your character must change

Whether you "mature" towards the realization that there are things worth fighting for, and possible better futures you ignored because of laziness, cowardice, myopia...

whether you "mature" towards cynical realism, to the point that the prattling on of idealists makes you want to punch them in the nose...

you end up thinking whatever change you've made (first thing they teach you about characters in writing class: they must change), whatever the kinetics of your life's evolution, that is what constitutes truth, higher consciousness, reality. Because you've evolved beyond your naive, childish opinions, whatever they were. One shift is enough, fulfills the quota. Now you're sophisticated. Maybe not quite wise, but wis-er. In a better position to judge.

So you form your final answer. Your posture. Old age isn't wisdom, just stagnation. At least that's how it seems to me now. I'm sure I'll revise that opinion when I'm older.

Primo hypnogogia

elaborations on an ochre haze of closed eyelids, phosphene flowers. hypnogogic visions on a codeine plateau. blotto assembly line. i couldn't get her up to my place with a banana and a crysanthemum. it would take more. maybe a dali-cheque. his subconscious is worth more than most.

providential pits of clotted fate. glottal be-in. il merchant. so i'm reminded about the loss of values. maybe i should eschew the world, find the icy pleasuredome.

three crew-cut sports dicks bouncing in their chairs. one gorgeous blond with a gaudy ring. i have a walmart ring. cirrus logic shakes your riff to its soul. shakes on a plane. i envision turbulence in murder sense is an everyday chevrolet. chrome-letting the birthing stock, a chromlette running through the dyke hole. she's got a candy cunt, comes in handy, merlot flows from her nipples. why am i always tortured with beautiful people in my peripherals?

plains refrain, a gorgeous day in a gleemonex way. it's michael's shore, with a sheep and a fox. all the law we know. the gurgling chud language is faint now, indistinguishable from white noise. non-insistent itches felt from here and there. the brazen nihilism of the opiate is fading, but what is in its place, i'm not sure. maybe a purple-veined dick joke. maybe cheney's got a gun.

the codeine-induced hypnogogic images were surprisingly vivid, exotic, and quirky, and no thc was involved. just reverie, the raw material of the mind, intersecting muddy folds of the cortex.

unprecedented levels of habit - the ironic novelty of it! what do we do? there are no historical analogs for this depth of modern exhaustion!

dayum ~!

Scuzzy but lovable spot

i'm sitting on the scuzzy but lovable spot, fretting over the "wrongness" of writing in this notebook at this time and place. what if it's not wrong, but the rightest thing there could be? what if it's right and true? what then?

i didn't know it was the scuzzy but lovable spot when i wandered over and decided it was an adequate place to sit down, to stop the random walk and freeze my thoughts in cubes. i needed to clear my head. the house had become a concrescence for inebriation-exacerbated emotion-driven delusion. stoned, drunk paranoid, arrogant, everything i do is wrong, everything i do is right.

so i'm writing what is wrong, right here, right now, on this scuzzy but lovable curve, grass-clotted bank, gravel-strewn curb, rounded sidewalk edge.

what is wrong at 4 am?

what justifies paranoia at 4 am?

navel grants the right of gazing. gazeright. the rite of gaze. tremulant paranoid associations pile up on this curb, nexus of two of town's siren-haunted highways, ambulance, fire, and police routes.

and i notice, in the dark night, in the cool breeze, in the basic warmth the atmosphere has trapped at this exotic latitude, on the plains, in a small american town, near the house i'm renting with my girlfriend, that i'm in the sweet spot of the circadian cycle, on this scuzzy curb, at 4 am. the rite of spring is cool like the breeze, and cool like jazz, and cool like the vast intergalactic intelligence which happens to catch this moment in nano-intersection during an icy ocular sweep. the temperature is perfect and i feel more comfort than i've dreamed possible since resigning myself to living, barely, in a chronically flawed and deteriorating body, in a necessarily savage society, being nice in a way that is, at its core, selfish tweaking of the endorphins that fire in response to acts i perceive as altruistic, aren't i nice? yes, nice, in the way nature selected, in the behavior algorithm proved to enhance survivability by genes of eons past, not necessarily in conjunction with this hyper-morphing tech-fueled clusterfuck, but in the grander evolutionary sense, the game of trial and error and error and error and error, the madness of the monkey's interval, his time in the sun, her time in the sun, when women aren't human but something better, if the dominance hierarchy disgusts you.

but this scuzzy curb somehow makes everything right for the moment, like a rite for the moment, a sacred write, and it's okay right now, but how long will now last?

cartoons squeeze through the mesh of a suddenly shut lucidity trap. filter.

lights change, magic fades. there is perception of hallucination. i'm seeing the sawteeth of death-dealing dynamics, kinetics of the moment, in bondage to the state.

remembering it's never too late for a change. classical raggae.

but the stubborn facts of gravity from the ages, circa copernicus, creep out of the woodwork. i find them engraved on the concrete tiles of city sidewalks, how did i miss them before? am i allowed to sit on the scuzzy spot and write this in a notebook? surely the city planners didn't intend that, surely that doesn't fit into the plan, surely not now, or ever. surely it's wrong, and surely i'm not the one to be that necessary paisley comma now, or ever. surely. surely the scuzzy but lovable spot is someone else's territory, at 4 am, illicit circadian territory, a state boundary that could kill you dead, for real, for ever and ever and ever, amen.

looking for leprechauns is a tiring pursuit. it wears at you. you wear your soul on your sleeve, and it wears the sleeve out. so you say fuck it and try to find werewolves. it's eternally justified, a rainbowpin to a honkey. thumps of heavy automotive machinery, a rickety u-haul attachment. walking back, i deem my head clear enough, enough to head back into the concrescence of familiar insanity. back to the house. mutual intoxication was proving more than i could deal with, malevolence and benevolence perceived in different ways, in different places, in conflicting superposition, a yin-yang engineered for symbiotic discord.

sometimes problems can be solved by sobriety. sometimes problems can be solved by getting fucked up. states change. that's what that recess acid trip taught me. the gravel turned to liquid. melting is a cliche when it's a word, but when it's the phasing of every photon into a state of mind-controlled malleability, it's authentic "outside the field" originality, the possibility of penicillin and paradigm shift, even if the reins are out of the child's hands, never giving a thought to the rocket-ride, the elasticity of unlearned, unschooled juvenihilism, the sacred damnation of extreme innocence, momentum of the unconscious, archetypes fragmented into falling tetris blocks, shards i drop with energy warrior efficiency into perfect stalactite placement on the commodore. they're calling it retro, but it post-dates jung by decades.

Last Fit of Ecstasy (new song)

My best work yet, I think, in terms of both recording and composition. Written for performance, tweaked for computer generated audio. I had help on the lyrics from meth and raz.
Last Fit of Ecstasy

dead kitten, dead friend, dead poet, dead end
empty bottle, empty flask, empty house, shattered glass
blank stares, empty pool, scavengers from high school
broken necklace, broken bones, broken body in the snow

i haven't felt right since my last fit of ecstasy
i haven't felt right since he put his hands on me
i haven't felt right since the coke binge mentality
violated virgin brain chemistry

i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since i lost mckenna's light

novelty novelty, where the fuck is novelty?
novelty novelty, where the hell is DMT?

is this my new paradigm?
is this a solid state of mind?
life's apotheosis - dread grimace
could my face be frozen like this?

can’t say how much i spent last night
since i came back, i haven’t felt right
life's apotheosis - dread grimace
could my face be frozen like this?

so the tension prickles up the spine of your lazyboy lounge chair
so the tension prickles up the spine of your lazyboy lounge chair
so you see through the sun in its gamma ray glare
so you feel that awareness is too much to bear
so you've decided to google "panic"
decided to google "panic"
decided to google "panic", panic

if you could only
appreciate this opportunity
if you could only be lucid
in the nightmare of history
the advantage is there
if you just have the strength
but you’ve decided to google "panic"
decided to google "panic"
decided to google "panic", panic

i should recognize this feeling as
psychosomatic transience
ride the long synaptic gap to the next meaning, feeling
once desired utopias spoiled like movies, cause

i haven't felt right since they told me the end
i haven't felt right since they graphed the trend
i haven't felt right since they told me the end
i haven't felt right since they graphed the trend

no matter how long it takes, i’m gonna take the scenic gurney
i haven’t felt right since i hit the shaman’s height

at least i have my health
a strange sort of health, i'll grant
if i had to say the alphabet backwards, i could

i know i’ve burned through a lot of things
i know i’ve burned through a lot of things
by now i’ve burned through a lot of things
but there’s still incineration to come

it's barely hallucinogenic, a glorified retinal grain
what you see after boggling for days on some dirty methamfretamine
fret fret fret

maybe this is how cancer starts
maybe it's how william burroughs starts
one thing i know, i need to keep dreaming

i haven’t felt right since a lot of things
i haven’t felt right since a lot of things
no no
no, no, no

Why did they care who was at the back of the bus?

We're all poor losers anyway.
What does it matter what our skin color is?
Is it really necessary to segregate the lower class?
Sounds redundant to me.
Then again, maybe it's vital.
Keeps up appearances.
His theoretical waspy solidarity with your cracker bus-riding ass:
Sure, I wouldn't piss on your head if your hair was on fire...
but I'm of your race, we're racial buddies, doesn't that make you feel special?
You get to sit at the front of the shitmobile
with the other fecal princes of turdtown
revel in your pigmented superiority!

Rank Blank

it turns a pacifist into a warrior, that is, a bully in the pecking order. to be ranked is to want to push around someone lower, or something, if you don’t have that bloodlust. maybe you can claim superiority in an evolutionary cul-de-sac. the kind of thing the void would appreciate, son of celesta. stay frosty, stay crystalline, keep your predictable hexagonal sheen.

slimy context fills in, sad canisters, phallic cylinders. hey. you think those hand spasms are funny? cause they’re not. not from here. not inside this capsule. indigestible.

i don’t see anything when i close my eyes, it’s infuriating, it’s like i’m blind inside. lost the rhombus in caesarian sediment and mahler symphonies i don’t listen to anymore.

dinner invitation, divination celebration of this first person divinity, right here, you’re all invited to partake in my sacredity, how lovely, don’t you agree? the cachet of the negative rank, except he’s still playing, isn’t he, so how could he attain that without the game genie? it seems like i only really live when i’m asleep.

can’t write the great prose. this day is a write off. got a few laughs though. action hotdog go! a lot of aches. no reason my back should hurt. i was supposed to exercise but i didn’t. a long sickly rut. still nauseas. still lulling. arrogant guilt with a little self-disgust. and disgust with everything. even though there are good things. dez is good. and my mom’s almond cookies. and the skootching supercomputer. but it all feels so fucked up. a lazy way to label it. labeling is lazy anyway. but less lazy than doing nothing i guess. except in my case, doing nothing as opposed to continuing to type would take effort. a ramble worthy of jandek. dark career of the soul. i can see his appeal. can sort of hear it, distant strains over the hills, not that strainy, sort of lazy. i should track my own guitar. write around an instrument i can barely play. piano is weighing me down. there are other options. there’s the tar pet trap.

i think my headphone cord is trying to hump my arm. it feels like a fondle. it feels good actually. sensuous.

i’m so sick of this window. addicted to the internet, addicted to my computer, usually unexamined. i want to shut this window, but then i’d be even lonelier than i am. for a while, but maybe soon after i’d discover some inner light. i want to take stone shelter on the rain drenched plains, and write songs the easy way, sing and play. or maybe i just want to want. there’s a chorus. when i wear my wet funboots, i want to want. leads to this arch and aching magnetic re-arrangement. don’t speak of words. spirituality ate itself. yeah well, it’s harder to find the sacred things now. but they do still turn up. one day they may turn up in my guts as intestinal parasites.

i think i need a glass of wine. i’m tempted to take a xanie. quite tempted. but i should save those for easing my interactions with people in situations where my hangups would prohibit me from getting work, even though that seems next to impossible anyway, unless nepotism comes to the rescue, like it did the only time i ever got steady employment.

anyway, i’m going to connect back to my ancient roman roots, and drink wine. let the id out a little. you’ll barely notice it. this white wine is tastier than i expected. it’s too bad it flips the switch so blatantly. closes off pre-intoxicated methods of appreciating life – from the first taste. i wish i got the exaggerated sense of verbal facility some claim. no, cannabis is the drug that makes me think i’m brilliant. and tryptamines are what make me think i’m sacred. and when i’m sober, i think i’m a snowflake.

i want to be softer now, short of liquid. the phase variance. four tet is good music. at this point. it’s finding combinations of sounds that haven’t traditionally pleased the auditory receptor systems. i don’t know what the method is. i can see my future loutish self flanged on a squeaky hinge. doesn’t look so good, but it never did. i’ll put on some shades, smudge the plastic glass with snot, obscure, cloud, blink, strobe, simulate epilepsy. maybe this is a nyquil night. maybe even a flexeril week.

i wish i could do my dreams justice in writing, but if i could do that, i’d know what those agents of the nightmare thrills were for. and that would be ridiculous, this side of the gnostic divide. i’ll just be happy with the stocking stuffers mckenna left me before he went up the chimney. a deck of cards, a fairyland sutra assortment. there aren’t many gaps in my set. i enjoyed bootlegs and trading days, it was my grateful dead tour.

fence-sleeper wants to have it both ways, life and death. semi-consciousness. a fetish of the pale, albino lust. go to the mountain where those people are. the mountain that does not exist. bring your ikea staff. the ball’s in your court. jacks, marbles, crypticity. it’s a soup you drink at the homeless shelter. it’s a romance. a hoodie, it was made in china in 2005, but it’s timeless. boxie could break it down for you. frederick abberline would recognize the taste.

am i going to get drunk, sleep, or watch a movie? i’m not in a fugue state, otherwise i’d do all three at once. a complimentary combination, it’s not unheard of. the window is flickering magic like a near-dead neon sign. maze walls narrowing, the day’s cheese long gone, new brain lobes cut away every day without notice, click click click, nothing new. run the circuit again, report at this juncture, a hallucination worth transcribing. was that a rubber duckie? not exactly.

i tried to play with a doll i drew, today, but i didn’t get very far. she looked like she knew all kinds of crazy games, but i didn’t know the rules. couldn’t make any. it was during the time i felt like smashing things, but instead i tried to command contours. it went better than i expected, but of course, short of redemption. still, i thought of draping her in paisley. it would be pornographic, but artistic. who said it had to be sacred?

jehovah’s witness temple stubbornly stands, near the graveyard. that’s too much spookiness for one neighborhood, it’s gotta violate some zoning law. nobody understands how the faith healer stays minted. or how she writes nursery rhymes for adults. it seems easy. but the only one you ever met who could do it… burned in and out of town, fucking everything that moved. barely seems real anymore, even though there are recordings. you haven’t listened to them in years. but you do sing your recollections of them when you’re really hammered.

remember the hand-drawn laminated map of annexia? best let the gibberish hang from a meat-hook, swaying provocatively, there is a vast intelligence at work, you just can’t see, but maybe you can feel, that little quirk in your personality, that crick in your neck, i will suggest, is tangentially related.

Willy Nilly

consumer fraud is getting as sophisticated as purveyor fraud? that's why i won't start a business. no patron gods for me. they killed each other on mt. olympus.

overzealous gag reflex won't retire, remaining obstinate in extra innings, bringing every cough to the point of retch. a toxic mix of coffee, goldenseal, and greasy fries. the incidents of hanging out. i'll do a cost benefit analysis later. or never. shred the files, or lose them in a mound of paper, or plain information.

the day jerks on. i see sparks of life in people, like perversely animate electronic humanoid toys. sorry to lay my diseased trip on you, it's just that this is what happens when your cachet runs out and you didn't realize it was prescription, a finite script, and no refills, and the search for life becomes a gutter dive, maybe that show tonight could contrive some situation i've been craving, something to fill the void.

biting my finger fills the void, it feels good, just a comfy bite, a friendly bite, separating myself into parts to be bitten. let's say this is spare decadence, presided over by a queasy reflex system warning me if i go too far with the self-regarding sickness, i will get a taste of the real wretched thing. pointless blunt first person fabrege interior smells like pharmasave, reasonable grace, how sweet the sound, how ambling the ambiance, rods and cones still detecting some movement. island in the aisles, i'm tempted to fake a seizure, i think it would trigger a real one, get some attention, i'd wake up in a hospital bed on a drip, and there would begin a bedridden adventure.

trapped house boy, lineage of gaulish wastrels completed by middling limey scholars, i'd like to mix it up with a guilt-drunk heartland pseudo-slut, sociology slur, looking around the room, stinking with ocular residue, puddles of ionized photons, a syrupy churn obscuring millions of options, listening to speakers at new age events talk about personal transformation, what a great idea. we must be purpose-less-ness-less.

yeah, i came back to waste away, it is okay to say? made sufficient overtures and efforts to arrive back, slack, let the spine curve, slump in discouraged non serviam because they don't want me, they'd rather have honest crooks stock the shelves, no one can see or define but i'm carrying around the curse i magnify in dawning awareness, it sinks in, the apollo-singed skin, while schizo plays playboy unknowingly, i scowl at the bearing of a better life than me, it's so obvious how everyone's above me in every category, envy corrodes possibility.

mashing up the air with my teeth, clenching, was paranoid enough to get a hair cut, foolish sellout fucker, now no job and no hair, funny, i guess i've got some sort of roman look now, i should find a brave centurion to squire, put me on the right humble path.

it's been more than a month since you've seen me, this patchwork of love and apathy, i've said shameful disloyal things but i usually feel little, even though i put my ring back on, like a talisman, apathy as retaliation, maybe a lull in co-dependency, funny, a lopside shifts the relationship, ballast and bombast pumps needy in me, still sloshing around, can't bail it out, don't want to bail out.

she learned a thousand new words for melancholy, apparently that is the swell in my malaisey vocabulary, but it feels good to ride on rhymes, a jaunty flaunt of virtuosity, too bad my hands will always be too clumsy, manual dexterity a skill i could apply if you would give me a crack at your pussy, they said it's not for me, but i demand to differ, sometimes i love to please at the other end of the charcoal filter, i'm a slave 4 u, slave with a six figure salary, indentured victor of the new economy, a spoiled spoil of the class war, discovered by a talent agency, appropriately appropriated to the southern front, with a catheter on my dingle dangle, willy nilly, vital signs stable, would be uncouth to freak out, i know, i know, it's like a guiding principle, a foundation of the new republic, i would never betray the marble ethos of deus excrementus, even if it meant keeping the war going, it's just another adorable epileptic fit after twenty stab wounds, in minute seven of the three hour death scene, most of which was redundant and unregarded.

jesus, this is getting gross and weird. well sorry, i'm just bored, oh good lord am i bored, and energetic, channeling petty devils, penned up in a picket fence perimeter for the entertainment of the earl of cul-de-sac. maybe this foolishness has shamed me into praying to the body temple, that's purpose, getting on the exercise bike, trying to defy the gravity of atrophy, just remember the dynamics of the pain/gain ratio, another tailspin, duck tales, chicken-fried goat scrotum for the young master, chest cavity filled with elf-paste, enchanted shoes, nutty bunnies, cloven-hoofed outlaw polish, wanted on seven star systems, i'll be careful. okay. sufficient. really. i can go now. now. slipstream 5000, a cgi slider.