The collocation of atoms is NOT accidental. Life has a will, it’s fate is in your hands. You learn how to chop an onion without chopping your finger. When on that rare occasion you slice through your own flesh, it’s not an accident. The knife is just trying to tell you something. It’s saying “look at your blood. Tomorrow it will be a story about yesterday and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.â€
I'd like to meet YOU. I would. Especially you. You above all others. Of course we could work on the setting. I'm reasonable. Romantic, maybe, in a drunk Sufi poet kind of way. I'll bring the wine. You bring the hashish. Under a large maple or bay or I suppose the best would be weeping willow. Who doesn't like willow trees? Next to a pond. Dragon flies of all colors and sizes flying about. I'm thinking that probably something would happen, we'd find something that would distract us from our original purpose of meeting, and we'd suddenly be thrust into the roles of partners. We'd have to investigate, or else react to the event in such a way as to leave the wine and hashish. We'd leave everything there under the tree and set off on an adventure that would give us volumes of material to share with others about. It would be the defining moment in our relationship, that first meeting, and everything about us would be an unfoldment of that time. Provided of course that we both survived and you didn't resent me for some foolish mistake that caused irreversible damage to your eyesight or the loss of a limb. In such a case our first meeting might well be our last and the rest of our lives would be an attempt to forget the awful events that took place. Either way, I am willing to take that risk. I am ready to meet you. Face to face. Virtually.
A crazy dervish once wrote: “Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.†Or, in my case, turn on the stereo and dance naked. Sometimes I get carried away and take my nakedness into the street, which is easy these days what with ipods getting smaller and smaller. I get weird looks and laughter, shaking my white ass to a beat no one other than me can hear, but when you look at the big picture, I’m absolutely convinced I am performing a public service. If you’ve never witnessed a naked man dancing to his own beat right out there on a good old public sidewalk, you don’t know what you’re missing. Think of how quickly all conversation would stop, all inner demon thoughts would evaporate. You’d be compelled to watch. You might not watch for long, but I guarantee, you will stop and take notice and tell others about it later. What was that guy thinking? He must be a looney. The cops will pick him up for sure, throw a towel around him and haul him to the station. Will he dance naked in his cell, with that same gleefull expression he had on the sidewalk? These are all things you may or may not think or talk to others about. If you’re prone to philosophical and or moral explorations, you may find yourself arguing how the innate trappings of clothes have forced us into a world of overly-sheltered conformity. That if more of us let ourselves go to such an extent that we found ourselves dancing naked in the street, we just might discover what real freedom is all about. Others I’m sure will argue that wearing clothes is a fine form of free expression, and that who wants to really see a pale skinny white guy with jerky interpretation of rhythm and dingleberries flapping from his ass. Especially if you’re in the middle of lunch. This argument might bring your idealism down to earth, and you’d probably smile in embarrassment, considering the reality of a bunch of naked people in a downtown mall, playing music for tips. Such things should never be allowed. There’s a reason we call it civilization. Yeah, I can see you might come around to that way of thinking, but you know what? It ain’t going to stop me from twirling my penis to Gnarls Barkley in front of Starbucks. This Friday on the corner of Fifth and Jackson, sometime around noon. After all, it’s what music is all about.
I like movies
I don't like television
Minerva looks at the last book in her entire collection of books. It is no more or less significant a book to the others, it just happens to be the last in the box. The title: Buddha Boy; author: Kathe Koja. She doesn’t remember ever reading it and has less of a recollection in how it came into her possession. As she tosses it in the air she notices how Buddha Boy, a hard cover, flips open to land spread eagle, cover facing upwards, over two other books: The Heart of Darkness and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. She remembers those books well, and recognizes them without being able to see their titles. She had studied Heart her senior year in AP High School English, and once again as a Master’s student for a class in Deconstruction. Ian gifted her with flow my tears on her birthday two years ago. He had written a poem on the inside jacket. She has it memorized. “Only within the scaffolding of these extinct truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.†Although he claimed this verse as his own, Minerva had always suspected that Ian had lifted it from another source. “Henceforth†wasn’t a word she had ever heard him use before. Who speaks like that anyway? Nevertheless, the content was all Ian. Weren’t all his band’s songs basically about extinct truths and unyielding despair? And wasn’t his refusal to live in the real world – by say getting a job, or eating foods other than raman noodles, mac and cheese, all to be washed down by Jim Bean – a mere reflection of these values? And what about the book itself he had insisted she read even though science fiction bored her as a genre. She read it and yes, despite the less than crafted writing style, came to appreciate the bleak humanness of its themes. It certainly gave her insight on Ian, his paranoia about mankind’s inevitable journey towards an all-pervasive, interconnected web of alienation. How ironic that the sex between them would be so good. But, finally, enough is enough. One must, if one is to grow beyond one’s own limited worldview, do more than simply read about it. One must fucking shut up and DO. She couldn’t stomach Ian’s despair any longer, and if she wasn’t going to match it, she’d simply move on to another part of the country and find another man, or maybe even a woman. It didn’t matter. Manerva opens the box of wooden matches. She strikes the scarlet match head against the ash-colored surface on the side of the box and giggles like a twelve year old at the sight of the flame. What potential resides in the yellow heat at the end of a match. Just kneel, and graze the flame against paper, stand back and watch the pages throw up their smokey words to the blue, illiterate sky.
Marsupials are cool