21 Dream).

Though I don’t believe its either of the dogs my parents currently own, for some reason one of their dogs comes with me back to my apartment. Once we get inside, I see that my gerbil is loose, though this gerbil is actually the size and look of a chinchilla and it looks sick, weak, and dehydrated. My own dog is also there. Most disturbing is the fact that I’d forgotten I owned either of them and wondered what they’d been eating, how they were getting food and water, and where they had been pissing and shitting.

I discover I have bowls for food and water for both of them on the floor in my kitchen, and there’s even some food in one of the bowls. Feeling incredibly guilty, I decide to buy some food for them, even some treats, and get two leashes so I can regularly take them outside so they can go to the bathroom.

This notion if having pets I had forgotten about was a recurring dream theme for me some time ago, and it kind of bothers me that its cropped up again — along with the more recent theme that’s emerged, which is having a messy, packrat of an apartment (which is not the case in waking life, for the record).

As to what these dreams mean: dreams of neglecting or entirely forgetting about our pets may represent our feeling that we’re not taking on our responsibilities, most likely towards ourselves — that we’re failing to acknowledge and nurture some aspect of ourselves represented by the animals in question, in other words.

The dog may represent loyalty or companionship, the gerbil may represent overwhelming energy or hyperactivity without a clear focus. Together, they may suggest I need to commit my hyperactive mind to something; conversely, it may suggest that I need to stop taking matters into my own hands and get a girlfriend.

This may have also been reflected in another recent dream I had, specifically the one regarding the purple flood. As cars often reference motivation, garages — where we often house cars — may suggest a lack thereof. If garages are also another manifestation of the typical meaning behind attics, basements, or hidden rooms, its also a symbol of the unconscious — so my motivation is buried in the unconscious aspects of my psyche. Water also suggests emotions and the unconscious, and given that the purple water was filling up the garage and then flooding the street, this also suggests repressed emotions bound up with my repressed motivation. The fact that it appeared to be boiling in the garage may suggest frustration, or perhaps merely passionate emotions that I’m repressing.

I’m not sure why the water was purple, but the color was vivid, and something so pronounced certainly indicates something. I suppose I associate it with spirituality, though I’m uncertain how that would relate to other aspects of the dream. Last but not least the mist may suggest confusion or not being able to see something clearly, which relates to my uncertainty regarding the meaning of the purple water, if nothing else.

The dream I had recently regarding Maria Cox may also have some relevance. In that dream, the clutter in my room may have represented the disorder in my life and within myself. The birthday cake wrapped up like a birthday present that I’d forgotten about allegedly suggests a pleasant surprise (the present) and either that someone values me or I wish to befriend them (the cake). Hugging Maria suggests my desire to befriend her or a more intimate involvement, and her leather jacket may represent her power and protection — or just that I find girls in leather unbearably hot. Of course, it ends with my desire for her battling my fear, leaving me in that frustrated, uncertain state.

Though they aren’t at all alike from what I can discern, I talked to a girl I value and find myself pretty damn attracted to last night, and while its likely been as long since I’ve seen her as its been since I’ve seen Maria, I’ve actually communicated with her extensively online and really enjoy talking to her, so maybe that’s behind why my unconscious belched up this dream of instinctive neglect last night.

In closing, I must say that I love how as soon as I give up and try to hang up my hat with respect to even considering getting with a girl again, convinced it would never happen and couldn’t work, no matter how much the desire may burn in me, my brain starts poking at me. “No, no, you really need this,” it seems to be saying, albeit in symbolic code, and of course without the slightest suggestion as to how the fuck I could go about doing that.

Chaotic Cycle of the Fast Food Industry.

Imagine you work with me at a fast food restaurant. We’re constantly busy, shorthanded, and all the employees are overstressed and underpaid. As a consequence, the food doesn’t get out quickly enough to satisfy the customers and their orders are often enough made wrong, so they’re pissed and take it out on the employees. As a result, some employees decide they’ve had enough, so they quit and get better-paying, less-stressful jobs.

So now we’re just as busy, even more shorthanded, and the remaining employees are even more stressed, orders take longer to get out and are even more likely to be made wrong, and so customers are even more pissed and take it out on the employees with increased viciousness.

Finally, we get in new employees, but after a short period of time — anywhere from half a work-shift to a week — they are understandably unwilling to put up with this bullshit for the meager hourly wage they make, so they quit.

And the cycle continues.

Customers either don’t get it or just don’t care and treat us like disobedient or dispassionate slaves, which I suppose in a way we are — but their act of treating us like shit is not an effective technique if their aim is truly to get what they ordered with speed and smiling faces.

I’m just throwing this out there, but a bigger paycheck, paid holidays, vacations, personal days, affordable insurance, and getting treated like fellow human beings by the people we serve — that might just be more effective.

Of the Mist & the Purple Flood (8/14/21 Dream).

I live with others in a small house along some suburban street. Its evening and I’m alone just outside the front door, eyes scanning the vacant road, and I’m growing rather curious about a strange mist lingering in the air.

As I look down to the end of the road, I come to focus on another house atop a hill, surrounded by the mist, and the garage captures my attention — specifically, the garage door. While it’s closed, it has two short and wide windows at its midsection, through which I can see that the garage is being filled up with this strange, purple-colored water. Its roughly halfway full when I see it and the water is bubbling and moving around violently. It appears to be boiling.

Soon enough, this purple water begins flooding the neighborhood. I tell my housemates about it, but no one seems to be concerned or even vaguely interested, for that matter, which confuses me.

Can’t You See We’re Talking Here?

You know how you can be having a deep, engaging conversation with someone over subject matter you’re both passionately interested in — not an argument, mind you, but a back-and-forth sharing of information and ideas and sincere questions — and then some rude motherfucker comes out of left field and starts talking to one of you about something irrelevant to the conversation, interrupting your joint flow, and while you don’t do it, what you have the burning desire to do is scream at them:

“Can’t you see we’re fucking talking here?”

That’s how I feel when I’m thinking about something, trying to formulate my opinion or understand a concept, or I’m imagining something and really absorbed in the universe inside my head and someone starts talking with me.

“Can’t you see we’re fucking talking here?”

In the moment, it feels rude of them and it enrages me — as if I expect them to be telepathic, as if they could tell I was so internally involved.

Its a lot like when I’m writing or reading and they do that, though such cases I’m of the opinion my anger is justified, but when its just me talking to myself in my head, as much as it feels the same, I suppose its pretty fucking silly of me.

Fear & Self-Loathing (Despite the Human Potato).

“Did you clean the bathrooms?”

“No,” Lenny informed me, “I accidentally already dumped the mop bucket.”

What a curious sentence.

With his round head, lack of a neck, and his oval body, Lenny looks like a cartoon character. I’m not trying to be cruel, but I can’t help but think of it when I look at him.

He looks kind of like a sentient potato, come to think of it.

He’s worked here before, and while he immediately knew me upon his rehiring, it took some time before I recalled who he was. I tried to be nice to the guy, but little things began to build up and Thursday, it all came crashing down.

“Well, you have to clean the bathrooms,” I told him, trying my damnest to constrain my irritation. “Just clean the mirrors, sink, toilet, and then sweep and mop.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t have a lot of time…”

I look at the clock not a foot away. He has twenty minutes. I just gave him a look, held my tongue, looked away, shook my head and shrugged. He walked away and I continued doing dishes.

Over the last day or two I learned that Lenny, who is allegedly gay, had said some incredibly uncomfortable and dirty things to one of manager Steve’s sons last time he worked here. I’m not sure if that was what got him fired — for all I know, he may have quit — but his unwanted advances have apparently continued, this time exclusively with women. More than one girl working here has told me how he stares at them, has absolutely no respect for personal space (something I have noticed myself), and has said some considerably creepy, sexual things to them as well. I had just heard another story that very evening, as a matter of fact, and it made my blood pressure rise.

To top it all off, during that conversation we had at the dish sink, I had the distinct impression that he was trying to elicit sympathy from me in order to manipulate me into cleaning the dining room for him, which sent me fuming inside. I do my best to help those I work with — this was, in fact, mostly the reason I was doing dishes. And despite the fact that he is supposed to clean the dining room, I typically do it for him, tonight being the only evening I asked him to do it himself.

My head had been in a dark place all week, as I’ve been beating myself up inside for how far I haven’t come in my life by 42 years of age. I’ve been drinking too much and sleeping too little and whether its been depression or lack if sleep to blame, I felt as if I wasn’t getting shit done as quickly as usual at work, so I finally decided to just have him do dining room for once.

Having felt guilty over being what I considered lazy, my conversation with him made me feel so much better about myself. I mean, at least I wasn’t as lazy as this guy, and I sure as hell wasn’t trying to manipulate anyone, and his feeble attempts to manipulate me served to spawn a redirection of the anger I had been focusing inward, at myself, externally, at him.

So amidst all that, I was almost thankful for the perverted potato. Maybe I wasn’t such a piece of shit. Maybe I wasn’t as ill-suited to live in the world as I’d been thinking. At the very least, I wasn’t as pathetic as this little worm, right?

Then the night ended and I got in my truck, eager to start enjoying my two days off, but the truck felt wrong as I began backing up.

Fuck.

I got out. It was a flat tire. My reaction should have been one of relief considering the issues I had with my last car, but I instantly felt fear and shame.

My truck had one of those spares that were beneath the car and I hadn’t the foggiest fucking clue how to get it out, so I had to go back inside and ask Emory, a seventeen year old, to help me. I felt it made sense to ask him as he used to work at his father’s shop. Between him and his friend, with the manager, Emory’s girlfriend and I trying to “help” but mostly watching, they got the spare down, the truck jacked up and the bolts off the flat, but none if us could get the tire off and we were afraid of jostling the truck too much because the jack was small and we feared it unstable. I finally did what I probably should have done to begin with and called AAA for road side service.

I know it’s all cultural stereotypes and shit, but these car issues tend to make me feel like less of a man each and every time. The guy finally came and Emory and the crew, who were kind enough to hang around with me in our dark parking lot, finally,got to go home. I stuttered like a maniac when he asked me for the mileage on my car, which I had to check, as I was clueless, and in the end the guy seemed to,uunderstand not only my utter incompetence in this area but my heightened state of anxiety and showed some sympathy. The rim was rusted, so he said he might not be able to tighten the bolts completely, so I should probably check them on the way home.

I got so drunk when I got home I woke up on the floor of the bathroom,staring at the base of the toilet around noon on Friday and didn’t feel I was safe to drive until all of the shops were closed. Nothing close was open until Monday, when I ended up sleeping in too late. Hopefully I can get two new front tires and an oil change tomorrow before my second Moderna shot and before work.

My mood was still low and internal self-flaggelation highly active yesterday, though I feel much better today — so far, anyway. I only wish I could manage this shit better. The smallest things become the biggest fucking ordeals, at least within the confines of my warped cranium.

The rational part of me believes in an indifferent universe, but it embarrasses me to confess that the emotional part of me is convinced I live in an actively hostile one that’s always out to get me. In the rare periods in which I finally feel some self-confidence and a sense of security in my life, it feels as though some force in the universe finds it necessary to knock me down a few pegs just to remind me of what a piece of shit I am and reintroduce me to the perpetual state of fear and insecurity where I evidently belong. The first time I felt this was in my relationship with Kate, or rather how it ended — the only relationship of the three that I didn’t carpet-bomb myself. Had things gone on, I’m sure the surreal high of the honeymoon phase we were in would have ended, but the floor dropped as I felt we were still blissfully building up towards the climax. I felt as if I’d been tricked into trust and, once it was finally secured, betrayed — not so much by her, but by circumstances. By the universe.

It was, for whatever reason, the only relationship where I was all in, where I felt confident and secure, and I had the grand illusion that I was finally, finally turning a new leaf in my life, starting a new chapter rather than living the miserable, run-on life sentence I’d grown so miserably accustomed to. And I learned the hard way that the cosmos, well, it apparently just can’t let that happen for me.

And between the humanoid tater being inadvertently making me feel better about myself and the flat tire I was too incompetent to change myself, which sent me right back into self-loathing after the shortest reprieve, it would seem the cosmic bitchslap process is accelerating.

If I can’t overcome this, I certainly hope that over time I become desensitized to it.

Death at the Door.

“One has watched life badly if one has not also seen the hand that considerately — kills.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

On the day before she left, I’d driven my shitty blue Mercury Topaz down that familiar dirt road and pulled into her driveway. As I went inside, I brought along my cigarettes and my microcassette recorder, which I faithfully carried along with me everywhere at that point in my life, not unlike Linus and his blanket. That night we sat on her bedroom floor with some guy she’d just met that day named Steve and drank a bottle of peppermint schnapps that we mixed with two liter bottles of 7-Up and Coke. It was I who drank most of the Schnapps, or so I heard. Memories were fuzzy until sometime early the next morning, when I awoke to a peculiar mixture of pleasure and pain.

I remember the sensation of Anne’s hands massaging my back as I saw nothing but white — a pasty-colored void that I promptly painted with chunks violently shot out of my mouth as if from a fire hose. I remember the horrific odor of peppermint vomit relentlessly attacking my nostrils as I heaved and emptied myself into that white bucket that Anne had kindly provided for me to bury my face in. I vomited so intensely that morning, as a matter of fact, that I burst a blood vessel in my eye; it was a freaky sight upon looking in the mirror later on. I also vomited the peppermint schnapps so intensely that to this day the flavor of mint — even something vaguely associated with it, like cinnamon — makes me gag. Mint chocolate chip used to be my favorite ice cream, but not anymore.

Oh, the plights of the circumstantial Pavlovian dog subjected to unintentional classical conditioning…

After I managed to purge my system, I felt as though I’d been to the brink of death and back. My throat felt raw, though my back felt nice. I followed her into the dimly-lit kitchen, where she had made us some coffee, and we sat across from one another at the table and talked. She warned me that after today, things would change. That she would change. As we sipped our coffee, she added that the tape in my microcassette recorder was full. Last night, while I was in an inebriated slumber, she’d left me a message she wanted me to listen to, but only after she left, and only when I was alone. I promised her.

As often as I’ve written about that day, trying so desperately to do the experience justice and accurately express its many layers, nothing has ever satisfied me. And so I try again.

As evening approached, my anxiety rose, a cocktail of depression, anger, and fear hanging over me like a dark and heavy cloud. We had locked ourselves in her room, laying on her bed, doing our best to comfort one another. Involuntarily, my eyes kept shifting back to that clock of hers, blood-red digital and ever-approaching five, and she kept pulling me away from it, distracting me with her sensual expertise. When she looked at me, I could no longer deny it as I so often had: I feared her with a fierce intensity. When it came to me, fear was the shadow of desire, but in my undeniably weird world shadows were as real as those which cast them. The bigger the desire, the greater the fear.

She once claimed that she never cried, that I’d never see it. On her bed that dawning eve, she told me that she wasn’t scared, but I saw the fear swimming in her moistening eyes. I told myself that I was prepared to see her go, that I didn’t hold her choices against her, and that I’d be right here waiting with open arms upon her return.

Then the knock on the door came, and with it an abrupt shift in her gears. She swiftly got up from where she lay on my stomach, straightened her posture, dried her face, and took a few deep breaths. From beyond that paper-thin door we both heard them call her name, and she announced she would be out in just a minute. With one last kiss she turned around, her back to me, put her hand on the doorknob and with one last, deep breath she turned it, pulled, and stepped out into the hallway.

There they stood, all proud and proper in their uniforms. Smiling as they fixed their eyes upon her, like hawks zeroing in on pristine prey, like fishermen reeling in one hell of a catch. I couldn’t deny that she was.

Anne exchanged a few words with them. She hugged her mother, and they grabbed her bags, which were leaning up against a nearby wall. She motioned for me to stand beside her, a request I wouldn’t deny, and I offered my hand and we shook. I tried to wish my emotions away, or at the very least how my body could betray them, but to my dismay the scowl remained on my face. They asked if I was her boyfriend, a question that at any other time might have led me to chuckle, but I felt possessive as fuck now. Far too fucking late, of course. Now it was her turn to laugh at the suggestion as she explained to them that I was just a really close friend. And there was absolutely no justification for how her response killed me inside.

“We’ll take good care of her,” one of them told me with a big, entirely punchable grin on his stupid fucking face. I wanted to rip his throat out with my bare hands, bathe in the blood that jettisoned from his wounds like a feral animal caught up in fury, but moral restraint, good sense, and, most of all, a deep respect for her kept me from attempting to act out that fantasy, which clearly wouldn’t have ended well for me.

Just their posture and the way they looked at me seemed to convey a million unspoken words. In their eyes, I was ill, and they had the cure, and she was far stronger than I because she was self-aware enough to proceed down a path I was passionately determined to never, ever embark on.

They walked through the living room, out the door, down the steps, with her following, her mother and I trailing close behind. As they guided her to their car, I thought to myself how it might as well be a hearse.

Things would be different after today, she said. She would be different.

I sat on the trunk of my shitty blue Mercury Topaz as the fatigued Grim Reapers proceeded to drive her away from me, their hearse obscured in a cloud of dust as she began her journey to be all she could be and all that rot. Her mother — that sweet, polite, and strong-like-an-ox old lady — stood just outside the trailer door and politely asked if I wanted to come on in, if I wanted to have dinner with the family. And I should have. It was just out of sympathy, it was just because she knew how very much I cared for the girl and how her leaving killed me, but I really fucking should have. Instead, I thanked her, but said I had to go, and politely bid her farewell.

Then I hopped off my mobile shit-box and drove away, hoping to high hell I was lost in the dust behind me as tears streamed down my stupid face and I proceeded to scream my throat raw all the way back toward home.

The Little Death.

10/99

It was fairly late by the time we got back to her sister’s place, and though I wanted to go home, Anne convinced me to stay. I had no car to drive home with, as she had driven me, and she told me it was too late for driving, anyway. She promised she’d take me back in the morning, and pushed me to call my parents to tell them where I was. I really didn’t want to do so, but I did, just to satisfy her. I ended up waking them up only to tell them what they would’ve assumed anyway: that I wouldn’t be home until probably noon tomorrow.

Anne and I pulled out mattresses from the kid’s room and put them on the floor of the living room for us to sleep on. Her sister, Janice, took the couch by the window, and Shelley went into her room with the creepy green light, along with her friend.

Anne and I lay on the mattress, with her head at my feet, and I looked down at her closed eyes and sighed. There was no way I would be able to get to sleep, thanks to my chronic insomnia. It would be hours if I got so much as a wink at all. My mind couldn’t help but fixate on Shelley and the story her sister had told Anne and I regarding her having dreams about being abducted by aliens, or being freaked out by the face of the standard Gray, or the story Shelly had told me her self about seeing those lights dancing in the night sky outside the balcony where she once lived.

And then there was Anne’s strange, little friend, Ella, who believed she was an alien. Then there was me. Why did Anne tend to attract weirdos like the three of us?

In any case, maybe Anne was right, and there was no way to know for certain whether any of this was real, if the government was covering it up. There seemed to be no sure road to truth, and even if I knew that truth for certain, I couldn’t ignore the fact that she was also correct in declaring that there wasn’t a damn thing I could hope to do about it. The answer, she said, echoing the Dizzy character I’d heard so much about but never met, was to stop thinking and start living, to live in the Here and Now.

”What are you thinking about?” Annie said from the other end of the mattress.

“Nothing,” I told her.

Nothing, nothing. How many times had I myself asked questions like that only to receive the response of “nothing,” knowing full well that it was a blatant fucking lie? How many times had I, myself, given that response, as I had just then, when it was the farthest distance from the truth? How much love, happiness, misery, hate, fantasy and memory, truth and lie, thought and emotion, confusion and enlightenment throughout the course of human history had safely hidden behind the guise of that bloody contradiction of a word, “nothing”?

That’s what she’d been preaching about, though: nothing. No thought. Stop thinking, stop conceptualizing, just sink into feeling, into sensation. And here I was, thinking about thinking about nothing.

I looked back down at her. All the time I’d known her, all that we’d been through, and she was still here with me: just one more relationship that was hard to explain, pin down, or define. One more relationship that, if logic dictates, shouldn’t have lasted. Yet I’d learned long ago that logic isn’t the guiding force in the universe, and if there was any doubt the evidence lay right there at my feet.

“You can come down here and talk,” she said, and so I swung my head to where my feet had been seconds earlier. We both had a cigarette and talked for a long time about things.

As I looked in her eyes, I thought I sensed something — but I told the animalistic fool in me to shut the hell up and to maintain some self control. We put out cigarettes and lay down beside each other, our conversation working it’s way into reminiscing. In the process, we rolled our heads closer to one another, and I was wondering how close I was permitted to get to her. I tried to read her, to ascertain what it was she wanted. In the end I just up and asked if I could kiss her.

“You don’t have to ask,” she said, and I tried to justify my asking, but she cut me off and kissed me instead.

I pulled back after a while and just looked at her and smiled. “Been waiting awhile for this…”

She put her finger to my lips. “Do you always have to talk?”

She didn’t say it in a sweet, sexy voice, either. At least to my ears, it seemed as if she was honestly annoyed. I was a bit confused, because that was one of the things I’d always liked about her: we could hold deep conversations while we were otherwise engaged in doing things to one another. I took the message, though, and I tried to shut my trap.

It was a long time that we played, too, and I got to do the things I hadn’t done in a long time. Then it got more heated. It got more heated than it had ever gotten between her and I, more heated than it had ever gotten between me and anybody. On reflex, I went to say something, but no sooner had I opened my mouth than her finger again went to my lips.

“Just feel. Try to stop thinking and sink into the moment.”

She unzipped my fly and her hand went down. I tried to do as she had instructed, to shut up and stop thinking, and just enjoy it all. I felt a warmth, a comfort, a trust sweep over me that I hadn’t felt since… when had I felt that?

And then I felt something different. Something unprecedented. Something strange, beautiful, wonderful, and ultimately foreign.

“Is this okay?”

The feelings sweeping through me put me in a state of indescribable awe. I shook my head almost violently.

“Yeah,” I said, and took off my clothes.

Any fear regarding what I had just agreed to was annihilated upon my guided entry. I lay back, and she moved atop me like an angel of the god I don’t believe in. It was smooth, warm, and rhythmic.

She was fucking beautiful: adjective. I was fucking beautiful: verb.

It wasn’t long, though, until I knew what I needed. I spoke up and asked her if I might try the top, and when she said okay I apologized like I’d just robbed her of her rightful throne. She insisted it was okay, and seemed to have no aversions. It seemed to be a courageous move on my part, for this was absolutely foreign territory. I tried to go with the flow; grow with the flow. I did the best an amateur can do.

As I was atop her, I closed my eyes. I truly put all my effort into not thinking, just focusing on the feeling. What happened somewhere in the rhythm, somewhere in the electric sweat between her and I, is a kind of thing that had often happened to me: I saw things.

I was soaring above a dark, desert plane at a steady speed, looking down from a bird’s-eye view at the desolate landscape, occasionally spotted with what I assumed might be people far, far below. The vision felt so real, the sense of motion felt so real. It felt as if I was bi-locating, as if I was in two places at once. Looking down upon that dead, desert landscape, I wondered if I had finally lifted from the pessimistic, futile, narcissistic wasteland I’d been stuck in the previous four years. Perhaps what I was seeing was a metaphorical hallucination regarding that.

Had this been all I had really needed — ironically, something I had feared?

“Who are you looking at behind those eyes?”

“No one.”

If I tried to explain what I was seeing in my inner eye, it would just come out total gibberish. Even if I had enough focus to talk in a comprehensible manner, I’d just sound crazy again, and she probably would’ve told me to shut up and sink back into the feeling anyway. Besides, how could I explain how she was obliterating all my preconceived notions regarding sex? That this wasn’t just some primitive, animalistic act? Sure, I knew damned well that it was a primitive ritual carried out by an organism’s most basic impulse — to survive, at least genetically — but I had never believed it when my punk rock friend told me it could also serve as a conduit to a spiritual experience. I never understood Annie when she said that it was her favorite recreational exercise. Yet here I was: I felt the snake rising at the base of my spine and biting my brain, intoxicating me with it’s magickal venom. Every pore of my being was irradiating in this sensual fire.

I had been so wrong. This was nothing like jacking off.

“Focus on me,” she said. I had closed my eyes again, but I opened them now to look down on her beautiful body. I escaped that picture-show behind my eyelids, and gazed upon my amazing companion.

After we went on a while, she grabbed the sides of my body tightly and told me to stop moving in a very sudden, urgent voice. At first, I wasn’t sure what to think. Had I done something wrong? Had I hurt her? Was I such a fuck-up that I’d even fucked up fucking? Fuck.

“You’re about to feel a female orgasm.” I will never forget how she said it. I will always admire how blunt she was. “Don’t move.”

It was the most bizarre thing — the way it felt like waves, like ripples, like I had stuck my soul in an ocean. She had hers and then told me to “finish up.” As I did as she had asked, I closed my eyes again and I saw Picasso-like still-lives in my mind’s eye, of lamps and couches and other such things. The images were wonderful, colorful and vivid. If only I could save these pictures in my head to file, I thought. If only I had paints and brushes and a canvas beside me.

“No thought,” she said, as if she could tell that I was glimpsing something in my inner eye. “Just feel.”

Indeed, I had nearly forgotten to practice the art of no thought, so I ceased to speak. I ceased to think in words, even in pictures. As I sped up my rhythm atop and between her, everything within me rushed to a point of silence, into static, to a blissful blur. It was nothing but pure sensation; pure emotion. When I reached climax, she grabbed my sides.

“Stop.”

As I swelled in her, I felt the most awesome thing in all my life. I had thought my nocturnal habits of taking matters into my own hands had brought me to orgasm, but it was nothing. It was truly a foreign experience until that night. I dispersed into everything. I was pure energy. I permeated the universe; the universe permeated me. I was at peace with everything. I was the universe.

I made noises beyond my control. She made the noises of a pleased, intrigued girl.

She got up and went to the bathroom.

I think I had this look of amazement, of shock, of total confusion stuck on my face. What the hell had just happened? I could, like, have that every day? Is this what normal people experienced on a routine basis — was sex supposed to be like this? Is it this cool because this is the first time I’ve ever experienced it? That I waited two decades? Is it because I’m a quadruple-Scorpio?

She came back, then I went, and upon my return she asked me if I‘d like to smoke. I was out of cigarettes, so she offered me one of her Marlboro lights. I still can’t smoke one of those without reflecting on that evening. We smoked, we talked, and I was numb and wonderful. We drank water amidst the fumes and utterances and pleasant emotions that enveloped us.

She asked me if I’d liked it, and I shook my head in a most certain affirmative. I wasn’t sure if I was sure about anything else as much as I was sure how fucking beautiful that had been and how great I now felt. I’d glimpsed beyond the horizon of the morbid state I’d been stuck in the last four years and had seen what could be. I felt entirely cleansed and energized. I felt as if I had gone into the depths of the dreariest sleep, and had suddenly been awakened — as if I had gone into the deepest pits of hell, and then been given transcendence -‘ as if I’d gone through the bridge of death, crossed it, and came out reborn as something new.

They call sex the little death, and I finally knew why.

“You know,” she said as she exhaled a stream of smoke, with a sly little smile dominating her face, “for a guy who doesn’t believe in god, you sure call out his name a lot.”

Automotive Difficulties & Walking Reveries.

It’s all dark now, in my mind, in my soul, but that’s no surprise to me. As fucked up as it all is, I anticipated this. As fucked up as I am, believe it or not, I am painfully self-aware. The spotlight that shines on my mind is utterly agonizing, and I can only assure you. The impacts that truly prove to leave craters and crack and so provide me with enlightenment, with self-realization — they’re curious and intense, to be sure, no matter how much you might demote them once witness to their particular manifestations, but I urge you to hold your judgement…

Every time there is an issue with my vehicle, I begin to reassess my life.

After consideration, I have concluded that this is largely because since January 26, 2004, I have worked at the same fast food job and since August 1 of 2014 I have lived alone in this one-bedroom apartment some 22 miles from work, or roughly 23 minutes away, give or take — for, given these circumstances, if I no longer have a functioning vehicle, this means I have no way to work. Unless, of course:

1) I have enough money to pay for repairs,

2) I can borrow enough money from someone and am capable of paying them back,

3) someone just gives me the money for repairs, and/or

4) someone is willing to pick me up and drive me from work and back, at least until I have the money for the repairs, the repairs in question are completed, and I have a ride to the repaired vehicle.

The common denominator of all the above is having to ask for help from other people, relying on other people, being a fucking burden on other people, and as a consequence feeling indebted to other people either/both financially and/or emotionally (in the form of debt that Nietzsche — that dark, mustached genius — accurately described as guilt).

I hate debt. Not only does it fill me with obligations I’m not certain how or if I can fulfill, but in either case it makes me feel like a weak, incompetent, pathetic parasite, a creature unable to hold his own, to manage his life without assistance, implying that without life support I would have been dead, dead, deadinski long, long ago.

In other words, I hate these issues with my vehicle because it betrays a putrid and profound (and profoundly putrid) truth about myself: that when it comes down to it, I am simply not fit to make it in the world. This culture. This society. That I cannot hold my own or manage my own shit. That I am a square peg in a world of round holes. That I can never be independent, never be free, and that I only make it through this hellacious maelstrom of my existence because I am lucky enough to know so many good and empathic people that either pity me or feel for some reason as if they owe me, and so as a consequence feel at some level an obligation to rush to my aid, to rescue this incurable dumbass in eternal distress.

I survive the recurring shitstorms of my existence given my lifeline of luck. That’s how I feel: it hasn’t been earned. It makes me feel guilty so much that it kills me inside, and yet without it I would be on the streets, homeless and hungry, clueless and hopeless. I can ignore this fatal flaw for varying periods, but the spotlight inevitably shines down on it soon enough. If I’m lucky, it remains latent long enough for me to forget it is there, but this only serves to pack the destined punch, as it ultimately rises into manifestation to remind me what a lost, anxious, naïve, ignorant, helpless fuckling child I really am, despite having lived in this flesh for a little over four fucking decades. And all feeble semblance of confidence I’ve managed to conjure from the depths of my being evaporates in a mere moment.

How do I exit this circumstance?

Well, I could find a decent job I could walk to, or bicycle to if I need to. I don’t hate vehicles, but if I didn’t have to rely on one to get to the place where I have to make the money I need to make in order to survive, if I could manage to get from home to work and back again without such a vehicle so I could still pay for rent and groceries and the addictions I need to feed and the vehicle repairs that would make my life slightly easier — if I could, in other words, eliminate my reliance on my vehicle — well, that fear would be abolished. Flame of fear snuffed out. Threat eliminated. Quality of life would be more secured and my peace of mind given roots and at least the hope of blossoming into true joy.

I came across a video or two recently regarding people who traveled and lived abroad and then came back to the states, and this one girl explained how when she lived in Denmark, maybe Norway, she had a car but eventually sold it because she didn’t need it. She could just walk or ride her bicycle everywhere. Imagining myself in that circumstance, these waves of relief and pleasure and security just washed over me. I imagined how much stress would immediately be eliminated from my life, and, ignoring my loved ones for a moment, I had the sudden urge to just save up as much money as I could and buy a plane ticket and get the bloody fuck out of dodge. I felt like I could make it in such an environment. I’d always feel like the odd duck, I’d always feel like I was on the outside looking in, I’d always feel like I’m an alien and I don’t belong, sure, but I always feel that way, I’ve fucking made peace with that, it’s just a basic element of my character, no matter what the context, or so I’m convinced — but I would be so much happier, so much more at peace.

I remember words of a beautiful fucking woman I know and adore whom I call Pretty Penny, and the comedian Doug Stanhope, who echoed her — or maybe its the other way around. I don’t know, I value them both. Pretty Penny more because I know her personally, her character is insatiably alluring and she’s a sexy little beast. In any case, the insight was simple: you can always leave. Pack up your shit in a car and move away to another state. Pack up your shit in bags and flee this goddamn country. Simple as that, they both say, my two drunken wise-people upon the proverbial mountain. You’re only as trapped as you think you are. You know the earth is round, but you look at the horizon of the sector of this small fucking beautiful wad of dirt you’re trapped in as if it were flat. There are regions so far beyond, and you can live there. If you aren’t happy where you are, you do know you can just go, don’t you?

How I wish our technological evolution had already advanced to the point where wormholes, or folding space in a teleportation manner, would have not only become possible at the macro level but affordable and routine, for I’d hop to Norway in a goddamn heartbeat and come to visit those I loved frequently, but that shit just isn’t possible now. So it means that to achieve my absurd ideal I would have to find a job close to where I live that would enable me to Uber out without putting me in debt or buy a plane ticket that wouldn’t put me so far in the hole that I’d have no fucking hope of ever crawling out — or, conversely, and much more realistically, find find a place to live close to a new job and that both would have to be in close proximity to those I love.

This is far from what I’d consider utopia, but its a fucking start.

It would still be far from the sun, in other words, but at the very fucking least I could finally see our shimmering home star as it rose above our blasted horizon.

Believe in that distant star, but move towards it in (albeit intense) baby steps.

Freedom, Judgement, & a Convenient Loophole.

At what point are you justified in judging someone? Clearly in the areas over which they have volition, where they have control, right?

Where are those areas, though?

Early on in life, I assumed everything deeper than the skin must be a choice, but life has slowly chipped away at that seeming illusion. You can’t blame someone for not being smart enough: this was my first realization.

And for the longest time I believed that, if nothing else, you indeed could judge someone based on how they treated other people. At the very least a person had choice with respect to their ethics — which, at least in my definition, arises out of the balance between empathy and reason.

Then I learned about psychopaths, who don’t have this empathic capability, so I was forced to wonder: is it even justified to judge another on that basis?

As of now, I find the notion of Sam Harris — that free will in totality is itself an illusion — to be absolutely absurd, first and foremost because I’m not a monist and actually believe consciousness is merely a temporary resident of the brain and we all aren’t mere meat-machines. I suppose this doesn’t necessarily mean we have personal freedom, however.

So does at least a part of me believe we all have free will because I desperately want to believe my need to judge both myself and others is still, at some level, justified?

But if that’s the case, if we have no choice in anything we do, can anyone justifiably blame me for believing in free will?

It seems like too convienent of a loophole…

Maria Cox & The Mess (8/3/21 Dream).

I’m in my apartment when I suddenly remember my parents are coming over, and I’m incredibly embarrassed about thr state of my apartment. Panicky, even. The living room isn’t too bad, but my bedroom is a disaster, so I hoped I could just keep them in the living room.

I also suddenly remembered the birthday cake they had gotten for me last time they visited, and it was wrapped like a present in corner. I had entirely forgotten about it until that moment and feared that they’d be hurt if they saw it unwrapped and uneaten.

(In retrospect, it reminded me of the vague recollections of a dream I had yesterday, in which I was a part of a team of people in my bedroom, organizing and cleaning things, with a lot of focus on the area around my art desk.)

When my parents arrive at my door soon thereafter, there’s some commotion in the hallway. They’re distracted by something — I think they’re speaking with a neighbor and there are dogs or other animals with them.

In any case, while I know they’re there, I don’t even recall seeing them, I’m so spellbound by who they apparently brought along. Its Maria Cox, the creative and beautiful goth girl I had gone to school with and follow on Facebook. She looked alluring as fuck and we hugged. It was warm, inviting, uninhibited. In the process of hugging her, I felt the black leather jacket she was wearing, and which she looked sexy as hell in (I have something for women in leather in general). The leather felt so fucking real.

I was so excited to see her, but when I began thinking about getting to know her, of maybe even getting the opportunity to do dirty fucking things with her, my mind suddenly took a downturn.

I became embarrassed regarding everything about myself. My apartment was a mess, I was a mess. Reality would ruin this fantasy. I would ruin this fantasy. I wouldn’t be good enough. I wanted to get close to her with a burning intensity, but the anxiety built and at the same time I had the overwhelming desire to run away and hide, though it would also kill me to pass up this opportunity to get to know her and I’d never forgive myself.