November 21st, 2005
113257928500880314
Onslaught
Below are the posts I wrote last month while on the plane. All of this material was actually written just on the trip from DC back to Tokyo. Although I did successfully reclaim these notes from a certain humanities professor several weeks ago, I just had the spare time to parse them yesterday. I’m not sure in how much detail I want to write about my trip to the States, because I did so much I could probably talk about it for a month, or at least get two posts out of every day that I was there. I have lots of low quality pictures from my phone, but at the very least I think I will hit upon the bachelor party and the wedding itself. Those pictures have been sorted and webified, they just need material to go with them.
So for now, here is a nice, fat, four page slab of my frenzied, aching mind listening to The Doopees and Brian Eno. You probably won’t get through half of it, because it would take quite a long time to read, and it’s pretty monotonous and boring, especially in one shot. Still, it’s part of my introspective coughing and very important to me, and will probably be repeated in some way or another much later. But I’m already scaring you away and I haven’t even started talking. Enjoy.
Yes, you will hate the punctuation to your very core and rind.
…originally recorded October 23rd…
Somewhere past track eleven
time drifts, pouring
over cherry wood dining room tables
in a house of a family long-lived
and all of the children became adults
moving through life and not noticing it
until the years rotted away
smiling yellow, teeth, peeling skin from
a decade of sunburn through summer picnics
flowing. sweet and silent tumbling
the world decays through every radioactive second
a view through windows into a generation unseen
so many worried and careworn expressions.
hearts choking out the slowly gagging beauty of eternity.
after memories are bottled, pop consumerism
feeds like locust on the rotting fruit of society
so many sweaty-toothed mammals half drowned in
heavy syrup, factories churning out decade
after decade of shiny plastic goods, so long in form
on this earth after their owners
will the cars and the DVDs cry when we are only rotten food?
how the blood of the flesh is wasted in dollars and intangible things.
I want to stop dying alive, and start living dead.
swat the taxonomy of useless meaningfulness!
why must life go on anymore
why do I want you more and more
why do I keep on asking why?
when you’ll be my love `til I die?
It’s crooked. I know that I’m always changing. Everyone is. Everyone. And my change comes with accumulating bias from experience. Each day I grow more eccentric more passionate more timidly uncontrolled; but regulated with the wisdom of living. Living and continuing to live. Thinner or fatter, balder or hairier. I see these things. I think these things. And they are mine, and they are unique. They are of no use to anyone but me, yet that is every man’s story. We are humans, we can’t help but to fabricate and expel the feeling that burns inside of us. We are here. We take in and we give forth nothing but incalculable fathoms of slowly, rotting existence. It’s a firework. We are all cherry blossoms. We are all meaningless and hakanai. Beautiful and meaningless. With so many yesterdays behind us, and so many tomorrows the same. Humans will be when they are and they will not. And crying and worrying, and fighting it; it’s a reaction of sincerity. “Pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” So we as a race will forever be under pressure. So sick and sad that we have to hurt each other doing it. But hurting is as unavoidable as death. Dimensions exist in life, that we may consider unpleasant or hope to avoid, but in happiness is a sadness so we are all still here. And I blithely lived in sunlight, so these words are empty to the sufferers. So I’m sorry to all these that have seen family decay and flesh burn. But there is nothing to be done, nothing at all. Just to be, and be as varied and aware as we can, for that is all any of us really have, actually. A chance, a choice, a fate. Savor the nothingness and burn out as silently loud as possible.
A page on touching
Oh rent, my dear gone loves. How deeply I felt for you at seventeen, or twenty, or when last I slept. To touch you and feel you tremble, it was one of the greatest things I was ever given. And each of you was special. Our lives came together for a moment and we were in love. Active and buzzing with the ringing of existing another way so fresh in our nostrils. The sting of parting ways cut a valley into my heart, and from the oping mouth, raw the cold burning water of life without a limb. Amputated, to stop the joy from surging out in wet tuxedoed waltzes. So heavy and soft, lying under terrycloth and cotton, so much electricity just crackling to drag the backs of my fingernails across your face. I carved every pore into the soft, wet clay of my mind, sensing each hair�fs vibration that sprang from the gentle tide of your breath. Wicker baskets, stick shifts, and barefoot wading across streams. All those moments cascade through the infamy of my poor, tattered and empty life. Am I really to believe that anything that happened between us was without import? It was an amazing thing to be done, as amazing as every flower in every field in every great novel about some other person�fs exhale of a life.
The seconds tick quartz and forty years from now someone will ask me what you were like and I can only taste black cherries and birch skin.
Wo, wo, down to the live of touching and starting and idealizing, so many gerunds just waiting to be picked and experienced. Don�ft ever think of me in remorse for all I can ever do is hold you with esteem.
“Poor Caroline, playing Chopin and crying… ”
“Things really must be tough for you. ”
How can love leave me so tone-deaf to logic?
Runway taxi up right sigh
Swim into the blue, soft linen fingertips
on the wings of a turtle dove dreaming for Asia.
�caudio science laboratory in Tokyo…
It’s knit for me in a striking pattern of tree lined streets strolling through parks and seeing one’s breath.
…Someday, that place in time…
I live in a city so cosmopolitan, but all I know are cafes and holiday sales.
Wrap me in seasons layered in leaves
shrugging off the murmur of modern life.
This is a parting made just for you
to cry and whisper and laugh!
Not since genesis have I been so content.
My role a small, small, part in a big, big city.
Happy a blossom,
hakanai.
“Music to prepare one for death”
In the open field of inattentive listening I listened, attentively. So rich in deep love letters and faces left on the floor. Wading through all the rubble, paper gum milled from life. Just wanting to not want, time without rain or rain without time, moments spent pitching cards of despondency into a cup on the floor, fourth tile from the radiator. A writer who writes much but writes nothing is perhaps the most tragic of all, for only a generation of critics after his prime can sift through the mountains of emptiness and find one nicely sized quote for a postcard. The few sound bites I end up making will probably be cynical, so only the lost and disenchanted dreamers will talk of it. But this was time not even spent selfishly nurturing one’s ego, it was the empty death almost zen, quite nothing. Impoverished on paper and rolling only to the block corner and back. I felt so demurely uncaring just then, for broken and inside was fuel and a kindling for the odorless consumption that would grip me every time I set foot in an airport. Music to calm music to think, the purity of an external echo for your heart, so you bemoan in stereo, and the incredibly beautiful love is left waiting and dies, past the luggage racks but before the currency exchange. Five hundred thousand untracked numbers of meaning and ache and downpouring holiday just gasping their last like so many horrified, mute trout, slaughtered by reapers of distance and time.
Although thought, too, is dimensional and goes forward, I am aware of the then and the will be and the not that wasn’t. So my immortality is a trivial thing, and the laconic pulls of advent wing on gentle breezes to a new heart. Aghast with the sheer dripping monument of how all this energy is nothing and everything I had to hurt in a way that was pleasurable. I had to feed that need for pain by cutting myself again and again, knowing full well, what it would be like to walk on daggers with every step and have no voice. I had to show up and do something you see. Because we can’t wrap around all the existence that is existing and being here untoward and feeling.
That living was just that, and something grand to celebrate and abhor at once.
And now I will think, without writing, if I can…
These are my brilliantly flawed trifles of the mind, the rose I can never complete shading.
A yawn but not I don’t want to sleep,
please don’t make me sleep.
Please just let me be awake a little longer.
I just can�ft rest now there�fs far too much
to be done. Let me make something be done.
Let me make something. Anything.
I have to make something to prove that I
was here, to prove that I could. I just
wanted to be talented and making something,
something beautiful and tragic like
life is. Something to say, “Thank you.”
See? I’m still a child, still not
grown up. Still crazy.
[Written in the margin next this was, "Slow down. Slow down. You're too serious and you try too much." ... "Slow down. Obviate myself."]
