Retrograd ‘08

Black ocean, white noise. Black ocean, white noise. I drove the emotions away. They’re now in stealth mode, plotting their next attack. They’ll be back to rip me apart. It’s as necessary as the annual vegetable massacre, I must be torn to the winds. I’m feeding an ecosystem with anxiety and awkwardness, nutrients for the creatures that feed on negativity, it’s all a rich tapestry, you can thank me later, in the natural history museum, you can mention me in a plaque, the epitaph to my single-celled life, uninvolved and unevolved, with a pile of redundant deoxyribonucleic data, recessive and depressive but there’s meds for that, here and now. I got a materialist’s inventory but no meaningful activity. Putting life in context like I put dishes in the dishwasher, my profession, my life’s work, my one true talent. A serf’s birthright, pays the bills, putting life in context like an obsessive compulsive puts personal items in the order only he understands, an arbitrary order that must be just so, once more, from the top.

Halfway through a William Burroughs bio on wikipedia, lost interest in health. Disease seems reasonable, all behavior being neurosis, woodland stress, quasi-rural culture-shock therapy. Mike told me he was diagnosed with the list. You know the list, everyone’s got one. When you get your head checked by your head checking professionals you come back with the list: obsessive compulsion, depression, mania, attention deficit disorder – implying there’s an order. Well there was. It was vegetarian, but they don’t serve our kind at the CHUD café.

I'd almost managed to sleep tonight, the inanity of Astroboy on daily motion, episode three, “save the classmate”, soporific purity of a japanime morality play. But I woke up with thoughts of William Burroughs shooting his wife. Why that historical fact woke me up I have no fucking idea - but it did. Every once in a while it hits me that William Burroughs shot his wife - like whoa, how could I forget that? Why do I care? I guess it's just startling sometimes to be reminded that something like that could become trivia in someone's life, rather than, say, the focal point. Somehow the fact shattered a precarious hypnogogic state. So I got up and wiki'd Bill. I feel a kinship with him tonight, even though I can't really write. But I like writing as an idea, and dreaming, and forging morphine scripts while living on allowance. It's a strange time to be alive, even stranger than that fucked up century he was allowed.

I've managed to secure enough trappings of "independence" that I'm not on allowance anymore, even though "independence" is an illusion. There are endless layers of sick support, factory farms and arms deals for synergistic slaughter, it's a lean-to shanty town, we've fallen all over each other to prop up a materialistic junkheap, gene made a machine, the machine made gene, he can't remember any other scene, it's the meme, it's clean, chlorine. Stay in the pool, it won't freeze, we’re keeping it warm, sober winter warmth, machine warmth, cause it's easier to warm up than cool down. Summer will bring sweat and insanity, it’ll be too much to handle. Maybe I'll find a way to be healthy, but health seems crazy, manic focus, a losing game. There’s no self-control, just a lot of self-loathing, with little blips of self-love to keep the game going for a hopskotch stagger, rarely hip, futurehead, pills on a picnic, making a show of having fun at a silent auction. Dissociation with a side of sexual frustration. Retrograd Zero Eight: The School of Hard Knockers. Well we got no class, and we got no principles. Gasoline rainbow. Immortality in absurdity.

The Pick of Destiny has been looping on the living room TV for weeks. Digital video wallpaper. Yesterday it was Blades of Glory. Will Ferrell hungover, puking in his evil wizard costume. Nostalgia for when I first saw that movie, at the theatre, with the X. Has it really been years? Now I’m intimate with K. Stranger danger cart. Mummy's ready for his mystical journey. Heavenly amorality. Eyecrust and angel dust. It tastes like wood when the crystals drip down my throat and I become the floor, curling into the grainy groove. Heaven’s on the rug, and Creek Street is the nexus of the universe. I’m an angel, a cockless wonder. I'm loved, in a distant, ephemeral way. Never physically. Not involved in earthly things. Absurd that transference to spacious telepathic being comes down to ketamine. A paradox. Absence of body is the presence of powder.

But it’s good to get drunk after returning from a reality-obliterating psychedelic bender. It feels almost innocent, alcohol. You know where you stand. Folks lend a hand. Finley’s at 1 AM, dead monday night bleedover. Kept it simple and solo, the intent was to drink, not socialize. Soaked in the bar, associations of good times, stupid fun, talking of sorostitutes, the game where you name your top three whatever. The last time the X was in town. Guzzled bulk cellar wine when I got back home, blacked out. In the morning I found that I’d added an old friend on facebook. The guy who taught me what songs could be, from those days when Nelson had a soul. I’d been on a memory trip, listening to the Charlottes open stage compilations, shameless abuse of nostalgia. I guess adding C was supposed to be a "fuck you" to the X, like hey pal, remember me? I decided, what do I care if you fucked the nymph while she was mine, you're hardly unique in that, so whatever, it means nothing, let's be friends, in that shallow facebook way. Waging the war against the girl by dropping my vendetta against the guy. Calling it ancient history.

The good thing about burnout is that you get burned out of burnout. Eventually, it’s just a part of life, not something to obsess over. Another meal. Frozen peas and coffee. Thermodynamics. I still talk in reductio ad absurdum, it's an irritating imprint, a vice. But the hollowness is no longer a revelation. It’s nature. It's the ground, whale guts everywhere. Holey. Solace in soulessness. Jo mama's so soulless she don't know what a soul is. She don't think one even exists. Sho nuff, she takes solace in this. Grist for the mill.