never yet tao.

ReTox to DeTox

Harvest Festival was perfect.  dewy long grass and music and blacklight and white and fire.

world end No. 1421

in the middle of the floor, they meet.

he meets her, that is, coming upon her, silent and bleeding and terribly still, half-huddled on the floor.
in the middle of the floor, he stumbles over her hand in the dark.

she looks up at the intruder, only partially believing that someone’s ended up here, of all places, on the end of days. she’d picked the hall for it’s emptiness, it’s abandoned syrup-heavy air. now he is here, and she can make out through the dark that he’d been expecting isolation, too. he can’t see her. just senses that there’s a human shape in hie way…his eyes still haven’t adjusted to the black.

she tries to use these precious moments to escape, find a new corner to countdown her thoughts, never enough for an occaision like this. she doesn’t even want to think about now. just great spectacular thoughts. thoughts she’d be proud to die thinking.

he feels her moving and stops her. it doesn’t matter that there’s company in his tomb, after all. he’s sighing and fixing his dilating pupils on the disturbed air near his left foot.

‘wait’

caught, she stops. stills breath. practices death, sings through the softest nursery rhymes as camoflage so he won’t see through her silence into thoughts. he’s a mind-reader. he came after her. she recognizes him now. he’s been hearing her headspace for weeks, months, years maybe…how long has he been here?

his hand is on the woman’s arm. without the yielding heat of it he’d mistake it for a louis the 14th chair. or parts of one. he’d seen a junk heap outside an antique store once and wanted the extravagance of tears. wanted to be neiztche’s mythical horse of understanding. the hat stand of sophocles, a nineteen fifties stapler. wanted to be anything but buried. meaningless. stupid. irrational and strange. he’s been living with his madness accurately and well.

she turns to the silhouette and asks him to go with her mind. she knows he’ll hear her better this way. she wanted to bleed into sleep alone and at peace and away from everything. no waiting with the masses, huddled in subway stations. no having fate fall on her. this once. this last time.

the man is starting to see her. he wants to leave her, hideous now as the grey takes on definition, her face and chest and arms scored red and weeping. the girl on the train. the one who wouldn’t stop crying. the one with the eyes. who made him help her. who hated him for trying. fuck. FUCK.

it registers in her hazy thoughts that he heard her. his grip is lessening, and his pulse isn’t telegraphing through her slick forearm now. he’s going to leave her to her hurt and lullabyes in peace.

he can’t leave. the dried blood glues them together.

and they are not alone as the world ends.
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fragment 1

there are times when she suspects she is a glutton for punishment, some natural home for unfounded and often unjustified laments. like she seeks out her own unhappiness and tries to multiply it past anything it should ever really be.

there are times when she sees this possibility with a bullethole clarity, but then she finds herself there, again. deep in a handcrafted den of discontent.

once upon a time, she would cure this with motion – running through dark streets and rowing like the machine was crossing oceans. once upon a time, not far after, she would cure this with another sort – raging bodies and purple rings of tiny bruises. but tonight she is without either, so treads water and tries to look like she meant to be there.

~

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old prose still says too much about me…

from 2001.

~

he said the idea that lives do not belong, entirely, between people is absurd and concave and it crashes against the barriers of visions created in caves with dried blood. he knew he didn’t have his own without the pointless, hated world, that without each other we were vapour. we are the product of mindlessness and desperate communication — he told me that just before he jumped.

fuck.

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pointless

so the “friends page” on this site is called “blogroll,” right?

am i the only person who reads it, and every time, hears “bog roll” in my head?

and if yes, am i the only person who’s so exposed to british lit and television that i know a bog roll is toilet paper?

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the state of the untao nation

It’s funny. This blankness, this weakness, this slowness….there’s another word that could cover all those bases, really. One word that sums up how unnatural I’m feeling. I am feeling gentle. Not only in the literal sense, in that I ‘m less harsh with my environment, but in the sense conjured by the word’s sounds. The soft whispering lilt of those two syllables.

Walking, talking, everything I do this last week is done with a dirge-like delicacy that, frankly, is freaking my normally-raging self right the hell out.

I know I should try to gentle to everyone, not just the people I love best. I know that kindness is key to keeping human. But there is an unnatural seaweed-swaying-in-water vibe to this, a feverish delusion feeling that wraps itself around my shoulders. it feels gentle, but it also feels incredibly off-kilter and much like the worst of the three concussions i’ve blessed my wretched skull with.

I know that I’m afraid of my own kindness, and maybe even ashamed at the depths of care that I’m capable of. Most people who know me know that i’m often harsh, and moody, and see my own comfort and happiness as the primary task at hand. (People i’ve loved know a secret loophole in the “how to have untao be nice to me” and the trick is basically to be loved by me, so much, that you and i become a village. because at heart i am a socialist, and have absolutely no problem giving up some of *my* comfort or happiness, if it bring the village’s happiness or comfort up. if the trade off is fair, you know?) In general, though, i am selfish, and alien, and not nice.

I don’t know why, but I do not want the Me broadcast into the eyes of the world to be in a position of weakness or subservience to anyone, and isn’t that what my mind screams caring, kindness, are? My mind is wrong, I know that, but. But it’s hard to be a superman in real life. You can’t be both strong and kind…not really. Nobody’s got that kind of room inside. And I guess, selfish bitch that I am, I would rather be strong. I didn’t think that was the case, but it must be. Because this feeling of gentleness, this feather on the wind feeling, feels like I’m not even real. It doesn’t even hurt, and that is just not cool with me. I need the constant input of my senses as well as my own psychic noise, to remind me to exist.

One of my art projects involved applying several layers of tissue paper in an elaborate texturized collage. I spent hours with my hands coated in a sloughed-skin looking covering of glue, and the glue got everywhere. At one point I realized I’d glued a very important piece of the collage to another piece of stray tissue paper, and it was half-dried together, and I needed those pieces separate. Wasn’t going to go back and do more work. So I carefully spent almost ten minutes peeling the moist gluey paper apart, and picking bit of migratory blanket-fluff off of its gluey surface. _{the texture of glue-soaked tissue paper makes me think of the insides of lungs…this wet fragile clinging thing.}

I feel very much like that piece of tissue paper, it turns out.

cheerful happy pickmeups

Ok. so what’s been happening lately? what worth mentioning? and what makes something worth mentioning? am i gauging it on audience, taste, intellect or cool, today? i guess it’s nothing. i am gaugeless, like a shitty dollarstore knitting pattern.

so i’ll talk about what’s on my mind.

a friend died two days ago. in the first leg of a motorcycle trip he was taking across the country, he drifted past the center line and met a really big truck. why do i feel the need to mention that, when it makes my bones hurt and my eyes leak?

we had our own we-knew-him-since-highschool wake for him @ a party last night, just because everyone there but one, knew him. we brought out photos and told stories and did all the stuff you do to stir up someone’s memory, make them be really violently alive this one last time. it was good. no one cried. we’re crying for ourselves when we do, i know that, we all know it, so we have the decency to not pretend, to keep those scared or self-pity tears to ourselves.

he’s one of our boddhisattvas. a hedon and a poet and a pencil-drawer and a beautiful seemingly unlined soul. i guess he ironed all the lines out. there were times when i thought he might be a new soul, and maybe he is. maybe he’s reentering the cycle and becoming someone else right now. but i think it’s possible he’s an old one, older than me, even – and he’s gotten off the ride.

in my secret heart, that place where all your petty and romantic and deluded hopes grow and fester, i picture him just understanding, wheels humming under him, blue sky casting its yellow daylight down on him. i see him opening, like he was so very able to, and allowing all the knowledge that we’re all seeking, in. and just being ready to be somewhere else, done with this whole shebang, ready to scatter back into energy.

but in my secret heart, he just disappears. or maybe his wheels lift off the pavement and he does some cheesy E.T. motorcycle into the sky bit. he does not drift past the center line. there is no semi coming towards him. the birds are singing that haunting northern ontario birdsong.

my secret heart is a coward who wants happy endings.

an excerpt of a Dystopia post he did back in the day:

“from time to time i can see the void between atoms, and the true emptiness of things. but i still miss you all and want more time w/ you. more sitting in fields thinking about how city slicker shit bags see us as small town fugitives who don’t know what life’s about. more sitting in indian restaurants stoned w/ an acute awareness of the sounds of the meal.  more growing into beauty.

life would be so sweet if i only had enough to eat. and friends around to love.

–”ALL COMPOUND THINGS DECAY. SEEK OUT THY SALVATION W/ DILIGENCE.”
–the final words of the buddha.”

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the sound of cheap champagne

that’s right. maybe it’s more the sound of broken glass. i christen this “unnecessary blog 2.0″