what wild things you bring.

there is a high wall along the back boundaries of the zoo. if you have nothing to pay, like me, we can scale the wall, hang from our long arms like monkeys, and drop to the ground, landing on tiny wrists or scraped up knees. We wander around the outskirts, until we see up ahead a large rock formation. We stare into a dark hole in the rock expectantly, our eyes wait all eager at the edge of the cave. And after a long enough time, out will come.. ghost tigers.. we will marvel at their bold black stripes, their snow white or perhaps glass-like translucent fur, their powerful legs and necks, tall teeth, their ice blue eyes with smooth drops of periwinkle added, and that steady gaze into. our human monkey eyes.. Rooaaaaaarrrrrrrrr.. we scramble back up over the meager chain link fence. and look back. in reverence.

and we never even enter the zoo.

i’m not dreaming i’m telling the truth

25% ghostwriter
25% skywriter
the other 50% of the time i will spend writing in my sleep.

(i don’t mind sleep so much as you, i suppose because
in my sleep i still move..)

“i realize now that i know a supreme order. when i give in to it, i channel it. and when i channel it, only then do i find peace.” nate powell

hey not-so-fairweather-friend…do you know more about me than i tell you? are you paying more attention than i thought you were? or is all of this just another strand in the endless stream of coincidences from which i pick out pictures?

“Our loner standard for insanity: that talking to others all day is symptomatic of failure to individuate. That it indicates an unhealthy fear of thinking. That being unable to entertain oneself is surefire proof of being sick. There would be new disorders if we were in charge.” Party of One: The Loner’s Manifesto

Take your ‘antisocial personality disorder’ and ‘borderline personality disorder’ diagnoses and shove it.

In his novella Identity, Kundera begins to wind up the dream-like story with an image of his heroine leaving the orgy – while all others around her turn to animals – as a shepardess, and her lover a shepard…they the only ones left among the beasts. Before this scene is my favorite line, so simple, “she has the impression of being drawn along in a conspiracy of coincidences.”

It was three days after Christmas. He looked into the mirror, and said to himself “Whenever I speak to others they have such a sardonic grin, one eyebrow raised, eyes wide and lips curled. They act as though we are both participating in a long-running, elaborate joke. We are, of course, and who wouldn’t want to protect themselves in a situation such as that? But what if, just once, I wanted to let them all see me naked, wanted to let them know what I was really thinking, how would such a gesture play out in such an environment?”

So he put on his clothes and left the house and went to the bar, even though he never drank and never met his friends at the bar to watch them drink. He showed up, and many of them flashed him large smiles – like hyenas they seemed. And he sat down and warmed up a little and made some small talk.

And then he said, to the small group of three seated at the end of the crowded table, which in that moment contained many conversations, “I was just sitting home all alone, lying in my bed, for three days, thinking I would certainly have to kill myself. Thinking that, despite how pointless and cowardly it seemed logically, that all previously constructed storylines certainly led to that one inevitable fate. But then, for one intense, slow-motion moment I thought, no, no – if I could just get up and move, just get up and go somewhere – anywhere – then everything would be okay.”

They all grinned knowingly and laughed. He had been wrong about the anywhere.

if storytelling is the creative demonstration of truth, then immortality is but ubiquity in time.

In Vonnegut’s imaginary religion of Bokonon there is a phrase customarily said to the shy, which roughly translates as: It is not possible to make a mistake. When someone seems particularly uncomfortable socially I think it would be nice to think this really hard at them. I would appreciate it, at least.

Then again, the philosophical basis for this religion, like all of them, are ‘harmless’ lies intended to make life easier. So maybe not. J wrote ‘there are no mistakes’ and asked me what I thought of that. (T had replied, haha, You are mistaken.) I would like to think no, but am obviously not entirely convinced. But I certainly don’t want to start labeling things right and wrong, so I suppose I ought to deny the possibility of a mistake from the start, just to avoid the inevitable path of that logic.