Month the Twoothe

4.20.23 Up against the bandsaw

There is no time for this, this familiarity, the pressure from the family. There is nothing wrong, I’m sure of it despite the voice in the back of my head that intones my deepest fears in the voice of somebody else’s father. I hold my gun here between my fingers wishing I knew a damn thing about the damn thing, wishing that I had more direction than to document the emotional toll of the passage of time. For that is all this grasshopper can manage right now, any attempt at craft has amounted to triteness so far. Keep the lights on ladies and gents, with careful accounting amongst the witches.

And yet I try to do it with style, with grace even, despite my clumsy falling down at the sight of an old friend whose professional chops have far outgrown me and my little old backwards ways wishing for a change of pace or at least a change of season. So cut out the bullshit and hand me a shovel, my own grave won’t dig itself and neither will yours. The only thing I am sure of is I will need one one day, be it five minutes or eight hundred years from now. Now will be with us then too, and now a small prayer that I hope as I take my leave I will realize the splendid relief it is to be nobody in the end.

And I guess I don’t necessarily need a grave, do I? Lots of options on that front. So morbid, so trite, so obvious. Why am I all of these things and if so why has anyone made it this far. Intonation in my voice even though I am not speaking, the human act of listening, distinct from the animal act of listening. Am I listening? Are you?

Musically I have only rhythm and the linear instruments, I know nothing of chords (or next to nothing), and my hands are as stupid as Frey Solar. That is why it takes me so long to compose. But in my slowness I found God, with the quarrel between the voice that speaks and the fingers that must record. A stickiness, a stickiness all too reminiscent of what I don’t want to speak of.

But I’m the one driving the bus, and the thing that ends up here is a function of me, whomever that is. There’s been a lot of speculation over who that might be, ultimately, but I won’t toot my own horn despite my dumbass tendency to speculate. My own dumbass tendency. I could write a book on that. Maybe I will. Maybe I will do a lot of things, but I will speculate wildly almost surely, I can’t help it. It’s written in the heavens for me to be this way as if I wasn’t capable of changing, as if I wasn’t in control of this little body that is not separate the way I thought it was when I waz thinking there was control. But who am I, really? Who are you? There are simple answers but they are not as interesting as some of the things that have trickled down as the absolutes lost traction interacting with time and the material world.

Am I or Neil (Neal?) Cassady driving the bus? Is it the big endlessly capable demigod or is it lil’ ol’ me who can barely tie his own shoes with his hands behind his back? Raise a glass to those that came before and then another for those who have yet to be. The meek who any minute now should be inheriting the Earth. Hijab and all. Shouldn’t have said that Richard you can still take it out but nope the tablet is coming down the mountainside, draining the Red Sea into upper Africa. A bread basket for the Arabs? A gift in the coming Kingdom? How many kingdoms do you think occupy the Kingdom as legend has it this rock is destined to be? How many Kings beneath the banner of the Redeemers?

I’m tired of all the hopes of Utopia, there will always be politics and even if we can get over our present squabbles (if genocides can be called such an innocuous word) there will be others. Discord is a necessary part of discourse, and not everyone can be happy. So be like the grasshopper and ride the breezes across the pasture that for all you know is greenest in the world. For it is yours, and that which is truly ours makes us know that time is an illusion and that all singular moments are one big in-out (im/ex) that will leave us all wishing for an encore that the universe almost certainly will deliver.

Tata for now, buttercup. I wish you wouldn’t smile so large when you think of the world actually ending. I wish it scared you like it scared me, and that you wouldn’t remind me of the separateness (space?) that keeps me from seeing where it is I’m headed.

4.21.23 Underground the sun never shines

There are two kinds of people in this world, and though I’m not much for broad sweeping generalizations I’m going to make one here: There are people that believe in God, and those that don’t. It’s an interesting distinction from a purely evolutionary standpoint, that is, which provides an advantage in reproductive fitness in the long run? Which is to say that settling down with your Christian Bride™ and pumping out kids is an easy option (easily obtained), but might not lead to the most adaptable familial culture in a changing world. Whereas reproducing among atheists is significantly less common, but these children tend to be raised on science, which is a primary language of the machinery that makes our society turn. You might even say it is God, in a way that Yahweh was in ancient Israel.

But in terms of God, or anyways as I understand it, believing in it or not comes down to whether you think that life on Earth has a steward that transcends time and space. That is, a steward that is always present in every moment because the essence of time is but a facet of their becoming material. That this steward is in control and will take care of every soul as they deserve based on the way that they are. And none ever knows how they are besides them and God so any judgment of perceived fairness is impossible, and besides, they and God are the same person. A committee of one with no oversight. Seems a pretty unfair gig, huh?

Only there may be an evolutionary advantage to allowing yourself to put Faith™ in the notion that someone more powerful than you is in control of what is happening in the world. Not in the sense of Earthly politics, I don’t mean, but that every action of man is an action of God, they being made in Their image (Abrahamic religions identify Them as He, South Asian traditions tend to address Her, I’ve split a hair here)–humans being made in the image of God, all human imaginings and all actions are God’s on a technicality–In its furthest extensions it is a recognition that the separateness we assume between objects in material reality is an illusion and that in reality it is a conscious continuum that really just wants to be opened, er–recognized. But we will leave that aside for now.

Because it can have some terrible effects on a child, this religion business. But it makes us strong, and it makes us believe, even if this belief is against our better judgment. Because God wants you to disbelieve in Them, it seems. Wants us to assume control of our breath and through that breath the world. And yet all that an action of God. You begin to see, I hope, what I mean when I say I truly don’t know who I am.

Because there’s an argument to be made that I am God, and that you are God, and that we are all uncovering each other slowly like a sparkler burning down on the 4th of July, masks being shed in a succession of light, a procession through our iterative selves, and all along the conscious mind, the thing that watches and watches and watches and so rarely speaks, these parts of myself that want to care for me and only know how to with drinking and drugging and the blank page. But that is my burden, and I don’t know that I totally buy all that everybody’s God business, though I wouldn’t take it so far as the Christians and say that only one guy ever was and he’ll be back someday to be God again forever either, but maybe, who knows? I told you pretty early on that I’m not here to save the world, that the troubles of others concern me only so far as they move me, and even then, I, like a tall arbor swaying in a stiff breeze, am still rooted in earth.

There is a certain silliness to speculating about God on the internet, as there is a certain silliness to walking the left hand path without a physical Guru. If that is what I am doing, often I am afraid I only hear the echoes of a stone falling from a ledge, moved by my heartbeat it clatters and sputters and comes to rest and all I hear are the voices of the loved ones. The pressure to achieve comes later, the desire to be bigger than small, only I know that small things sometimes have an easier time surviving, don’t they? But don’t I deserve to flourish?

Aren’t we due for a social revolution, isn’t our freedom of expression the one thing we have going for us in the west? Can’t we engender more joy instead of just maintaining business as usual? It would require us to think of doing things differently, first of all, and then we would actually have to do them differently, and that I think is where a lot of us get hung up. Because to change, to be flexible, is something that, while it has always been a strong suit of our species as a whole, we as individuals tend to struggle with. We like our routines, and our safety-nets.

But there is no safety-net, really, it could all fall apart at any minute. Be aware of that always friends, and be grateful that you aren’t dead yet. And for the roof over your head, if you have one, and the food in the fridge, if you have any, and for the love in your life…I grow tired of this small room, I grow tired of the weight I feel often, pressing in on me from all sides. Is it guilt, or shame? Or a cycle feeding one and then the next? I don’t know, but it is heavy, and it has made me strong. Only I never wanted to be strong, I wanted to be fast. And now I am slow, slow slow slow, trying to see the good in every being I meet, bee, bear, and flower. Do not speak of the brown one, child, for their kind is always listening. An ancient superstition like this has every right to exist.

But that is enough for now, only I wish to say that it is possible to Acknowledge the existence of God without believing in Them, by way of admitting that even if it is just an idea and has no transcendent material bearing it still exists in the minds of men and thus is borne onto the material world by way of their actions, no? So even if a delusion we cannot discount that They are very real. Scary huh? Or a cold comfort akin to salvation, I guess.

TTFN,

R

4.24.23 To The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me

You said you wanted to feel alive and I don’t know how I feel about that. Don’t you already feel alive? Or de you mean alive. I mean scin crawling alive. Fuck you bitch I don’t know anything about no stinking dog. There is only the smells of the vices, the filtering effect of the liver. We don’t give up because we don’t know how. Ow. What a bitch it is to see your own reflection here in letters.

I used to be such a burning example, I used to be so insecure. There was cuidad, meaning caution not care there was so much holding back. But I’m through, have had enough of the way i have been in the world. I am here and I have no more reservations. There is nothing left to stop me.

Except the way I will feel in the morning light. The opposite of this midnight special, the opposite end of the high being low. And I don’t know who the…fuck that line of reasoning, may morning never come, never show its ugly head around these parts ever again.

Turn your face to greet the sun and you recognize the face you have always seen behind the moon. The same brilliance that drove all those sleepless manic nights through the endless progressions of the same old same old. Maybe it is time for something new. Maybe, she thinks.

And who am I to say anything about what is going on with me. My feet won’t stop clapping but I know what that is about. If ythe don’t put me away it’ll be a miracle. I’ve not been dead yet three days and already things are pressing in on me like the ten walls of this living room. What a day and what a floor plan. What a strange and unusual day to be ripping hoons. It seems like it should be raining, like there is a wild beast out there in the rain that knows your last heartbeat like something it has long ago possessed. Like a wolf but wilder, if such a thing were possible. And I just a small man–er a man made small by his desire to be but a rabbit to the wolf. Easy pickins but brittle meat. I don’t know what that means. That whole paragraph is gibberish.

Time for a fresh start by which I mean that these fingers move on their own when things are going best, that the thought starts and is finished by the letters moving out along the horizontal column (aka row) and don’t forget that one year at summer camp you accumulated so many nicknames as to be known as aka, all a product of having Dick not follow directly from Richard. How do you get pointy toes to sit on your face? Why, try asking her nicely, lad.

Strange that that sentence is punctuated wildly differently than it’s said. British accent required of course. There is no course that this stream bed is following, we are going downhill at a high rate of speed and need no more encouragement than gravity herself provides. Thinking of my Self as a person that I would like to see more of and beyond the high concept of a Self that is your best most authentic self there is just the way that you actually are and that guy is pretty cool most of the time, when he can just relax and not worry too much about what the others think.

You’re my favorite burden when you sing. Hey. By then you I could do without, let them shoulder all the blame. I don’t know how that contract\ed but I kind of liked it. Slash slash www.slashslash.bash What an addressee. I’ll leave that there and leave you with this: the grass was green before you were born, but was only made that way for you.

4.30.23 Too long

There is nothing worse than too late, said one old master looking back on a life of pain and suffering and little inflexible moments of joy. There is a beauty in that, and I’m sorry I was talking so much about God. It’s just that at times there seems like there is nothing else. Does anyone else have that problem?

The trees are starting to bud out and the airs have been still the last few days. I always long for a great spring blow in this part of the calendar just to rattle everybody’s cages a bit. Always the suggestion that I am not the doer, that the doer has been compromised and I just a slave to the perceptions that rage inside me. You can’t get out of prison until you recognize that you are in prison I think the saying goes. So where were we? Here: the experience of reality in its totality without the slobbering of the ego to distract you.

So many distractions, so many suctioncups on the nose. What does that mean, pardon me sir, I don’t understand you sometimes. Am I talking to myself, or not even to myself but the vacuum where I imagine myself to be. I’ve seen that void, tried not to stare. There’s bodies in the bataclan, there’s music in the ere. Where do we sing? On Friday nights, of course. Maybe I will get her there with me, knowing how precious our time together is.

No more shopping, no more pills! If I can avoid it anyway, and maybe I’ll even pull this needle out of my arm, the one that makes things so desperately easy as riding a bike with training wheels. To face down the winds of October, of full moons and paper thin walls–that, is the dream. There is something about my life that reminds me that I don’t have to take myself as seriously as I have been. That’s a given, for anyone who really knows me. I just heard a scream, from a distant beast. They are out there, waiting for us to descend to the depths of the Cthonic realms where their presence is still tolerated. What a strange and unusual day. I don’t know how we got from there to here but here is a lot better than there. For now anyways. G’morning to the rest of ya’s, I’m off to see a man about a dog.

TTFN,

D

5.1.23

Happy May day, and felicidades to the one and only Botchkiss, who with any luck will read this on the day of its debut. One can dream of such a readership. There has been no greater influence on my taste in letters. And I but the humble servant of someone outside of time who feels like speaking. There is no give, no take, there is only the progression through the Champagne daydream, the screaming interpolated vocals of Ethel Cain. I’m nobody’s daughter. I’m nobody, and what a relief.

See I always thought that I needed to do something with myself, needed to leave a footprint, a perfect Angel, in the snow. But that snow will melt if the present is any indication. What a strange world to inhabit. I am just the passenger, along for the ride of wherever this century is taking us. With any luck, I’ll see the next one. But don’t count on it, that would make me very old. And for all the cigarettes, the endless offerings to shiva and zeus. What a strange fire to keep burning, within one’s own chest, to keep the flame knowing that God smiles at you that you must die. For They know what a torture it is to be eternal, to be alone. I will not be there, And if I am, then that is to be and I will die by my own hand when I am ready, and start the whole process over.

I don’t know who came up with this sick game, but the devil told me it was me. I don’t know what that even means. Who the fuck is he to be the fucking Devil. The arrogance, and I to be God primarily as his foil. What a strange and innocent trip in a man who fears God so much he will shut Him out of his existence. For his is HIS and I do not mean to imitate a snake, for this man is more centaurian than serpentine, though so perhaps it is not wrong to call him a snake. MN is calling and I’m contractually obligated not to pick up the phone. People talk, but e know.

Make sense of that why don’t you, spontaneous poetry at the speed of my slow ass fingers. There is a heavy guitar riff that has me half chub in these mental hospital thrift store trousers with a tear in the gooch. At least until you find out what a fake I am. There is no end to the fakery that I am willing to perpetrate here. That any of this is mine; that anything belongs to anyone. I can take everything from you at any moment, can end the experiment for the both of us but that serves no one. Who is writing this? Who really?

Because I know people would tell you it is God and other people would tell you it is me, but speaking as the one who is typing this out it does often seem like I’m taking dictation, and Henry Miller wrote of writer as receiving apparatus, and the fact that I managed to spell Receiving but not Apparatus write is not an error. I have control, he is not writing this. It is only a bit, everything is Recieving nicely.

–D

5.8.23 Erasurehead

Today is a new day, a new opportunity to be kind and to have fun. But always bear in mind that L&G not to be confused with L&P which is in most every restaurant meal you have ever tasted. I’m glad for who I am, and that I’m alone in here, and that I can be both sober and use. For Sober™, as given to me by one of the keepers, is “of a sound mind” and we can be sound and be high, or have a few drinks and be sound. So I guess I would say I finally got sober. After all those years of madness. The pain swells up within me, a gangrenous boil–too close too close Richard take three steps back and turn around. See the pattern of your mind and let it too fall away.

What would be left without the pattern we ask ourselves as the morning sun beats down on the body we share? There will only be I, as I am alone in here in direct experience of the reality that often I am tempted to call God. But with the inception of God comes the presence of other, and in fact beyond, beyond, beyond that beyond is the only place to be. Too much, I ask her, as the scent of her flower drifts by on warm springtime breezes. Oh Guru you were inside me all along! Strange and curious, this tradition belongs to no nation, under nor over God. I am neither, I am only They, at peace in this body and in love with the world as big red trucks pass by on the street. And sleek silver sedans, ladies in pantsuits and the same old busy body neighbor who always seems involved in a construction project.

But oh, the devil’s inside. But that isn’t much of a concern. I was destined to die before I made a deal with the devil, and I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell as absolute eternities beyond death, so my lot in the universe is not changed but for the soluble perceptions that came in the wake of that trip to the crossroads in front of Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor. And change me they did, first splintering and then unifying my consciousness. And still little shards of broken glass, little snatches of unreality sweeping over me and often within the fugue of smoke.

There’s not really a lot to say about anything. You can get back a soul you’ve lost, if only you don’t die first. Ha’Satan is a very real presence in the world, but he lives within, that patriarchal conscience that makes you feel small and under the gun. He I finally have a name for and so can exorcise. Why did you speak to me in Bob Keedy’s voice? Why try to poison that?

Always that, isn’t it. The thing that is coming. The thing that will take Him too, when all is said and done.

Start over, if you can manage it, you only have the rest of your life.

5.9.23 Haste makes waste

There is no more urgency than there was yesterday, which is to say there is still quite a bit to go around. A false start, though not a falsity. Just things that you don’t need to know. In fact I don’t need to know them. There is a lot of love in my life and I don’t have any complaints about that. My slippery fingers, the devil who is just as comfortable messing with me in the silence that I have cultivated with the realization that I am alone in my head. You see the slip, no, the devil in here too but he just me a thinking portion of myself a slip of a j or a k into a word. What does it mean, is it just a typo, but if so why always significant letters? LM LM, I don’t remember what L&G meant in the last post. I am alone in here. It is only the guru who is I and We are They in conversation available to fill up as much of eternity as remains for Us. Why I am the way I am is none of Their concern, it isn’t really even my concern. I’m unbothered, you see, unmoisturized, but hydrated, truly.

I think I am tired of the direction this has taken, though it has been useful for me, personally. I think the true miracle is that any of this exists at all. There could just as well be nothing but there is something! What a joy, what a relief. Even if you change the past you really can’t fuck it up too badly. And if you think that you can’t change the past, think for a moment about ancient Rome or Egypt. You have some picture of it, right? But what makes you think your imagining of that time and place is anything like the way it actually was to be there? And if it differs from the reality haven’t you effectively changed the past?

Sorry, Time Travel™ is not coming for a little while yet and anyway haven’t you heard about the 2029 time traveler jail set up by an inept US Government? The world is a wild place, and we’ve only just begun to probe the limits of it. Be prepared for an unusual future, Ladies and Gentlemen (now I’ve got it), because we have agreed upon an unusual past.

5.10.23 Nothing to show for it

I’ve got nothing to say which is a pretty terrible way to start saying something, isn’t it? But on we must soldier as the couples stroll the streets, the sun shines and the air conditioner humms. Remember when I shook the pillars with an AUM? Who remembers the hour that they came to realize that their time here was impermanent? That it couldn’t go on forever, our blessing and our curse. Speed on down that desert highway, meep meep. There is something waiting for me in the sky, but it has nothing to do with where I’ll go when I die.

You see in the space between my breath, the ache in the back of my throat of the cigarette I foolishly smoked last night, there is a stillness, a spaciousness, and that wasn’t there before despite the forever eternal presence of tat. And there goes the painter, king David in his little honda. I want a honda. Wouldn’t change the fact that I have to bum rides off people. All my life the feeling of being in sin, and then all of a sudden a shift like a baptism and I am free of that. What’s the point? To be Kind™, I thinks.

I haven’t done anything wrong, and there is no Eye in the Sky who’s going to rate my performance and consign me to one eternity or the other. I’m going to die and maybe be reincarnated but maybe not. Maybe I can step simply off the wheel and be blessed for my singularity. They say I’ve been 10,000 humans before but I don’t remember any of that. There is a grace in allowing yourself to die. To accept that no matter how many times you live you still can’t save the world. That God and chaos are in control in varying ratios, and there’s no reliable way of forging a utopia of Atlantean proportions.

There is freedom in that limit, but also…it’s a limit. Makes me feel like I don’t have time to idle, and yet it is in the idling, the precious stillness, that the peace comes. So smile today, say hi to your neighbors. And don’t forget to eat lunch, and to get some sun if that is happening where you are. How do submarines come back up? Forward thrust and fins I guess. Sometimes the simple answer is all you need.

TTFN,

R

5.13.23 Tired time

Yes you might have guessed that by the time summer rolls around I’m going to be exhausted. There isn’t enough caffeine in the world to keep me from feeling it, unfortunately. Actually all the world’s caffeine would surely be an overdose. I wish there was music to drown out the sound of that airplane but my phone is wet and won’t charge at the moment, and I might need it later. So phooey, another day, another inconvenience.

That is the way with modern life in the first world. I rarely even have too many problems. Most of them are work related but that has no place here. You never know who might read your blag. But I’m tired of incompetence in the world, people who are so distracted by their lives and their inner struggles that they can’t do the things that are required of them. It is draining to compensate for it. It can suck you dry sure as a vampire or a lady of the evening, in a couple different senses.

So how do we inspire competence? How do we inspire people to be better? What is the way through the dark wood that threatens to consume the poet on his way to the concentric circles of light that await him in paradise? To come into communion with God? Is that all it takes? And what does that even mean? Something about the present moment, the ever spacious now where in fact everything seems to be happening. And if everything is happening now then why am I worried about next week? Because I don’t feel I’m being treated fairly, I guess.

But I said I wasn’t gonna talk about that, only I don’t know what else to talk about. I’m running on empty but there is still that silence in my head that wasn’t there before. That is something worth talking about, only the nature of silence is that there is nothing to say about it. I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine. I wish I could be completely uninhibited, at least for a little while. That I could just reach out my hand and take advantage of the fine things being laid upon my table. But alas, life goes on, steaming ever toward the finality that makes me, ultimately, what I am.

Which is to say temporary. Like a wave breaking on the shore I will dissolve back into the sea of time, and who knows, maybe someday I’ll be a wave breaking once again, but I doubt that any of this repeats itself exactly. If you knew how to fly an airplane do you think you would rather do that than what you’re doing now? I know I would, but I’m kind of a weirdo. Did you ever read Richard Bach’s Illusions? About a messiah from Indiana who travels around working miracles in a plane that defies the laws of physics? I don’t want to be that guy. I’d rather be anything but that, I think. Even if it is all just an illusion I’m still going to treat it like it’s real knowing that I too will die a painful death. Gotta have some gravitas, you know?

I guess that’s enough for today. Thanks for bearing with my boring stories, but they can’t all be winners, and I am not singing for you, so to speak.

5.16.23 Desnudo

I am clothed, if any of you were wondering, but still naked. Naked before the Lord, the thing in my chest that requires that I be honest with myself and others. It sees me, and demands that I be what it sees. Which is fair I suppose, for I can’t really argue with the logic that I should be the thing I am. But what is that thing? Who is that man? For it seems that that is where I fall on the gender spectrum with no regrets. Or few regrets anyways. I guess I’ll always have a couple, like that it has to be this way.

But what is this way, what is this cold discomfort, this emotional pain that has had me iced out for the last few days, dying under the pressure but unable to let it off. I must be crazy, mustn't I, to be struggling? Only I don’t really feel like I’m struggling, only sad. Sad for what has been, and for what is yet to be. But also happy. This is bittersweet nakedness I suppose. But naked I am and so I will go. There will be no secrets before God, ultimately.

That anyone could love me is something I have always struggled with, though I have heard people say that my own ability to love others is born out of my ability to love myself. Only I don’t know that that’s the right relation I have with myself. It is not quite love, for love is something else, and I’m not quite sure how to describe it either. Which is to say I don’t know how I feel about myself. Certainly I am angling to do some questionable things it seems. Where to look? There is nowhere to hide.

Brenda told me to turn toward my passionate side, to become one with the man who bears the great feelings that I have always had. Thelonious Monk told me that the only guys out there worth a damn are the ones taking risks. Costar told me that every choice has consequences. I guess they’re all right. And I just the one down here under the gun, forced to bear the consequences of my choices, of the risks that I feel compelled to take in order that I might live in my passion. Is that so wrong? Asking for a friend.

No I don’t have any friends, not really. I am utterly alone most of the time. And that’s not true either, I do have friends, if not as many as I used to. I feel like a fool. Like I don’t know anything about anything. What does it say about me that that feeling is comfortable? That it’s not the thrashing beast of my manic self, and instead the cold hard truth that I bear within me. The quiet and sane man who has been living all this time beneath the layers of delusion that have kept me safe in a blanket of infinite future for all these years.

For my days are numbered. I don’t have any time to waste. For every moment He does not catch me I am grateful, for the power to dream of the life I really want I give thanks. For the angels who have helped along the way, I weep in the light given by your Grace, but you must know that you are not the ones I serve. For who is it that I serve? That transcends the material desires of the man whom most know as Richard? I am not in control of this anymore. I have surrendered to God, I guess, only to find that I was right when I initially realized I was He all those years ago in a fever of LSD. For what He wants is what I really want, consequences aside. It is the earthly hurt of those consequences that keeps us bound to samsara. The suffering doesn’t stop but you realize you didn’t have much of a say anyway. Some things are too important. That, I think, is the truth.

Or anyways my truth. There’s more than one way to be, and more than one way to move towards the will of God, which, again, lives within me and is not an externality, ultimately. And I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t still fear. It is with me every moment. That I am wrong, that this will all be a waste. Only I have never felt so called to anything. So able to answer the call by being still. By knowing that I must act and that there is no rush on that action. And always the spectre of Death, assuring me that there will never be enough time. And the call of the knife, telling me that it could all be over if only I was a little braver.

Only I know that voice and that voice is a liar. And if I couldn’t let my family and my grandmother find me bloodless in a bathtub then, then why would I now that I’ve realized how precious my future is. And still it screams and shrieks and hisses. Calling out that the strain is too much, that it doesn’t have to be this hard. Only it isn’t really that hard. If I have something to do I am distracted from it, and if I don’t then I stare at the demon until it blinks. It is the only thing to do ultimately, all of it, the whole wretched anti-plan, of object and subject with whatever path between. I am tired but I’m not down. I’m drowning but I will not die.

There are things I need to do but I can’t do them now. Instead I will convalesce here on the porch where so many happy days have been had, and so many terrible ones too. Somebody once told me I would have to make a choice, but I always had a sense that at the critical moment there would be no choosing, that the right thing would be obvious, if not easy.

I’m not sure that I was right.

5.16.23 Fig Leaves

Korshye,

I still don’t know what exactly I am going to do. I feel like I have unmet needs. And a lot of love for other people. And everything is different than it was just a little bit ago. I need to tell you. I need to talk to the boogieman. So maybe yeah, I would like to ask the girl with the pretty smile if she wanted to go on an alcohol-free date with me. Is that too much to ask, really? To have permission to see where my honest to God feelings take me? I love you, Korshye, and nothing is ever gonna change that.

You see, when I met you I was extremely delusional, living in a world that didn’t exist in an attempt to escape my pain at what had happened to me in the one that did. I still long to escape that pain, but I don’t think I get to. Don’t have permission to, to do that, that is. I need you. You’re my favorite, my fancies are out of control. Fervent cycling through repetitive thought and emotional patterns. Interrupted by the five miles that brought me from my state of naked grace. Instead I am here in pants and an unbuttoned flannel listening to weird music that I’ve only heard a few times. It’s a nice change from the endless hit parade.

Now that my heart is broken I can see so clearly that it will never be as simple as ‘yes or no’, and that only a person who didn’t understand me would expect that lack of nuance. Or maybe she only meant to say that she didn’t care, as I don’t now. Cycling, cycling, these thoughts, but the cycles get shorter and easier to interrupt. The present is quiet except for the hit tv show theme song and the clattering of my fingers on the keys. Tiesto baby, I’m tired.

Tired of pretending that these social strictures work for me. This is it, I ain’t wastin’ time no more. My process indicates that the choice is more obvious the longer you regard it. I’m making up my mind, for what seems like the thousandth time in twelve days. Headaches, eye-strain. Sore from crying. From holding still in my emotions. And yet, and yet. Where are we going?

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over,

Richard

P.S. I’m calling it on Taurus Season. I’ve had quite enough of taking the bull by the horns. I love you. XOXO