pastthepillars

[pastthepillars]

Landscapes of the Dream

And where was that boy now?

He moves through the mall, away from the damp cold outside that will soon be night, and into the warmth.

He moves into a bookstore and engages himself with a copy of Yukio Mishima's Temple of the Golden Pavilion. In the last few pages he sees the young orderly stretching out upon a mound smoking a cigarette as he admires the destruction beneath him. With the temple now at last seized by flames, he is free from the object of his obsession - his possession at last relinquished.

The boy pulls back slightly to return the book to its shelf and in doing so feels the collective weight of the information stacked up before him. Intimidated, he seizes a copy of Truman Capote's Music for Chameleons and rapidly scans through the opening pages, thinking that he needs to read more, that he needs to write more, that he needs to get his book on this shelf, and above all - COMPREHEND.

But what is it that he is trying so hard to comprehend - what is he striving towards? Is it Capote's piano and the little lizards that reel up and motion alongside his feet? Is it his artful reimagining of a porch, the light curtains with the breeze passing through them just so and the blinking stars in the glacial night sky overhead?

And does he remember once reading that the stars are merely pin pricks that allow the true divine light to seep ever so slightly down upon us, and for that all it's worth we are entombed in some sort of vault?

Is it Truth that he seeks?

He steps outside and it is raining. He senses a slight inclination within himself to walk again the quiet streets of the suburbs where he knows now that on clear day's winters golden sunlight falls and summers dead leaves turn.

Though he knows too that this rapturous ramble will have to wait.

He goes out at midnight and there are scarce few people stirring. Though there goes before him now a throng of people who may from a distance be supposed as animals, perhaps screeching possums or a choice assortment of the many numbered limping prostitutes who plague this quarter like a vile pathogen both before and after nightfall.

He takes a left into a semi suburban side street, not liking the look of the nightclub toughs on the main boulevards; seeing as he does, an imploring usherance to combat smeared as a smile across all their faces.

He thinks better of the shady streets here, those that are lesser frequented for their lesser aesthetic value. But he ducks none the less into an almost transparent ramshackle shack of an all-night cafeteria; for he knows that here they shall serve him up the tepid instant coffee and plaque engendering banana bread that he presently so hungers for.

He slips serpent like into a booth and watches the night. While the coffee and cake he takes a little to the right of him, meditating upon the desolation of the void that he now finds occupied solely by none other than himself and the staff.

He knows the houses to be lined up in even rows. Some that follow before him the course of the river in its artless meandering, while others that neatly frame parks.

He walks past a school, past maisonettes that arise in an unaffecting majesty upon pillars with their roots in parking bays and slap up storage units below.

He sees a beaten up old van that proudly asserts itself with the masses of stickers it adorns: ST KILDA BUBBLE PARTY MAFIA BEWARE - BAD THINGS HAPPEN WHEN YOU PARTY NAKED.

When he finds himself beneath a singular tree he can be found distinguishing it with consideration. For he remembers that last night he saw possums feeding there beneath it - and they were the first to be seen by him in what many are calling his, insofar, comparatively short life.

These pop punk punk rockers - at first one may take them to be nothing more than a common pigeon; feral and squandering endlessly away for the discards of humanity with the feverish jerkings of the neurotic.

But upon further inspection, the Mohawk, erect and proud as it is upon the cranium of the beast, strikes the vision.

And there it is now; as nonchalant and ego-consciousless as the hallucinogenic parakeets that skirt the skies ahead with the cool whisper of the ether rippling beneath their wings.

Here they are, the antagonisers of the status quo - the inadvertent revolters of the psychic equilibrium.

Beneath the climbing frame the Chinese crouches - negotiating a deal whilst suspended indefinitely out here in the ongoing rain - he finds himself nestled deep within this desert of recreational space that sits marooned upon the sanctified spit of bay land beach, deep within the very crotch of this continent.

The rain beats down heavily overhead, steadily - whilst by degrees the structure in which he shelters himself begins to breech.

Now compromised, water drips, drips and then fairly gushes through the unfortunate flaws in the design, making it so now that only scarce space remains where one may remain dry.

The boy watches on as he hazards the exterior, pausing on the threshold as he does so to consider the still portentous sky and the veritable gallons that descend from it.

The Chinese makes an emboldened dash to another implement of infant pacification, perhaps one with a greater integrity of design.

The boy watches on as he rocks unamusedly back and forth in the parasol roofed pirate ship. He torches his cigarette, he pushes his deal defiantly ahead.

The place that our boy was staying at was an indisputable dive. It was initially a hotel, being opened as such upon the completion of its construction two hundred or so years ago - though almost as soon it began to run fairly steadily into an irrevocable state of dilapidation through the disagreement on the part of the patrons, and the ensuing neglect of the disheartened management.

Falling into ruin, the building was by turns claimed by the righteous though fumbling hands of the cities bohemians, drifters, junkies, beatniks and hip queers - all of which there was regrettably no shortage.

Some years later however, the vacancy sign once more flickered cautiously into life, and it was almost inexplicable, for the building appeared in aspect to be in much the same state of decay as the townsfolk had grown so familiar with through the self-successive passage of the passing years.

But be that as it may - this is where our boy had settled, and for but a while it had seemingly sufficed.

He walks out of town before dawn. The traffic lights shimmering back at him in their way upon the tram tracks. Neither cars, nor people could be seen.

He rides the metro alongside the assortment of suits and construction workers - but even they were sparse, worn.

He watches the stations go by, watching the few people on the platforms waiting, boarding and alighting in the cold darkness.

He turns on his seat every so often to look at his bag as it slumps complacent in the galley of the carriage - trying to think where, when, but losing it just the same.

It is still dark when he arrives in the city centre. He hazards his way from station to station, more tired and unenthused than he could have foreseen or supposed.

He skirts by shuttered shops through the stillness, every so often spying out a taxi cab that stalks the sidewalks like a sullen predator of this slumbering megalopolis.

As the boy closes in on his destination his path begins to convene with those of other travelers, all weary and drawn together in their ways, interweaving and engaging through the suffocation of inherent disposition and relucted necessity.

With his cup of coffee cooling beside him he watches the paling sky. A crane materialises from the vacancy before him, adorned with a trailing corporate banner like the obstinate final remnants of a tattered Buddhist prayer flag.

There is fifty minutes till boarding.

He could see people moving behind the net curtains of the hotel across the way - there where on one of the upper floors two small children could be seen parting the light fabric for an aspect upon the gradual dawning of the hard edged streets below.

The city passed by. Behind him now laid the gargantuan industrial scape, scraped in his mind as if some horrific leviathan across all four horizons.

And there before him now there were bridges that spanned the ongoing distance, stretching onwards for the attainment of new vistas, to feel foreign soil beneath the feet.

The water beneath him meanwhile he knows to slosh cruelly, polluted as it is through incessant industrialisation to a depressed and dull alloy.

The sky overhead he sees is a near perfect blue.

The pigeons peck at his feet while the wind whips omnipotently about his hair, enveloping him almost indiscernibly as he surveys his surroundings.

He breathes the blustering air deep, deep into his lungs - taking it in as if by force as he watches the trees all about him both bend and sigh like a mirror to his disheveled locks.

The pigeons pecking at his feet make him want to run across the park and scream. What are those ridiculous things on their heads? What purpose do they serve?

Where is he going?

She looks back at him from her seat smiling.

What is this smile? He thinks.

Engaged as she is in conversation with another, why must she proceed to cast such hopelessly enigmatic glances? Why not rather momentarily pause the discourse with her acquaintance, and make the few steps back to his seat to verbalise her emotions and feelings - whatever it is that she so eagerly hopes to communicate. For as it is, she has so short sightedly left herself and her smiles dangerously open to the straits of misinterpretation, the high seas of perceived insincerity.

The boy can’t seem to configure, he can’t seem to comprehend.

And so he just scrawls into his notebook instead - and he sees that it is good.

So where is he now-where was he then, and indeed where is he anywhere?

He sets the burger down upon the plate before him and considers the mountain view. And before him unfolds the sprawling succession of semi-suburban and suburban streets, where all around there is the incessant buzz and pulse of human activity, that knowing as he knows it, knows no end, and no direction.

The grimace upon his face at present is something indicative of homicidal fury - for there is perhaps a sense that he possesses within him of both the danger and futility of the urban display; a compulsion to contempt for the quasi narcissism that acts out now from a deep seat in the very root of mans mutated nature.

Is it true that he believes that they have nothing better to do with themselves than excessively burden and inflict pain upon one another, that they are ever looking for a way out, though never looking hard enough, or in any case never acting upon what they find, for the fear of what they may feel in the vacancy of suffering, in the disconcerting void of inoccupation?

And so on might he see this go. On - and without dignity.

He was ill today, he had the dark sickness - the sickness that somehow distorted his perceptions, the sickness wherein he himself did not seem to be the same person to himself, and rather more a stranger that he watched upon from a distance; feeling his hands bound in powerlessness to stall the illogical though impossibly invaliable actions of this crass and morally crooked imposter.

Everything was indescribably off in some way, tainted quite clearly though by nothing of external nature, but apparently - and he very well knew it seems - solely by himself, by his mind.

Such is what he mutters beneath his breath in any case.

But what is this disturbance, this strange pain that plagued him so, this pain that is suffered not so much as pain, nor indeed the gut wrenching anguish of an unrequited love - for it is in fact quite the opposite.

He was confused - and we'll allow that he was perhaps fearful, in fact very much so. Because the truth was young students that he was terrified - both of himself and the innumerable and hopelessly infathomable forces at work in the world around him, whose intent was so very dubious. And as it happens he was beginning to see them all as the same thing - the mechanics of his mind and those of the external world that is.

It would not be an at all far cry to suggest that he was perhaps well on his way to experiencing some sort of major psychotic break - and that perhaps he was indeed very much there as it was.

The clerk resembled a rat more than he did so a man - this much was clear from the beginning. It was also clear as a result that both he and the boy were denied from the outset any promise of companionship, or dare I even say it - amorous relations.

For what one typically finds with these rat people is that their behaviour is indeed very much reflective of their countenance. There is, need I say, no need for I or even you students, to consult or refer to any learned texts upon this subject to attest to my statements here. It is after all a fairly established fact, and is indisputably accepted internationally I hope in this far slung period of our evolution as an intelligent species, that people who resemble rats, or indeed any other given specimen of the rodent genus, can be more or less expected to behave as if they indeed were.

On this point I need say no more.

He faced him from across the counter. $12 for a paper back novel - A Heart So White by Javier Marias.

Already our boy knows that he is going to have to paste over the photograph of Marias on the back cover as it is insufferably repulsive. he can see the great author himself standing there smirking in his self-satisfied way like a brother to this specimen behind the desk - both of them hunched, slippery handed intelligentsia of the literary fold.

Though of course our boy wasn’t willing to admit that his antipathy to the type that these two literates represented lay in the fact that they were in-cannily resemblant to his own image.

It had admittedly been awhile since he’d looked in the mirror.

Psychotic pigeons circled wildly overhead, locked violently in an ever transient and tentative ally/assailant relation with the squalling shoals of the local gulls.

He runs for cover with his $1 coffee, knowing like an axiom that he is going to be subject to an unprovoked and passionless defecation by this boisterous rabble - just as he knows much the same as a fact that he is going to be hit in the face by a ball whenever passing a soccer game.

 But, alas, there is no shelter.

 Yet just as if there were, he flees the scene scott free and surfaces from it unscathed. This however, he processes without surprise.

He just wonders around with these endless days endlessly at his disposal. Without occupation and tangible contact they render to the conscious mind as valueless, and auto-erase as such.

He walks nowhere. With just a coffee in hand he staggers, raising the cup intermittently to his wind cracked lips whilst being ever conscious of the fact that he dare not spill a drop.

While licking his lips, he takes a right.

 And spills a drop.

He sees his old boss again, crossing his path - they cross one another’s.

He sees him every once in a while, a few times a day, or every other day a few times.

The ex-civil servant turned chef.

He’s seemingly also walking around without aim, and likewise nestling a chain store coffee to his coat padded breast.

The two occasionally glance at one another as they pass, not registering surprise so much as an acknowledgement of their mutual strangeness and misplacement.

When they worked together several months ago, or rather when they worked together almost a year ago now, and in a wholly separate country; they never really communicated with one another beyond what was necessitated in the course of an evening’s service in a busy kitchen. Our boy was merely a dishwasher, the lowliest of kitchen positions. An average evening for him entailed a series of tediously repetitive, though fast paced and consequently physically and mentally demanding tasks that required the unwavering dedication, and strength of spirit in the face of pain, as that of the self-flagellator. For leagues of adrenalin were fired incessantly throughout the ravaged territories and provinces of his sinuous and wrought person - enough arguably to disregulate the correct functioning of the fight or flight reflex, and so engender unpleasant emotional flashbacks for some years to come.

Meanwhile however, the boss was positioned way over in the other corner, applying himself defiantly to the operation of the grill; flash frying pak-choi and tossing the odd pitta bread on for a toasting between tending to business demands at large, known to him by such names as accounts, book keeping, payroll and the like.

And so it was that now when they looked upon one another in the street, that they didn’t seem to possess this shared work history, that they bore no such relation to one another. Though it is likely because early on in this work relationship the two had co-consentedly resigned themselves to the fact that since their separate positions in the restaurant didn’t require them to associate with one another to any great length, they therefore needn’t acknowledge one another as actually existing as human beings.

It might come as no great surprise to you now then when I tell you that the boss didn’t recognise the young man, who so frequently appeared before him in this period, as one of his former employees. Though still, he may have looked somewhat familiar - perhaps reminiscent of someone he’d paid for sex once - but above all else he was just another stranger on the street.

Not knowing where to go now, the boy sets off in the direction of the park exit in an unconscious, almost fumbling manner. When it begins to rain he makes an abrupt dash for the public toilets he’d emerged from but moments before. However, once inside he quickly realises, though slightly less startling than in what had been his first visit, that there is no roof on the building and that it is well and truly yawning upwards to receive the wide open sky in all its majesty and splendour. But as our boy is finding, this is a flawed design- somewhat like the climbing frame at the beach -only this is less forgivable, for it was a sure case of short sightedness on the part of the architect and the city councilor for giving the plans the proverbial thumbs up.

It was an abomination.

He made a hopeful though realist bolt for the female toilets that lay just across the open passage that sat also roofless and now fairly brimmed with water. Much to his dismay he finds that the architect and the city were fascistically stoic in their system of design, for indeed the female toilets were a mirror to the gents: roofless and fully furnished right down to the inclusion of the Day-Glo syringe deposit boxes on the urine flecked walls.

When the rain at last abates he makes to depart from the now existentially suffocating confines of the park, that the public toilets seem to be both the enclosing and ever encroaching perimeters of. For he seeks now to know the nearby strip mall, and within that the inner mall and its afforded warmth and shelter.

For he knows that there too is the supermarket with its luminescent aisles that overflow with ripe, rustling produce from all four corners of this lucky country.

And there he knows that he will undoubtedly attain the supplements of satiation that his stomach so eagerly yearns for, and at once frisks him on towards.

For there there will be bread rolls laden liberally with their nameless and nutritious variety of seeds, and grains too of all shapes and sizes, that will find him hot and soft, fresh as they are from the baker’s oven.

And then there will be the prime domestic bananas, suggestive, though none the less delicious, grown within a tropical clime to sit both proud and relatively gargantuan to any he has encountered hitherto in his short, though not altogether un-eventful life.

And so on he goes, from the park that sits somehow reminiscent in his mind with undertones of the gothic and macabre, and away and onto life, onwards to the nucleus, to the sanctuary and relative solace that is all afforded in the sanctified brick and mortar, of the once infamous Acland Arcade.

He is disturbed by himself, by everything he says and everything he does and thinks.

What is going on? He may ask. But he cannot know.

Nor could he know if he were a professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge with well over thirty years of hands on experience, as it were, in the field. For it is the subjectivity of one’s condition that inhibits this - he cannot see the forest for the trees, as they say.

However true that may be, and however true he himself knows it to be - for he indeed does - he still cannot help but rigorously self-assess at every given opportunity with his amateurish auto-didacticisms.

And it of course goes without saying that when he does eventually fall staggering, or perhaps restrained and dragged into the hands of a psychiatrist, the resultant perversions of his auto-probing and his held belief that he himself is something of a psychiatric professional, will make him all that much harder a patient to manage and treat than he already would have been; given both the notoriously troublesome nature and severity of his condition.

                                                                      *

In the lobby of his hotel he can be seen in the bathroom there studying himself in the mirror.

It is true that he has some knowledge of our presence, abstract though it may be, and as of yet very much fleeting in its comprehension. But still, the fact remains that this inkling of information resides within him, and that is interesting for us as it is, perhaps surprisingly so, for him too - though as a given, equally disturbing.

Yes, he is on the very cusp of insanity - on the cuff as it were, if you may be so kind as to permit me the liberty of metaphor. For there on the cuff there sit frayed threads, scarcely visible to the naked eye unless viewed directly in a beam of uninhibited white light. And it is on these threads that he has yondered upon and at once yearned for. For there he is, transiting upon a teetering course from the known and certain, from the very fabric of reason and rationality, and onwards to where below and above and all around is the blissless abyss.

And why oh why, young students, would a boy willingly place himself in this horrifically unsettling predicament? Why? For this is his dream! - the longly waited for iconoclasm; a would be seer at last begiven his vision, an artist swimming deep in the unearthly torrents of his uncapped genius, a Columbus with his America - an explorer requited after all with his blessed terra incognita that he has suffered so dearly for.

Although, the lands that he believes he is crossing into in his uncertain and intermittent increments bear little relevance to anyone but himself. For if it is prestige he seeks ultimately, and believes he is soon due, then he is mistaken. For though he believes he is crossing into, and at once dismantling theories and long held conceptions of human consciousness and the nature of reality -even unravelling the truth of existence!- he is again, wrong. For this is no zenith of metaphysical exploration - this is insanity, fantasy.

The legwork of all this however is done in what appears to be a very much indeliberate manner. This we could say is how it might appear to him, which is to say the deeply seated I of the conscious mind. For though he may peddle in this direction to some affect, in reality he hasn’t the slightest idea where he is going.

As it stands he exists simultaneously in two worlds - which to a degree you might say we all do, those being the inner and outer worlds, objective reality and the insular landscape of the psyche. However in our subject’s case this is remarkably more pronounced.

He has knowledge of both worlds, clear as realities to him, or at any rate present. But what isn’t quite so clear is the distinction between the two - whereas for you and I there very much is, and where there once was for him too. There was once also an understanding, or perhaps acceptance, which has now seemingly all but diminished.

The lines are fading rapidly between the two worlds. Reason is breaking down to give way to fantasy, in which his two worlds are becoming increasingly permeated and confused in - whereas before it was only arguably the case with one, the inner. And it is from here that there floods the unfortunate distortion.

He himself, the seeker of truth, begins to question the boundaries beyond and within him, as he sees them fall apart quite literally before his eyes. He wonders whether they were ever meant to be in place to begin with. What force imposed them, what upholds them? And what does the arrangement of letters in their namesake really mean to represent, if anything at all?

And in the midsts of all this, he attests still to the collective slavery of all men.

He sees the other young man sitting on the impromptu sea wall of algae slick boulders by the shimmering shoreline. He is there fly fishing, seemingly at peace, seemingly at ease.

Our boy is out for a walk, it is sunset but the day’s heat hangs thick and heavy in the air to effect something of a Turkish bath.

The sweat runs down his face, as he appears to consider the many interdependent dimensions of the scene before him.

There above him is the fire in the sky that sinks with a steady increment into the straits. There is the contented fisherman with his bowing rod and the murmurous waters at his feet indicative of a potential catch now baited below.

And there at the ground where our boys feet progress there lies a dense and onwardly stretching ocean of grass that is wholly foreign, though not in the least hostile to him.

But he isn’t seeing it - he isn’t seeing any of it.

So where is he?

And where is his mind?

From the doorway a voice is asking him how he is. This he hears clearly, albeit from some distance. He thinks that he is smiling as he replies that he is...good. But his face is severity incarnate.

The visitor shuffles awkwardly upon their feet, they ask our boy how he’s finding it out here, you know here, as in here in this open country.

The boy says its...just fine.

And there he is lying on his bed with that Marias book in his hands, on which we can see now a piece of card has indeed been pasted over the photo of the author.

A cup of coffee sits steaming silently at his side. He raises it to his emotionally vacant face and sips as he says...this place is...good.

But where is he?

Almost an hour passes before he realises that his visitor is no longer before him, though it may have seemed very much as if it were five seconds or less.

He looks up to see the open door before him that now quietly frames the hallway. While reaching for his coffee, he finds it cold.

He senses his presence from some distant point of the stop motion fiction that he dips in and out of. There in the quiet anonymity of the bus that steals through the thick indigo of the desert night - he knows the crunch of sediment beneath his feet, the stars that hover just so over the shackled tin roof of the roadhouse gas station where he sees the driver steal behind the blockhouse for a ponderous perusal of the premises.

And the driver, he is old - coming up to his sixtieth year now. Though our boy is young. So young that he may be afforded these momentary, though increasingly prolonged, absences of presence, wherein his peers may deliver a jovial slap to his back, summoning him to, and call him a dreamer and a romantic.

But such individuals and their intrusions settle as mere apparitions in the dust that is left behind by the turning wheels of the bus.

And then there is only the night.

We can see him now lying upon his bed - another room.

The man next-door is throwing his wife’s head into the tiled wall of the bathroom that adjoins the two rooms.

Our boy sits there staring at the wall. For a moment he thinks that they are perhaps having sex - but then he recognises the sound, that smell of violence, and he thinks that he can see blood emerging from beneath the bathroom door.

But he can’t be sure, and so he rises with a rustle of the bed sheets and finds that it was merely a shadow - a projection of the unconscious mind.

He taps his knuckles gently against the bathroom door, and he can hear the woman whimpering in the sudden stillness for the brief moment before the man says YEAH?

The boy lowers his head and retreats as softly as he can back to the bed, where he again picks up his Marias book with trembling hands.

He hears the couple in the room behind his head begin having sex.

He finds himself walking in the desert. Without warning and without welcome, finding the once incessant hum of the city subsiding for a new vibration to burden its memory in its wake.

For the silent roar reigns now - and it sits all around, making itself manifest as a visual also by the unbroken bareness and stark desolation of the landscape.

But then there emmits a rustle from within what was once vegetation. A large dog proceeds to present itself and settles in to transit the trail that the boy himself advances upon.

Without once acknowledging the boys presence, the animal nonchalantly crosses the path, and clambers up the rock laden hillside that sits baking before it in the midday sun.                         As it very quickly becomes enveloped by it, the boy pauses to perhaps consider this disconcerting transition - the perhaps metaphysical implications of mirage, the validity of human perception.

He steps outside again, wincing at his failure once more as he descends the fire escape to once again reckon with the dank rodent ridden squalor below.

The TV set is on above him, unfolding news footage that reveals all the horrors of a faraway place in full 1080hp clarity.

Before him burn the world’s jungles and deserts and cities. They commune a paroxysm through the artful replaying and splicing of footage- a cry for aid in paraphrase, the concision of atrocity relays re run at preternatural pace to induce optimum affect.

The janitor sits to his right at the breakfast table, his heavy callused hands folded before his cereal as he chews with an indeliberate, bovine like method. He too glares fixedly upon the apparently unaffecting scenes - though for but a second or so, the boy believes that it could very well be his homeland.

Outside on the close streets it is raining yet again. The Malays circle the oil slicked puddles in their glorified rickshaws, pathetically directing the dispersion of their precious calories upon the middle classes as they weave their stuttering courses through the many faceted inlets of the Rundle Mall.

And omnipresent is the handsome voice of Dale Brick; the ex-television actor of once daytime viewing notoriety, whose hair presently does not move - appearing to be something more lifeless and supine upon his head than a car struck possum. He parades up and down, ever so slightly sheltered in the entranceway of the Manson Arcade, proudly professing into his megaphone with expansive, sweeping gestures the therapeutic implications of thoughtless and frenzied consumption: YOU ARE WILDERBEASTS AT THE WATERING HOLE LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. YOU ARE WILDERBEASTS AND YOU WILL FUCK AND DEFECATE WHERE YOU EAT AND DRINK, AND SO CONTAMINATE THE VERY RUDIMENTS OF YOUR SUSTENANCE. THIS IS THE WAY...STEP INSIDE...

The boy descends to the food court and beelines straight on through to the supermarket in the rear. He stalls by the refrigerator where there lie cellophane choked offerings of pumpkin and other seasonal vegetables. Holding a slither in one hand, he makes to weigh up the nutritional merit of such produce in what is his now barely conscious mind.

Is he talking to someone as he walks around? No? Is he angry?

Seemingly some Korean students got a little too close for comfort over there in the cereal aisle, or in any case obstructed his predetermined course from the glimmering arcade and back to his slick mildewed cell.

He looks like he is reaching for a bag of oats when another sets to lay their hand on them first. The Korean girl looks up at him smiling as their hands almost touch, but he’s not looking - for he can hardly contain himself it seems. He has to pace off down the aisle and wing through the frozen foods section amidst a mumbling harangue of questionably directed abuse before he can safely return to claim the oats.

Though for a second it is indeed true that he was entertaining the idea of hurling his basket at the enlivened congregation and splitting from the store altogether - it would have been the greatest art statement since 9/11. But what did he really expect the outcome of this loose foray to be?

Were the people in the dairy aisle eyeing him with circumspection?

He discerns a voice through the darkness.

...hello, he says

...I’m fine, he replies.

And there he is in the shower, knowing his John Thomas as no foreign instrument beneath his beseeching gaze.

He grasps it as one would the hand of an old acquaintance - a slap on the back, a knowing smile and conspiratorial bat of the eye.

And there he is in the mirror, now only half recognising himself as himself - the voice behind the already grey and drained face. And here he senses once again this brooding detachment; the walls slick all about him and the tangled knots of pubic hair in the drains looking up at him like the condescending, cod-like eyes of Javier Marias.

The boy’s eyes look dead and vacant before him.

He runs a tongue across the cluttered clusters of ulcers in a mouth that isn’t his.

Is he going to rape her?

She glances warily back at him again - is there rape in those empty eyes of his?

Empty - he drops back with a slight lowering of his pace, seemingly cautious and ill at ease. He stumbles upon a tree root that reels up out of the asphalt, and the young woman clutches her bag tighter, noticeably quickening her pace.

And her heartbeat is very nearly his. For he can smell her fear as he might do his own - the fetid tang of his penis before the decayed porcelain of the hotel toilets, the thunder both within and beyond the crassly graffitoed walls.

Were they going to rape him?

He sees them advancing towards him, each themselves a projected portent on day release from his own small fiction - an inkling of the immense horror that he can only ever sense, not translate.

Will he fall to his knees now beneath their cruel hands to resign himself to their perverse will? And will his eyes meet there once more the singular sinistry of a spent condom that lies cold and congealed upon the well seasoned concrete? For there it may find him again, sitting ominously charged, as if the final frontier between one plane of consciousness and the infathomable next.

They all crowd into the room with a start - and he watches on in silence as they at once hurry out of their clothes and proceed to frantically fumble with one another’s genitalia.

The women take the men in their mouthes, and he observes with an incongruity of affect, the glistening streams of saliva that trickle down their faces to bead up and cool upon the faint down of their chins.

He leans back his head to look up at the stained and peeling ceiling - while quietly knowing himself as an invisible man; he listens to the wet smacking sounds that dance upon the walls and furniture all about him.

What is he cooking on the stove? Rice, pumpkin?

He seems to believe in the nutritional sufficiency of the meal, whilst also registering from some distance that he is steadily, day by day, slipping into a state of rather severe malnourishment, and at once realising that the effects of that are proving to be wholly detrimental.

The janitor is a paedophile. He believes this as he once believed so incontestably that he was anchored wholly, as it were, in a rational plane of existence - this however, he now clearly doubts.

But what he doesn’t doubt is what he saw through the crack in the janitor’s door the night before last.

We can see him now, our boy, considering the janitor from across the breakfast table. He forks his pumpkin rice into his mouth with a manner of deliberation that requires no further explanation. For what he is trying so ardently to figure, is whether or not he is within his rights to make a citizen’s arrest - or rather whether he possesses gumption enough to take him from behind with his knife when he goes to rinse his dishes at the sink.

What is this sickness - his head, his stomach?

He can’t sleep - why can’t he sleep?

Why must he be bound as he is to pace the room, to stalk the boards right through this starless night?

He feels deep within him now that he is not the person that he once was, that he is slipping, that he has slipped, and to a perhaps much greater extent than may suppose.

As he walks the streets he is beginning to think that he is someone else imagining that they are him - whilst meanwhile, he is imagining that he is someone else.

On the back of the door could be seen the legend: FUCK COMFORT/FUCK MONEY/FUCK AMERICAN DREAMS/FUCK JESUS/AND FUCK YOU/

To the side could be found a somewhat less obstreperous inscription, which read quite simply: the dream is real.

He picks up the book every once in a while and reads a few lines - but it generally fails to hold his attention, for as both a cause and effect, he is unable to suspend his disbelief - and so he levels the book back down, thinking as he does so that it will take him quite literally years to complete it if he carries on this way.

He tries to calculate how long exactly, but this proves difficult, and then he loses track fairly rapidly of what he was actually trying to calculate, and soon falls wearily into thinking about essentially nothing.

And so it is that he sinks into complete self-oblivion, and for all its worth - ceases to exist at all.

The people on the street look strange, they give him strange looks as he passes. This he suspects may very well be due to the manner in which he looks at them, which is perhaps strange. For maybe on some level they can sense that he indeed finds them strange, even deeply disturbing - for he indeed does.

Or rather this ominous feeling all around could be nothing other than projection. Projection.

This he considers, and he begins to feel a low level, though rapidly intensifying, panic creep in.

He sees that there is something in their eyes - he thinks of it as something searching and sinister sitting deep and malign within their minds.

We see him.

He sips the coffee. There he is, sitting in his coat, writing something again into his notebook and seemingly unaware of his surroundings.

What is this he is writing? That he raped and murdered a young prostitute in Tijuana?

What does he mean to imply by this - does he know what such statements would mean for him were they to fall into the hands of an officer of the law?

He looks up now from his work as if to scout the room for witnesses - uneasy as he very well may be of his own psychic fruits.

Though fortunately there are none, it seems, in sight - and so he settles back both to his coffee and the page.

Once he had finally steadied himself, he sat down. His head though however was still spinning and his hands were awash with blood.

Indeed, he sees at last that it was a heinous error to step in here and expect anything less.

His head slips to his lap, and the weight begins to lift as his eyes fall heavily to a close.

Brimming, sinking.

                                                        ******

I came back to the cereal spilled across the kitchen floor - a broken trail that led from the door back to the crumpled box by the oven.

I found her in the bathtub, an electrical cord leading the way to the still tepid water where faint coils of smoke permeated the room, rising up from the now innate vessel of her body.

I pulled the hair back from her face with a gentle hand, revealing her now unearthly eyes rolled back into the recesses of her fractured mind - instinctively I made to close her eyelids with the tips of my fingers, wanting someone to cover the body, wanting someone to call the police.

I watched the still land that lay outside the window, punctuated silently by the woeless progression of a suburban driver and his impeccable automobile through the leafy curves of the streets - an assurance of human harmony in its own slumbered way.

The children were at school, but I had to go -– I knew I had to go; someone had to call the authorities.

I can hear them coming, I can see the cellphone ringing endlessly in the cavernous lap of the passenger seat - the flashing screen, nomadic elk passing over the blacktop, gas stations selling corn dogs, motels, all-nite diners, clear night roads right through to Vermont.

I traced my way back out - along down the stairs, alone impounding the scattered cereal to a fine dust under foot.

I could still hear the car engine turning as it waited in the drive, purring, hungering for the course with which it was born to unconsciously comply.

I paused with one hand on the door handle and the other on my heart - just to see if it was still beating.

And for a moment I almost thought it wasn't.

Littered cereal densely laden upon the blacktop, a child with his arms outstretched and begging for his mother.

I plow him down.

The wheels turning hot on the road, the palms blurring to burn to steel at my side like the chamber of a gun barrel.

And I’m firing on white hot right through to Vermont - Vermont and straight on through.

Mummy’s, dead, dead, dead.

I sweat coarsely in the eaves - coarsely draining blood like tears from a soon to be corpse.

We had two pipes and a rock- someone flipped a blade and I saw it glimmer with the glisten of a new sun upon the periphery - but when I called out no one listened. The dealer took it to the neck before me, yelping out like a dog with its tail slammed in a door, and sinking to a heap. While meanwhile I made a run with the ring still resounding in my ears, tripping up again and again with all the colors and sounds blaring out at me, time flickering and faltering, speeding and slowing.

I began to scramble blindly - concussed, I found myself on what I took to be a fire escape, feeling caged in, the wires and the lights closing in, the beast tearing down upon the barred entrance - locked and loaded and with his teeth and eyes flashing before me. And I could only close mine, praying, and praying out to a god whose name I endowed with a benediction only now.

I cried and shook, praying for myself, praying for life.

When at last the shaking subsided, I looked around to find that dawn was breaking. Silence reigned and slipped imperceptibly into the meditative song of birds.

A weight lifted.

Murmuring derangedly in the corner and foaming at the mouth, I felt myself to be bleeding - while when I finally faced the mirror, I could see that my hairline was receding.

Vermont and straight on through.

I yonder for the dust country, wide open lands and mesas rising up to meet the eye of the eternal sun.

I want to know canned red wine swill streaming from my lips and into the slipstream when zipping through another small town - I yearn for the liberty of the pioneers, the ragged romance that modern man has projected upon it.

I dream of canned spam and beans cooked on the fire - eating them straight out the tin and feeling them sit on the tongue.

I pulled into another rest stop - reaching out for a Mars bar, I saw my own image moving before me on a crackling monitor.

I felt on my hip for the .22, making a mental note to check the chamber in the car - I visualized myself pulling back the hammer and hearing it click concertingly into engagement.

I would watch myself in the wing mirror as I pulled out of the gas station. Winking - I would have half an eye for myself and half an eye ever primed on the weapon beside me. And the other for the road - like a hawk, like an eagle.

I stepped out of the car, the dust still stirring around me, the smell of road and rubber hanging acrid and heavy in my sinuses like a slice and a slither of Americana.

I wiped my brow and looked out across the flats - all still save for the shimmering heat.

I turned once more to face again the road. Looking up I saw vultures circling overhead in the white hot sky - whereas below and across, cars beat endlessly upon the sprawl of the interstate, shattering the mirage, and so taking away all I had - the road, the moment - my heart and soul.

I looked through the passenger window to see if the gun was where I'd left it.

HOT CHICKEN: signs reading COME INSIDE - JUST LIKE MUMMA USED TO MAKE IT.

Slipping into a booth - it squeaks like I’d rather it wasn’t, engendering speculative glances from all the patrons.

The waitress swiftly proceeds to descend upon me. Howdy sir - her overflowing rack of melons come tumbling down.

Coffee?

I look deep into her eyes... I said I’ll have it black ma'am.

She moves away - while meanwhile I fumble for occupation. I feel my hands yondering onwards beneath the table in the great American tradition, reaching out unwaveringly into the infathomable distance.

Honing in on gum, I reel up with a start - my eyes darting up to the steady aluminum clock on the wall, seeking the solace of its' predictable mechanical precision.

As I level myself back down an old timer in Johnny Cash get up meets my eyes. He nods his head to me as he chews his gum, his hair combed right back - a washed up greaser.

He sits there bloated, his fat rear overhanging the seat of his swivel stool like the chiseled countenances of Mt Rushmore.

How long has he been frequenting this selfsame haunt for now - dragging out his docile reptilian wife to sit faithful at his side in her faded Graceland tee?

I am moving through a hallway, warily negotiating step by step the waxed tiled surface that leads through to the bathroom facilities of this establishment.

I pass through a door that says GUYS and feel my gut warm as the porcelain urinal meets my eye.

There it sits on the wall before me - glistening almost celestially, adorned as it is with its own chrome handled flusher.

Polished to perfection - I take in a lungful of comfortingly sterile air, an almost carnally satisfying concoction of both bleach and turpentine.

This is the best place I have been in a while - I smile.

I begin to feel my heart go - something awry in my nether regions, a hole in the pit of my stomach - dull churning sensations.

I checked myself - took stock of the world beyond the windscreen. I looked at the calm faces looking back as they zipped by, all on the road to somewhere, index fingers pressed perhaps musingly perhaps to their pursed lips - there for but an instant, and then gone.

I watched my feet at the pedals - looked across at the claw on the gear shift. It seemed detached, inhuman.

The eyes in the rearview mirror looked hollow and heavy - seeing myself screaming backwards at myself in the silence of the a/c regulated interior.

My face sat as still before me as that of a euthanized fetuses.

The ride was hungry. I pulled into the gas station and immersed myself in the harsh dryness of the small air conditioned shop.

Discerning a small greeting from the clerk at the desk, I lowered my head in ignorance, feigning the role of a man whose life is too busy to take note of such menial nuances in his environment.

Eyeing the candy imploringly, I braved engagement, and laid my hand delicately upon the stellarly shimmering wrapper of a SPACECHOCO.

I knew I was out of this world.

In a heap they tried to ease their tears together. As I paced they made futilely to loosen the ties that bound them within this ill fortune of unconscious design.

It was hopeless; they had no idea where they were. The boy watched on as I nervously stumbled around, while with the barely concealed desperation of a door to door salesman, he tried to pass off upon the girl that he was in possession of some sort of sixth sense.

He said he knew where they were, that they’d get out of here, she'd see - he could see.

I would have laughed if I wasn’t so scattered and hounded so ceaselessly as I was by the punitive apparitions all about me. For I knew as little about the whereabouts of our location as the two youths, and likewise whether or not they’d be making it out alive.

For there I was, smoking profusely, rushing my hands through my hair in anguish - loading, unloading and reloading the gun with something like religious mania.

Though the boy kept saying they’d pull through.

The sun wore my skin so thin. Blasted as I was with razor sharp sand, I felt the wind and dirt bite deep my eyes.

Through an ever so slightly finger spread hand, I took to viewing the terrain.

I was sun drunk, sand blind. The vultures closed in on their prey, in legion as they were with Satan’s perverse will and the cruel hearted fates.

I suffered in drought - no water, no light. I abandoned the totalled car miles back - though walking in circles I knew I’d soon enough stumble upon its barren chassis once again.

And there it was as I said. And there I was - both of us neutral on the cusp of death.

Out here there are echoes of the men forged from failure and fluoride fortified water. They are passing ships that pass with lowered heads in the blinking neon nights. Those who know each step ahead upon a sidewalk square as the entrances to new realms of intennable despair. Their destinies unfold to meander through a ceaseless cycle of degradation and self-abasement - while they know too that the trail opens wide at the many taverns and tittie bars that are littered liberally across the stretching vistas of this open country like diseased semen across their sun bleached motel bed sheets. And hollow now to them are the tunes on the radio - for with the sticky linoleum of their elect tenements under foot, they know things that none of these light footed rock'n'rollers could ever hope to understand.

No one was going anywhere until my dick was sucked - they thought that it was money I wanted. I had them down there on the floor begging before me. Nestling the gun just below my chin, they begged for my life as well as theirs.

I told them pray.

Saturday. I pass through another small desert town, the wrinkly veterans out on their porches saluting me over their well-watered lawns.

'An American!' they cry '-he’s one of us!'

And so it is that behind the wheel of a patriotic automobile, I see I very well may have all America on my side - a friend in every town.

Some of them tell me that this is what they fought that war for.

She told me to call her Sally.

-Ok Sally, how you going? It’s been a very dry day hasn’t it?

-Oh yes, dry indeed.

-Must be the rain hey?

-Yeah, it’s kinda funny isn’t it – I mean I can be out here on the corner with, you know, my thumb stuck out getting soaked through to the skin, and like, these johns can’t come along to pick me up in their nice warm cars.

-Maybe the weather has some bearing on the male libido.

-Perhaps. You know, I actually think I saw something along those lines on Oprah a little while back, last year I think. I could just be imagining it though...

-Oh I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

-What do you mean?

-Get the fuck in the car Sally.

I ordered an Elvis burger at the diner - a slippery slope. The staff seemed to resent the patrons for ordering it, as if it was something obscene placed upon the menu to only jest and provoke.

When I placed the order the waitress took me back somewhat by way in which she raised her voice - oh having an Elvis burger are we?! What are you, sick?

Hey look everybody, look who’s having an Elvis burger - can you believe this guy? Who does he think he is – Elvis!?

By this point the whole diner’s attention is focused upon me. The staff from the kitchen have also poured out from their stations to get a view of the criminal amongst them.

This also unfortunately included the manager, a fairly heavy set man in a short sleeved shirt and standard issue restaurateur black tie, who briskly made his way towards me, seized me by the collar and dragged me into the parking lot.

...don’t you ever fucking think about coming back here again - you people make me fucking sick, sick...An Elvis burger…Jesus Christ……

Fumbling the keys into the ignition, I felt my heart pounding. I pulled away to see everyone’s faces pressed up against the diner window, scowling out at me and pounding their clenched fists into their open palms as if to illustrate my still pending fate.

And as I pulled the car round to face the highway - I remembered that my wife was dead.

My condition was becoming more and more apparent - I turned to the gun more often at food stops, slipping it into my pants just in case. While thoughts of moving were never far from observations of the landscape.

Locked in ceaseless conflict, forever a slave to the torch that I bore - I saw myself wounded and dazed, wondering lost through a boundless land - an American man to the very bone.

I watched a car turning in from my window. I pulled the curtains shut in defiance to it with my cold 4am stare.

I knew him - the driver. Knowing him to be both one and the same as the rest - his feet progressing as something trained across the gravel forecourt, then there he would stand at the office, jesting tiredly with the yawning receptionist - and then with keys jingling in his hands he would step along the boards to occupy the elect room seven, there to fold out upon the creaking bed as yet another child of the grave.

I left the curtain and got down on the floor. I felt anxious and began to pick at the lint on the carpet, noting as I did so the various accumulations of boot scuffs on the skirting. In one corner it seemed someone had inscribed their name or initials. Though when I moved in for closer inspection, I found that it was rather a collection of numbers - 26/08/94.

It was just a date on a wall.

Life had slipped away somewhere in the tireless succession of days. For some time I swear that I could still see it in the rearview mirror. It laughed and smirked, mocking the one who rides away, mocking those who evade as a rivet through the motels and travel stops, their car tires screeching endlessly upon the endless roads.

Was the mistake my own?

I had to push these thoughts out - I was driving. Driving lone across the land - maybe looking for a home.

DRIFTERS ARE SCUM.

I see that money expresses a dynamic of fear - a deep seated disdain for collective enterprise.

I see a roach scuttle back and behind; the flickering light overhead has me reeling within myself and feeling such fear. Though a fear easy to forget - easy enough to have one foot out on the forecourt and find it two just as soon.

Through the sun I move back and forth - from the car to the door and back again; driving weary upon brittle earth.

He told me that they were passing by in an endless night. He had been writing on top of his refrigerator all day like Thomas Wolfe, and had so lost track of the progression of the sun, neglecting the grocery run from his cabin to the town that he was just making now.

And then there I was, riding alone, when I saw him with his thumb stuck out by the side of the road. He asked me what state this was, and I asked him if he was high.

Though he said just concussed, and mumbled out something about Eugene Gant.

There was nothing that you could have sold me. What I could see was the sun dried jerky of road kill at my feet, the roar of the passing cars and trucks, streaming endlessly by as if there was any direction at all.

I’d been sitting there awhile toying with suicide - nothing serious though, just a quart of whisky thundering round my mind, augmenting the already distorted reality before me.

And I knew myself very well in that moment as being one of those who have been denied the luxury of a botched suicide attempt, a cry for help.

I told her to get in. I knew that cunt from a mile off. I said do you like my friend, I'm not messing around - get the fuck in the trunk. Yes this gun is loaded - I’m not fucking around, do you think I’m fucking around - who the fuck do you think I am. I’m Daddy Dave - Daddy Dave never fucks around.

We ended up driving some way together. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship you might say - the two of us becoming the three of us - the three of us riding out west with the tang of vagabondage thick in the air all around us.

Gant didn’t find out that she was a hooker until we'd made San Diego. I could see that stung him to the quick, undermining every cherished moment they’d spent in one another’s trembling arms.

I said, Gant, don’t you know that this is the Wild West baby!?

Dope or coke? I think I’ll go for both - in fact I’m sure. I’ll roll up a white widow in these here papers. The irony isn’t lost on me - I almost smile.

reclining in cheap plastic patio furniture that seems fit to break - it crosses my mind that the stars are nothing more than splinters in what may be an otherwise perfect sky.

I take long drags on the reefer - knowing a taste of heaven when I close my eyes.

I awake in shivers, the carnal intent incinerated upon my body like an indictment.

Looking out at the gluttonous sag of the moon, my eyes pan the room to reluctantly fall upon the two of them in the whimpering heap of their fallen corner.

I sighed with a deep discontent- knowing with the incontestability of an axiom that it was time to throw some more paint at the canvas.

They’ll tow the car in five days. No more motel room and no more gas - no more money.

My home is now the ignoble forecourt, the soiled backseat of the Pontiac.

My regret is my wounded pride, the weaving of a noose from woe and the perceived judgement of inferiority from their glazed animal eyes.

They are towing the car in five days.

Anything - a head full of lead. A carrier bag to put the towns guard dogs to sleep and out of their misery. I’ll take an empty stomach of barbiturates, a fistful of dollars - the eyeless moon. I’ll take an abandoned parking lot in which to scatter my wicked bones, a sickly crown of thorns, the final pickings of meat from a cancer choked songbird.

I’ll take anyone.

Cats with slunken backbones slink endlessly through the garbage strewn alleys, reeking of spoiled meat and excrement.

I clasp my hands over my mouth in the first dousings of rain, feeling them upon my puckered flesh like the mercy of gasoline - and I see that it washes.

While as I say this, somewhere in another sense I perceive the imminence of a sweeping tide of negativity that will at once consume and forever banish.

I choke on my own words.

SAVE MONEY.

I couldn’t get them out of my head. Sick and bloody -– I kept retching up into the bowl.

Too much white widow - my trousers soiled with the pathetic mementos of pay-per-view pornography.

I don’t even know why I took them.

I told Sally about the fallen men, the travelers in their diner booths shivering over their fifty cent coffee and thinking about the next ride.

I told her about the perfect streets and the perfect moments; wood smoke hanging thick in the cool and crisp air.

I told her about turning up my collar in the rain, the attainment of oneness and absolution of self - my chest heaving in the early dusk.

And I told her about the shoe in the middle of the road and the body beneath the car.

I spoke candidly of all things - describing a dialogue of discontent, the detachment from myself, and the systematic, self-sustaining denial of the rest.

I watched the blood flow from the wounds, spreading them ever so slightly with my hand to accommodate the exorcism - my eyes growing heavier all the while.

And I could swear it was almost over - my head on my torso there and the delectation of a sweet void sweeping in like a spring breeze.

I told him to step back, that he was messing with a dark mind - step back boy.

I watched him hazarding the room like one on bare feet crossing glass. I told him step back, back, back from my shattered psyche. Did he want to become me? Did he want his bones hanging heavier in his skin than a nemesis of gravity?

I told him leave.

I know I will move again - I can’t stop. Addicted as I am to this incessant stimuli and misery, I move in order to elude the inevitable.

Though still I yearn to watch it fall all about me.

I see a mirror in my own hands - in my own hands I whip up the tragedy, weaving my own narrative through this hollow mistake.

Someone ought to get this on film; me, breathless and bleeding till the last.

The .22 was where?

Has mother baked cookies for you?

You can almost smell them as you step out of the car - out of the cold and into a comfortable life where death is forever pushed back and denied.

For here there are no hard winds that tear across the living floor - no sharp sand biting unforgivingly into your sun puckered skin.

Will lay down your wicked bones here?

Here where the air is forever a moderate twenty two and the TV never cools. A life of comfort, the all concerting coziness of unconsciousness

They sleep the sleep of death with open eyes - see them now.

And they are for each second as the rope around their neck pull tight.

Heinously aware, though smiling on just the same in their insane suffocation - forever unbribed slaves to their messageless messiahs.

I told him it was .22 caliber, that I was going Mexico way. He asked me if I’d shot it before, and I told him about the spic with the woman’s mail – I shot him twice, I said - that there was no reprimand, that I felt pretty good inside.

Was the USA the greatest country in the world?

Yes it was sir - I said it was the best.

I awake in the night again with chest pains - bones that ache heavy and cold.

I reel upwards to the sound of gunfire on the TV set, something of a bourgeois borealis that stirs me from my slumber with a panic.

While keeling over, I fall apart with dry coughs that shatter my frozen ribs - though despite the agony, I am in turn somewhat warmed agreeably by these fruits of my own decline.

Only 7am and already on my second beer. young Katherine hot at the heels and passing by, her wide open dress trailing behind like some flowing mane of hair torn across a mesa.

Taking shallow sips and shuffling my feet. Watching the sidewalk warm before me. I feel the eastern sun rising upon my bare, burnt neck, my bare broken head.

Been up since 5am - shuffled out of the cold dirt, the torn tarp, and into the blue dawn.

I could see it there; hard and still, feeling my stubble with my cracked hands and digging around in my pockets for change as I yawned as luxuriously as a new born.

I stumbled away from the camp and into the open land and the open sounds that resounded at once eerie and familiar to my ear. I myself a soul with its doors ripped wide open and the breeze just passing through me so naturally. Knowing it as both a ragged and passionless primordial force while something carnal throbbed and reared its decrepit head in my body.

I stepped into the cool a/c regulated interior of the 24hour liquor land, feeling its air so cool and familiar.

Now Katherine at the signpost. Her gleaming golden face spread wide across as a blessing for all those who journey inside.

Golden brown desert girl that’s never worn a pair of shoes in her life, hair like straw framing those flashing blue eyes that sit there as something more serene than the Central Pacific, like something you could dive right on into and never return again.

And you can see her right there, that young little thing. Out here on a bench at 7am, out here in the ever so slightly stirring street, out there in the wild blue yonder - right here by your side and all around.

Katherine everywhere - Katherine deep down in my blood pulsing like a drum that I can tap out the rhythm to with my feet. And it spells her name – I can hear it in my ears, I write seized by her vitality, by her youth.

I am possessed by that girl - Katherine. A beacon of salvation burning bright out here in the lonesome wilderness of this fallen man, with his six pack and fallen dreams.

A train tears by - someone hollering out someone’s name.

The screens on the stores shooting up, signs reading DIRT! flickering into life as the shutters on all the houses burst open and the inhabitants spill out with a dull roar upon the streets.

And there I am somewhere, painted across the backdrop, splattered out on the margins, on the crooked courses and perches.

Blackened, faded eyes - pale face – I am there, always there.

Though somewhat less poignant now.

I shake the dust out of my boots, watching it fall as a sharp snow upon the asphalt.

Slipping out of my clothes, I slipped between the covers for what would prove to be the last time in a motel.

I watched the door and the ceiling with trepidation, waiting as I was for Satan and his legion to come tearing down upon me and lay waste to the relative sanctuary that I had found afforded in the first five minutes of a fresh motel room.

I lit a cigarette and began to weep - how did it get to this?

His head spilled all over the sticky garbage strewn ground - the place reeked of ammonia and shock. It seemed as if I was turning to before he'd even opened his mouth.

Recollecting, as I caught my breath in the roaring streets, I remembered that he'd only asked for a buck.

A buck and I’d laid him down - there was no thought.

A buck had cost him his life.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN LIBERATION?

I could see my own hand bleeding again. Shunned behind and mauled in a vice - they would have me gagged forever at the bottom of this slick walled well. Here where there is an inadvertent though successful veiling of ruthless contempt, righteous vengeance and fury that sits smoldering in the direction of the man behind THE MAN.

I see my fair skinned brothers and sisters worn ragged at the tip of his sharpened point - falling through coffee cups, mangled by the river in the gnarled thorns of something like a cruel and precise mechanism beneath these crimson tinted skies.

And now my man is buried, crooked in the wind. I see the town signs as I pass by, beating against their bent poles as benign burdens in the endless westerly winds.

In the mirror I watch my hair grow, I watch the dirt accumulate on the fender with insects and blood as I pull into slap up diners for slap up meals where Uncle Sam’s promising lies burn white hot on crackling projector reels as an all too insidious entertainment.

I see my hand on the gun beside me as the lady driver walks in - which way to the john she asks.

I see the others probe her with their eyes, smiling at her smile while their famished gazes implore her tenderest cuts.

The reptiles are down there in their cages, they say. Down the hall just there, a dollar for a touch.

Mankind molested. – I run my knuckles raw across the sharpened underside of the booth. Bleeding – I think of the sun sinking down indifferently into the splayed ocean of asphalt.

I check the window - and I pay the bill.

Somehow we ended up in a strip club. I’d just been paid and was somehow out of my mind. I slipped into a cab outside my office and told the cabbie to drive. He asked where, and I told him anywhere.

It wasn’t till we were gridlocked somewhere in the CBD that I saw Patrick stumbling around panhandling for change and shamelessly harassing leggy foreign exchange students that the evening began to take shape - its form being set as a course, a meandering stream of primal carnality shaping our destinies.

I wound down the window and hollered at him to get in. He asked where we were going, and I told him that I knew this place.

Milk ducts fit for sucking in a place like that. A hard on in my pants like a poised javelin - hot, hard and fit to blow.

Just one touch, I kept saying, just one touch.

I was like a randy dog beneath them, jumping up on my hind legs and waiting for my master to give the signal.

I wanted my treat; I wanted to have my way.

I was ready to lap up whatever they had to give. Just one touch. Slip in an inch or two and I’d be done in seconds.

This is all you get Dave, that’s what he meant to say - and he knew I knew.

Well good, I said - great. I was going to throw myself three sheets to the wind, get all I could, burn out scorching and go down swinging.

I was like Columbus, I said. We were like Columbus and his crew - reaching out into this open night with its neon question mark circled all about it like a noose - or a halo.

They could sweep my head across the floor for all I cared - and that’s what the bouncers said they were going to do.

Will this stop the bleeding? Can you help me help me? I’m looking for a man named Patrick, about 5ft9, stocky, ruddy faced Scot. Can you hail a cab for me? Wait, do you eat Chinese food? Excuse me I’m looking for the local Girl Scout hall. Yes, I'm collecting the daughter that I’ve ordered. So you say that China is just down there? They sell Snickers fried rice there, correct? Sorry, do you mind if I piss here? Hang on is that a cop or a stripper? Are you drunk or stoned? Both? It’s a hooker isn’t it? Did I ever tell you about the pubic hair that I found in a burger at McDonalds in New Jersey? Oh yes! That’s him! Wait, but you mean a hookah? But no - no that’s not him. Would you like to join me for dinner? Here, let me see what size they are. Yes I'm a writer of sorts, a newspaper editor, a confidence trickster. Have you ever tried to suck your own cock before - have we spoken about the third man syndrome yet? Hold up - is that a pigeon or a bird of prey? Yes, your wife and yourself are more than welcome to join me for a scotch or two in my hotel room. No that is not a banana in my pocket - it’s a gun. Oh, so this is your daughter? I’m just kidding - it’s only my penis...I'm Dave by the way...

I kicked down the door and had her right there on the bed.

Punching on the light - the sheets a crumpled mess as she writhed desperately beneath me.

She tried to cry out and make jabs at me, at my groin - but I had her pinned down, I had her suffocating.

Were the children at their grandparents?

Yes - I was a man who had done his homework. I had all the time in the world - and I had my goddamn way.

Right there I forced myself inside her with a clenched fist, my elbow in her neck.

I made sure to tear off her negligee and have a good look. Those hard perky breasts - I took a bite.

I felt like I could do anything.

I had my goddamn way with her.

Its fifty cent coffee in a place like this. Nothing on the side - no way in and no way out but my now inert ride.

I look out the window and see the paint working cooking to peel beneath the fifty degree South Western sun.

Its fifty cent for coffee and the waitresses smile lingers in my mind like my eyes lingered too long upon her body as the pen in her hand progressed across her notepad.

She looked up at me chewing her gum and told me to beat it off.

Beat what off? - My slick rapist smile playing across my jaundiced face.

Another patron shuffles out of anonymity to ask the waitress if I'm bothering her.

She’s just taking my order, she says, nothing to worry about. Isn’t that right slick?

I ask her if the coffees good here and she tells me it’s the best in the West.

Do they tell you to say that? I ask.

'Course, she says.

So I take a coffee - I take coffee, and pore over the stained laminate menu as if it were some sort of existential road map - considering my options, considering apple pie.

I long for cooler country in which the human reek subsides somewhat.

Out here in the heat they seem to ferment in the sweat that never ceases to slick itself upon them like some shimmering film.

I could see it on the waitress’s lip, where I looked just long enough to discern the faint shadow of a moustache - the perspiration grappling obstinately upon its downy fibers.

And yet she seems so self-assured and aloof - perfectly secure in herself as though I cannot smell her cunt in this heat.

I can smell the guy’s dick in the booth behind me - some disgusting potbellied trucker with a salt and pepper pony tail.

I wonder what kind of idea he grips onto of himself in this decade of decay - whether he possesses any sense of self, whether self-respect in a concept known and valued by him.

People make me sick.

The waitress is coming back now with the coffee, shooting that insincere smile out again like some sort of cheap throwaway.

Enjoy, she says, as she settles it down before me.

I see some redneck over in the other corner smiling at me - then the waitress looking over at him smiling as he turns to wink at her.

It’s like they’re in on some lightweight conspiracy together. I’m glad I left the gun in the car.

I’ll have to beat off in the bathroom before I go.

Was it the same for them - did they wear the same masks in times gone by - were they bound to suffer the same cruel fate of pain and hate, fury, regret and lament?

Maybe it was all there to see and I just never saw. Perhaps it was once the same with me, how I once knew my children to endear me with their innocence, how they called me Papa and told their classmates that I was their hero.

I wish I didn’t know that - that they’d believed in me once as they did Santa or the President.

Every moment I spend now thinking about how they once saw me I die a little more.

And indeed, how do they see me now?

On the news they are calling me a lone wolf gunman out on the hunt for his next glory prize - his wanton eyes out scouting the downtown boulevards and gas station forecourts with an almost inhuman exactitude.

They are warning those who run my way to stay away.

Do they know that I made a mistake?

I had my brown socks hanging up on the radiator, seeming somehow wet.

I found myself naked again in a bed that wasn’t mine - in another room that wasn’t mine.

Washed up and aching all over, everything about me subtlety tarnished with the essence of hooker that was hard to pin down, and yet harder still to swallow.

How many nights now?

I step out of bed and look at myself in the bathroom mirror, my face so sallow and sinewy - no meat at all.

It’s been pancake dinners for too long now.

A fair mop of hair on that head though - something of the kind that your Granddad would used to ruffle up before pulling a dollar out from behind your ear. Always here for you sport, he’d say.

How long ago did he die?

I could feel myself slowly circling, closing in by degrees upon the precipice that would flush me down, flush me out, and at once effortlessly extinguish the small flame that I had for such a tentative period known as my existence.

I was a citizen.

On the second night I walked the streets looking up at the stars - seeing them as perhaps little pin pricks of divinity, a calling to something higher - an ever so slight view onto something more.

And I wondered as I walked, why it must hurt to crane my neck so in order to view them?

And then my thoughts moved quite naturally, organically, you might say, onto other things.

I felt myself pulled along, as if I were sediment in a river that meanders on and on through a wide open landscape.

Though I felt that I would eventually be deposited - I knew despite everything, anything, that I would in time be left behind.

Have you always thought that? He asked.

I told him more or less - as I dragged out the last of my cigarette and artfully stubbed it out in the ashtray between us.

I said, you can taste it sometimes when you’re all alone, or maybe motioning to you from the periphery when you’re in company. And you take a look around you, and it’s like you’re almost there - only a step away. If you could only make that step, you think, if only you knew how to. But you can’t make that step - you don’t know how, nor will you arguably till the last. Because the truth of it is that you’re probably miles off - I'm miles off, you’re miles off. You see, Patrick, we're probably way out here with our dull, logocentric western minds, and that really, this is all very much speculative. It all is in the end, you know - philosophy, theology - all theory period- and that is to say even in its most stoically empirical groundings too. So you can add science to this list.

I lit another cigarette.

Look, I could just easily suggest that there is nothing at all to be revealed - there are people who attest to this you know - and that both the world as you and I know it is quite simply ruled by chaos, by complete meaningless, and that anything and everything we apply of value to life in the face of this melancholy truth, and may believe as absolute through your conditioning and ensuing experiences, is nothing other than projection - projection, and ultimately a lie.

I sipped harshly upon my scotch.

And it may very well be the case that there isn’t even a you, only a me, and that I am here merely to stutter through the dubiously open country of the so called self and the enigma of my unconscious.

Or it may just be after all, that both we, you and I, and everything that we see around us, is nothing more than the figment of someone’s imagination - but again, this is all as I said, speculative.

Yes, he said, we don’t really know anything do we?

I stole another’s bread to occupy the ashes of all that civilization had wasted itself to. I trod paths through desolate dumping grounds, discerning the sound of frozen desert dawns and looking to the east to see the breaking day like an ember fanned to a flame by all omnipotent hands. I watched with faraway eyes the black roads that meandered like snakes of death to harbour the misery and pain of an aimlessness that many find to be imbued with the wayfaring spirit of a former time. And yet I saw them there, dispersed haphazardly across the stretching bareness of these starkly empty lands. They are that to be yondered on, for the seekers and outlaws, the restless and unforgiven, the broken and fallen. There where for but a night home comes in the form of a slap up side road shelter, wherein through an exchange of monetary tender an elect place is secured within these hubs of relative warmth and sanctuary. Exhaustion pervades restlessness, the deeply manifest discontent - the weight of the miles travelled tugging down upon you like an anchor into the unfathomable and eternal depths of the unconscious, where still the scars smart and peel apart to reveal the gnarled souls of the fallen and forgotten sons; the forgotten Christ’s that are suspended from their crosses that sigh heavily as they slump southwards into their fourteenth hour, and with no one to bear witness but their own echoed voices that now seek to speak in all but indiscernible tongues. And they are the suicide of another, the birth of a child in its wake and the lips that make to press against its still malleable skull, there where upon the faint wisps of downy hair recoil upon themselves to welcome neutrally, and without knowledge, the weary desperation of the great mass of men who fervorously posture beneath the now faded banners of love, and so hardly know themselves at all.

But alas, the road goes on - the jaws that are opening wide to your own demise yawning malignant and cruel before you. And yet you go on - and yet I go on.

We go on hand in hand but separate just the same- isolated in a deliberate aversion of the truth, a denial of reality in order to keep the dream alive. For the reality is that the dream is pressing down upon you with the weight that will in time come to terminate you. A truth untenable.

We go on and blind.

No one went anywhere until my dick was sucked.

I held the gun in my left hand, watching myself with the cigarette slanting out of my mouth in the mirror as I had both of them down there slobbering on their knees. While meanwhile the TV played out indifferently the relayed scenes of the Kennedy assassination over and over again; zooming right in for the prize winning head-shot in slow motion and obsessively describing a super imposed circle around the conspicuous slip of a figure on the grassy knoll.

And I could hear the cops maybe coming, maybe not - but we were on the second floor looking over the parking lot and the crooked neon strip beyond it with its liquor store and porno emporium signs blinking out at me with exclamations of DIRT! DIRT! And DRINK! DRINK! And I knew for sure that if I squinted and tilted my head so, then I’d be able to penetrate the ever defiant nets with my gaze, and so see any cunt cop pulling in with his little siren on his hood from a mile off. And besides - I'd be armed, locked, loaded, and with two slobbering hostages at hand to boot. But since no one was here yet, I figured that obviously no one had thought anything of the shot that I'd let off in here earlier to illustrate my integrity - because the odds were that the three of us right there in that room were making up a large, if not complete, percentage of the motels patrons for that night.

But I was getting bored.

I reared up my free hand and administered a clean back hand to the once drained street walking crack whores face, and then another to the other.

They scattered across the floor wiping their mouth's and catching their breaths, and I just looked at the gun barrel laughing to myself, pulling up my pants and pulling back the hammer on the weapon as I muttered something about Time and the River.

I delivered a succession of shots, not counting as a marine might, but just feeling it. I watched the bodies sprawl and twitch across the room, affecting something of an elaborate rain dance in the shower of blood that sprayed about them from a nailed jugular.

As my thoughts raced with the thrill of adrenalin, I looked about me with something close to disbelief - knowing for certain that now the cops would be on their way.

But what the fuck.

I quickly got all my shit together and stuffed it into my duffel bag, stopping at the window to peek out of the curtains and check the lay of the land before making the bolt to the car. When I made to grab the keys from on top of the dresser, I noticed that the TV was still on. I could see JFK's motorcade racing off away from the plaza and the pandemonium and hysteria that was breaking out amidst the distraught crowd. Though in the midst of this I was thinking about Oswald up in his nest - collected, satiate. Had he lived I imagined that the two of us would have had a fair few things or more to say to one another - the two of us going out and sharing a drink, a few laughs.

And I tore away from that godforsaken scene in a lonely lament for his loss.

So maybe Charlotte was her name. I found her out there somewhere in the coloured lights, the moving sounds - and then even beyond that where you find the silence, where you wake up with the colours and sounds still turning incessantly in your mind, even though they are long gone. And the silence, it hits you like a freight train at first; a hard fact that becomes ever present - though yet in time, you learn to bask in it - you breathe it in and live it with every step.

But it’s not enough.

Wandering, always wondering.

Despite what you may believe there’s a lot of time and a lot of space out here. And within that there sit contrived many faces and things bearing bright names. Here there are cities, towns, houses, countries - all just about enough to make people want to strive for a while.

But there’s still time, and there’s still space. And could it really be that in the end it is nothing more than a moral question that decides the happiness and fulfilment of a man’s life? Or could it rather be a matter of taste; a democratic hand in a masquerade of aesthetics with which to anaesthetize the ever pervading paranoia? And what indeed is the root of this - this neurotic posturing? What is the name of your boss, your town’s mayor?...

In any case, for myself denial became fear and fear resentment. In time in-expressed anger became repressed and in turn laid its claws upon itself. And violence leaves shattered glass within the mind, puncturing, scathing, and holding you forever to ransom with nothing with which to pay the debt but yourself.

So could everything be just one thing? The discontent of dissection as only dislocation? A matter of ignorance through pride and the consequent swamping downwards with the demands of the primal drives? - That crass juxtaposition of opposing inclination.

Don’t you see that this is God playing hide and seek with himself and forgetting where he is, forgetting what he’s playing - that he’s only playing?

You know, you can burn out your eyes looking into the sun for too long; distorting perception, invalidating reason, and above all faith in intuition. Though, be that as it may, perhaps still the blind man shall bear witness to the sublime power of the sun into which he gazed - finding it to dawn over some other landscape, in some other dream.

Perhaps my name was Dave.

                                                          ******

Well I’d just stepped on through the door there you might say, and the first thing that of course hit me, as it were, was the cold - you know it being late and all - and then there I was turning up the thermostat with my free hand in the darkness, for I hadn’t even turned on the lights yet - which goes to show how cold it was - and then with my other hand/arm unit - which as I recall was my left, for I have always seemed to favoured my left side in terms of load bearing and pushing/pulling manoeuvres etc, and have actually over time developed somewhat of a muscular imbalance - and well so here I was now I suppose, bearing a regular library of books on my regular load bearing side, and maybe it was then when I turned it up to twenty two and could feel the heat just passing through the vents overhead in a delectable and reassuring gust - reassuring, I might add, for there had been issues in recent weeks concerning the heating systems in my complex - and so maybe it was then when I was fingering the dial, just about steadying myself with the misdistribution of weight, that I discerned that noise, that noise ever so slight that emanated from the darkness at the end of the hall, and felt myself slipping, falling amidst a thunder of books and an abrupt on rush of phantasmagoria.

How long they had kept me in there I do not recall now. For the days passed, nights dawned. There was in there no unit for measurement of the time I transcended. The days of the week had eluded me since the very instant of the blackout; when they took me, when I awoke - perhaps before. Once there I soon realised that I was merely subject to the turning of the earth, its ever changing, never changing passage through both space and time. And it was only there, and then now here again, that I see and saw what both space and time really mean to represent; not words as symbols to represent the well-known, well-worn images in mind of the trusty wall clock and the quartz mechanism that ticks ever away upon your wrist. Nor is space what lies beyond the earth’s atmosphere, that which suspends and upholds earth and all that earth is an object of and subject to.

No.

Space and time are both symbols and clumsy tools with which to describe the nothingness that we occupy - its elusive comprehension, the order of its disorder - An apparent reality that some may be so bold as to call beautiful in both its mystery and splendor.

Nothing you believe that you know is anything more than what you believe you know it as.

It was strange to be back - to be back and getting on again, to be getting on and soon on the way again to getting ahead.

I would be making ends meet for myself anyhow.

I put my keys down on the kitchen worktop, thinking as I did so of the person who lived here before me who would have done much the same as he returned from a hard day’s work - perhaps feeling and doing much the same as I was now; thinking of himself, thinking of others’ lives and their relation to his life and his to theirs.

I remember they told me in the hospital that all that thinking had ruined my health.

In another time I would have at once pitied and mocked those who spoke as such, viewing them as I would have done from some lofty perch whereupon I basked in an icy and delectable solitude.

I would have pitied them for their mundanity, the predictability and complicit resignation to the imposed routine of their aimless and fruitless lives.

And yet there they were above me then, digging their nails in deep to my pride and unknowingly wounding with each and every act of grace and goodwill.

It was a struggle, and I wanted to revoke all that they gave me; stamping it stoically null and void and sending it back to them with a cold smirk of condescension.

But the will to survive was too strong, undermining what I myself believed myself to be. I could see them from where I now slumped below; looking at them towering above me and knowing now that my fate was in their hands. For they were it seemed the true arbiters, claiming such authorship of reality by nothing other than sheer volume. And I could see that they pitied me - that all along they had pitied me.

Though they told me that everyone was equal here - my doubt remained.

At nights I would hear the other patients screaming out - screaming for some sort of deliverance to a state of sanctuary and solace. They were those amongst me who sought out a state of fairness and equality, though however hard they endeavoured to see the world before them as such, and however hard those around them endeavoured to prove to them that the world before them indeed was what they’re souls so desperately pined for, they still could not be brought round to believing so.

For they were subject to what I learned to be the most frightful and abominable of conditions, as they were effectively suspended between self-sustaining and autonomous fantasy and a hideously distorted reality. They had no true sense of what was real and what wasn’t. They had neither reason, nor truth in such perpetually dubious terra firma, and so no handhold and consequently no life to speak of.

I recall once that I asked a nurse what was to become of these patients, were they ever to know freedom again? And I have to admit that the answer I received did not altogether strike me as surprising; for they were never released, they died in here, and despite the ardency of effort in prevention - regrettably many died by their own hand. The nurse, however, added that surely one could not begrudge them this final, albeit small sanction - to which I nodded in assent.

It was as if I were nothing more than a vaguely self-aware Fed-Ex package. I received the marshals assuring hand passively upon my emaciated knee, looking out across the plane and all about me - finding something again of the delusional in the eyes of those who looked back.

Held captive indefinitely in this strange corridor in the sky, I was feeling it, as it were, as seemingly void of velocity, as if we were all just sitting there to pass the time in an at last shameless and unabashed resignation to the fact that there really was nothing left for humanity to do in this life.

Instead we rather amused ourselves with the far-fetched movies and television shows of yester year; exacting hours of moderate engagement from the suggestions of Johnny Depp’s attire and the unexacting, perhaps lithium induced, languor of his manner. And we played the infantile time passing games that stalled upon us in their hopeless way, evoking feelings of both pity and frustration within us, as if finding ourselves left cold and breathless in the arms of an impotent lover.

Though- back to the subject of velocity once again - the craft boasted, despite its seeming inertia, to credentials of colossal altitudes and speeds faster than I could run, let alone walk - displaying the statistics and figures as such upon an endless loop, lest I be subject to some degree of dementia and be liable to forget. Which as it happens, I indeed was.

When we hit the pockets of air that they called turbulence, I threw myself into the aisle and yelled that it was God trying to rip his defiant children out of the sky - for we were, after all, truants of the earth, I proclaimed - sinners both to ourselves and our Lord the Father. I said I was going to throw myself out of the exit door, along with their pathetic excuses for food - to which the psychiatrist responded by placing a calm hand upon my shoulder, and brought me back down with the composure of a hostage negotiator to my seat.

come on now, he said, as he fumbled with a Valium in his soft hands - why don’t you take one of these sweeties, sit back, watch the film - and think of England...now how does that sound...? lovely green and pleasant dreamy, dreamy England...a green and pleasant land…

I came round. I was perhaps coming round. Perhaps I had been wrong in myself - sick as they said. And perhaps it was forgiveable, forgiveable for we all had our weaknesses; our all too ignoble recourses to more infantile states of being.

I was rebuilding myself. I could see myself looking back at myself in the mirror - though was perhaps now seeing myself as they saw themselves; as a man amongst men, but one piece of the puzzle, and horribly depraved in the cold absence of other pieces with which to connect myself to and engage with.

Man can sink to infathomable depths within himself, they said. Ghastly does he become - a mere slip of what he very well could have been and of what he perhaps once was. He loses track of himself, he doubts perpetually. What is reality? He says. What are people, what am I - where do I begin and where do I end?

Well, it’s just as well that he can reclaim then cant he? That he can reinstate, that he can allow himself to lower himself in his estimations of himself - he can learn. He can return to men at large, and learn to become one again - to cherish an embrace, like the warmth of the noblest sunset. He can look into the eyes of a newborn child and smile, feeling satiated and at one with both himself and all those around him.

He will feel the wind in his hair once more - feeling it upon him much the same as it turns through the trees in the most ancient and virgin of forests.

Such is what they said.

I remember the visits from my parents, their hands reaching out to me as we shared green tea and tales of times gone by upon the sunlit, springtime terrace.

Did I remember when I flew my kite and ran and ran on days such as today? There where there were children who played much the same, there beyond the perimeter walls, just across the street and in the park, with their apprehensive but deeply contented mothers watching maternally on, harbouring each moment and each nuance of the landscape with which to furnish and cultivate internal landscapes of their own design, wherein such days and moments would be cherished and recalled dearly for many years to come.

Do you remember?

I could see my father considering me from a further distance - close enough to be considered as love and care - though circumspect none the less.

But I could not fail to forget that he was to be forgiven - for he was a man of an older time, wherein the views upon those who landed themselves in a predicament such as mine were somewhat more conservative, and that I was indeed, without exception, best kept at arm’s length and away from children.

He asked me if I’d begun thinking yet about what I intended to do when I got out, how I was hoping to support myself. It was always best to think ahead, he said - to plan in advance. For those who failed to prepare, were indeed preparing to fail.

My mother nodded sagely in concurrence.

Of course, it went without saying that there could be no question of returning to writing, to thinking - dreaming. After all, all that sitting hunched up over a desk for days on end and not sleeping or eating properly was behind this.

Why not get yourself a trade, he said. It's what he’d always been telling me, right from when I was in secondary school. Get yourself a trade, he said - it’ll be a job for life there. Fresh air, manual work - it’ll make a man out of you boy.

I told them that I was thinking about writing a book on my experiences. A book about writing a book and bringing about my own mental breakdown, the subsequent spiritual transformation and a sketch, a portrait of how life ought to be lived, embraced.

They said I needed to start eating meat again.

I slept on their bedroom floor for the first few months proceeding my release. This was upon my psychiatrist’s advice and my parent’s insistence to adhere stoically to every suggestion he made. If I were to oppose anything proposed I was always met with the same counter from my mother and pseudo aggressive echo from my father - do you want to go insane again? They’d say. For it was indeed in the DSM that anyone who refused to comply with the polite recommendations of a psychiatric professional is by the very act of ill psychological standing, and would be better to have his rights stripped from him until he can get the help that he needs.

I found it better to comply.

My father invited me to work with him for a while at his consulting agency that dealt with small scale construction projects within the county. Though of course, as with anything I was invited to do in this period, I was being less invited than I was simply being told. It was all, in any case, for my own good - to get me back on my feet again.

And so it was that I went to work with him in the day, and slept on their bedroom floor in the night.

All the while, however, I was planning out my book in my head. I was planning out much of what I am writing now - visualising it on the typewritten page before me, feeling the keys click away concertingly beneath the command of my fingers.

And there I was too, thinking about the book that I was trying to write when I made my slip up, when I’d lost my mind. For despite all I’d suffered, the appeal to resume the work had not diminished in the slightest. I still wanted to finish what I’d started - to secure the prize of self-comprehension, an ontological harnessing. I still wanted to lose my mind, again.

One day, several weeks perhaps into my stay with my parents, I was sealing envelopes in my father’s office, when he looked up from his desk and coughed - so letting me that he wanted to say something - that it was time to talk.

Well, he said. Any thoughts?

Thoughts on what, I asked

You know what boy.

I told him I was going to write this book, that it would be good, that it would be published and I’d be right back on my feet.

Would I?

I told him that I had a few other projects in the line too, that I had them all planned out and that I’d been meaning to ask for him to take me over to the cabin to pick up my notes and the typewriter that they’d dropped off there before I went to the hospital.

Though, apparently that wasn’t going to happen. Psychiatrist’s orders, he said - no psychological stress, no writing. Mother agrees.

It would seem that the notes had been misplaced, that the typewriter and the cabin had been sold on during my internment.

I’m sorry? I asked.

*

I had obsessed over ideas of metaphysics for some time. Not of my own deliberate decision - or at least so it seemed then, and as it still seems to be now. Though perhaps it would be permissible to say that there once was a time, a long time ago, where I decided to apply myself in such a direction, to lift the hatch and step inside, as it were. But in any case, what an unfortunate mistake it has proved to be. For I am indeed rather possessed by the field - even now it still seems to be the case, at this late, late, and all but disillusioned stage.

Though admittedly, it was worse then. I believed in some way that it was my duty to transcribe some truth that had made itself known to me, that it was my predestined mission to do so, and that it would be nobler to die or go insane in the process of doing so rather than forego the task altogether and write it off in favour of, excusably, more pressing and less disturbing activities.

However, I struggled to articulate the things that I believed I knew. There seemed to be no language adequate or form of presentation accurate enough to put my message across. Which, by turns, brings me to the idea that my psychiatrists have been pressing on me for some years now, and trying to sway me into believing. And that is, for one, that I am insane - which I can indeed now hardly deny - but have rather always been insane, that since early adulthood, and arguably even before, the gears of a rapidly deteriorating state of psychosis have been in motion.

Now, as I said, I don’t refute the statements they have made of my present sanity – or rather, lack of it- nor do I deny that I have been insane, unhinged, for quite some time. I accept this fact. I accept that the loss of my sanity was perhaps inevitable, I knew this at the time of losing it - and I accepted it.

What I can’t accept however is that I have always been insane, that I have never been in my right mind. Because this, you see, discredits the integrity of my opinions, of the things I have perceived and endeavoured to express so earnestly for so many years now. Such claims of prolonged, latent insanity and an unsoundness of mind, reduce my words to the standing of the nonsensical and of schizophrenic fantasy. And such is far from agreeable - such is a blatant distortion of fact.

My initial idea and intention was to create a book that showcased what I believed and felt to be the relation between insanity, the creative mind and metaphysics. There seemed to be a congruity amongst them, a marriage that loitered perhaps somewhat more as a mechanism beneath the surface, and one that I couldn’t see anyone else exploring, or at any rate attempting to express. Though naturally, I was to learn why.

Additionally, I set out to raise a few questions about the society that I was living in at the time, questions that, again, I couldn’t see many people asking, or indeed attempting to put forth.

And it was so that a theme began to develop before me - seemingly of its own accord. There was a congruity between all things. A congruity, and there were questions.

I drew by and large upon my own experiences for part one of this book. What I hope you will find is the product of my attempt to craft something of an objective biography. It was my wish to see myself as another might see me, and also as a hypothetically removed and unbiased person might see and interpret the world. Through juxtaposing my own work from the time - which comprises part two of this volume - I intended to attain myself a grounding in truth, seeing before me on the one hand, my point of view, and the other objectivity, objective reality, unbiasness. My intention then was to unearth and expose my own misconceptions and ill reasoning to the light of day.

It was with this truth in hand that I then intended to strive forwards, unwaveringly once and for all in the revelation of other perhaps profounder and more pressing truths - certain as I would be then of myself, my grounding in truth, the validity of my perceptions. For I could very well almost taste the fruits off that which lay beyond the now near transparent veil.

But then came the first breakdown.

*

The business arrangement with my father was extended indefinitely. An appointment to the agencies accounts manager afforded me my own desk and promise of lacquered business cards that I was permitted to disseminate at liberty. Whilst meanwhile the inclusive wage secured me the means with which to occupy a humble pay by the month apartment, and there in turn the independence to once more apply myself to the imperative task of writing - for I could not purge my mind of it.

With my first pay cheque cleared, I cashed it and set myself to finding a new typewriter - for of course my last had been disposed of under the good and sensible adherence to psychiatric suggestion.

Since all my notes too had seemingly suffered the same fate -and the original typescript for this book- my first task was to sit down and type up, scratch out or scrawl everything I could remember, and everything else I’d since mentally composed.

And such is what I did - doing so with a fervor of compulsion, a zeal that was very much hard to dampen or indeed step down from.

Working as much as I read and wrote, I worked in turn both night and day. For while the sun was high and progressed through the sky I would toil tenaciously for, and alongside my father - while in the evening the time would be mine all mine to seize.

Into the sparse cell I would go. The walls stripped down, the bare desk, the typewriter, the notes. I would sit down and engage, losing time as much as I gained it, watching on - though only half - as it fell and folded endlessly away.

It was as if I were choked - I felt the days perhaps drawing to a close. For within the closed walls I resided - a narrow perimeter about me wherein all but too narrow options presented themselves. And while rewinding upon myself, I saw all that I had so clearly denied in the name of derision; a name forgotten, stamped out upon empty passport pages like the kiss of blood and oil upon the fresh cement planes of this dull, decrepit age. And I bled their blood rites then as I may very well breathe them now. I typed away with the tenacity to please - ever seeking to believe. The formulation of names, words and phrases beneath me - I needed to see the faces emerge.

And who’s did I seek to see there more ardently than my own?

I located them in the lower recesses of the lounge, seeing before me in the dimness the dynamics of the projected illuminations that played across their cold faces.

I moved between them and the set to make my way to the hallway where I’d stored the remainder of my things. And I wondered to myself as I walked, whether they were aware of their surroundings, and indeed of themselves as an interdependent entity within them. Indeed, what could provoke such a willing application to a state of suspended consciousness in a waking state?

As I passed once more through the wordlessness and again to the wilderness beyond it, I felt within me a bite of hate that was ever so slight. A compulsion began to nag within me - rising up was the desire seize them both by the throat and pull their eyes out of their heads and back into the present moment. Look! I would say - just look.

It was with a lump fairly lodged in my throat that I slunk back to the streets. For almost at once as I had felt the rush of resentment, I saw through too to its root. For I realised quite well that it was myself that I saw when I looked out upon them and their ignominious ignorance of life. Blind of us both to the calm luminescence of the Aurora Borealis that flickered with an incantation upon the silent distance.

As accounts manager at my father’s consulting agency, I of course did much more now than sealing envelopes. I had my own desk, computer, and the promised and eagerly awaited lacquered business cards that bore my name like a selling point smile of a slogan.

On occasion I was even known to adorn an open collar shirt, with the top two buttons disengaged to affect an air of informality. Though givenly, in terms of aesthetic conduct I adhered to the unspoken etiquette of the business every much as bit as my father did.

Often as I worked I would think of my time spent out there on the road, in the midsts of that uncherished, though now gold plated independence, of unprecedented creative activity. It seemed as if I had never quite seized it, never quite lived it.

I remembered the early drafts of the book, my disdain for the landscape that was presented all about me - how I had tried to commune my image and interpretation of it.

Though there were dear winds there too - despite everything, there was this beauty and indeed its associations. Only, it seemed I was only able to cherish them in my mind, unable to grasp them in the present, in reality. And in hindsight I could see, I saw only in hindsight.

Because I realised then that every experience, after all - whether directly or indirectly encountered - is merely the experience of a memory - that which once was but no longer is.

I had to write this down.

My motives then were much the same as they had been initially. People talk of personal progress as if it should be a daily developing thing; that is, the evolution of the psyche and the self within it as ever enhancing itself through the cyphers of dreams and collected experiences; taking anything given in image and sense as a veritable source of nourishment.

Though in the months since my return, I could see myself as having made none. However, I believe to an extent that I played the part quite well of one who might be developing and improving himself in a very much unconscious and organic manner. For instance, there had been the trip, the journey - there had been my trials and tribulations through the psychiatric wards of the hospital, my passage through the depths of insanity and my way back up, away from the past, moving on and very much a citizen of the present, of the here and now.

Though from the facts that I could feel within myself - and subsequently picked apart -I was able to deduce that this was very much far from the truth.

When I walked the streets of those towns so very far away from here in both time and space, I was so very certain that I was on the cusp of some weighty discovery. For it felt as if I had my hand laid upon some sort of veil - mystical and profound in the fact that it was so very fleeting and transient in its comprehension, that it was so intangible.

I felt that if I could find some way to lift that veil - which it at any rate seemed to be doing so of its own accord, in ways that would at once startle, enthrall and irrevocably disturb me - then I would find behind it a truth beyond the bounds of human conception, something so beautiful and miraculous – perhaps the final truth; complete understanding of the scope and purpose of all existence. Perhaps this was then, the final frontier.

And it would be my noble duty I saw, as both a pioneer and a writer, to transcribe my findings so that others too may find and populate the land I had so ardently endeavoured to reveal.

For then there no longer would be any doubt, and all would not have been in vain.

It was quite inevitable that I would lose myself again. Having been already as good as defeated once in my pursuit of knowledge, I ought to have foreseen the imminence of the very same fate once again. Though perhaps I was welcoming it.

I was welcoming it. I had been poking my psyche with a stick for far too long, demanding more and more of myself and never finding myself to be happy with what I had achieved, the land I had claimed. I always wanted to push further ahead, finding that the words were never quite right, that there had to be some other language, something more precise with which to penetrate that final frontier of my mind and spill its fruits out upon the page.

I pored religiously over the typescripts and any published texts I could find that bore relation to what I was seeking to produce, to what I was seething to say. The days fell away once more, interminably and without notice. For there I was in my cold solitude, burning all my time in the timeless trap of my ascetic’s cell.

The compulsion of my obsession began to lap over the walls of covertness and into daily life, to the work with my father. For I found myself scribbling away as I typed and reckoned with his figures upon the computer, fumbling with frayed threads of fantasy, chasing them down and wrestling with them in the torrents like a bear amidst the frenzy of a salmon run.

And it was so that I was unable to balance, able to believe again less and less - retiring ever more back to the dark and dubious recesses of malign psychosis.

It came on while I still believed I was still in very much good standing within myself and the eyes of those around me. For I could no longer discern conception from unbiased reflection.

They found me beneath the thermostat, sprawled amongst the scattered pages of the typescript and psychoanalytic journals that I had scoured from the shelves of the local library. I spoke rapidly in my delirium of the forgotten Christs’ upon their crosses, swaying as they sighed in the south westerly winds to the beat of their own steadily declining hearts.

They say I grabbed my father by the lapels of his coat and asked him if he believed in Jesus - if he believed that he was Lord and that he was I.

I had been there three days and three nights.

*

As unhinged as I still may be now, I can’t help but believe that day by day I have myself on the mend. That once more I am showing all the signs of being able to bear a steady and firm grip upon myself, able at once to effortlessly distinguish myself from others, their perceptions of reality and the words with which they apply themselves and their reasoning to.

They tell me that the Rasians have at last called a truce with Eumerica - they tell me that this is good, that it’s been a long time coming in getting mankind back under control and on the way forward again.

A long time has passed now since my re-internment here - and once again I do not know how long.

Time, though, has passed. Psychiatrists come and go like the seasons may have done in another time; each to their own with manner and presentation, though none the less portraying in subtle, all but in-articulable ways, a continuity of matter, a congruity of essential tone and of thought.

They tell me how important it is to know what’s right in front of you, to know who you are, and have a firm comprehension of a whole array of boundaries that they attest before me so ardently to the existence of.

I find some reasoning in their words, though I do too just the same in my own that often appear to run somewhat contrary in idea to those that issue from them.

But none the less, some offer me water as we speak, perhaps fresh air and a stroll in the gardens if it appears to be fair outdoors. And many of them tell me that there is hope wherever there is humanity; smiling coyly at me as they say something to the effect of; the human spirit prevails. And it strikes me now that this they seem to agree upon as unanimously as they do the works of Sigmund Freud, whose books I see from time to time peering back at me, dog eared and heavily annotated upon all their shelves.

[pastthepillars]

2

Experience sanctions experience. How one is able to perceive is largely determined by what they have perceived hitherto. No one persons experience is exactly alike any others because what we have all experienced individually differs so vastly. In many indigenous cultures the thinking 'I' of a person is often identified as local to the abdominal region and not the head, as in our culture. I can only reasonably assume that the entire experience of the person is different from mine to allow such to be the case.

[pastthepillars]

1

If we can believe that the techno-industrial capitalism driven machine as a whole plays upon the manipulation of and gratification of human instincts, then – if we take as a rudimentary definition of neurosis; to step aside from and deny one's instincts – to step aside from the appeals of a capitalist system and the destruction that is inherent to it, is to, also, in a sense, step aside from the more fundamental nature of ones self, to become neurotic, to be outside.

[pastthepillars]

A Transmutation of Form

Death is manifest in all things. It is the nature of all things that Death lends a guiding hand all throughout the entirety of what is perceived of as their existence. There is a lamentably striking fact of the brief transience of all that is, present as it it from the very moment of conception. That is, that the End permeates the Beginning, as of course it was from the End that the Beginning was born; at once sanctioning and negating the very matter from which it is so tenuously constructed.    Though, of course, truly, there is no death. For nothing that has ever been or will be has either begun or ended. The problems inherent in conceiving such an idea may be wholly attributable to the constructs of language, which, through the word, appears certainly enough to possess both beginning and end. This becomes particularly apparent in the spoken word which almost undeniably arises from silence and falls again to the self same silence.    The structures of language come to surpass the simple utility of exchange between individuals. The structures of language in fact structure the mind in such a way as to render near impossible the comprehension of that which sits outside of language. To many, what is beyond language may even seem inconsequential; believed to be unreal in the fact that it cannot be immediately perceived – or rather, immediately believed to be grasped and understood through the allocation of name.    What should be remembered, however, is that what is not perceived is not necessarily non existent. For one, the human range of perception is limited, it is said, to a mere ten percent of scientifically measurable reality. And on the point of Death, it ought to be remembered that energy cannot be destroyed, only transferred.    The human conception of Death implies a complete and eventual abolition of all form, when in fact all form is nothing more than a temporary manifestation of a force that is absolute, undying, and encompasses all.    There is no Death, only a transmutation of form.

[pastthepillars]

The House That Is Built Upon The Sky

Was I alive in any sense of the word, ever? Could I discern, if I were to fully commit myself to the question, and summon all my powers - deliberately focusing them upon solely this one specific question – what the point of my being here could be, what it might mean?

What I mean is; if I had the mind to, could I unravel the riddle of my existence?

It was something to chew upon, certainly. Though maybe not something to become so inextricably bound up in pursuing that one loses track of all else to only eventually find out that nothing could be found and that now, as a result, everything that once was is lost.

Yet the word everything – the assortment of symbols joined together that make to imply the concept of all things together – the word itself seemed to point towards something that was open and shut, as if it were a room that had succeeded in containing all it described. Yet if such a room were to in fact exist in a literal sense, what would it be that laid beyond the borders of its hopeful construct?

'Everything'?

The word was a contradiction of what it intended to capture. The word itself crafted a distinct division between that which it made to be and what it itself was in attempting to contain such.

Perhaps silence was a truer representation of 'all things together'?

With the concept of nothingness in swift tandem...

*

Reality it seemed was like an elusive creature that could be seen and yet not seen simultaneously. It could be held and not held. To define it was to lose sight of it.

Though to negate definition was by turns to lose oneself, the elusive handhold upon that which one believed themselves to be reaching for. To no longer speak of it, but by (paradoxically) becoming it, was to speak of it in it's most simple and clear terms.

Reality, I had heard, was at its most fundamental level made of nothing at all. On such a premise one could suggest the analogy of a house built upon the sky. It would be plausible to consider the resident of such a house drifting in and out, going about his life as the seasons interminably mark the passing of time and the adoption of novel means of perception that grant a sense of progressive purpose to the life of a given individual. It may very well be the case that one who lived in such a house would take it entirely for granted that they did so. Perhaps because all others lived their lives in a similar fashion. Perhaps because habituation had inevitably dulled the wonders of intrigue.

At any rate, it is likely that in a world where the very feat of such a construction was possible, its mystery – if it indeed possessed any to begin with – would prove to be entirely finite. It's existence would presumably be reduced to a few sets of very simple and well worn scientific laws. If not, there would certainly be a number of academically accredited theories put forth. Based upon the sound logic of  mathematical equation their integrity would be incontestable. While on the other hand of course, there would be the crude juxtapositions of mystics and heretics. Their sacred postulates, as a given, nothing more than untimely echoes of the primordial mind.

And such is the state, at base, in this reality of ours. In this house of ours that is also built upon the sky.

* That there are answers and that there are questions is clear. Though whether the relevant answers align with the corresponding questions in an agreeable or - better yet – scientifically grounded fashion is contestable, and maybe – just maybe – at base, entirely beside the point.

As I walk tonight and look outward from the edge of town into the great abyss that I know now enshrouds the lava fields between here at the pavement and that distant snow capped mountain range, I try to take stock of what I know - and what I know is that I know very little.

What I know, strictly, are the names of things. What I know is that I have learnt to make certain sounds fairly well and  join them together in such a way as to express a varied repertoire of feelings that arise upon the scene as vague nuances of emotion; mere slips of sensation that often seem intent upon defying such simple categorisation as can be made clear, or at least apparently so, with the slippery tool of language.

As I walk I make a feeble attempt to ease such constructs from my consciousness and see clearly, if I can, latent form, both within and without.

And so I close my eyes, I put my fingers in my ears and breathe. I come to a stand still on my path, rooted in darkness, silence; knowing for a brief, all too brief instance, little more than the faint stirrings of an intent, unnamed.

When I again open my eyes and find that I am facing a not all too dissimilar darkness than the one that I had but moments before tentatively known, a feeling strikes me, and I present it clearly to myself with the sound of words.

Will I ever step outside of this house to truly walk upon the sky?

[pastthepillars]

The elaboration of structure implies a narrative that isn’t

A beginning and an end

[pastthepillars]

The enemy was what I had caught in my hand

Sleeping; the planes moved gradually overhead. Neatly approaching, all but brushing the rooftops of the apartment buildings with their wheels or floats.

While meanwhile at the airport itself a select few individuals progressed from one given point to another. Silently considering the scene, from the base at their feet that their vision allows right up to what the rafters are concurrently attaining in the emptiness that they have framed.

Just what was the point exactly would be hard to say or comprehend. Though that the point sought in of itself to be spoken opposed to merely seen and enunciated as such is contestable still, not absolute.

*

Many are those that we see now in a fluid inertia that they have spontaneously reached. They sit in such a state lone, perched upon benches or the low to medium height walls of business plazas and the marble shrouded complexes of various other centres of enterprise. Such places seeming myseriously fit to find oneself abruptly taken, and then held.

But what in exact terms is this stillness?

Oneself in interminable transit though now as a fixed axis upon which all else that surrounds now seems to revolve and eventually pass.

From such a point where it is seen quite clearly that all that is perceived as reality is a perpetual unity; its breath discernable in the rise and fall of all action, of all conceivable movement; the entire breadth and essence of which is miraculously encapsulated in the most minute of objects, which is to say events.

[pastthepillars]

The Answer Is My Death

Seated at the table to look silently across the room to where both shadow and filtered beams of sunlight fall. I made my way here unknowing. I strip down now like one who prepares for death. I remove from myself all that is not necessitated by frequent use. I part with the obsolete. I desire only that I should be possessed by no desire. But it is hard. The ego is a stubborn tool. It was assumed once for a purpose and is now very difficult to shed. One is liable to confuse what one truly is with this particular manifestation of psychic energy. It is a good con, one that parasitically leaches from me whenever I eventually fall down in exhaustion from the struggle of attempting to balance myself with what I may happen to perceive as reason or objective form.

The clear mornings are the best times. Early mornings when its clear blue skies and the suns light impart a rich colour that brings to life all that it shines upon with a certain poignancy.

It is best when the non human animals can still be heard stirring in their worlds that are inextricably bound to, yet almost exclusively perceived as separate to Man's. Perhaps the illusion of such separation is transcended for a time in this brief instant - or - its just a brief snapshot of a simpler, more propitious time.

Time before the gears of the machine begin to turn, before the great mass of men awaken to again commence their ritual assault upon consensual reality. The time that their car machines spew out a toxic poison, flowing through their veins, congesting their lungs, falling still born with self defence and insincerity upon every word from their putrescent mother borne mouthes that convey them with axiomatic certainty from point A to B like a bullet that lodges itself agreeably in a war criminals unjust skull.

There are men on planes perusing the Wall Street Journal, imploring as they do the the business and technology section with consternation, as if therein may lie inherent truth, that the answer is what one may ever so desire, work towards and possess. That, as one decants from their BPA ridden water bottle a pasteurised serving of Scottish mountain mineral water, their destiny is outstretched there before them, inextricably bound up with their deeply held ambition, written out like the fate of a God in the stars that they can no longer see for, incidentally, the very self same ambition.

The answer is my death.

[pastthepillars]

How Bourgeois Materialism Has Transcended Samsara: On Extremism and Getting By.

“And you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.” - John 8:32

The new millennium is something that we are now firmly rooted in. We live in a time of manifold innovation and industrial excess. The City is becoming the global; claiming more and more of the Natural as Technology accelerates at an ever increasing velocity on towards what many are claiming to be 'the singularity.' As Mankind hurtles ever onwards towards this uncanny fusion, the ground beneath his feet seems to shift and lurch. The literal environment that he himself inhabits seems to no longer be so structurally sound – as the environment, too,of his psyche oscillates with an equal degree of imminency. It is said that we are living in an age of the extreme. Extremes of religion, lifestyle, diet, art, education  - the list goes on. The extreme pervades all aspects of human culture, it provokes conflict, it provides comfort and transient security in times of uncertainty; the extreme divides and it conquers. The extreme has drawn a gulf between man as a species and the extreme threatens to engulf the species as a whole through the destruction that it has reaped, if not engulfing the planet as a whole along with it. On the face of it it would seem that if a solution were not found then collapse could  be the only possible outcome. For the stress that is burdened upon the planet and its 'resources' by the human species, and the stress that is borne of  man being  at odds with himself; a relinquishing of tension could very well resemble extinction. On the other hand a solution could resemble something very much like apathy. Just as many are saying that we live in an age of extremes, others are discussing the extreme as something of a spectrum, whereupon somewhere within the middle may very well lie the truth. Viewed objectively, then, one may very well deduce that the remedy for destructive extremism was something akin to radical mediocrity. It is true, certainly, that there is something to be said for the relative indifference of those who could be said to occupy the central tenements of this spectrum of extremes. Conformity to obligation, consumption of unethically sourced goods, the shadowy pursuits of sensual satisfaction – such could all be stated as hallmarks of this particular class. And rationally, were one to allow themselves to survey the data at hand - with its unapologetic postulates of Godlessness and blind creation - one might very well conclude, and indeed begin to perceive for themselves the very likely accidental nature of all existence; the implications of such upon morality and goodness, not to mention the slippery proposition of beginning to entertain experiencing a world of meaning without purpose. Viewed in such a light, one may very well conclude that accountability of ones actions is not so much a necessity as it is a choice. Beyond the arbitrary philosophical constructs that one may appear to craft for themselves, there would seemingly be no one to answer to but ones self – and why bother to burden oneself with such responsibility or the desire to achieve success in a world that is hopelessly indifferent, that imperceptibly begins, and then just ends. Material consumerism may be the answer. Since there's nothing to answer to and there's nothing to gain, why not merely yield to the short lived satisfaction of impulse and the incidental nullification of the extreme. The extreme is just for people who can't handle the truth after all. What is it that you're trying to prove? Surely you must see that you're acting upon nothing more than existential wounding. You're trying to be something you're not. Just sit down and enjoy yourself.

[pastthepillars]

Should There Be a Badger Cull In Sussex?

Badgers are a medium sized mammal that is native to the British Isles. They are nocturnal creatures that live beneath the ground in a network of chambers and tunnels that they have fashioned known as setts. They feed typically upon insects and worms, fruits and cereals, but will often indulge also upon birds and even small mammals. They are easily recognizable for their singular, humbug-like facial markings.

In recent years there has been a great deal of media coverage discussing badger culls. Badgers, it has been found, are prone to harbour a strain of tuberculosis that is believed to be transmittable to cattle. The first TB infected badger was found in 1971. It was understood at the time that there was a connection between the condition of both the badgers and the livestock. Cattle that are found by farmers to be carriers of the disease are to be destroyed. This is of course costly to the farmers, significantly impacting both their livelihood and the meat and dairy industries of this country. A set schedule of culls has since been planned and undertaken,with separate sets of scientific evidence being presented that at once confirm and call into question the validity of this approach. The vaccination of both cattle and badgers has also been suggested as a means of containing outbreaks and preventing them from occurring to begin with. But in any case, opinions upon the matter are thoroughly divided.

From the point of view of the government who are seeing to the undertaking of the culls, it is understood that badgers are known to be carriers of TB, and that it has been scientifically shown to be transmittable, theoretically, through the urine and faeces of the badger, to cattle. It is thought that perhaps the grasslands that the cattle graze on are contaminated in this manner. The evidence to justify the potential effectiveness of the culls is derived from a study that points towards a 12-16% reduction in cattle contaminations over a sustained 9 year period.  For farmers who are subject to the devastating effects of the disease, such promising figures would seem enticing.

There are though, however, many others outside of the government who would contend that it is ultimately not the badgers that are the problem, but rather the cattle themselves. Separate studies have shown that it is likely that only a mere 6% of infected cattle contract the disease through contact with an infected badger. This would mean then, in accordance to the results of the study, that 94% of cattle are contaminated from within their own herd. This would naturally seem to reduce the activities of the culling to unwarranted barbarism and instead open the door to a more humane and rational approach at management and prevention of the contagion.

The RSPCA believe that vaccinations and improved biosecurity are a more effective means for tackling the problem. They argue that the typical culling methods of trapping and shooting do not allow for a precise containment of the disease as many badgers that are caught and killed are in fact not carriers of TB at all. They estimate that only around one in seven badgers that are silenced in the sweep of the cull would prove to test positive. Moreover they believe that the way in which they are killed is simply horrific and cruel.

In concurrence with the views of the RSPCA are those of allegedly more than thirty esteemed animal disease experts. They also believe the cull to be cruel and unnecessary, costly and distracting us from the real cause of the problem at hand – which they indicate again to be none other than the cattle themselves. They argue also for improved vaccination procedures and biosecurity, as in the past these methods have proved to be wholly effective in the elimination of the disease.

Many farmers who are not the owners of cattle, but instead crops, are known to see the badgers as less of an infringement on their livelihood and more of a welcomed ally. The badgers purge their fields of pests, protecting their valuable crops from slugs and other undesirable encroachments. To them, as well as 210,000 or so members of the British public who have signed a petition against the culls, the badger is an animal that they wish to remain in our country.

However, as humane and more effective an approach as vaccinations and such may at first glance seem to be – their cost may be seen by some as high, and the results perhaps less immediate, or indeed, as is the case with cattle; hardly effective at all. In regard to badgers the vaccination is also difficult to administer, as it must be done so intravenously. The vaccination of a single badger in Wales is said to be £662 at present. It is, though, estimated by some that the termination of a single badger through culling would amount to the costly sum of £4,000 per badger. An effective vaccination for cattle is still not available at present. The best that is on offer (the BCG vaccine) merely retards the contagion, reducing transmission from animal to animal within the herd, but not preventing an outbreak.

It is for this reason that for many, owners of cattle in particular, the cull of badgers by means of trapping and shooting would seem to be the most effective method for tackling the problem, or at least as a way of keeping it at bay for the meantime, that is, until more humane and realistically administrable methods are developed, such as a reliable cattle vaccine.

Personally I think it remains uncertain as to how great a hand in the problem the badger really has. That the badger carries the disease and that it can be transmitted to cattle seems likely, but to initiate an intensive cull of the animal without the certitude of convincing evidence seems preposterous. It is clear however that the problem needs to be contained. Badger culling has been shown to have a moderate impact in some cases, although in others it has only exacerbated the situation. A greater focus upon prevention through vaccinations for badgers and the development of an effective one for cattle would seem to be the most humane approach. In my opinion a wide ranging vaccination program for badgers – although potentially trying - would better replace the existing culls. As this is undertaken, improved biosecurity for cattle and further research into appropriate cattle vaccinations and the ultimate role of the badger in the transmitting of the disease, would seem to be the best route to take.

There shouldn't be a badger cull in Sussex or, indeed, anywhere.

[pastthepillars]

2. Death is manifest in all things. It is the nature of all things that Death lends a guiding hand all throughout the entirety of what is perceived of as their existence. There is a lamentably striking fact of the brief transience of all that is, present as it it from the very moment of conception. That is, that the End permeates the Beginning, as of course it was from the End that the Begining was born; at once sanctioning and negating the very matter from which it is so tenuously constructed.

[pastthepillars]

Advancement

He takes to browsing his assorted booty in a pair of soiled underwear, the stains visible from here, where we stand, to the naked eye.

Though he is showering soon.

He has burdened the sink with his tooth’s paste.

A silent mark of the man that he might be.

The breaking of a day, the parting of the curtains at night that affords a sly vantage of the main street below.

Its cars, its human beings in varying degrees of states of decomposition and denial.

The delusions of the ones who shift their forms across the water and beneath it, to another land with its self same traps that make to trip and project the great deception upon the faces of those who pass so that the given individual may know and face, a laughter that emmanates from within.

A man rubs his gut and considers sex.

The steel frame of the apartment building that is bound in brick, and ill considered just so.

As the traffic lights at each intersection bear the very insignia of which we were all bore.

A man shifts through his carrier bags.

[pastthepillars]

The state of Arkansas is a lie

You will find in time that you have been lied to and that they are cheating you and that it was over before you ever even had a chance to know that you never were alive in any sense or shape of the word

But this is really neither here nor there

For the mayor of Arkansas is a master of deception; a layman cloaked in all the filth of fortune and excess, initiated as he is into the great sage brotherhood; esoteric agents of dream manipulation and distortion, righteous - though indeed very much mistaken - retributors, fools

[pastthepillars]

The state of Arkansas is an interpenetrable labyrinth of semi-concealed to wholly concealed worth

Though its worth is disproportionate to the meagre merit that can be seen to be assigned to its public though thoroughly obscured résumé at present

As too its résumé is but a fraction of what discursive thought may be seen to become before the veritable shroud of dream

Thus is the state of the state of Arkansas

[pastthepillars]

SHAMAN: - RUN BACK ALONG FRESHLY TRODDEN PATH TO RETURN TO POINT OF INITIAL ENGAGEMENT - TALK ABOUT A, WITH A - DISCUSS SIMULTANEOUS OCCURENCE OF PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE - INVITE N TO GUNFIGHT - TELL N THAT I HOPE HE WANTS A GUNFIGHT

[pastthepillars]

An echo of your childhood impounded systematically in the cruel vice of reason

Shielding a shard of glass, licking my lips and wiping my mouth

[pastthepillars]

Beholding

The spectral severance of any given scenario

A slight passage is illuminated between the crux of the matter and its ensuing consequence

Therefore it is the breadth of each newly broken day that we must make to infiltrate and so set ourselves to conquer

We must make to do this without haste