Tag: culture

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How the World Ends

As my eyes darken and the storm erupts inside my veins, you mistake my anger for passion, slide your hands around my hips and press me to you hard. My mind is a lightning rod of electric visions, none of them tender. To be alive at all in times like this is to exist inside a caricature of cruelty, the outside world has become a pornography of brutal harm. Women and children fleeing for their very survival in the desert, chased into madness by the callus greed of the rich and powerful men who own everything but most importantly they own the power to kill. Kill us. Destroy all of the things we worship and believe in as we scramble to understand what is even happening when it’s all happening too fast. You grab a fistful of my hair and firmly tug while kissing the soft skin of my exposed neck and in one deep exhale I try to imagine what it must feel like to die. To be on the other side of destruction, free of the fear. Do we still feel affection even after we cross over? Do we still know all the same things we know now but are they somehow neatly tied together in such a way that it all makes sense? You don’t ask yourself any of these things that I obsess over with near relentless hyper attention which may be why there are  times when you can get yourself off while all I can do is roll with it through the numbness. Who deserves pleasure, who deserves pain. Who deserves more of one or the other. As I drive to work with headlights peering through the hollow darkness down the same old road, I pass a deer on the side of the highway, headless. In the split second when I notice it I see only its wide stump of bloodied insides, then its beautiful young body limp, lifeless. We have been told there are too many deer and it’s a problem and it’s a shame. We have been told a lot of things are not as they seem. Violence is not violence, truth is not truth. What you see is not what you see. But who hits a deer with a car in such a way that the head comes clean off – and then disappears? A static voice on the radio speaks of the most recent catastrophic event on the other side of the globe. Hand grenades and the smiles on the laughing faces of the enemy. War is not war. Death is not death. Life is not life and this one’s not mine. I sip my coffee, and drive.

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Stray

As I tighten my mouth around a smooth cigarette, you are telling me things I already don’t care to know about. Something about the guy at work who never has his shit together and always manages to drag you into the mired mess with him because that is what people who are clueless do, grab onto everything helpful around them and drown it out. Meanwhile I, on the other hand, feel something of a smug triumph because I have managed to hold down a day job that doesn’t come home with me. All the useless drivel is left where it belongs: inside the gray and dying walls of a building which corrals hundreds of people for the better part of their days, the majority of their squirmy eyeless lives. Taking a long sip of wine, I attempt to change the subject and talk about moving because I am terrified of a future together which is devoid of adventure, but the truth is I love our house with a bone-deep kind of love I have never known in a place ever before. It’s just a split level house in a no-name town, but over the years we have carved ourselves into it so deeply that I can’t imagine being anywhere else let alone leaving this place behind. The way it feels like living in a park when I wake up to the sunlight falling through the trees and streaming through our open bedroom windows. The logs on the fireplace in the dead of winter as snow piles up against the back patio. It’s a home now, one that stays inside of you even when you go away for a while so that it is always calling you back. I think sometimes I talk to you about home because I don’t know how to talk to you about writing, how much it means to me, how much I need it. To have a home like this is a beautiful trap not unlike writing. There is a wandering loneliness in writing which is oddly seductive, it keeps you writhing around in its web until it kills you or makes a meal of you or both. But if I don’t write, I can feel the sickness crawling up underneath my skin, the sad panic at not being able to find the words. For all the romance they will offer you about being a writer, it’s nothing short of an affliction really to have a relentless desire to retreat alone to a room and be with the dead quiet so that you can close your mind to everything except the most immediate sensations and thoughts. It’s still dark outside as I type, there is a cat crying loudly down the street. The sound is so crushingly hollow with pain and desperation it makes my insides ache with both affection and disgust. For as long as I can remember I have had myself convinced that I am a writer who can only write in the very early mornings before the rest of the world realizes anything is even happening. It’s not true of course, a real writer can write at any hour and we are always writing no matter where we are at any given time. We are just especially good at fooling ourselves, at backing ourselves into corners in our lives and in our stories. The only way to claw out of ourselves is to dive into ourselves. Maybe that’s why I love the home we have built together so much. No matter how far off I need to wander I always seem to wind up coming back. The cat is screaming now— hasn’t let up. And high above the idle moon watches, glowing from a vast cold distance.

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Desperate Hours

It’s another day gone by and the winds are picking up as the seasons turn darker and colder every time the sun sinks down into the ether. I check my phone too much, compulsively now I don’t even try to stop myself- sure the world is going to end any minute but of course it won’t be that sudden. The avalanche of atrocities and terror and greed will continue long past when we deserve to even be here at all. It’s hard to think about anything else when you are so rattled with existential dread and yet there are still the temporary pleasurable escapes: poetry, music, erotica, writing, wine.  Women’s drinking is on the rise here in the States and I’ve about a million fine guesses why but at the moment I’m just trying to survive being human staring alternately at screens glowing dumbly as we bomb and kill and torture each other with no end in sight.  I’m torn between raging and laughing because still they look for heroes, still they hope and pray and pretend someone else will save us from the evil we let pour vainly through ourselves. The arrogance of that kind of ignorance infuriates me and then leaves me numb. Because the state of current affairs is such that I don’t know anymore if I give zero fucks or all the fucks. Because commercials for lingerie, whiter teeth, and spa vacations are the only things breaking up the never ending psychotic reel of cruelty. Because as this particularly ordinary evening turns to purple clouds in a graveyard sky, in my veins there runs a story I am unable to find the words to tell, and page after page this life which I cannot ever seem to master, cannot ever seem to wrap my fingers around to hold on tight, slides silently passively by.

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In the Blink of An Eye

A soft thin rain mists along the neighborhood as I stare into the dull white sky from the upstairs window of my writing room. A touch of October wind on my bare shoulders, I’m snuggled in thick blankets while curled up on the couch with my laptop, skimming over the events of the day as I breathe deeply and decompress. The gray fade of afternoon, the steady sound of the falling rain, low lights and a few glowing candles tucked among my houseplants. Never could I ever understand why people don’t adore this weather. I’d take it every day of the week and twice on Sunday along with the chill in the air, a chunky sweater, leather boots, and cinnamon in my coffee. Drifting off into the fog which is now settling upon the high tree tops, my mind stumbles upon the hazy decades-old memory of sitting outside at a late night bonfire, watching the flickering light lick at the spicy night air. Tight jeans, cigarettes and cheap beer, and a boy I wanted who wanted me, too. He was tall and rugged and shy but for his height which towered over all of us. I would have given him everything but he had a girlfriend he was very loyal to which I did think was sweet but also a waste of a perfectly beautiful hungry youth. When you are young you don’t know anything except what you want and when you find something you want you think only about how to get it. Nothing else matters, everything is a crushing pursuit, everything is a chase, a challenge, a dare. You don’t ever think about what could be on the other side, what happens after you actually get everything you want. That boy is a man now, lost most of his thick wavy chestnut hair, packed on a sizable gut, and had three or four kids. He’s some kind of security guard someplace out in the sticks. I wonder if the girl he loved so hard then still loves him, I wonder if he still loves her and has been faithful all this time. I wonder what the loyalty awards you after all the regular years spent not chasing, not turned on or moved by anything you long for that’s just out of reach.  V-neck sweaters bought with coupons and Christmas parties at the homes of other people who are also parents and also resigned to the madness of the middle of their ebbing lives. Is there more than that? Does there have to be? I’m the last to know. My only child is all grown up, twenty-one and gorgeous in all the ways you’d want for a child you raised into a man. My home is tranquil and full of books. I have filled my life with writing and thoughts and research and reading. And I’m here in my upstairs room listening to the birds calling for each other through the sifting autumn rain feeling like I have already lived a thousand lives. None more sweet than this, cherishing the sound of the clicking of the keyboard as I type quietly alone in a room of my own.

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Pretty Little Lies We Tell

It’s sort of like being in a cage but plush with trimmings and cash. The tunnel you live in which is a train which takes you from station to station and back again. Shower. Coffee. Lipstick. Heels. Office. Home. Writing desk with nothing to say except how do I get out of here. How did I end up here. Here are the lies which allow the bars of the cage to begin setting into place: money and safety above all else. Money to keep you safe and images to make them feel safe. The bars are invisible but if you push too hard you can feel them because they are firm and hard underneath your skin (not only must you abide by them, you must carry their weight as well). When you feel them holding you in, forcing you back, you feel a sensation which has two opposing sides: anguish and gratitude. It is the spirit which experiences the anguish, the ripe sadness of never being allowed to express herself, for the spirit is all colors but the air in the cage is colorless. It is the part of you which has been domesticated which experiences the gratitude but always a split second after the anguish. You know that this is because the anguish is your first instinct, that which you feel without being told or taught, your very soul crying out, and the gratitude is the part that was strictly hammered into you in order to keep you hesitant, fearful, jumpy and afraid. You should be grateful you have a job. You should be grateful somebody loves you. You should be grateful you have a roof over your head. You should be grateful you have it so good. You should be grateful you are still kind of pretty, you know, to age is to disappear. You should be grateful. You should be, so you are. At least enough to keep you from talking about the anguish, from giving in to the ache, from focusing on it and listening to it and giving it any of your attention. How you want to love on your ache. To caress and stroke and kiss sweetly that part of you which is wilderness, unexplored, pristine with glittering liquid want. To feel into it with everything you are and everything you wish for just one day you could be. There is a part of you which is quiet and yet is always screaming. She is red with rage and wrecked with sweat as she rattles the chains in your mind as you smile and offer your “Good evening”s on your way out of the ceiling high glass-plated office doors.  On the street a pink tangerine sunset gently greets you and you can smell the soft warmth of early autumn drifting on the fading light. Heads down and silently marching, no one else seems to notice. It’s sort of like being in a cage, the tunnel you live in which is a train which takes you from station to station and back again. Office. Traffic. Home. Tee shirt. Wine. Writing desk with nothing to say except there is always the screaming and never a stop on the train for that kind of station.

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Wasteland

We create because we are afraid. And we would much rather not be. We drink because we are coming apart all across the kitchen floor in slivers, anxiety in liquid pools at the center of our drowning. Chattering teeth, shaky hands. We are unsteady as we pretend to make dinner we pretend to build a house around a home which is part of the display. And the vines of crimson panic growing along the empty afternoon walls of my disordered mind remind me that nothing matters in the end. We had tried out the various sins: pride, greed, lust, gluttony. We had tried the gym and Facebook and little beads around the wrist, big rocks upon the finger. We had tried, we had really tried. But the devil finds a way inside and once you stop trying so hard her poison tastes just fine. Novocaine and bloody gums. If you looked like me, honey, you’d be alright. You could be famous on the internet and curl up in the heat of happy empowerment as you watch your ratings rise. Tits and ass and injections, a painted face and a Mastercard. Come on, baby, for a price I’ll let you be my savior, leave you sick by the pallid light of dawn but I’ll get you through the night. Red shiny apple rotten to the core but you know… nobody else wants you anymore. And I’m here to help and you could make something of yourself. It’s easy. It’s some beautiful kind of hell out there but it’s all the same, you could go anywhere, you could have gone anywhere. And we try and we try and we try. But the wasteland promotes itself.  Smile for me, sweetness. There’s nothing emptiness won’t buy.

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Hungry Girls

This restlessness eats all the way to my fingertips. Because of the anxiousness I can’t seem to figure out what to do with the feeling so I pull out the laptop and start typing without a single thing to say. There is a layer of something so deep and murky under the skin I feel as though a dark and unforgiving ocean walks the earth inside of me. Childhood memories of crisp fall evenings walking the concrete sidewalks of my old neighborhood. Before there were cell phones, before there was so much fear in everything I touched. The thin tension in the air between my small body and the only slightly larger body of the boy I wanted to kiss but never did. His curly hair and my bright blue eyes. Days of knee socks and growing into an awkward quiet creature. The years have gone by and some have been kind but some have been crueler than I can bear to recall. Regret, panic, destruction. Red lipstick and dimly lit bars and strangers who turn you on. A hungry girl grows into a reckless woman, but you like that and so do they so you mistake desperation for power. You live a life that becomes only a memory but also continues to loop inside, turns the stomach, clutches at your breast at night. How much time. What have I done with any of it. What do I have left to do but write, but write, but what. For who. Why? And as the black morning sky peels itself open like a weary eyelid from the ending of the night, you think you know. Because the soul needs something to worship. Hungry girl. You need an obsession that will tear you open. Something to rail against and submit to. You need devotion in your life to stay alive.

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Hold Onto Me

He lights my cigarette as we duck underneath an overhang on the front patio, as the rain overflows the gutters along the roof line and slams into the concrete in torrents. It’s a Friday night and the summer sun has been oppressive all day. The rush of the rain feels heavenly, the now cooling earth smells of the faint sweetness of musty dissipating heat. As I take the first drag and let the smoke fill my tender lungs, I’m speaking obsessively about the ways in which the world will end. How it’s already been stripped of so much of its dignity that whatever tragedies happen almost feel well deserved. Why are we are so good at destroying ourselves. Each other. We stand by. It’s not the things we say it’s the things we don’t say. Out loud. It’s what we swallow hoping it will stay deep down inside where it can never hurt anyone but ourselves, as if we were gods, saviors. Humans once or twice removed. We watch the cars driving by slowly on the street next to the house, the glow of their headlights reflecting jagged lines into the wet darkness. Searching. You agree with all the things I say but you don’t see the point in my saying them. I can’t help it, these thoughts have no where else to go. I need to get them out of me. I guess I’m just trying to reach my hands out into the blackness of a terrible nightmare and fumble for something to grab onto, something to stop my head from spinning in this deathly spiral of dread. Something to steady me and make me feel like I’m not alone and even if it’s not all just a bad dream, it’ll be okay. We will be okay. If you are lost, you don’t have to be able to see all the way home. You just have to be able to see a few feet in front of you, one step at a time, and you’ll get there.

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Go to Hell


Whatever you are reading is not the real story. No matter what she says, underneath the words is something darker, harder, truer, and therefore more debilitating. Behind those dazzling white teeth is a mind full of racing doubts and a starvation for love so severe it has begun to eat itself, hence the bright glossy smile. A smile like a rainbow over a natural catastrophe, raging rivers overflowing banks of emotions crashing through poorly constructed dams straining to hold them back.  Though she sits biting her fingernails waiting anxiously for you to come through that door and with one firm grasp of her hips take all her defenses down, everything, of course, is already written and collapse is only a matter of time. Your hand on her neck is fear that she’s running. Fears are keys into the other side of reason, tiny invisible holes, miniature flaws built right into the human infrastructure that under just the right conditions, just the precise amount of pressure, burst. Pressure is pleasure in the pain and vice versa. There is an undercurrent that is a whisper that is a slow rolling thunder that is the tremor underneath the streets of her delicate city. You want to believe she needs you above all else but the story is not the story, the story is about the story, or so tight next to it you might mistake its silence for your own twisted satisfaction. Just close enough for people to believe her and not have to invest anything. If there is never a problem there never has to be a breakdown. If there is never a deadline you can waste away your insides every night of the week and throw the crumpled up days over the edge of a cliff and not have to worry that you’ve ruined the sacred beauty that was handed down to you inside that reckless body. But she’s so beautiful, golden skin glistening there in the setting sunlight atop the mountain in your newsfeed. If only if she were me, you think. If only that were my story. If only it didn’t feel so threadbare underneath your skin, like if by mistake or negligence you pull one single thread your whole life will fall elegantly, entirely apart.

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Mind Eraser

Having spent the weekend alternating between reading new erotica and a book about the inevitable collapse of society, I’m now draining my second cup of coffee wondering how to begin a day filled with so much beauty and potential interspersed with moments of sheer apocalyptic dread.  In some ways we are all machines, going through the same motions to bathe, feed, clothe, secure, and care for ourselves, while another part of us is on a constant hunt for a turn on, a high, an escape, a perversion. Some part of us needs deviance despite the fact that Google won’t let us out of our own three dots long enough to purchase or read anything that doesn’t already jive with how we purchase and think. Every keystroke, calculated, cataloged, coded, until a third persona develops itself into sinister being. Somewhere between who we are and who we wish we were emerges our cyber self, the strange cross breed of digital existence which knows and simultaneously blinds us to our secret habits. How you like to read about sex rather than watch it. How you want flawless skin and what you are willing to pay to get it, or fake it. The music you like, the DMs you wish you could get back but you can’t, the selfies, the drama, the outrage, the news feed tailored just specifically for you based on your clicks, likes, leanings, worldview, friends, spending habits, Facebook posts. We are all being watched all of the time and yet we are still desperate for an audience. Hungry to be seen, looked at, praised, followed. But what we don’t seem to grasp (or care about/ be willing to change our patterns for) is that we have fallen for the scam just as planned by those who study us, feed off of our every move, making billions by collecting infinite data points on our behavior. As you sit wondering what the fuck to do with your life, they already know you better than you know yourself and knowing what you’ve done they know exactly what you will do. They’ve already got you doing it. How much is left to chance? How many opinions are truly your own? How many of your decisions, large or small, are in or out of your control, really?
It’s a regular morning and the late summer sun is sloping up over the horizon as I sit by the glow of my laptop in a silent house. Google. Instagram. Medium. WordPress. Amazon. In the stillness, each of my movements is tracked. Everything is timed. Filtered. Filed. Analyzed, optimized, collected, monetized. Everything is seamless and we are smiling as it all falls apart. Life is the hands of a clock sweeping over and over the same terrain, hours that hang suspended on the wall, waiting for no one.

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