Monday, March 21, 2011

Current Events

I don't listen to the news as much as I used to. I hear it. I know things are going on. A crazy man that looks like an old pale wallet wearing a tacky window dressing is slaughtering his own people like a prison warden putting down a riot. A little girl is missing not too far from where I sit. I bought two books recently, one looked like a copy of the bible with the golden silhouette of a naked woman on it, the other had a picture of Sartre and Camus. The absurdity of my own existence has become more presient to me as well. The past 20 months have been something else. I began living in a triangle between two states. I've begun drawing buildings and composing music out of triangles as well, I've learned about renaissance geometry, virtual architecture, and the virtues of cruelty in youth- against my better judgement. I've learned that we've been in a war for 10 years, but you wouldn't know it. There are cities being torn apart like bodies by cancer, but not here. At least not where you can see them.

Oh sure, the ghettos still fester, perhaps finally the 'negro problem' we've inherited will finally become simply a black scab from a festering wound that can be picked and flicked off with a friendly thumb nail. I wrote a story in protest about a young black man being raped by an old french man. It disturbs me to see hip male 20 somethings enjoying this kind of topic rather than leaving the room or shooting me dirty looks, but I guess I'm out numbered so what else do you do but keep reading?

That was a true story, about that young black man. So is this. I keep telling myself to write a journal. To keep a document so I don't forget all the crazy shit that's gone down, but Sartre would say 'keep having adventures, chronicles me damned!'. All the fun, all the despair, all the hard work, and blood, and tears, and loud noises. I've been through three cars, three places of residency. Everything seems to be about the number three. Three cities, three girls, three's company, Ad Triangulum.

I know there's a war going on, and I'm not in it.

I know the Marines will be back soon. My friend Mike came back to kill a man. A friend of mine, a friend of his, a friend of my father. There's that number three again. Another friend went back, because he didn't see enough action. Maybe he'll come back to kill someone too; another gay black professor, or a japanese feminist art historian. Maybe me, who knows. I don't know. I say that a lot too. I don't know. I'm not big on descriptions these days. My favorite method of writing is on my cellphone. I've written several poems, even started a novel on it. It's quite a machine, I won't get rid of it because it's got some of my finest work on it, but I'd due for an upgrade, so what do you do other than get a new cell phone?

I'm no longer in a depression as I used to be, but now we're all in a depression all the same. But you wouldn't know it from where I'm sitting. Where are all the soup lines? I'm happier than I've been in a long time, and I don't owe it to a career, or a woman, or fame or recognition. I owe it to bending my body into uncomfortable positions, and hacking dead tree branches off of a douglas fir with a hatchet. I'm getting bored of the sound of my own music, but I'm too lazy to make more. Not lazy.

I don't know.

I'm busy as ever. Busier. There's a war going on and people are dying. There are coup d'etat's spreading all over the middle east like dominoes against a man that looks like an old catcher's mit in a salmon colored window treatment. There's a war, and a famine, and a disaster. I scare people without trying simply because they look in my eyes- they give me authority, they call me sir without even noticing, but they won't give me a job. I guess I have to do that myself.

I rather enjoy my genteel poverty and my romantic friends. I could do with out Byron, but Percy and Mary Shelley would be good company.

There's a war going on still, and I'm not fighting the bad guys on either side, I'm just waiting for the veterans to come back and start raising hell like they should on a weekend. I ask myself where all the ass holes are at the bars. They're all over seas learning how to be bigger assholes, learning how to kill gay black college professors, or straight bi-racial college graduates who have noticed the lack of protest and sincerity in casual sex. I guess I should be thankful. That's been what I've been telling myself now for months.

I should be grateful for the war, grateful for fascism, grateful for something to wage a crusade against, grateful for being next in line to be bestowed the honor of marxist-revisionist-experimental composer and abstract painter who's tall, dark, handsome and frequently able to make people laugh. I like my glasses too, and the girls like my hair short, but there's a war going on and I'm not fighting it.

The hipsters are starting to disappear, being replaced by test tube babies in tight pants, not because they have hepatitis or took too many drugs, but because their fathers didn't make them play sports. They didn't make them do anything except take out the trash or fill out a college application because they THINK that's what a boy his age should be doing right about now. That's what I think America really is. Just the end result of everyone doing what they think they're supposed to do. It's not evil, though the army does evil things. It's simply the end result of a history of cast off foreigners all trying to be someone else, all trying to be something better, something more inherently moral, and it's okay if millions die for that private luxury. They were sacrificed, and sacrifice and murder are as different as sacrifice and suicide. Their lives were not taken in vain. It's a just a country full of people whose whole history has been defined by people doing what they think they're supposed to.

There's a war going on.

I heard a voice on the radio today. It was in English. A translator speaking over a voice in japanese. It said that the japanese are not the type to wage a coup d'etat. They'll just sit around quietly and wait to die.

My 1st ex-girlfriend of 2007 said to me in 2008, in the wake of a disastrous relationship with a predatory lesbian, that we lived in an age in which nothing was happening. I knew THAT was bullshit, and I couldn't believe that SHE of all people would say something so asinine and obtuse. But then again, she thought that Nietchze was 27 when he had that picture taken. You know the one I'm talking about. We were only weeks away from a having either a black or female president (there was no way the republicans were going to clean up the mess when a negro or a woman could do it instead). Weeks away from an global economic meltdown, devastating earthquakes in Chile and Haiti. Personal technology was spinning circles around us. 'Big Brother' had come out into the open and could chat with u online. Nothing is happening? At least acknowledge the fact that we haven't spoken to each other in almost a year, that your coveted triste with an older woman has fallen apart only months behind you, the wreckage still visible in you living room and disheveled appearance. I didn't say anything about the war, or Obama or Hillary, or secret prisons, or a communist president, or a fascist corporate state, or even a fricking iPhone, I just agreed with her politely hoping that if I made a pass she wouldn't tear my lungs out. No coup d'etat on the balcony this afternoon, no exercise of superior physical force or passion waged against my former oppressor right in front of me. I guess I'll just listen to my roomate's ipod on the bus and avoid conjouring memories that never took place to pass the time, ho hum. I did the polite thing and just sat on the other end of the deck and kept my hands to myself and it occured to me that she might never be happy again, at least as happy as she HAD been when I knew her best.

But I digress, there's still a war going on.

Now japan is on the verge of the worst nuclear disaster since 3 mile Island (nothing tops Chernobyl), the earthquake there has rocked the earths rotation slightly out of alignment. A couple more of these little global tectonic hiccups, and we very well could do a 180 from pole to pole by next year. Hurricane season, like the holidays, will be here before you know it. I'm waiting to hear that Amsterdam has been hit by a flood, that Naples as been bifurcated by a massive earthquake, that a coffeee shop in Seattle is buried in volcanic ash, that the galapagos island chain has begun hovering above the ocean, and that the 'illegal aliens' have crossed back over the border and returned to the Mayan temples with trucks full of big digital atomic clocks stolen from Children's museums. I'm waiting to see a stock broker in a teflon armani suit open fire on his daughter's montessori class with an AK-47 and finish the survivors with a tomahawk. I'm waiting to get laid again, I'm waiting for grandma to go to a nursing home, I'm waiting to lose 10 lbs, I'm waiting for my student loan deferments to run out, I'm waiting to get on a plane to Italy and show off some schematic diagrams of sonified architecture that I'm currently waiting to finish. I'm waiting to see a ghost in this house. Maybe I'm the ghost. Maybe I just sat politely and died in my sleep at some point last month and I can't remember. Maybe that's why I've learned to be Invisible.

Perhaps, now I'll stop seeing people as the realization becomes less of a dream and more of a reality. Maybe I am too nice. But I don't think so. I think I'm right on point. A little tardy, out right late most of the time, but always ahead of the curve, or at least able to see where it's turning. I don't know. I just like to say that to seem humble.

I DO know.

I DO know that everything will be okay,
I DO know that I'll get laid soon.

I DON'T know if I'll grow my dreads back out,

but I DO know, that it won't be long before I'm standing on an elevated platform before a crowd of people speaking again, living in the moment the only way I've figured out how to do it. It's a comfortable feeling, very familiar. It may be on a stage, it may be at a podium. I might have a loudspeaker, I might have a laser pointer. It may be in Perugia, or Assisi, Rome, Chicago, Mexico City, my own back yard. It might be because I'm Invisible. But, it'll happen. It's happened before, just like the tide that destroyed Sendai rolled back, only to come back stronger.

I identify with that wave, and Invisible strength of water. But end of the world or not, I'm gaining speed and heading toward land. To hell with the end of the world, I don't have time to wait for that. Besides, when all is said and done. I know it's going to be alright, I just don't know for how long.

2 comments:

  1. Sing it back: Amen: It begins again.

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    1. Reading this 12 years later. The only thing that's changed is now I'm trying to lose 40 lbs.

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