This isn't really a blog. In order for that to be true, I’d need to write in it a few times a week, every week, or some variation of the aforementioned patterns. That’s NOT my habit. Sorry. But there ‘are’ a few things I've been thinking about. The first: How I can turn this into something I’ll be motivated to fertilize often. The second: how I can make this intriguing for my fans, macabre aficionados, conspiracy theorists, regular Joes and Sallies, and the Americana a la mode Montanan rifleman posted up in his subterranean God-plex awaiting the fated execution of civil liberty … all at once.
(Dramatic pause—cue Jeopardy theme song)
Over the years I've developed a proclivity for citing the Arcana and Obscura of cultures and events no one cares about (but which invariably make for interesting conversation). Most of these are observations I can’t share with my girlfriend (last time I made her sit down in front of the 60” to watch a documentary on ancient Sumer she fell asleep). I love her, but she wasn't designed to tiptoe through the cognitive tulips of my neocortex. Them things got thorns, Cletus! Amy is a nurturer, a laugher, a jokester, and a mother. Not a mental TWISTER-player like yours truly—a role often time-consuming and problematic.
I started writing this post with the hope that, like the meandering brave who wanders on his spirit quest in hopes of glimpsing the vaporous definition of his animal guide, I’d figure out what to do once I got there. And I have.
I’m going to let you know who I am.
Before you start in an uproar about how bland and self-aggrandizing that sounds, you should know something. I’ve lived an interesting life. Seen things and been places that the bourgeoisie observe on HBO SPECIALS from the safety of their insured condos. I've seen death up close, balanced on the precipice of human depravity, been locked in tight places against my will, and broken plenty of laws. Unintentionally, of course. My ambitions, like Dorian Gray, were the simple indulgences of the human experience. Nothing more.
Well … maybe a little.
So, as often as I can, I promise to give you snips of my past, my present, my future (I recently saw a third-generation Yugoslavian Gypsy psychic with double-Ds), and gimlet peeks into my soul. What makes me tick, what makes me afraid, what makes me laugh, and what makes me hang my head like Senor Jesus Christo must have done when those greasy black-toothed Philistines screamed for his blood.
Here’s something:
Pain. We avoid it at all costs, while seeking its better-looking twin—pleasure. The great sages have all posited it is between these two great shorelines that the river of life flows, finding us, the human driftwood, momentarily dragged along its shores. And so we avoid one and yearn to explore the other, all while missing the point of life’s great illusion:
The drunken, bobbling inner tube trip. Hey Roy, pass me that there cooler. I’m runnin’ low.
This weekend I found myself confronted with the warty cousin of pleasure. That hunchbacked, bowlegged, wheezy cackler. And it was the worst kind. PHYSICAL PAIN. To give you some background, and at the same time help you understand the contributing forces to my dental recession, I should explain that I used to use drugs. As a kid. I mean a kid, kid. I went to high school in East County San Diego, AKA shit-kickin’ country. I know you wouldn't think of horses and farmers and chew if staring at a So Cal travel add, but a forty minute driver inland and that’s EXACTLY what you get. Along with raising pigs, weekend rodeos, and the ever-aspiring low-IQ white supremacists, Lakeside and Santee had a sub-culture of most vile associates.
Tweekers.
I was one—for a time. Which is how I went from having no cavities at 16, to having 24 at 18 ½, when I finally kicked the biker powder, septum salt, shit, glass, crystal, shards, enter code-word here. Needless to say the damage has been done. A future anthropologist might one day kneel before the open mouth of my skeleton, shake his head, mutter, “the poor bastard never flossed,” only to witness my ghost emit from a nearby sink hole with a sputtering gust like flatus exiting a beefy rodeo clown, rear up to its wispy height, and bellow: “I was just young and impressionable!
So there I was, Thursday morning, thinking a Crest Whitening Strip would help earn respect from total strangers. I followed the directions, slapped the babies on, quickly lost track of the clock. Fifty minutes later (20 more than the suggested application time) I tore them off … went to work … and regretted it. In no time it felt like my mouth was being gang-raped by a band of vengeful needles. The next thing I knew my front tooth was aching. The next next thing I knew it was Friday night (Saturday morning), I was sweating and on my couch at 2AM, and my mouth felt like it was going to fall off.
The pain got worse. I saw an emergency dentist outside of my network (who promptly reviewed the X-Ray with an expression somewhere between bad gas and genital pain), got a prescription for fungus and non-habit-forming narcotics, and parked my rear in front of the 60”, hardly absorbing episode after episode of FRINGE, just focusing, knees bent and heels together, lotus position, taking deep breaths and drinking cold drinks and counting the minutes until I could take another pill.
By Saturday evening my lips were the size of Homo Neanderthal. Amy offered me a spear and an animal pelt, and suggested I hunt stray cats by moonlight. The worst was when I laughed, which happens often in our home. By Sunday my nose had joined the swollen party, and I was pretty sure I was going to die. All of my short stories, novellas, novels, screen plays, and a book deal in the works … to say nothing as I drifted off into the nightland On Sunday evening I was so desperate I tried pulling my crown off with a pair of channel locks, giving up only after I realized I would have to snap the tooth beneath to relieve the pressure.
So I endured, watching my face transform, observing as desire after paltry desire came sloughing off the body of my thoughts. Shaving, showering, recognition, companionship, conversation, money, success, none of it meant shit. I was reduced to an animal, and in that reduction began to understand the true futility of those things we use to make ourselves feel superior to the other motes of dust that caper before the Eternal Eye.
The senses themselves are things meant to protect us, to aid survival. With the constant presence of pain I felt nailed to the moment. I began to see the difference between hunger (physical) and appetite (mental). My phone was the last thing on my mind. My central focus was on survival—so much so that I stood in front of a mirror for an hour with a pair of pliers shoved inside my mouth. Not only desperation, but the horror of watching my body distort, of feeling the pus bore into my healthy tissue, between the walls of my bones, distending its pressure until I could feel my heartbeat behind my eyes.
For a brief time I was released of my humanly duties.
I became a thing.
And when the antibiotics finally kicked in, the writer in me awoke. I saw the story. Felt the detachment from civility, the restoration of instinctual drives. Saw that pain can be a gift. What I gained in the end (besides a firm wedge of drying puss I can still feel above my gum ridge, and which I hope will be removed when the tooth is repaired next week) is an understanding of what we are on the inside, beneath the social rank and personality, beneath the egoism and absurd hail-Mary attempts at securing happiness.
We are beasts.
And beasts will do anything to survive.
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