J'accuse

If you read my words here (though you claim you don't), know this: you are a counterfeit bohemian parading about in the borrowed finery of a banished god. Despite his exile, however, he will continue to cast a long shadow over your life.

I am your Pygmalion, your Frankenstein, your ruach Elohim.

Third Dispatch from Samsara

I stand guilty of improvidence, and now I have no money. Fortune runs from me like one I've accosted to implore of her consideration I do not merit. I am, in short, completely broke. . .

Everything around me reflects mortality, the rush of time upon Aeolius's mighty breath. Everything screams death. I move through a world leeched of its vibrancy like a photograph left too long in the sun. Dense boluses of emotion are lodged within me and cannot find egress because of my SRRI-befogged mind, which heeds these boluses' dull throbs but will not respond. I wish I could cry just one more time over my former life; I wish I could feel the heart-rending agony of my divorce just one more time. Then I could remind myself that I am human.

What has fallen away? I find it impossible to say. But I can tell you this: I see descried by projecting tendrils of sadness a future of grainy savor and etiolated hope.

Bloody Narcissus

Everything is damp and dreary in my apartment, which has sunk into squalor. I pitch darts at an easy target, intent on destroying, piercing, wounding; on drawing freshets of her heart's blood so I can see my reflection tinted crimson in the pool that forms at my feet. Bloody Narcissus: Scion of Despair.

Would that my face, which has somehow remained unravaged, could exchange places with my heart so the world could see it for the defunctive clotted meatfist that it is--a shattered vessel that can hold love no more than one's fingers can hold sand.

Ah, to close bleary eyes for the final time, to bring surcease to a life measured in sighs, measured in scars, measured in tears. . .

Weariness

Weariness like millions of microscopic leeches coursing through my veins, sucking their matrix in its channels. Earnest emotional appeals made to the narcissist who holds the blade to my throat. . .

"You bear the blame for your state," my ex-wife tells me as she waxes crocodilianly lachrymose. Hers the ersatz melancholy; mine the true. The melancholy of he who has had the burdensome cross of penetrative lucidity thrust on his already sagging shoulders.

One day she will look to me, in secret moments, to impart the fruits of such terrible vision to her. She will want solace, and thus she will seek to purchase cheaply that which came to me so dearly.

"Who," I ask her, "do you think imparts such vision to the benighted, the confused and flailing? It is those like Dostoevsky, the epileptic and compulsive gambler, who was taken before the firing squad only to be granted a reprieve as he stood blindfolded, terror-stricken, listening to the fateful drumroll; who, in the face of abyssal mortality, made the move of resignation, and slumped against the pole in weariness--unfathomably deep weariness.

"It is those like me, who lashed neck to crossbeam in order to wring the burden of sight from me precisely because it brought me such weariness--unfathomably deep weariness."

Lucidity, I have come to learn, remains inadequate until it is brought to confront and accept its own annihilation. Only after this can the lucid one grant his gift to the benighted as he endures that peculiar "no-time" that those who should be dead, but are in fact not, find themselves in. This "no-time" is the time to harvest the ebon pearls of weary wisdom.

"Infernal Raisins"

I saw myself, and my girfriend saw me, an exhausted man, made so by an injury I sustained in nearly being devoured by my perfidious ex-wife, the egoist. The T-Loc.

My girlfriend succours me, fills my mind with vivid dreams of a Viennese life, teaches me German. My krankenschwester who nourishes my soul and body in equal measure. "You must cleanse your liver of the toxic accretion thirty-three years in the making," she tells me. And so I comply. I drink Epsom salts and olive oil until my stomach draws itself into a fist. I double over from deep enteric pains, chthonic rumblings in a region of myself as alien to me as Bhutan--unseen, visible only through strange cameras on articulated stalks.

My liver floods with bile: the salt and oil work their purgative magic. I renew myself during long stints on the toilet, gasp and moan and make various wet sounds as the abjecta of a lifetime run out of me. My girlfriend and I invent euphemisms for the foul stones that exit my liver: "tender buttons" (neither one of us could stand Gertrude Stein's writing; hence the ironic tribute), "infernal raisins."

I watch them as they leave me, bid them adieu as they swirl down the drain, these infernal raisins, internal raisins, dark as my ex-wife's eyes.

I am cleansed now of all the residua of a life lived constantly on the verge of self-destruction.

Tucson: The City of Despair

There are a thousand stories in the Naked Pueblo . . .

A leathery, wild-haired man, likely homeless, likely disturbed, with a strange heel-toe gait and a visage like a startled goose, approaches me in a convenience store parking lot. I prepare myself for his inevitable request for change, but he passes me and gives me that enigmatic glance which the insane often give me, that glance which makes me wonder just how I have penetrated this individual's conciousness. Does he even see me as a person, or do I appear to him as a large, animate potato? A totem pole?

This man cruises the bank of pay phones, furtively probing change return slots for a meager windfall. To subsist entirely on coin -- can such a way of life still be possible in this day and age?

* * *

Tucson is Bunyan's "Slough of Despond," a cesspool where the outcast, outlawed, defeated and damaged can settle in order to pursue a curious liberty all too familiar to those of us in the West: the exchange of one's dignity, and perhaps even hygiene, for a dusty freehold on which to park a trailer -- a grim aluminum asylum where one can sift at her leisure the shards of her broken dreams. Often, enough trailers and trailer denizens accumulate in one area to form a "wildcat" development (three points to whoever can tell me about Three Points): an ad hoc community, a confederacy of the impoverished, the drug-addled, the defiantly desperate, mixing promiscuously through lurid liaisons and sub-rosa intrigues -- manufactured drama, all too common among these people, intended to bring intensity to their lives of sun-scorched, pinchpenny monotony. Diets of affordable, heavily marketed processed foods betray their bodies into obesity; their arms become flabby flippers, their legs unsightly topographies of dimples, bulges and blemishes. Among these people, ranch dressing is the universal condiment.

Beware, O Reader, of the "T-Loc," the Tucson local, whose frenzied desires have been heated to boiling in this infernal outpost. The "T-Loc" is a predator, albeit a stupid one, who will attempt to coax her prey (usually a Tucson non-local, but T-Locs have been known to eat their own) into a snare of sordid drama. Once besmeared in the pitchy slime of such drama, the trapped victim will soon be leeched of her vitality, the staple food of this vampiric creature.

Immorality and schemes abound in this city where parasites' parasites play silly confidence games for pathetic stakes in the eternal bellum omnium contra omnes that is life in Tucson.

An Unacknowledged Devoir to a Pioneering Pole

A professor I know possesses a mania for E-Prime, though I sometimes suspect that he does not recognize his mania as one for E-Prime. The brainchild of the Polish mathematician and linguist Count Alfred Korzybski, "E-Prime" means written and spoken English absent a certain verb that typically indicates equivalencies or peculiar qualities. The virtue of E-Prime, according to its proponents, lies in a certain epistemological claim, namely, that use of the pernicious aforementioned verb encourages dogmatic, absolutist thinking. Once forced to speak utterances or craft texts in which this verb never appears in any of its conjugations, the practitioner (right word?) of E-Prime will come to experience the world afresh as a place of myriad perceptions of no immutable ontological truth. In other words, the speaker or writer of E-Prime will eventually retrain his mind in a manner which constantly emphasizes his subjective perceptual limitations.

Relativistic thought-policing? Well, I cannot say for sure, but I can say this: E-prime certainly makes for more vigorous prose.

Second Dispatch from Samsara

Becalmed in the doldrums of a months-old divorce, I have come to realize that my status as D---'s ex-husband is as attached to my name as B. A. and M. A are. There is a certain ontological weight to the designation "ex-husband" and, as a consequence, it is something those of us who earn this designation will have to drag through our remaining days like herpes or some scandalous family secret.

The ex-husband, if he truly and deeply loved his ex-wife, will forever be a diminished being, a lesser light, no matter how much he strives to put the past behind him. He haunts the mansion of his mind as ghost of one murdered by the terrible determinism of a divorce he did not want.

The Surfers of La Jolla

The ocean breeze in La Jolla, cool and moist, moves over one like a mother smoothing her child's cowlick.

I walk through the tony downtown shopping district and various indigenes pass by: bottle-blonde girls of lithsome gait chirping enthusiastically into cell phones; studiously deshabille surfer dudes whose mincing barefoot steps on the pavement give them a vaguely avian aspect. These dudes have returned from the shore, where they arrange themselves battalion-like upon the breaking waves which run toward the shore in a way that reminds me of spilled cappucinos.

Patiently they float upon the undulating green waves in hope of the perfect ride, these lazy, strange creatures facing the Pacific's rippled, dappled immensity. One breaks off, suddenly a frenzy of action as he paddles furiously to meet the wave in stride, and springs nimbly upon his board, swinging its nose from side-to-side like a shark through chum.

But there are always others waiting . . . waiting.

To sit in a restaurant upon a bluff overlooking the sea and watch such an evening's activity is delightful--I with my drink, they with their boards, as the sun sinks into the sea till we are darkling all.