X & Y above and below.

You already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know you already know how this will end....

F
A
L
L
I
N
G

&

S
I
N
K
I
N
G

Isn't it relatively arbitrary, don't you think?

To play with your words like that.

Don't play with your words. They're liked Mashed Potatoes.

"This means something."

Day 75 - Arbitrary.

MySpace. I deleted it because it had a crappy server, a ton of subversive advertisements, and it wasn't allowing links in its bulletins.

And I made a new one (http://www.myspace.com/americanpulp), and nothing's changed. I'm an idiot.

On the lighter side, Superbad comes out on the 17th. That's in 12 days. I'm eczema-cited. In all the rashy ways. I believe in you.

Day 65 - You might sleep but you'll never...dream........into the ECHELON!!! We GO!!!!

Do You Realize - that you have the most beautiful face
Do You Realize - we're floating in space -
Do You Realize - that happiness makes you cry
Do You Realize - that everyone you know someday will die

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes - let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It's hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn't go down
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round --Ye Olde Flaming Lips

So, okay. I think God is having fun tossing shit at my life. My aunt just died in a freak car accident. Jasmine's got her things I'd rather not discuss without her permission. I've got my own personal shit. And now my family's in mourning over one of my mom's and everyone's favorite people.

And yet... I can't seem to feel anything but numb. It's like I can sense everything, and it all sucks, but all I feel is a great irrepressible desire to leave, to get the fuck outta dodge, to "Alright Ramblers, let's get ramblin'." I feel apathetic, I feel mean and cold.... Yet that's how it seems that I'm reacting to this... Cold, yet affected. Aware, self-aware. Amazed. Awe-struck.

I'm so small. I feel like I should do something but, when I ask advice, I get garbled advice that emits from eight sources all at once, and all I can respond with is, "I don't know how to oriwejrjioewjio[wjriojw]!" All the advice I gets reminds of this passage from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonfen Safran Foer:::::::::::::

"I found a payphone and called your mother, that's as far as my plan went, I assumed so much, that she was still alive, that she was in the same apartment I'd left forty years before, I assumed she would come pick me up and everything would begin to make sense, we would mourn and try to live, the phone rang and rang, we would forgive ourselves, it rang, a woman answered, "Hello?" I knew it was her, the voice had changed but the breath was the same, the spaces between the words were the same, I pressed "4, 3, 5, 5, 6," she said, "Hello?" I asked, "4, 7, 4, 8, 7, 3, 2, 5, 5, 9, 9, 6, 8,?" She said, "Your phone isn't one hundred dollars. Hello?" I wanted to reach my hand through the mouthpiece, down the line, and into her room, I wanted to reach YES, I asked, "4, 7, 4, 8, 7, 3, 2, 5, 5, 9, 9, 6, 8,?" She said, "Hello?" I told her, "4, 3, 5, 7!" "LIsten," she said, "I don't know what's wrong with your phone, but all I hear is beeps. Why don't you hang up and try again." Try again? I was trying to try again, that's what I was doing! I knew it wouldn't help, I knew no good would come of it, but I stood tehre in the middle of the airport, at the beginning of the century, at the end of my life, and I told her everything: why I'd left, where I'd gone, how I'd found out about your death, why I'd come back, and what I needed to do with the time I had left I told her because I wanted her to believe me and understand, and because I thought I owed it to her, and to myself, and to you, or was it just more selfishness? I broke my life down into letters, for love I pressed "5, 6, 8, 3," for death, "3, 3, 2, 8, 4," when the suffering is subtracted from the joy, what remains? What, I wondered is the sum of my life?" [page 269]

--

I only know how to survive the way I know how to survive. Esoteric, cold, cynical, passive. Death is just an illusion. We all truly live forever within our legacies. The time comes when we've done all we can as flesh and the rest of our purpose can only be fulfilled through remembrance and not our own furtive actions. Though our bodies may cease, our souls surely live on forever as do the memories. We have affected who we are to affect... And soon, they will tell of me posthumously... And I will down, and I will smile....

You are all so goddam wonderful.

That is that and this is this... when the ocean met the sky.

I'm reading the last Harry Potter book. I want to ruin it by reading the Wikipedia page on it. I already read some things that would have otherwise been unknown. F'in A, man. The things you can get on the internet.

I went to a club last night for the first time, smoking my way through the night. Check it out: it's this club V.I.P. and it's supposed to be a gay club. But I didn't get hit on once. I was disappointed, almost. And the DJ kept looking at me, and I kept thinking of John Cusack in High Fidelity, and how he met his girlfriend who he's trying to mend things. Then I thought of how that movie reminded me of Annie Hall with a musical subtext. Then I thought of, "Sometimes, when I'm driving alone at night..." And a funny-as-hell young Christopher Walken in a great cameo. Jeff Goldblum was in that movie too, with one line: "Hey, yea, I forgot. What my mantra again?" And then I thought of the "I'm a Pepper shirt" he was wearing in The Life Aquatic when he was playing cards with his Phillipino Pirate captors. And all that led to a smile on my face as I looked upon some very pretty young ladies I hope to see again one day.

And, speaking of Wes Anderson, The Darjeeling Limited gets released on Sept. 28th or 29th or Oct. 5th, depending on your source. That's two weeks after 3:10 to Yuma, and one week after The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, two westerns I'm excited for. I like Westerns. They're epic, they're big. Sergio Leone is a bad ass. Sergio Corbucci? Thanks for Django. It was weird.

I know that made me sound like a film geek, but I haven't even seen the Godfather. I haven't seen Bullfighter, though I say I like Scorsese's work. I haven't see Once Upon a Time in the West, though I say I like Westerns. Yea, see, what the hell is wrong with me?

Oh, right. I'm 19 and a disillusioned youth. I've been reading too much Harry Potter.

"as the cardinal hits the window."

Day 58 (Almost) - I am pathetic. You are the rub.

I will box your ears in with cryptics. I will teach you your lessons. I will become what you wanted me to be...

But I am afraid of far too many things that mar my sight with sound and my touch with taste. I am awake and alive with none but above below the down away away away caromed off the corner wall and against your back to find your sight among above the sinews. Your heart and its ventricles. Your soul and its sinews. Torn all apart away from the beginning towards, but not quite, to the end. I am pathetic. You are the rub. This is the story of your pathos and its own desires to become its own pathology. I am what is worth believing in, yet you are none but the evil deeds you've succumb to once or twice in the past--the past is corrupted and yet it is what creates our very being. We are corrupt. We are all serial killers, belaboring the nightfall creationism brought on by the clouds that pull the stars away from us, sucking them out of the night to leave us feeling cold and moist around our neck as from a lover's kiss.

But I am afraid of far too many things--what more shall I say? That I don't trust you? That I don't trust the great and unattainable monolith called "God's will?" Isn't that just a copout? Why can't you control yourself and be among those that need not great unbounding grace and love and forgiveness? Why can't you just tear yourself away from your great unadulterated ways of torture and pathetics and be someone without a character that staves off others while necessitating their forgiveness? I am yours and I am lost and I am you beyond what you will ever know for every day within this universe expanding, drifting, returning, cycling about and about like our own still-life reviving. I know your name. It translates roughly to "he who knows no bounds." You are the greatness. You you And not I I though we are, quite truthfully, one and the same yet uncontrollably paradoxical. That is the rub. Aren't we the rub, then, my darling in the night time under the stars sucked dry? Stars sucked away piecemeal by cocaine-lines of grey clouds shouting and hailing that the morning is coming, the ocean isn't far off, you can leave me if you want. And go on forever knowing that I have my doubts.

But I am afraid of far too many things to pull you back towards me and hold you close against everything I've ever been taught. I've been afraid for six months on... I've known you for three years, I've known you for all of my life before the birth, before the conception, i've known you all my life and I am afraid that you will one day run away from me to become what I know you're not....

Day 57 - Atrocities

This is what we believe in, this is what we know: that the world is what we make it, that the world is how we perceive it. We are aware, yet we are subtle about our feelings because they can get us into trouble. We can enable though we can also disable. We can scare, we can incite. I think that there are fewer things that we can't accomplish and more things we can achieve if we only chose to become more self-aware.

This is what we know: we know that God is in control and that Christ died for our sins so we can live without regret or worry. We must be penitent. We must keep our feet on the ground. Moving forward forever more. I know your name. Pushing it all out beyond what we know will be the challenge in the days to come.

There are things I know, there are things I need.

"The children swing the dawn in." Put a quarter in the "end a sentence with a prepositition" jar.

Day 54 - This is the Mask. Keep your Ear to the Ground and you may feel my Feet Again.

She must have been dead.

At least for the past 10 years.

This sets up a mystery.

A faint dust rose out her mouth when she spoke like breath in the cold.

She did not ask them, “Did you receive the notice from the sheriff?” We are in the silver-star west.

The dead is still alive, you’d think.

Apparently, she’s living quite well in the past. It’s hard to tear her away from him. The Past is so charming, illustrious, and debonair. You can make him up so well.

She did say, “I seek you,” with that strange dust rising up out of her mouth as from decaying furniture. The little boys in the town said her lungs were made of the dust and that when it’s all puffed out, she’ll die. This is why she smokes: the tar holds all that dust together. That’s what the boys says.

I think her name was Amber. But there’s a disconnect these days. Her eyes of emerald green were filmy orbs merely held out to bemuse the cinders strewn about in stillness. She remembers the fire that that the electric blanket started. Her leg is still scarred. That was okay because she was able to kill her parents, and her scar was her reminder of that brave, August night when the heliotrope chose to bloom.

Some say that the dust is the ash of that fire—it is the ash of her parents, specifically, as if it infected her. She was the trenchant cat-lady but she didn’t have any cats… just the past. No one in the West was clever enough to car her the trenchant past-lady.

As said, she smoked a lot to hide the dust. She would draw it long into her lungs of ash, yellowing her left index and middle fingers before the War, then right index and middle fingers. She could not change teeth until she got dentures that she washed nightly. She found the sensation of smoking without teeth liberating.

“I did not murder them,” she said, 50 years earlier, at 20, as she tapped ash into the clear ash tray in the middle of the Spartan table in the middle of the apartment on the second floor of the decrepit wooden building in the middle of town. We are in the middle of the universe.

At the time, days after the fire, her injury was bandaged enough to hinder her walking. She would need a cane until it healed as much as it could.

The sheriff—brown shirt, silver star and all—subsequently heavy-stepped around the kitchen, as if his boots were made of lead. “You may say that, Ms. Amber, but we’ll find out the truth about you. About the dust. You know now, and we’ll know soon.” He was trying to impede upon her as she sat on the tweed couch among the rented pieces of someone else’s life. He was leaning down towards her so as to make his words stronger, as from above.

“That is well.” He could not instill fear, she looked up at him with a steely green view from below.

“Very well.” He replaced his Stetson and left down the rickety stairs, each one bending under the weight.

When the creaking and the moaning of the stairs ceased, she sighed. Smoke and dust.

Eight days late she was arrested on evidence that had nothing to do with the fire. She was released two days afterwards.

The truth was that no one but her would know. It was the scar that threw them off. It was so bad she almost lost her leg, and murderers don’t hurt themselves. And women don’t even murder. Especially at the age of 15! It had to be accident. It had to be.

It was the scar and it was also her lack of guilt.

This sets up a mystery.

It’s not like she was ugly, neither. The dust softened her lines, made her complete and deceiving, like the stars of Old Hollywood. Curious boys would sneak over on summer nights to see her change, to see her naked, to see her scar, to see her body—the most beautiful body in all of Babylon. They would see her pleasure through the window, her writhing and her toes clenching among screams alone.

She never wondered why there was a patch of grass that never grew. It was under her window and she understood. Though she knew (or thought, at least) that no one would lover her, she took solace in the fact that all the boys in town would want her. Society would say no, but the spot from which nothing could grow spoke more volumes than any city’s unwritten decree. This spot from where they watched, within her knowledge, said that all the boys in town had loved her and spilled for her. Everyone at least once.

She liked knowing this. She lived through the open window and got even more excited when she heard an escaped yelp and subsequent shuffling feet and jingling belt buckles as they ran away, erect and fearful.

…But then she got older and they stopped coming. They stopped coming and the grass grew back and she was alone again.

At this, she sighed. Smoke and dust.

At 35, the man of light appeared. His uvula was lit as if from bulbs within him. He came when she was 35. He was 37. She would cough, he’d open his mouth and they’d watch the dust settle unto love. He was Irish-descended, as from something great and Joycean, flaming lanky with red hair, eyebrows, and beard in the winter. He was wearing a Kelly green shirt and khakis when he laid her down for the first time. Everyone was watching. Her screams of painful pleasure rang through the city. I’ve never seen so much dust and light. They made love with the lights turned out so that we could follow by only what filtered through his teeth, guiding we the voyeurs to the parts of her body which he enjoyed the most.

The boys came back for a time, the grass stopped growing again. They liked to see the light along her scarring like nodes of direction along a canyon.

The scar consumed her left thigh and looked cavernous because it was deeply cut. It was as if she had reverse-varicose-veins that were sucked inward instead of pushed outward. It looked like roots to within her thighs or a roadmap upwards toward the grassy knoll that you could lay your head upon during a cooling day in October’s orange sickness. It was always so goddam beckoning. I stood on that grass with my hands in my pockets every week, looking up at her, wondering about her.

I wanted her but I was 20 years younger. She would never look at me. So, one night when the Human Torch was away, I snuck up to her room and took her for myself, pushing her back, rubbing the scar, coughing among the dust. She looked into my eyes, her orbs of emerald green, glowing with more passion than I’ve ever seen. She pushed me off and I looked at her like a chastised puppy. I was fearful and ready to run. I realized my lust and was ready to run away from it.

Despite seeing this she stated, “If you’re to going to take me like this, at least do it right!” She pushed my head toward the canyons and caverns.

I committed.

I ran my fingers along the roads to Babylon. The scar was erogenous. I should have known this after all those years. She screamed and clasped and writhed and scratched and coughed and covered everything. She was with the past again, in heat and in passion.

She was scratching my back from mid-spine down toward my kidneys, digging and digging and digging into my flesh. I bled everywhere among her dust that speckled it all.

When I felt the warmth starting to well up within me, I rolled over into the sheets and bit them, tasting my Type A. They were stained; they could never be slept in again. I had dyed them crimson with her help.

I stumbled out, tired and woozy from excitement and blood loss. My shirt clung to my back, the blood trying to get at anything as it cried, “Make it stop!”

As I left, the boys on the grass stared at me. I looked at them and smiled—I laughed a little in triumph. They knew that what they had seen was her youth once more. And never again.

They never returned.

And I suppose that the Human Torch saw the speckled, bloody, sheets and subsequently knew what had happened. He cried for vengeance at his hands, up and down the city streets.

But nobody really cared, I think, because they knew, from the stories that the little boys told, that she hadn’t been happier in years.

This settles up the mystery.

She would die a year later, to the date, as if her remembrance broke her closely to the bone.

I didn’t go to the funeral, I left town after that night. Clamoring west to the Ocean Away with nothing but my scars. I never knew what caused all that dust.

The Human Torch was doused two weeks later. He hung himself in the basement of their house. No one found him until a small boy of about seven (I think he was the Hendrickson boy, come to think of it) walked by the empty house and heard the decayed thud of the neck breaking apart. The boy peeked into the opaque window atop the basement and saw the heap of decay next to the head finally liberated below the noose that acted as liberator. This is diplomacy. I believe in you.

It’s been long enough to tell you. I’ve spent long enough in these lands with a name that translates roughly to “The Rooted Back,” and I have rooted you back to these incidents that happened so long away, so far away from this land among the grey clouds and forests and small houses and rickety shanties.

I hope that you can therefore understand. I followed the road to Babylon and am rooted from there, for 10 years odd… And so it is now I travel back and become uprooted.