THE 3 FACES: IS THIS A DREAM?
Professional help never helped. Until one autumn day in 1990 when you felt compelled to seek the counsel of a Jungian psychotherapist in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts named Dr. John Huele. Initially, your parents agreed to pay for your weekly visits, relieved that at least you were finally out of their house and living "in squalor" in the big city. But once they received his bill for your first $90/hr session, they did not think your mental health was worth it. Dr. John did however, and asked you how much you could afford to pay without the help of your parents. So you continued seeing him for the next 18 months at the adjusted rate of $15/hr.
Long before the advent of hallucinogenic substances in your life, dreams had always been a place to receive guidance and insight, a place of both secret joys and enormous horrors. Often, it was easier to recall your childhood nightmares than to remember the actual events that took place.
The longest running reoccurring scene began at age 5. The whole family would sit in a small pink tiled bathtub inside a palatial space like a sound stage, always too brightly lit. One by one, they would pass around a plastic orange gun and point it at one of their own eyes. Pulling the trigger loudly sucked that eye out. Then they would all turn to you. Staring, one-eyed. The red hole of their newly exposed occular cavity dripping with bloody severed nerve endings. They'd hand you the gun and pressure you to do the same. Waking up screaming every time, your hands covered your face, guarding your precious double-eyed sight.
Together with Dr. John you moved through these quirky and cruel psychological imaginings, pieceing together an intricate and imposing map of your subconscious landscape. You began to uncover by emotional associations what certain colors, words, sounds, animals, people and places really meant. It was the only type of therapy you felt just as excited to engage in as did the Dr. himself. Whenever you would rattle on about the frustrating things happening in your regular life, he would patiently sit and listen. Inevitably, the words would come, "...and then, i had this dream," at which point, he would excitedly grab his yellow pad and pen and start scribbling down your dream's details like an inspired madman. The two of you would then set about working on the decoding process, slowly adding more elements to the expanding cartography of this emerging new found land.
It was fascinating and sometimes heartbreakingly illuminating. You would always have to take a step back in the presence of this other, higher mind. It would record and playback so many complex issues, effortlessly weaving together a song of solution, so delicate and so simple. You never felt quite qualified to take credit for coming up with these mechanisms for coping. They never seemed entirely yours.
Those sessions enabled you to first conceive of the viable possibility of self-healing through dreams. They birthed the connections your mind made to the infinite sources of healing energy out there in the unknown universe, inside the quantum omnipresent vibrating fields. You're forever indebted to the knowledge gained from Dr. John. You also thanked fuck that Jungian psychoanalysis existed at all. Otherwise, you might have succumbed to your parents wishes that you be committed to a mental institution for being depressed anti-social bipolar defective or whatever. It should come as no surprise then, that when you first heard the song "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies in 1986, you had found a long loyal friend in punk rock. And, incidently, the more involved you became with Jungian dream journeys into the collective world of ancient archetypes, mythological beasts, and other archaic symbols,the less involved you were with the outrageous consumption of drugs and alcohol in order to deal with the ongoing psychological and socioeconomic trials of anyone trying to stay alive below the poverty line.
Lucid dreams happened sporadically as far back as you can remember. But practicing "dream yoga" almost religiously, you were having sometimes 2 or 3 lucid dreams a night, most often in the form of nightmares. Gradually, you learned how to transform these repetitive haunted terrors. Becomming lucid, you could bolster the courage to take control of your own mind. The nightmares then began to diminish and nearly ceased. Getting to know those Black Dogs that chased you for so many years, you now took ownership of your imagination. You screamed at their snarling, "STOP!" No longer would you run from them. You stood still, commanding them with a pointed finger to "SIT." And they did. Their faces shifted to little grins with tongues dangling and tails began to wag. The Black Diamond Dogs became a crazy bitch's best subconscious friends.
However, for some reason, waking up from these exalted states of consciousness became more difficult. Equal amounts of curiosity and fear caused you to question the nature of reality itself in a much more intensely tactile way, having up to 8 or 9 "false awakenings" after each lucid dream. This was so exasperating that you worried if you would ever really wake up at all. And a part of you started to feel the distinction between real life and the lucid dream waning. Thinner and thinner. The difference was disappearing. It got to be a bit much.
This persistent fear of losing your mind, without the reliable excuse of being fucked up on drugs, induced a sober admiration for the practice and a larger sense of responsibility toward approaching this state of mind with sincerity, not aggression or greed. In return, you discovered many valuable truths within each dream's revealing riddle. It seemed these riddles were coming from, again, a source of higher intelligence you couldn't even begin to understand. Nor could you make any sense of why it would feel your damaged brain was worth receiving the wisdom embedded within these undazzling, but inspired insights.
Insights so hackneyed, yet they stood the test of time. Recalling these unvarnished mantras helped you regain a sense of internal calm while caught in the constant storms of stress and strife. All you had to do was take the time to look, feel and listen...because sometimes, it IS all too much. You get so tired of having to fight nonstop for every single little fucking scrap of some stupid bullshit basic need; like being heard, like being seen, like being treated with the barest thread of common human decency. Not being overlooked or ignored or cut off or pushed aside when waiting in line at the corner store or at a red light. Taking a timeout from society's infantile needs to go inward instead calmed you. It calmed the defeatism that would leak from feeling like the blank faced rusty little cog that amuses itself by squeaking in sync while it's trapped inside this massively malfunctioning male dominated earth raping kindness killing machine.
But this is life in the Natural World; even single-celled organisms have to defend themselves in order to survive. Every living thing is a sentient being, struggling just as hard as you to feel a momentary peace. Every single molecule is capable of reflecting intentions, of resounding vibrations of consciousness. Paying attention to those equally sentient cells involved alongside you in the act of living, breeds compassion and kinship. Insights are then bestowed upon us all when we open ourselves to the auras within empty spaces because they are Not Empty At All.
Put into the context of each individual's map of their own subconscious symbolism, any manner of things can take on new magical meanings, or renew a childlike curiosity with the mysteries of life. And despite society's attempts to carve, cut, shock, tranquilize and otherwise mute different kinds of creative thinking, as a species, we continue to be mystified with the ancient ancestral magic of dreams, with the connection we all have to the collective unconsciousness, with the innocent divinity we keep secret but secretly celebrate inside our sleeping minds as it delights us with it's absurd little insights on the nature of being.
Absurd little insights like "There is no such thing as Winning, there is only Spinning"- a phrase accompanied by an image of the cyclical rotation of the earth that occured while you were, once again, feeling like a total failure and considering suicide.
A song, whose humorous showtuney chorus,"Men are Minor, Waste of Eyeliner," was a response to your frustration with the misogynistic inequality you repeatedly confronted both in your intimate relationships and at work.
Your personal favorite, "If you take lots of small steps to hell, you will end up in hell. If you take lots of small steps toward heaven, you will end up in heaven."
After the more recent addition,"All there is is IS," you found some sense of ease in regard to making big life altering decisions, viewing the consequences of your choices as neither good nor evil, but knowing that no matter what you chose to do, all you would ever have to deal with is exactly what is in front of your face. Every decision therefore forces you to face simply THIS. And this 3rd face then revealed itself to you as a face that is All Faces, yet faceless.
*u can call me ph!*
Showing posts with label quantum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quantum. Show all posts
8.10.2016
7.05.2016
13% [chapter 16]
TRUKLIFE
In May 2007, as a last desperate attempt to revive your sputtering relationship, you and Evan stopped doing drugs and drove a rented 16 foot moving truck from San Francisco to Chicago, delivering his sister's furniture to where she now lived. Armed with 2 weeks free from work, an old school Nikon camera and rolls upon rolls of 35mm film, you went the long way around. Avoiding all major highways, it came as a complete surprise to stumble upon one static and decaying town after another. All those bustling hubs that once thrived from the railroad traffic that steadily flowed through til the 1930's, but got choked off by interstate highways, slowly subsided and died. You took hundreds of photos portraying the sad beautiful things life had left behind.
Fords with open suicide doors ditched in dry deer tick fields encrusted with snakes and rust. Dandelions and ivy sprouted up through bathtub drainplugs. Bedsprings clung to plastic bags blowing in the breeze. Windmills missing most blades still turned with a squeak. Schoolhouses buckled under warped belltowers that won't ring. Potbelly stoves stood more solidly than the homes they were once warming. Swifts and swallows nested in a hand painted nursery. Owls guarded proudly marked depots where trains no longer came. Rodents undermined an efficient bank office filing system. Pigeons cooed and pooped all over an empty factory lunchroom. Dark crooked barns, leaning at a frail 45 degrees, were propped up with feeble sticks to combat the inevitable sag of gravity.
Arriving in Portland, Oregon one rainy Monday night, being in an urban environment made both you and Evan want to get high. To quell the drug cravings, you instead got wicked drunk pretty quick at a little bar on the north side. Usually, this doesn't work and only makes the cravings worse. But for some reason, it distracted you from going out on the prowl just long enough this time. Staggering back to where you had parked, you both decided it would be easier to pass out in the back of the truck than to slovenly drive to some cheap motel that was nowhere near in booze-goggled sight.
It was freezing cold. Evan lit the propane gas stove and camping lanterns, turning up their hissing blue glows as high as they would go. You tugged out a long couch from under a pile of boxes. He rolled down the back door and yanked up a bunch of moving blankets. Collapsing there together, curled up for warmth, Evan commented, "We might die of asphyxiation if we leave the gas on all night." You slurred, "So what...at least I'll die happy." "Me too," he replied.
As grim as it might sound, that was one of the most intimate and romantic moments of your life -- facing such a silly demise together. After so much hard lined loss had dredged up all your disappointed desires, this gentle surrender to death was a sweet little delight. In the morning when you both woke, you collectively sighed, "Oh well, we're still alive," and smiled. Rolling up the back door invited the bird songs and dew drops and rising sun's light to come in. Full on. Hangover bright.
While pulled off onto a dirt road somewhere outside Missoula, Montana, Evan was putting another pot of coffee onto the stove. You sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, looking out past the rolled up door to the lolling yellow ochre expanse of open prairie. Pale violet peaks teased it's distant edges. Endless and abrupt. Sustaining winds whispered and hummed. Pink clouds drifted down. Waist high grasses swayed and bent, swishing like a woman walking in a long tafetta dress. Taking a snapshot of Evan against this backdrop, you said, "I could live my whole life like this." He answered, "Yep." Then you took a long clean deep breath.
This idea of living in a housetruck was neither new nor novel.
You first considered it a future possibility when you were still a kid in the late 70's, during one of the many long drives your restless parents took across the country to attend Amway conventions. Another one of their attempts to succeed at building a pyramid scheme American Dream of materialistic prosperity. But you noticed that while on these road trips, there was a consistent absence of the violence and abuse that was so common during periods of housebound stagnation.
Maybe it was being in motion that made attitudes shift. Or the limitless light in the big round sky stretching over wide carved out canyons. Or the acerbic serenity of change itself that smoothed the behavioral snags into well-contained conduct. No one knows, but these motorhome memories were happy and golden-hued for everyone in your entirely damaged family.
While traveling through Europe in your early 30's, you befriended a photographer in Ghent named Wim. He lived in a converted 20 foot freezer truck he called Babu. He drove Babu all over the place. From his home town in Belgium to Ireland, Croatia, Russia, Mongolia, Morocco and back, always taking pictures of the people he'd met along the way.
One such image held your gaze, spellbound. It was a black and white portrait of a handsome middle-aged woman sitting on the wooden steps at the door of her vividly decorated caravan. Wearing a thick sweater, rain boots, and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, her long dark hair was pulled back into a loose bun, but riotous strands broke free and were blowing in the breeze. From a hook under the stairs hung an empty bucket. At her feet sat a muddy mutt, smiling up at the camera playfully. She did not smile but stared off to the left, deep in thought, a thousand kilometers beyond the lens. You could sense that the reality of her life was not easy. Yet this picture sang a song of raw liberation, a lament of redemption. Perhaps society had exiled her to the bitter margins, but she exuded a contented resilience, a defiant inner strength. Inspired, you could see yourself living well like this woman. Solitude, animals and nature are your most trustworthy all-weather companions, too.
More than a decade later, during the autumn of 2011, you got the chance to revisit Wim and his housetruck in Belgium. He was now married with a 4 year old daughter, a black cat and a large comfortable RV in tow. Babu functioned as the "guest house" in which you gratefully spent a week living simply. You took to it immediately. Like a fish inside a duck to water.
The housetruck's shower was in need of some plumbing repairs. Early one October morning, you could no longer bear your own ripe stench. You didn't want to wake up Wim and his family next door in the RV. So with a clean towel and a full gallon jug, you walked out into the woods beyond the industrial lot where you were all parked next to a friend's circus caravans restoration and repair shop.
Dumping water over your weary body, the invigorating icy coldness made you gasp for breath. Swabbing soap around in the roguest spots, rapidly rinsing, gasping again and dancing like a spaz, you quickly dried off. Clamouring back up into the warmth of Babu, you whipped on some clean clothes, that, by comparison, smelled almost heavenly.
Then you sat down and smoked a cigarrette on the stoop, checking out the updated status of the sunrise. With wet hair on your warm head, foggy wisps of vapor trailed off to join the haze of dawn's discreet ascent. You couldn't remember the last time you felt so alive. So quiet inside. Or so clean, emotionally. Although you were still hopelessly mired in the cross-continental smuggling embrace of an ether-soaked amphetamine addiction and global alcoholism, here, in this hidden back lot, you were cloaked with invisibility for at least a week. Free in the anonymity. Somewhere so much closer to safe.
9 days later, you were walking down a London street toward Victoria Station to ride the tube to Heathrow and board the plane back to San Francisco. You heard the startling sound of a pack of mad dogs barking orders behind you. "Dump the drugs!" your intuition distinctly heard them say. Weird, but ok.
So you took a quick detour into a local pub next to the Eurolines bus station and ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of cognac. Locking yourself in a toilet stall, one of the few places you ever felt unsurveilled, you methodically did line after countless line, devouring all of the substances you had left in your possession. So much so, you felt gluttonous and nauseated half way through. But waste not, want not. You couldn't bring yourself to throw away perfectly good drugs. Spread out over a cd cover of "The Fountain" soundtrack, each powdery pile that got injested slowly revealed more of the mesmerizing image on the cd cover beneath. The words that appeared there, "Death Is The Road To Awe" would be imprinted indelibly upon your memory for the rest of your at-risk life. You had no idea you were still capable of getting this stupidly Whoa Hey Goofy Magic Mountain high. Oh holy shit. Hold on tight.
Immediately upon arriving at the airport's security checkpoint, one of the uniformed guards pointed you out in line. As if to say, "She's mine!" Every square inch of your baggage was manhandled, scanned and rescanned, sniffed, rubbed down and rifled through for such a long time that you would now have to run impossibly fast in order to make it to your gate before departure time. They even confiscated your box of matches. You complained that you had a stop over in Chicago and would want to smoke a butt after the long flight. The officer snarled and threw down a single match. You bellowed, "I said, CHICAGO! It's called 'The Windy City' for a reason! Wanna gimme more matches, please?!" She acquiesced politely to your request. You were now allowed 2 matches but nothing on which to strike them. Dismissed. Next!
In the ensuing funnel of chaos and on the verge of a panic attack, 3 separate strangers empathized with your obvious plight and gently said reassuringly, "It's going to be alright," at each heaving pause while waiting for the next disasterously overcrowded shuttle car or at the bottom of every compressed escalator line. After being run through the vigorous gauntlet of official friskings, you took off without grabbing your wallet which held your passport inside. Somehow, it arrived before you did at your departure terminal. You didn't even realize you'd left it behind. "Oh, THANK FUCK!" you screamed as the smirking airline employee shoved it into your sweaty palms just as you were slipping through the swiftly closing gate.
Running onto the plane, you were so exasperated you thought you might vomit, have a heart attack or just faint. But none of these things happened. The stewardess held your shaky shoulders steady, gave you a glass of water and showed your toxin soaked body to it's assigned seat. As soon as you'd buckled yourself in, you threw the soft blue complimentary blanket over your head and began quietly sobbing like a little child. Not due to any invasive anger, but because you were too overwhelmed with gratitude.
Gratitude for the dogs that warned you to get rid of your stash. Gratitude for the completely unexpected kindness that came from those 3 strangers each time you nearly lost the plot during your mad dash. Gratitude for those who had returned your wallet and passport back to you in time. Gratitude for the airline staff who recognized but did not ridicule your messy distressing display of anti-ennui. Gratitude for all the choices you had made, even the ones
disguised as mistakes, which were now easier to define between the voluptuous bookends of a decade. Although those decisions had born hardships, they also lit the way to this self-sufficient life in which you were now wed to music and art, not breeding more resentful spite.
Saf, another old friend from Ghent, had commented on this devotion to creativity you were still engaged in when he said,"I can't keep up with you, crazy." Ten years ago, he was too self-conscious to stand up in front of people and sing the songs he was writing back then. You bombarded him with encouragement, saying, "Fuck Them, Saf! Do it anyway cuz one day, yer gonna be dead. And so will they. So who gives a fuck!?" He recorded his first album that summer and was now one of Belgium's most celebrated performers, "The Flemish Tom Waits". Gratitude that, even though Saf never acknowleded this or said thank you, here was real proof that one person's kind words could make an actual difference in another person's trajectory. Recompensed and respected, words now became something so much closer to sacred.
And gratitude for this melting pocketful of Belgian chocolates that you were now gobbling down and offering to the Indian man beside you. Because, when you removed the blanket from your swollen tear stained face, he looked worried about sitting so close to your highly charged emotional state. This was your way of telling him, "It's ok. I'm ok." He shook his head side to side, smiling, and relaxed back into his window seat.
And then came that shifting lift from asphalt to air, held again in Ariel's arms, on tenderhooks but holding it mostly together, swimming through space, peacefully sighing, "Everything's gonna be ok...everything's ok...it's all alright."
*u can call me ph!*
In May 2007, as a last desperate attempt to revive your sputtering relationship, you and Evan stopped doing drugs and drove a rented 16 foot moving truck from San Francisco to Chicago, delivering his sister's furniture to where she now lived. Armed with 2 weeks free from work, an old school Nikon camera and rolls upon rolls of 35mm film, you went the long way around. Avoiding all major highways, it came as a complete surprise to stumble upon one static and decaying town after another. All those bustling hubs that once thrived from the railroad traffic that steadily flowed through til the 1930's, but got choked off by interstate highways, slowly subsided and died. You took hundreds of photos portraying the sad beautiful things life had left behind.
Fords with open suicide doors ditched in dry deer tick fields encrusted with snakes and rust. Dandelions and ivy sprouted up through bathtub drainplugs. Bedsprings clung to plastic bags blowing in the breeze. Windmills missing most blades still turned with a squeak. Schoolhouses buckled under warped belltowers that won't ring. Potbelly stoves stood more solidly than the homes they were once warming. Swifts and swallows nested in a hand painted nursery. Owls guarded proudly marked depots where trains no longer came. Rodents undermined an efficient bank office filing system. Pigeons cooed and pooped all over an empty factory lunchroom. Dark crooked barns, leaning at a frail 45 degrees, were propped up with feeble sticks to combat the inevitable sag of gravity.
Arriving in Portland, Oregon one rainy Monday night, being in an urban environment made both you and Evan want to get high. To quell the drug cravings, you instead got wicked drunk pretty quick at a little bar on the north side. Usually, this doesn't work and only makes the cravings worse. But for some reason, it distracted you from going out on the prowl just long enough this time. Staggering back to where you had parked, you both decided it would be easier to pass out in the back of the truck than to slovenly drive to some cheap motel that was nowhere near in booze-goggled sight.
It was freezing cold. Evan lit the propane gas stove and camping lanterns, turning up their hissing blue glows as high as they would go. You tugged out a long couch from under a pile of boxes. He rolled down the back door and yanked up a bunch of moving blankets. Collapsing there together, curled up for warmth, Evan commented, "We might die of asphyxiation if we leave the gas on all night." You slurred, "So what...at least I'll die happy." "Me too," he replied.
As grim as it might sound, that was one of the most intimate and romantic moments of your life -- facing such a silly demise together. After so much hard lined loss had dredged up all your disappointed desires, this gentle surrender to death was a sweet little delight. In the morning when you both woke, you collectively sighed, "Oh well, we're still alive," and smiled. Rolling up the back door invited the bird songs and dew drops and rising sun's light to come in. Full on. Hangover bright.
While pulled off onto a dirt road somewhere outside Missoula, Montana, Evan was putting another pot of coffee onto the stove. You sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, looking out past the rolled up door to the lolling yellow ochre expanse of open prairie. Pale violet peaks teased it's distant edges. Endless and abrupt. Sustaining winds whispered and hummed. Pink clouds drifted down. Waist high grasses swayed and bent, swishing like a woman walking in a long tafetta dress. Taking a snapshot of Evan against this backdrop, you said, "I could live my whole life like this." He answered, "Yep." Then you took a long clean deep breath.
This idea of living in a housetruck was neither new nor novel.
You first considered it a future possibility when you were still a kid in the late 70's, during one of the many long drives your restless parents took across the country to attend Amway conventions. Another one of their attempts to succeed at building a pyramid scheme American Dream of materialistic prosperity. But you noticed that while on these road trips, there was a consistent absence of the violence and abuse that was so common during periods of housebound stagnation.
Maybe it was being in motion that made attitudes shift. Or the limitless light in the big round sky stretching over wide carved out canyons. Or the acerbic serenity of change itself that smoothed the behavioral snags into well-contained conduct. No one knows, but these motorhome memories were happy and golden-hued for everyone in your entirely damaged family.
While traveling through Europe in your early 30's, you befriended a photographer in Ghent named Wim. He lived in a converted 20 foot freezer truck he called Babu. He drove Babu all over the place. From his home town in Belgium to Ireland, Croatia, Russia, Mongolia, Morocco and back, always taking pictures of the people he'd met along the way.
One such image held your gaze, spellbound. It was a black and white portrait of a handsome middle-aged woman sitting on the wooden steps at the door of her vividly decorated caravan. Wearing a thick sweater, rain boots, and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, her long dark hair was pulled back into a loose bun, but riotous strands broke free and were blowing in the breeze. From a hook under the stairs hung an empty bucket. At her feet sat a muddy mutt, smiling up at the camera playfully. She did not smile but stared off to the left, deep in thought, a thousand kilometers beyond the lens. You could sense that the reality of her life was not easy. Yet this picture sang a song of raw liberation, a lament of redemption. Perhaps society had exiled her to the bitter margins, but she exuded a contented resilience, a defiant inner strength. Inspired, you could see yourself living well like this woman. Solitude, animals and nature are your most trustworthy all-weather companions, too.
More than a decade later, during the autumn of 2011, you got the chance to revisit Wim and his housetruck in Belgium. He was now married with a 4 year old daughter, a black cat and a large comfortable RV in tow. Babu functioned as the "guest house" in which you gratefully spent a week living simply. You took to it immediately. Like a fish inside a duck to water.
The housetruck's shower was in need of some plumbing repairs. Early one October morning, you could no longer bear your own ripe stench. You didn't want to wake up Wim and his family next door in the RV. So with a clean towel and a full gallon jug, you walked out into the woods beyond the industrial lot where you were all parked next to a friend's circus caravans restoration and repair shop.
Dumping water over your weary body, the invigorating icy coldness made you gasp for breath. Swabbing soap around in the roguest spots, rapidly rinsing, gasping again and dancing like a spaz, you quickly dried off. Clamouring back up into the warmth of Babu, you whipped on some clean clothes, that, by comparison, smelled almost heavenly.
Then you sat down and smoked a cigarrette on the stoop, checking out the updated status of the sunrise. With wet hair on your warm head, foggy wisps of vapor trailed off to join the haze of dawn's discreet ascent. You couldn't remember the last time you felt so alive. So quiet inside. Or so clean, emotionally. Although you were still hopelessly mired in the cross-continental smuggling embrace of an ether-soaked amphetamine addiction and global alcoholism, here, in this hidden back lot, you were cloaked with invisibility for at least a week. Free in the anonymity. Somewhere so much closer to safe.
9 days later, you were walking down a London street toward Victoria Station to ride the tube to Heathrow and board the plane back to San Francisco. You heard the startling sound of a pack of mad dogs barking orders behind you. "Dump the drugs!" your intuition distinctly heard them say. Weird, but ok.
So you took a quick detour into a local pub next to the Eurolines bus station and ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of cognac. Locking yourself in a toilet stall, one of the few places you ever felt unsurveilled, you methodically did line after countless line, devouring all of the substances you had left in your possession. So much so, you felt gluttonous and nauseated half way through. But waste not, want not. You couldn't bring yourself to throw away perfectly good drugs. Spread out over a cd cover of "The Fountain" soundtrack, each powdery pile that got injested slowly revealed more of the mesmerizing image on the cd cover beneath. The words that appeared there, "Death Is The Road To Awe" would be imprinted indelibly upon your memory for the rest of your at-risk life. You had no idea you were still capable of getting this stupidly Whoa Hey Goofy Magic Mountain high. Oh holy shit. Hold on tight.
Immediately upon arriving at the airport's security checkpoint, one of the uniformed guards pointed you out in line. As if to say, "She's mine!" Every square inch of your baggage was manhandled, scanned and rescanned, sniffed, rubbed down and rifled through for such a long time that you would now have to run impossibly fast in order to make it to your gate before departure time. They even confiscated your box of matches. You complained that you had a stop over in Chicago and would want to smoke a butt after the long flight. The officer snarled and threw down a single match. You bellowed, "I said, CHICAGO! It's called 'The Windy City' for a reason! Wanna gimme more matches, please?!" She acquiesced politely to your request. You were now allowed 2 matches but nothing on which to strike them. Dismissed. Next!
In the ensuing funnel of chaos and on the verge of a panic attack, 3 separate strangers empathized with your obvious plight and gently said reassuringly, "It's going to be alright," at each heaving pause while waiting for the next disasterously overcrowded shuttle car or at the bottom of every compressed escalator line. After being run through the vigorous gauntlet of official friskings, you took off without grabbing your wallet which held your passport inside. Somehow, it arrived before you did at your departure terminal. You didn't even realize you'd left it behind. "Oh, THANK FUCK!" you screamed as the smirking airline employee shoved it into your sweaty palms just as you were slipping through the swiftly closing gate.
Running onto the plane, you were so exasperated you thought you might vomit, have a heart attack or just faint. But none of these things happened. The stewardess held your shaky shoulders steady, gave you a glass of water and showed your toxin soaked body to it's assigned seat. As soon as you'd buckled yourself in, you threw the soft blue complimentary blanket over your head and began quietly sobbing like a little child. Not due to any invasive anger, but because you were too overwhelmed with gratitude.
Gratitude for the dogs that warned you to get rid of your stash. Gratitude for the completely unexpected kindness that came from those 3 strangers each time you nearly lost the plot during your mad dash. Gratitude for those who had returned your wallet and passport back to you in time. Gratitude for the airline staff who recognized but did not ridicule your messy distressing display of anti-ennui. Gratitude for all the choices you had made, even the ones
disguised as mistakes, which were now easier to define between the voluptuous bookends of a decade. Although those decisions had born hardships, they also lit the way to this self-sufficient life in which you were now wed to music and art, not breeding more resentful spite.
Saf, another old friend from Ghent, had commented on this devotion to creativity you were still engaged in when he said,"I can't keep up with you, crazy." Ten years ago, he was too self-conscious to stand up in front of people and sing the songs he was writing back then. You bombarded him with encouragement, saying, "Fuck Them, Saf! Do it anyway cuz one day, yer gonna be dead. And so will they. So who gives a fuck!?" He recorded his first album that summer and was now one of Belgium's most celebrated performers, "The Flemish Tom Waits". Gratitude that, even though Saf never acknowleded this or said thank you, here was real proof that one person's kind words could make an actual difference in another person's trajectory. Recompensed and respected, words now became something so much closer to sacred.
And gratitude for this melting pocketful of Belgian chocolates that you were now gobbling down and offering to the Indian man beside you. Because, when you removed the blanket from your swollen tear stained face, he looked worried about sitting so close to your highly charged emotional state. This was your way of telling him, "It's ok. I'm ok." He shook his head side to side, smiling, and relaxed back into his window seat.
And then came that shifting lift from asphalt to air, held again in Ariel's arms, on tenderhooks but holding it mostly together, swimming through space, peacefully sighing, "Everything's gonna be ok...everything's ok...it's all alright."
*u can call me ph!*
6.04.2016
13% [chapter 8]
POINT OF NO RETURN
Back in LA, it did not take long before that idea of watching the sunset on the ocean was stowed behind the snobbish shoulders of private property holders, over the constant border patrols and beneath the police brutality riots simmering in caustic volitility. It all became too crowded, too cloudless, too crass a concept to bring you any peace of mind. That crap pile that is society kept stealing the spotlight and getting in real beauty's way. So, you soon found yourself back on an eastbound plane.
Adam was persistently urging this return. Apparently, he was not kidding when he said he wanted you to be his wife. But it was difficult to consider his proposal seriously. The moment you were back in his company, he gave you something that would last a lot longer than most marriages do: Herpes. Great. Though you were grateful he didn't give you syphillus or AIDS, you bowed out saying, "Thanks, but no thanks," to the honorary title of being his old maid.
A debilitating fear had formed around this worrisome concept of the wedding dress of chains. Wife just looked like a worse version of the girlfriend role you already so sucked at playing. So again, you failed to achieve any of the love you thought you wanted until it was staring you in the face. But it only resembled death by then. All the joy lightness and vitality of your previous feelings for Adam had dissipated. Now it felt forced obligated and confining, in a really tediously dull and boring way.
Then a distant relative died -- an aunt from your father's obscured family line. She used to call you "devil's spawn" so the thought of her leaving you a parting gift was completely unexpected. She willed you a savings bond that could only be cashed in your name. Therefore you actually received this one and only cash sum of $1200. All other gifts later bestowed upon you from other relatives never made it past your parent's bank account of utter unhidden disdain for the "drifting through life" choices you continually made.
With his head hung low, Adam glared at you resentfully from the station's departure platform. You just giggled, childishly waving Bye Bye from the window of an Amtrak train headed west for San Francisco Bay. You decided you wanted to be a comic book artist and finish college at the Art Institute. This was the new aim in your life spent adrift. At the farthest other end of the country, you felt you'd be safely out of your parent's disapproving reach. "Fuck them," you said, and I agreed.
You had already chosen to live, that much was true. You accepted that there would be a shit ton of work to do, but no fucking clue as to the How To... How to live, how to live with other people, how to live with yourself. So you began with Aldous Huxley's 'The Doors of Perception' in one hand and a bottle of valium, a bag of weed and a bunch of acid hits in the other.
America's various sameness dramatically swayed through the smoking lounge car's window. Night and day cascaded across the hard labored serpentine rails. The lullaby of a rhythmic angelic cradle. Moving from and moving to. In one long continuous 96 hour blur. From black to brown to yellow to green to white to gold and to gray.
*u can call me ph!*
Back in LA, it did not take long before that idea of watching the sunset on the ocean was stowed behind the snobbish shoulders of private property holders, over the constant border patrols and beneath the police brutality riots simmering in caustic volitility. It all became too crowded, too cloudless, too crass a concept to bring you any peace of mind. That crap pile that is society kept stealing the spotlight and getting in real beauty's way. So, you soon found yourself back on an eastbound plane.
Adam was persistently urging this return. Apparently, he was not kidding when he said he wanted you to be his wife. But it was difficult to consider his proposal seriously. The moment you were back in his company, he gave you something that would last a lot longer than most marriages do: Herpes. Great. Though you were grateful he didn't give you syphillus or AIDS, you bowed out saying, "Thanks, but no thanks," to the honorary title of being his old maid.
A debilitating fear had formed around this worrisome concept of the wedding dress of chains. Wife just looked like a worse version of the girlfriend role you already so sucked at playing. So again, you failed to achieve any of the love you thought you wanted until it was staring you in the face. But it only resembled death by then. All the joy lightness and vitality of your previous feelings for Adam had dissipated. Now it felt forced obligated and confining, in a really tediously dull and boring way.
Then a distant relative died -- an aunt from your father's obscured family line. She used to call you "devil's spawn" so the thought of her leaving you a parting gift was completely unexpected. She willed you a savings bond that could only be cashed in your name. Therefore you actually received this one and only cash sum of $1200. All other gifts later bestowed upon you from other relatives never made it past your parent's bank account of utter unhidden disdain for the "drifting through life" choices you continually made.
With his head hung low, Adam glared at you resentfully from the station's departure platform. You just giggled, childishly waving Bye Bye from the window of an Amtrak train headed west for San Francisco Bay. You decided you wanted to be a comic book artist and finish college at the Art Institute. This was the new aim in your life spent adrift. At the farthest other end of the country, you felt you'd be safely out of your parent's disapproving reach. "Fuck them," you said, and I agreed.
You had already chosen to live, that much was true. You accepted that there would be a shit ton of work to do, but no fucking clue as to the How To... How to live, how to live with other people, how to live with yourself. So you began with Aldous Huxley's 'The Doors of Perception' in one hand and a bottle of valium, a bag of weed and a bunch of acid hits in the other.
America's various sameness dramatically swayed through the smoking lounge car's window. Night and day cascaded across the hard labored serpentine rails. The lullaby of a rhythmic angelic cradle. Moving from and moving to. In one long continuous 96 hour blur. From black to brown to yellow to green to white to gold and to gray.
*u can call me ph!*
13% [chapter 6]
ROADKILL
A couple weeks after arriving in Los Angeles, you went down to San Diego to visit Richard. He was your first love when you were both high school sophomores in Hightstown, New Jersey. The two of you would often hang out together after school, but he asked you not to act like you knew him in the lunchroom. He was worried how it might look to his upper crust preppie clique, if he were seen hanging out with a weirdo druggie band geek chick. This first love, unrequited, kept you chasing it. Just like that legendary virgin dragon crack hit. Ride the snake. It's a long cold class war bitch.
You wrote scores of letters to Richard over the years. He never replied. Still you kept sending them, just to write it out, that shit that life is all about to people like him and you -- grown up kids who grew up under the willows and toadstools of abuse. It didn't matter that he never wrote back. Though, at the time, you hopelessly hoped that he would. He did tell you much later that he finally caved in to feeling something for you while reading all those hand written pages that he had actually kept in a box under his bed. And that meant the world to you.
He now seemed somewhat amused that you'd even bother to come visit him again from so many miles away. Stepping off the Greyhound bus, his first comment to you was, "You looked better when you were fat." How fucking great is that?
Back in Massachusetts, a couple years before this particular visit, you'd be so wound up after your shift at the mental institution that you were crawling up the walls of your small rented room. Silently, you'd slip out of the house around midnight, pop the clutch in your little silver Toyota Tercel until you were safely down the hill before starting the engine. Then you'd be off to see Richard. He was living in Winsted,
Connecticut. A mere 3 hour drive away. You'd hang out for a little while, maybe have a quick fuck around 4am, then drive back to Burlington before your parents woke up at 8.
The impetus to stay up all night driving was, of course, to be with someone whom you loved. But it later became clear that these repeated roadtrips were really all about the drives themselves. About being alone on and off the major highways. About roaming through the dark craggy forests and foggy moonlit fields. About feeling the immense freedom to cry and sing along to Smiths and Cure songs as much and as loud as you liked. It was therapy. And it was on these solitary night drives that you first began to notice you did not need to be on drugs in order to feel good and alive. All you needed was solitude, music and that long road to motor into the truest version of you that could be derived.
The last quick visit to Richard in Winsted gave you your first pregnancy scare. He said he didn't care. So to save yourself the $300 it was going to cost to get an abortion, you decided it would be cheaper to do all the cocaine acid whiskey weed and pills you could get your hands onto and gluttonously shove that shit into yer face instead of eating any healthy food for the next few weeks. 24 hours before your appointment at the clinic, you successfully miscarried. Your nose bled out almost as much as your confused womb. But your rent got paid that month. And no one was there to bitch at you.
This time, in San Diego, visiting Richard only spawned several huge marguaritas, thankfully. But you were totally unsure of yourself, of why you were here, of what you had hoped to gain by revisiting him and this old wound. Nothing had been discussed about the past. And so nothing but unresolved insecurity, commonly the emotional terrain of youth, filled your pudding of proof. Proof of your inherent unloveability. There was a polite but oddly robotic screw that you gave him on his back porch the following morning. Then, perplexed, you left his place with this weird emptiness of having achieved some great reward. The reward of knowing that There Is No Reward. You spent your last day there wandering along the boardwalk alone, cuddling several cheap beers to liquify this pointless game you had just senselessly played and lost again.
A couple sitting on a beach blanket called out for you to join them. Julie was a white hippie chick from Berekeley. Her long haired Mexican boyfriend was named Jose. He never removed his shades. He scared you, but she seemed harmless enough and lulled you into feeling safe with her flowery blousey she-won't-let-anything-bad-happen-to-me gaze. They poured more booze down your gullible gullet and smoked you out. You all sang a Jimi Hendrix song rather flailingly and laughed cuz Jose pronounced "Joe" without the j sound, so he sang it "Hey Yo" instead. They said more music booze and drugs would be on the way if you went with them back to their place. You agreed, assuming it would be a short walk around the corner. But it was a long hour's drive down several unknown freeways.
Their place was a small dank room in a run down long stay motel. It didn't take long for them to propose a threeway but in your lost stoned drunken and paranoid state, you found this idea grossly depraved. Everything below your neck had grown numb to sensation anyway. And you did not find either one of them sexually attractive at all. Oh well. There goes another fantasy that in reality only turned you off with its utter inability to titillate. Perhaps part of porn's success lies in it's absence of odors, those moist reeks that you
cannot psychologically erase. And, right on cue, as always when combining weed with booze, you puked and just wanted to be left alone with your self-deprecating dismay.
Julie kept saying, "Just check out Jose's beautiful cock." But you were stubbornly unamazed. Frustrated after several failed attempts to fuck you, they agreed to give you a ride back to the boardwalk so you'd quit complaining. Jose's last attempt to grope your tits and grind against your ass was met with more struggling, so your body was tossed out of the van's passenger side door as they drove down the freeway on-ramp.
It had grown dark. Wearing only a pair of ratty cut off shorts, combat boots, and a bathing suit under a thin 'Confusion is Sex' Sonic Youth tshirt, you were totally exposed to the sudden desert chill. You checked yourself. No money except for some small change. No ID, just a slip of paper with Richard's phone number on it. No major injuries. Only some minor cuts and roadrash on your hands and knees from making out with asphalt and gravel. You were glad to be free from Jose and Julie, and made your way toward the highway to hitchhike back to Richard's place. Though, in what direction or how far it was, you could not say.
Coming to a 7 foot tall chain link fence, it took forever to scale the thing. Immediately afterward, you promised yourself to set a personal goal of gaining more upper body strength so as to avoid this kind of fat-assed humiliation during any future attempts to escape. Finally on the freeway, you looked down and found 2 dollars crumpled up in the dirt. Things were looking up. Thumbing it down the breakdown lane, you prayed to not fall prey to a rapist or serial killer out on the hunt for young female strays. Such a contradiction to
the deathwish that had purposefully put you here in harm's way.
About 2 hours passed. A Latino man driving a white pick up truck pulled over. He couldn't speak a word of English but he drove you to the nearest gas station so that you could call Richard on the payphone. Richard translated to the man over the phone where you needed to go. The man then silently drove you for over an hour back to where you had originated. You tried to give him the 2 dollars in your pocket that you found in the dirt. But he just smiled, shaking his head no and drove away.
As you turned toward the familiar basketball court near Richard's back porch, you fell to your dried bloody knees in the soft green grass and thanked the heavens above for crossing paths with the kindness of that unknown man. You made sure to mark this moment should you ever feel tempted to judge any one entire race for the despicable dickheaded actions of one person when another person will perform the most selfless and generous of deeds.
That goes for judging Julie too, which is why, when you saw her several years later walking on Cole Street in SF's Upper Haight, you restrained yourself from charging over there and punching her in her super friendly face. Instead, you thought about all this upper body strength you had since gained.
As for Richard, you still keep in touch with him. And you still feel love for him. In the best and only way you know how to love another person -- from a distance that is safe.
*u can call me ph!*
A couple weeks after arriving in Los Angeles, you went down to San Diego to visit Richard. He was your first love when you were both high school sophomores in Hightstown, New Jersey. The two of you would often hang out together after school, but he asked you not to act like you knew him in the lunchroom. He was worried how it might look to his upper crust preppie clique, if he were seen hanging out with a weirdo druggie band geek chick. This first love, unrequited, kept you chasing it. Just like that legendary virgin dragon crack hit. Ride the snake. It's a long cold class war bitch.
You wrote scores of letters to Richard over the years. He never replied. Still you kept sending them, just to write it out, that shit that life is all about to people like him and you -- grown up kids who grew up under the willows and toadstools of abuse. It didn't matter that he never wrote back. Though, at the time, you hopelessly hoped that he would. He did tell you much later that he finally caved in to feeling something for you while reading all those hand written pages that he had actually kept in a box under his bed. And that meant the world to you.
He now seemed somewhat amused that you'd even bother to come visit him again from so many miles away. Stepping off the Greyhound bus, his first comment to you was, "You looked better when you were fat." How fucking great is that?
Back in Massachusetts, a couple years before this particular visit, you'd be so wound up after your shift at the mental institution that you were crawling up the walls of your small rented room. Silently, you'd slip out of the house around midnight, pop the clutch in your little silver Toyota Tercel until you were safely down the hill before starting the engine. Then you'd be off to see Richard. He was living in Winsted,
Connecticut. A mere 3 hour drive away. You'd hang out for a little while, maybe have a quick fuck around 4am, then drive back to Burlington before your parents woke up at 8.
The impetus to stay up all night driving was, of course, to be with someone whom you loved. But it later became clear that these repeated roadtrips were really all about the drives themselves. About being alone on and off the major highways. About roaming through the dark craggy forests and foggy moonlit fields. About feeling the immense freedom to cry and sing along to Smiths and Cure songs as much and as loud as you liked. It was therapy. And it was on these solitary night drives that you first began to notice you did not need to be on drugs in order to feel good and alive. All you needed was solitude, music and that long road to motor into the truest version of you that could be derived.
The last quick visit to Richard in Winsted gave you your first pregnancy scare. He said he didn't care. So to save yourself the $300 it was going to cost to get an abortion, you decided it would be cheaper to do all the cocaine acid whiskey weed and pills you could get your hands onto and gluttonously shove that shit into yer face instead of eating any healthy food for the next few weeks. 24 hours before your appointment at the clinic, you successfully miscarried. Your nose bled out almost as much as your confused womb. But your rent got paid that month. And no one was there to bitch at you.
This time, in San Diego, visiting Richard only spawned several huge marguaritas, thankfully. But you were totally unsure of yourself, of why you were here, of what you had hoped to gain by revisiting him and this old wound. Nothing had been discussed about the past. And so nothing but unresolved insecurity, commonly the emotional terrain of youth, filled your pudding of proof. Proof of your inherent unloveability. There was a polite but oddly robotic screw that you gave him on his back porch the following morning. Then, perplexed, you left his place with this weird emptiness of having achieved some great reward. The reward of knowing that There Is No Reward. You spent your last day there wandering along the boardwalk alone, cuddling several cheap beers to liquify this pointless game you had just senselessly played and lost again.
A couple sitting on a beach blanket called out for you to join them. Julie was a white hippie chick from Berekeley. Her long haired Mexican boyfriend was named Jose. He never removed his shades. He scared you, but she seemed harmless enough and lulled you into feeling safe with her flowery blousey she-won't-let-anything-bad-happen-to-me gaze. They poured more booze down your gullible gullet and smoked you out. You all sang a Jimi Hendrix song rather flailingly and laughed cuz Jose pronounced "Joe" without the j sound, so he sang it "Hey Yo" instead. They said more music booze and drugs would be on the way if you went with them back to their place. You agreed, assuming it would be a short walk around the corner. But it was a long hour's drive down several unknown freeways.
Their place was a small dank room in a run down long stay motel. It didn't take long for them to propose a threeway but in your lost stoned drunken and paranoid state, you found this idea grossly depraved. Everything below your neck had grown numb to sensation anyway. And you did not find either one of them sexually attractive at all. Oh well. There goes another fantasy that in reality only turned you off with its utter inability to titillate. Perhaps part of porn's success lies in it's absence of odors, those moist reeks that you
cannot psychologically erase. And, right on cue, as always when combining weed with booze, you puked and just wanted to be left alone with your self-deprecating dismay.
Julie kept saying, "Just check out Jose's beautiful cock." But you were stubbornly unamazed. Frustrated after several failed attempts to fuck you, they agreed to give you a ride back to the boardwalk so you'd quit complaining. Jose's last attempt to grope your tits and grind against your ass was met with more struggling, so your body was tossed out of the van's passenger side door as they drove down the freeway on-ramp.
It had grown dark. Wearing only a pair of ratty cut off shorts, combat boots, and a bathing suit under a thin 'Confusion is Sex' Sonic Youth tshirt, you were totally exposed to the sudden desert chill. You checked yourself. No money except for some small change. No ID, just a slip of paper with Richard's phone number on it. No major injuries. Only some minor cuts and roadrash on your hands and knees from making out with asphalt and gravel. You were glad to be free from Jose and Julie, and made your way toward the highway to hitchhike back to Richard's place. Though, in what direction or how far it was, you could not say.
Coming to a 7 foot tall chain link fence, it took forever to scale the thing. Immediately afterward, you promised yourself to set a personal goal of gaining more upper body strength so as to avoid this kind of fat-assed humiliation during any future attempts to escape. Finally on the freeway, you looked down and found 2 dollars crumpled up in the dirt. Things were looking up. Thumbing it down the breakdown lane, you prayed to not fall prey to a rapist or serial killer out on the hunt for young female strays. Such a contradiction to
the deathwish that had purposefully put you here in harm's way.
About 2 hours passed. A Latino man driving a white pick up truck pulled over. He couldn't speak a word of English but he drove you to the nearest gas station so that you could call Richard on the payphone. Richard translated to the man over the phone where you needed to go. The man then silently drove you for over an hour back to where you had originated. You tried to give him the 2 dollars in your pocket that you found in the dirt. But he just smiled, shaking his head no and drove away.
As you turned toward the familiar basketball court near Richard's back porch, you fell to your dried bloody knees in the soft green grass and thanked the heavens above for crossing paths with the kindness of that unknown man. You made sure to mark this moment should you ever feel tempted to judge any one entire race for the despicable dickheaded actions of one person when another person will perform the most selfless and generous of deeds.
That goes for judging Julie too, which is why, when you saw her several years later walking on Cole Street in SF's Upper Haight, you restrained yourself from charging over there and punching her in her super friendly face. Instead, you thought about all this upper body strength you had since gained.
As for Richard, you still keep in touch with him. And you still feel love for him. In the best and only way you know how to love another person -- from a distance that is safe.
*u can call me ph!*
13% [chapter 4]
LOOSE ANGELS
Nowhere felt as permeated with fake brick wall falsehoods, with the whorrific dull hum of unfulfilled longing, as did LA. Nothing seemed real. And not much was. Except for the people that grew up there. They purely did not give a single solitary fuck about any of that lalaland porniconography bullshit. Mostly because they were too busy working to stay alive. You liked these people because they had real world problems. And they treated you like a real person not an opportunity to get whatever they could get outta you.
But what is there to get from a 23 year old who's already rough trade? From a murky dirty bitch with an unpretty pockmarked face? No money, no honey, and thighs that rub together on most days, even though you were throwing up everything you ate. From some feckless femi-nazi who shoplifts on a regular basis cuz stealing from corporations cheers up that glum, especially when angry and drunk, which is, again, on most days. But you found expensive cheeses much to your taste. That and fruit seemed to be the only foods you could stomach without the constant nauseous pangs of female shame that made you heave into a shape that glamourized near invisibility. Faded, yearning to be erased. Long long before being diagnosed with caeliac's disease --whose symptoms include vomitting, headaches, depression, mood swings, constipation, rashes, dizziness, migraines, diarrhea, seizures, fatigue, distaste. Just from eating wheat. What a fabulously obtuse waste.
This was how you learned how powerful the power of suggestion really was: Keeping steady eye contact and waving a receipt for the one box of tea you had actually purchased in the security officer's face, you held a bag that contained not only the tea, but also blocks of fancy cheese, a carton of orange juice, a box of frozen fried chicken and a fifth of tequilla. You angrily exclaimed with the shrill disgust of a spoiled teenager that he was mistaken for stopping you at the exit. "Look, I have a receipt! GAH!!" And it worked. He cowered without examining the crumpled slip of paper, apologized and let you go.
Decades of poverty induced shoplifting forays keenly attuned you to when you were being watched or suspected. Especially during the holidays, when you'd bring home hauls that surpassed a thousand dollars in worth. You wanted to spread the love and cheer you could not afford, but felt that others deserved.
Those internal signals warned you to stay true to hightened survival intuitions too. "Don't go down that street." "Stay on this side of the door." "Slow down, an animal's going to run into the road at the bottom of this hill." Once, during shop class in New Jersey, it said, "Get up from that stool and come over here to the other side of the room." So you did and stood there fumbling for a second, not sure what to do. A loud snapping sound came from a table saw. Something silvery flew across the room. The sharp circular blade thumped, it's teeth stabbing hard into the wall at chest-level where you sat only moments before. When you were 3, living in Germany, "Setzen, Jetz!" is what that intuitive voice, in German, said. Then something violently shook the chain of the swing you were sitting in. Your father was mowing the lawn behind you when a bolt came loose. The shaking of that chain was the lawnmower blade spinning off and slicing through the air a few inches above you.
If only you would have listened every single time you heard those whispered warnings, then Los Angeles might not represent the City of Utter Failure that it so disasterously means to you these days. But back then, you were still starry-eyed and full of hate. And if a disembodied voice was the only thing that wanted to protect you, you were grateful. It was better than no one. Though you were never sure why you would be worth saving.
Working for minimum wage at the Nuart Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, you stood in the shadow of a towering Rutger Hauer at the premier of the director's cut of Blade Runner.That did not seem real, but it was Really Fucking Awesome. So was meeting Dennis Hopper as he stared down at some stray drips of red paint below a stairway railing. Rubbing the dried drops with his shoe, he wondered aloud, "Is that blood?" As he would do.
What was not awesome was being completely annoyed by the reoccurring appearance of Christian Slater with his sloppy entourage of rich young white coked up yes-friends. He'd stand there, all fidgety and fuckfaced, demanding free entry to obsessively watch himself on screen and impress everybody. Somehow, even from your lowly position of being a nobody in the box office, this sad arrogance seemed pitifully real. You said no and made him buy tickets at the full price every time. Pffft. Thespians. You saw no skill or craft in his lame imitation of Jack Nicholson.
Who's a critic? Everyone.
You didn't own a car in LA. Back in Boston, walking around with your headphones on was a calming form of exercise, an impoverished necessity to get home from work, but one that you had come to enjoy in some semi-meditative way. However, here in LA, you received much public humiliation for performing this derided activity. People honked, laughed, threw old sneakers at you and screamed, "GET A CAR!" So you turned up the volume on your Loop tape, attempting to drown them out with 'A Gilded Eternity' and just kept walking.
Arriving back at your cousin's apartment on 12th Street in Santa Monica, you tried to eek out some small sense of contentment by smoking a shitload of purple haze. She had agreed to let you stay on her couch until you landed on your feet. But there was no real ground on which to land and you now felt ashamed of using your feet at all.
This feeling of envious disability was exacerbated by the fact that the $200 rent for your cousin's comfortable one bedroom apartment was paid for in full every month by her parents while she was a full time student at UCLA. They also paid her full tuition. Contrast that with this: While staying with your parents in Burlington, Massachusetts, they charged you $200 a month to live in their house while you attended classes at a small art school near Salem and worked at a mental institution near Danvers so that you could afford to pay both the rent and tuition yourself.
Proudly, you brought home one of your first paintings to show your parents, having received an A grade. The assignment was to combine various elements of another artist's work into your own unique vision. You did a variation of Magritte's work and painted a thick colorful cartoonish oil image entitled "A Fish With Toes And Tits Surrounded By Small Multicolored Flying Penises Wearing Bowler Hats." Your father, a frustrated painter himself, was mortified. They had absolutely no intention of ever supporting you in this pursuit of a college education, suggesting you be more like your brother, do something useful and join the military.
This might be why landing on your feet in LA was a bit difficult. You felt legless. And passionately despised every ounce of this demonstrative counter-productive self pity that you were swimming in. So you took to flight instead by getting really fucking high most of the fucking time.
*u can call me ph!*
Nowhere felt as permeated with fake brick wall falsehoods, with the whorrific dull hum of unfulfilled longing, as did LA. Nothing seemed real. And not much was. Except for the people that grew up there. They purely did not give a single solitary fuck about any of that lalaland porniconography bullshit. Mostly because they were too busy working to stay alive. You liked these people because they had real world problems. And they treated you like a real person not an opportunity to get whatever they could get outta you.
But what is there to get from a 23 year old who's already rough trade? From a murky dirty bitch with an unpretty pockmarked face? No money, no honey, and thighs that rub together on most days, even though you were throwing up everything you ate. From some feckless femi-nazi who shoplifts on a regular basis cuz stealing from corporations cheers up that glum, especially when angry and drunk, which is, again, on most days. But you found expensive cheeses much to your taste. That and fruit seemed to be the only foods you could stomach without the constant nauseous pangs of female shame that made you heave into a shape that glamourized near invisibility. Faded, yearning to be erased. Long long before being diagnosed with caeliac's disease --whose symptoms include vomitting, headaches, depression, mood swings, constipation, rashes, dizziness, migraines, diarrhea, seizures, fatigue, distaste. Just from eating wheat. What a fabulously obtuse waste.
This was how you learned how powerful the power of suggestion really was: Keeping steady eye contact and waving a receipt for the one box of tea you had actually purchased in the security officer's face, you held a bag that contained not only the tea, but also blocks of fancy cheese, a carton of orange juice, a box of frozen fried chicken and a fifth of tequilla. You angrily exclaimed with the shrill disgust of a spoiled teenager that he was mistaken for stopping you at the exit. "Look, I have a receipt! GAH!!" And it worked. He cowered without examining the crumpled slip of paper, apologized and let you go.
Decades of poverty induced shoplifting forays keenly attuned you to when you were being watched or suspected. Especially during the holidays, when you'd bring home hauls that surpassed a thousand dollars in worth. You wanted to spread the love and cheer you could not afford, but felt that others deserved.
Those internal signals warned you to stay true to hightened survival intuitions too. "Don't go down that street." "Stay on this side of the door." "Slow down, an animal's going to run into the road at the bottom of this hill." Once, during shop class in New Jersey, it said, "Get up from that stool and come over here to the other side of the room." So you did and stood there fumbling for a second, not sure what to do. A loud snapping sound came from a table saw. Something silvery flew across the room. The sharp circular blade thumped, it's teeth stabbing hard into the wall at chest-level where you sat only moments before. When you were 3, living in Germany, "Setzen, Jetz!" is what that intuitive voice, in German, said. Then something violently shook the chain of the swing you were sitting in. Your father was mowing the lawn behind you when a bolt came loose. The shaking of that chain was the lawnmower blade spinning off and slicing through the air a few inches above you.
If only you would have listened every single time you heard those whispered warnings, then Los Angeles might not represent the City of Utter Failure that it so disasterously means to you these days. But back then, you were still starry-eyed and full of hate. And if a disembodied voice was the only thing that wanted to protect you, you were grateful. It was better than no one. Though you were never sure why you would be worth saving.
Working for minimum wage at the Nuart Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, you stood in the shadow of a towering Rutger Hauer at the premier of the director's cut of Blade Runner.That did not seem real, but it was Really Fucking Awesome. So was meeting Dennis Hopper as he stared down at some stray drips of red paint below a stairway railing. Rubbing the dried drops with his shoe, he wondered aloud, "Is that blood?" As he would do.
What was not awesome was being completely annoyed by the reoccurring appearance of Christian Slater with his sloppy entourage of rich young white coked up yes-friends. He'd stand there, all fidgety and fuckfaced, demanding free entry to obsessively watch himself on screen and impress everybody. Somehow, even from your lowly position of being a nobody in the box office, this sad arrogance seemed pitifully real. You said no and made him buy tickets at the full price every time. Pffft. Thespians. You saw no skill or craft in his lame imitation of Jack Nicholson.
Who's a critic? Everyone.
You didn't own a car in LA. Back in Boston, walking around with your headphones on was a calming form of exercise, an impoverished necessity to get home from work, but one that you had come to enjoy in some semi-meditative way. However, here in LA, you received much public humiliation for performing this derided activity. People honked, laughed, threw old sneakers at you and screamed, "GET A CAR!" So you turned up the volume on your Loop tape, attempting to drown them out with 'A Gilded Eternity' and just kept walking.
Arriving back at your cousin's apartment on 12th Street in Santa Monica, you tried to eek out some small sense of contentment by smoking a shitload of purple haze. She had agreed to let you stay on her couch until you landed on your feet. But there was no real ground on which to land and you now felt ashamed of using your feet at all.
This feeling of envious disability was exacerbated by the fact that the $200 rent for your cousin's comfortable one bedroom apartment was paid for in full every month by her parents while she was a full time student at UCLA. They also paid her full tuition. Contrast that with this: While staying with your parents in Burlington, Massachusetts, they charged you $200 a month to live in their house while you attended classes at a small art school near Salem and worked at a mental institution near Danvers so that you could afford to pay both the rent and tuition yourself.
Proudly, you brought home one of your first paintings to show your parents, having received an A grade. The assignment was to combine various elements of another artist's work into your own unique vision. You did a variation of Magritte's work and painted a thick colorful cartoonish oil image entitled "A Fish With Toes And Tits Surrounded By Small Multicolored Flying Penises Wearing Bowler Hats." Your father, a frustrated painter himself, was mortified. They had absolutely no intention of ever supporting you in this pursuit of a college education, suggesting you be more like your brother, do something useful and join the military.
This might be why landing on your feet in LA was a bit difficult. You felt legless. And passionately despised every ounce of this demonstrative counter-productive self pity that you were swimming in. So you took to flight instead by getting really fucking high most of the fucking time.
*u can call me ph!*
5.26.2016
13% [chapter 3]
GOD IS NO PLACE
Growing up in the military, you were accustomed to moving to different places bi-annually. This made it difficult to form any real lasting relationships with people, always getting torn away from the friends you finally managed to make. In some ways you loved, and in some ways you hated being the new girl again and again.
And in many ways, you wished you could seasonally shed all of your skin like a snake, devour yourself tail first, yet somehow avoid ending up with your head up your own ass, so to speak. Oftener, you'd curl up into a protective armoured ball like a roly poly and just roll away.
So much of a child's life is out of their own control. So much of what they are taught is on the importance of learning how to obey rather than learning how to think for themselves. To have some illusion of control over your own mind and body was the only form of autonymous choice you could fully embrace. This is why you told yourself that it is a decision you make, whether or not you allow yourself to fall in love or go insane.
As a rootless kid, you had formulated the ridiculous paranoic theory that every new town to which you were forced to relocate was just an updated version of the same ten people in the same small place, having been elaborately redecorated while you were all stuck up in the air inside that massive military cargo plane.
Since you and your brother were often the only children on board, the pilots let you sit in the cockpit and gave you lollipops to keep your curious hands occupied. You strained your little necks up to get a good view out the front window. You could see the tops of huge thunderhead clouds as you cruised straight through them instead of passing by alongside. This was one of the most beautifully sublime places you'd ever been to in your entire short life, up there in the boundless sky.
While unpacking moving boxes in Warner Robbins, Georgia, you pretended it was Christmas again and handed out all the wrapped items to other people so they could feign surprise upon opening each new gift of that thing they already owned. Your first day in kindergarten, you said hello in thick German. All the kids gasped and screamed, "Hitler!" But you had no idea what this word meant. It must be something hateful judging by their scowls. So your 5 year old speech patterns quickly shifted into the long slow drawl of an American's southern accent.
In Austin, Texas, a tornado came and blew out all of the windows of the house while your family huddled together in the tiny tiled bathroom, gripping the sink and shuddering. Afterward, you all went for a grateful walk across the flat cracked muddy plains that
seemed to stretch out forever beyond the little grassy fenced in yards. You played with some scorpions and knew you should be afraid of them, but you were not. Nor were you scared when your brother threw down his fishing pole after spotting a huge yellow water moccasin on the river. You grabbed his hand and brought him back to the spot where his pole landed unharmed. Then you made yourself conquer your fear of the high diving board at the public pool. Soon, that new found thrill became an obsession. At 7, you were a drug addict just waiting to happen.
While living on the Greek island of Crete, you saw 'Star Wars' on the big screen in an outdoor 3000 year old ampitheater beneath a bright sea of stars. You rolled around happily in fields of poppy and clover and swam with seahorses urchins stingrays and starfish in the heavenly clear blue Mediterranean. At night, you covered your ears to block out the slaughterhouse sounds of pigs being butchered because they sounded like children screaming. Along the edge of their fence lay scattered dry dead hoofs and horns and snouts. In utter glee, you rode many a wide bellied and very unimpressed donkey. For Easter, a goat was hung by it's feet in an olive tree and left to rot for 2 weeks. You inspected it's decomposition daily. At Knossos Palace, you sat in the King's throne but knew it really belonged to the Queen. You also wondered if Jesus was a time traveller from the future, where we all know how to heal each other already, and that he was stuck here, keenly aware of exactly what he had to stoically go through in order for the Piscean Age to unfold in the inevitably brutal and neccessarily ignorant way that it should. You found an Ankh ring on the village street and wore it even though it turned your finger green. While watching an opulent wedding from the kid's table, it made you cry. This lavish act of ceremony glimmered so sweetly in your 9 year old mind.
Ultimately, it was great for your mental health to have lived in so many different places growing up. You were especially grateful to have been exposed to the ancient Celtic, Minoan and Egyptian cultures, where, with the clear third eye of a child, you could sense the presence of memories from people that passed eons ago. These emotional but ordinary scenes
from older civilizations felt far more expansive and equalitarian than that of the non-Native American country you now inhabited; imperialistic genocide having paved the way through these desecrated lands; shopping malls in defecit being converted into private prisons for profit; a poorly housed chemically tainted urban sprawl that, for thousands of years prior to capitalism's arrival, was a communally sustaining well-tended crop of sacred maize.
It was this loss of sacred nature, replaced by the punitive hard line formation of strict angry man-god and woman hating laws to obey that turned you against organized religion's Just Do As I Say. You shut the Bible immediately after reading the passage that if a man cheats on his wife, he pays for his crime with a camel. But if a woman cheats on her husband, she is buried up to her neck in sand and has rocks thrown at her head until she is dead. Although you were still a kid, the stink of this injustice was not something you would ever be able to obey, much less worship. Christianity was no safe haven. Even it was calling you a whore before your 12th birthday.
So you curled up and rolled away.
Traveling induces egolessness. It invites you to befriend the present moment as something from which you need not seek permission nor escape. It will begin and end as it does regardless of your participation, so you might as well be there and appreciate. Listen to what you might hear it whisper in the wind, what it might show you while gazing out from that oval hole on the plane. Traveling awakens empathy for others as you see them from the bus lane, struggling on the streets to get home with their overflowing burdens before it's too late. It instigates the truest feelings of spiritual freedom you've ever known, as motion and light never discriminate. It induces a timeless sense of psychic connection to the organic structures of conception birth life death and decay. Air fire water earth and ether are moving in space, in swirling patterns that are all exactly the same.
And you don't even have to be totally high for motion to make you feel this serene, this constantly changing, this anonymous, this ok.
*u can call me ph!*
Growing up in the military, you were accustomed to moving to different places bi-annually. This made it difficult to form any real lasting relationships with people, always getting torn away from the friends you finally managed to make. In some ways you loved, and in some ways you hated being the new girl again and again.
And in many ways, you wished you could seasonally shed all of your skin like a snake, devour yourself tail first, yet somehow avoid ending up with your head up your own ass, so to speak. Oftener, you'd curl up into a protective armoured ball like a roly poly and just roll away.
So much of a child's life is out of their own control. So much of what they are taught is on the importance of learning how to obey rather than learning how to think for themselves. To have some illusion of control over your own mind and body was the only form of autonymous choice you could fully embrace. This is why you told yourself that it is a decision you make, whether or not you allow yourself to fall in love or go insane.
As a rootless kid, you had formulated the ridiculous paranoic theory that every new town to which you were forced to relocate was just an updated version of the same ten people in the same small place, having been elaborately redecorated while you were all stuck up in the air inside that massive military cargo plane.
Since you and your brother were often the only children on board, the pilots let you sit in the cockpit and gave you lollipops to keep your curious hands occupied. You strained your little necks up to get a good view out the front window. You could see the tops of huge thunderhead clouds as you cruised straight through them instead of passing by alongside. This was one of the most beautifully sublime places you'd ever been to in your entire short life, up there in the boundless sky.
While unpacking moving boxes in Warner Robbins, Georgia, you pretended it was Christmas again and handed out all the wrapped items to other people so they could feign surprise upon opening each new gift of that thing they already owned. Your first day in kindergarten, you said hello in thick German. All the kids gasped and screamed, "Hitler!" But you had no idea what this word meant. It must be something hateful judging by their scowls. So your 5 year old speech patterns quickly shifted into the long slow drawl of an American's southern accent.
In Austin, Texas, a tornado came and blew out all of the windows of the house while your family huddled together in the tiny tiled bathroom, gripping the sink and shuddering. Afterward, you all went for a grateful walk across the flat cracked muddy plains that
seemed to stretch out forever beyond the little grassy fenced in yards. You played with some scorpions and knew you should be afraid of them, but you were not. Nor were you scared when your brother threw down his fishing pole after spotting a huge yellow water moccasin on the river. You grabbed his hand and brought him back to the spot where his pole landed unharmed. Then you made yourself conquer your fear of the high diving board at the public pool. Soon, that new found thrill became an obsession. At 7, you were a drug addict just waiting to happen.
While living on the Greek island of Crete, you saw 'Star Wars' on the big screen in an outdoor 3000 year old ampitheater beneath a bright sea of stars. You rolled around happily in fields of poppy and clover and swam with seahorses urchins stingrays and starfish in the heavenly clear blue Mediterranean. At night, you covered your ears to block out the slaughterhouse sounds of pigs being butchered because they sounded like children screaming. Along the edge of their fence lay scattered dry dead hoofs and horns and snouts. In utter glee, you rode many a wide bellied and very unimpressed donkey. For Easter, a goat was hung by it's feet in an olive tree and left to rot for 2 weeks. You inspected it's decomposition daily. At Knossos Palace, you sat in the King's throne but knew it really belonged to the Queen. You also wondered if Jesus was a time traveller from the future, where we all know how to heal each other already, and that he was stuck here, keenly aware of exactly what he had to stoically go through in order for the Piscean Age to unfold in the inevitably brutal and neccessarily ignorant way that it should. You found an Ankh ring on the village street and wore it even though it turned your finger green. While watching an opulent wedding from the kid's table, it made you cry. This lavish act of ceremony glimmered so sweetly in your 9 year old mind.
Ultimately, it was great for your mental health to have lived in so many different places growing up. You were especially grateful to have been exposed to the ancient Celtic, Minoan and Egyptian cultures, where, with the clear third eye of a child, you could sense the presence of memories from people that passed eons ago. These emotional but ordinary scenes
from older civilizations felt far more expansive and equalitarian than that of the non-Native American country you now inhabited; imperialistic genocide having paved the way through these desecrated lands; shopping malls in defecit being converted into private prisons for profit; a poorly housed chemically tainted urban sprawl that, for thousands of years prior to capitalism's arrival, was a communally sustaining well-tended crop of sacred maize.
It was this loss of sacred nature, replaced by the punitive hard line formation of strict angry man-god and woman hating laws to obey that turned you against organized religion's Just Do As I Say. You shut the Bible immediately after reading the passage that if a man cheats on his wife, he pays for his crime with a camel. But if a woman cheats on her husband, she is buried up to her neck in sand and has rocks thrown at her head until she is dead. Although you were still a kid, the stink of this injustice was not something you would ever be able to obey, much less worship. Christianity was no safe haven. Even it was calling you a whore before your 12th birthday.
So you curled up and rolled away.
Traveling induces egolessness. It invites you to befriend the present moment as something from which you need not seek permission nor escape. It will begin and end as it does regardless of your participation, so you might as well be there and appreciate. Listen to what you might hear it whisper in the wind, what it might show you while gazing out from that oval hole on the plane. Traveling awakens empathy for others as you see them from the bus lane, struggling on the streets to get home with their overflowing burdens before it's too late. It instigates the truest feelings of spiritual freedom you've ever known, as motion and light never discriminate. It induces a timeless sense of psychic connection to the organic structures of conception birth life death and decay. Air fire water earth and ether are moving in space, in swirling patterns that are all exactly the same.
And you don't even have to be totally high for motion to make you feel this serene, this constantly changing, this anonymous, this ok.
*u can call me ph!*
13% [chapter 2]
LIFE AFTER DEATH
After the twin abortion, you left Ben.
His guilt over cheating on you preempted him to propose marriage. But you wanted to live now, not die some more. And honestly, you knew he would probably be happier with someone else. Someone else who was way better at doing this girlfriend thing than you were. He seemed to be alright, as he sat there watching you pack up your shit. But he knew nothing was going to stop you. He cried a little at the kitchen table. You cried too, but not until after your suitcases were loaded into the cab and it was pulling away onto Commonwealth Avenue. You had already become way too preoccupied with partying constantly to hang out at the apartment with him, all sullen and serious and sad. You could no longer see the point in discussing the unspoken issues of distrust this failed relationship now had. But you did keep his Joy Division 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' tshirt as a momento and wore it into the ground for the next 20 years in tribute to your one and only experience of domestic bliss.
By some twist of predictable fate, a few weeks after ending it with Ben, you found yourself hanging out with Adam, a guy who happened to be supplying you with all the LSD you could ever want or need. He had fallen for this new passionate vitality you now embued, but couldn't profess to know the Actual You, or that death had so nearly just claimed you. Usually, your starving mouth was too full of crullers from the latest Dunkin Donuts dumpster dive to talk about the past.
Adam's house was the kind of place where your circle of misfit friends gathered in groups; making art out of everything including shit and puke (as college sophomores do), playing chaotic music through random amps that invaded the basement, watching bizarre cult movies in the couch and bong infested living room. And sometimes just fucking, exploring each other in unisex groups of more than 2.
Don't overanalyze it -- it's what happens when everyone's young and uninnocent, drunk and on drugs, searching for something that always remains unclear. Just another bunch of punk kids in some other definitive-only-after-it's-over year, learning how to navigate and trying to dance on the dangerous transitional seas of a carelessly self-aware youth.
Tripping made you giggle at everything, including Adam. He was a tall lanky slim jim of a stretch toy with purple dreads, a drug dealing comic book dude. He had long fingernails, a lot of scars and a beautiful ancient sword mounted on his wall. Dead Can Dance, African Head Charge, Sleep Chamber, and Current 93 filled the room as he slipped a silver lizard ring on your finger. He said he wanted to marry you. That struck you as incredibly hilarious too.
One morning, whilst gently gliding back down to earth after tripping balls all night along the Massachusetts shore from Magnolia to Manchester-By-The-Sea, you watched the sunrise alone over the Atlantic ocean. In an instant, you decided you wanted to watch the sunset on the Pacific. Your first thought was "my parents won't let me." But then, the realization clocked you: you're on your own now. It's a fact. No longer do you need permission to live your life in whatever way you see fit.
Within the week, you sold some crap for cash, grabbed what few possessions you still had left, shoved them into a bag, headed for a plane direct to LAX, and told Adam you'd be right back.
*u can call me ph!*
After the twin abortion, you left Ben.
His guilt over cheating on you preempted him to propose marriage. But you wanted to live now, not die some more. And honestly, you knew he would probably be happier with someone else. Someone else who was way better at doing this girlfriend thing than you were. He seemed to be alright, as he sat there watching you pack up your shit. But he knew nothing was going to stop you. He cried a little at the kitchen table. You cried too, but not until after your suitcases were loaded into the cab and it was pulling away onto Commonwealth Avenue. You had already become way too preoccupied with partying constantly to hang out at the apartment with him, all sullen and serious and sad. You could no longer see the point in discussing the unspoken issues of distrust this failed relationship now had. But you did keep his Joy Division 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' tshirt as a momento and wore it into the ground for the next 20 years in tribute to your one and only experience of domestic bliss.
By some twist of predictable fate, a few weeks after ending it with Ben, you found yourself hanging out with Adam, a guy who happened to be supplying you with all the LSD you could ever want or need. He had fallen for this new passionate vitality you now embued, but couldn't profess to know the Actual You, or that death had so nearly just claimed you. Usually, your starving mouth was too full of crullers from the latest Dunkin Donuts dumpster dive to talk about the past.
Adam's house was the kind of place where your circle of misfit friends gathered in groups; making art out of everything including shit and puke (as college sophomores do), playing chaotic music through random amps that invaded the basement, watching bizarre cult movies in the couch and bong infested living room. And sometimes just fucking, exploring each other in unisex groups of more than 2.
Don't overanalyze it -- it's what happens when everyone's young and uninnocent, drunk and on drugs, searching for something that always remains unclear. Just another bunch of punk kids in some other definitive-only-after-it's-over year, learning how to navigate and trying to dance on the dangerous transitional seas of a carelessly self-aware youth.
Tripping made you giggle at everything, including Adam. He was a tall lanky slim jim of a stretch toy with purple dreads, a drug dealing comic book dude. He had long fingernails, a lot of scars and a beautiful ancient sword mounted on his wall. Dead Can Dance, African Head Charge, Sleep Chamber, and Current 93 filled the room as he slipped a silver lizard ring on your finger. He said he wanted to marry you. That struck you as incredibly hilarious too.
One morning, whilst gently gliding back down to earth after tripping balls all night along the Massachusetts shore from Magnolia to Manchester-By-The-Sea, you watched the sunrise alone over the Atlantic ocean. In an instant, you decided you wanted to watch the sunset on the Pacific. Your first thought was "my parents won't let me." But then, the realization clocked you: you're on your own now. It's a fact. No longer do you need permission to live your life in whatever way you see fit.
Within the week, you sold some crap for cash, grabbed what few possessions you still had left, shoved them into a bag, headed for a plane direct to LAX, and told Adam you'd be right back.
*u can call me ph!*
5.16.2016
13% [chapter 5]
THE 3 FACES: HEREIN LIES THE HOLE
It begs for fulfillment and has always begged for fulfillment since the dawning of humankind. Throughout history, all manner of things have been used to fill the Hole: drugs, booze, money, sex, power, risk, crisis, relationships, religion, gambling, materialism, nationalism, etc. for the sake of feeling a purpose, in order to feel Real Love.
Your Hole was filled with some of these things too, but only ever Felt Full when filling it with music, art or other compulsive acts of creativity. Akin only to the bellows of being boiled alive or the scraping desire to tear off all your skin and bash your skull against a brick wall til your brains seeped out, this uncontrollable burning urge to Create Something always instantly derailed the equally strong impulse to Destroy Something, most likely yourself.
These compulsive acts of creativity never held sway over the resulting expressions they produced. They never turned on you. They never abandoned you. They never ridiculed you for being too depressing, too brutal, too sad, too aggro, too political, too victimy, too intense, too strong, too cold, too feminist, too emo, too stupid, too you. Being in their midst seemed to be the only time you could catch a fleeting glimpse of that tiny beautiful spark hiding in the depths of your abysmally dark heart. This essentially made the Hole a necessity. Each time you filled it with creativity, the feeling of Real Love that shone forth was that of the miraculous and unconditional kind. It made you grateful for the Hole lies herein.
Although it would take many years to learn not to take for granted this face, once you began talking to it, spending more time with it and developing a resonating respect for it, you found yourself devoted to being its lifelong companion. Not until semi-consciously painting this phrase onto paper, did you realize it's ugly truth: "the only time i feel happy to be alive is when i am alone."
Because being alone meant being creative, not trapped under anyone's thumb. Being alone meant being uninhibited and standing naked in the light of your spirit not your sex. Being alone meant doing no harm to anyone including yourself. It meant channeling all that rage and aggression into something somewhat atrocious that also housed little slivers of a mysterious tranquility, an indiscrimate hint of redemption. Being alone meant being transported away from the meager repetitive trivialities of your own traumatized ego into a realm of pure thought, heavily populated with energy, ideas and that revitalizing feeling of Real Love.
It should be said that this sense of expansion and connectedness could only have happened after gradually shedding it's contrasting skin -- that tyrannical grasping at the feral act of expression as if no one within a ten mile radius was permitted to engage in their own creativity. This thing, this face, was the only thing that you felt was truly yours. And you hoarded it. Hiding it away as if it might be suddenly stolen or betrayed. Then putting it on blast upon completion, splaying it out to the whole world. But 'the whole world' seemed to only consist of that one dude that was currently fucking you, plus a couple other dudes that wanted to fuck you whenever that first dude had decided he was done fucking you.
No draw. No fans. No love. No duh.
Still, you'd put out more work than put out sexually (while remaining present in the room) and just kept hoping. Hoping for validation. Hoping ideas might be brought to life without all the junkie-slut judgements and false rumors that haunted you -- rumors that originated from the butthurt mouths of men whom you had refused to bow down and deliver some sacrificial oral sex to. Hoping your work might be seen and heard on the merit of The Work Itself, not only after taking into consideration that the person who made it has a cunt. Hoping you'd exist as something Before Cunt or After Cunt or Other Than Cunt. Not a woman artist, but an artist. Not in a girl band, but in a band. Not a female filmmaker, but a filmmaker. Hoping that your presence on this earth was even worth spit.
However, more often than not, splaying out only seemed to further the alienation. It most assuredly caused all sorts of schisms that ended every relationship you had with men who felt it was your duty to nurture their creativity rather than spend so much time and effort exploring your own. Relationships with women ended sadly as well. For what reasons you still can't tell. Maybe after you pull the broad axe out of your back and crawl out from under the bus, all will be peachy, swell.
Most other people ignored your work. Or belittled and denigrated it. Or just got more weirded out by you than they were before. And sometimes, they felt so moved that they'd send you pictures of their dumbass dicks. How terribly fascinating that is to someone who has seen nothing but the mediocrity of dicks since the age of 4?
Occassionally though, others said the things you made inspired them. You later read somewhere that the best thing any human being can do is inspire others. This surprised
you because you always felt insulted by the compliment; preferring they book you a show, buy some merch or share their tour contacts and technical knowledge with you rather than just get inspired. You translated this into meaning they now felt motivated to go make their own better version of what you just made because nothing you do is ever Good Enough.
And how could anyone argue with that kind of logic?
Inspiring others didn't garner you any of that sought after support from "the community" either. You only noticed it bringing repulsive levels of disdain, rejection and other grossly competetive behaviors your way. This, of course, is inevitable for anyone willing to put their underpants on display. But so reviled by the hypersensitive; to one who's grown so weary of those odorous unlovable traits that kept being force fed into your already stuffed up face. It only gave you more reasons to hate. Even though you were now a fully grown crybaby who had the capacity for hard reflections and real profound change.
Unfortunately, change only actualized after it was already too late. And that thirst to feel part of some imaginary creatively sustaining group, like those photos of surrealists in Paris circa 1932, never bore any of the hoped for fruit. Truthfully, hope had blinded you to all the fallen fruit at your feet. While you pouted and stomped around, spouting out your enormous expectations and warbly angst ridden images and sounds, those modest but sweet opportunities were just laying there, rotting on the ground.
After all those formative art fag punk years spent being ugly overbearing arrogant awkward anxious and weird, you're fortunate that this artistic devotion was never completely smothered in those heavy handed, desperate-for-love clutches. At some point you had to let those things you created walk away and go live lives of their own. Watching your little creative children from a distance as they went on living gave you a beaming teary-eyed mother's sense of pride -- if this is what a mother's pride feels like.
Eventually, you'd come to see through the stunted hierarchal power play for recognition that occurs in every creative "scene". You despised that word since you never really felt part of one. And if you were, you were completely unaware of it. Pretty much mirrors the feelings you had about your family. Every conversation was always instigated by you. The only time your phone rang was when someone's butt or bag called to make muffled noises and squishy sounds. Ha Ha! Loser. Perhaps your mom was right when she said, "You're such a downer. It's no wonder you go through men like water." And if your own mother doesn't really love or support you, how could anyone else be expected to? Yup. There's that yoke too.
However, when others did absolutely love your work and asked you to autograph something, fawned over you with dilated pupils or began liking every single thing you posted on social media, you got creeped out by the attention and felt as if your virtual personal space was somehow being infringed upon. There really was no way to win with you. Essentially, no matter how other people responded, you consistently felt afraid of everyone and suspicious of their motivations on both sides of the ditch. It was just as difficult to deal with violent opposition as it was to deal with sincere admiration. Either way, you'd be a disappointment. Right, mom?
So Fuck it. Stop trying so hard to be anything to anyone.
And when you finally felt that transformative joy of letting go of those wobbly notions of control, discovering that the Less you clung to your own need for an ego boost via creativity as if it Belonged To You, the less you tried to control others or allowed them to control you, the More that energy would recharge the environment itself -- setting the room and everyone in it alight, turning a small free noise and doom show in the living room of an old slum (affectionately dubbed bleakhaus) into a generating storm of lightning bolt positivity for electromagnetic acres around. One might notice this with any live music venue. Everyone feels, not only high on whatever they're already on, but also noticeably more aurally alive during the course of that sonically cleansing night. And those were some of the happiest nights of your life.
Perhaps creative energy is a lot like a woman. When you try to Own it, Control it, Make it Conform to Your Needs, it can no longer breathe, so the spark of love withers and dies. But if you take a step back and Let Her Do Her Own Thing, she is a wonder to witness, a joy to behold, a time to admire.
You liked to liken this more approachable attitude to being a radio. The radio does not Own the show it broadcasts any more than you Own the creative energy that just so happens to flood through you, tapping into your veins whenever it feels like. Being receptive to its sudden company is always a welcomed high.
Like those moments when the music moves you to tears, when a unifying psychic awareness of the tenderness in the present moment makes colors shine bright, when the sweltering heat is tamed by a summer thunderstorm's downpour, when every vulnerably fractured emotional toll doesn't seem so tragic anymore and your heart's willingness to feel springs back to life.
Regardless of whether or not you were high on drugs, it was always there, that clear-seeing energy within alpha state, that unconditional love that softens off the jagged edges of pride, that forgiveness that opens you up to what is outside.
At last, comprehending what this enigmatic Hole face had been trying to show and tell you the whole time -- that Creativity IS Mysticism, doofus.
Now go start a fire!
*u can call me ph!*
It begs for fulfillment and has always begged for fulfillment since the dawning of humankind. Throughout history, all manner of things have been used to fill the Hole: drugs, booze, money, sex, power, risk, crisis, relationships, religion, gambling, materialism, nationalism, etc. for the sake of feeling a purpose, in order to feel Real Love.
Your Hole was filled with some of these things too, but only ever Felt Full when filling it with music, art or other compulsive acts of creativity. Akin only to the bellows of being boiled alive or the scraping desire to tear off all your skin and bash your skull against a brick wall til your brains seeped out, this uncontrollable burning urge to Create Something always instantly derailed the equally strong impulse to Destroy Something, most likely yourself.
These compulsive acts of creativity never held sway over the resulting expressions they produced. They never turned on you. They never abandoned you. They never ridiculed you for being too depressing, too brutal, too sad, too aggro, too political, too victimy, too intense, too strong, too cold, too feminist, too emo, too stupid, too you. Being in their midst seemed to be the only time you could catch a fleeting glimpse of that tiny beautiful spark hiding in the depths of your abysmally dark heart. This essentially made the Hole a necessity. Each time you filled it with creativity, the feeling of Real Love that shone forth was that of the miraculous and unconditional kind. It made you grateful for the Hole lies herein.
Although it would take many years to learn not to take for granted this face, once you began talking to it, spending more time with it and developing a resonating respect for it, you found yourself devoted to being its lifelong companion. Not until semi-consciously painting this phrase onto paper, did you realize it's ugly truth: "the only time i feel happy to be alive is when i am alone."
Because being alone meant being creative, not trapped under anyone's thumb. Being alone meant being uninhibited and standing naked in the light of your spirit not your sex. Being alone meant doing no harm to anyone including yourself. It meant channeling all that rage and aggression into something somewhat atrocious that also housed little slivers of a mysterious tranquility, an indiscrimate hint of redemption. Being alone meant being transported away from the meager repetitive trivialities of your own traumatized ego into a realm of pure thought, heavily populated with energy, ideas and that revitalizing feeling of Real Love.
It should be said that this sense of expansion and connectedness could only have happened after gradually shedding it's contrasting skin -- that tyrannical grasping at the feral act of expression as if no one within a ten mile radius was permitted to engage in their own creativity. This thing, this face, was the only thing that you felt was truly yours. And you hoarded it. Hiding it away as if it might be suddenly stolen or betrayed. Then putting it on blast upon completion, splaying it out to the whole world. But 'the whole world' seemed to only consist of that one dude that was currently fucking you, plus a couple other dudes that wanted to fuck you whenever that first dude had decided he was done fucking you.
No draw. No fans. No love. No duh.
Still, you'd put out more work than put out sexually (while remaining present in the room) and just kept hoping. Hoping for validation. Hoping ideas might be brought to life without all the junkie-slut judgements and false rumors that haunted you -- rumors that originated from the butthurt mouths of men whom you had refused to bow down and deliver some sacrificial oral sex to. Hoping your work might be seen and heard on the merit of The Work Itself, not only after taking into consideration that the person who made it has a cunt. Hoping you'd exist as something Before Cunt or After Cunt or Other Than Cunt. Not a woman artist, but an artist. Not in a girl band, but in a band. Not a female filmmaker, but a filmmaker. Hoping that your presence on this earth was even worth spit.
However, more often than not, splaying out only seemed to further the alienation. It most assuredly caused all sorts of schisms that ended every relationship you had with men who felt it was your duty to nurture their creativity rather than spend so much time and effort exploring your own. Relationships with women ended sadly as well. For what reasons you still can't tell. Maybe after you pull the broad axe out of your back and crawl out from under the bus, all will be peachy, swell.
Most other people ignored your work. Or belittled and denigrated it. Or just got more weirded out by you than they were before. And sometimes, they felt so moved that they'd send you pictures of their dumbass dicks. How terribly fascinating that is to someone who has seen nothing but the mediocrity of dicks since the age of 4?
Occassionally though, others said the things you made inspired them. You later read somewhere that the best thing any human being can do is inspire others. This surprised
you because you always felt insulted by the compliment; preferring they book you a show, buy some merch or share their tour contacts and technical knowledge with you rather than just get inspired. You translated this into meaning they now felt motivated to go make their own better version of what you just made because nothing you do is ever Good Enough.
And how could anyone argue with that kind of logic?
Inspiring others didn't garner you any of that sought after support from "the community" either. You only noticed it bringing repulsive levels of disdain, rejection and other grossly competetive behaviors your way. This, of course, is inevitable for anyone willing to put their underpants on display. But so reviled by the hypersensitive; to one who's grown so weary of those odorous unlovable traits that kept being force fed into your already stuffed up face. It only gave you more reasons to hate. Even though you were now a fully grown crybaby who had the capacity for hard reflections and real profound change.
Unfortunately, change only actualized after it was already too late. And that thirst to feel part of some imaginary creatively sustaining group, like those photos of surrealists in Paris circa 1932, never bore any of the hoped for fruit. Truthfully, hope had blinded you to all the fallen fruit at your feet. While you pouted and stomped around, spouting out your enormous expectations and warbly angst ridden images and sounds, those modest but sweet opportunities were just laying there, rotting on the ground.
After all those formative art fag punk years spent being ugly overbearing arrogant awkward anxious and weird, you're fortunate that this artistic devotion was never completely smothered in those heavy handed, desperate-for-love clutches. At some point you had to let those things you created walk away and go live lives of their own. Watching your little creative children from a distance as they went on living gave you a beaming teary-eyed mother's sense of pride -- if this is what a mother's pride feels like.
Eventually, you'd come to see through the stunted hierarchal power play for recognition that occurs in every creative "scene". You despised that word since you never really felt part of one. And if you were, you were completely unaware of it. Pretty much mirrors the feelings you had about your family. Every conversation was always instigated by you. The only time your phone rang was when someone's butt or bag called to make muffled noises and squishy sounds. Ha Ha! Loser. Perhaps your mom was right when she said, "You're such a downer. It's no wonder you go through men like water." And if your own mother doesn't really love or support you, how could anyone else be expected to? Yup. There's that yoke too.
However, when others did absolutely love your work and asked you to autograph something, fawned over you with dilated pupils or began liking every single thing you posted on social media, you got creeped out by the attention and felt as if your virtual personal space was somehow being infringed upon. There really was no way to win with you. Essentially, no matter how other people responded, you consistently felt afraid of everyone and suspicious of their motivations on both sides of the ditch. It was just as difficult to deal with violent opposition as it was to deal with sincere admiration. Either way, you'd be a disappointment. Right, mom?
So Fuck it. Stop trying so hard to be anything to anyone.
And when you finally felt that transformative joy of letting go of those wobbly notions of control, discovering that the Less you clung to your own need for an ego boost via creativity as if it Belonged To You, the less you tried to control others or allowed them to control you, the More that energy would recharge the environment itself -- setting the room and everyone in it alight, turning a small free noise and doom show in the living room of an old slum (affectionately dubbed bleakhaus) into a generating storm of lightning bolt positivity for electromagnetic acres around. One might notice this with any live music venue. Everyone feels, not only high on whatever they're already on, but also noticeably more aurally alive during the course of that sonically cleansing night. And those were some of the happiest nights of your life.
Perhaps creative energy is a lot like a woman. When you try to Own it, Control it, Make it Conform to Your Needs, it can no longer breathe, so the spark of love withers and dies. But if you take a step back and Let Her Do Her Own Thing, she is a wonder to witness, a joy to behold, a time to admire.
You liked to liken this more approachable attitude to being a radio. The radio does not Own the show it broadcasts any more than you Own the creative energy that just so happens to flood through you, tapping into your veins whenever it feels like. Being receptive to its sudden company is always a welcomed high.
Like those moments when the music moves you to tears, when a unifying psychic awareness of the tenderness in the present moment makes colors shine bright, when the sweltering heat is tamed by a summer thunderstorm's downpour, when every vulnerably fractured emotional toll doesn't seem so tragic anymore and your heart's willingness to feel springs back to life.
Regardless of whether or not you were high on drugs, it was always there, that clear-seeing energy within alpha state, that unconditional love that softens off the jagged edges of pride, that forgiveness that opens you up to what is outside.
At last, comprehending what this enigmatic Hole face had been trying to show and tell you the whole time -- that Creativity IS Mysticism, doofus.
Now go start a fire!
*u can call me ph!*
13% [chapter 1]
THE 3 FACES: AVARICE!
Depression's been a constant dull ache since you were in 4th grade, so you always welcomed the presence of rage. It supplied you with the energy required to destroy whatever was in front of you in an effort to create positive change. Rage was such a regularly occuring emotion, you consistently recognized it's face. But it was so prevalent that by the age of 14, drugs began to build for you a buffer zone so as not to see this face so fucking often. An additional coping mechanism was also instated at this time called vigorous physical exercise.
Anyone born into a kid that receives ample abuse and neglect from those who are unable or unwilling to nurture and protect, intimately knows this horrifying red rage-filled face. They also know a child's instinctive longing for calm kneejerks them to grab the nearest broom and clean up the huge mess that the red face inevitably makes, regardless of whether it stems from elsewhere or is a self-made mess.
Who could blame you for being confused? The need to bond with others opens the oxytocin floodgates in our brains and sends warm fuzzy hormones careening around all over the place. However, in your case, twisted mental pathways interpret this hormonal release as a signal that someone is going to hurt you, so you turn away. To survive and protect yourself, you learned to turn away. For 40 odd years, you kept turning away. Yet at the same time, you so deeply yearned for that feeling of connection that continually eluded you. Seeing successful connections being made everywhere around you produced even more confusion. So you'd hide from the face of rage under your buffer zone drug blanket and bury yourself under quilted cries from wanting to be held but knowing that you cannot be held. There's a fabulous joke in there somewhere that you might one day find.
Whenever someone was engaged in the act of beating the shit out of you, they were also screaming bloody murder and visibly in pain. For this reason, you preferred violent physical abuse to the sexual kind -- preferring also to be the target of the attack rather than to watch someone else getting beaten. It felt far worse to witness your brother being hurt than to psychologically dissociate while going through it yourself. Also, your brother never discovered this secret weapon which proved to be your most powerful deterrent: urine. A few punches in, you'd let loose the bladderful you'd been saving up for this special occassion. And, like magic, yelps of disgust would replace the torrent of scorn. Instantly, the hitting would quit. You found pearls of joy in those tiny triumphant moments sitting on the kitchen floor in a peaceful puddle of tears spit piss and glory.
But the scars of sexual abuse were far more insidious. The sights, the sounds, the opaque presence of a person's intense feelings of pleasure while causing someone else terrible pain displaced that pain into a realm much colder. A hurt that hides deeper, in a distorted trench just below, but too close to, your own pleasure zones. Violence might find that cold hurt's hiding place but cannot hold a candle to it, nor can it ever cure it. Bruises, broken bones and burns prove violence occurs, but hidden are the scars of sexual abuse beneath the molten words, "I will kill you if you tell."
Enter the deathwish; swimming down there like an invisible shark, constantly stalking a freedom that is absolute -- a freedom that can only come to you from somewhere outside yourself. Deliverance via suicide, they say, only traps your soul in that state of wretchedness, confining it to that time and place instead of bringing you any of the desired relief you so desperately crave. And maybe that's all bullshit, but the benefit of the doubt must be given to all the ghosts of people who successfully committed suicide and later crowded around you asking for help. Clearly, they were not resting in peace.
Being a woman with a quick temper, an iron poker opinion and not much respect for authority, your chances seemed pretty damn good that you might one day receive this gift of deliverance from some angry asshole's bitch-killing hands since America is #1 in the world for acts of violence against women. So hooray for that.
But shit happens.
When long slow periods of cowering in fear suddenly transform into an overwhelming shockwave of action, critical mass occurs. Well directed, that shockwave of shit is capable of altering and healing lives. It can flip the switch for the victim -- to give up the ghost of victimization, to shift the mind out of that passive frozen in time emotional vortex it is stuck repeating, to actively crack open the present moment and lean you into the inertia of growth that naturally throws you toward letting go.
Unforgettable was your moment of cracking open at critical mass on June 10th, 1988. Squarely, you thrust your steel toed boot into the charging crotch of your dad who had for so long, shoved that thing in your face and at your punk ass.
At the age of 6, you already had enough defiance in mind to not let his dick penetrate you, though all kinds of other things did. How you had gained this early knowledge of carnal invasion was, as of yet, unknown. But now that you were bigger, you could better defend yourself from the unpredictable hair trigger walking on eggshell eruptions of animosity that bombarded you. At last, you could fight back.
Watching your father collapse so quickly, writhing there on the floor, scrunching his nuts in hand -- you stood so solid and strong, like some kind of engorged proud prisoner of nuclear war! Perhaps this shit happened because it was during your very first very short very scary experiment being a straight edge skin head of the anti-racist sort. A blinding glimpse through a clean drugless window with no buffer zone between you and a world where your rage was a wholly warhorse of consumption that you had none of the skills to rein in.
And when your father angrily jumped up from the floor with his balls still sore, he hurled himself back at you, screaming, "I HATE YOU!" His fists wheeled against your teenage frame. So you kicked him again. In the same place. Harder this time. Your mother cried from the sidelines, then ran to his aid during his second tour of the writhing floor.
Marching off toward the front door, you swung it open. While still in the eye of this purging hurricane, you let loose a stream of FUCK YOUs, puking out all those long rooted petrified agonies at your parents who had for so long sewn them into you. Quaking inside, you felt a subtle shift, the loosening of a crystallized stillborn cacoon. It's newly wet wings just beginning to protrude. Slowly unveiling over several seasons, they would emotionally inchworm you away from that tendency to dwell in your own personal hell and go for that oh so stereotypical due-to-the-aftereffects-of-child-abuse noose.
God forbid, you had never returned that wrath back to the source from whence it came, it would have been 87% more likely that this constant unexpressed chasm of avarice would have mutated into that common concave outlook of My Childhood Was Shit So Now The World Owes Me. This would only have produced relentless passive aggressive manipulations, surreptitious self-interest disguising itself as sympathy and other malignant misanthropic deeds. Undoubtedly, these traits would then cause harm to countless innocents surrounding you for the rest of your suppressed aDult days.
Those innocents include the children you never gave birth to. Abortion was your only inroad to harm reduction. Often, tears of gratitude were produced when thinking back on all the possible atrocities that were avoided; all the scars your younger tempermental fucked up self would have inflicted onto those poor kids because it's not as if you didn't show these malevolent signs during your earlier period of hope's decline.
But that initial critical mass, that shockwave of shit, ultimately saved you from your statistical self. It gave you a 13% chance of having a less than bleak outcome in life. Not being a mother was the sacrifice you were willing to make. Take that to mean whatever you like.
And as long as you resisted the urge to do one or more of these 4 things: prostitute yourself,
commit suicide, get incarcerated for assault,
or overdose on drugs, then you would remain in that 13 percentile. Seems simple enough. But you'd be surprised at self-destruction's tireless jags of acrimony, it's imperious drive to which the only defense is a softening into the impermanence of time and some resolute vigilance, always mindful and kind. No matter how hateful and angry that drive is to end your pathetic wasted life.
Up until this attack, self-defense was characteristically pacifistic, a psychological impasse. Kicking your dad in the nut sack was a heroic act in a heroless tract. By now, you knew no one else was ever gonna come save you but you -- a person that you did not trust even existed. Someone who'd one day emotionally understand how to take full responsibility for their own happiness.
A future you that would splatter and stain walls, vent onto paper instead of people, grow a pair for fuckssake, what's the magic word, be nice, say thank you, stand clear, speak up, have the courage of your own convictions, understand mutual aid, practice, lose yourself, it's ok. Find the frame of mind that differentiates self-pity from self-compassion. Be willing to walk the valley alone between self-deception and self-hate. Remember where you came from. Have a little faith. And feel the majesty of that moment when all fear vanishes and out blossoms the enveloping awe of a justified rage, a pivotal truth, in all her glorious unfurling furies of grace.
*u can call me ph!*
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