Defiance

I find myself messing around in my head looking for the face of my reader, the many faced murky image in there who is the roaring crowd and caustic critic and hypocrite lecteur and who at this point probably doesn't actually exist, because how would you find your way here? To this remote tendril of the web? And I find myself trying to please you, to live up to you, and I wonder what damage that does to this work. Then I think of Layla Anwar and her blogs, how among her various states of rage are those directed toward her readers, her defiance of them - you and me - her insults and accusations, stools flung, fists shook, palms raised against us. Some of that will be assertions of fact she wishes to convey to us for our edification; and some are incantations against our influence over her style and content; over her power to express - or just to perceive, to call up from her depths - whatever she can. The guts that takes. Produces some volcanic writing.

I'm not writing to the people I'm mad at and I don't hate the people for whom I write. Not today anyway. I been mad at the world so long it feels like normal to me and I'm tired of it. Too much pettiness in it, too much delusion. As long as the anger is there, though, it's got to be accessible and sometimes let off its rope.

As a kid, defiance was the genie that kept me on my feet and in the fight, that kept me alive and intact. I am glad for its presence and proud it was mine. The situation required that since I lacked the weaponry - the very strength - to walk the world without it and survive. Now I can. There will be days, though, and reasons, to call on the old demon. And maybe against you, especially if you become real and independent of my imagination; who knows where this will go. So if I need to struggle upright and throw off some chains, shake off some grabbing hands, rip off badges, tear off helmets, wipe off grins, break some lacquered fingernails, kick some balls, claw some eyes, puncture some egos, shut some mouths, burn some cities, topple some statues, wipe my ass with a flag or two, whether it leaves me standing and laughing or clubbed to the dirt and kicked in the face, I can always reach down in there and pull up...defiance. Mon semblable, mon frere, mon enfant, ma soeur. Kid.

Insight

Insight - perception - revelation - glimpses - illumination - the flash - apotheoses - the breakthrough - theophany - epiphany - anagnorisis - realization - intuition - the vision - getting it - that light bulb over your head...

Sometimes a little satori will come upon you in the nine items line. Once the checkout girl nodded at the big bottle of wine in my basket and said, "Don't drink that all at one time." I heard myself reply, "There is only one time."

Another checkout asked me, "Did you find everything?" Without thought I answered, "Everything is everywhere." Just a little joke, but at the center of the instant there was a flash.

They're what I - still - live for. Those are the payoff. To suddenly see something new. Feeling good feels good and victory's a gas and love is the heart of it all but all of those come to me best as those moments of dawning. The best of them are beyond language and some of them wriggle away before you can nail them and I'm not entirely sure that all of them together have done my life any tangible benefit but those arrows of light are the target of whatever I am.

For instance, I twigged the intent of existence. In all its levels and manifestations. Gazing at a stalk of horsetail (snake grass) on a work break in the Olympic Peninsula the first eye opened on that. Wondering what the force was that extruded this simple green being into all the nothingness...

The point of existence is to do everything it possibly can. To fill all the nothing with every form of something, to proliferate and elaborate, to be all that it can be. 

That was long ago. There was another small eruption a couple days ago developing out of the question, does the universe have infinite RAM? Or are its resources limited? It is an act of pure imagination?

Another thought. It – even this cosmos here, our hometown, must be at least as smart as we are. At least.

Twice I've understood time, once sitting on the roof of a garage. I didn't need to write anything down, it was so obvious. Now I have no idea what I was seeing; so I can't weigh the reality of it - was it bullshit? Or some worn out cliche?

These cerebral easter eggs don't have to be lofty, they can open some small box, but the point is that some recurring question gets answered a little more or...some question that's never been asked. The acid-flash blossoms, whhhoooommm!

I gave up long ago the bayonet charge on nirvana. What Jay Stevens called Storming Heaven. It makes my skin crawl to even consider it. Becoming a monk: Zen, Sufi, barefoot Carthusian, trying to intrude your way into divinity by main force - like taking a difficult shit - not for me, man.

But in topical increments, probing my way through the textures of normal life, that's all right. That's my direct deposit.