Path of Partiality

 Life comes in such strange waves…dissonant frequencies and vibrations that seem impossible to deal with at times, but we keep going, because that’s what we do.  We keep going, whether anyone appreciates it or not.  Sometimes we kick and scream at each other, then we wake up and realize that it’s pointless.  Sometimes we discover things about ourselves and we fight to change them, only to find that our fight to change just changes us into something else that we have to discover later and fight to change; ad infinitum.  We have dreams; we push to achieve personal goals; only to find that every molecule in the universe is working against us.  We do what we’re supposed to do.

 We rarely get what we want.  We generally get just enough of what we need to keep going.  Most of life is beautifully summed up in the thought of rats chasing cheese on a string: we’re just hungry, but someone is finding a sick kind of fucking joy in keeping us that way.  They tell you that if you want something you have to go get it, earn it.  Then they tell you that happiness isn’t “out there,” but already in you.  If you want to be happy, just be that.  So I’m just supposed to be happy with all this?  OK.  I’m happy; to spite you; to spite this bullshit life that you told me I’m supposed to be happy with; to spite the work we do to get patted on the head by people who don’t see the world we live in… people who CAN’T see past their own world and needs and wants and desires that seem to be met just fine, but are negated by infinite want.  Yet I want not, out of necessity, not out of needs being met.  We have dreams…

”This is the story of America.  Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to”… page sixty-two.

 I’ve been picking away at my dreams for 40 years, while blatantly denying what society expects of me, but somehow continuing to do what everyone asks me to do, individually, not collectively.  I’ve been saying for years that no one in my life has ever really pushed me to succeed, unless it is relative to what they are trying to accomplish.  I just keep doing it, until I decide to stop doing it, usually out of boredom and creative starvation, and those people swiftly become my enemies.

 “…They danced down the street like dingldoodies and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing… but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” ~ Page five

Where are those souls?  Where are my dingldoodies?  Where are my roman candles?  Where is the gemeinschaftsgefühl that I’ve been waiting for?  Just keep going.  Just keep waiting. 

The recent eclipse left a little to be desired, but that's the story of my life.  I have an irrational hatred for people who can afford to just chase the sun whenever they want, like I do towards those who can afford to unplug from life and hike PCT whenever they want.  I can never complain about having my own personal Joshua Tree, though.  We headed into the park as the eclipse was starting to meet up with a photographer from LA, who seemed nice enough, but there were issues.  He shot one roll of 120 and left.  We wandered around a bit.  The eclipse did cool down the park, but it wasn't long before it was August in Joshua Tree again.   We got home relatively early, but I was called in to work to pack grain into our even smaller grain room.  Then it was basically back to work again.  Still in the kitchen.  Still waiting.  I've gotten messages from a couple amazing models in the last couple weeks.  The plan was to get back into this.

I can't.

I'm just happy with all of this.

Notes On a Hanging

In the recent series of photographs that finally got me a little attention, be it negative or not, after completely cutting off the random dress that she got at the help center because it was the closest thing anyone could find to what I wanted, I noticed the tag of the dress which could not have been more beautifully scripted, "Positive Attitude."

...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is my life.

Two Beats Down

 “‘Please to be restful.  It is only a few crazies who have from the crazy place outbroken.’” - pg 38

I have finally escaped from the dysfunctional, severely violent and graphic, drug fueled ramblings of Burroughs’ homo-erotic mind vomit.  Naked Lunch was like reading an aneurysm through the stretched rubber of a used condom.  Necessary read, yes, if only so I can truly say go fuck yourself, you fucking waste-of-life, trust fund baby, and fuck you, society of mindless sheep who think shit is brilliant because you can’t think for yourselves and have anything resembling rational thought process. 

 The ONLY purpose this work serves is to either keep anyone with half a brain from doing drugs, or to fuel the negative deviance of a criminal mind that throws their potentially beautiful life away to be high and oblivious all the time, until the hazy fog of life becomes the death that never seems to come too soon.  Too brutal?  Seriously?  If I were to write anything even resembling this I would be more likely to find myself in prison than celebrated, which brings up the luxury of having famous friends and coming from money, again.  I am seriously starting to lose interest in accomplishing anything, especially if the worse that it is in reality, the more it is celebrated for being “different.”  This entire generation of writers completely embodies the boredom with beautiful things, and defines our current obsession with different, which doesn’t really exist.

 The upside to this, for me, was that it fueled a chapter I’ve been putting off on my own drug addiction twenty years ago.  Now I understand that it not only doesn’t need to make sense, but the more incoherent it is the better.  I’m just not sure if my rational mind will allow me to do even simple things like throwing grammar out the window and not forming competent sentences.  Though I am curious what kind of response I would get if I went on a rant about sucking some guys dick, then hanging him, snapping his neck, and fucking his final erection while he sprayed diarrhea all over the wall.  I don’t imagine it would be great, but I have also never been that fucked up of a deviant to have any kind of secret fantasies like that.

Gauging by the reception his work got, I imagine there is a much bigger problem with the human condition, bubbling and festering beneath the plastic, fake-smile surface of a seriously fucked species.  I always mentioned that we were a deviant species, based on my own experience and observation, but this is a whole new level of fucked up.  

“May all your troubles be little ones - said one pedophile to another.”

What?

Is that entertaining?  Did I need to read that?  Is the world a better place with minds like this wandering around?  

*breathe*

I can’t write about my life right now, even though epic things are happening, and I feel significantly betrayed, so I’ll just hide behind what I’m forcing myself to read, even though I clearly don’t want to read it.  I found myself binge reading Burroughs, not because I enjoyed it, but because I just wanted it to stop.

 There was one chapter in the additional writing that was worth a read (The restored text, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles), in which a sober Burroughs talked candidly about addiction, and fumbles a little in trying to excuse some of the images with which he told his story.  That had some redeeming qualities, but overall, I don’t think I need to go on about how I really felt.  I mean, honestly, it took nine years to do this?  Anyone with half the addiction and half the creative obsession could write something better.  Fucking Beats.  I hope you died choking on your incoherent, deeper meaning that only makes sense to you and your idiotic excuses.

But…

But….

Shut the fuck up.  Now I’m on to the Kerouac that I don’t want to read because everyone won’t shut up about how brilliant it was.  This isn’t the edited down edition that was published in ’57, but the original scroll, so… it’s all one rambling paragraph.  This specific edition starts with over 100 pages of introduction, and has already proven to be disappointing.  Recently I read an article online in which Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time confessed that this work was not written in three weeks of a “sustained burst of creative energy,” like Kerouac advertised, but was meticulously structured, paragraph by paragraph, for years, which considerably reduces the creative legitimacy of the work.

 Even in this first introduction by Howard Cunnell, it is confessed that it was no secret amongst his creative piers that Kerouac had been working on this since ’48, if not ’47, before he wrote his first book, and went through many drafts that went in many different directions, with various different narrators from many different nationalities and voices.  He may have written A draft in 1951, in which he was writing a story that he was already so familiar with that it was easy to pound out in three weeks, but that was not the first or final draft by any means.  Yet, the cover of this book references this original scroll and “the legendary first draft (1951),” and the cover flap advertises mentioned sustained burst of creative energy, in this “uncut” version, that had already been cut to fucking confetti of literary lies and bullshit.  The cover of this book completely contradicts what the first twenty pages explain.

I’m sure it’s a fine book, it certainly can’t be worse than Howl or Naked Lunch, but can we start focusing on the reality of all of this: none of these “brilliant” writers were that brilliant, nor were they even writers, arguably; they were mostly trust fund babies who had the luxury of knowing people of influence and took advantage of the opportunities that were handed to them like the rest of us are handed bills and rent deadlines.  

Maybe you can sense my frustration with the current state of my life by what I have to say about a couple guys that were celebrated in their time, but I don’t have the energy to explain because I’ve got to emotionally prepare myself to read a fucking 300 fucking page fucking paragraph.  

Oh my.

How do I really feel?

Teru Teru Bōzu