And Speaking of Labor Day...

...my own labors continue. Received my first rejection slip of the month today, pushing one more short story back into the "like a rolling stone" category. On a Sunday, of all days. And a holiday weekend, too. Feels good, in all sincerity. The sour taste in the back of my mind lets me unequivocally know I've been rejected by a by-God professional.

It's Official

You are The Hermit

Prudence, Caution, Deliberation.

Via the MySpace distraction What Tarot Card are You?):

"The Hermit points to all things hidden, such as knowledge and inspiration,hidden enemies. The illumination is from within, and retirement from participation in current events.

The Hermit is a card of introspection, analysis and, well, virginity. You do not desire to socialize; the card indicates, instead, a desire for peace and solitude. You prefer to take the time to think, organize, ruminate, take stock. There may be feelings of frustration and discontent but these feelings eventually lead to enlightenment, illumination, clarity.

The Hermit represents a wise, inspirational person, friend, teacher, therapist. This a person who can shine a light on things that were previously mysterious and confusing."

A significantly more upbeat interpretation than the one on Wikipedia.

The Hermit is related through a cross sum (the sum of the digits) to The Moon. While The Hermit mostly integrates the lessons of the sunlit world, the Moon stands at the threshold of light and dark and churns the waters of life. In both cases, treasures can be uncovered through contemplation of what is brought forth. In both cases, monsters may be found.

Some say that The Hermit is a Threshold Guardian, representing an obstacle the Querent, the hero of the piece, must overcome to move on.

A potentially dangerous aspect of The Hermit is his retreat, his isolation. We all need to retreat sometimes; retreat and renewal are necessary for growth. But The Hermit may be tempted to completely withdraw from the world, not because the journey is done, but because the dragons of the real are too daunting, or because the trivial pleasures of the cave are too intoxicating. Withdraw at the wrong time, stay withdrawn too long, and growth stops.

The cowl The Hermit wears protects him and isolates him. Hopefully, at some point, he casts it off and rejoins the world.

Some say that The Hermit represents the time we learn our true names; who we really are. The Greek philosopher Thales is reported to have been asked, “What is the most difficult of all things?” To which he is said to have answered “To know yourself.” The Hermit is given time to obey the Delphic Oracle’s demand: know thyself.

So you're saying I should just go on doing what I'm doing? Thanks. That's Tarot cards, ladies and gentlemen: reinforcing your worldview since the 5,000 B.C....though I'm sure some Wikipedia dick would tag that last "citation needed."

232

Because I can’t think of anything else to say, I’ll let Fredrick Douglass play us in.

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....

[…]

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. (The Meaning of July The Fourth for the Negro, Rochester, New York, 1852)

Read the whole damn thing, why don’t you. And remember, s was true in his time, so it is in ours: you don’t have to be black man to be treated like a slave. His was the slavery of whips and chains. Ours is the slavery of economic pressures, interest rates, propaganda, eternal drudgery. The very form of slavery that the slaveholders of Douglas’s time decried. From their lofty perspective, toiling in a shoe factory for sixteen hours a day, performing the same task over and over and over, was beneath the dignity of any white man, save perhaps the Irish (who weren’t really white in any case, being largely Catholic and thus tools of Satan). At least, the slaveholders argued, their brand of forced labor uplifted an otherwise idle and obviously inferior race, giving them the twin gifts of Christianity and Civilization (which, to most Americans, then as now, is the same gift given twice).

One of the most famous articulations of this perspective, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters by George Fitzhugh (of Port Royal, Caroline, VA, as the title page adds—so readers will literally know where Mr. Fitzhugh is coming from) went so far as to claim that, “Christian morality is the natural morality in slave society, and slave society is the only natural society. Southern Slavery “has become a benign and protective institution, and our negroes are confessedly better off than any free laboring population in the world.” After all, “The whole moralé of free society is, ‘Every man, woman and child for himself and herself.’ Slavery in every form must be abolished. Wives must have distinct, separate, and therefore antagonistic and conflicting interests from their husbands, and children must as soon as possible be remitted to the rights of manhood. Is it not passing strange, wonderful, that such men as Channing and Wayland did not see that their world of universal liberty was a world of universal selfishness, discord, competition, rivalry, and war of the wits. "

All bullshit, of course, save the part about “universal selfishness” and “discord.”

I walk the all-but empty streets of my adopted city and in the distance I hear the mortar-crack of fireworks. I can’t help but be un-American on this, our most sacred of secular holidays. I can’t help but think, “What the fuck are you people celebrating?” The fact that, for the first summer in God-knows-how-many-millions of years, the Arctic is melting? The price of gas, set to reach $7.00 by year’s end? This and every other nation’s increasing wage disparity? America’s new national past-time of conspicuous consumption? Or the ubiquity of wage slavery?

It’s a term I’ve longed to reintroduce to the American idiom, as it so perfectly sums up our position in this mournful first decade of the twenty-first century, when the rich get richer and the poor eat themselves away to nothing, all with a smile on their face.

Most generally, you could define “wage slavery” as “a social condition, whereby a person is rendered totally dependent on the cash economy for their survival and the survival of their immediate dependents (parents, children, guppies, whathaveyou).” But, wait, you might say, Isn’t that all of us?

Precisely.

As with some much else, the concept of predates American by centuries. One thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two years before the Declaration of Independence the Roman lawyer/statesman/philosopher Cicero, in what may or may not have been a letter to his son, noticed that, “vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labor, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.” (De Officiis, 44 B.c.) And we can’t even think about a topic like this without bringing in the obligatory quote from Karl Marx:

“The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.” (The Principles of Communism)

Currently, I sell myself for $11.25 an hour. The CEO of Goldman-Sachs (the firm predicting that $7 gas, mentioned above) is pulling down $6 million a year. He won’t be worried about a two hundred dollar dentist bill breaking his household budget. His name is Henry M Paulson Jr, and I don’t know what his wife does for a living. My partner daily wastes her life riding the highways of our adopted city, prostrating herself before any employer with the merest hint of an offering. She’s falling all over herself for the chance to be exploited; to become just as burnt out, depressed, bored and unmoored as I’ve become.

For the past two years I’ve been a tick on the hide of my region’s largest utility companies. Portland General Electric, Comcast Cable, the Seattle Steam Corporation, the Spokane River Water District…these are the faceless, corporate entities that pay my rent, buy my shoes, and put food on my family (as Our Glorious Leader might say). They are, in effect, bribing me to not care, to keep my head down, do my job, and not worry about the fact that their actions have destroyed the salmon population, despoiled the local river systems, turned lakes into toxic soups, flattened mountains for their coal and gas, and poisoned thousands of miles of ground with their ever-expanding network of leaky, bargain-basement pipelines.

I should ignore the fact that, to the U.S. Forest Service, everything is an excuse to cut down trees. Weevil infestation? Grab your saws and hardhats, boys; we’ve got to kill those trees to save ‘em. Fire season? Can’t have fire without wood to burn, and why burn it when you can turn it into x numbers of board-feet, which equals y dollars, which equals a z increase in Weyerhaeuser’s stock price. That way the CEO’s can feel good about themselves when they award themselves another pay raise.

Should we celebrate the fact, on this July 4th, that CEO Robert J Stevens of Lockheed Martin makes over thirty-six million dollars a year? What about Mr. David J O'Reilly of Chevron, with his “mere” $34.61 million? Is that what you get when you sink a pipeline deal with Burma’s military rulers? Not bad, all things considered. Closer to home, there’s Brian L Roberts of my good friends at Comcast, pulling down $38.98 million.

Do you think you’ll catch any of these men scratching their heads in the grocery store dairy isle, wondering if they can afford a block of cheese? No. Extra sharp cheddar doesn’t even count as an “expense” to someone with a summer home in Big Sur, a penthouse in Manhattan, and the ability to actually pay for a $200 hamburger.
Yes, we can actually shit gold. What a dream this is, this American Dream. Would that we could all wake up one day and realize that things don’t have to be this way.

Noam Chomsky observes that

“Anarchists of this tradition [the libertarian, Anarcho-syndicalist one that Chomsky favors] have always held that democratic control of one's productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful…”

But who wants to hear something like this? On this of all days, how can I, a free, American male (who, thanks to my ten-hour days inside an office, can even pass for white) talk about “income inequality” and wage slavery? Today “my” country turns 232, and in spite of the perfect socio-economic storm I can feel, even now, gathering on the horizon American shows no signs of slowing down. No force on earth seems capable of opposing the onward march toward the Apocalypse. As a concerned citizen of country owned outright by rich assholes who, as George Carlin so rightly articulated, “don’t give a fuck about you,” what have I to celebrate today, save one more day of life on Earth?

I’m under no delusions here: no one will read this post. Any who do will probably accuse me of being a pinko-commie-faggot-Marxist who’s obviously rooting for Al-Kay-Duh. But as Eminem says, “I write songs for me. Fuck what you like.” Replace “songs” with “essays,” “blog posts,” or “masturbatory rants” and you’ll find yourself face-to-face with my exact frame of mind. In that spirit, I’ll let another contrarian writer from Missouri, Samuel Langhorn Clemens, play us out.

“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office- holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is a thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to. Its institutions are extraneous. They are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags, that is the loyalty of unreason.”

I [Heart] My Neighborhood

I spend my Monday at thinking about all the things I should be doing—those that working keeps me from and those that keep me working. Should I quit my job before or after Regina’s Liberty Tax job disappears? Should I quit my job before or after I finish my godforsaken book? Is the book forsaken, or am I? Can God forsake you if you deny His existence? How can any fictional character forsake the living? We don’t refer to “Hamletforsaken weather” when our eternal Portland winters drag on into spring. We don’t speak of “Pipforsaken Hell Holes” in Iraq, Brazil, South Africa, America. Jesus didn’t ask, “Frodo Baggins, why hast thou forsaken me?”

If there is a god, has it forsaken me? At one time I deluded myself into believing I could sense the Force—the eternal, uniting principal of all life on this planet—nay, all the living systems of the universe. I imagined I could make myself aware of this principal and literally feel the live around me, a physical presence in my airspace. I can’t imagine that any more. I’ve lost the knack. Skills need practice. Without practice, there is no progression. Without progression, no evolution. No evolution, no survival. I’m up to Voyager’s Fourth Season, the Seven of Nine season, so I occasionally think in Borg. I will adapt. I must survive. The big question is always how?

Do I get the job before I go back to school? Landing a job at the college would generate the greatest amount of reward in this department. Or do I go back to college, securing a job once I know what my class schedule is like? Why am I rattling my brains so much, wasting time on this absurd plan? Enroll in to college to get a job that will secure me cheap prices on college? Does that sound like a good reason to re-enter the American educational system? Is it anything other than a half-baked, bullshit excuse for plan? The last flailing of a desperate man? A wage slave lashing his own back?

I walk down the street thinking about all this. It’s Monday afternoon. Dark clouds hug the tree line like spectators in Persian art, peering over the far horizon with their hooded, rainy eyes. But I’m on 82nd Avenue, walking to the bank, and for the moment I walk in the sun. I pass the crosswalk I cross each day on my morning way to work. I pass the carwash, the Bar and Grill, the newspaper box that I set my coffee on as I pause in the morning.

A man walks up to me as I approach the bus stop where, nine hours ago, I waited for the bus to work. “Hey, man.” He’s a late-twenties, unremarkable man. Taller than I, like most, with dull blue eyes and hair like wet sand. “Do you know where I can score some crystal meth?”

Immediately my brain performed an operation in what I call Narc Calculus, a complex system of logical postulates designed to recognize the Narc from the simply ignorant. Narc Calculus indicated this man was out of his flippin’ mind.

“Nope, ‘fraid not,” I said, not bothering to slow down. I didn’t apologize, as I might have had the man asked me where to buy weed. However, I did have a revelation after I’d walked a block or so.

“Now there,” I said to myself, to God, to the invisible audience that’s followed me around since I became aware of the mechanics of television at age three or four, “there goes a man who’s got his fucking priorities straight. No moral grays in his universe. Nothing but black and white. And I hear Irvine Welsh, author of “Trainspotting” in my head. “When you’re on junk, you’ve got only one worry: scorin.
But when you’re off it, you’re suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shite.” (Translated from the original Scottish.)

For a moment I envy that anonymous methhead his simple, moral clarity. Then I go back to despising him. Fucking methheads.

I love my neighborhood, but goddamnit I hate cities. Human civilization disgusts me. I could never be a sociologist. When it comes to study of human society on a marco level I can’t help but agree with Agent Smith of the Matrix and see parallels between human begins and diseases. Particularly sexually transmitted ones.

And now that I’ve had a horrid, eternal Tuesday, I can’t help but be cynical. Maybe humankind is really planet Earth’s syphilis. We’re certainly know how to crazy up the place. National Weather Services across the globe agree that 2008 will be colder, wetter and stormier than 2007 ever dreamed of being. Thanks La Ninia. Thanks, other humans. When we’re dead and gone, alien historians will probably chisel something like, “They got what they disserved” onto our figurative headstones.

I don't know if you can tell, but I had a horrible day on Tuesday.

Holdays Always Make Me Think of Evil

Whereas my friend Nathan said, on his own blog (and church news letter, apparently),

“I enjoy Twinkies and canned ravioli as much as the next fellow, but bringing in our own small crop of corn, tomatoes, and watermelon tended from seeds by our own hand helped me realize that there is something more than magical, something sacred in the harvest. Sometimes we become too insulated from the great but subtle miracles which the Lord has placed in our lives, especially when we see them pre-packaged every day along the shelves in the supermarket. Sometimes we need to see the gifts of God springing forth out of the earth under our own imperfect hands in order to cultivate a spirit of gratitude and thanksgiving for our Father and Creator in all that he has done for us.”

I would say that we in the opulent West go through our entire lives “insulated from the great but subtle miracles“ that lay scattered all about us. We a kept so purposefully, that we might be more compliant, that much more susceptible to crowd control and mass indoctrination. We’re rich and powerful, you see, and if we were aware of even half the evil that goes down around the world every…single…day…we certainly wouldn’t tolerate it. We would not tolerate the destruction of our planet—our one and only home, with its clear cut forests, beheaded mountains, poison streams and lifeless oceans. We would not tolerate even a tenth of the senseless brutalities the human race inflicts upon itself.

We need seasonal shopping sprees to take our minds off all of this. That’s why Franklin Delano Roosevelt invented Thanksgiving on the second-to-last Thursday of November, 1939. Go on. Go look it up. Congress fought him over it, and 22 states (mostly the South…surprised?) didn’t go along with it, but it became a federal law on the books scant months before Pearl Harbor.

Nathan and I do not share the same Lord, however. If I’m to pick a Jesus, I pick the Living Jesus, of whom it is written,

His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?"
"It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."
--The Gospel of Thomas, v. 113

It’s the truth. And with that thought, Merry Thanksgiving and a Happy Christ Mass to come…(thought certain sects continue to warn that celebrating either might just condemn you all to Hell--if so, then I’ll see you there.)

(Not) Our House

Our first choice for a house was owned by a very nice man. When another group of his tenants suffered a devastating fire in their house he offered them “ours”. We did not get that house.

My Ambassador and I discovered our second choice of a house while on a walk around the neighborhood. We were (or, at least, I was) on a St. Patrick’s Day quest for Guinness and noticed the house. Two blocks down from our current moldering roach trap. Three bedrooms. Two stories. A back yard. A detached, two door garage. A finished basement complete with carpeting and a secret room I’d loved to turn into a Batcave…all this and a tree in the back yard, its branches pruned and sawed away, true, but it was still a live and I planned to see that it grew strong in time…but we were slow.

As a unit, as a household, we were slow. Uncoordinated. There are four of us now: my self, my Co-President Dye, my Ambassador (who is also my love and heart) and our new member who of this writing has not received nearly enough ceremony. She has yet to be initiated into the modern self-made family/nation state we call Monster Island. I supposed she will be Speaker for the Conclave at some point (thereby giving us a Legislative branch to balance our Duel Executive) but that point has yet to come. At present she does not even live with us. And while she has the soul of a patient confidant I have the distinct impression that she is not yet One of Us…and will only become so through the same patient weathering process that drove all of us toward each other and made us all what we are now.

We will find a house. We must. We can no longer manage this place. Rent is up a hundred dollars in three years and we’ve suffered a parade of foolish, self-infatuated toads who’ve posed as our Apartment managers. The current batch are no better than their predecessors. They check smoke detectors. They hand out maintenance request forms. They accept rent checks and general ignore us, their “valuable” tenants. There is no doubt that when (no longer “if”) we get our house they (and their corporate masters) will rape us for every penny they deem necessary to repair all the “wear and tear” in this moist cardboard box.

I suppose I should take another walk. It’s warm enough. Spring has come and my adopted city is green and good again. Who knows what I might find.

April Fool

The scene: 9:45 a.m. I’ve just woken up.
Her: “You know those at home pregnancy tests?”
Me: “Um…yes…”
Her: “Well…I already took one…and you know what…we should play the lottery…because we’re good at beating long odds.”
Me: “…you’ve got be fucking kidding me. There’s no way. There’s just no way.”
Her: “There’s something else.”
Me:…what is it?
Her:...April Fools!

Spring is here and I feel a profound sense of disconnection. For the past months I’ve only felt comfortable when truly alone. When you’re alone there is no self-censorship. No selective omission. No need for strategic truths. When you’re alone you’re completely cut off from the responsibility of interacting with others. It is a condition as liberating as it is potentially dehumanizing.

Most of the time I long for nothing more than a quiet moment to myself. A moment to stare and think. An hour. An entire day. I rarely find time for things, being that I (foolishly, perhaps) chose to live in a major American urban center…with people that I love…rather than go all Walden on everyone. If, as Thoreau said, “A man is measured by the things he can leave behind,” then I have certainly inherited the dreaded “short gene.” I am too lazy to build a cabin in the woods and too antisocial to do anything else. I work all day at my mechanized job, and at night I lock myself inside a room and star into my computer. This soul-less, humming box that is certainly inhuman in its unfailing ability to do only what it is told.

I feel as if I have assimilated some of its less-enjoyable traits. I, too, seem to suffer from a bad habit of doing what I’m told, of acquiescing to other’s needs, of not getting what I want, or even knowing what that is. Of having nothing to want…or wanting only the impossible.

Jagger said, “If you try some times, you just might find you get what you need.” I will continue to try. Otherwise all of this is going to turn balls-up, into the sixth season of Buffy. And nobody wants that. That would just be maudlin.

My Friend Friedrich

Nietzsche says a lot of things, most of them vain, which is only fitting. He has more balls than Ayn Rand and when he wrote Human, All Too Human in 1878 he had not yet succumb to his disciple’s kind of crazy. He never would, dying of an all too different crazy ten years later.

Unlike Beyond Good and Evil (the one with, “the abyss gazes also”) Human spends a lot of time one “artists,” mostly writers and musicians, reaching the eventual conclusion that “We could give art up, but in doing so we would not forfeit what it has taught us to do.” In this it is much more hit and miss, and given to descend, sharply and critically, into the midst of nineteenth century bourgeoisie thinking. The next sentence reads: “Similarly, we have given up religion, but not the emotional intensification and exaltation it led to.”

Right. That’s why we “Christianized” all those savage Indians.

To be fair, Nietzsche never saw America. Would he have thought us a glorious experiment in observational evolution? Did we not carve society out of the “untrammeled wood,” imposing our will upon an entire landmass and mercilessly exterminating its natives, our rivals? Would we not exemplify all the best and worst that is his philosophy? None of Horace in Nietzsche’s talk of “artists.” None of this, “he tamed the beast within,” crap for our boy Friedrich…he would no doubt consider Art’s civilizing power a vestige of “slave morality.” No poets will form Nietzsche’s civilization. Art itself will wither and die the same death reserved for religion. After all, who ever survived with poem? Except Nietzsche.

“Soon the artist will be regarded as a wondrous relic, on whose strength and beauty the happiness of earlier times depended; honors will be shown him, such as we cannot grant to our own equals.”

The post-modernist in me fights the urge to grin as a writer criticizes other writers. In prose, no less. I snicker down at my friend Friedrich from my vaunted place atop his one hundred and seven year-old grave. I don’t to plan to go anywhere, old man, and neither do my brothers and sisters, in success or out. The world has always needed artists…as much, if not more, than it needs self-obsessed, German philosophers. Who are you, the man who would write Zarathustra, to say, “Art proceeds from man’s natural ignorance about his interior (in body and character): it is not for physicists or philosophers”?

I will admit, however, that my friend Friedrich gets some things right. He also spake, “Ostensibly [the artist] is fighting for the higher dignity and meaning of man; in truth, he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions for his art, that is the fantastic, the mythic, uncertain, extreme, feeling for the symbolic, over estimation of the individual, belief in something miraculous about genius: thus he thinks the continuation of his manner of creating is more important than a scientific dedication to truth in every form, however plain it ay appear.”

How nice it must to live in an age that still believed in “truth,” or that it might, at the very least, actually set you free.

Prefacial

It is possible, though highly improbable, to concoct a moral system based upon the actions of superheroes. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

It is possible to set out a systematic philosophy of ethical thought, observation, and behavior using nothing more than aphorisms composed of two-sentence thought-stems. Nor is that what I want to talk about. My roommate’s co-worker notice I’m reading Human, All Too Human and asks what it’s about. I tell him, “Philosophy,” and he tells me, “I didn’t know you were a philosophizer,” dragging the word through California sand like “Ted” Theodore Logan: “phil-os-o-phizer.”

“Dude,” I wondered, “you aren’t?” To me, it’s as if someone has announce they didn’t know I breathed oxygen/nitrogen/trace element mixture. At the same time, how could he have known? It’s not as if I’ve told him. Two years ago, when my ex-wife called me a philosopher I didn’t believe her. Philosophers have systems, books and fixed beliefs. I was a fool two years ago, and believe some foolish things. Now I’ve become quite acquainted with the fluidity of all things, shook hands with relativism and discovered that the universe is an uncertain chaos; that we really cannot know and what we know we can rarely tell given that we have slaved ourselves to the techno-fetishism of language. The Word Virus marches on, ever West…until it reaches East and bites its own tail like a jargon snake.

Was that what I wanted to talk about it? Not really, no. Really, all I wanted to do was get the juices flowing, get the ol’ synapse firing, and get ready for the real Work. I must find a way to finish a story and at last leave behind this inescapable feeling that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing.

Strange choice of words, that. “Supposed” to be. Strange. This is what happens when an impressionable writer reads William S. Burroughs. If I needed a defense, I would offer up the fact that we are both children of Missouri, and we both fled for the Big City as soon as we possibly could. Both of us found our pet addictions and enjoyed our unrequited romances…though if he weren’t dead I might feel sorry for old Bill. Alan Ginsberg sounds like a hard bastard to carry a torch for, like the kind of girl who’ll bring her new boyfriend over, the better to solicit your opinion, “as a friend.” What to do then, and remain “moral” (or, as Nietzsche might say, to remain in synch with one’s own will). My heart and love once again summed it up quite succinctly: “It’s a happy ending; just not for you.” And this is most definitely not what I wanted to talk about.

But I’ve spent the week reading Naked Lunch and last night attended my best friend’s birthday party. The month of February is falling away from itself and I’m not closer to where I believe I should be. No closer to working my will upon the universe. My mind is a fragmented haze and I must get to Work soon. No choice to be had. I must learn to finish things.

The Ghost of Dian Fossey

Yesterday I received a rejection letter from Asimov’s. A form generated, Xerox copied, standard issue reply. A McNotice; their editorial staff did not lower themselves to signing it with a sig-stamp or a robopin, depriving their letter of the personal touch I characteristic of, say, F&SF’s rejection letters.

Easy enough to make out why I did not rate the robosignature. As Harlan Ellison reportedly said to the creator of Babylon 5, “Stop writing crap and you’ll start selling.”

Raised on the Novel I, spent the longest time balking at the Short Story, both as a medium and as a form. Too short, I thought, too base-board. To forgettable, to clichéd. Too O. Henry, and how I hated O. Henry. Bastard. Now I must pay for all this time spent in spite with time spent perfecting my personal achievements of the form; going through the same, slow process of experiment and expectation that’s allowed my Novel In Progress to swell to 30,000 words, with its end only barely in site.

I recognize the necessity of this learning process. The bricks of Rome rest on a bone yard of centuries and Robert Heinlein I am not. No contest winners on my hard drive, and I also recognize the fact that, in the process of writing everything but the Good Short Story, I’ve written myself an indeterminate sentence: twenty-five to Life in the Big House of Service Industry Economics. By day I look through my bars and dream of life on the Outside, where the toils of my class of worker are swallowed by the same visual background radiation that allows us to pass orange jumpsuited work groups as they trim brush along our highways.

Thankfully, my coworkers suspect nothing of my plans to consign them to nonentity oblivion. If they did I’d promise to make it up to them as best I could: by immortalizing their struggle for the wider world, preserving it in its own prison of abstract, symbolic representation.

I doubt that would cool them. This is why writers must remain anonymous. To be affective students of the human animal, we must allow ourselves to be possessed by the spirit of Goodall and Fossey and disappear into its midst.

Joyce Stick

There’s never enough time in the day. But, of course, how could we ever have time if we never make time? Isn’t that what the devil said?
So I’m making the time to read James Joyce, and finding myself fascinated by the extended sermon on Hell that takes up a vast portion of chapter three. The hero of the novel, Stephen Deadelus (the author’s semi-autobiographical avatar) spends most of said chapter embroiled in guilt over the nightly bouts of in-and-out he’s indulged in since the end of chapter two. Poking and prodding him toward repentance is the sermon on Hell delivered
It’s a particularly Catholic vision of Hell—five hundred years of over-thinking and categorical sub-dividing. The sheer uniformity of it leaves a down right institutional aftertaste in my mind. The way every sense of body and soul is assigned its special torment, the unflinching, ponderously serious detail of it, strikes me down and tries my patience, much as the book itself tries my patience. There’s none of Dante’s Twilight Zone-brand of justice in James Joyce’s Irish Catholic Hell. None of John Milton’s haughty, fuck-you-I’m-English rebellion. Certainly none of Richard Matheson’s good ol’ America melodrama. It’s (if you’ll pardon the phrase, which I know you won’t) on Hell of a depressing pit of eternal damnation, devoid of even the Inferno’s saving grace: its manifold variance. The depraved imagination of a single politically-minded fourteenth Century Italian has a lot on the institutional imagination of the Holy Mother Church.
I shouldn’t be surprised, given the amount of energy wasted on pondering the after life. Visions of it fill volumes, and spill out across the world. Stacked together they’d reach the moon and fall on that plaque with Nixon’s name on it.
Would that human beings put more energy into examining their own lives, and the neglected world that they inhabit. We might all be better off.