Yeah, this sucks.

ocd sans plan/routine = live fish on dry sand

On the 47 bus there was an old crazy lady who had a face like that of a corpse, and would dress it up with incredible amounts of pink and red lipstick and rouge. She will actually be a corpse by now. Internally, the transition will have seemed like quite a major one, but to the rest of the world there probably wasn’t much difference.

Likewise, the people who used to see me on the bus every day never once gave a thought to the fact that I stopped riding it abruptly sometime in 2001. In fact, I suspect they never even realized that anything was different. And I don’t look like a corpse at all.

Well, not entirely.

—

Sesame street teaches children that a) karate is for men and b) it is used to do the work that is otherwise done by wood-cutting and cinderblock-cutting saws.

Also, the X Files are still shown in syndication almost continuously.

And everyone loves images of hell, the more depraved the better. Whenever an image of hell is about to be displayed, everyone secretly leaps and dances with anticipation inside, then is secretly disappointed when it really isn’t that disturbing after all.

There are better poems in me than the ones that I post here, but every time I try to write them, they stand up of their own accord and climb off the page, climb off the monitor, abandon me with a singular sort of disdain.

I’ve therefore more or less given up on them, since it’s painful to be left again and again by one’s own fondest creations, in which one had placed so fervent a field of hopes.

—

I don’t belong in this century. Obvious thing to say, I know.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve always felt like such an alien living in the United States, and I think it’s because I received a fundamentally Chinese upbringing, thanks to the fact that my dad is Chinese and my mom is Mormon (a very socialistic, authoritarian worldview). I was raised to believe:

   – That you can trust the gestalt to provide order, stability, and care
   – That you must in turn provide stability and care to the gestalt
   – That interdependence is the key to greater social wellness and personal happiness alike
   – That self-sacrifice to all others is fundamental to these goals
   – That you can also expect all others to make the same sacrifice to you
   – That order is not only good, it is essential for all to function or to trust the social contract
   – That justice should be uniform, blind, universal, and swift
   – That personal “dreams” are mirages whose karmic (for lack of a word) value is often negative

Really, deep down, I think I believe all of these things. I want to sacrifice myself for (again for lack of a word) the state, and I want the state in turn to promise me food, housing, and family. Note that the state in this case is not a faceless government, but is really the collection of all others, a manifestation of the caring of each citizen for every other — of the willingness on the part of each to sacrifice self for the betterment of all.

But this is the worldview of the former Soviet Union, or of past Chinese regimes. Certainly it bears little resemblance to anything practiced or believed in here in the United States. Here I feel betrayed by the gestalt and by nearly all individuals within it because none feel any responsibility toward me, and I feel paralyzed in my own behavior, unable to develop the initiative to sincerely want to transcend the gestalt and act purely in my own interest. I so very deeply wish that I could feel that others were comrades and have them in turn call me the same.

I simply do not want to act in my own immediate self-interest, nor do I believe that I should act in my own immediate self-interest, yet in this culture no-one but me is ever going to look out for my immediate interests. In fact, here it is seen as fundamentally impossible for someone not to act in (or want to act in) their own immediate interest; it is something contrary (goes the dogma) to human nature and human will.

—

I don’t know. Maybe I don’t think all these things. Maybe this relentless self-analysis is just destructive. (Maybe?!) But it remains true nonetheless that there is some fundamental paradox in my being and context that remains central nearly 30 years into my existence.

“Freedom” is a trope invented by the bourgeois to keep the working class working. There is no greater enemy of the common man than “freedom.”

—

Yet another scoring system for politics, but with a twist.

Your scored -4.5 on the Moral Order axis and 5 on the Moral Rules axis.

The following items best match your score:

1. System: Socialism
2. Variation: Extreme Socialism
3. Ideologies: Social Democratism, International Socialism
4. US Parties: No match.
5. Presidents: Jimmy Carter (77.79%)
6. 2004 Election Candidates: Ralph Nader (81.12%), John Kerry (68.36%), George W. Bush (39.04%)

Statistics

Of the 84198 people who took the test:

1. 0.1% had the same score as you.
2. 5% were above you on the chart.
3. 93.9% were below you on the chart.
4. 77.4% were to your right on the chart.
5. 15.9% were to your left on the chart.

What I found most interesting were the relationships between the political variations, ideologies, and religions. Also interesting were the respondent plots by nation.

I want to vomit. I want to vomit forever and ever and never stop.

—

Way beyond Easter disenchantment
and into the kitchen realm of all these things,
really wanting to break, I go.
I am a transient in Chicago snow falling,
full of revelry and the warmth
of everything I’ve lost.
Down these backyard alleyways
between black giants, I am following my breath
to a little room of evening respite,
to a place of rest —
wherever that is.
The voice of so many Sunday mornings,
concerned forever that I impress and grow,
will tell me when I’m there,
in that cadence I used to know so well —
it seemed another shade of me.

I hurt.

It’s been a long time since I grew my home
in the city’s womb, beneath the trees
where books and names were born for me —
where the days were belonging,
the nights were endless travel,
altogether deep and whole.
When the wilting swore, I took my core
and drove off into the sidewalk sands alone,
not knowing if I would ever return
to the wooden leper land of knowing —
to a place of fiery rebirth.

I didn’t.

Since then, I’ve seen a gathering of things,
across my path or just a step ago,
and I’ve never stopped dreaming
of the living I did,
on endless yellow days
so long since gone.

Tonight is different from the rest;
this darkness climbs the high-rise walls
and smiles to me on my urban way —
on a night where I’m ready to abandon the walk,
to forget where I’ve been
and find a place
to stay.

I will.

But now, between footsteps on the track,
I can hear the stinging guile of every person
that ever hurt me;
their lies accumulate like the drifts
that mark my way,
cold and unfamiliar
the last impression of the chanting crowd
on the saddened heretic —
no apology to be heard
in the lone still of now —
in the hypocrisy of my smile.
It’s only apropos, how my stamina fades…
like lake Michigan into the sky.
I unmark my passage and my dream,
and take what I want and need tonight —
a benediction.

when I say that all women are liars.

Woke up, climbed a mountain.

Then, came back down.

I don’t understand anything about anything.

All women are liars.

All women are liars and all men are wise.

In the umpteenth day of the sixth month of the double-thousand-some-odd year after the invisible man hung himself on a giant mathematical operator a medium-sized hairless monkey sits down in the middle of a large, empty room in front of a giant supercomputer to write a manifesto. This is what he says, more or less, though because he is a monkey and becaue he has been drugged by his capitalist captors, he is wont to make clerical and thought-process errors that would make most beasts’ hair stand on end:

– Something’s gotta turn out right
– But maybe not for a long time
– We refuse to serve anyone not wearing a shirt, especially women
– On the road to St. Ives there was no-one who didn’t also appear in Candide
– There has never been an end to slavery
– You gotta sing to yourself and rock gently a little or you’re just another schizo
– Death is joy
– Joy
– Joy, joy, joy (melodic)
– This is my manifesto
– Amen

He stands, looks around, and pulls his arms off. Hairless and bloody, they lie there like modernity on the concrete until the wardenkeeper comes to take them away. Later, he will fed them to his small, hairless children.

It is a Gacy world, mostly.

I never, ever want to become “southern California people.”

I had planned to go climb a mountain today and maybe (though I hadn’t decided yet) carry a camera and shoot some trite photos, but instead yesterday my radiator hose blew up in the middle of the day while I was on lunch break and so, since I need my car for all kinds of general stuff (including getting to work) while in southern California, I spent the first half of the day or more working on fixing it.

Then I was going to try to get my oil changed and then maybe go and do something this afternoon downtown or god knows what, but I have this new neighbor exactly across the way who left me a note saying that she needed to “angle” her apparently sizable furniture into her apartment through my open front door and perhaps it was the subtlest hint or perhaps it was my imagination, but I suspected that if I didn’t give her a call within an hour or two, she’d call the landlady to come and open my door in my absence so that she could finish moving in.

The problem with that is that my place has been an incredible mess, stacked high with paperwork and and endless stream of empty beer cans and bottles. That’s enough by itself to trouble a landlord, but add in the fact that I don’t have any furniture and so everything is stacked high on the carpet around a sleeping bag and I suspect I’d have had something of a crisis on my hands if anyone were to come busting in.

So I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning and mopping recycling and organizing and uncluttering and going through my paperwork and blah, blah, blah, shite that I hadn’t planned to have to deal with this weekend. And now it’s after 4.00 and I don’t really want to do anything anymore, I’m pretty beat, mainly because I’m a fucking weenie.

So.

I’m gonna play some video games and drink a beer and watch some television and take a shower and contemplate the possibility of hiking tomorrow.

when they were young they read twain, old — proust
and when the sun descended each day, they would always wait for the sound of the last car passing
the sound of today sliding into forever