there are those of us live like a skydive. there are those of us who live a job. Mr. Ay may wake up in the morning and think, oh, i will drink coffee with my girlfriend today. i will sell some stocks for a 150% profit and make a mortgage payment. i will buy a turquoise lamp that compliments the grain of my hardwood floor. and then, there is his neighbor Mr. Bee who wakes up in the early afternoon and does not think but rather puts on a coat and sits on his porch with a cup of coffee and stares. wonders how he would go about describing snow to someone who had never seen it before. he walks to the store to buy a loaf of bread, an apple, a jar of peanut butter, a quarter pound of cheddar and on the way back expound the pros and cons of returning to a home which does not bear resemblance to a home. he pays someone so he may live there. if they are going to take his money, he may as well get something out of it. there will be the wish for a home more resemblant to an anchor, not in physical size but in characteristic function and allegorical value. but simultaneously there will be a flash of the english robinson crusoe, who after 28 years stranded on the island, found england a bore and wanted to go back home. robinson has nothing to prove and neither does Mr. Bee. life is an obligatory run through. a practice round for a game that will continually be rained out. the big red curtain.

Mr. Bee lives like a lung. there are elements entering and there are elements leaving, changed. but there is a sacred balance to it all which is understood and never violated. he does not put his hand on anything that the force of nature will not enforce counteraction upon. some call this calculated. Mr. Bee does not call it anything. he does not talk to people unless there is a straight line from object medulla to subject occipital lobe, this is why he does not need to call his way anything. he understands it like a child does not know he already understands everything. he knows it like the back of the hand knows itself.

there is a house he once lived in. a memory remains, though house may be gone forever. it would not make any difference either way, because the memory remains. that period was eventful. he took a bite out of a gingerbread woman for the first time in that house. the act opened a window that he has been trying to close since. not so much for the sake of closing it, but for the sake of being able to. he ate until the gingerbread was consumed and there was nothing remaining but crumbs and a memory- a segue to the memory of a physical window. he would open it and smoke out of it. but the wind would blow the smoke back in. he’d leave the window cracked to air out the room. the smell of smoke in the heaterless room. there are objects in it, but the viewer’s attention is drawn to the empty space in the middle of the floor, making the room an empty space at all times, and a lonely place to look back on, with its smoking window.

synecdoche, ny

"Here's what I think theater is: it's the beginning of thought. The truth not yet spoken. It's a blackbird in winter. The moment before death. It's what a man feels after he's been clocked in the jaw. It's love... in all its messiness. And I want all of us, players and audience alike, to soak in the communal bath of it, the mikvah, as the Jews call it. We're all in the same water, after all, soaking in our very menstrual blood and nocturnal emissions..."

I was lying in my bed, listening to the remastered Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was four in the morning and lightning bolts were blazing thoughts and ghost trails and firy rings around my eyeballs. I could not sleep. It was not unusual that I could not sleep. Sleep rarely came anymore. When all the little silver ball bearings have rolled into their little silver holes at the end of the day, then sleep is easy. when some of the ball bearings are still rolling around, shut eye is harder to come by. on this night, it occurred to me that none of the ball bearings were in any of their silver holes and were in fact rolling around in the proverbial attic, getting lost in termite alcoves and being licked up by squatters, who, by the way, often mistook the silver balls for breath mints. some of the silver balls, in fact, had stuck to the crevices in between the ridges of my shoe sole and later had dislodged on the floor of the car, and were rolling around on the floor of the car, which moves even when the ignition is off, because of rotational and revolutionary movements of the planet.

back to my bed- somewhere in astral projection- i was at the perfect juxtaposition of 1958 bled, slovenia and Alphaville and 67 degrees north longitude and middle C and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and then it dawned on me- The Beatles are Jesus Christ. At the end of the day, the rock and roll standard. a development as a musical union which is marked by constant expansion in depth and breadth of musical, lyrical, structural, conceptual scope. four creative standpoints (i.e. beatles) contribute to a Holy Quadrilateral of unprecedented and unsurpassed musicultural impact.

i was excited because this thought was new to me, and it occurred to me there was some profundity in it.

after taking a hot bath and reading by candle light, i fell asleep.

the next afternoon i pulled myself out of the tub, thanked allah that I had not drowned over night, and went to the halfway house to meet Beau, where I always met him on Wednesdays.

we leaned on the handrail and smoked cigarettes and drank iced tea, like usual.

i explained the idea to beau, but he did not accept it-

yes- it absolutely makes sense. you have the ghandis, the MLKs, the dhali lamas, the mother theresas- that is, the velvet undergrounds, the bob dylans, the sex pistolses, the nirvanas, the david bowies. but none of them measure up to the power exuded by the beatles. in terms of admitted influence, worldwide appeal. album sales. beatles have sold the most bibles. jesus has sold the most albums.

no- jesus is jesus. the beatles are the beatles. they are separated by an unbridgable disconnect. you can not make a comparison. you cannot mix a religious leader of the 1st century and a rock and roll group of the 20th century in the same pot. the rules are different for each group. each was an opportunist in their own right, but that’s as far as i’ll go in admitting likeness. now, present day, nobody likes anything for what it is, or believes in anything for that matter. it has to go against something that was there before. what makes this different from the beatles or jesus, is that now, the human condition is one of concentrated angst and bitter retribution against a large ghost. the large ghost is made up of smaller ghosts, which are the efforts of every person up until now. more people have lived and died and left craters on the surface of the earth now, than ever before, and that will always be true. you cannot step anywhere without stepping into a crater someone else has already left. this leaves the world in a worrisome place if it still considers originality an ethic. tomorrow the now will change and the law will continue on, like tin cans trailing a hearse that says “just married” on the back of it. you can’t do anything about that, man. just like you can’t predict when the next unprecedented, unsurpassed whatever whosamuhwhatchits are going to leave a really big footprint that covers the other footprints and fool the next insomniac into believing that anything means anything.

i am not arguing against that, i am simply highlighting a parallel, possibly a bridge. i did not know you were such a nihilistic person. it doesn’t become you.

i believe a bridge is built to be burned, eventually

do you like the beatles?

i like the beatles. i like jesus. im just saying your argument is visceral, at most empirical. it is weak in this, and i cannot be convinced by anything you say.

At this, i walked to the jukebox that our supervisor/sponsor Ricky had set up. Ricky was a handy jack of all trades. he had opened it up and taken a soldering iron to its innards and made it so we didn’t need to put quarters in.

the best part was were able to bring in any CD of our choice and have it played through the box. we had whole albums on that sucker. not the a side b side capitalize off of consumer quarters malarky.

i return to the rail, and leaning on it. the first track of Sgt. Pepper’s plays. we stare at the wall through the duration of it. then, “with a little help from my friends” plays and we stand upright, as if it’s some rehearsed thing we do, which it isn’t, and we go to the makeshift billiard room and rack up a game of pool.

we gather like eggplants

to understand wolves

some argue

eggplants can understand

other eggplants only

but some still find the

written word effective

we write and regret

regret, and write

until they are two empty mirrors

affirming a chasm

to involve an eye

would be a brick wall

materializing three feet in front of

two tons of metal at

immeasurable speed

hear through the vine

proverbial or literal

fragments of a meaning and

vocalized lust broken off, fragments

crossed comets of conversation-

though our heads are hard pressed

to absorb

the clinging gobs

connecting us by happenstance

and strings of

accidents in common

they'll have a peep show,

exposing all naivety to an

audience of wackjobs and whores

who criticize

they (not the wackjobs and whores) can take their scowls in stride

wear them like stripes on

sleeves of scab

laugh

understand or not understand

something

first said

with profound understanding

or perhaps a

week-long hangover

but we are wolves in a black cave

circling the stack of

paltry bird bones

flashing our mandibles

as usual the strongest will

leaves with

bone in mouth

but the cave is still black

he is still hungry

the bone is still meaningless

he will still want to eat eggplants because

he is an eggplant

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

kurt vonnegut

]

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid Personality Disorder:	Very High
Schizoid Personality Disorder:	High
Schizotypal Personality Disorder:	High
Antisocial Personality Disorder:	High
Borderline Personality Disorder:	Very High
Histrionic Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Narcissistic Personality Disorder:	Very High
Avoidant Personality Disorder:	High
Dependent Personality Disorder:	Very High
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:	Moderate
-- Take the Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Info --

He looked it in the eye and told it NO

"the folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us"

paul valery

beautiful birthday

i turned 23 and am still alive-

this year, the days are only going to get better. you know, to balance things out.

read it while it's free.

buy it while it's in print.