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The Spiders Knew

“Ronnie Cutrone:  I loved Jim Morrison dearly, but Jim was not fun to go out with.  I hung out with him every night for just about a year, and Jim would go out, lean up against the bar, order eight screwdrivers, put down six Tuinals on the bar, drink two or three screwdrivers, take two Tuinals, then he’d have to pee, but couldn’t leave the other five screwdrivers, so he’d take his dick out and pee, and some girl would come up and blow his dick, and then he’d finish up the other five screwdrivers and then he’d finish up the other four Tuinals, and then he’d pee in his pants, and then Eric Emerson and I would take him home.” [1]

I have a fascination with vice.  Hedonism has its degrees and, at the far end of the spectrum, it becomes animalism. Prostitutes.  Junkies.  Transients.  All living for “lesser” pleasures.  Is it a simple addiction, or a driving life philosophy?  How self-aware are these people?  Are they knowingly exchanging time for intensity of experience?  Is it worth pissing on yourself to feel that good?

The obtainment of pleasure is the master of human focus.  When will it come?  How long it will last? How do I maximize it? This includes all types of pleasure.  Everything from religious to physical passion.  A great emphasis is placed on the security of future pleasure.  Indulgences of less decadent flavors — such as family, home, and other domesticities — are the commonly accepted goal.  Fleeting pleasures like sex, drugs, adventure, and other dopamine-steeped activities are considered less valuable experiences and, from a religious perspective, of an evil bend.  I don’t intend to discuss the merits of pleasure varietals, but to explore the curious habits of those who live in a near-animal state of sensualism.

When living in Boston, I frequented the Harvard Book Store.  One afternoon I was scanning the fiction section when I noticed a sign indicating that both Bukowski and Kerouac were available only by request.  As an avid Bukowski reader, I found this odd.  Certainly, he was a filthy old man constructing semi-autobiographical novels out of lewd diction and awkward sentences, but I never considered him worthy of censorship — and most definitely not at my usual bookshop.  I approached the counter and asked a young man in an argyle sweater vest why Bukowski was kept off of the shelves.  The employee looked at me, smirked gently, and replied, “Because people steal it.”

I now had something tangible in common with those who would shoplift.

A common question asked of me by the uptight, educated sorts is, “Why do you like that drunkard?”  Because he was free.  He lived his life as he chose, which is a greater achievement than may be seen from the Harvard students across the street from the bookshop.  Those students will spend their lifetimes questing for a socially acceptable happiness.  Respect, financial security, and acknowledgment on the menu.  These items are complex desires with winding roads leading up to them.  Life seen as a series of obstacles between the man and his goals.

There was a purity to Bukowski’s lifestyle.  He existed.  He woke, he drank, he wrote, he fucked.  His goals were no more complex than procuring a bottle, or orgasming.  Crude, but nearly touching on Buddhist ideals in that he removed a number of the wants most men experience.  As he put it:

“I made it to the bed, got the clothes off, dropped in as down in the railroad yards they moved across the tracks picking cars, places, hoped destinations — better towns, better times, better love, better luck, better something.  they’d never find it.  they’d never stop looking.  I slept.” [2]

Perhaps the most self-aware example of living in a hedonist, animalistic state would be Dash Snow’s Hamster Nests.  The Nest would entail hundreds of shredded phone books, Dash and a group of his friends, and enough drugs to render them burrowing, defecating, fucking, drooling animals.  Dash, Dan Colen, and fifteen of his pals “rolled around” in a room filled with shredded books for eight hours in preparation for the installation at the Deitch Projects gallery for the first public exhibition of a usually private party.

Snow, born into an art-royalty family, was self taught — possessing a ninth grade education.  Presented with incredible wealth and a choice of outcomes, Dash chose a life that ended with one final binge in July, 2009.  Addled with drugs and alcohol, in constant trouble with law enforcement, and living the life of voluntary poverty, his point is not to be mistaken.  He saw purity in the lives of rodents.

Spiders and rodents know something that we have forgotten.  Whether that simplicity is nobler than the complexity of culture, economics, and intellectual engagement is open for debate, but I cannot dismiss these artists as mere drunks and junkies.  Authors and artists, emissaries of beauty and emotional existence, are too often entwined in lives of abuse and insanity.

“I wasn’t asking for love.  but something was odd.  the books never spoke about it.  the parents never spoke about it.  but the spiders knew.” [3]

[1]  Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Grove Press, 2006) 31.
[2]  Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (San Francisco, CA:  City Lights Books, 1969) 88.
[3]  Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (San Francisco, CA:  City Lights Books, 1969) 116.

I started a new story tonight.  Invested about two hours on it.  I’m trying to be ore realistic about writing.  Most things will be shit — just pound it out and shape it later.  I got maybe a third of the pounding done this evening…

Partial first draft

The waiting line for hell is a long one.  Snaking from left to right, forever forward, like the queues for rides at Disneyworld.  No velvet ropes for us.  Retractable nylon straps extending from one pole to the next, clicked in place, encircle us.  Every six feet there hangs a photocopied reminder:  “NO EXIT.”  There lies a sea of sweating, impatient humanity ahead of us, and I’m too short to see past the shoulders and heads of the damned.  We assume that we will meet the clerk at the front.  We assume he’s there.  Or she.  Or it.

***

The clerk in the Sin Assessment Office was a small, elderly woman with short, crisp hair.  Half-moon spectacles below the bridge of her nose, peering over the rims, entirely coal-black eyes, tapping the tip of her pen in double time, button down salmon blouse opened to reveal eight inches of mottled cleavage.  When she blinked, a membrane slid across her black orbs and flicked back rapidly.

“Have you been Judged?”  The dried spittle in the corners of her mouth cracked when she spoke.
“I assume so,” I snapped back.
“Do you have your Judgment Inspection Report?”
“We didn’t bring anything with us,” chimed in my ever-earnest traveling companion.
“If you don’t have your Judgment Inspection Report, we can’t register you; please come back after you have visited the Judgment Inspection Department.  Here is the address…”

The hag stretched her peach clawed fist through the sliding glass window and dropped a grimy dollar bill marked with permanent ink on the high counter in front of me.  There was a crude map indicating that we were, approximately, 900 paces from the Judgment Inspection Department.  We began our hike through the White Desert.

***

The White Desert isn’t as uncomfortable as you’d imagine.  In the world, deserts are hot, inhospitable places of intense, burning sun.  In hell, they are flat and bright, and you can see neither your companions, nor your destination.  There is no sound, no shadow, and no perceivable horizon.  Without landmarks, distance is measured in paces in the Desert.

One would think that longer or shorter legs would affect the prescribed distance but, I’ve come to find, hell treats us all equally.  No successes or failures.  No getting ahead or falling behind.  Hell is perfect social equality.

Outside of the Sin Assessment Office, all went white.  My companion disappeared into her own silent wasteland behind me.  Left foot forward, and I began to count.

***

We arrived simultaneously in the parking lot of the Judgment Inspection Department.  The building was comprised of three large arches side-by-side of aged marble and an attached concrete office without windows.  The office was a small, cluttered place populated by waist-high men in dirty coveralls sporting various physical deformities.  Stacks of paper, rusted tools, power cables, dead mice, and hunks of rotted and moldy food sullied the floor.  The men sat on high molded plastic stools, swinging their short legs (or, in some cases, a single leg) toward the back of the small office.  As we pushed open the single glass door (shoving a pile of debris aside in the process), one small man discontinued his discussion with the group, and hopped down from his seat and approached us.

Save a cleft palate and a club hand (his left, with the lone pinky finger jutting out at an odd angle), he was intact.

“Oi!  Welcome to the Judgmenh Inspecshen Depahtment!” He declared in a cheery, heavily accented voice.  (I recognized it as blue-collar Boston.)  “What cahn we do fah yah, ladies?”
“We were instructed by the clerk at the Sin Assessment Office to come here for Judgment.”
“Not ah prahblem.  Jus’ a few questions.  I’ll need yah names, ages, an’ soshal securahty nuhmbahs an’ we cahn get stahted.”

My companion was occupied by a still-live mouse clinging to her slacks, and missed the request.  She was shrieking and brushing wildly at the animal, which was scaling the khakis with the clear intent to make her face.  The fellow with the cleft palate reached out, plucked the animal from her thigh, tossed it to the floor, and slammed his work boot down on it with a muffled crunch.  He brushed his good hand off on the breast of his coveralls.

“Pahdahn the crittahs, ladies.  Since weh stahted acceptuhn cahcahsahs fuh paymahnt, the place has really gahn downhill.  I’m Mahtin, pleshuh –“ and he held out his grease-stained, mouse-grabbing paw intending to shake my freshly manicured hand.

***

The prevailing mood is not terror, but boredom.  The woman in front of us – the one with the black, spike-heeled boots and latex miniskirt – is shifting her weight from side to side.  Her skirt has been riding up her thighs over the past few hours, revealing red, moist chafe and dark prickles of ingrown hair.  If you’re going to spend half of eternity being sorted, wear comfortable shoes, cotton garments, and consider waxing.

***

After a serious loss of dignity, we retraced our steps, and entered the lobby of the Sin Assessment Office once more.  There was no organized line here, but a mob of people milling about the desk, pushing forward for a moment of face time with the bespectacled woman.  “Have you been Judged?,” the question came, over and over again.  And the answer:  “…Please come back after you have visited the Judgment Inspection Department.”

A heavy woman with jowls and a stretched, sweat-soaked Nascar t-shirt pushed past me, and out the door.  Presumably, she would be visiting our friend Mahtin.  Her (sizable) vacated space allowed us to move forward toward the desk.

“Have you been Judg—“
“Yes, we have.”
“Do you have your Judgment Inspection Report?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have proof of identification in the form of a disposable finger or seven drops of menstrual blood?”
“I… what?”
“I said, ‘Do you have proof of –“
“I know what you said.  A finger?  Menstrual blood?”

As she grew more exasperated, her third eyelids flicked over her black eyes separate of the typical pair.  She inhaled sharply through dry lips, and began again.

“Acceptable forms of identification include one finger, preferably index, or

DPS (Williamson)
Tax assessor 1
Inspection
Tax assessor 2
DPS 1
Ss office
*DPS 2?

The Human Spirit

4:30AM Tuesday night, Wednesday morning.  Something incredibly foul just crept forth from my dog’s ass onto my bedroom carpet.  Note to self:  dogs are not disposals for leftover wet cat food.  I should know better.

It’s not as though her movement was loud but I heard her creeping about due to the fact that I was awake.  This is my second night off of Risperdal.  I have slept for four out of the past 36 hours.  I am tired, but my brain is still doing somersaults.

For years, this had been the way of life.  When battling it, I tried all of the standard cures for insomnia.  Quiet time before bed.  Exercise.  Meditation.  No eating within X hours of bedtime.  Sticking to a schedule.  Useless.  Useless.  Useless.  Over time, Ambien ceased to work.  I could stay up on a pair of 25mg Benedryls and a few stiff drinks.  I fought with it for all but a couple of years during which I accepted the constant fatigue and irritability that comes with constant sleep deprivation and simply slept only when I could no longer stay awake.

A blister pack of small, pink pills changed that.  An antipsychotic (or neuroleptic, if you’re a diplomatic member of the mental health community) called Seroquel brought me down like an elephant gun.  Hell waking up, but sleep was sleep and it was a recuperative coma after a few exceptionally difficult nights in a row.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that my diagnosis came.  Bipolar disorder and insomnia make excellent bedfellows, it turns out.  My brain does somersaults not because of that slice of Havarti an hour before bed, or because I was chatting on IM until the very last moment before switching off the light — it was flopping about because of some funky business of my neurotransmitters.

During a full-tilt manic episode, I was perscribed Risperdal, another antipsychotic.  The feeling was sudden and intensely calming without sedation.  Twelve trains of thought were reduced to three, restlessness and talkitivity cut to above-average levels from Severely Obnoxious and Disturbing.  As the episode passed, I took less and less of the drug until I was taking a modest dose at bedtime.  And sleeping.  And able to wake the next morning without feeling as though I were coming out of a tranquilizer dose intended for a mastodon.

Now I am attempting to quit Risperdal.  It has an unpleasant side effect of weight gain that I am less than enthusiastic about.  However, I am thinking now that the solution is more exercise and not giving up my sleepytime drug.  Healthier, but irritating.

The idea that there is something incurable, life-threatening, and alienating living in your head is difficult to accept.  Feeling your own mind turn against you, show you things no one else can see, or feeling it will you to do imaginative and bizarre things, or having it turn in dark directions and wells of fear and despair…  It is a discomfort that is challenging on a good day.  It’s not a disease you can excise, cure, or manage with lifestyle changes.  It will be with you until you die and, often, cause the strings tying you to reality wear and warp.  Denial is a huge issue for bipolar patients.  We feel perfectly normal most of the time, and who wants to take medications with obnoxious-to-debilitating side effects if you don’t have to?  But when you go off of those meds, you open yourself to the risk of perilous highs which are chased with dark and lingering lows.  My insomnia reminds me that I am not like the rest of you and I take my Lamictal faithfully.

Worse than accepting a chronic, incurable disease is the notion that my soul is tainted.  I don’t believe in a human essence, but I was conversing with someone tonight who did.  He felt that humans were much like nesting dolls, each smaller shell containing darker and truer secrets until you reach the center, where we keep our “secret self.”  This was discussed in the context of sexual proclivities.  His main point being that you only glimpse the true nature of another in the moment of release, when each wooden doll facade is dropped and a bare person and their bare wants lie exposed under you.

That moment is a dopamine storm.  This happens for drug users and the mentally ill (drugs that block dopamine, like Risperdal, are used to treat such states for schizophrenics and manic patients).  What I call dopamine surge, he called the human spirit.  If the state of orgasm is innately different than that of mania and cannot be reduced to its chemical components, that brings up the question “What is mental illness?”  A disease of the flesh is one thing, but a sickness of soul is another.

My lack of faith brings me great comfort during times like these.  I am simply sick, I am run by a series of chemical reactions, and the smell of dog feces has dissipated enough to no longer keep me away from my bed.

Moving

movingThere’s nothing quite so tiring as moving.  Physically as well as emotionally.  Over the past two days, what was MY space, is returning to a room in a house that is not my home.

All of my linens have been packed up, my dishes, my finer toiletries.  I’m using Chuck’s towels, Chuck’s plates.  I inherited one of his perfumes.  I’m drinking a beer brought over by a friend of Chuck’s.  I’m living out of a large suitcase for the next month.

I’m feeling pretty lost at this point.  Boston has always seemed like a pit stop in relation to my life.  I’ve only been here a year and a half, and I have condensed a failed relationship (turned friendship), two jobs, and one mental breakdown into that short time.

I’ve learned a few indispensable lessons while here:

The lion’s share of dissatisfaction I have felt in my life is due to an illness, not any failing of my own.  Furthermore, cycles of misery have altered my decisions.  Particularly in the realm of relationships.

I’ve been compensating for a lack of personal stability by chasing stable people.  This has always proved fatal for the relationship.  Chuck and I have talked about this at length, and life philosophies come into play.  He and other lovers I have had over the years have a strong need for predictability/safety in their lives.  Over time, I grow bored and frustrated, and leave.  I’ll never do well with these sorts…  The “nice guys.”  I’m much too caustic and mercurial, and the lack of stimulation and friendly antagonism leads me to stagnate.  Good men, just bad for me.

I have felt like a failure for not having finished college yet, or knowing what direction to go in.  I keep changing my mind, thanks to the disease.  Changing how I feel about life, uprooting, flailing, drowning.  I’m reasonably certain of my course now, and am heading in that direction with a plan now.

Every facet of my life is in flux.  My location.  My relationships.  My career.  My mind.

As a manic-depressive with a delta tattooed on her neck, this feels comforting.

moving

we trickle out
she purges us
she bleeds us into the street
and goes pale
and hollow

a space where there was once a print
over what was our stove
an echo where there was a nightstand
in what was our bedroom

she echoes new voices
for whom white means
potential

then, she is nothing but a place
for us
instead of a time

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Take that spending and shove it.

BANGing Balloons

Unsavory things to do to balloons.  Not that I judge.

Saturday Boredom

My downstairs neighbors are having extremely loud sex at this very moment.  She’s doing vocal warm-ups at the same time.  It’s humorous and sexy at the same time.

BFF and platonic lifemate is at her parent’s house all day.  Roommate is giving a talk in North Carolina.  Girl Date is busy all day.  Man Date is most likely sleeping off two weeks of 18-hour days.  I don’t have the option of going to my family’s because I have cat duty this weekend.

There is a large scale pillow fight happening today in Boston.  For the first time in months, all I want is to not be alone; courtesy of drugs, I am well-rested and frisky.  Today is seeming to be a vacuum for social activity.

stables

hank’s face down
on my floor
again

another night without
drinking or
fucking or
wanting for

too proud to be poor
with holes in our shoes
spirit in our glass
and something warm
to grab in the dark

minds
like wild horses
wasted
in stables

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