Bums

The fucked up thing about dry cleaning is that I can never completely remember if I just dropped something off or picked it up.  Regardless, I had a pack of matches in my pocket from my buddy’s wedding and it came from my dry cleaning, wherever the hell it was.  I hopped into my truck and drove north.  Through the choking traffic and caustic fumes of car exhaust into the barren black hills that are all that remained after the wildfires.  Pendleton looked like the surface of some alien world, barren and bleak, waiting for some boring little rover to send pictures back to earth.  I hate how the media makes everything try and seem so much more intense than it really is.  I guess it feeds the human need to feel like we are living in important and climactic times.  Times where every little thing is either sign of the apocalypse or of the heights of our pathetic human civilization.  We are living in the ascendancy as well as the decline of our world simultaneously.  Like the two girls I observed in the gym that morning.  One, gangly, strangely constructed, boney, with long writhing cords of muscle tensing and releasing, like sickly snakes wrestling under a loose blanket of pale flesh.  She was a whore-type, her eyes like two extinguished cigarette butts, scouring every guy that walks past her as she peacocks on various pieces of exercise equipment.  The other girl, a knockout blonde, perfect tight body that defies belief with eyes as deep and blue as a glacial crag.  She was completely oblivious to the outside world, and inside her head I can only imagine a soft world where unicorns eat from trees of cotton candy and little squirrel like creatures frolic in a pink river.  To embrace both images at once is almost sickening, overwhelming, too pungent for the mind to wholly absorb, and yet each in their seclusion is meaningless and nondescript.  My phone had been ringing off and on for that past few days, the calls a strange sampling of the world that I inhabit.  An ex-girlfriend calling me to ask for me to ‘come rescue her’.  An old friend asking me to go back to Iraq to help out on a contract.  My parents, each in their own way, expressing their selfish needs for the upcoming holiday.  And another fucking wrong number asking for Muir Capital.. FUCK would you assholes fix your goddamn brochure so that I don’t get desperate people asking me to approve their loan applications.  I’m fucking sick of it!

I continue north, following for fifty miles an idiot driving a minivan who is oblivious to the fact that his left turn signal is blinking.  Fifty fucking miles behind a complete moron.  As if I didn’t already have enough reason to hate him.  Fifty goddamn miles.  From Solana Beach to El Toro. Blink blink blink.  Wake up you fucking LOSER!  The blinking is driving me insane but I resist the urge to pass or run him off the road.  I force myself, almost a test of will, to remain behind the vehicle for as long as is possible.  I keep telling myself that it will all end soon, he will pull right or realize that his blinker is on and my brain can finally relax.  But relief never comes.  The small blinking light burns into my eyes like a welder’s torch.  My hands grip the wheel with increasing tightness.   My teeth clench and grind.  My mind wills cancer and smallpox onto the driver.  But I stay the course and eventually he flicks the blinker to the right side and gets off the freeway.  I had overcome the challenge, but it left me worn.  I had an overwhelming desire to pull right, follow the minivan to its final destination, get out of my truck and beat the man to senseless.   Not quickly, but slowly, the punches coming after long luxuriating pauses where I soak in the warm satisfaction of his pain and eventual death.  One punch for every blink of his turn signal.  Payback for his stupidity.  I imagine pounding away on his broken face as a freakish smile plastered on my own is slowly sprayed to dripping with his blood.

I decide I needed to chill the fuck out.  Can’t have a drink yet so I settle for some Mexican food.  In case you were wondering, everything I consume is in burrito-form.  Carmels.  I used to eat at the Carmels in L.A. every fucking night.  They would have my order ready for me when I walked in like clockwork.  No ordering required, just throw some money on the counter and grab my shit.  I used to always have 50 cents left over and I would play two games of Ms. Pacman before heading back to the dorms.  I hit the drive through then swerve another 300 meters to the best thrift store on planet earth.  Right there off El Toro Road hides the last bastion of good thrifting that I am aware of.  Its right in the heart of a extraordinarily rich area and every solitary tax-evader pays off their heaping debt of white guilt with massive donations of crap to the local thrift store.  It’s an out of style dumping ground for every designer fashion from ten years past.  I imagine these richies all going through their vast closets in these vast houses and throwing into a pile the latest fashions from the 70’s and 80’s.  With no more knowledge of what to wear than what the television tells them is cool.  No identity, no souls, just a bottomless pocketbook and all the time in the world.  Well fuck ‘em.  Their loss is my gain, and so a thrifting I will go.

Things I hate right now:

I purchase nothing.  The store is rife with Mexicans.  They have adulterated the last bastion of my individuality.  Mexicans swarm to thrift stores like flies to shit.  Go home you fuckers, and I mean back to your primate mud-huts back in Mexico.  Quit turning my country into a shanty-town.  Quit taking all the good shit from garage sales and thrift stores and leave that to us Americans you fucking fucks!
North again, into the smog pile.  I heart smog.  I heart bums too.  That’s why I’m even doing this job.  Joel called me the day before, I’m supposed to pull a thug detail at a halfway house.  As it was later described to me it was the entry point for the lowest common denominator.  This is not a halfway house for rich Hollywood celebs or even middle-class housewives, this was for the bums – the homeless, the utterly abandoned souls barely scratching out a subsistence living out of trash cans and handouts.  Most with some form of mental instability, most with some kind of criminal record, all utterly derelict.

Their desperation is palpable.  Like a morbidly obese person overcome with hunger, fat greasy fingers scrambling wildly as if all the answers to life were at the bottom of a KFC bucket.  Their sanity was a dirty thing, like the disparate sloppy chunks of a hundred rushed meals inside an old microwave.  Many have replaced alcohol and drugs for cigarettes and coffee.  This is considered success.  There is no god here, just an enigmatic ‘higher power’.  Paying tribute to this mysterious force is tantamount to putting change in a parking meter.  It’s the new urban metanarrative – self-help.  This one tick forward, the one moment we are loved and embraced by god and society.   Admitting that you are flawed and incapable of being fixed.  The city itself has rejected the old Christian ideals of redemption after the fall.  There is no universal rule, no telos for humankind.  There is no heaven or hell but what life you make within the city.  Abandoned also are the Enlightenment theories of rational thought, allied to scientific reasoning, which inexorably would lead toward moral, social and ethical progress.  The city defies progress, defies logic.  Its mere existence is a crime against nature.  Fundamentally, a man-made organism, unsustainable in every aspect.  A hundred square miles of concrete.  The only nature left within its sprawl is the street names.  They have turned long strips of concrete into trees, bushes, birds, and unspoiled vistas.  It’s a crime against the mind.  The city lives as those within its borders live, to cosume everything and produce nothing save their own existence.  Like a comatose patient in a hospital bed, fed through tubes.  The city itself is like a junkie, a subliminal buzz, always present, always jonesing for the next hit, just there in the back of your mind.  The street sounds become a mellifluous symphony and the city exhales its lustful smoggy breath between the tall sexy legs of dirty skyscrapers.  Honking horns, sirens, internal combustion engines, the rattle of bums rooting through garbage cans.  Pigeons roost above every storefront foretelling of disease and pestilence.  Their droppings mix with grey-brown globs of human saliva, lipstick kissed cigarette butts, and small circles of chewing gum blackened by the soles of a thousand dirty shoes.  Pairs of old sneakers hang from powerlines.  Trash and graffiti have pushed well beyond the tipping point, the entire city is a dumpster.  The earth has no language here except earthquakes, violent outbursts, sins against the city, sins against the system.  It’s a contradiction to logic, to god, to nature for the city to even continue, yet here it stands.  And amidst the contradiction more contradictions are borne.

In our country, and in all classes, there are, and always will be, strange social ‘failures’.  People whose destiny it is to remain always beggars. They are poor bastards all their lives; mostly broken down, they remain under the dominion or guardianship of someone or something.  All personal initiative is for them an insupportable burden. They only exist on condition of undertaking nothing for the betterment of themselves, and by serving, always live under the will of another be it a master or an addiction or the consequence of their misguided decisions. They are destined to act by and through others. Under no circumstances, even of the most unexpected kind, can they get rich; they are always beggars. Always derelict of success, always homeless of glory.  I have met these persons in all classes of society, in all associations, even at the SEAL teams.   The people I was to guard and protect this weekend were just such people, and yet, of the lowest possibly segment in society.  They were in the most obvious way bums.  In this time and place only those with no possessions, no “worth” can act with impunity.  The only freedom is vice.  And there the paradox exists.  So here I stand, an obscenely paid mercenary, a samurai of the best training, hired to protect the very lowest form of life in our society by one of their own, a bum who had become rich.

I walked around the parking lot of the halfway house.  Hands covered in gloves, jacket zipped tight, a small Styrofoam cup of bland coffee in one hand – the butt of the knife tucked away in my pocket in the other.  I bounced between conversations, sometimes breaking in, sometimes just pressing up against.  I am here only as a ghost, to observe and interfere but only with the rattling of chains or the moving of furniture, not as an actual participant.  Les yeux sans visage. The only way people observe me is in the same manner that scientists discover black holes in outer space.  Simple look where all the light has been swallowed up, even though you can’t see it – it is there.  The people of the house were as full of color as any who have walked the earth.  I grind the heel of my boot against a pile of small blue-green cubes of glass on the edge of the street.  A car was broken into here.  Across the street a cell tower rises against the city lights.  An obtrusive structure, expressing violence, like a caltrop for the eyes.  I watch the steam rise from my cup, turn back towards the house, and like the cast of a play the house’s residents introduce themselves to me each in their own way.

A 16 year old girl.  Two kids, one abortion (by her dad’s best friend), and a 40 year old boyfriend locked up in county.  In her injured soul, fucking equals love, and getting boys’ attention is how she defines her self-worth.  She was instantly enamored with Joel (and for fuck’s sake who isn’t!?), who jokingly at first but sternly very soon after, rejected the flood of “do you like me? __ Yes __ No” notes passed via third party, from every recovering alcoholic and drug-addict in the place.  Her confidence was as stable as a house of cards.  I only spoke with her briefly, kindly, and very carefully.  I was of no consequence in her mind, her own inner gears churning more powerfully than all the kind comments and thoughtful remarks.  I believe she was molested as a young girl, possibly by her father.  I also believe that she was to some degree a prostitute.  Its one thing to hear about these things on tv or read it in a magazine, its quite something different to meet them head on in person.  I was really nothing in her world – a decoration, a toy.  She only questioned me about things that she thought would provoke a deeper interest by me in her, but nothing did.  She tried to use her pubescent whimsy to glean information about Joel, but her ploys were poorly constructed and obvious.

A hideously deformed woman named Carol.  God only knows the horrors that her yellowed eyes have glimpsed.  Sickly yellow bags, like smelly old motel pillows, filled with questions that only tears could answer.  Her gums, little pink mounds where teeth used to be.  Chewing itself, a long forgotten concept.  Her belly peeks out from beneath her matted shirt, as wide and round as a prize winning pumpkin.  Her belly button sticking out, protruding distended, like a purple half of an orange.  She said her name was Carol and asked me my name 5 or 6 times every night, my answer never lodging in her brain for longer than a few moments.  She walks oddly, one leg like that of a marionette – the other a zombie.  For all the times I reached out to her, I was instantly forgotten.  I forced myself to draw close.  I penetrating into the miasma of her musty words and musty smells to be kind, but was forgotten.

A strange wispy woman.  Long thin blonde hair that caught the wind like barn hay in a fire.  A giant puffy faux-fur jacket, giant puffy Ugg boots.  A pair of undersized tights connecting the puffs.  She looked like a giant poodle.  Her voice was always far off, even if she was standing right next to you.  Her mind, although gentle and compassionate, was is another dimension – another world altogether.  She existed in a place that was unlike anything I have ever imagined, soft, beautiful, intoxicating, and at the same time completely disturbing.  I don’t know if she was at the meetings for drugs or alcohol, god only knows what furtive needs people from completely different dimensions have, but she was there – albeit aloofly – nonetheless.  She seemed to know everyone there, except me of course, but she still seemed completely distant.  I remember back when I was in Kurdistan about a year ago.  I was so sick I thought I would die.  My Kurdish liason brought me some “Kurdish cough medicine”.  He and I had become friends, and part of my Kurdification was to experience the glory of this time honored tradition of a thousand feverish Kurdish boys.  It must have been pure opium and licorice, knocked me out for three days straight in a drug induced fog.  I hallucinated wildly, I was in pain but it didn’t matter, I was feverish and found it entertaining, I was enchanted by the dim orange sunlight as it crept through my brown curtains, I lay mesmerized by the dust particles floating in my room, I was halfway between dream and reality – and yet somewhere altogether different.  I was in a world that I imagine her life must be like.  Sadly though, soft gentile creatures like her are often taken advantage of in our world.  I shudder to think the depravity she has been party to.

A scaly biker dude who would endlessly complain about a spider bite on his leg.  His handshake was like a bundle of dry leaves.  His eyes dirty and weathered, like two piss-holes in the snow.  He was later identified in a long paranoid rant as being a spy or plant in some sinister master plan to take over the halfway house.  This is the place of spider bites.  Spider bites and flea bites and paranoid rants.  Down the street a dog is hit by a car, its piercing whelps shatter the fragile calm.  Everyone gathers to berate the driver of the car, spider bite told the driver to just drive away, earning him the admonishment of the entire place.  Everyone except me that is.  A bull-dyke with short cropped hair and denim from head to toe got an inch from his face and told him that she would rather kill him than have that dog be hurt.  He told her “fuck you”, and she responded in kind.  I walked over and looked at them both, they cautiously and surreptitiously acknowledged my presence and moved apart.  They weren’t really going to throw blows.  This is just rehab posturing.  In this un-drunk world the defining of values is a sketchy business.  The bull-dyke simply wanted to advertize that she loves animals and hates men.  She also wanted to put it on the table that she is willing to fight to defend these beliefs.  The love of animals makes her more affable to everyone else, at least in her mind, while the threat of violence makes her tough.  The perfect position from which to stand on a soap box and cry about your weaknesses.  The scaly biker dude just wanted the drama to go away.  He only afterwards made overly obvious gestures of compassion towards the wounded dog as an effort to repair the perceived damage to his reputation done by the confrontation with the bull-dyke.  I would have to listen to both of them converse with everyone that would arrive later in misguided efforts to sell their own actions through back-alley politics and shady one sided depictions of the event.  They sold it to everyone but me.  I don’t really exist here.  My beliefs don’t matter.  My words are hollow promises.  My actions are invalidated before they are performed.  Why?  Because I am not ‘in recovery’.  I still drink.  I still use drugs.  I still live and fight and fuck and destroy.  I have not surrendered myself to a ‘higher power’.  Until you have surrendered yourself nothing you do matters at all to these people.  You could be slaying dragons and winning wars but it is all bullshit until you surrender.  Only then will you be accepted at the table to bicker endlessly about whose actions BEFORE they surrendered were the most significant, the most depraved, the most self-destructive, the most painful, the most drunk or addicted.  Only then can you bet your experiences at the table in an endless game of one-upsmanship.  The funniest thing is that the biker and the bull-dyke were probably more alike than anyone else in the place, and yet they struggle against each other – despite each other.

Marxists believe that in order to be emancipated, society must undergo a revolution. Just as the bourgeoise (whose living depends on the control of capital or technology) took power from the noble class (whose wealth was based on control over land), they believe that the present system of capitalism will fall and the proletariat (who live by selling their labor) will take over. This change will be driven by the unstable and cyclical nature of capitalism, and by the alienation felt by the laborers who keep the system working.   Well Marx was right about everything but the conclusion.  The observations about a capitalist society were balls accurate.  Alienation and instability.  The endless marching of steamrollers forcing people to live as prisoners in their own homes, isolated, marginalized, consumers of goods.  No voice, no representation in the forces that affect them, no freedom.  Impotent.  Emasculated.  Sterile.

The problem is that there will be no universal change to the very foundations of the flawed system.  That kind of change has been made extinct by the system itself.  Instead the revolt expresses itself in the individual.  One singular person, the very smallest and least significant part of the whole great machine, thereby becomes the engine of self-destruction, revolution, and self-repair.  The people, not the system, are ground to dust.  The system is safe, the people themselves burdened with the brunt of the system’s flaws in their own lives.  It forces them to abandon everything in pursuit of their desires, freeing themselves of all other encumbrances, only to hit bottom and struggle from nothingness towards their own impossible redemption.  It is this struggle against the world that drives men to drink, this struggle against the world that drives them to madness.  The world, like a giant hand squeezing a ball of worms, destroys everything within its grasp and alienates everything that escapes.  In this impossible situation it is only through drugged perception or madness that there exists only for the briefest moment the realization of one’s dreams.  In the city, in the system, if you follow the rules and walk the line, there is no realization of dreams – just an endless shopping list jus to break even, your identity defined through your most recent possession.  Dreams are dangerous things, and maybe the system has a way of engineering solutions evolutionally.  For all those who dare, for all those who try, for all those whose fortitude and guts and effort might just create the slightest hint of change, or maybe for those crazy enough not to give a shit, there has grown a solution.  Like an orchid in a poisonous swamp, the rarest and most tenuous form of perpetuation, its unique shape and color evolved over a multitude of generations to attract just one single insect out of the swarm.  Drugs, alcohol, sex, madness, crime – these are the release valves in this city that’s just a mere tangle of pipes all leading nowhere.  For the people at this halfway house just talking about their favorite vice is like coming close to their dreams once again.  They talk about addiction dreams where they get high or drunk, they call these “freebies”.  Their addiction, their most intimate and personal relationship, their most treasured and valuable possession, has become just a stranger in a crowd brushed against for an instant and then it’s gone.

Drugs are freedom, madness is freedom, and this halfway house is the church where these things are backwardsly worshipped.  If the individual is the engine of Marx’s revolution, then the violent raging of a druggie alcoholic can only be seen as a new existential communist revolution.   One drunken night of rebellion, where one destroys all his relationships along with all his furniture in a fit of primal frenzy.  All things being made equal at zero point.  These things happen every day, most are simply corrected by the machinery of society itself.  Small and inconsequential rebellions, a traffic signal ignored, a fashion not followed, a gossip not shared.  Other times they take out entire high schools, colleges, or shopping malls in a bloody rampage.

Everyone is astounded at the cause of this unexpected explosion on the part of a person thought incapable of such a thing. It is the convulsive manifestation of their personality, an instinctive melancholia, an uncontrollable desire for self-assertion, all of which obscures his reason. It is a sort of epileptic attack, a spasm. A man buried alive who suddenly wakes up must strike in a similar manner against the lid of his coffin. He tries to rise up, to push it from him, although his reason must convince him of the uselessness of his efforts. Reason, however, has nothing to do with this convulsion. It must not be forgotten that almost every voluntary manifestation on the part of the convict is looked upon as a crime. Accordingly, it is a perfect matter of indifference to them whether this manifestation is important or insignificant, debauch for debauch, danger for danger. It is just as well to go to the end, even as far as murder. The only difficulty is the first step.

The criminal who has revolted against society, hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes. The addict is the same way.  They have abandoned everything and are thereby absolved by their emptiness.  Finally to be filled up again with the fulfillment of their beliefs, their desires, their addictions.

For those within that society to understand is impossible.  The rebellious man’s actions must be that of lunacy, must be that of a natural born criminal, because to understand even on the most basic level is tantamount to suicide.  Spiritual suicide.  To see the reasoning of these wild thrashings is to for oneself view the painful, prison spectacle of the system itself.  Of the city itself.  Of their own lives.  To understand the rationale is to view oneself within the cage of our society, trapped, the only escape is to abandon everything like the madman, or the junkie.  The only true act of freedom is their self-destructive act of madness.  Maybe even nature is revolting in this way, the earthquakes a mournful cry for freedom from a under smothering concrete mask.

I myself am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman at times. Sometimes just funny or obtuse.  That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.   Essentially it is through absurdity, through madness, that I have preserved my sanity – my clarity.  In the face of an impossible situation, in the face of utter existential abandonment by god and by nature it is only through absurdity that some semblance of sanity can be maintained.  This madness causes me to suffer, but in a world of suffering can’t we only truly love with suffering and through suffering? It is the suffering that creates the capacity for love, and it is this ideal that explains why I can only be happy when I’m miserable.

I wonder sometimes if my moods aren’t more a side effect of my surroundings.  L.A. is a miserable city, but it relishes in its misery.  Trees are planted in the pavement, their flesh marred and slashed viciously.  Every vertical surface is buried in squiggly lines, names, ink, and blood.  Every bus window and plastic fast food table is carved with the city’s own Braille.  A million names all written on top of each other, a million people all clamoring on top of each other.  Maggots on a rotting corpse.  Everything is in some degree of disarray or degradation.  The only pristine images are that of celebrities and advertisements.  Meticulously manicured bodies and faces each selling something different and yet all saying the same thing.  They are impossible faces, airbrushed, photoshop’ed, every aspect of their world painstakingly controlled. Every shadow, every ray of light, every angle, every mood.  Their surgically modified, chemically enhanced, mouths speak out one singular message “you are inadequate”, “you are not beautiful”, “you are horrible”, “life is horrible”, “everything is horrible”, “buy more detergent”.  It is no wonder that the squalorous masses aspire to the figures they see on the glowing box.  Its also no wonder that they want to see them destroyed.  This is the revised edition of the laborers resentment foretold by Marx and Engels, alienation from potential.  Alienation from “humanity”.

The days turn into nights.  I only work the halfway house from 5pm to 9pm.  Four short hours.  And after being locked in the presence of so many drunks and druggies I felt compelled to turn every night into a inebriated fiasco.  It was all a blur really, only a few memories strike from the shadows.

Every morning feels like being plunged into shit.  The taste of puke seeps out with every breath.  My mind is beleaguered by disturbing memories that it can’t push away.  Like a swarm of mosquitoes around my face, there is no relief.  As I stumble to brush my teeth I wonder if I even still have a soul.  I look down my hangover hole in the mirror but I can’t seem to find it.  I am saddened necroticly.   I feel like I’m going to die.  Most people want nice painless quiet deaths.  Not me.  I want horror.  Most people are fearful of the future.  You can see this at every sudden view of freeway.  You are driving along, traffic is normal, then there is a long stretch of road where you can see cars for miles into the distance and everyone slams on their brakes.  Infuriating, but human.  It is the knowledge of their own doom that causes them to brake.  Like cattle wandering through the maze leading to the slaughterhouse, they are happier with their illusions, with their misconceptions, with their lies.  I embrace the spectacle, I can’t force myself to believe the lies – don’t want to, and thereby I embrace my own demise.  Embrace the horror.  Not the horror of drowning or being burned alive.  Not crucified – too symbolic.  I want to be tortured to death.  Taken apart brutally a piece at a time and then shown each dead portion of myself before its discarded on the floor.  I want to know I’m dying.  I want to see it.  I want to watch my futile little life end.  Guillotined face up.  My severed head lifted and forced to gaze upon my lifeless body as I fade into eternity while a crowd of my closest friends and family laugh.

I don’t even know what I want any more.  There was a time when the future seemed so clear and simple, my beliefs seemed to make so much sense.  Those times are gone.  Everything is much too complicated now.  Its understandable I suppose, for  after all you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments.  And if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him.

I head home, but find myself still lingering on the thoughts of the places and people I saw over the weekend.  I go back to my routine in San Diego.  Working on my condo, waiting to hear back from several other real jobs, working out at the gym.  Days drop away and I find that the weekend has affected me, and affected me strangely.  I’ve taken on a form of malaise.  The kind where my world shrinks down to the size of my apartment and everything that happens there takes on new significance.  The way when you are in love that trinkets and baubles become meaningful and rich in memories.  I sit around drinking tea, the hot bitter liquid draining through my unbrushed teeth.  Time slows down, like when you’re listening to the Moonlight Sonata.  I sit in front of the clothes dryer and play my acoustic guitar with the rhythm of warm dry air.  I explore the window sill for dead bugs and mysterious pieces of things.  I get angry shuffling through my old CD’s and DVD’s and eventually fall asleep in a pile of them.  When I awake my back is creased with strange curved indentations that I run my fingers over endlessly.  I take long hot showers at awkward times of the day, spending most of the time either listening to the sound of the shampoo bottle pop open and closed or watching water drip away from my eyes.  A thousand tiny clear droplets falling out of focus.  I try to set tasks but in decreasing levels of motivation they all fail to be completed.  I discover strange phrases that have no meaning at all and they become my daily mantra, echoing through my brain until late that night.  And then I lie there in bed, gears churning out of control.  I question whether I should get up and just make some more tea and watch a movie.  Sometimes I’ve gotten up and gone for long meandering walks through the darkened city.  Sometimes long drives.  Its at these times that my camera replaces my mouth, and all my meaning is expressed in the images I capture.  I’m always dissatisfied though, the pictures never come out the way I see them in my mind, the way I’m willing them to be.  People stare at me in puzzlement and judgement.  I feel more alone sitting at a freezing bus stop in the middle of the night than I do back in my malaise cave.  Holding my camera steady so as to not blur the shot.  Slowly a strange sense of alienation and failure creeps into my bones and I walk back home.  Start to peel off my clothes, usually leaving myself halfway undressed asymmetrically until I wrestle the rest off in my sleep.   I am lonely, sleazy, and lost.

I wake up but the questions are still right in my face.  And so I confront them.  Where is meaning?  Where is God?  If God is dead then man is god.  Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. That’s how they’ve made it. Life now is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that is the whole deceit. Man now is not yet the right man. There will be a new man, happy and proud. He for whom it will make no difference whether he lives or does not live, he will be the new man. He who overcomes pain and fear will himself be God. And this current God will not be.  Hopefully this new man can be me.  But do you understand?  Do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way and in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness.  And so I embrace unhappiness, ugliness, evilness, and pain.  I embrace these things because they embody the essence of why my soul is endlessly screaming into the void.

My god, I am a bum.

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