Gatsby Home Invasion

As I left the liquor store the heat of the afternoon entered my lungs like a hot paste in which I distinguished the smells of asphalt, crumbling plaster, and rotting fruit from the dumpster nearby.  Here the bus had its station; it stood on the other side of the street, on a break with its engine switched off.  I climbed into my truck, tossed the case of cold daddies clanging down on the passenger seat, and started the engine.  Hot wind like dog’s breath smothers my face from the air-conditioning vents until the compressor kicks in.  As the buildings through the windows surged past me I thought over my brief interactions in the liquor store.  It was the one with the rotating sign.  Circles of light bubbled up in a neon bottle, I had thusly named the place ‘glug glug’.  I still had no idea whether my chat with Ray, the shop owner, would be of any use to me, but whatever it meant it had left me feeling pleased.

We were discussing the mystery of why I don’t update this website sometimes for long periods of time.  Yeah, my neighborhood liquor store owner reads the site.  Sometimes I hammer away at the site, hell fire burning in my veins, but other times the place is a ghost town for months on end.  In my absence people wonder.  People make assumptions.  People judge.

“He doesn’t want to see anymore.”

“He doesn’t want to write anymore.”

“He doesn’t want to try anymore.”

It’s not enough for something to either happen or not happen.  People want to flash lights on it, give it a voice, give it a reason.  Strange and invisible arrangements are made.  My legacy is auctioned off a piece at a time.

“People,” Ray said.  “They can’t understand the silence.  If he is dead, they want to know it.  If he is insane, they want to know it.  If he has a reason for silence, they want to know it.”

Me, “Right on man.”

I’ve been getting a lot of hate mail lately, and to be fair I am a real sonofabitch.  The shit comes is waves, usually in the hotter months.  Some certain group of assbags finds something I have to say here offensive to their world view and feel the need to strike against it.  A hundred hateful questions that they don’t really want answers to.  Well, fuck it.  The rhythm of the rails is an enticing song to those who long to be far away.  If life does suck, then it can suck my dick.  My shit is profane, nihilistic, sexual, racist, crass, horrifying, glorified, and comedic.  I will not justify myself.  If you don’t like it, just click away, don’t read it, and fuck you.

Ray asked about my shoulder.  I had worn a sling for 6 excruciating weeks after the surgery, but now the only evidence is a long jagged scar that itches uncontrollably at inopportune times.  He asked me about the girl I brought into the place a few weeks ago.  She had honey blonde hair, amazing deep dark eyes, but even though I hung her on my arm proudly for the beauty she was, she and I both knew deep down that she wanted nothing to do with me because she couldn’t have a future with an un-saved guy.  Motherfucker.

I suppose I was never innocent.  I popped my cherry in the backseat of a stolen car with a cheerleader and looked back with no regrets.  You can’t ascribe my fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances.  You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.  Mass market nostalgia gets you all hopped up for the good old days, a glorious past that never existed.  My continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight.  Only a reckless girl’s similitude can set that line straight.  The real holy trinity is look good, kick ass, and get laid.  After a couple weeks of late nights and Kafkaesque office politics I was hungry and tired in ways that reduced my ‘give a shit’ level almost to zero.

I pull into my condo complex.  The place hides in the hinterland of several overlapping districts.  It’s located near bars, basically guaranteed to produce class struggle on every night of the week.  I crack open a beer and walk down the street to pick up a few groceries (read: booze and cigars) for the weekend.  Work’s been demanding, I haven’t had time to do laundry, clean my apartment, or buy food.

My cell phone was buzzing as I sat down at the bar.  I gave up on groceries to explore bewilderment at the local watering hole.  I check out the avalanche of texts and sigh with annoyance.

Scumbag bartender, “What’s up?”

Me, “Oh, it’s just some dizzy dame who hates me for using the internet.”

I don’t remember the dude’s goddamn name, and I don’t even pretend to know it.  I think we’ve had a few heart to heart’s, wasted of course, right in this same dirty spot.

Scumbag, “How can any woman love you, you have such things in your head.”

Me, “What!? What the fuck are you talking about!?  Whaddya think’s going on in their heads?”

Scumbag, “You must have a miserable life, you are such a tormented soul.”

Me, thinking I must have fucked this guy’s sister or something, “What!? No boss, I’m having a blast!  I’ve got this big fucking throbbing hard-on for life, for history, and for women as redemption.  Just don’t use the word ‘normal’ around me, bub!”

Scumbag, “You want another one?”

Me, “Yeah bro, fill ‘er up again.”

So is this fucker right?  Am I just another alienated misanthrope basking in the aura of my own perceived ‘rightness’?  What is the fucking truth? It’s hard to recognize the truth when you are bombarded by lies all the time, every minute of the day. You have to go to sleep, but even in sleep you dream of the presence you have during the day.  You are bombarded by commercials and completely senseless information every single day.  If you turn on the TV you are bombarded.  If you turn your head in any direction, you see some sign, some commercial, every magazine, newspaper.. Senseless information.  The news is itself the products being sold.  Everything is meaningless.  Sure the truth is out there, likethe fucking  x-files.  The truth is there to be found, but in a sea of lies it’s just about impossible to find it.  Unless you know how to look, where to look, and when to look.  Of course it’s not possible to just wake up in the morning and say ‘yeah man, I’m gonna find the truth’ and then go find it.  You have to try and fail, and eventually you will weed out all the lies and you will end up with something that is at least similar to the truth.

The truth is hidden, under grass, under some rocks, on a hidden trail, a forgotten trail, in the forest.  And when you are trying to find these trails you will stumble, you will have branches scratch your face, and you will make mistakes before you finally find it.  And so then you think you’ve found it, so what do you do with it?  What do you do at all?  I can’t just live out the rest of your life like a jellyfish, spineless, soulless, leaving no fossil record, invisible to history.  Living at the bottom of the ocean in a cold world without day or night, perpetually in darkness.  No seasons, no weather, only the poison breath of the earth on which to live.

The agony of living verses the inevitability of death.  I think back to my old crimes, my childhood explorations, my youthful fantasies.  Breaking into mansions, sneaking around while the people were out to dinner at a restaurant, away on vacation, or in their summer house somewhere far off.  Take a few hits of booze, raid the medicine cabinet.  All the rich houses are filled with prescription drugs.   Pop a couple pills, not too many because you don’t want to get noticed so you can come back again.  Make yourself a sandwich.  Try on a fancy sportcoat.  Sniff some panties.  Take a shit like a king, wearing fancy robe and slippers, while reading travel magazines.   And then disappear like a ghost.  I existed in this way, like Gatsby, a voyeur to the human community.  At the heart of, yet completely alien to it.

I think about the knowledge of my own death.  I suppose it was only a matter of time after Angie killed herself that this would happen.  I remember the dead bodies I’ve seen, turning to leather in the sun.  Eaten by stray dogs.  The face goes black, starts to rot.  The skin tightens, pulls back, away from the teeth.  White teeth.  The corpse is smiling… at you… because it knows that you will be dead one day yourself.

To have emerged from nothing.  To have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this – yet to die.  Every day we involve ourselves in a multitude of activities to distance ourselves from harm and death.  Click a seatbelt, lock a door, look both ways before crossing the street, but we are aware that beneath the surface all these strategies are doomed to fail.  We will die eventually, and all of this will come to an end.

Human beings find themselves in quite the predicament.  We have the mental capacity to ponder the infinite, seemingly capable of anything, yet trapped in a heart pounding, breath gasping, decaying body.

We are godly yet creaturely.  Death is the end of the self.  It is the ultimate mystery.  Death is to be avoided.  What do we do with it and why do we fear it?  Fear of death is ubiquitous, it is hard-wired into us.  For me, on the most fundamental level, death is unacceptable.  I did not sign that contract.  I refuse to pay up.  I object.

We have the capacity to think symbolically, to make one thing stand for another.  This of course is the basis for language.  We have the capacity to project ourselves through time and imagine things that have not yet happen.  We have the capacity to think of things in terms of cause and effect.  We have the capacity to reflect back on ourselves and look back from a standpoint outside of ourselves.  All of these capacities play a central role in the system through which humans regulate their behavior.

On the one hand we have these minds that are capable of just really embracing the universe on all fronts, you know – we can think of the old days, we can think what it will be like 500 years from now, we can think of what it would be like to fistfight Nazi’s on the surface of mars while we sit here drinking beers in San Diego.  So we can ponder our present circumstances in light of future possibilities and modify our behavior accordingly.  All of that is tremendous, and all of that is highly problematic because it renders us as human beings uniquely aware of the inevitability of our demise.

We then recognize that death then happens to us.  I have to live with the knowledge that ‘I am going to die’.  All organisms have a life instinct, an instinct to live.  Our species has as much of that as any other species, but we also have the intelligence to know that we’re doomed.  This creates a cognitive problem for us.  It creates a potentially enormous amount of anxiety that we have to do something with.

The explicit awareness that you are a breathing piece of defecating meat, destined to die and ultimately no more significant than the worms that will eventually eat you.  This is not especially uplifting.

Fear is a response to danger.  Animals experience fear, but animals live in the present moment.  When animals experience fear it is due to a present danger be it a fire, or a predator, or some threat to their life.  Their response to that is the fight/flight reaction.  They will either fight or flee from the predator.

We too experience fear when we are presented with a present danger.  But we can also anticipate future dangers, and we can imagine future dangers, but the physiology is the same fight/flight reaction because the body can’t tell the difference between the past and the future.  Anxiety is the anticipation or imagination of a future danger.  So were all anxious about the future because we all know we’re going to die, we just don’t know when.  We carry a burden of anxiety that no other species carries.

Since the beginning of recorded history, and times immemorial, the existence of our mortality has haunted us.  We have gone to great lengths to forget, deny, and overcome death.  From the ancient myth of Osiris, to the myth of Jesus Christ, history is filled with tales of the afterlife.  Of people rising from their graves, returning from the dead.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, I quote it on this site endlessly, is a quest for immortality.

Death anxiety pervades every aspect of our existence.  Death awareness is a broad topic and requires broad scope investigation.  The bringing together of all the knowledge from the different social sciences and even in the humanities as well.  This leads into an exploration of the writings of the ages.  Ernest Becker in his famous work ‘The Denial of Death’ states that if “I want to understand very broad questions about what it is that underlies human behavior.”  If you undertake that quest seriously then you can’t confine your inquiry to any particular discipline.  Big questions require wide ranging scrutiny and no discipline should be disqualified from the act of consideration.  What Becker insists is that the human species solved the existential problem of death by utilizing the same intellectual skills that created the problem in the first place which is our vast intelligence and the ability to think in abstract and symbolic ways in the service of constructing and maintaining what he calls ‘culture’.

For Becker, culture is a collective fabrication.  A shared set of beliefs about the nature of reality in order to help us deal with our death anxiety.  Culture provides meaning and helps us to maintain a sense of security in an unsure world.  When we look at history that as long as can be recorded, across cultures and across vast amounts of time and space that death denial seems to be rather central to all human constructions.

We cannot be human without living in culture.  We are meaning hungry creatures as human beings.  We require meaning, and whether we talk about it or not, we are always living within meaning whether it has to do with some kind of family or work or activity or goal.  It may be, and usually is, unspoken.

Culture provides meaning by giving us a sense of where we’ve come from.   Some of these creation stories are oppressive and mundane, while others are fantastic and quite beautiful.  While creation stories give members of a culture a sense of meaning, it is roles within those cultures that give individuals a specific and individual sense of importance.

Culture helps us out by essentially giving each of the roadmap to find the prescriptions of acceptable action.  All cultures have social roles with associated standards of valued conduct.  The satisfaction of which allows you to proceed yourself as a significant individual, but it’s only through this culturally constructed sense of reality that we know what it means to be a valuable or an important figure.

In American culture you can stuff a rubber ball through a metal hoop, but in other cultures that would be pretty much worthless, some cultures value the ability to throw a stick through a fish’s head.

There is also a connection to the eternal through religion.  Throughout the ages people have debated the existence of the ‘eternal soul’.  Belonging to a religion is a sort of collective immortality, a symbolic immortality.

Symbols concrete our most cherished beliefs and values.  They are tangible representations of abstract ideas and meanings.  Without symbols it would be impossible to sustain our faith in ideas.   When the literal world fails us we turn to the symbolic.  In the case of death, if the battle can’t be won in the physical world then perhaps we can gain a sense of victory in the symbolic.

Darwin comes along, and periods of history like the enlightenment, and people start to think that this is all there is.  Were just this, physical materials, that will decay and die and that’s it.  What happens then when you don’t have that literal immortality thing, then how do you cope?  Instead of trying to live on in the physical world we take that whole dilemma and we move it to the symbolic level.  We invest ourselves in symbols that we get from our culture and from religion that come to represent us.  We identify with them.  We see ourselves in them.  And instead of trying to live on literally, physically, we try instead to make sure that our symbols of immortality, our culture, our religion are seen as powerful and durable.  Through their endurance we feel that some aspect of ourselves lives on with them.

One aspect of it is a collective sense of immortality.  If you can get a sense of being a part of something bigger than yourself that is immortal, that can transcend your individual death, then that is a kind of symbolic immortality.  But also there are individual way, we all know this, American’s certainly know this.  We’re going to write the great book, create the great work of art, have that amazing blog website (!?).

We try to figure out in what ways our culture defines the good life and we try to excel at it.  I distinguish myself and I stand out as special and when I do that I have a comparative gap between myself and other people and when I do that I find I kind of see those other people as merely mortal and I see myself as transcending the limit of mere mortality.  I look around me and everybody represents the ways that human beings naturally are, but I become supernatural.  Heroism as a means to transcend the limits of mortality.

The urge for immortality expresses itself as the urge for creativity.  The urge to build, the urge to make a mark in the world, even if just to carve our name in a tree or spray paint it on an abandoned building as a way of telling the world that we’ve been here and that we matter.

Our immortality then is contingent on our culture being stable and lasting forever.  Monuments, architecture, religious buildings, even the law – being constructed out of what historically have been the most enduring materials known to human beings.

American utopianism at the moment is consumer utopia.  It is associated with money and the ability to command the wills of other people by paying them something, which is in effect magnifying your own self.  It’s magnifying your own strength.  Effectually if you can make anyone in the world do your bidding with your check book then you have everyone in the world under your power.  Wealth is a symbolic barrier against death.  The tragic flip side is that if you do not have money, you do not have the ability to control other people.  You are radically vulnerable.  You are a slave.

If our immortality depends on the durability and persistence of our symbols and our symbolic systems, what happens when those symbols fall or fail us.  Again our symbols and our efforts to become something more that we are, are shown to be just as fleeting as life itself.  We experience a sort of symbolic death.  On a social scale, the loss of jobs, relationships, and our sense of self-worth in our day to day lives are experienced as a sort of social death – an overwhelming sense that we have not achieved the standards set by our culture.  To be totally vulnerable to the wills of the people around you.  In many ways, social death is analogous to and just as disturbing as real death.

This is why it’s not surprising that when you look around the world again and again you see people threatened by social death responding with the kinds of vehement emotional reactions that you would associate with a more explicit threat to life and limb.  Which is to say deep depression or volatile aggression of a kind of berserk violence.

Death imagery tends to haunt us and we constantly try to transcend it with experiences of life or affirmations of life imagery.  It can include the producing and raising and nurturing of children which are both a source of love and affection but are also a symbol of the human future and the prospect of a larger human connectedness.  That’s why after large-scale destruction many people seek to marry and have children because they wanted to reassert life, feelings of life, images of life.

One of the easiest ways to make yourself feel more than mortal is to stand as the conqueror of someone else.  Anyone who’s won a fistfight knows this feeling.  There is this tendency to lift yourself up by elbowing other people down.  That can be done in socially acceptable ways, sporting teams or getting the promotion at work over your colleague, but it also can manifest itself in violence.  If culture helps us deny or stave off death then the existence of other cultures or differing others within our own culture can pose a threat to our emotional and psychological stability.

If ultimately there can be only one ‘true’ then the other supposed ‘true’ must be wrong.  The existence of other perceptions of reality causes us to question our own belief system and therefore our claims to immortality.

If I believe that god created the earth in 6 days and then took a day to chill out and then I run into somebody like the Norse people who believe that the earth was made from the various parts of a frost giant, well if he’s right then I’ve got a big problem.  What we generally do when this happens is engage in a host of unsavory behaviors that serve a defensive compensatory function that allows us to restore our own psychological equanimity by bolstering our faith in our particular perspective.  So what we generally do when we encounter somebody different is to just dismiss them as an inferior form of life.  Sure the African dude believes that the earth was created by god out of a giant drop of milk, but these are ignorant savages worshipping piles of sticks and mud and they don’t have email and iPhones and cable television.  By derogating we kind of defuse the threat.

The thing is that these stick and mud pile worshipping savages are doing ok.  They are no less happy than we are, how can that be?  So derogation is not enough, and we try to assimilate others into our worldview.  If we can sell them our world view and they buy it that’s a very strong validation that we are right.  The most obvious example of this sort of behavior is missionary activity.

The cold war, a battle between two death denying ideologies – capitalism and communism, who attempted to extend their sphere of influence through as much of the world as possible. This is another example of this activity.

Sometimes what you can do is, if the alternative world view that is implicitly stating that yours is not the best or that yours may not be true, you can incorporate certain aspects of that alternative world view into your own and thereby defuse the threat.

Hippie subculture in the mid 60’s for example.  Mainstream America incorporated certain appealing aspects of the hippie subculture into the mainstream culture and cut off the really threatening aspects.  Hippies started wearing blue jeans.  Blue jeans, before the hippies came along, were something that was worn by a certain population of workers in America. After James Dean popularized them in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, wearing jeans by teenagers and youth and/or young adults became a symbol of youth rebellion during the 1950s. Because of this, they were sometimes banned in theaters, restaurants and schools.  The hippies said, ‘appearance is bullshit, we’re going to wear blue jeans.’  That had some appeal, so what mainstream America said is ‘if these things are going to get popular, fine, but now were going to have designer blue jeans and they’re going to become a status symbol.’  Today jeans can even be seen as formal attire.  This use of blue jeans is actually contrary to the original message of why hippies started wearing blue jeans.

These are all methods of coping that originate in our subconscious.  They linger under the surface of our actions.  However, what happens when these methods fail and the threat to one’s immortality is not sufficiently diminished?  For one’s culture to continue serving its death denying function the threat must be dealt with at any cost.  It’s a fight or flight reaction.  The derogation, the assimilation, and the accommodation of others are occasionally intense, direct, and brutal – but are no match for the final means of dealing with differing others.  Annihilation.

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