About Going to the Gym, or, the Extradimensional Nature of God

Hello, sexy!  Here's what I've written.  Tell me what you think (and if you notice any really blatant misspellings.  I'm a terrible proofreader.)

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A Game with God

I smoke one cigarette and listen to loud music on the car stereo when I'm on the way to the gym.  The loud music makes me feel like I'm someone else, if it is the right music, and the cigarette is used to balance out the healthy effects of the workout.  The best music to listen to either before or during a workout is the early Ice Cube album The Predator.  It's ear-drum-shattering, through a good set of headphones, and the lyrics seem to push the psyche forward into some ethereal zone of almost unadulterated pent up rage, which is precisely the zone in which one ought to be when lifting weights in the company of other men who are all much larger than oneself.  Of the other men, I suspect some of them to be on steroids, but I don't reserve any particular judgment for these.  The cigarette is always a Parliament Light, and I frequently think, as the smoke flutters toward the open window and then quickly zips away into the warm air outside of the vehicle, that they should have athletic clubs in which one could smoke.  Especially when lifting weights, all is vanity, and I remain convinced that I would look particularly worldly and perhaps even menacing in the mirror doing dumbbell curls with half of a lit cigarette dangling from my mouth.

I walk into the gym with a confident stride, but I wear my gym shorts at least twice in succession to the gym, and they reek something awful if there is a little updraft.  I feel bad wasting water and detergent on clothing I've only worn once since the last wash.  My preference (because of my unfortunate odor) is not to pass anyone too closely as I navigate my way through the turnstile, which only allows patrons to enter after they have waved a small card, printed with a member-specific barcode on the back, in front of the red eye of a little peripheral code reader.  The atmosphere is humid and warm past the airlock, and the code reader makes a familiar beep and flashes, for less than a second, a green light, permitting me to proceed.  The older man behind the counter knows my name.  He reads it on the computer screen every time I enter the gym when he is working.  I don't know his name, but I always ask him "how's it goin'?" or make a comment on any out-of-the-ordinary weather.  He is at least twice my size (all muscle) and I wonder what he must have looked like when he was my age.  I wonder, then, whether body-building (is that the phrase for what men like him do?) is something safe for a gentleman of his age.  But he seems healthy and happy enough.  I grab a clean hand towel from the reception counter to my right as I walk forward.  Below the stack of clean towels is a large wheeled laundry bin full of dirty towels.  The new-born towels loom over their deceased brethren below, and in under two hours the towel I've just picked up will have lived out another lifespan and will join that graveyard of sweat and stale cotton.

Lifting is a chore.  Well, at times I wonder if it is worse than a chore.  But on most days, lifting is a chore and I don't really enjoy doing it.  The best thing about lifting is the numbness of the muscles one feels immediately after a particularly hard lift.  The numbness is accompanied by a little bit of euphoria, and a state of total alertness.  I guess the body, under the stress of the weight, must pump out quite a lot of adrenaline and endorphins (and all that other stuff) into the brain to keep one pushing for that one more repetition.  But it doesn't feel good, for me, until after the stress has stopped.  As for it possibly being worse than a chore, I (because of my various neuroses) wonder about the economic efficacy of the act.  When I lift weights on an even semi-regular basis, I plow through what appears to be twice as much food as I normally would.  I worry about my food intake as it is, and I am the odd type who feels transient pangs of intense guilt about the fact that I have never experienced real life-threatening hunger, in a world where one billion (or however many) live in food scarcity.  I feel guilty about eating, and I wonder how many extra calories are being consumed and (from a global perspective) wasted by large sweaty men lifting large cold metal plates on bars until they are so bulky that they, in my humble opinion, couldn't possibly be attractive to the top-drawer group of the opposite sex.  So, sometimes lifting is an effort of will and physical exertion, and sometimes it makes me feel guilty.  I rarely enjoy it.

Actually, to have the whole story out here, I do enjoy lifting on the days when my girlfriend and I are able to go to the gym together.  This is enjoyable for a number of reasons.  Although we lift at dramatically different weight levels, there's a certain amount of unspoken competition that goes on for me in my head when I am lifting with J.  She is a dancer, and I could pass a polygraph saying the words "she has the bangin'est body I have ever seen."  ("Bangin'est" is my crude attempt at creating the correct verbiage to adequately describe how she looks from the neck down.  For the uninitiated, be warned: bangin'est is not precisely synonymous with "beautiful," in that you can't use "bangin'est" to describe a female's face.  You're best to stick with "beautiful" or "angelic" or "stunningly cute in both feature and proportion" if you're describing the facial area.)  She is athletic, more so than I, and I enjoy following her around the gym to the various weight lifting areas, switching off machines with her, and making sure that I am always working out at least as hard as she is.  The little shine of a thin layer of perspiration on her mediterranean looking skin is sexy the way hot massage oil is sexy, and at the gym she dresses scantily in shorts that leave little to the imagination, and sometimes nothing more than a sports bra.  We joke and laugh and I enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of watching her do squats under a weighted bar.  Usually we alternate machinery and are both doing an exercise simultaneously, but when it comes to squats we both just watch the other, waiting our turn.  J looks sublime doing squats in the miniscule clingy shorts, and I'm content to sip water and take in the sight.  Occasionally, I'll notice other men (larger, better fed and stronger men) looking at the same thing I am looking at as I mentally count J's repetitions.  I feel like the prize fighter, the champion, in that moment.  I think to myself: "the only reason I could ever see spending as much time in the gym as these guys do would be to woo a girl like J."  I'm across the finish line, then, as they continue to practice for the race.  She never seems to notice when other men look at her.  Lifting weights with her is not a chore.

My distaste for the lifting of the heavy things keeps me out of the twenty-four-hour gyms that have sprung up across America in dark and empty shopping center corner properties.  The only thing to do in these "24/7" gyms aside from lifting is a cardiovascular workout on a treadmill or an elliptical machine.  Indoor cardio is worse to me than lifting and I avoid it like the plague, and as such, I avoid the whole twenty-four-hour scene.  Now, one might be inclined to wonder, what do I enjoy doing, if anything, at the gym?  What compels me to get into the car alone, with an overfull backpack and a cigarette and a big bottle of water?  Why would I suffer the stale sweat smell of the gym shorts the way I do?  What is it that goes on in the gym that makes it one of my favorite places to go?  I can answer this question by explaining that my backpack seems overfull not only because there is a full sized bath towel stuffed into it, but because there is a portion of a racquetball racquet sticking out of the top where the zipper will not fit up entirely around its length.

I love racquetball.

That is not to say that I love the sport racquetball.  I have only played the actual game perhaps twice, and I don't know any of the rules.  I don't know what the lines on the court mean, and I don't know how many points one would need to win a match.  I know nothing.  But, when I'm alone at the gym, the first thing I do after grabbing my nascent white hand-towel (equipped with a black plastic anti-theft device) is walk down a short hall, and directly down a six-step patch of stairs, to my right past an empty racquetball court, and on to the second court of the pair.  There are three possible courts to play on at the Longmont Athletic Club, the third of which is elsewhere in the building, off of the side of the basketball court.  Incidentally, I prefer only the one court, and feel deeply dissapointed when I show up and it is being used (which is refreshingly rare.)  


So I don't love the sport, and I don't know how to play, and I don't believe myself to be particularly skilled at it, but I can hardly wait to do what it is I do in the court.  I place on my right hand a snug red and gray athletic glove made out of some ultra light, space-age breathable fabric.  I remove any necklaces or bracelets I might be wearing and empty my pockets.  I take a big drink of water and pluck the racquetball out of its place in my backpack.  I pick up the racquet.  The racquet was gifted to me last Christmas by my parents, and it seems very nice to me.  I don't suppose I would be able to tell the difference between a racquet of poor quality and a professional-grade one, but I know that I relish the light and airy feeling of my racquet in the tightly gripped palm of my hand.  Its construction also seems space-age to me, and I can't begin to wonder about what fancy elements the body of the apparatus is made of.


The sound of the thick glass door closing into the thick glass wall behind me makes a booming, echoing noise, and I immediately bounce the ball, a blue spherical piece of rubber, off of the floor once with my hand, and then, with my racquet, to the end of the court.  It makes a satisfying pop upon its impact with the white wall, and returns to me with once bounce off of the floor.  I return it to the wall with the thwop noise the ball makes bouncing off of the taut strings spanning the racquet's open face.


It is slow at first.  pop... thwop... pop... thwop


My mind doesn't wander far from the ball for the first five or ten minutes.  My body starts to warm up and the speed of the ball's return to me increases.  It seems always to increase from the beginning of a volley to the end, as if I subconsciously become more urgent about the act of hitting the ball back and forth to myself over a span of time.  My focus is only ever on hitting the ball back to myself as many times as possible without letting it get away from me.  I prefer that the ball bounce off of the floor only once on its return trip from the wall to wherever I am standing, and usually this is the case, but with the ever increasing speed of each volley, there comes a point when I hit the ball in some slanted manner and it goes way too high, or zips down the wall too closely upon return to hit it without whacking the wall, or it finds that exact spot (the crotch, they call it) where the back wall and the floor meet, reducing its momentum to almost nothing and destroying any desirable trajectory.


Nothing tamps my mood down when I'm in there, though.  I have some sense at all times of how I am performing, but hitting the ball irregularly and without exerting myself at full potential doesn't frustrate me.  If the ball goes astray like a sheep losing its herd, I simply pick it up and continue on.  I start to sweat and after an interval I enter a state that is similar to what I have heard hypnotic states described to be.  pop... thwop... pop... thwop.  My thoughts become lucid and dreamlike, and my mind gets to wander.  I am not certain about the physiology of this, but sometimes I theorize about it as my consciousness drifts.  I imagine that the repetitive act of hitting the ball back and forth, engaging most of my muscles in unison to meet the ball wherever it desires to be met, and engaging most of my reptilian "kill or be killed" brain in the act, brings my entire being into a more natural and perhaps primitive state.  My action, my reflexes, my eyes on the ball, all of this is an emulation of the hunt.  This isn't the mind numbing drudgery of sitting at a keyboard pounding out weak prose and reading the news to distract me from my own filth.  This is engaging a wild animal, small and nimble, in a battle of wits and speed on plains of the Serengeti.  I am more human than at any other time, and most of my peripheral and distractible faculties are expired on the task at hand.  pop... thwop... pop... thwop.  With the lower parts of my brain adequately transfixed and occupied by their work, my neo-cortex is allowed to fire away in a manner it is not used to.  My frontal lobe says: "thank God, the back portion is finally giving me a respite from its infantile pleas for sex and food.  Now I can get some work done."

And then it's off to the races.  I think about writing.  I plan grandiose three volume novels in my mind.  Novels about sex and debauchery and dope.  Novels about love and redemption.  Novels about alternate histories in which Christians actually listened to what Christ was purported to have said.  I think about revolution, and what it would look like if someday I was involved in one.  (I'd never hold a gun, nor a molotov, nor even a big stick, should the occasion finally occur.)  I think about politics and about the time when I was recently at the DMV and the woman at the counter asked me if I would like to register to vote.  I had let out half of a laugh, which would have matured to a full out guffaw, had I not stifled it.  She smiled at me, I waved my hand in a signal of negation and said "no way."  I would bet that when I think about politics, the ball is more likely to find the crotch of the wall and floor.  I make an attempt to steer my now free mind away from such inanery.

I think about God a lot in those moments of bodily active meditation.  I ponder the concept from all sides.  I've prayed, on occasion, while twisting my body back to my left to get a good backhanded swing at a particularly fast return.  I like, on certain days, to think of it thus: I am playing tennis with God.  Sometimes God is a man, and sometimes God is a woman, and He or She is with me, in some sense.  To clarify, She is with me in that She exists outside of our dimension, and so can penetrate and experience all things that we know and do.  When I hit the ball, thwop, it doesn't exactly come right back to me per terrestrial physics.  What actually happens is that the ball is, for an imperceptibly small period of time, sucked through a trans-dimensional-membrane from which it pops out into God's dimension.  God, being the professional He or She is, is able to return the ball invariably to the exact same spot at which I had initially hit it.  God returns my ball perfectly through the membrane every single time. pop.  For me, it takes the ball a second or slightly less to travel from the white wall to my racquet, and, thwop, a second or a little less to get back to the trans-dimensional-membrane.  God exists in a dimension that transcends time, however, and although I don't know how long the ball (in God's terms) is actually gone, from my feeble minded perspective it never actually leaves, but just bounces back to me.

I meander back in my freewheeling way to the Serengeti concept.  What would it be like if I were living at the dawn of man?  Physically uncomfortable, no doubt, but perhaps spiritually freeing.  My imagination tells me in elementary terms that primitive man was perhaps living in a far more liberated fashion than I am today.  Primitive man was not chained by ephemeral and synthetic concepts like state and church imposed monogamy.  He wasn't obese, and didn't need to be told to exercise.  His life was exercise.  He bowed to another only out of the deepest respect, not because we was an abject slave to a childish economy of greed and its instituting statesmen.  He bowed as he pleased, and if he didn't please, he got his furs and his spears and walked away.  He needed no visa, no passport, no shoes, and the world was his.  Or, of course, hers, as the case may have been.  I fathom behaving more like a monkey, slapping the rubber ball to and fro, and think about all the hang ups civilization has hung up on me.  I fathom walking around naked or nearly naked, and seeing other people do the same.  I fathom people selling their televisions, or burning them en masse, because they've realized that their saintly monkey-selves have been caged by the garbage coming over the airwaves.  I fathom teepees and mushrooms.  A slight feeling of dissapointment washes over me when I realize that none of this can be real.  I resolve myself, though, to be more like early man.  I resolve myself to laugh loud enough that the sound of it would carry a mile across rolling grassy sub-Saharan Africa.

pop... thwop... pop... thwop.  I'm sweating a lot by this time.  I'm euphoric.  Then, I glance at the clock.  An hour has gone by blissfully.  One more volley with God, five minutes maybe, and then it ends.  I open the glass door and feel the hypnotic state follow me as I pack up my bag and trot up the six stairs, down a short hallway and into the locker room.  I rig the temperature gauge in the sauna (a small piece of metal resting at the end of a thin but rigid wire protruding from a quarter-sized hole in the reddish wood) with two tissues that I have soaked with cold water.  The cool of the water activates the heating element in the sauna, and causes the room to get far hotter than it is normally supposed to be.  I lay in there, drifting out of my racquetball induced stupor, and now pouring sweat out of every inch.  Not many people use the sauna.  I'm alone in there nine times out of ten, and I try to stand it as long as possible.  Slowly, the real world creeps back in as my reptilian brain realizes it is free to push the neo-cortex around again.  What will I eat?  When will I sleep?  What is the weather outside?  When is the last time I had sex?  The drudgery of the truly primitive.  When I feel as though I will suffocate if I stay any longer, I get out and take a quick rinse of a shower.  Clothing is replaced on my body.  I feel quite right, filling my water bottle at the fountain just outside the portal into the mens' room.  I walk toward the lobby and the airlock.  My hand towel has no funeral, no flowers, as it passes limply into the realm of its dead family, the laundry bin.  As I pass the turnstile, I notice that the muscular old man has been replaced by a young girl who I'm sure works there only part time.  She smiles at me each time I pass her, but I don't flatter myself, knowing that she smiles this way at everyone.  I smile back.  I find her cute, but J does not, so it's just a smile (unattractively dripping with residual water and sweat) and then I am back in the sun and into my car.  I wait for a few seconds until the alcohol detection device tells me "BLOW" on its digital readout.  I blow, while humming, into the device for five seconds.  It tells me immediately: "PASS."  Primitive man would never have had to put up with this.  I start the car, and begin to pull out, but stop suddenly.  I've forgotten something.

Ah, yes.

I light one cigarette, and breath in the first puff deeply.  It feels refreshing.  And I need to balance out the healthy effects of the workout.

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Hope someone found that engaging.  If you did, leave a comment.  Or tweet me.  Or e-mail me.  Or whatever's clever.

Love.

John Waters is a Filthy Old Man

Hola, compañeros magníficos!

So, I've been spending a bit more time on the "YouTubes" than I ever did in the past.  For a long time, I thought of YouTube as a one-stop-shop for people who wanted to see videos of humans inadvertently hurting themselves, humans purposely hurting others, cats acting funny, or surly unicorns venturing in search of magical caves.  I didn't realize until more recently how much educational or high-brow material could be consumed on YouTube.  I'm glad to report that if you are willing to search for Noam Chomsky interviews or lectures, Norman Finkelstein debates, Alan Watts monologues, or what Christopher Hitchens' fans call the "Hitch-slap," you can find all sorts of really interesting, and far more mentally stimulating, stuff.  (The "Hitch-slap" is, of course, a play on the phrase "bitch-slap," denoting particularly memorable moments in which Hitchens "pwns" a person with whom he is debating.)  ("Pwn" is a neologism originating from the online gaming community, and evolving because of the frequent misspelling of "own," a verb meaning, roughly, "to decimate in battle."  The neologism is synonymous with the properly spelled "own.")

Maybe someday I'll create one of those lame "list" blogs in which a blogger who is generally out of ideas makes a completely un-empirical "top ten" list about some arbitrary topic.  The topic will be: "top ten best YouTube videos or video series."  But I won't do that today because I find "list blogs" distasteful and cheap.  (Even the many list blogs I myself have done in the past.)


Instead of giving you a list, I'm going to talk about a particular video, and where it landed me. There is a video series on the interwebs called "The Big Think." You can visit their main site here. The Big Think is a video series, and a blog, and a couple other things. They explain it thus: "...we believe that success in the future is about knowing the ideas that allow you to manage and master this universe of information." That universe of information to which they refer is the growing body of digital information.  The videos they produce are compelling, abbreviated interviews with various thinkers and doers from around the world.  The interviews are very pointed, so you don't ever have to suffer a long diatribe that is completely off topic when all you wanted to hear, really, was how Penn Jillette reconciles his atheism with his libertarianism.  They keep Mr. Jillette, and all others, right on topic.

Many (if not all) of these videos are available on YouTube.  They're channel can be found here.  I haven't watched all the videos on there, and find myself in disagreement with some of the stuff said in the videos, but I like the concept very much.  It's a "marketplace of ideas."

I've said all this, and explained too much and at too great of a length, to tell you about this one particular video that I enjoyed tremendously.  Here's that video:

John Waters: Why You Should Watch Filth

For those who don't recognize this man, he is a filmmaker, social commentator, and as some might describe him, a gay saint.  He is hilarious and engaging, and I think that he makes some really interesting points in this video.  He speaks to the heart of free speech, and seeing this video prompted me to (finally) take the time to see his (semi) famous film Pink Flamingos.

original movie poster

Pink Flamingos had been on my radar for quite some time, but I had had trouble in the past finding a way to procure the film.  I would look for it intermittently, and then forget about it for months, before some strange thing (maybe a pink flamingo lawn ornament) would remind me anew of the film I wished to see.  I would look for it again briefly before giving up once more.  This happened over a period of years.  Because of this "Big Think" video, I finally made the full effort.  My girlfriend and I watched Pink Flamingos a little over a week ago.

I'm not going to recommend that any of you take in this film.  

Where the subtitle of the movie suggests that it is an "exercise in poor taste," it grossly understates the nature of the thing.  Accept my apology for the crudeness of what I am about to say, but I find this to be the best way to put it: Pink Flamingos is totally fucked up.  It is probably the second or third most fucked up thing I have ever seen.

By "fucked up," I guess I mean "transgressive."  This film was designed by a young John Waters to be exactly that.  It was designed to make the audience feel something they may not have ever felt before.  The film was very funny (it's a dark-comedy.)  It was rated NC-17, and when it first came out it was banned in a few countries.  Probably the most infamous scene in the film occurs at the end, when the main character, a woman named Divine (incidentally played by a cross-dressing man who also went by the name Divine), eats some real, true, fresh dog excrement.  The dog-poop-eating scene was the first thing I had ever heard about the film, and is certainly an image that is hard to shake from one's mind.  Believe it or not, though, the film is not at its filth-apex during that scene.  The entire movie is pretty shocking and depraved.

Let me be clear, if I haven't been already: I am not telling anyone to see this movie.  I don't want to be responsible if you get it and watch it and can't sleep or have proper sex ever again.  Besides, I know I don't have to tell you to see the movie.  There is a certain segment of the population that is reading this right now and thinking, already: "I have to see this movie!"  That's how I was when I heard about it, and I didn't need any convincing.

Pink Flamingos is, as I said, not the most "fucked up" thing I've ever seen.  There was another film Mr. Waters mentioned at the beginning of that video called Salo.  The full title of that movie was Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom.  I am not even going to describe Salo to you, because I think that describing it even a little bit might be imposing too much on you.  I'll just say that I saw it several years ago and it was the roughest piece of art I've ever gotten through.  I call it art, but I wouldn't doubt if many people would call it depraved evil.  But I guess that's the point of this.  Speech and art are different things to different people at different times.  Since it is impossible to pin down precisely what is filth or obscenity for all people at all times, it is necessary that we have no law or social construct inhibiting the kinds of art or speech people want to make.  If someone wants to make a movie filled only with dog-poop-eating, I have to advocate for his or her right to do so.  Obviously, I am compelled as such because if someone can force another human to not make dog-poop movies, than they might decide to censor the more crude elements to my blog the next day.

Mr. Waters argues that we ought to be legally allowed to yell "fire" in a crowded theatre.  He advocates for absolute freedom of speech, and he is not concerned that mafia lawyers are paving the way to absolute freedom of speech by defending the most vile pornographers in the land.  He believes that people should be able to see filthy things (like Salo or Pink Flamingos) because, as I've interpreted his message, a population that has inoculated itself against arbitrary moral shock will be more free where speech is concerned, and more mentally liberated in general.  I agree, basically, with this hilarious old man's assessment of the situation.

It's easier for me to let go of old false standards of morality, I think, when I see films like this, or when I read messed up literature.  That is the crux of the argument, for me.  The idea of transgressive film or transgressive literature or art is to find within me something that I hold to be true or right and to push hard at it, to the point of discomfort, as a kind of test. The result always seems to be one of two things: the notion that is being tested will either withstand the sensory barrage, which yields more perfect understanding of my personal constitution, or the feeling of being transgressed upon will wane in time, and I will find myself forced to throw out a piece of old socially imposed morality that henceforth appears to have not been rooted very deeply in my concept of reality.  It's an inward philosophical experiment, I suppose.

Or maybe I'm just a person who enjoys being shocked.

It would be heartening to know that I'm not the only one out there who finds value in this kind of bizarre deviation.  Do we have any "rotten-dot-com-ers" out there?  Any 4chan freaks?  Any John Waters fans?  I'd like to hear from you.  What do you all think about freedom of speech, or about fucked up movies where large cross-dressed men eat fresh dog-shit?  Am I out of my mind?  Let me know. :-p

Love.

P.S. - I find Salo, Pink Flamingos, Two Girls, One Cup, and Irreversible, all rolled into one, to be far less outrageous and stomach churning than the idea of President "Drone-Strike-US-Citizens" Obama having been given the Nobel Peace Prize.  As per usual, all appears to be relative.

Love (again.)

An Open Letter to Beyonce Knowles

Hello beautiful humans (and extra-terrestrial intelligences, if you are receiving this transmission.)

Frequent readers will know that I'm really kind of all over the place with the sorts of topics I cover here.  Over a long enough span of time, I could really be found writing about pretty much anything, from inadvertent extra-lavatorial bowel movements to the case for Christ having been an anarcho-pacifist philosopher.  Of late, I have tended toward trying to scrape the depths of my admittedly shallow mental pool, trying to serve up ideas that I find to be profound and ringing of truth (whatever that means.)  Oddly enough, though, my intellectual diggings seem to be accompanied, of late, by a marked change in my open-mindedness toward some of the more banal and trivial aspects of the society in which I live.  You've probably noticed this too, if you've been reading for long enough.

This started with Lady Gaga.  I, sometime within the last year (or perhaps a little more than a year), experienced a revelation, a turning of opinion of precisely 180 degrees, on the music of one Ms. Gaga.  I grew up with a taste for the bizarre and fringe, and spent most of my life railing against mainstream American entertainment.  This has been especially true with pop music, which I have almost always found to be grotesque and beyond the pale of idiocy.  Due to various changes in my psychological constitution, my distaste for mainstream music has been dulled a bit to the point at which I have allowed some of the most mainstream-poppy stuff into my iTunes library.  I attribute this to two major factors: my (sometimes subconsciously evolving, sometimes consciously driven) desire to be less judgmental of all humans, and my corresponding desire to be able to connect with more humans on any number of levels (even if it means the shallow common ground of MTVesque brain-drain-culture.)

I like to think that I'm still more likely to be seen listening to some underground hip-hop, old Grateful Dead recordings, or Enya than I am to be found consuming the likes of Nicki Minaj or Rihanna.  (As a side note: that Nicki Minaj album with "Starships" on it has only one good song on it.  It's called "Starships."  Should have been released as a single.)  I've also not allowed myself to plummet so far into the morass of American anti-intellectualism that I have yet to purposely listen to anything by that girl, Justin Bieber.  (Not to be judgmental, but isn't her whole act a giant national cock-tease?)  Nevertheless, I have allowed myself to get into some of this music.  Don't judge me any more harshly than I do Ms. Bieber.

So, you may be wondering about the title of this blog-post.  Let us, then, get straight to the heart of this thing.

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Dear Beyonce,

You don't know me.  It's not tremendously important that you do know me, at this juncture, unless you wanna sponsor my flight from the USA to Nicaragua, where I fancy living on a collective farm with people who are so lucky as to not have televisions in their homes.  Before you click hastily away from this letter and back to your "luxury mansions in Hawaii" web search, let me alert you to something you may not have noticed.

Rhianna (the female recording artist) is attempting to have extramarital physical relations with your man!

Now, I don't know what kind of agreement you have set up with your husband "Jay-Z" (henceforth referred to as the "Jigga Man," "Jay," "Mr. Z," "Shawn," or "Mr. Carter.")  Perhaps you and the Jigga Man had the commendable and progressively-thinking social foresight to have entered into an "open relationship" of sorts.  If this is the case, and the Jigga is permitted to, while an integral part of your household, be spreading his seed all about the decadent landscape of the music industry, then please disregard the rest of this letter (unless you want to share any steamy details about three-way encounters featuring you, Rihanna and your husband.  If this is the case, please please feel free to use the comments section below.)

If, however, your relationship with your husband is more than a shrewd business partnership (as it sometimes looks from the outside), or if it is the case that the morally upright image you have spent years building in the media spotlight is not just a sham designed to aid you in your insatiable quest for money, then I have to encourage you to watch that Rihanna chick carefully, especially when it comes to your "baby' daddy."

You are wondering: "How could this dork Charles, an impoverished poor excuse for a pseudo-intellectual from the hillbilly state of Colorado, know that Rihanna has designs on my man?"

Stop wondering stuff and just keep reading!

Go find Rihanna's most recent album.  I know you've got it on an iPod somewhere.  Check out track number nine, entitled "Roc Me Out."

Now I've looked all over the internet and have yet to find anyone out there who has interpreted this catchy song in the same way that I have.  This either makes me an alarmist (or perhaps a freak desperately looking for an excuse to write an open letter to you) or it means that the average person listening to Rihanna's music has the deductive ability of a slice of Key Lime pie.  You and I both know, of course, that while delicious, and possibly the king of the pie world, Key Lime pie is known for its lack of mental prowess.  Whether I'm crazy, or Rihanna's fan-base is a broad collective of functional illiterates, what I have heard in this song cannot be un-heard and it is my obligation to call it to your attention.

The song is sang from the point of view of a sexually frustrated Rihanna who has her eyes set on a man who is, in some way, off limits to her.  The song is basically her attempt to seduce said man, while reassuring him that, in her words, "whatever we do, is between me and you."  Now, I ask you, does it not stand to reason that the meaning of this is that she is after a man who has previously been spoken for, either by means of a public relationship or a wedding ring?  I can't imagine any other reason why Rihanna would want to hide her seduction and fantasized sexual victory.  After all, subsequent to her violent encounter with one Chris Brown some years back, she must be used to having her personal life under the scrutiny of the whole world.  I would even venture to say that she revels in it.

The chorus of the song is as follows:

Give it to me like I want it,this is for your eyes only.Roc me out, back and forth.Roc me out on the floor.

Mrs. Knowles, I think that you will agree that what Rihanna is looking for here is some sweet lovin'.  We are all well aware that this is the same girl who sang famously that "chains and whips excite" her, so we know that she is a bit on the freaky side.  This freaky side can be heard coming through in "Roc Me Out," as well.  She encourages the man whom she is trying to seduce to "come right now, you better hurry, before you miss out and I finish it off."  This is fairly graphic, as lyrics go, and blatantly seductive.  Many men would find the allure of a girl challenging him to beat her to the moment of sexual climax, as if it were some sort of race, to be irresistible.  I will refrain from digesting in totum the lyrics to "Roc Me Out," which are all, however revealing, quite uninspired and not worthy of even the most juvenile literary review.  The important thing is this: the song is directed at your Jigga, with whom you've just had a child.

How do I know the song is directed at your husband?  This is very very clear.  The song is titled "Roc Me Out," not "Rock Me Out."  The missing "k" on the word "roc" is meant, very obviously, to be a reference to your husband and his apparent obsession with naming stuff "roc-this" or "roc-that."  His clothing company is called "Rocawear," his record label is called "Roc-A-Fella Records," and his "Roc Nation" entertainment group has managed portions of Rihanna's career.

There is only one man associated with the deliberate misspelling of "rock."  It is your husband.  The one known to advertise the fact that he has "ninety-nine problems," of which a "bitch ain't one."  I humbly submit to you, Mrs. Knowles, that whether or not he's got a problem with a "bitch," you might.

If you don't buy this, listen to the song again.  Here, I'll even embed it for you.

I don't know how no one else noticed this.  The naming of this siren-song isn't a nod in the Jigga's direction.  It's not some kind of homage.  It's Rihanna's way of telling us who she is singing to when she says that he's been "taking too long to get [her] head on the ground and [her] feet in the clouds."

You better watch that girl carefully.  Although I wouldn't get too pushy with your husband about this until you've confirmed or denied that indeed our little starlet has lured him outside of your bed.  As you know, he frequently sings about his various criminal connections and his ability to still "push weight."  I have a difficult time discerning whether or not he does still deal in the cocaine industry, but you'll want to play it safe.  You don't want to wake up at the bottom of a river, and to hear your husband tell it, he's bigger than the mafia.

I hope I haven't ruined your day, Mrs. Knowles, and that I haven't wasted your time with this.  As a person, you seem nice enough, despite your megalomaniacal acquisition of superfluous wealth.  To be sure, we ought to give Mr. Carter the benefit of the doubt, here.  Perhaps the singer of such hit songs as "Big Pimpin," "Girls Girls Girls," and "Money, Cash, Hoes" has been lying in public for all these years, and he is actually really completely interested in a good ol' monogamous Judeo-Christian relationship.  

But...

There's just something about him that tells me he's not.

I'm just tryin' to help.  I bid you good day.

Sincerely

Charles 

-------

Well there you have it, readers.  I felt I needed to warn Beyonce.  Since I didn't have her

phone number, email address, or anything of the sort, I figured I'd just write about it here and hope that one of you had her email.  If you want to help, you could tweet a link to this blog to her at @Beyonce, and bring this to the attention of all of your like minded friends.  Hopefully, Rihanna has not yet sealed the adulterous deal, and we can prevent the breakdown of what some have called entertainment's "most powerful couple."


If anyone out there is on "team Rihanna," you can help her by tweeting this blog post to her as a "heads up."  She's at @Rihanna.

Ok.  Go ahead and leave a comment.

Love.

Watching the One

Romance cannot be said to be synonymous with love.  This much should be quite clear to the average American.  Recall hot fumbling evenings in strange beds with strange people, heart pounding exhilaration at what feels preposterous and euphoric at once, giving yourself to the one you don't know, and will never know.  Frequently, the smell of alcohol emanates from the bed and congress is stymied by a kind of lack of experience.  Trudging over new terrain, over which you shall not pass again, footing is lost, you become bogged down by the combination of the natural (oh, so natural) act of walking and by seeing a new place at once.  It is romance, devoid of knowing love, and an indispensable experience.  One trips and falls and finally rolls out of that foreign place never to return.

No, romance is not the same as love, nor can romance even be said to be the child of love.  Romance has no father.  No matron.  Romance was born of blood itself and has existed since the beginning of time, a contemporary of love, and occasionally a bedfellow of love, but unrelated.

The marriage of love and romance (romantic-love) must then be set apart from love and romance themselves.  My words here are redundant in the sense that all humans are required, under threat of being robbed of the title "human," to have understood these things before almost any other.  Yet, still, this frequently unsaid but commonly known thing bears repeating.  Take note, poets and lyricists: you sell a lie when you write "love" where you mean "romance" or "romantic-love."  I would be much obliged if you could find your way to correcting this maddening mistake.  Generations have been thrown briefly astray by this.

I've known a lot of love.  I've known a little romance, here and there, spread across the expanse of Colorado, in mountains and seedy apartments and in the backs of parked cars.  I've also, precisely once, known romantic-love.

Love trumps romance, and the notion of romantic-love.  But romantic-love trumps romance, in turn, and yields an almost unworldly set of gifts, almost completely unrelated to those extracted from love.

Here... let me tell you.

It's about what you can see.  What you watch another person do.

Picture this:

She sits on the brown carpet floor, which needs to be vacuumed soon, in a pale, thin, blue night-tank-top, a garment which you are sure has a proper name that eludes you.  Her blue shorts ("booty shorts," perhaps they're called) you bought her in Panama City Beach, Florida.  The bottom of the shorts, obscuring her own bottom, is studded with tiny diamondesque rhinestones in the shape of a pair of flip-flop sandals, and in the shape, below that, of the words "Panama City Beach."  The shape of her butt causes the letters in the middle to be pulled slightly from view, thus: "Panam Beach."  One of her legs is extended, her left one, out before her and to the left slightly, right leg tucked in close to her body, laying evenly on the floor.  Before her, a 14"x11" painting canvas rests flat upon the brown, unvacuumed field.  She's commandeered a blue plastic cup that you have been drinking from since you were maybe ten years of age, filled it with water, and rinses her paintbrushes in its contents.  Oily pigment collects on the rim's edge, creating a bizarre rainbow all the way about the circumference.  She has a palate of disposable wax-paper sheets to the right of the canvas, and a few smudges of paint have been squeezed out there, in no certain alignment, but neatly, anyway.  You don't know anything about painting, but it occurs to you that she is conservative with the material.  You've been told that it was expensive, but it occurs to you that you would spend all you had on paint for her if she wanted it.  Her lips are pursed at times, and she sits back frequently, cocking her head slightly to one side, looking at the thing.  The brushes move in ways that make you at once envious and, in some sense, proud.  "I'm in love with a painter," you think.  No.  Wait.  "I'm in love with a woman who paints."  Perhaps this is closer, and you wish she would paint more because there is a glow of serenity coming off of her face, which isn't smiling physically, but appears happy, undistracted, even hypnotized.  You're not allowed to look at the canvas.  She insists upon these things, and thrives on surprises and big finishes.  Excitement to see the finished work pales in comparison to the Godly painting of the girl as she works.  It's as if you aren't there, and seconds in a row, or even sometimes minutes, can be stolen away from time staring at her without so much as an upward glance from the woman.  Venus.  Venus.  Venus! You love to watch her paint.

Picture this:

You lay stretched across the bed.  She is folding her laundry.  This is a thing of unrivaled beauty.  Tanned skin protrudes from her simple blue shirt, and these arms never seem to stop moving.  Sometimes, in moments like these, there is passing conversation.  What should you make for dinner?  What should we do to pass our evening?  What will the weather be like on the morrow?  But the most elegant and picturesque minutes are those in which you don't say a thing, and she doesn't reply.  She folds laundry at a rate that appears, at first glance, manic, but her brilliant eyes seem to exude caution, care and a cooling calm.  They don't dart about, like her arms and hands, frantic and disoriented.  They operate with precision, selecting the next garment from the cluttered pile of clean clothing sitting next to you, and focusing on it as if it were the only thing in the world, until it has been folded and placed away on a hanger or in a drawer.  Each drawer is opened and closed a number of times, and in this way and others she appears to act as a machine, programmed to do these things in the most particular of ways, all this closing and opening of drawers.  You are entranced by this.  You think to yourself, sometimes, that this is "zen."  This is the relinquishing of the self, and of the world, and the surrender to nature.  It is as though she is disappearing in her action, and the contradiction between her manic arms and her zen face create something that seems impossible.  She dissolves, and ceases to be, and becomes the act of folding, the way she does when painting.  Only briefly, you're distracted by thought about how you, yourself, fold clothes.  Oafishly.  The drawers hang open until they absolutely must be closed.  No fold is exactly like the subsequent or prior, and your eyes betray impatience.  Short movements with the feet, and no motion seeming deliberate but instead labored and exhausted.  No hint of zen when you fold.  A weird feeling, to wish you could fold clothes like another, but you feel it.  The moments when she disappears into the closet to hang a blouse upon a hangar next to its myriad brethren, you wish she would come back, or perhaps that you had chosen a better vantage point, from which you could watch the dresser and the hangars at once.  You despise her absence from your eyes.  When she returns, you feel warm with no blanket and safe with no lock and this, you think, is better than Broadway.  You love to watch her fold clothes.

Picture this:

It's two o'clock in the morning.  She's in bed and you're awake.  Many nights, you can't sleep, as the world rushes past the mind's eye many times over in the span of minutes.  You go to look at her.  Not to wake her, but to just see her.  A heavy blanket and a soft sheet cover her, and she appears snuggled and quiet.  Her eyes are closed, and the light shining dimly into the room from above the kitchen stove gives your eyes just enough leeway to see her face.  In sleep, she looks more like a child.  Skin is softer and her freckles, which are sparse, appear somehow to contrast more heavily than they do in daylight.  Seraphim.  Burning angel.  You can feel from two feet away the heat of her sleeping form.  She's pushed the covers down slightly below her chest in her sleep, and despite her hair being tied up tightly behind her, whisps and tendrils of dark brown drape themselves here and there across her forehead, around her ears, and even in one case down to her upper lip.  Noticing her lips, you desire to kiss her, but refrain.  Her eyelids twitch every few seconds, and she is dreaming.  She's unraveled.  No longer a woman, but only now the substantial act of dreaming.  She is half smiling.  You know it is not just an effect of the way the pillow tugs slightly at the skin on her face, because the half of the smile appears on the side of her mouth opposite the pillow.  Every now and then her nose wrinkles itself up, offended by some itch or odor, and you can see at those moments the tiny dimples on the end of either side of her nose.  You believe that this is sleeping beauty, and denounce any prior impostors.  As if through some ethereal osmosis, your eyelids become heavy from hers, and you feel heat washing down your skin in waves.  Everything is slow and perfect and the only person you could ever imagine sharing a second like this with is her.  At these thoughts, your mind drifts to the metaphysical, and you imagine yourself in her dream.  In her dreams, in your mind, you are unworthy and afraid to speak lest you disturb an atom in her body.  All things defer to her calm, and her glance silences the storms of man and earth.  You venture a kiss.  One kiss.  A peck.

You venture a tiny little kiss on her forehead.  When your lips touch her flesh, you can smell her.  Sweet.  Very subtly sweet.  This is romantic-love.  You love to watch her sleep.

There are degrees and variations to love and romance.  I could only know these degrees and variations in totum when I found the one I loved to watch.

This is for Jera.

Love.

Thoughts on Acid (Not "Thoughts, on Acid")

Greetings wonderful sentients.

I'm going to write, but first I'd like to direct your attention to the right side of the main page, where I have updated the "currently reading" and "currently listening to" items for the first time in months.  I've read and listened to much in between this moment and the preceding update, but I have again chosen to treat my blog as a bastard step-child with a shade of hair different than my own.  That is to say, I have neglected it like it was nobody's business.  Take heart, though, dear reader: my treatment of my blog is no reflection on how I feel about you.  I value you and your readership as if you were a paternity-test-verified child of my loins, bearing a striking resemblance to me in feature and demeanor.  I promise, you will never get the belt whoopin' that the blog itself gets.

Note that the book I'm reading is the Christopher Hitchens memoir.  I may at a later date have to write about this man at length.  I have found myself relatively drawn in by him (or his YouTube-immortalized ghost, as it were).  He fascinates me in the same way I have become fascinated by William Buckley Jr.  I disagree with both men at nearly every turn, but am floored by the linguistic ability they exhibit.  Particularly, I am very nearly obsessed with Buckley's ability to speak with what I consider to be maximum eloquence, off the cuff, and with nearly unblemished consistency.  If I'm taken in by Buckley's speaking, I'm equally enthralled by Hitchens' writing.  If you geek out on epically brilliant use of English, and like to listen to old arrogant assholes speak as though they know all there is to possibly know in the universe, you should do a web search for videos of both men.

Ok.  Now I'll proceed to talk about something perhaps more interesting.  Stand by.

-------

(For legal purposes, let us shake hands and wink at one another here, agreeing to call the following "non-autobiographical fiction."  Because that is certainly what it is.)

As you may be aware, last summer I was caught hopelessly (and pleasantly) in the grip of what I still view as having been the most intense spiritual (or pyscho-social) revelation I've ever experienced.  To recap, I found myself, in a short period of time, transformed from being a hateful and masochistic little excuse for a man, driven only by greed and lust and a kind of spiteful death wish, into a person I never even conceived of being.  Universal, or "agape," love came to the forefront of my mind and found a resting place there, along with concepts resembling peace and complete pacifism.  My bulimia, a behavior I had exhibited for a decade or more, despite many attempts to be done with it, was suddenly gone.  My manner of speech and dress changed radically, in a way that almost felt imperative.  My life was rid of many physical objects (things I had never considered myself capable of living without) and I was overwhelmed by an intense sense of connection to the whole of the human race which left me frequently with nothing to do but to cry tears of joy at having ever been a part of such an amazing collective.  My interests and tastes, in some places, underwent dramatic upheaval, and I encountered myself in the mirror, for the first time since my days as a very young man, as truly happy at a constitutional level.

Many of you may not know that, in the midst of this rapid transformation, I was given the opportunity to ingest the potent hallucinogenic known as "Lysergic acid diethylamide," or as it is colloquially shortened, "acid."  I've frequently considered describing my (two) experiences with the drug here in writing, but for one reason or another have simply never arrived at the keyboard with the proper words.  To be sure, I still don't think I have the words to properly examine the two experiences as a reasonable re-telling of any kind.  Rather than attempt that task, I just wanted to share, broadly, some of my impressions about the drug itself.  I think this may give me a little bit of linguistic bearing on the thing, so that I might, at some point in the future, be able to wrestle it down a little more tightly and try to tell you exactly what it was like for me.

I'll begin with an obvious question: being that I had dabbled in a myriad of other drugs since the age of eighteen or nineteen, how is it that I had never been inclined to drop (the slang for "take" in the case of acid) LSD before?  The answer is that I had been grossly misinformed about the nature of this substance, and had developed an irrational fear of it.  The misinformation I received, as per usual in this fine mental-prison-camp we call America, was largely an effect of the government, and more specifically, its "war on drugs."  It is well known that the government exaggerates, lies and manipulates on a professional level when it comes to disseminating public information about drugs.  (As a side note, I must say how much it pains me to even use the word "drug" anymore, as it has such a heavy and negative connotation to it.)  The lies I was told in the DARE program weren't enough to stop me from trying methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana and a slew of other substances, but in the case of acid I have to say that I wasn't merely misinformed by the state-propaganda machine, but also by my own skewed research about the substance and even by people who had eaten the drug themselves in the past.

The culmination of all of this bad-info resulted in my being deathly afraid of ever trying LSD.  My impression was that it was too powerful in the sense that it could alter my reality in a way that other drugs could not.  I felt a certain amount of trust for alcohol, marijuana, nitrous oxide and the rest, because they were decidedly not hallucinogenic.  Despite the fact that the substances I had generally chosen to use to alter my consciousness weren't getting me anywhere as far as spirituality or intellect were concerned, and despite the fact that they seemed often to lead me down a path of self-destruction, I took comfort in the fact that I could predict with certainty their effects.  A pint of schnapps always feels like a pint of schnapps.  A line of cocaine always feels like a line of cocaine.  A hit of weed always feels like a hit of weed (give or take a little bit of paranoia.)  The information I had about LSD indicated that I would not be able to predict the effect with any degree of certitude.  I might hallucinate.  I might hear things.  I might laugh.  I might puke.  I might find myself in what Raoul Duke, narrator of the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, described as "hellishly intense introspective nightmares."  (My apologies for the cliche of this quote in this context.  I've since gotten over any juvenile fetishizing I used to do over the film or Mr. Thomspon.)

To put it most simply, I was afraid that acid would do one of two things.  First, it might turn me into a glass of orange juice.  I don't know where I contracted this infectious urban-legend-idea, but for some reason I had always believed quite literally that the substance was potent enough to alter one's psyche to the extent that complete ego death might occur, along with a total reshaping of one's concept of reality and one's physical constitution, resulting in my becoming convinced (perhaps forevermore) that I was not a human but a tall cold glass of delicious citrus drink.  I didn't ever find this appealing.  Second (and more realistically) I feared that use of LSD might open up the darkest portions of my psychological makeup, and that I would find myself in the grips of a vicious bad trip, finding time distorted out of any imaginable proportion, and seeing myself for who I really was with every passing frenzied thought.  To be more clear, I feared that being confronted mentally with the "who I really am" concept would leave me scarred for life and probably on the brink of suicide, because, up until last summer, I had been convinced for a very long time and for a very long list of reasons that I was truly a bad, immoral and pathetic excuse for a human being.  I couldn't bear the possibility of being confronted so harshly with such a reality.

But then, as I have stated again and again, last summer happened.  My spirit was shaken awake by what I have frequently referred to as some kind of cosmological miracle (though I wouldn't be miffed at being given a more scientific explanation), and I found myself loving myself and those around me.  My fear of ever having to be confronted with some hidden dark portion of my mind disappeared.  Thus, when offered the opportunity to eat some acid, I simply took it.

I must, at this juncture, reassure, dear reader, that the revelatory experiences of the summer of 2011 happened entirely independently of any substance use.  There were periods of time during the summer during which I was using various substances (including, for a time at the beginning, a powerful anti-depressant.)  But there were periods of time during which I was completely sober (which were self-imposed purposefully in order to double check that my fantastic mood was not merely drug-induced.)  My two experiences with LSD have added much to my life and my understanding of the human condition, but these understandings were merely supplemental to the more substantial and spiritually-natured awakening I had already undergone.

As I've said, I mean not to describe the "trips" much here.  I can tell you that they were beautiful experiences.  I laughed.  I cried.  I vomited in the bathtub and I had many of my new ideas about the generally good nature of humanity verified in a bath of blinding lucidity and clarity.  I did not fall into a "bad trip" at any point, and for a time I did feel as though I was undergoing ego-death, or perhaps ego-disintegration, which I found desirable and still do.  I hallucinated dancing, ancient Aztec men, beamed into the darkness of my eyelids.  They moved, these little cave-carved symbols, with the music I listened to and seemed to be chanting, marching in a perfectly symmetrical line, their preposterously sized, engorged penises jutting out before each of their masked faces and frail bodies.  (I'll let you interpret that tidbit however you will.)

After both experiences, I was struck with regret that I had not been privy to them before, as a younger man.  I wondered anew about the claims that acid can help alcoholics recover from the cycle of constant drinking, which Bill W, the co-founder of AA, researched in depth himself with zeal.  I wondered what things I might have had verified or disproven to me had I taken the dose at age eighteen.  My understanding of the "hippy" movement, of psychedelic music and art, and of the 1960s was acutely clarified, and I even had the (not too strong) feeling as though I had been given some secret knowledge, the kind which the monkey ancestors had all known at birth.

This is by no means the end of the story, though.  I wanted to understand this better.  Over the summer, I was exposed to many different people and different ideologies, both online and in the physical world, and I tried, where possible, to comprehend the experiences of others who had used LSD or drugs like it.  Naively, I suppose, I was expecting to hear, or even to be able to sense, a common spirit in such other people.  I felt independently happy and liberated, generally free of the self-destructive anger that had been my primary character trait for years before, and I think I was expecting to find the same liberation in a majority of the people who had taken the "acid test."

This is not, by and large, what I found.  Rather, I found mostly people to whom acid was just another "high."  Something to do at a music festival while listening to the latest hipster-wet-dream bluegrass band.  I found this odd, at first, but have since come to some rudimentary understanding of it in my own way.  Here is what I now believe:

LSD cannot synthesize psycho-social or objective, empirical knowledge in a mind.

LSD cannot be relied upon to consistently induce what we normally would call a "spiritual awakening."

LSD has the capacity to induce certain amounts of euphoria and elation.  This, in conjunction with its ability to increase awareness or enjoyment of things like music and dancing, give it a propensity to be used more frequently as a "party drug" than as a catalyst for self-affirming revelatory experience.

LSD's greatest strength is underrated, and is to have the effect of connecting disparate information, in a mind saturated with many different ideas and data, in novel ways, forcing the mind to, in a sense, realize the broad subtext of all previously collected information.

I think of it thusly: if the human mind, at the outset, is a blank white field or page, and everything learned in the course of a lifetime is a single dot painted upon said field, then creativity and the capacity for transcendent understanding is the result of a certain number and combination of said dots being connected in a novel way.  Each human, of course, has a very different array of dots painted on their field.  I mean not to come off as arrogant, but merely as pragmatically realistic when I venture to say that many people are dealing with fields that are, for the most part, left blank.  I don't presume to say that this is the fault of the individual, because very clearly it is the fault of the system we all live within today, which encourages the blind acquisition of goods above all other things, and endless submission to advertising machines (read: TV's) which propagandize us at almost every waking moment.  In the world of "American Idol" and "Jersey Shore," the inquisitive, knowledge thirsty mind is becoming increasingly and tragically out of style.  I believe that the tragedy of the information age, thus far, has been to allow so many people to continue wandering about with so few dots to connect.

Acid seems (as verified by my experience and by the experience of a small handful of other people I have spoken to who have used the substance) to force the mind to connect the dots of knowledge on its white field in ways which would have otherwise not been easily done.  It has a cascading and unifying effect on existing knowledge, and allows deep and otherwise unforeseen conclusions to be drawn from the whole of the field, or sometimes from certain data rich sub-sets within the field.  This notion is admittedly unscientific, but I will say that a good amount of the research done with LSD in the 1950s and early 1960s seems to bear out this conclusion.  

The take away?  I don't think LSD would have yielded me much at the tender, naive age of eighteen.  I had a mind-field (I quite like the way that rolls off the tongue) that was basically wide open.  K-12 had provided me with few substantial points of knowledge, and I had yet to truly embark upon my own autodidactic journey.  Of course, I am not saying that the acid experience is monochromatic.  I am not grandiose enough to be indicating that acid is meaningless to the brainwashed, ignorant masses, and that I am somehow superior to these and thus qualified to make mental gains by the use of the drug.  Allow me to suppose that, under the right circumstances, the experience could have a cascading, dot connecting effect on anyone, no matter how many dots they happen to have.  I simply think that this only becomes a likelihood when an individual uses the substance with a certain purpose in mind, and when that person's number of knowledge-dots have passed a certain threshold.  I don't think there is a moral quality to anyone using acid.  I also think that, if I knew more than I do now, (which is, at the end of the day, relatively little) I would get more from subsequent experiences than I did from my first two times.  My fantasy would be to become as learned as some of my intellectual idols (Chomsky, Hitchens, or Tolstoy) and then experiment with the drug at length in the privacy of a warm cozy room filled with books and good music.  

Blast my own tiny set of dots!

Ultimately, I've experienced all of this and digested it to this end: I think that one Mr. Timothy Leary was wrong about having attempted to convince an entire generation to take acid, or in his words, "turn on, tune in, and drop out."  I think that the reason the revolution he thought could come of a world filled with dosed up young people tripping in public and playing tambourines failed is that he failed to look at the experience objectively.  Mr. Leary was a well educated man with a field full of dots, by all accounts.  To me, then, it is no wonder that he had extremely transcendent experiences on acid.  He made the mistake of thinking that there wasn't anything unique about his mind, or the minds of his well educated contemporaries, which allowed acid to take them to such a place.  He assumed, in a way that now seems preposterous to me, that LSD could be counted on to synthesize information in the minds of the average human.  I don't think acid, having been synthesized, ever synthesized anything of its own.  I think it just gives people a different way to look at the memories and beliefs they already have.

I just felt like I was finally ready to mention this.  To those who take it: happy tripping.  To those who don't: I'm not advocating that you do, but merely relating my experience.

I'd be really interested to hear anyone's personal experiences in this area.  Perhaps I have it all wrong.  Leave a comment.

Love.

A Birthday

There's a gentleman I know whom I refer to as "father."  People call him Chuck if they've met him in the last quarter century.  Many of the people who made his acquaintance before then call him "Waldo."  The nickname Waldo is derived from his last name, "Emerson," in reference to the great transcendentalist thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Oddly enough, my Chuck isn't a big fan of Ralph.  Chuck's birth certificate bears the name "Charles Merrill Emerson Jr," or something close to that.  There was some question at one point whether the "Merrill" on his birth certificate exactly matched the "Merrill" on my own birth certificate, which designates me as not "Jr" but "III."  An "r" or an "l" were said to have been absentee through some fluke of hospital childbirth procedure.  I've frequently thought of attempting to adopt the nickname "Waldo," as my father no longer uses it much.  I've refrained for fear of seeming presumptuous.

I'm going to write briefly today on the topic of Chuck (or "dad," or "father.")  Rather, I'd like to write briefly about a sub-topic of the meta-topic of dad, which in and of itself is a sub-topic of family, which is a topic that becomes increasingly important to me these days.  I've returned recently from a family reunion in the slow-paced state of South Dakota, where I was surrounded by more family than I could easily shake a stick at, and I was struck by how much my life, my psyche, and my body could change over varying periods of time between seeing a myriad of family members without my love or feeling of connection between these individuals wavering in the slightest.  I digress, here, but with purpose.  In the realm of the earthly, I find fewer and fewer things that retain the value that they once appeared to me to have, and fewer and fewer things that even succeed in ever appearing valuable to me, despite their apparent power to seem valuable to many other people.  My family is something that has retained in all places, and in many places even increased, its value to me on an array of different levels.  To the reader, I would hope that you have experienced, or are currently experiencing, the maximum benefit of some kind of loving family.  There are few things more euphoric or guiltless in the world, and I know much on the topics of both euphoria and guilt.

To return to the topic, or rather to elucidate it in the first place, I am writing today to celebrate something that happened precisely eight years ago.  In the interest of brevity, I will just let this go here: my father received a life-saving liver transplant on this day in that long past year.  We have coined this, then, his "liver-birthday."  (Father also has a "kidney-birthday," celebrated along with my sister, who donated the kidney.)  (Father also has a normal birthday, bringing his grand total of birthdays to three.)

In remaining faithful to the nearly-full-disclosure which has been common in my online writings, I will say that eight years ago I was personally preparing to dive head first into a world of depravity and addiction, and will admit that, despite my family having always been there for me throughout my lifetime, I was not always adequately present during the trials of my family around the time when my father had his transplant in a monolithic hospital in Denver.  As a result of some of my activities in those days, there are large portions of memory that seem to have been whisked away permanently, as if my brain had never even been wont to log them down at all.  Some of the things I remember most, I wish I didn't, and many of the things I wish I could recall with greater ease, I cannot.  It's interesting to me the way certain memories fade so thoroughly at the edges as to become nearly translucent, blending into that span of time that we just recall as "general, unremarkable life," and how at the center of those memories there can still be sticking points, jutting out like boulders from a river with sharp spires, that seem as though they will never fade with the rest.  They refuse to succumb, these tiny points, to the constant flow of the river of life.  Still images or tiny clips of sound frequently constitute such memories, and, more frequently for myself, smells.  Smells seem to exist outside of time.  An image is one second, no, less than one second.  A point.  A memory of a voice or a sound can exist in a few second span, but this span is nearly equally exactly defined as an image, refusing to flow over and endlessly in a loop.  A scent knows no limit of time and I can pull it up out of the filing cabinet of my memory and play with it for minutes or sometimes even hours on end, allowing it to flow across countless images and sounds.

I recall well hospital odor.

Hospital odor is known to be sterile.  The air smells as if it is too thin to breath in most sections of a hospital, and is cool to the nose.  Walking about, though, passing various bustling nursing stations and quiet patient quarters with curtains drawn and support machines intermittently beeping, the scent of anything that isn't stereotypically sterile hospital air strikes the nostrils with ferocity, not the way a new odor would strike you walking on a busy city street.  It is the stark contrast against sterile, almost odorless air, obviously, that makes these various other smells so strong.  Many of the scents are not what anyone would likely describe as pleasant, but the memory, at least, enjoys logging them away for later.  The smell of vomit or stale urine are detectable from some rooms, while other rooms allow the detection of a bouquet or perhaps numerous bouquets of flowers, all of them likely adorned by a small card demanding that the patient "get well soon."  I particularly enjoy the scents of the lunch or dinner cart as it is rolled around from patient to patient.  The smell of the cart reminds me every time of the cafeteria in elementary school.  To this day I have some fondness for mass-prepared foodstuffs like you find in hospitals and elementary schools.

Eight years ago today, my immediate family were no strangers to hospitals.  My father had been waiting on the liver transplant donation list for several years.  When he had first learned of his diagnosis with Hepatitis-C, the disease which had proceeded to destroy his (forgive the colloquialism) OE liver, he had stopped drinking beer (something he had enjoyed in the days of my early youth) and began seeing specially trained doctors immediately.  In fact, aside from being a very large man, father had seemed completely healthy to me when he first learned about the Hep-C.  Amazing, though, how in a few short years things changed.

My supposition is that it would be arduous and beyond the point to recount the many trips our family took to the various odorous hospitals and emergency rooms with my father in the later years of my second decade.  I will say this: the man, once healthy, found himself on the precipice of death.  He had gone from being maybe thrice my size to being a man who weighed less than I did.  There were times when my mother woke me in the middle of the night in a panic.  "Dad's not breathing!" she said.  She explained hurriedly that, more precisely, he was breathing, but that he was breathing at an unimaginably slow rate.  We went to check.  I got close to his nearly lifeless figure, under a mountain of blankets in his big bed, that I might hear his nose whistle or see his chest rise.  He took a short half breath in, and let it out immediately.  I counted.  One.  Two.  Three...  Nearly fifteen seconds before the next time he took a breath, and I was immediately as panicked as my mother.  The ambulance came.  Face and eyes jaundiced, the ambulance had to come get him more than once as he suffered and waited for his name to arrive at the top of the transplant list.  We prayed.  There were times when he was conscious, but that the ammonia in his body, normally filtered out by a healthy liver, was so prevalent that it had shut down parts of his brain to the extent that he didn't even seem to know who we were.  "Dad, it's me, Charles.  Do you know me?"  He tried to mumble something in response unintelligibly, but stared through me as if I wasn't there.

These were terrifying times, as the representation of manhood in my life held on by a quickly unraveling string.

Twice, before the epic day eight years ago, we had what we now refer to as the "false alarms."  The hospital called us and said that they thought they had a liver that would match my father, and that we ought to get him down to Denver as quickly as possible.  After rushing to the hospital and waiting in dim patient rooms, too anxious and excited to say much except, repeatedly, "I hope this is it...," we were disappointed.  These livers were no good.  As explained, they had had "too much fatty tissue," or "there was a more viable candidate on hand."  None of us had ever felt so let down.  Portions of hope chipped away for me as time went on.  I feared the worst.

I don't feel presumptuous or as though I am exaggerating or being insincere when I say that one of my life experiences was watching my father in the process of death.  He was, indeed, dying.  When I was clear of mind, my heart ached.  Many times, I avoided being clear of mind.

And then...

And then...

And then, the liver was found!  As I said, with some things, memory is not a high definition film but rather a series of images and noises and extended odors.  The image I recall is my father in a busy surgical prep room.  I believe that we were all crying.  They had IV's in him in several places and he, more than any of us, appeared fearless somehow.  Strong.  Ready.  As if he had known that it was coming.  I shook the hand of the man about to perform the surgery, and we hugged dad.  "I love you.  I love you.  I love you," my sister, mother and I said to him over and over.  That grim idea in the back of our heads, or at least mine, was that something would go wrong and that I wouldn't ever get to say it again.  We hugged him and we could smell a half a dozen other people, the odor of sickness and corporal desperation, as they were being prepped for other surgeries.  IV machines and heart rate monitors beeping, always beeping.  The sound of nurses and doctors conversing was calm and collected, standing in contrast with the words we choked through tears.

Finally, we were told to leave to a waiting room, back to the crisp, cool, too thin air.  A scent of coffee here and there, and of hand sanitizer.

I don't recall the waiting much at all except that it occurred as though inside of a time warp.  My mother was impatient, and kept her eye on every doctor or nurse walking toward us.  Maybe this person was about to give us news.  I could sense her disappointment when they never stopped, but each time veered off through a set of doors through which only doctor and nurse types were allowed.  We prayed that whatever the news was, when we heard it, that it would be of success.  The waiting took days or maybe years.  I imagined the procedure in my head, my father's abdomen opened up by sharp implements and tensioned mechanisms.  Horrifying ideas, I think, to anyone outside of the surgical community.

Finally, after moments that I can't remember but which I know stretched out and out and out, the news came.

Joy of joys.

Success!!!

I wanted to find the surgeon and hug him until his ribs broke, wetting his scrubs with my snot and tears.  I wanted to find the assistants and the nurses and do the same.  We huddled together and waited until the moment when we could actually see father, and whispered to one another relief and love.  I wanted to scream my elation.

The next time we saw dad, he had more tubes coming out of him than we'd yet to see on any previous hospital visit.  He was, as discerned from his face, in incredible pain, despite the steady drip of morphine the physicians were using to try to mitigate it.  This was a moment of overwhelming emotion.  Some emotions are things not properly described by English, or, at least, not properly described in the condensed form of a mere word or sentence or paragraph.  I will try, once: I felt as though relief and joy were a sledgehammer being repeatedly brought down at full force upon my sternum.

We wept again, in a different shade or tone than we had hours before.  Father smelled awful, his breath a rotten sweet odor as we approached him to (very gently) embrace his neck.  He couldn't have water in a cup, but was allowed to suck minuscule amounts of water out of a little flavored sponge that rested at the end of a lollipop style stick.  I suppose this dehydration accounted for his breath.  The smell of urine seemed present, too, and momentarily I thought I smelled flesh, as if the scent from the operating table was still with him.  He weakly ventured a smile.  His eyes were bright, and already seemed to be draining of the yellow tint that had been present before.

I guess love doesn't have a smell.  At least not when love is defined in the ephemeral, emotional sense.  If it had an odor, the smell of it in that room the first time seeing dad after his operation, although he was in so much agony at the moment that tears were in his eyes, would be one of the single most intensely happy memories from my entire life.  Instead, one of my happiest memories is the unpleasant odor from my dad's mouth in that moment.  I can smell it even now.  Foul and sweet at once, and perhaps a stand-in for the scent of love.

And so I have this fragmented and imperfect memory of hospital smells and love and this date eight years ago.  The love persists, today, although the hospital smells occur (thankfully) less frequently these days.

My intention, after all of this, has been to say three things.  First: please consider changing your license or ID to the status of "organ and tissue donor" if you have not done so.  It takes very little effort on your part, but can make a world of difference in the lives of others.  Second: if you would, join me in devoting a moment of reflection and a prayer (if you are the praying type) to the memory of the woman who passed away shortly before my father's transplant, providing the bittersweet organ he so desperately needed.  I am thinking about her and her family today.  Third (to my father): happy birthday, dad.  The only thing that has stood between myself and complete insanity, loss of meaning or even total destruction at many many times in my life has been you.  I am grateful in a way that defies expression that you are still here with us and for us.  You are a testament to faith and love and manhood, and there could be no thing in the world that would make me stop loving you.  I'm thinking about you and saying a prayer for you today.  You're the best.

Love.