zachariahskylab

Perfecticrastinator [per-fek-ti-crass-ti-nate-ter]

-noun

1. A person who waits to the last minute to do a perfect job
2. A person who never gets anything done

I'm still trying to perfect the sand ziggurat. But sand doesn't like to form hard corners. I find myself sculpting more and more. First building up a pile of sand, packing it down and then forming the edges and the corners. Eventually I'd like to make pyramids and temples with elaborate engravings but first I need to work on simply making distinct corners and edges. Unfortunately Siesta beach was so crowded we couldn't find a parking space so we had to go to Crescent beach and the sand isn't as good. I have new blisters on my fingers because I haven't built any sand structures in a couple weeks.

I like my job. Basically we have a full-fledged partnership with the Salvation Army now. They act as our bank. Any funds we get from any of the churches we put in an account with Salvation Army. Then, when we refer someone to the SA, they first try to use any of their grants to help the people out but if they can't find anything that matches that particular family or individual they ask us if we want to use our funds. The only problem with this new arrangement is that I feel uncomfortable making such big decisions. Like I'm playing God in deciding who gets 500$ in rent assistance and who gets nothing. I'm past the point of feeling jaded. I've gotten over the initial disillusionment- sometimes we just can't help people. I'm fine with that. But it's a lot more complicated when I make the decision on who gets help and who gets none. Of course I still talk things over with my supervisor, but I just see where this is going. Eventually he's going to leave it in my hands. On the bright side, we'll probably run out of funds soon and then we won't have this problem. (It's really a measly amount of money to begin with, a couple thousand, but since we portion it out in 500$ packages that's a handful of people we can help if and when the Salvation Army can't. Of course we might get more in the future if we get more donations plus a grant we just applied for.)

I do appreciate that the learning curve at my job continues to climb. I am far from figuring everything out and it's far from boring. But it is stressful and it's hard not to take it home with me. I like this job more than anything I've ever done before so I think I'm on the right track, or at least a pretty good track.



I'm enjoying Florida despite the heat. It's been less than a year and this is the first Florida Summer I've ever experienced, but the beaches more than make up for that. I like where I'm at in my life. I like my kitties.
I officially turned 30 yesterday and it wouldn't be such a big deal if we didn't count in base-ten.

I feel like I had more to say... usually I try to communicate a bit more nonsensically. I'll close with a gratuitous picture of my cat, Vercingetorix.

Because I've become my father and now the withering look
comes from the bathroom mirror over drooled toothpaste
and viney nose hairs peeking out the corners of the nostrils
and the same judgement remains, the knee-jerk of the spine
reacting to a stranger sneaking in through the window or a politician carpet-bagging my moral outrage

Because I still favor certain texts, grant authority to old assumptions picked
up from commercial jingos and hellfire sermons, feel the slickness of the wheel in my hands at a red light,
or at times wishing my father could see me, wondering what that distance between us was, that
cat-out-the-window feeling of panic when I said something wrong, or how he never believed me when I lied,
and the way the screen door always bounced twice behind me when I left the house for good or just to get away by myself for a little time to think

Since I've become my father for whatever reason, whatever it was he said, his voice, like my mother's father's petulant tone, like all the boys throughout history acting strong for the sake of other boys, for the sake of an army of young men, but really for themselves, for the watery image of themselves in the eyes of their spouses before breakfast, or after work in some factory, how throwing rocks at other people, or nailing them to trees, or hanging them in the town square just made sense and I never repented for being what I was, which was me, or the idea of myself strung along a crop of highway memories too long to remember in one go, or

Maybe I'm just waiting to die, or waiting for my father to die,or the idea of death- no matter how long winded I become it's still an abbreviation of my own sense of self-importance, but there's loyalty also, and something undefinable- a single nerve ending dangling over the abyss, a tiny spark shooting up into the night sky, a me desperately waking up some thirty thousand times and exchanging verbal signals with loved ones, passing friends, finger gestures to unseen assholes who cant drive and then... I wonder who my father was, who I was, whatever happened to the memories I kept brushed and polished like a shrine to the saints hiding in my closet and the sins I kept count of with vengeful intent, scrupulously tracking accounts of wrongs received, waiting for the perfect moment to forget

Because my father said so and I disagreed, or because of what he didn't say when I thought he was right and only changed my mind when the crowd grew loud but even then secretly remained loyal and believed until it fossilized into a kind of religion, or pattern of thought that became a prison, the escape from which would come to define me and because it's the only way out

I'm waiting to die, or for my father to die so I can look back at him and take my time staring without any shame, to fix him in my mind as a single part of me, something definite and unmoving as a bronze statue wielding a sword, or a picture of his face just before he told me what I done wrong, or even just his fingers tightly gripping a leather-bound stack of papers with the words he dedicated his life to, whichever version.

I was in Tokyo and a tall Japanese man was asking me if I had ever heard the story about the tortoise and the fox. I hadn't. He leaned in closely and whispered to me with alcohol on his breath, "Well then listen closely, because everyone has already heard it so many times that they're immune, but you might get it..."

He proceeded to tell the story of the tortoise and the fox, but his voice kept fading in and out and he kept changing his mind about certain, specific details. And I was hungry looking around for something to eat, wondering what was good to eat in Japan, when all of a sudden I saw Coreena. Coreena, as in my ex-girlfriend's younger sister. It was such a bizarre coincidence to bump into her in the middle of some dirty neon bar somewhere in Tokyo that I went up to her and, not knowing what else to say, asked if her big sister hated me.

'Of course she does,' Coreena, completely nonplussed about running into me in Tokyo, replied, 'what do you expect?'

'I don't know what to expect. That's why I asked.'

Coreena shrugged. She was drunk. Almost every guy in the bar was plying her with dirty neon drinks to get into her dirty neon panties. She left with a group of party-goers in a decidedly unjapanese Ford pickup truck.

I spent the next hours asking everyone what was fun to do in Tokyo but they were too busy sucking down yogurt ecstasy to give me a proper answer. I stumbled down a brightly lit street with my hands in my pocket. I didn't know how I got there, or how long I would be staying, or any such mundane details.But I was in Tokyo and I liked the idea of it. The idea of Tokyo. A place I had never been.

Then my boss called, waking me up, to remind me to meet him at All-Faiths Food Bank at 9:30 am.

I'm writing this because I really, really don't want to start cleaning the bathroom. I'll talk about politics or horse testicles for hours just to avoid doing any real work especially when it involves using a carefully unbended coathanger to dredge out rotting hair sludge from the unseen depths of the bathroom drain. Although now that I consider the case more closely, I can think of no purer religious metaphor, ritual even, of cleaning your own bathroom. I am cleaning the cleaner. Deep cleaning the space I use to clean and drain my body, by simple sponging and humble poop scrubbing, I attain to a higher overall level of hygiene.





All language is a struggle for power. One idea of self against another, one meaning swallowed up by another, one symbol reflected in another, I have gone blind from staring too long at words running across the screen on the wall in the dark.

All power is a dance of moving, interconnected parts. The electric discharge, the swinging entourage of the spinning star treading through choppy galactic winds, the process by which a thing comes to know it is a thing has blurred, everything has coalesced in the fragmented shards of once transparent logic.

I am a quivering blob of consciousness making uninformed decisions that will change the future of my world forever while forming confident judgements about things I've never seen and forming well-established opinions of people I've never met. It's a riddle of a game in a dream and I have to be careful not to trick myself by thinking I'm awake.

I can't dig my way out. There's only one reality and I'm swimming upstream against it, through it, towards it. Downstairs, my wife is slamming doors and kicking cats with a righteously angry demeanor, rightfully knowing by the clacking of the typewriter that I am in point of fact only trying to delay the job that I promised would be done by yesterday- cleaning the bathroom.

I'm returning to Toledo, OH, tomorrow. It's been one year and one week since I've been back there. I've changed a lot since I left, but it's difficult for me to see how. I've reached a new cycle of stability, landed a normal job and a normal routine and it's almost a little boring. There were a couple years where I was committed to living a hobo life. I'm not too worried because I understand that the option is still available to me, will always be available. There's something I admire about homeless beggars, their proximity to reality, which we give up when we pay taxes and use electricity and talk on phones and drive cars and check the internet and all the little nuanced social interactions that warp our fundamental understanding of ourselves and our world.



It's not that I'm for one thing and against another. Say what you will about the evils and corruption of government in particular and society in general, but the average human life span has increased, the average, what's the word I'm looking for- the average level of comfort has increased, and on top of everything else, the range of human experience has exponentially expanded, not only because of population but because of more possibilities, more lifestyles. So I'm not one to argue against civilization. Nor am I one to argue for it. A domesticated house cat loses a certain aspect of itself, which it trades for comfort, in the process of domestication. The same holds true for humans. I'm glad that we are beginning to replace the law of the jungle with the law of logic and hopefully even, maybe someday, the law of love. But in the process, we lose a certain immediacy to our lives. Not every day is a fight for survival. Nor should it be. But it's too easy to go an entire lifetime without ever looking death in the eye until the very end. And that's not healthy. We can become saturated with the illusions of the marketplace and almost begin to think that it is the most important place and the most important thing.



I've become devoid of ideology. At least I've tried to become so. I've tried to turn off all my assumptions in order to listen to the silence. But I can never hear silence. I only hear the echoes of what has come before, and the constant, spontaneous buzzing of my consciousness.



So I'm returning home and my family is throwing a dinner celebration for me and my new wife. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it. But it's all part of an ancient pattern that's much bigger than I am. I'm trying to take it in stride. I don't want to make a ritual out of happiness, but a certain amount of ritual is inevitable in any attempt at communication. So, if they want me to, I'll even wear a boutonniere, although admittedly I didn't know what a boutonniere was until they told me I'd be wearing one. But it makes them happy. So I'll smile and dance and feel myself swept along by a prehistoric custom that I don't really understand.



A new home in Florida, a new business arrangement with a new partner, and a new search to discover what I really want to do with the remaining time I have in my life. I like to read books. I like to write when I have something to communicate and I also like to write as an exercise or a game, playing with symbols and meaning, watching them interact in new and unexpected ways, and posting the results on the nearest telephone pole. I like to go to the beach and stand against the waves, or build sand castles and let the water wash them away. I like to make love and I like to go for long walks by myself at night and smoke and think. There's lots of things I like to do but too often I numb my brain with computer games or television, or "work" or all the little things I do to distract my brain from a vast underlying boredom. I don't really know how to live. But I've read about people who knew how. And that gives me an example and some hope.

http://www.preemptivekarma.com/archives/2006/10/the_get_motivat.html

I didn't really want to go to the big motivational seminar today. What I wanted was a smaller, local training titled "Compassion Fatigue," however that was paid for with a grant that only applied to Goodwill employees, which I am technically not. My supervisor realized that I was disappointed when I wasn't allowed to attend the "Compassion Fatigue" or the "De-escalation Training" and so he tried to make it up to me by getting us all tickets to the motivational seminar. I told him I didn't want to go. I told him no three or four times. But when I was asked a fifth time if I wanted to go and that they still had an extra ticket, I relented and agreed to go.

I'm glad I did. I didn't like it, but it gave me food for thought.

The "Get Motivated" seminar featured Zig Ziglar and Rudy Giuliani as well as a handful of other speakers. It lacked substance. It's like someone throws a big feast and sets up a lovely buffet with fancily decorated tables but serve only large trays of skittles and M&M's. Here are a few examples of their gems of wisdom from my notes, which I took because I couldn't believe the watered-down pablum they were serving and felt the need to document:

-Your whole life will change if you clean up your act!

-Positive thinking changes everything!

-This is how successful people stay successful- by attending seminars, workshops, getting the books, and watching the dvd's...

These phrases are taken out of context, but that's the thing- there was no context. Most of the time these cliches were strung together with no connection. So it started bad and it only got worse. It soon became clear that we were being pedaled a cheap brand of christianity. Let me be clear. I consider myself a Christian. I think there's something wonderful about the message of Christ. But... I couldn't help myself from identifying with the atheists who were were invoked and mocked by one of the speakers as I listened to the heavily leavened christian messages climaxing into appeals to sign up for the investment training workshops for only $99. It was ugly. It made me hate christianity.

Taking the pseudo-religious element out of it, it's unsustainable. The motivational speakers made it sound like everyone in the room could learn how to invest their money and they would never have to work again. Now if everyone in the room can do it, then why can't everyone in the world do it? And what if everyone in the world stopped working and we all just support ourselves through the stock market? It's imaginary. It's pretend. It's a kind of magic. And it doesn't make sense.

I don't even have a bank account. I don't think I was their target audience.

But after all is said and done. It beat a day of work at the office. It was at least as enjoyable as watching a really bad movie that you can make fun of.



And this is a mostly unrelated article by the New York Times about motivational speakers raising fears of mind control

I like my job. Earlier this week I screwed up in regards to one of care-receivers in need of foreclosure prevention assistance. As a result I was asked to attend the Goodwill Housing Team meeting with lots of middle-aged women with sassy attitudes. I flipped it on them. I became the hero. I went in as the screw-up and came out as the hero.

I’m having trouble adjusting in Florida. Basically I haven’t made any friends yet. It’s like a friendship detox. Just me and Erika and work and the landlord and a few neighbors.

Also I had a dream that Barack Obama came over to help the landlord fix the wall in our bedroom closet. We started talking about books and he let me borrow a book titled “A Short History of Non-Linear Mathematics.”

There’s actually no such book. I googled it this morning. But it did lead me to read about a lot of interesting phenomena related to non-linear mathematics. I had never even heard of “non-linear mathematics” before this dream. But after reading about it, I know about all sorts of stuff, including “freak waves,” “soliton vectors,” and “robotic uni-cycling”, (difficult but not impossible if formulated as an inverse pendulum function.)



Also, for my job, does anyone know if you can retrospectively claim earned-income-tax credit for previous years if you’ve already filed?

I’m obsessed with my cats. They are really the only friends I have.

I need a separate desk for my typewriter. There’s too much contention between the computer and the typewriter. I’m afraid to leave them alone together because I know I’ll wake up one day and find one of them murdered by the other.

I can't stop building sandcastles. It has come to define me. It is what I do. When people ask me where I come from or where I'm going, I say I come from building sand-castles, or I'm going to build sand-castles. It is the only positive impact I will ever make on the mold of human consciousness. My only contribution as the trundling iron-cast wheels of civilization pass over my life time, a few crumbling sculptures at low tide. These particles of sand are made of waves, and they will reverberate into a future that does not remember me, or the blisters on my fingers.




I am content to build sand-castles. It enables me to understand the fluctuating value of the water and the wind. I study history like a myrmecologist observes the nest of her favorite species of ant. I am outside of the law, beyond definition, a shallow puddle of human consciousness reflecting the sky. I build sand castles to describe my impression of existence- a gritty tower destined to crumble- tragic and beautiful.



I divine the future using clamshells for oracles. We will all most certainly die. Some of us dreaming of Prester John's earthly kingdom and earthly life, and some of the wandering Jew wandering like Cain with a mark on his forehead, cursed to live forever. Sand dollars are the talismans of the wise. I hide my treasures beneath the ocean where they remain safe. I am fully invested in the moment. Now and forever.




After I finish my ranting and foaming at the mouth, after I finish prophesying, I collapse in a shivering jello of confusion, sun-burned and dehydrated, and return home to take a nap.

First period. I don’t remember how I got here. But my cat, Vercingetorix is with me and the teacher, Mrs. Hrosko, doesn’t like it at all. But she’s a pushover and I’m 29 now so it’s easier to push, so the cat comes in. There’s only two of us in the English class. Mitchell Hawley and I. Mitch looks up to me because I’m older and have a louder voice. I begin to paint. I have a couple cans of different colors, a few brushes, but only a few small pads to work with. Mitch on the other hand brings a huge piece of canvass and begins painting abstract alien art that the teacher begins to rave about. She doesn’t shut up either but keeps going on and on about how much of a genius Mitch is. I grow jealous. Not a lot. But definitely a little.

Mitch defuses my jealousy easily by looking up to me. When a couple hippie chicks with their children arrive to pose for us, he acts just as if he were my apprentice. Setting up my boards and preparing my brushes. Just as I’m about to start I look at Mitch. He has an angelic simplicity in the way he holds his head slightly lowered. An ingrained humility. Maybe he is a genius after all. I tell him to go work on his own projects. He smiles and leaves. I begin painting the hippie chicks and their young children. They are beautiful- on with long blond dreadlocks tied off into pigtails, and the other’s hair keeps changing color as I stare at it. At first they pose and keep still, and I get a good start, but then the children start moving. I still try to capture everything I see honestly but I’m having to fudge it here and there. The painting quickly becomes a mess as all the figures keep crossing in front and behind of each other. When the entire board has filled up as brownish-gray soup of paint I notice that the hippie chicks are painting as well, and their paintings are much better than mine. I laugh and throw up my hands.

“I never said I was a good painter. I just enjoy doing it.”

( Continuous... )

How did I end up sitting on a wobbly stool staring at the egg-shell plaster walls, too lazy to toast a bagel, too bored to read a book; just to pass the time I watch morning talk shows and drool when Martha Stewart presents her cupcakes. I have to wash the dishes again. I have to vacuum the floor again. I have to scoop the cat litter again. I dreamed of floating through eternity wrapped in divine aether like a fine mist over the pores of my skin. I had visions of lighting to split open the heavens, and the moon crumbling to ash- I wanted to be Moses, to part the Red Sea, to send plagues, to rant wild portents to hard-hearted pharaoh. I yearn for angelic visitation, for illumination in the depths of a shadowy cave, for truth with a capital T potent enough to make a blind man see, and infinite hidden treasures of wisdom fought over by wild dogs in the alleyway. I'm driving myself to hysteria, forcing myself not to sleep, honoring all my hallucinations as sacramental and holy; I savor strict dogmatism like a fine wine. Just once I want to KNOW. To balance the significance of the Kosmos on a single Koiné infinitive, to understand the overwhelming sense of a Dagesh Kel on a curved Gimel head, to leave behind the body, in short, and live in those pure realms of mind and spirit.





I failed college. I still owe them money and now the attorney general skims the top of my tax return. I got a job at a box factory and stopped going to church for fear of excommunication; I know I'm a heretic. I can't stop thinking about ants and their empires. When I answer the phone, I don't speak my own name, for fear of having too much pride. I feel sorry for myself and for my imaginary prodigy. I stare at the eggshell plaster wall, too lazy to toast and English muffin, and watch Judge Judy for a sense of self-discipline. I need to wash the dishes and vacuum the floors. The kitty litter stinks. I used to imagine travelling to distant galaxies with angels on a ladder through the heavens. Now I'm eating chocolate ho-ho's and waiting to die. But first I intend to compile a critique of the assumptions hidden in television commercials and mail them off to their respective corporations. And then a nap.

            Yesterday I set the sheets and pillowcases into the washer and let them spin for some thirty minutes. The smell in the laundry shack reminds of something I can no longer remember. It reminds me of the mundane, casual passing of time from childhood until now. The things I remember are remarkable, but the there are things I don’t remember, that were so routine and unconscious, even at the time, that they have coalesced into a coral reef of hidden memory. Something hard and tangible, but non-descript. Nothing stands out. The memories have refined themselves into clear glass, smooth and unseeable. I run my fingers over it, once twice, and then move on.

          

            I’ve lost my touch. There are so many things I’d like to talk about, memories to describe, poignant thoughts while I can’t sleep, secretly believed prayers during a walk on a cold winter night with a full moon. But there’s no time and my life has become a series of boring chores to help other people dissolve their problems in the system. I used to have wild dreams of soul wrenching stories, or the idea of burnished truth set for all to see. I’ve forgotten, or perhaps never knew, how to tell a story, how to describe the exuberant sense of loneliness I feel walking alongside the highway. I’ve lost my sense for details. My singing voice has changed for the worse.


            Maybe I need that ancient artifact upon which to construct an edifice for my tottering towers of conceptual metaphysics. Sand has gotten into this keyboard and my teeth are slowly rotting; I no longer strive for immortality, but for simple reality and human contact.

     

             Nothing’s the same without sound. Can’t hear the vibrations in the air- it’s like a dance without music, all the intentions dissolve into a simple matter of fact. I don’t know how to free myself from all the obligation of meaningful seriousness. I’d rather learn to fish, I’ve never caught one, though I’ve sat for hours pretending to hold a stick with wire dipping into water with a hook at one end. It didn’t work.

             I used to have consecutive linear thoughts. I used to dream long strands of narrative onto the page and allow each reader to guess at my innermost secret intent.

          I need my old machine. I need the sound of a machine gun to accompany my thoughts, and the worn out ribbon to trace faintly the insinuations of my most subtle feelings.

             I put the sheets and the pillowcases into the dryer. My mother used to hang sheets to dry. That is a good picture of paradise- children running through summer-dried sheets blowing in the wind. Laundry detergent companies know this and have already bombarded the collective unconscious with these images and pleas for money. Pleas for money come everywhere, and the wealthiest tend to beg the most. Of course one could say they are offering a trade and this is true, but it still seems unnecessary to spam television shows with repeated commercials offering the same lame crap in the same damn way week after week with no hint of ever letting up. Just once I would like to see someone buy a television commercial slot and simply recite a poem, or sing a song, without selling anything. It’s an indication of babylonia when simplicity and radicalism overlap so much.
 

 

            And then sunshine on a new day- of course- always makes me feel alive again. On the internet I find portents of doom everywhere, and I can’t tell if that is because of impending destruction or merely the tendency of anonymous people to over-exaggerate. It’s just a ride. This life is just a ride. If I end up murdered in the street by drug-brained hoodlums, or a mob, or a civilized court, I still have to admit that it’s been fun. That I’ve enjoyed it.

      

Of course portents of doom have been around as long as humans and solar eclipses. Fear can catch your throat but it’s still important to think. There’s no one in control. A feral species, we have no way to understand our own psychoses, no way to see what could be wrong, no frame of reference to diagnose our own illness.

     We are saying openly that these men of the Darqawi way of learning are men of freedom. They have mastered themselves, so everyone is free around them. The present society has leaders who are inwardly in chaos so everywhere around them is oppression. The great fear of modern society is not that of the police - it is merely an outward manifestation of the inner fear of the power group who lead society. The leaders of modern society are walking demonstrations of terror - their own fears, that so fix them in bodily and mental rigidity, crush the other, not only physically but in a restrictive mental atmosphere that has no outcome but violence and death (introduction The Meaning Of Men, Shaykh Dr. Abdal al-Qadir as-Sufi al-Murabit ad-Darqawi)

   I'm continually amazed at the depth of Islam. Like Christianity, it is heavily layered over with bullcrap, but if you pull back the layers, you find the honey.

   The worship of the present society is not an atheist society but a deeply religious society and it is a zoroastrian society. The guardians of zoroastrian power are the people who are at present the occupiers of the Haramayn because they worship oil which is fire. They take their living by it, their power from it and their importance from it. This is shirk. They depend on it therefore it is their god, therefore the occupiers of the Haramayn today are mushrik because this is open worship, it is not nafs.


So anyways, even though there were a lot of terms I didn't know, I was able to follow it more or less. I learned the concept of a barzakh, which is a barrier between two non-intersecting oceans. Man is a barzakh between the seen world and the unseen.

    “…its oil all but giving off light even if no fire touches it.”

It is light in itself before the fire has even touched it. The human being’s secret is light before it is even ignited. Man is the khalif of Allah, if he only knew! “Truly man is in loss,” Qur’an says. Why is he is loss? Because he does not know his own secret. Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, radiyallahu ‘anhu, says in his Diwan, “Truly if a man knew the secret of his own heart he would never speak again, he would shed a tear with every breath he took.” It is already luminous before it is even lit and the gnosis lights it.

    “Light upon Light.”

   It's especially neat to me because I had just read this Surat this morning while I let my cats out for a walk in the courtyard.

An actual good deep informative rich personal analytic group discussion. Heck, I've almost dropped my bad attitude and gone over to the other side, the loud brash obnoxious hand raiser with urgency as if he were about to ask for a bathroom break. Of course I always try to combine the roles of class clown/devil's advocate/and outsider rebel all in one for a confusing mish mash of angsty rhetoric that makes Sylvester Stallone from Rambo look articulate.

Still, what do I know? About anything?

First evening at Americorps Vista training. All my reactions to everything are mixed. Hiding behind my roguish facade for the benefit of my roommate from the suburb slums of Philedelphia, I secretly yearn for a sincere, spiritual revelation in the claustrophobic affairs of my day to day living. I'm not so naive to clap at every Joe Success Story from a liberal arts college in the Rockies founded by a Tibetan monk and funded by rice proceeds- nor am I so cynical as to believe that none of us have sincere ambitions to explore and harmonize with our ever-changing environment and social construct. As Vista's, our stated goal is to fight poverty; however I hearken back to the Medieval, and other obscure, esoteric, and even mainstream schools of thought throughout human history, that consider poverty as a virtue of the individual, particularly in those wellsprings of creative compassion who wander the planet incognito as we speak, healing the sick, and fixing secretly broken bones in the alleyways of our decomposing cities. I suggest we embrace poverty and tweak our ambitions toward new and alternate means of life and our fundamental perceptions of the underlying spheres of reality.

The food's good at least. Steak and kidney pie last night. Tapioca pudding.

I do wait upon epiphany like a long-distance lover's imminent arrival at the airport. No that's not right. It might not come. I wait upon epiphany like a long anticipated letter from a close relative, or an old friend from high school upon whom I could always depend to reply to a letter as quickly as possible but now has a wife and a career at Detroit Public Schools and so I can hardly blame him for failing to remember to reply to my heartfelt sense of nostalgia. I think what I'm trying to say is... I've lost faith... in my self... in my God... in my godself... in all my re-hashed conceptions of the real, in my most basic understanding of primordial phenomena, at the eschatological level- a tautology of the soul- my own personal definition of the word, "I", and of everything that directly followes after.

I have a headache. I need to sleep. I wish my roommate would turn the television down...

Too many thoughts for words. And too little time in which to set the words. The pinball board of my understanding of the surrounding environment has lit up and all of the bells have begun to sing. Something is happening now. Like pygmie shamans, we blow smoke upon one other and play at economic theory to calm the angry gods of this impending storm. Fear.

And loneliness. As we begin to understand the vast infinites stretching out above our heads, we wonder if our earlier childhood dreams were real or not, if our ancient scriptures were naïve or wise, if all of this can be rationally explained away or any of it.

At least Nate dreams that I am some kind of hero, that he will wake up one day to find me panhandling on the streets of Montreal when everyone thinks I’m still in Florida. I’ll ask him to keep my secret for me and never let anyone know that I’m a beggar and a poor one at that. How sweet it is to appear in the dreams of old friends, old lovers, sweetness that we will never know, never properly imagine because we only ever taste it as the sadness of dreaming of our own old friends and old lovers. Sadness and beauty stand in direct proportion to one another.

I’ve been reading Jeanne Guyon's, "Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ." What a terrible little book she wrote. I picked up her book, as well as another by St. Theresa of Avila, (From 16th century Spain, not Mother Theresa,) at the Goodwill yesterday, where I work. We had a meeting. I got there early and bought these two books and just sat down at a table and started reading them. Now I can’t stop. In fact, I stayed up late reading Madame Guyon, whom I had heard so much about growing up. I suppose that’s a better activity than vegetating my brain playing some open-source computer game for hours on end just to see what it’s actually possible to do and play for free. What strikes me are the very obvious parallels between Madame Guyon’s book and the various meditation techniques described in the Upanishads and elsewhere. It strikes me how similar these teachings are at their center. And yet, when speaking of the unspeakable, when trying to describe the deep, personal experience of the Eternal and the Infinite, words fail. There is only metaphor. Rumi put it best when he said it is like a bath house where various costumes and dress are hung up on pegs outside the bath. On the inside everyone is naked.

I’m beginning to think that language, and possibly even the human mind are essentially dualistic, or aristotlian. False dichotomies abound in conversation, in the news, in our own heads. But that is how we think, in scales, in on/off switches. We’ve been trained to think like that since Kindergarten. I don’t understand reality. I really don’t. The closest I can come to describing it is as a deep underground river full of sparkling gems. Bu you have to dig deep and inward. Most of the time we are too busy considering what others think of us, how we will be remembered. The idea of self limits us. It’s almost as if we are trying to get a high score in a MMORPG. Again, we are encouraged from a young age to “make history/” And I would agree that children and young people need to be encouraged to develop themselves to their full potential. But it’s too easy to cheat ourselves and others by looking only at the outside things, at the surface things. We honor superficiality and we don’t even know how to appreciate real wisdom, real honor, real people.

It’s a ruse I play against myself. A cheap parlor trick. A hedging of the mind and soul. A cleft in the sea of my self. Whatever I say, whatever I see or do or know, it is a series of waves copied, patterns on the surface of a screen. More than illusion, the effusion of life through the pores in ancient rock; space dust risen like the Pheonix from catastrophic ash! This petty edifice upon which I erect my being, the idea of ego, this self I want so badly for other persons to admire, it is an artificial construct. The person is the mold that contains the essence. The mold can change, the structure can shatter, but that invisible liquid consciousness will remain like water in outer space, or so we would believe if we could remove ourselves like fish from the sea, if we could decameralize the camera, or spot the spotter, like spying the secret behind the magician’s trick- we would know!

I know a song or two. I have heard the old ballads of ancient men, well fought and dead. I have bowed my head reverently for honored elders to say a word of prayer. The sap is freshest at the core. And at the edges, an outbreak of megalomania, a babylonia of idle chatter, a clutter of images fills the empty spaces between each cell, what we want and what they want, what everybody wants, only distorted in a mirror and sold to us for nineteen ninety five at participating stores one hundred percent satisfaction or your money back guaranteed! Is it any wonder we try to debug the universe? We can find no foothold against our own mad desire. There is no center.

Blind hunger, deaf panic. A stampede of elegant cattle justifying to ourselves and to each other our reasons for running together off a cliff.

It’s only just past noon and I’ve already inaugurated a new president. Not bad for just sitting around in my p.j’s watching television. Speeches and music and poetry, a great clapping of American hands, and nods of the verbal head to nations around the world, whatever it is, the ancient political machine trundles on like a broken wheelbarrow. It smells of old paper or a field trip to the history museum where a curator might talk to you about freedom, power, and sacrifice. Some people just die. Still, it is nice to hear it talked about, working for the common good. Entropy forces us to unite. Fear is an axle grinding without lubricant. Life is a precious cargo on an unwieldy planetship rigged against the stormy chaos, imaginary or otherwise. It is like a child carrying glass marbles in both hands as she sits in her purple banana seat and rides her bike. She cannot steer well while holding them so they cause her to crash and the marbles go scattering down the road and into the sewer grate...