Ablogalypse Now

a splendid torch

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

- George Bernard Shaw

feels like i've been here before

here we go again....

i'd rather burn

over the course of my life i've often been accused of being too emotional, but i prefer to see myself as passionate. this unshakable propensity to feel everything too deeply has often put me at odds with those who see passion as a detriment, or who fail to see that the essential nature of passion resists all attempts to surgically pick and choose when passion is appropriate, and when it's uncalled for. the conventional wisdom seems to be that it is far better to live a life governed by the cool, detached calculus of reason, rather than the unpredictable flames of passion. but from my perspective, given the choice between living like a machine, and the fiery alternative...

i'd rather burn...

groveling for dollars

today i saw a co-worker - a grown man beg, plead, and grovel for the right to keep his job. he and i had committed a minor fuckup for which we certainly deserved a verbal reprimand, but, as usual a verbal reprimand wasn't enough and soon become an absurd and humiliating exercise in top-down managerial flagellation. i've been through this many times before and in many different settings from the insane regimented world of the army, to the hallowed halls of academia, but i'm not sure i've ever seen people seem to take so much pleasure in making other feel stupid, weak and small as i have here, and i'm frankly sick to fucking death over it. what is it that drives people to act this way? why such smug, arrogant and condescending bullshit from such pathetically shallow and haughty motherfuckers? fuck these people. there was a time when i would beg and plead to keep a piece of shit job, but not anymore. i'm done groveling and would rather be broke and homeless than eating shit from the hands of these thankless fucks.

dignity

a broken man who tried to love and lost, wanders the streets of a nameless town. he remembers days of sunshine and grace, quiet laughter and summer rain - he remembers, but tries to forget. tries to forget how it all came apart. how in losing love he lost his mind, his job and his dignity with a quickness that made his head spin. dirty, stinking and disheveled, he looks for a place to shit in private, but everywhere he goes he's treated like a leper and so he ends up shitting behind a bush in a local park, hoping that no one sees. while he squats to do his business, he is seen by a young woman walking down the street. she recoils in disgust and yells at the old man for his lack of social grace, but she keeps on walking because she's late for work. she's attractive but has a weary look about her, like she's been battered and beaten down by life, or maybe just an abusive boyfriend. she walks quickly, the crystal meth in her veins propelling her on the way to a place where she will dance naked for a room full of drunken businessmen and frat boys. she thinks they're all scum, except for the one with the nice eyes and expensive shoes. she likes him because he makes her feel special, not like a piece of meat on a shiny metal hook, spinning under the lights for everyone to pick at and devour. later that night, she sees him and he gives her a shiny gold necklace and a business card with his name and number on it. maybe she'll call him later, and maybe she won't. as the young businessman leaves the club that night, he's a little buzzed, but he gets into his new bmw and drives away. as he pulls up to a stoplight, he sees a middle-aged man dressed as a hotdog spinning a sign on a corner. he laughs at the hotdog man and tells him to get a real job before driving off into the night. the car he drives isn't paid for, and neither is the driveway he pulls into, or the $500,000 house he brags about to his friends. he's maxxed out on all his credit cards and daily has to contend with a flurry of calls from creditors all over the country begging for their pound of flesh. maybe he'll pay them, and maybe he won't. he has a trophy wife, a pool, a timeshare in cabo, and is well-respected by the guys at the office, so life is good. as he goes to bed, he thinks about the cute stripper at the bar, about how great his life is, and sinks off to sleep, oblivious to the cancer growing in his bones that will kill him in under 6 months. the next morning, after a brisk workout at the gym, a massage and a hot shower, he spends an hour berating a fellow co-worker for his poor judgement and tendency to be too emotional. he could have just written the guy up, but he enjoys making people feel weak and small and helpless, so he drags things out as long as possible, savoring the moment, the raw fear in the eyes of the weak little pussy in front of him. he ends by telling the guy that maybe he's just not cut out to be a manager, and sends him on his way. stunned, shaken and humilated, the young man leaves for the day to ponder his fate, because it's either this, or a trip back to the corner and that fucking humiliating hotdog suit. later on, the young man will go home and smother his dreams of white collar success with a quart of vodka and a handful of prescription painkillers, never to wake again.

on being thankful...

exhausted this morning, thanks to the miracle of melatonin. maybe i need to lay off that shit for a couple of days because it makes waking up alot harder than it should be. this is one of the down sides to working late nights. when you get off late, then it's not like you come straight home and go right to bed. one's mind tends to wander a bit, and it takes at least an hour to wind down from the day. so yes, i'm up now and getting ready to suck down some coffee. had dreams of some kind but not very vivid ones, or maybe they were vivid when i was having them but the melatonin haze simply won't let anything seep through. ugh...i hate starting the day this way, especially one where i'm going to have to spend a couple of hours on the highway.

so, despite feeling like i've put the events of 2005 squarely behind me, i still feel like i'm waiting for something. for an opportunity to just come along and materialize out of nowhere, for a suitable woman to come walking into my life, for The Next Big Thing, whatever that might be. i've often heard it said that if you follow your heart and move confidently in the direction of your dreams, then new vistas you could never have imagined will suddenly open up from out of nowhere...well, i'm here to tell you that really isn't the case...i've left behind a life it took me 10 years to put together and made a new start in the direction of passions i've long held close to my heart and there has been nothing else, nothing magical or unexpected, no divine providence of any sort...am i in the right place? how does ever know such things? all i know is that this feels more right than anything else i've ever done for a paycheck. and i am thankful for my family and my life. for having left behind unhealthy associations, poisonous habits of body and mind, and for having managed to stay alive long enough to learn how to be a better man...but the fact remains that i need to find some way to get into a creative routine, to shit or get off the pot because i've been on the fucking pot for far too many years now...unsure of my talents, afraid of doing something less than perfect, afraid to fail, afraid to succeed, afraid to try anything, there's that and the issues of commitment, perserverance and sustained focus...it's so easy for me to get distracted entirely too goddamned easily, and for a writer, for anyone, that truly is the kiss of death...need to find some cognitive mechanism that allows me to short-circuit that...actually it would be enough to just devise and stick to some sort of a writing routine, like a fitness routine...something i do more or less at the same time every day....and i wa able to get into the gym routine for several months but have stopped ever since my work schedule got flipped upside down, but this is the way things go, this is the trade-off you've made for sanity and peace of mind...because i had it, i had what most would consider a "good job" working from 6-3 monday through friday...i had paid vacation and sick tme and weekends off and all that shite and i was absolutely fucking miserable at the sheer bloodless, clockwork monotony of it all, so much so that i lost my mind and my marriage over it...so yeah, a chaotic work week with a constantly shifting schedule seems to fit me better, at least for now, but it does make it more difficult to devote a regular chunk of time to writing, but i must find a way to not only do that, but to get back into the gym too, because i'm not getting any younger, and no novel or screenplay ever wrote itself...i feel thankful, and more optimistic than i have in a very long time, but i still find myself haunted by thoughts of love withering on the vine, and of growing old alone, save for the company of my dogs...a good friend told me that it's never too late to reinvent your life, and while that may be true, i don't think i can ever reinvent myself in a fashion that most women - obsessed as they seem to be with the pursuit of material things and illusory security - would find appealing...

dream 11.20.07

i was at loch ness, or some other big scottish loch, and had apparently been hired on to help with some kind of historic archaeology/restoration/preservation project. it was warm, the surroundings were lush, and i was going to be traveling to and from work on the back of a huge whale while facing backward. i remember my boss telling me to just close my eyes and allow the sensation to wash over me like some sort of meditation. was there a point in this? something about facing backward and not forward? was the big whale-creature a metaphor for life? was the dream telling me to relax, go with it and watch the past slowly recede into the distance? or, is my subconscious trying to tell me that i'm still spending too much time dwelling on the past rather than the present or future? i don't remember what i was going to be doing, only that for part of the dream i was in an academic setting working in some kind of art studio with different lumps of wet clay. one was very flexible, pliant, soft & pleasing to work with while the other was quite stiff and dry and harder to work with. i remember geting up out of my seat to go and get some water to soften up the dry clay and being chastised for it, like i was undisciplined or something. i remember the school seemed old, and it had pictures of the blues brothers and hst taped to the walls. i remember having to find a bathroom and pissing while someone watched me, then turning around and pissing all over the floor.the teacher that chewed me out was eccentric, flirting with my female classmates, and he wound up being the guy who hired me for what was to be a 2 year project. but i have no recollection of what the work was going to involve. only that it was on or near a lake, and that i was going to be living with a dog in a tiny cottage near the lake when i wasn't working on this project. and what the fuck was paul doing in my dream of all people? i haven't seen or talked to him in well over a year. i got the strange feeling that the work was going to be connected to other arch. work i've done in the past but for the life of me i just can't remember. maybe i dreamt that too. what was the central theme of the dream? was there one? what did the clay signify? being creative and working with my hands? why was one lump of clay soft and the other dry? is my subconscious telling me to go back into archaeology? or was this all just an outgrowth of having seen the trailer for that new movie, "the water horse" last night? that's funny, because my dreams could very easily have been about all the fiendishly bizarre lovecraftian creatures from "the mist" - but the tone and texture of the dream seems to have been inspired almost entirely by a trailer that ran for less than 5 minutes. regardless, i woke up feeling great, very rested and refreshed, and with the vague sense, founded or not, that something truly momentous is close at hand.

confessions of a recovering rage-oholic

it's hard to believe i am just a handful shy of 1,000 posts for this blog.

1,000 nuggets of gibberish churned out over nearly 4 years. what's even more amazing is the shift in tone from the early days until now.

looking back, my posts were almost entirely bitterly vitriolic screeds of some sort or another. random troll-baiting was a goddamned art form.

but not anymore...i'm not sure when it stopped altogether, probably sometime around my divorce. in hindsight, perhaps all the bile and anger in my posts was somehow connected to all the repressed emotion i felt during my relationship.

maybe there was some connection, but i think most of it was inspired by the ongoing nightmare that is the bush administration.

they say that a lack of outrage in today's world is indicative of a lack of attention. and while there may be some truth to that statement, i fail to see how sustained outrage is anything but a one-way ticket to a spontaneous brain hemorrhage.

in the early days i naively thought that blogging could somehow make a difference, that one pissed off blogger could somehow become a community of pissed off bloggers, and that those pissed off bloggers would in turn become pissed off voters, and they did, but then the bush regime showed us that it really doesn't matter how many pissed off people go to the polls when you can just steal not one, but two motherfucking elections...

so, i really don't think blogging can change things anymore. if i've learned anything from all this it's that: a) it doesn't matter how profound you are, or think you are, nobody gives a shit what you have to say, b) in general, people care more about the trivial and absurd, and c) there are an awful lot of people out there with a shit-ton of credit card debt.

so now it's all about trying to find a kinder, gentler version of the madman that i was, and still am, somewhere deep inside. and about trying to find a way - without god, drugs, therapy, or 12-step groups - to enjoy what remains of my my life in an age of endless war, stolen elections, unparalleled government corruption and hubris, technological change, catastrophic environmental degradation, and widespread public apathy. and maybe, just maybe, to find someone to get a few kicks with while we sit back and watch the american shithouse go up in flames.

a tough row to hoe...but i've got to try....

6,570...

...plus or minus a couple hundred, is, according to my calculations, roughly the number of days of my life that I spent stoned and/or drunk, or in some other state of severe chemical derangement...how I managed to navigate those years without maiming and/or killing myself or someone else is beyond my comprehension...

notes on my death

I could feel my mother's tears over the phone as I led her down a path she never wanted to revisit again. To watch in mute horror as her son revisited the sins of his father. She told me that I'd kill myself, that the guilt would tear me apart. And although at the time I scoffed at her words, in time she was proven right. But not the way she imagined. I chose death. Or perhaps death chose me. But it was not the easy sort of death that involved a gun, pills, slit wrists, or crashed cars. My death was agonizingly slow and painful, something I lived from sunup to sundown over a period of days I can't even begin to recall. I don't even remember the point at which I realized I was dead. But the Me that I was then, the Me that habitually sought approval without instead of within, the Me that knew only darkness, excess, rage and rebellion, the Me that chose Numbness instead of Life, the Me that thought that I could conjure my muse with alcohol, drugs and the prolonged derangement of the senses, the Me that allowed my Shadow to dominate no less than 18 years of my existence - was dead. Having emptied myself of these crippling illusions, I must now refill the vessel that is Me with something more….