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.

Why Angry

A few weeks after the Death Valley trip I found myself popping off on strangers - losing my temper with people who didn't know how to properly form a line for the train, who blocked my path, who blew the yellow light with people in the crosswalk. I chased one to the next light. I growled at another to get the fuck out of the way if he's not boarding. I shouldered another out of my way. Too many people get on the elevator, I curse, "Fuck. I'm getting out of here," and push out of the car. These people are on my schedule, I'll see them again; I'm poisoning the waters. I need to get control, I tell myself. But it comes on too fast to see, then it's done.

So, apparently, I'm angry. There must be some freight of pain hiding in there unseen in normal life, no aesthetic surface.

I've been mad all my life, my mother said I was born angry - I wouldn't breathe until the doctor slapped me. Howling in rage is a form of breathing. But it was an abstract, enduring, generalized, pervasive refusal. I didn't really have a temper. Now it's a petty, mean, explosive thing. I mean, sure, those perps are annoying in their little ways, but I used to be above all that. Not some cranky old cane-shaker.

One day a few years back walking away from my place I thought, "I'm tired of being mad all the time. But there's nothing I can do about it." Then, a few weeks further on,I cautiously noted that the ancient black cloud had begun to lift, as if speaking the wish had effected some inner alchemy; the old dudgeon seemed to have dissipated. That was the historical, world-kicking wrath. Now I'm forced to recognize this shabby tempermentality.

Actually, that was born, hatched from its leathery egg, while driving cab in the 80's, but it stayed sequestered, off to the side, behind the wheel, until the last few years when it began insidiously creeping into everyday life.

So. Ask me how I am. I am lonely, angry, and afraid to die. How are you?

Why Lonely and Afraid

Looking west across dry ground over Furnace Creek to the ridge I asked myself why I don't live under a sky like this all the time - compared to the grayscape wherein I live and work. There is a slippery place when I try to recall the next step of the mind: to the suicide I've always kept in mind for when I get too old to carry a pack on a hike. Maybe it went, if you're not living right, why live? To leave behind the city doesn't seem like so much, but here, under this vast empty sky, breathing the dust, feeling the heat, eyes full of shades of dun and dull green, the most skeletal world, there comes over me a mighty fear of death. The world without me, that's okay; but me without this world, that's unacceptable. I'll never have the guts. That's a revelation. I wondered but here, it seems sure. And when I picture the irreversible act, finger on the trigger, looking into the little round black eye, in that moment with the fear comes an unbearable loneliness. That isolation is always there, sleeping in the Cthullu dark, waiting to open its eye on you.

So when I rode out of there I carried an interesting insight. I'm lonely and afraid to die. It's lucky that I have a sense of humor, for if there's an antidote, that's it.

Key Words

The mind is a monkey, so it's said...it does play tricks. One of the lesser pranks is with memory; it, with an evil little grin, locks up on some word you've had at hand all your life...for a few years it wouldn't let me remember Max von Sydow and Maxfield Parrish at the same time. So I make lists to consult. Sometimes just pulling the clipboard from by the bed is enough to kick the demon off and free the word.

Now I'm going to use that list for another purpose: to post keywords to hook google searches, and to define my mind to anyone diverted to this site. Here's the current list, populated mostly in this cube farm, where I now hear one other keyboard clicking...that rapidity probably means personal email...a throat is cleared to the southeast - a (here's a case, my monkey makes me have to look up Bernadine's name) Bernadine passes by like a ship in full sail, militant in requiring that I Have a Good Afternoon...I can do that...I accept that responsibility...at this workstation this list is extruded into the world...

Sat sri akal = god is timeless and true
Idiom
Innuendo
Mitochondrial Eve 200K YA
Y-Chromosomal Adam 60-90K YA
Nitrian monks killed Hypatia
Phatic = small talk to perform social task
Agnosia = loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells
Dunning-Kruger effect = where dumb people do dumb things because they’re too dumb to know they’re dumb
Nzinga = Laari (Brazaville)
Starets = religious teacher or advisor
Pourriel = spam (French)
Arabic:
Gazma, kundara, Tozz fiik, Kuss umak
Maluus
Chaldean = Iraqi/Turkish Assyrian Christians
Druze = Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan sect, 11th cent, Gnostic/neo-platonist etc.
Alawite = Syrian Shiite
Skitsnack = horseshit
Turritopsis Nutricula – jellyfish lives forever through regeneration
Crypsis = biology; avoiding detection through camouflage, mimicry, mimesis, etc.
Serer – Senegal, Gambia
Borla - crown
Tocapu – inca textile patterns, possibly logographic
Evolutionary Epistemology
Uncu – inca tunic
Mathangi Arulpragasam
Neoteny – kid traits in adults
Evenks – tungus
Mbuti-bambuti – (Bantu)
Armillaria ostoyae – Oregon honey mushroom 2400 years
Taxis – trope
Giorgio Chirico
Adenosine Triphosphate
Manuel Zelaya
Palladium catalyzed cross-couplings
Ayanna Andita
Ghanian, Yoruba
Tene
Tony & Johnny
Eyeworms = floaters, myodesopsia, enoptic phenomena, muscae volitantes, mouches volantes
Lorraine Feather
Shikran, afwan (F1)
Ni hau ma? Wo hen hau
Gravamen
Alan Blanchard
Until it seem I must behold immensity made manifold
Raphael Lemkin – coined genocide 1943
Ali Ibn Abi Talib – (cousin) Shia
Abu Bakr (friend) – Sunni
As salaamu alaikum; wa aliakum salaam
Kundara = shoe
Ce ne fait rien
Tririga = Roman 3-horse team
Male gebi, cau ni ma
Hindot ka = fuck, Tagalog
Walang hiya ka = you are without shame
Putan ginamo
Riemann hypothesis, Poincarré conjecture
Discipline, rebuke, reproof, reprimand, castigate, penalize
Gung hay fat choy
CCPOA = California Correctional Officers Association
Jamais plus
Desulforudis Audixviator = lonely sunless bacteria
Parahippocampal gyrus, amygdalae, temporal lobe
Emanations and penumbra
“They know and they do not know that action is suffering”
“Only the fool fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheel upon which he turns”
Khamwat = crime of close proximity
Faltaneh = too free girl
Apophatic, catophatic
Osmophobia, autodysmophobia
Pilcro (paragraph sign)
Chilango – from Mexico City
Nakba – Palestinian disaster
Niitsitapi (Original People) Pikani, Siksika, Kainai (Blood), Piegan
Liquichiri (also Kharisiri, Sacamanteca) – steals human fat to make soap
What’s the word, hummingbird; what’s up buttercup; what’s the deal banana peel; what’s the story, morning glory
Her eyes were enormously given to all the world around her – Pynchon
Lane-splitting, filtering, white-lining, stripe-riding
Chathab = liar
Munafiq = hypocrite
Abu Al-Jazari 1136-1206, polymath, brazen head
Jannat or Jannah = heaven
Zulamaat = darkness
Niqab, hijab, burqa, khimar, chador
Synechdoche, metonymy, metaphor
Solecism, malapropism, catachresis
Kodukushi = people who live and die alone
Abdul Karim Qasim
pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
Keep it simple, Stupid (all Occam's Razor)
Paraphilia, hybristophilia
“Short letter” – Cicero, , Augustine Blaise Pascal, Sam Johnson, Twain
Gluconeogenesis – makes sugar from non-carbohydrates
Irhabi, hirabi = terrorist
Necrotizing fasciitis
Lin Yutang

Okay, that's it for this swivel chair. I think I can jerk "crypsis" from the monkey's paw now...call it up on command...There are more lists in my three-room 360 degree attic...I can't claim a garret 'cause the roof ain't pitched.

Lonely Angry and Afraid to Die

Three days to Autumnal Equinox. Another Monday closer to death. Since a little revelation on a ridge in Death Valley this summer I reply, now and then, to "how are you?" with, "lonely, angry, and afraid to die." I googled the phrase this morning and got zero hits. Good. It's mine. I fix that fact in time. I piss a circle around it. I plant my flag on this mound of black volcanic sand. If I have nothing else to say...that probably won't shut me up.