MAD

This will be the lo-fi lullaby for the plant nursery I open up. When I've retired. After I've found a career from which to retire.

That's the last time I start reading a J.G. Ballard book before bed. More notes on it later as my synapses stop sizzling.

My body is so tired but my brain continues to taunt it with thoughts from the novel. Sleeeeeep.

American Assholes Need a Bidet

I started watching the X-Files last night. Yes, for the first time. Yes, I realize that the show is nearly 20 years old and just now getting around to watching it - especially given I was an adolescent during its run - is tantamount to admitting that I'm only now learning to wipe my ass (more on that in a minute).

There's something endearing about watching a show that "old" given the technological changes the first-world culture has undergone in that short amount of time. How many times did it occur to me "Oh, that'd be different now that everybody has smartphones" whenever Mulder raced to find a phone. Or the warmly familiar sound of Scully's computer literally dialing up to the internet when some hacker was thieving her reports. How many nights did I sit around in my parents' office as a teen with that digital nocturne as my lullaby?

Given my nostalgia for the technology of 1993 (I didn't even know what an Internet was back then), it served as a perfect reflection for how quickly the digital age has grown in a very short span. Smartphones, 4G LTG explosiery, cloud here cloud there, none of that stuff hardly scratches the surface. The Large Hadron Collider, insectoid drones, stem cell livers, Cassini images of Saturn's moons, laser hair-removal, a Starbucks in every bathroom, a complicated eye gesture that will transmit your credit card information to said barista so you don't have to suffer the grueling task of taking out your wallet - it would seem that we can't even keep up with science these days.

And if for any given moment you ever believe that humans are keeping up with technology, I implore you to look no further than behind you to prove yourself wrong.

Immediately behind you. Your behind, even. There: that fleshy coral of a skin-knot hiding between the two plushy hams of fat you call your ass. Yes, I'm talking about your anus. Butthole. Asshole. Rosette. Brown eye. Whatever you want to call it, that little stinky wad of dermis that makes shit deposits for you (if you're lucky) is why this technological age will never impress me.

Well, it's not exactly the asshole; it's how we react after having shat out of the asshole. Scientists talk about discovering the so-called "God particle" and building a colony on Mars yet here we are, still tending to our freshly shat-out asses no better than we were before we ever came down from the trees. The only difference is we've moved from folding up maple leaves to now counting out squares of Charmin Ultra. The fact remains that at least once a day (again, if you're lucky) you still have to stick your hand between your asscheeks and literally wipe and rub away at the dangling, unseparated shit hanging out of your anus with a wad of tissue until it literally is rubbed so thin against your ass skin that you can't wipe away anymore.

Why is toilet paper still acceptable let along considered to be the most fucking hygienic or even effective method for a post-defecation ritual?! Jesus, can you imagine if we treated other bodily functions with such carelessness? Wash your hands with dog saliva instead of soap. Brush your teeth with cauliflower. Substitute a handful of crushed up saltines for a condom. WE'D NEVER SURVIVE IT. Each and every one of us would instantly become a walking capsule for anarcho-noroviruses that would effectively rend this planet habitable only to the creatures that already thrive in shit: pigeons, squirrels, flies, cockroaches, etc.

In fact, we're lucky we haven't incurred such a fate already given how carelessly we've continued behind this fantasy of toilet paper.

That technology has neglected this bio-bomb just waiting to go off is shocking to me, especially given that there is at least one technological alternative that currently exists: the bidet. Yes, it is a strange fucking sensation to feel what is virtually a commode pissing up your asscrack. Yes, it's been completely maligned in the francophobic American culture as some strange, emasculating semi-fetish that threatens the socially destructive chromosome in Americanism known as masculinity. But who cares. I'm tired of this shit. Literally.

Why stop at a bidet, though? Today even that seems as antiquated as a telegraph. We have moved beyond the atoms and into the realm of the subatomic, so bring our ass habits up to speed. Hell, car washes have more advanced washing technologies than we've reserved for our own asses. Why hasn't Proctor & Gamble come up with some type of non-touch dung removal pressure light that steams off the dingleberries and converts them into a nice aerosol possessing the scent of lavender with a hint of mint? Aromatherapy and healthy bowel movements. You'd never again feel embarrassed about taking a shit in the only bathroom at a well-attended party. People'd probably thank you for dropping a load, really.

Yet, we do not have anything close to this. That the developed world, and especially America, has resigned itself to the disgusting habit of manually sandpapering mushy pebbles of shit off their asses is embarrassing and unforgivable. If a regular if not bi-daily (if you're lucky) hand-to-sir-reverence contact is what keeps you an American, fuck that. I renounce any citizenry if it means I'll get to live well past the rest of you assholes once you've succumbed to volcanic eruptions of hepatitis A. Keep your shitty hands to yourself and let me inherit a world less swollen with your crap-spawned diseases.

Dropping Physics

I'm scared to write. Not just to put one word after another and perform some carpal locomotion with a drop or two of fetid brain drippings stirred in, but actually write. For the past seven months, I've written foolishly, meaninglessly in a trajectory that has put me back to the end of November in spite of summer's relentless pursuit these past few weeks.

Ideas aren't lacking. I've got too many ideas, ideas that cycle and reproduce and make new ideas that I still never follow-up on. The ideas are fresh; my writing is sclerotic, wasted.

(There are too many beetles to even focus here.)

(Moved, better.)

My hands even began to shake as I worked open the computer and started a page. A blank page, a mirror that has no reflection unless you force one into it. All I see looking back at me is nothing, fearful nothingness that urges me to retreat to my bed.

Pull the covers over my head, hide from the big, blank monster that still looms between the folded-up innards of my notebook.

Hold a ball, drop it. Physics will take care of everything else. I don't have to be responsible for the ripples in the water, but only for dropping the stone.

While I was organizing words - I still restrain myself from saying that I was writing - my Writing fell off the radar, a scant word here or an occasional attack on a napkin with a ball point, but nothing serious. Now that I'm left with the writing again, the writing seems harder than ever in spite of the ample time I allowed very good ideas to steep.

In the time away from writing, I began to reevaluate my language, the over-voice that hums without end as I amble through the days. That Voice might sound different now, or worse, might not be something I recognize anymore. Maybe it needs to change, to molt, to mutate, to cut something off to spite its tongue. Maybe it will be better, maybe it could be worse. It's one of those things where I'll never know until it's too late to do anything about it.

I've drank enough coffee today to sterilize a whale. Can't tell if that's working for or against me.

I call it your park although it only is so in namesake. Still, it is your park, pregnant with manufactured hauntings that are fitting for someone still aching for another person as I am for you.

I call it your park because it's a cheap gift shop souvenir that reminds me to remember you, to not pull the hook from my lip and set myself free. It's less of what you've done to me and more of what I've done to myself using you as my awl. Facts don't matter when imagination doesn't need them.

The thing I want from you I don't even know anymore. It's no more a want than a sky can want light or air; it simply has them and it is what it is. Mine is the void sky, a canvas that rejects all cyan and canary hues alike, something lacking but impossible to fulfill. Hunger that cannot be fed. Thirst that cannot be doused.

I call it your park because it is your park. I had been here before you, without you, but it ceased to be a place I knew of my own after I knew you. You skipped line, you came first. You who with stake and spade made this park over in your own image and then left me to flit across it with the beetles and the dead leaves.

We met unexpectedly at the corner. Your dress gray like February, your hair black like walnut oil, your shoulder bag as broad as your frame. Standing six feet from each other, the only reason I looked at you was because I was wearing sunglasses. I looked at you but I'm clueless as to what I saw because your own eyes plotted behind a pair of large, bug-eyed sunglasses. No smile, no smirk, no kink in the corner of your mouth. But you were facing me.

I counted cars as they passed. I counted down with the hazy orange numbers of cross-walk sign. I counted on you to say something but then the orange numbers disappeared leaving only the open-palmed orange hand.

"This is about to get somewhat awkward," I said.

You waited, as if I'd spoken to someone behind you, mistakenly to you as someone I thought I knew, to anyone except you before the pause hastily burst and you replied, "What?"

The crosswalk hand reached out. The cars slowed to the traffic light.

"This. We're about to cross the street and now we have to see who's going to take the initiative to walk quickly and who will try to lag behind so neither one of us aren't stuck awkwardly walking next to a stranger as we cross street."

"Oh, that," you started with a smile. "That always is a little weird, isn't it?" You said it with sincerity, as if we'd just been taught a secret handshake no one else in the world knew. It was a welcoming reply.

"Well, if you want, I'll let you get a head start," I offered. Even with the rest of the face easily visible in the afternoon barrage of sunlight, though so much could be divined from every other part of your body, that your eyes remained concealed behind sunglasses left me wholly in the dark about you. My offer hung like a "Marco" that must wait until "Polo" finally arrives.

I will write and re-write stories until I finally have something that doesn't make me want to shove my head in the oven. But I will write no matter what. Eventually, hope I'll carve off the shittier parts.