I’d wandered, 

barefoot,

‘cross salt flats,

My heels began to crack,

had I dried right out,

and shriveled up,

I still

could not turn back.

For I’d left it all behind me,

possessions, kin and kind, 

there’s no home left to hide me,

pale and wet, inside.

Bolivia had beckoned,

reflections never lie,

and I walk with clouds beside me,

on an endless salty sky.

At times I’d like to stay awake;

and others, sleep for good.

I’d not invoke the basal urge,

to eat something, when I should.

At times I’d like to float away;

and others, lower root. 

It seems I can subside on ire,

among other bitter fruits.

Come comatose, come still, come cold,

come wash me out to sea.

I stay here, waiting, patiently;

alone, but for the tea.

Awfully tired.

Tough economic times! 

The misery of Northeastern Metropolitan winter has come again. 

I feel connected to the general public only in the manner of our collective despondency.

A primary symptom of depression, I am told, is being unable to weld your sentences together into coherent paragraphs. 

Or being unable to transmute errant thoughts and emotional pulses into meaningful words and phrasings. 

There are so many friends who I have forsaken, not with action but inaction. Gems left to gather dust and ultimately lose their luster.

To brush off the neglect and polish away with stimulating conversation? I fear that my reserves of anything interesting to say are dangerously low. 

Perhaps the further I retreat into a niche of total obscurity, the more fanciful the rumors about me will become. 

I’d rather be a wild man in the street than a mediocre boy in his room.

There are many people who I admire to some degree. 

I believed once that by analyzing another person’s single action, you could draw some kind of accurate conclusion about who and what they were. 

Neither of those last sentences should drive the direction of this entry.

Life events are so strange, indescribable, wholly logical, and ultimately unpredictable. It shocks me when I think that I have only been alive for eighteen years.

My life is all I’ve ever known! My body has been my only home. This is my infinity! enclosed and endless. To the great Undulating Snake of History, sure, I may have only come into being at such and such number of years after such and such bearded desert prophet was nailed to intersecting pieces of such and such. And to the U.S. Government, sure, my humanity may only have been entered into the Social Security data banks eighteen years ago; but to me, my God, I am vastitude incarnate!

The days begin in a haze of happiness and fear, adventure and novelty. Consciousness comes gradually and never matures fully. The other fleshy shadows in the fog view you in the same manner. Suckle on one, assault another, find a special one and impregnate them, gather a bunch and drink some whiskey together, recruit lots of them and tell them the world is going to end; commit mass suicide in Guyana! 

Whatever the size of the fires you start, feedback filters through in the form of muffled comments and cold hands.

Anything may happen. Most people lack true knowledge but have a basic sense of the way a system works. 

Che Guevara believed that anything was attainable through sheer force of will. He was a privileged asthmatic Argentinian physician’s assistant who climbed mountains and went on to help secure a Communist revolution in Cuba. There is nothing remarkable about his story. He studied hard, had a goal in mind, and simply blocked everything else out. Everyone achieves what they set out to achieve, nothing more, nothing less.

A person may go forth toward a destination, but without direction, they have no idea what they are searching for. 

What am I even talking about?

Nobody can grope at a satisfying enough reason for life and living.

I for one would find some measure of anticlimax even if the Creator Deity himself descended on a bridge of gilded rainbow and dictated to me the precise reason for my individual existence. 

Life is an invention. 

Something with physical characteristics which explain its behavior. 

An extensive series of interactions.

“A transitive axiom of mathematics.”

There is no ‘meaning’ which the natural world can objectively offer to us. There are only our brains and the inventions we conjure within them.

We are born, we grow, we build our nests and lay our eggs. We rear our young. They leave, we die. 

This is a recipe for dissatisfaction for us thinking creatures. 

And then there is interaction.

There is love.

Beyond all social arrangements, beyond all physiological imperatives and necessities, beyond national boundaries and party lines, oceans and mountains…

Transcending every distinction, actual or invented, which separate us so; there is love. 

There is nothing but lying with someone you love, in the dark, music on, temperatures equalized, lips curled. Breath on skin. Hands in hair.

You are two separate beings. Your thoughts may never be known in completeness by the other. Anything may happen to either or both of you. 

Soft warnings, met with smiles. Because the song is nice and the lighting is perfect and you can’t help but smile. 

Because you are there. And you are in love.

There is nothing but thinking fondly on memories of acquaintances past. Little planets. Microcosms. Worlds never to be visited again. Closed by an atmosphere of distance and divergent dreams. Tiny and sizable.

They may have been interactions of necessity, you may have spoken to them because they sat near you in history class, you may never speak to them again. 

But this does not stop the glow of memory from relaxing your face, squinting your eyes and curling your mouth, pulsing pure and true. Your shared sentiments were real. You made a difference, small or large, in the life of another.

There is nothing but petting a happy dog. He may not be able to read, or write, or turn door knobs. He may be the product of evolutionary expediency, a reflection of the efficacy of friendliness and cuteness as a survival strategy. Your respective reference banks are not similarly attuned. 

But this does not stop your head scratches from feeling good. It does not stop the dog from being consumed with happiness at your very sight. It does not devalue the connection which you have. Which you feel. 

Love is a series of reactions.

Love is a transitive axiom of mathematics.

Love is self evident.

And love is. 

It’s sad to think that platitudes are often axiomatic in their value. 

It’s sad to think that truths about proper values and love and The Noble Life which have filtered thoroughly into the culture, so oft-repeated that they are considered redundant, are not really given the time of day at all. Their messages are forgotten and not given credit for their true veracity. And yet, these sentiments survive generation after generation, handed down by regretful and guilty adults who failed to take heed of the warning they now bestow, only to be ignored by incorrigible children with no need for obsolete proverbs.

A sane mind is a tenuous thing. A tenuous state, really. A particularly effective arrangement of learned behaviors and tempered impulses.  This state is liable to become unbalanced at the slightest shift in weight. An errant memory. A nostalgic scent in the air. A television advertisement which seems to be speaking to you and you alone. It is easy to tip the scales. 

A writer has a monumental task to undertake. A writer does not need to memorize every painstaking detail of the human body, the theory of particle physics, or the United States’ legal code. But a writer must understand these things.

A writer seeks not to bury himself so deeply in a field of study that he can lead the pack and eventually break through to the other side. No! A writer seeks to document the pack. A writer aims to understand the comprehensive flow of every pack, their comings and goings, ins and outs, wars and trade agreements. 

A writer may, however, be a doctor, a particle physicist, or a lawyer. A writer simply aims to write about truth. 

Obviously this truth comes in many different flavors, each with its own dust jacket design. 

I once read a quote by an author. Something like: “A writer first seeks to distill his truth into poetry, and when he fails, he writes short stories, and when he fails at that, he writes the novel.” What he means to say is that every writer attempts to reduce the sum total of life experience into a few simple words, but is almost always unable to do so.

Even a person who fully believes in their truth can not possibly influence another to feel something in the exact way that they do. Not until thoughts can be converted into comestible tablets will we be able to do that. (Though probably sooner than later.)

Why is it so difficult? Various reasons. The most obvious one is that nobody can invent a convincing enough “Final Truth” which will end all further discourse on the matter. I mean, my god, there are so many religions and assorted cults espousing different Final Truths that its difficult to keep track. 

Another less obvious one which all writers eventually come to on their beatific quests is that they lack any sort of authority which would enable them to assert something insightful about the grand scheme of things. Eventually all writers realize that they’re 17 year old boys who attend city college and have only been out of the country one time. Rational perspective and the promise of experience to come triumph over gross narcissism and delusions of jadedness. The world is massive and physically there. It could conceivably be cataloged and the cataloger could conceivably be said to have ‘written the world.’ Society is a big and ambiguous invention. It is a much more complex task to write such a thing.

Yet another is that there is usually something insidious lurking just under the skin of whatever sugary sentiment a wordsmith can stick in a piece of inspirational propaganda. We can all come together as Americans, united before those who would trample on our freedoms, before remembering our unemployed, uninsured, uneducated and disenfranchised, and the tens of thousands of civilian casualties in either of our decade long quagmires. We can all come together as humans, united in the pursuit of peaceful coexistence, before inhaling a cloud of toxic smog as the last of us left on Greenhouse: Earth paddle forward in a sheet metal canoe across a lake of fermented Coca Cola. Woah, I’m going off on something here.

Some people have managed to divine some maxims about the human life. 

Take proverbs as you will; sacred ruminations on extremely relevant social phenomena, or as generalized scrawl fit for fortune cookies and not much else. 

It is my experience that the simple truths have the most insight. 

-If one does not plow, there will be no harvest.

-If you don’t scale the mountain, you can’t view the plain.

-Whoever suckles me milk is my mother.

(After searching for some suitable proverbs to use as examples, I now think that people can be forgiven for not taking these sayings with quite so much gravity.)

Why can’t I force out a blog post anymore?

Is that entirely-too-rare realization that cynicism gets you nowhere at all.

Things are not always like this. Hallucinations both audible and visible, indistinguishable from waking reality, manifestations of the enemy I imagine hiding in the bush. This paradoxical sense of impotence, powerlessness and humiliation, snuffing out your breath, and the searing lethality of an animal on edge, ready to pounce and tear flesh from bone. Death becomes a savage mixture of defiance, acceptance, hatred and relief. The uncomfortable, albeit exclusive, transport from an alien world.

The vision: running naked and free, pounding the forest floor in a fit of frantic discord, snagging a root and coming up bloodied, continuing to run. Knowing pleasure and pain as inseparable parts of the same system. Loving each end equally and understanding at the same time that ends do not exist. Spinning infinitely inward, gorging and fighting and fucking, until the motion is no more. It loses momentum and ceases to create footprints. Ceases to tear. Ceases to be.

There is no past for this animal. That pretense that civility is something inherent proven untrue in an eloquent speech composed entirely of the sound of ripping skin. Human Kind is a paper mask bound in barbed wire atop the head of a rabid dog, reduced to pulp in the rain. There is only this moment; this leap, this arc, this bite, and this feast. Nothing else. There is but the hunt and Mother Night and it can never be any other way.

No, things are not always like this.