I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I don’t know whether I am a lucky bastard or an exploited chump.

Someone should put a bullet in me.

It was the springtime, and somewhere in the middle of the west desert are children, children in the foothills of a mountain where the shadows gather. They sit outside the boundary of the funhouse, outside the boundary of the park where the giant Indian lives. He is smiling. He smiles forever, carved as he was by everyone, by us, by his maker to look at us with judgmental eyes, pointing out everything we ever did to his people and everything we know to be true.

He stares.

And there, within the boundary, are the slides. Maybe ten, maybe twenty. Only it’s springtime and they’re not operating yet; they’re full of ice and full of the hopes of little children that haven’t arrived yet. But they will. They will. When the sun comes, the air will be full of the laughter of little children and the water will be full of the memories of little children sliding, little children swimming, little children remembering in the future.

But at the moment, the air is simply full of ice and of the breath that you could see only two weeks ago.

And they cross the line; they cross the boundary, these young men of the spring. They pass by the Indian where he sits, looking at them with the same wise eyes that his maker well saw, well read in his ancestors, as though he were stealing souls, as though he were stealing from Shelley. And so it goes.

They climb.

They climb and in the boundary they find what they are after: gravity and the path to the water, to the below, to the darkness, to the womb. And they stand. And they talk. And somwhere within the boundary they find their camaradarie and they know; they know where they are going and what they are doing.

A smile. A gesture. A slice of life and a slice of knowing and they are off. They are off. Together they descend, together they race toward darkness and wetness; together they race toward the metaphor, toward their innocence. In and out, around and around, circumventing this corner and following that one, up on the ridge and down below the edge, in and out of the shadow and in and out of the evening. It is all what they are; it is all what they will be, and they are one with it. They love it and they love each other and they love their matrons for having borne them.

And at length, one of them loses a wheel. And then another. And now they are wild and reckless; now they slide, now they twist and now they turn. Now they are primoridial and related.

When all is done, they have stopped; they are somewhere along the way, somewhere in the twists and tunnels, somehwere in the dark truth and miasmatic meanderways of the suburban villa into which they’ve plunged. They aren’t particularly wet and they aren’t particulary dry.

And they realize that they are alone; beyond the boundary lies nothing and no one. They have been left. They are alone, alone, alone, like a mixed-race child, like a prodigal, like a rebel son.

Together they run.

Together they run.

Two men who stand in the middle of the hallway for minutes talking. For hours, talking. The drink. It’s incredibly bitter, you almost can’t get it down. Now you want more. And more. And more. Stairs. More stairs. It smells like food, like whatever people are eating where you can’t see them, a kind of familiar otherness; you wish them ill. You wish them well.

The doors. The same doors. They are strange and unheimlich even after all of these weeks. There is a small crowd. There has been a speaker. The tile floor. The flags. The carpet. A strange man that you used to know, now dressed in traditional Pakistani garb. You don’t speak to him. You don’t know what to say. You’re self-conscious even though you know it’s insulting to be so.

A shaky table, no leg, with a checkers board on top. No-one has played checkers on it in years. It shakes and shakes. It’s not 1850; you can’t bring the bitter drink with you. “The common people,” she says, as though you care what she thinks, sitting across the room like she is. Swimming lights. The bitter drink begins to take hold. You want more of it.

The future. The near future, at first. In it, there is a car. You don’t know what it looks like yet; you haven’t seen it. It may be a mirage, you can’t quite tell. But you cling to it like it was a raft, like it was your keeper. The others. You know they’re out there, but they may as well not be; it’s quiet here even though people are speaking. The man in Pakistani garb laughs. He’s suddenly very foreign. His smile isn’t friendly; it’s menacing. You hate him, not because he’s Pakistani, but because you’re not.

Hollowness. Apprehension. Uncertainty. All of the things that are your friends when you are alone, when you are on the road with yourself and yourself. But you are not on the road and you are not with yourself. You can’t revel in your hate or in your loneliness. You have allowed yourself to care and now you are like the others.

Like “the common people” that she talks about, from across the room. She is speaking to her friend. She made fun of you, not too long ago. She has always made fun of you. You wonder if she makes fun of the man in Pakistani garb, but you don’t much care. You begin to thirst for the bitter drink once again. You begin to thirst for the past.

You begin to thirst for once, when you were a small boy holding a red ball. You begin to thirst for umbrellas in the rain in the city in the seventies, before there were strip malls, before there was an Elmo. You have been around for too long. It has been too long since the rain. It has been too long since Sugarhouse. It has been too long. You are ready for something. Not for this. Not for what you have.

You are ready for what you are sure must someday come.

But someday is still such a long way off that you can’t fathom it. You want more of the bitter drink yet again. You imagine New Orleans. You wonder if you will get there. You wonder about everything. You remember something about a race, something you didn’t think about earlier, when you heard it for the first time. You remember your grandfather, surrounded by smoke, serene, wise. You remember the leaves. You remember the apricots. You remember everything you have ever known, but you forget yourself.

You know that you are not who you were yesterday, and that you are not who you will be tomorrow. The table shakes. The checkerboard is full of your thoughts and no pieces. The light is full of the shadows of darkness chased away, like a bedtime story written by an eleven-year old boy long, long ago, when three buildings were the world and nobody was in danger. Like a small dog alone in a big world, but for the coat that surrounds him and the owner who carries him. Like yesterday. Like love.

There is nothing. There is nothing. Tobacco and Absinthe and the wood from which the table is made, like a Camus novel, like a gas station dream. You are ready to leave.

You stand up and leave.

I am as confused as ever. I don’t know what I think. I wasn’t going to forget, but now I barely remember, even though I know that soon enough, I will be telling myself (once again) not to forget. Life is little more than a collection of vicious cycles. You get your choice of which one(s) you want, but you’re not allowed to ever live without at least one vicious cycle of some kind going on.

On the upside, I have now written an outline for one of my papers, which will now practically write itself. Should be about an afternoon’s work. As a result, I am probably a good twenty-five percent of the way done with my quarter’s papers. F’ckya.

But what to do just now? I don’t know. Same as ever. Follow my nose but avoid where it goes.

check your tyres
grease your eye
and see through liars
things get odd
you get heady
don’t jump early
if you’re not ready

What a silly fucking game life is.

Things are broken. I am broken. I love broken things. I love to polish them and polish them, to fetishize them like they are George’s kisses on my right rear cheek. Dollars, dollars, flies and worthless people! I love them all!

I love them all!

—

we have to find the perfect leader
we’d love to find the perfect leader
we need to find the perfect leader
we want to find the perfect leader
it’s time to find the perfect leader
we have to find the perfect leader
we’d love to find the perfect leader
we need to find the perfect leader
we want to find the perfect leader
it’s time to find the perfect leader

—

A Word Of Advice = best fucking song ever.

Today I feel strong. Strong and angry — a good combination — a useful combination. Today I will do everyone and everything. Today I own all of you. Fuck you all.

Today I win. I win without pity, without remorse.

Today is to be an excellent day. Excellent.

It should have been an up evening. One very, very good thing and one mildly bad thing . But instead, I’m fscking bummed because those things that always seem to repeat themselves… are repeating themselves again.

That whole “circle of life” thing belongs to past generations, when mating relationships were primarily economic, and only shockingly, in the end, loving; now things are the opposite — they are primarily loving and shockingly, at every one of the ends you’ll endure, economic.

No way I’m getting any work done. It’s time for that road trip. Only it’s not. Damn.

So… I was gonna amend my last entry before, but since the pictures I plan to post are so fantabulous , I decided to make a new entry, because don’t nobody wanna miss these. So… here are the latest fotos from my life. Oh… that’s not what I meant. Ha!

Bad pun. Fsck. Yes, I read the damn book, I liked it, go suck a… Oh well. Scroll down for pictures.

On the left… the “enemy” card I found in my mailbox in the department today. Note the fangs and the little droplets of blood coming down off of the knife. It’s not unusual that I have a lot of enemies, but none of them have ever sent me a card before. I’m touched. There’s maybe one major suspect and one or two minor ones, but I may never know who to ruthlessly ravish for this .

On the right… the beer I had last night while working on Project 51 . As I drank it, J. had the balls to suggest that M. Python isn’t actually funny. You’re wrong, J., but I love you anyway.

—

Later I’m going to Jimmy’s. I shouldn’t because my academic career is in a shambles. But by God, I have drinkin’, and other things lit’rary, to do.

—

This parrot has passed on. No fuck.

Heh… I’m a pretty unstable person! For some reason right now, that really makes me smile.

Jesus… I don’t get things like this:

Me: “I should let you go, you’re busy…”
Others: “No, no, I wanna talk, let’s talk…”

Others: “Mmm… I should get going, I’m pretty busy…”

—

Were they the wrong three words? I mean… why? And of course posting this is bad behavior… I hate bad behavior. Bad boy. Bad, bad boy.

—

Don’t nobody tell me that I’m playing at being Jesus Christ only my ennui isn’t as great as his world-crushing existential pain and it’s blasphemous and all that, I’ll take your Jesus & nail his ass up somewhere so that he can’t compete with me for sympathy and for taste.

—

Who killed the Kennedys? I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, all right.

…in exactly the same way that bricks don’t. Harmir: got me summa them now. Shit, what are you gonna do. Nothing you can do. Just woke up and they’re still there.

—

Roe v. Wade almost overturned
Welcome to Utah
Katrina gets it.

—

And here’s why I woke up: there was knocking. Knocking on the door. And it kept on. And I tried to ignore the fuck out of it. So finally I come to the door and some leftover genetic malfunction of a man, all pink and lurpy with that white trash moustache that you love so well, is asking me if my window is open.

No apology. No “I’m sorry sir to wake you up, but…”

I tell him I don’t know if my window is open. He tells me that “If it is, it needs to be closed for point grinding.” I tell him okay, I’ll shut it if it’s open. I close the door. Then there’s another knock. I open the door again.

“So is it open?” the same waste of skin asks me.

“I think so, yeah. I’ll close it.” I tell him. I shut the door.

Another knock. I open the door again.

“Please close it.” the motherfucker says, apparently not noticing the fact that he hasn’t yet given me the three and a half seconds I need to get my ass across the damn room and shut the damn door. At this point I want to grab him by the face and smash his skull into the door latch.

“Hold on to this door,” I tell him, “so that the spring doesn’t shut it again. And then you can watch me close it.” He actually takes the door and watches.

I go and shut the window.

And having finally seen with his own hairy-possum eyes that I did indeed close the window, he lets the fucking door slam. No “thank you,” no apology for waking me up or for acting like he was the fuzzy foetus of his mother and her half-wit brother.

So now my window has to stay closed all day, so that the room can get all hot and poisonous, while this insane grinding noise goes on just outside of it for renovation. No problem, though… since I have no Internet access in there anymore, I’m not in there anyway. I’m sitting on a bench on the first floor half asleep and drooling on my keyboard.

The charm of I-House is wearing off really fast.

Jesus christ, all these people who know me trying to tell me who I am. I hate running into people and dealing with their expectations of me.

Me & the SO googled Aqueous & the electaboy. Oh sorry, electaman. The hot lover. (Everyone likes to say the term hot lover.) Burlington city council people do make national news tickers! Then:

1. Half of class. Spaces of neoliberalism? What?

2. Some text messaging. Now that I have an unbroken phone, and no Internet, I will become a junkie.

3. Ex Libris. Food and drink.

4. Fixed a certain broken bit of the blog that I’m sure Aqueous noticed.

5. Working on the paper that’s due tonight before midnight.

Oh, guess that means I gotta go. Shit. Welcome, Aqueous!

How many things or people in my life do I care about? I can count them on one hand.

The purity of a drug is one of its most important factors.

—

More than anything, I need a god. But I am not capable of having one.

—

All of my life I’ve tried so hard
Doing my best with what I had
Nothing much happened all the same
Something about me stood apart
A whisper of hope that seemed to fail
Maybe I’m born right out of my time
Breaking my life in two
(Throw me tomorrow, oh oh)
Now that I really got a chance
Everything’s falling into place
Seeing my past to let it go
Only for you I don’t regret
I was Thursday’s child

—

If you should die before me, ask if you can bring a friend.

—

There is nothing. There will be nothing. There has never been anything more.
Ashes, dust, and me.

Spring is the most sad of the seasons; winter I love. True, in wintertime, you can’t help but consider and accept your own mortality. The end of the year is icy, but it’s always familiar, and the warmth the endless stream of little holidays is everywhere. Ultimately, wintertime is mine and yours; it’ll be our shared destiny until the day we die. There’s a kind of comfort in that. Sprintime, on the other hand, forces you to face rebirth…

…and the fact that no one, myself included, will ever see another spring.

—

I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty. I hate the human heart. I hate human frailty. I love the human heart. I love human frailty.

I don’t understand anyone. I don’t understand anything.
I miss everyone. I miss everything.
I love everyone. I love everything.

—

Marry Queers, Get Charged.
Another Day, Another Coup.
Books Not Bombs.

—

Logan Fils, bring it on down.