Excerpts of Excerpts from the Nocturnal Dialogue

There were always blacker things tumbling in the orbits of the multiverse, unspeakable biologies wrenching in the shadows of the liquid moons of unobservable dark space, where stars aren’t even called stars but are articulated being to being (or force to force) instead by the dispersing of white-hot light glowing inside you, calligraphing in the cephalopod dialect of light and color, of covert cloudiness and with the punctuation of disappearance in inky silence. Where black holes are never seen, rather felt, because maculas and irises are unknown freedoms of vision in a cosmic know-nothing void where “seeing” is not even a sense but some kind of unbelievable dream. Where the aimless paths of asteroids foist murderous intent with no discernible brains at all, for the cosmos boils and burps with algorithms and equations of faith and fate that all our cleverest scientists, clairvoyants, physicists and moonbeam-baby astronomers could never possibly deduce.

Understanding the hue-moods of the naked deep-sea octopus, then, is nearly a supernatural undertaking.

But crawfish aren’t octopi - not yet anyway - with really no exception. The laws of evolution are hardly etched in stone; and even stone etchings have a shelf life. There was absolutely no logical explanation as to why a glowing crustacean might be fisting its telepathic Bantu into the sensitive fissures of his psyche.
But that unlikelihood, after all, is why stories are told, why anything is worth reading or wondering on. If everything worked the way it was supposed to, if leaps of logic and reason were never to be endeavored, what dreadful films might we be watching in the darkened theaters of the world that we couldn’t see right outside our front doors everyday?
A crawdad was sending messages to a little boy from a creek in Fairdale, California, and it was fucking things up.

Exercises in Forgiveness

"I want you to know that there are times when I find myself able to understand why you do what you do. Why you did what you did. There are fissures of clarity, maturity and apathy that allow for infinitesimally minute waves of forgiveness. Like a shrug in a hurricane. Or a wink in winter snow.

"There are moments when I find it not only completely okay, if a bit ruthless, for you to be exactly who you are at the expense of others’ trust, others’ love, others’ possibly unstable psychological balances, I deign even to eek out a tiny smile, like a silent salute to the overwhelming powers of thuggery, cowardice, soul-stomping uncaring. And in those moments - those weak links in the chain - I love you again for just a millisecond for being everything I’d hoped you would be to everyone else but me. And it’s like a little time travel bonanza to the one millisecond of adventure and fun I feel comfortable acknowledging we shared together.
"You get one second, and nothing more."
You get one millisecond. And you get no more." 

Frozen Hair

Two dead leaves commenced a tiny dance in the shadows of their branches, a life after death, waltzing with frozen hair and beetles all skittering along the concrete with the swirling winter wind, sounding the defiance of their demises with brittle clicks and clacks against the ground like little morse codes from beyond the grave. ".. / . -..- .. ... - . -.. .-.-.- / -.. --- -. .----. - / ..-. --- .-. --. . - / -- . .-.-.-"

Mean Maybe

I'm going to record some songs I've been working on the past year or so with my brother over the holiday break in Sacramento. So far, I've just been sending him bedroom recordings of me on acoustic guitar and singing - usually quite out of tune. But I'm excited to get something recorded again after a very long hiatus. Sometimes when I'm working on one of my own tunes (rudimentary though they may be), I stumble upon some other tune I really like.

I really like this song "Mean Maybe" by this fantastic band Yellowbirds. So I recorded a dumb little bedroom recording of it. I think you can hear my cat howling in the background of just about everything I've ever tried to record. Goddamn thing.

I Should Have Shouted

There have been times I should have shouted, but could not. Did not. Did nothing instead. Did nothing but feel suddenly hot as my blood boiled and my heart rate tripled. But that's not really doing anything. Maybe on some metaphysical level, the biological reactions I've experienced on my insides could fit the mold of some sort of reaction. But blood pumping through my dumb, dead veins all day isn't exactly voluntary. Doesn't make me brave. Or maybe it does. But no one will ever see it, or know, or deign to stretch to guess that sitting around doing nothing is actually doing SOMEthing.

I can feel when it happens; when I want to scream and when I want to scare someone. Or when I feel like some cerebral injustice is about to unfold and some fucking common sense ought to be distilled from all the half-truths and conspiracies and shortcuts to thinking that are all-but bound to stem from a panicked mass of souls, each of them afraid of dying. Of growing old. Of being alone forever. I can see it in the eyes of some of my closest confidantes when the veil of their skepticism is lifted, and everything's a grimace, and how could anyone in the world have a sense of fairness and just thought amidst this big pop culture tornado blowin' through the Bowerys, and the Bays, and the Burnsides.

Follied be they for whom extant virtues have been absorbed through mediums they can never understand. Fortunate (and rare) be they for whom sense doesn't need to be common to be just. And fair. And a life lived in the moons of neverending cosmos invisible to eyes a million years from now be wished upon to those for whom the rigors of honesty with themselves, with others, and with unencumbered pride and humility for the understanding of it all is relegated to some fantasy realm. That the fantasy is often much more appealing than the small efforts and rewards bequeathed by leading a virtuous life is the wellspring of every evil in the world.

It is to these last referenced that my silent protests, my seething inner diatribes, my distrust in humanity as a whole, is most steadily focused upon.

So, there have been times I should have shouted, but did not. For some reason figured I could not. That to rock the boat meant to chase the tornado. Meant to acknowledge that I play a role, if only as opponent, in a web of systematic insanity. With paper trails. With photo IDs and retina scanners, and workplace safety standards and lunch hours and no time for naps or outrage or questioning of anything of any real cultural significance. McKenna's maxim "Culture is not your friend" is perhaps the best synopsis, or the most succinct. Had he pointed out, in turn, that the parameters instilled into those whose entire intellectual apparatus has been hinged upon impossibly unreal expectations, has been imbued by unfair standards of role, has been smeared before even their birth by thousands of years of hate, fear of death, disgust of peace, I believe that McKenna's relatively small contributions (although terribly influential to many facets of rational thought, and to a more dramatic extent, influential to the scores of brain cells mystified by extraterrestrial research, or drugs, or humanity and fear) may have hit home harder outside of the underground world of ethnobotany and the hippie-youth drug scene who desperately want to believe that we're descendant of apes who mistakenly ate psylocybic mushrooms growing on ancient cow manure.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe nobody would have thought any different anyway. Despite the evidence. Despite the inimitable truths burning holes right into their eyes and ears. And that is what is worth screaming for. That the proof in the pudding must pale its hue to that most lethal drug: Distraction. For with the barricade of ignorance, willful or otherwise (but especially willful, which, frankly, all ignorance is), distraction's etymological kissing cousin, destruction - at least of the brain, or of any other wholly humanistic trait that separates us from wild dogs - is all but a foregone conclusion.

Live in the wild and live your truths, and be who you are. If your wild is the cultural wastelands of the valleys and the strip malls and the ridiculous facades of faux-historic corporate conglomerates, stay there. If your truths are morsels culled from television programs run by corporate-sponsored networks, or billboards, or flash-in-the-pan, hypnotic, repetitive, bland and unoriginal pop music, save them for yourself (see also: save yourself from them). And if you question, for even a second, ever, that who you are is a force detrimental to the advancement of society, or a hurdle in the thoroughfare toward peace, or a chigger in the doe hair of mother nature's vast, uncompromising-yet-delicate hide, CHANGE.

Failed Pitches

...Wherein I post treatments or pitches that were rejected by various publications for indeterminate reasons. This installment was sent to the folks at Amtrak, as I and every other writer in America with more than a passing penchant for laziness lunged to try and land a residency to write aboard a long, free train trip. I sent them a writing sample previously posted on this blog ("Cadaver"), forgetting to read the fine-print that they were not interested in any crazy-asshole rantings on sociological accounts of depressive maniacs or otherwise burnt-out fuckers bent on imminent demise. Whoops.

Anyway, here was my stupid, idiot pitch on what I would have written about, as sent to the suits at Amtrak, and which was given a big ol' "FUCK YOU, GUY":

I'd like whatever I write to be a meditation on the effects of human tendencies toward isolation/agoraphobia/complacency as it relates to a world bent on bridging the gaps pertaining to hermetic psychoses (social media, smartphones, GPS, FourSquare, etc) - the paralyzing fears wrought by lack of connection and the collective bristling of people who’d just as soon be left alone.

-An intrinsic analysis challenging the false connections people make over uniform obedience to social trends and entertainment; or the nearly blind filing-in and marching along with the ubiquitous ebbs and flows of some TV series/news story/fruitless pandemic warning.

This idea could be given further bloom within the construct/context of the writer/narrator isolating himself within a sleeper car aboard a passenger train burping across the country - the United States rolling by; interesting ramblers carousing in the observation car; the junkies and lovesick romantics and runaways and spooky old drunks; the sometimes mortifying proposition of a dimly lit dinner in a dining car at a table full of strangers. The dichotomy of attempting to expand on one’s comfortable spectrum, while being forced to abandon certain aspects of reclusive tendencies to accomplish it. Almost being commanded to.

It’s not that the story has to take place on a train. Rather, the self-imposed isolation could serve as impetus to the creative synapse necessary to spark my fledgling story of this meek figure who’s facing his fears of returning to the location of what he thinks is the source of his self-imposed isolation.

...Clearly, they made the correct decision to decline. So it goes...

Freeform/Freefall

Today you’ll write about that time you found an alpaca dead inside the city canal while you were walking to school. How disturbed you were by such a regal jaw agape at sewage currents in the muck and by lips flapping in the algae riptide of a thousand pollywogs. How you stared and stared at its lifeless husk wet with bloody rivulets cascading from untold numbers of cruel wounds. And wondering how the beast had managed to be here, then remembering the farm where the soft creatures roamed like aliens in a liquid metropolis just above the waterway. It’s fall, you remember thinking, must have been a silent dive.

You’ll write about the boldness of bloodhounds sniffing for scraps at the dirt walkway of the canal above the rodeo grounds, abandoned by their masters and hungry for anything. How their dead red eyes would zero in on ankles as the bicycles whizzed by their porches, mocking them for their exhaustion, and how those eyes said, “you watch yourself when we’re both on level ground again, fella…”

You’ll remember how you secretly wore shorts under your pants so after you left home to walk to school, along the old canal path, you could strip the pants off and give your legs some life. How you’d watch reruns of The Simpsons at your best friend Danny’s house, where his dog Blackie would stench up the place with its ancient breath. How we watched the unfolding of the Los Angeles riots on TV in real time following the Rodney King trials, and how we realized, for the first time maybe, that the world was a dark place full of danger everywhere.

You’ll write about how you threw your prescription glasses in a garbage dumpster en route to class because a girl told you you were cute without them, and a bully called you four-eyes for the millionth time. How that bully rots in jail now for murdering someone he found sleeping with his mother. How you wanted to interview him from prison for a book like some kind of revenge-craving Capote, and how you thought better of it because in a way your secret revenges are being played out without your input all the time, and without you doing anything but moving forward.

Today you’ll write, because you can. And because you have things to say. And because it’s the only way you’ll ever remember anything.