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November 17, 2003 "I just finished reading your BM rants, and enjoyed them greatly. You
don't "write", you bang words like a metal smith on the anvil...You
write like the White Stripes drummer-girl attacks the skins. Just don't stop,
OK??" - Marie Vlassic, The Flying Pickle.com My Weird Life Sunday afternoon in a small southern California town. It's cold out, cold and
gray in mid-November here at 6000 feet in the mountains. Just an hour's drive
in any direction and it's not winter at all. It is instead southern California
the way you'd picture it: sunny, warm, almost bereft of seasonal change. If
I had to start analyzing why my life has turned out so strange, I'd start with
the weather. Like immortality, life without seasons just doesn't seem natural.
Next I would cite days like today, things like this. I'm a 37-year old poet and prolific writer who is damn-near totally unread,
certainly unpublished. I live day to day, rarely with more than $20 in my pocket
or anywhere, in the bank, under a mattress, invested, anywhere. Twenty bucks.
That's it. I have been in love no less than five times in the past twenty years
and still love them all, each for their own beauty and unique qualities, though
not one of them is with me today. Because I have no girlfriend and no job, it
is therefore assumed by most people that I have no schedule, that I probably
do nothing most of the time. This is of course bullshit, but it is a common misconception in a society where
the norm is a 9-5 job, a constant slew of meetings and appointments, then social
obligations from the simple wife-n-kids model to the complexity of urban social
interactions. I have none of these. None. Neither. Nothing. But I do have many
friends in all walks of life with the one common element being a creative bent.
All this is leading up to something, I assure you. And that something is bound
to be something weird. And so, today, it is. After a late night of drinking
gigantic cans of Australian beer and sharing Henry Miller quotes with the bereaved
mother of a recently deceased friend, I slept in til almost 2 this afternoon.
I awoke to gray skies and the fading, gossamer filigree of the strangest of
dreams (involving circus freaks, my maternal grandmother, and a one-hundred
foot sheet metal dragon on wheels). I showered, made coffee in the freezing
kitchen, and retreated to the warmth of my room and the small space heater humming
away inside. There, I did a bit of internet work, nebulous research and email crap that
invariably leaves me feeling as though hours of my life have been sucked away
from me with nothing to show for it. A friend dropped by and chatted awhile.
He posed a curious question that I did well to answer as optimistically as I
did. He asked, "What's the point of finishing a novel, of even writing
the middle of it (after having written the start) when you know the ending?"
In essence, where's the mystery in it for the writer? And if there's no mystery,
then why bother writing it down when, and here he pointed at his cranium, it
is already all written up here? This is the sort of "pointlessness of human existence" question that
typically sends me into a depressive tailspin, but somehow today I was able
to answer it more or less unfazed. I said that all three large pieces of fiction
that I'd written had ended quite differently than I had envisioned. The characters,
once well-developed, had essentially taken over and written their own ending.
This element of change, in addition to the fact that I gain a tremendous amount
of satisfaction from just plain writing, is what for me lends mystery to the
work and therefore makes it worth writing it down. After my friend departed, I sat down to a Disney movie and a meal. The film
dealt with the subject of immortality. I interpret its author's message to be
that living out the natural course of one natural human life is preferable to
eternal life. The romance of the two main characters, he immortal, she not,
was apparently insufficient to make her choose to be immortal with him. I didn't
buy it, but I cried at the end anyway. I retain the naïveté and
mushy sensibilities of a soap-watching housewife on her period. The film over, I listened to a few missed messages on my answering machine.
Both were from the aforementioned mother-friend. In addition to her now deceased
son, my friend - dead at age 27, she has two daughters in their early thirties.
One daughter is a successful cellist, the other a celebrity-level successful
bassist. The latter daughter, a "rock star" in the parlance of our
day, had recently announced her decision to move to Kentucky. I found it odd
that someone raised in Los Angeles, a celebrity musician to boot, would want
to move to a state that even I, for all my domestic road-tripping, had trouble
locating on the virtual United States map in my head. But, what the hell. Why
not. And then, the proposition that, for all its weirdness, prompted this rant.
Would I, the mother asked, accompany said daughter on a cross-country road trip
in the Ford Fucker, the 1982 Ford F150 pickup bought by her brother shortly
before his death, to deliver her safely to Kentucky? The truck is old, the road
long and full of scary variables, and mother, down one child in recent months,
is understandably concerned. I would go with, and then be flown back. Well,
would I? Would you? I mean, assuming you have no other engagements (which we
have well-established that I have NONE). Well would you? Do you, PUNK?!! (Clint
reference) The road. Four days with my dead little buddy's sister, my friend's daughter.
Was this Luci's doing? Luciano, up there in Heaven, moving us like chess pieces
and giggling. He was a wily little fucker, a quiet trickster, a good, good soul
with a wry grin. Of course this is him. It has his name written all over it.
Kentucky. Jesus. Anymore, I feel that my life is frighteningly open to such strange Kentucky
road trip possibilities. Frighteningly and wonderfully. We should all be so
lucky, right? Please tell me I'm right, that this is a good thing. Anymore,
I begin to understand what it is about true, absolute freedom that frightens
the living shit out of most people. I begin to understand, after years and years
of living like this, why the mass of men choose lives of quiet desperation,
choose cubicles, factories, adhere to schedules contrived for them by men they'll
never know. I begin to understand why people vacation the way they do as well,
choosing preplanned and guided tours over faith-wanderings in uncharted waters
and wilderness. I begin to understand a lot these days. Yet something inside
me refuses to choose that easier path, even when not doing so has resulted in
horrible fear & loathing, dark depressive episodes begging for the soothing
hand of death, anxiety and paranoia of terrible proportions. Even now, as six years of chronic depression culminate for me in a sort of
official recognition of my inability to cope in so-called normal society, I
feel like the sanest man on Earth. I look close about me and then farther out
in ever-widening circles like ripples on a pond, and I see insanities of every
ilk. Friends like me trapped in tape-loops of failure and nowhere-going despair.
Acquaintances derailed from hopeful dreams by ugly realities and nagging fears,
fears as pervasive yet insidious as cancer-causing toxins in groundwater. And
whole cities, states, nations, peoples swallowed up and slaving hard for matrix-like
illusions: credit card debts, glossy magazine beauty, desire for statistically-impossible
stardom, media-engendered fear of one's very neighbors, of "liberals,"
of strangers, of terrorists. I begin to understand a little too much for my own good, it seems. Is this
the price of freedom? To know that one can go anywhere, do anything, yet never
not-feel the pain and suffering of people, because you know it's there, because
you see and feel too much? A friend recently broke down a popular adage for me, took it apart, made me
look at it anew. Ignorance, she said, is not bliss. Ignorance is ignorance,
and bliss is bliss. I look out across this world, see the priorities of my people,
see all the bad directions we are headed in, and I wonder. I really, really
wonder. I want to believe in the inherent goodness of the world. I really do. But then
a dear friend blows his head off, when two months before an acquaintance had
done the same. And then a woman I know bids adieu with a noose. And daily the
death tolls come back from Baghdad. What's happening to us? What's going on? I think I'll take that ride to Kentucky, take the opportunity to get to know
better my buddy's twin-like sister, keep her company on the road and give her
some of the attention and love I now wish that I had given him. Maybe
we'll cry together. Maybe she needs that. I know I do. "There is no salvation in adapting to a world which is crazy."
- Henry Miller Kick down now before you wish you had. Even just $20 will tickle the Muses pink. Click da Button now! Until I pump out another Burning chapter, enjoy the photo gallery from Burning Man `02!
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