What are we gonna do now?

 How do I end this? I can't stick my head in the oven because it's electric. Even if I slathered up my head in grease I'd probably not die, end up horribly disfigured and setting my apartment on fire.

This anhedonic trip during the latter part of my life is no fun, lol. There's more than a dozen stories I've started and just left unfinished. An art project I've abandoned. Surf the net for news and memes and fall out at the end of the night with nothing done but eating, reading, and maybe a shower.

The only thing that keeps me engaged are my mixes on Spotify, the next-time-I-do-acid mix, the powerpop collaboration with my daughter, the end-of-life mix to play when they drag my corpse out into the woods and dump me in a hole. 

But you went and left me here with troubles on my mind

It’s been over three weeks of a low-grade cold, body aches, fatigue, fucked up stomach, chills and fever. I’m like, please just take me out, don’t let me wake up for another day of this torture.

There’s no motivation to do anything but wake up for another day of making a wage, dealing with corporate bullshit, responding to emails that ultimately won’t matter—the words are useless and the content less so.

Seven more years until retirement I remind myself as I lie awake at three in the morning, drawing the darkness into myself. Wondering if I’ll make it that long, if there’s not a fatal accident in my not-so distant future. Maybe cancer, who knows? It’s a fucked up world and none but a few of us would do it all over again given the chance (no changing the timeline, of course).

Get yourself together, snap out of it, straighten up and fly right (seems homophobic), get your pecker up (seems homoerotic), put your big boy pants on and quit whining. Because the problems in this world can be solved by doing things we have no motivation to do, dogpaddling instead in the shit we continue accumulating from our inability to find the motivation to do what needs to be done.

At 3 am, suddenly wide awake, not like having to pee or anything, just thinking about how dismal life has been.

There are so many memes about how awesome it was to just jump on a bike and explore, check out weird things, hang with friends. Almost all of those memes are about being suburban and white, not urban and black but that’s the internet we got, not necessarily what we need. Nonetheless, there’s a romanticism about that kind of freedom, a nostalgia for a simpler, less-scary time. For white people.

What those memes forget is that it was also a time when the effective tax rate was still around 70% and the rich were paying their fair share, funding the ability of white kids to ride bikes unmolested.

In the meantime, cops gunned down black people with impunity. Wasn’t a great time to be riding your bike around if you were a black kid. Must not be a lot of nostalgia around that.

3 am and wide awake thinking about how fucked we are, all of us (except the rich pricks)—Earth is hitting back at all the shit we’ve done and there’s no way to nuke our way out of this (bombs, not energy which I’m totally behind). Remember when Trump thought we could nuke a hurricane? Inject solvents to defeat covid? Is he really going to be the Republicans’ savior?

At 3 am, that frightens the fuck out of me.

Double O, Cactus, yeah we towed up

SCENE: A typical kitchen from the 1950s, HUSBAND has slicked back hair, wears suit and fedora, smokes his pipe while WIFE, in a dress, heels, and an apron, bends over the oven.

H: You know? This whole fascism thing makes a lot of sense!

W turns around with a casserole dish in mitted hands.

W: Who wouldn't want fascism? All us suburban white women are terrified of the black and brown people who work for us! At least the fascists will get them out of here!

H: Is the casserole ready? I'm starving!

W: Let it set for another ten minutes and then call the kids for dinner. I'm leaving for a meeting to get some books banned.

Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes

Sorry bout that....

I had all this shit planned and then--fatigue. It's got a grip on me. 

Tried some retail therapy, actually got almost all my Christmas shopping done, online. I don't go places unless I absolutely have to. Not even for free flu shots. Essentially, I'm a hermit who drives a Prius maybe ten miles a week.

This is the first day in weeks where the combo of weed and work doesn't have me crawling beneath the covers. Please, more manic phases, fewer depressive phases; less sleep, more writing.

It crosses my mind, several times a day, that I might be completely fucking insane. And the original Catch-22, I can't be insane if I know I'm insane.

It feels alone even though I know there's millions, billions of people going through the same shit.

Honey, I get stoned on your love all the time

 

Are you receiving me? Are my pleas crackling through the white noise of your day? Will you brighten my doorstep with your goofy grin?

Really, it’s quite possible that I have become insane. You have the receipts—this blog and my journal—so please shock me back to reality.

Let me know that I’m alive for you, that this sense that I’m dying is false, that we’ll meet again in this life and not somewhere that is inhabited by small animatronic dolls. Maybe the same coffee shop where I was convinced we’d be busted forever? I thought we’d be busted and yet your kiss lifted me away from our small town and swept me into your spacetime, sucked me in where your galaxy swirled.

Sheila comes back to me eighteen times a day, every day for months, no concern with the how and when, just faith that it will be. Dinging my temple bell and listening to the rime peel into the day, clearing my space for you to enter.

Noam Chomsky is a soft revolution

Anyone up for Ketamine? *

Some dispensary sent me a text saying that, like that was their ad for their unlicensed Ketamine services, depression, PTSD, genital warts, everything will be better after a dose of Vitamin K.

I’m not saying that’s right, one way or another. Summer of 1994, I was the local Ketamine dispensary.

At the start of K Summer, an ex approached me, told me that Ketamine was the only thing that would cure her migraines and that, y’know, if I could let go of a vial we could…. A buddy offered an ounce of pretty swell bud for a vial. By fall, I was fat with coke, acid, shrooms, Xanax and other goodies. And about a grand in cash—even though I preferred trade—that I spread around stashed in books or rolled-up socks.

Obviously, there was a moment in my life when I lucked into a fuck ton of ketamine, fifty-six vials, traded to me by my professor for a quarter ounce(!) of some shitty local grown. He didn’t know what he was giving away and I didn’t know what I was getting.

Itching to try it out—and knowing dick about how to ingest it—I cracked open a 10mg vial and poured it into a Petri dish so it could set up into crystals I could chop up to snort. Once set, I invited my best bud over to give it a shot. It burned like fuck and the high didn’t seem much more intense than the buzz we were getting from the booze and bud. That was, until I opened my apartment door and looked into the void of the universe. When John looked out the door, he was likewise convinced that K was more than we’d assumed at first.

It was then that I pulled the pages from the little box that held the vial and read that it was an anesthesia for cats and sub-human primates—MAGA we assume they mean by that—and baseline for putting a 3-5 pound cat was 5mg intermuscular. I didn’t want to have surgery so I decided to stick my thigh with 1mg and see what would happen.

What happens is you’re chatting up someone after the injection, this, that, other things, and then you’re suddenly not you, you’re a fly at your father’s funeral or shifting between z and zed, a moth emerging from its cocoon, sticky and hot and then rising to the nearest light, spraying a scent around to announce your presence, your light escaping as a beak breaks you in two.

Moments after his third hit, Gooch watched the world around him fade to a dark spot in the center of the universe—all places viewed from the middle of space—stars and galaxies shooting away from where he tumbled. Growing less disoriented, he became aware that objects were also moving toward him, some barely perceptible specks, others much larger and gaining definition as they approached, all corkscrewing their way to where he floated. Without warning, he was hit by an enormous silver locomotive from a 1940s Sci-Fi comic book, his form exploding into sparkled parts crackling into the pull of a planet’s atmosphere. Those particles re-emerged to form in a muck-filled cocoon warmed in the jungle’s balmy night, goo inside a cigar-butt casing hardening into a final stage of being with wings breaking free, shivering off slime in the morning sunlight and then slipping to the sky above, shaking away every hint of what he once was, to fly off into what he now was. Gorging on the sweet-lime sugars of a red flower’s pollen, flattening himself beneath a broad leaf to shelter from an afternoon shower, warming his wings in the sun’s last light, then finding a spot where he could stay hidden for the night. Waking with the chatter of birds but not yet safe to fly—better to wait for the midday heat—feasting some more and then finding another like himself, one doing the correct dance and emitting the right scent, rising together toward the sun then descending in parallel vortices to land in tandem on a leaf. Abdomens locked, an aedeagus inside him, shaking with its splattering of sperm, his mate shuddering with release, wings battering the air around them and then flying away in ecstatic loops. After adhering all his eggs to where his progeny might thrive, he was lifted in a gust of wind that tore him into dust carried across wood floors, wood walls, a structure built of pine and meant to burn. An assay office with huge books of claims, the aroma of horseshit embedded into floorboards. Flipping a page, he watched characters tumble, twist, turn into abortions of words and understanding. Listening, he caught uncertain meanings with quick grasps, pulling them to him and then burying them in his gut. Turning his eyes back on the pages of the assayer’s ledger, symbols skewed themselves into arabesque curlicues as they tumbled across the page, unravelling their meanings with whispers of not here or not this and lurid alternatives to both. Then, after asking where he was, Here! Here boy! a finger like kindling pointed at words that rolled around on the page that defied comprehension. Here boy! The apparition still insisting and pointing and then, finger taps sending him into a waiting room, one of those where he’d sign in Gramps and endure more Goin to Denver, are we? but without any sense that a name would be called, it would only be checking in and waiting until the end of time. Impatient, rising from his seat and his Architectural Digest, stepping to the counter, he watched letters flip and flop as he looked for his sign-in, letters drifting into an infinity of scribble. You’re not here boy, and then tumbled back into other lives, beings, existences, realms and realities flipped his way for him to ride as far as the run would take him. 

“What the fuck did we just smoke?” Dave’s face and voice cut through a confused place in the universe. For a moment, Gooch grasped desperately at the shards of reality surrounding him, urgently hoping his trip would tear him away to a safer world. Flynn was gone but Indian Leo returned, beaming in the room’s subtle light and cackling about the fires of Hell. Dave’s august words were an anchor back to the reality he’d left before smoking Leo’s magical weed.

 Like that.

*If so, don’t put Sun O))) fwtbt on your playlist. Trust me.

don't help them to bury the light

It’s been long COVID for too long. I’m done with the fogginess, forgetfulness, fatigue, fuckin over it—or wish I were. Got no creative juice or energy to work a thought, an idea, much less find the motivation to work on shit already cooking and simmering. When I do find the drive to write, it’s scattered and, like this blog, a bit lazy.

And it sucks when almost my entire weekend is spent asleep, the Rona creeping back to spread its foul fingers and grip me. “Boss, I got the grip.”

Really, all I want to do is make Spotify lists and read about two-headed sharks. It requires a backhoe to get me into the shower, to do almost anything.

Tried meditation but it seems like “yum” and “yuck” are the only mantras that work for me. Dunno why I’m stuck on “yuck” like a skipping record but my suspicion is that it’s the same motherfucking thing that’s been going on since my 61^st birthday. Another dose of the shit thirteen months later. But even after my first hit, I was feeling all the symptoms of long COVID and when it smacked me down a second time it didn’t go on for two weeks but just seemed to magnify the depression, the sense that I was dying.

Yeah, we all die but with long COVID, life becomes anhedonic, a dreadful trudge to a grave filled with regrets, unatoned for sins, the suffocation of nothingness and cold dirt. As if everything that’s happened prior to being infected is meaningless existential horror, sucked into a black hole and reduced to particles added to infinite mass.

Pretty much like life, amiright?

Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen

A little too lit to continue with msn.com critique—hey it’s Friday night and I did a Delta-9 gummy on top of everything else—so it’s a wonder I’m here at all.

Having said that, it’s hilarious to be IRT for the fall of Trump. He’s always been an insufferable prick and his election made it evident that some people liked that—not a majority of Americans but enough from flyover country to snag the presidency despite not winning the overall vote.

Water under the bridge and Hillary didn’t go ballistic with stolen election claims because, um, she’s not an infantile narcissist.

Straight up, republicans are doomed in 2024, especially if Trump is the GOP nominee. He might have an adoring 30-some part of the population behind him but really, the other 60-70 percent, both dem and rep, can’t stand the guy and see him as a direct threat to our country. A threat to democracy, a menace, the real reason shit seems so fucked up right now.

Of course the media is going to make it look neck-and-neck, they need a horse race to sex up their coverage, they need to make the race to appear like lives are in the balance.

Lives are in the balance but not in the way you’ll hear on anywhere but maybe The Nation or The Jacobin. Not just Palestinian lives but within the diaspora of those displaced by climate change, violence, hopelessness. Which is only going to get worse so someone needs to figure it out.

Trump’s not the guy to do that and more than half the country knows that. If Trump is the GOP nominee for 2024, republicans are going to get smoked, up and down the ballot in almost every state. Even women weren’t protective of their bodies, people weren’t dying from fires, floods, or hot af summers, no one but the cult wants to see that bloviating ballsack back in office.

And since most of the GOP has tied their shoelaces to a veritable oaf, they’ll walk with him into oblivion.

White lines

Every morning feels like I’ve just come down from doing a bunch of cocaine—anxiety chewing up my insides, calculating how I’ll make it through work, wishing I could sleep.

Say you went exploring in a cave but got lost on your way out—you’re well and truly fucked and you’re gonna die—do you go scratching and screaming or do you just lie down and let exhaustion take you into the big sleep? I’d go for the latter but I know I’d last about three seconds before going for the former.

Then again, a cave might be the ultimate tiny home if it doesn’t go too far back, doesn’t have a bear already living there. Set up some simple Ikea stuff for comfort and standby firewood, hunt deer or pick up groceries from the Dollar General, a bluetooth speaker to really rock that cave tiny home.

Out here in the desert, a cave is a good place to go if you want to mummify, let the arid air desiccate your corpse into a shriveled version of yourself. TBH, I don’t see the advantage of being a mummy, other than to be discovered and then shipped off to be displayed at a carnival.

I’ve seen pictures of mummies and pictures of (supposedly) ghosts, but never both in the same frame. Apparently, you can only be a mummy or a ghost but not both. Personally, I’d rather be a ghost, hang around and fuck with people.

If I find a cave to mummify in out here in the desert, those social security checks will roll in until somebody finds my withered corpse and by then, my time of death will be indeterminate—could have been last month, could have been last month and a decade. All those accumulated social security payments can buy me a nice headstone to sit outside the cave I once called home. “Used to be a mummy up in here,” or something like that, in case people get too curious about where I lived.

Maybe to understand how I survived the brutal winters?

I haven't given too much thought to my tiny house/mummy cave but there are three things I require if I'm going to curl up, get mummified, then end up in some display:

1. There must be a toilet.
2. The toilet must be fitted with a bidet.
3. Someone to come in and clean the toilet/bidet every afternoon, preferably while I'm taking my nap.

I be the fab, I be the fabulous but see, unlike the Chi

It’s been three months since I started my marble journal and this blog is most likely close to the same age, like twins born a few days apart. Except, I feed my marble journal every day—that’s where the 3/6/9 gets done—but this place is pretty much a luxury in the manifesting process. Why I don’t get these so-called manifesting experts commenting on my posts seems a little chickenshit given their brand. I mean, didn’t they manifest me to come read their instructions?

Insane as it is, I continue practicing magic (essentially) even though it’s gussied up in pseudo-scientific babble and dubious claims about quantum mechanics in how it all susses out. My thinking is that if it doesn’t work, at least it committed me to doing something outside my comfort zone, it gave me a ritual of futility—a sand painting, a Zen garden—to spend time on something other than spiraling into the desert death trip.

A quarter of my year devoted to conjuring you here to me, to have you suddenly appear and say after twelve years apart and say, “Nah, thanks for the memories but that was just a lark.”

I don’t believe for a moment that’s what you believe or feel but that’s the kinda shit that pollutes my day. My mother’s voice screeches in my head, “And for what? For what? A quarter year and whaddya got for all that?”

Good question, mom.

Here’s some more Powerball to consume:

However, after Randal returned from Delaware, the dialog took on a new dynamic and it was Randal who mostly directed the conversation’s trajectory. While Whisper’s post-Powerball Thanksgiving soiree was in full swing, the Colonel got an earful of what Randal’s new status wrought. “If what you’re preaching about comes down to a personal relationship with Jesus, God, all that, let him into your heart and you’re done, then I don’t understand why I gotta go somewhere every Sunday and hear everyone else yappin about their relationship with God. I couldn’t give two shits about someone else’s relationship with God. It’s personal, right?”

Stiff as the posts holding up his roof’s overhang, the Colonel moaned out his reply. “It’s about The Word, son. Sharing the light. Fellowship in tongues.”

“See? I don’t know what any of that means. So why would I want to go somewhere every Sunday to hear a buncha that shit when I could be out bustin some hippie faggot for sellin drugs? We all serve The Lord in our own way, Colonel.”

Nearly a mile away across the valley, the two could hear the revelers at Whisper’s Thanksgiving party, their whoops and hollers and hearty laughs, their joyous appreciation of the moment with each other. Standing on the porch of the Colonel’s modest cabin, the two drank black coffee and stared across the cleft in the mountain, both grim-faced and sour.

“Do you hear that bullshit?” Randal spat, took a cigarette from his pack and lit it. “If I was to go over there to start writin noise tickets? Check for drugs? Bunny would have my ass ground into burger. Pounded by his criminal biker buddies because those filthy hippies makin that racket are his customers. See what I’m dealing with, here?”

“Son,” the Colonel’s voice taking on no more emotion than a dry-cleaning ticket. “There’s evil everywhere, but this is a trifle compared to what the Devil is using to pervert the purity of our race. Weaken us and set the stage for war with demon aliens. These are mostly White people up here. Race-traitors, every one of them, but they’ll see the light in The Word. Leave them alone.”

Randal took a long draw from his smoke, its glow lighting a face that was pinched and puckered. “I can’t. They’re snotty, smart-mouthed perverts. They should all be locked up.”

“And they will be, one day. In camps where they can be watched and preached to and made to work. But you’re putting the cart before the horse, son.” The Colonel’s intonation had all the range of a Jew’s harp. “The Lord has bigger plans for you, for us… for the money He gave you. You’re rich. Glorify His name who gave you such bounty.”

“I got plans for this money, if that’s what you’re sayin. And it includes you and what you’re doin up here. We got some differences of opinion on some things but the important stuff? On target. In fact, there’s something I wanted to run by you. Which is I why I’m here. I saw your lights on, that you was up, while I was on patrol.”

“Why do you do that, son? Stay on patrol. With all that money you got, why don’t you quit the law-enforcement business?”

“Because they’re all numbnuts down there in my shop and if I quit, there’d be no one with the gumption or wits to arrest folks. This town would become a goddamned drug orgy the moment I turned in my badge. Filthy fuckin hippies,” pulling the cigarette from his lips, Randal pushed a billow of smoke from his lungs to give himself enough space for the emphasis of spitting. “And, I like being a cop.”

“You like the authority? Upholding the law? Seeing bad people brought to justice? Whatever justice means in this sinful country of ours. And ensuring the safety of our White citizens?”

“Yeah. Plus seeing the stupid look on faces when they don’t know the rules and gettin fucked for not knowin em. All that. I’m gonna stay a cop and I’m even thinkin about using some money to make upgrades to our department. But that’s not what my money is for.” Randall sipped his coffee and then puckered his words. “And that’s what I came here for, to talk about.”

“And what’s that, son?”

“I’m gonna buy you out.”

Randal sat satisfied with his announcement and waited for the Colonel to respond, certain that the preacher would ask what buy you out meant or argue the sovereignty of ownership and rights and God’s plan. Instead, the Colonel was taciturn, a null cipher of expression. Unable to wait the Colonel out, Randal broke back in, “You rent from me. And I get a huge tax break from it. You go from payin whatever you’re payin now to a dollar a month and I write you off. We both win.”

“But it’s my land. I own it.”

“No you don’t. The bank owns it. Aliens and Jews, whatever. You’re always just a step ahead of foreclosure on this place. I know because I learned how to find things out. I’m not just a cop, I’m a detective.” The corners of Randall’s smirk lowered and mirrored the dispassionate moon of the Colonel’s face. “Now, I’ll own it. And you can do what you want with the money you’re not giving the Jews and aliens.”

The Colonel responded as though he’d just been told that socks are nice, a good cushion between the shoe and foot, sweat absorbent. “Why, son?”

Randal couldn’t contain his fire, his blazing desire to burn the town down. “A mystery, Colonel, my mystery. I got enough money now. And I just might start playing God.”

Happy three months, I hope you enjoyed the read.