"The Wander Luster Makes Peace"
Man this thing really sucks! I mean my attempts here to create a piece of writing (literature? Ahem!); I dare not say literature though the temptation’s tasty! I don’t even know what I’m blabbering on about! Years of drug abuse have left me with independent fingers, they’ve a life of their own and there’s nothing really I can do to control them. They crack their knuckle-bones and type their own shit, in a way its good, reminds me of that Sean Connery movie where he tells that budding boy-genius-writer to just ‘start punching those fucking keys!’ I am getting allusions here! That was a fucking Hollywood fantasy recreated to make people like myself feel like myself; down and out, dried and hung about, poorer by ten bucks and making them studios richer by a few hundred millions more. And I did watch it one of those deep pandemonium nights. Whatever that means!
‘Life’s not fair, is it, you see, I’ll never be king and you shall never see the light of another day’. For fucks sake these eyes and ears have seen and heard too much of my boy’s cartoons! This here right above are Scarface’s lines from ‘The Lion King’! I been an owl too long and the lights are definitely blinding me! Mufasa’s not gonna be pleased as well, when Zazu reports all of these. After all remember, Mufasa’s the Lion King, a symbol of everything the sonnies wanna be. He always dresses in gold and is king of the rock. Gold, that’s another interesting symbolism, it’s the sun’s stone, just as sunflowers are the sun’s flowers, and the names give it away! Don’t you get it!
Here’s a digression; this was how I was suppose to be writing this piece about; namely the subject of not being able to write about anything. It was something like this when it started:
“I see a blank page and I tell myself what am I possibly going to think about to write about that hasn’t already been written about? Then I realize I couldn’t even think about writing about things already written about, or things not even written about. What’s all the fucking fuss I wonder, as I pause to catch something I can think about...? Anyhow better save the shit I just wrote, can’t forget proverbs like the one about a thick/thin ice between genius and insanity’’.
There’s nothing really, least in my mind there’s nothing really to harp home about. The mind can be the biggest of cans at times, creating ceaseless chatter that shatter away the moments you might have had, and when you most need that bit of cerebellum to produce some juice, the serotonins have all left the building, leaving you all alone, high and dry.
Maybe some lunch would induce a bit of momentum, one of my thousand minds tells me, I say a thousand minds, ‘coz there are that many and innumerable more, the one speaking to me now was the lunch-minded mind. The thought flashes as Fatou the maid brings in the midday fare. Purposefully I get up to wage battle at the supper table.
Bon Appetit! Yeah, thank you and now I’d just like to get over this food as soon as possible, ASAP. I already feel wounded and injured. Forget the battles, I’ve lost the war and they haven’t even started firing! You see I have now taken to food as something I gotta chew in so I can sustain my physical body and preserve it for further continuum of subtle delicate emotional humiliations. God! This is the pits! How pathetic can one get to produce some writing material? Why not just write about the crazy life I’ve had riding high on prescription drugs for the last thirteen years (did I mention decades? Forgive me if I did).
That sounds pretty promising, after all, it’s not everyday you get a guy from a mystical kingdom long unknown mixed in webbed spaghetti of the maddeningly modern and the torturously traditional. Bhutan is that country long isolated, of its own accord and record, now caught in the hippie bonhomie of mass globalization. The frustration builds and so does the urge to write, just about what, is the question that begs to be answered. For now I just have to give up before I swallow the goddamn laptop or pull out the keys, one at a time. Ignoring the subject matter, the will to just punch the keys perseveres and now my fingers are li’l kings of the keyboards!
Days like these can come without a warning and turn your mind upside down, knocking the living force out of you. When I cast my weary eyed glances around, everything’s a bother. The sight of the tropical sun with its fierce stinging rays penetrates and blinds my eyes, I have never been in so much disagreement with the role of the sun and its scathing heat as it does today. The sea and its shoreline with its ceaseless waves crashing upon the rocky shores might have inspired a hundred others, but all I see is the endless repetition of the same wave upon wave dance of oceanic boredom, somebody drown me! It’s a Herculean task just trying to say a ‘hello’ or a ‘hi’ to another fellow human being, thank god they’re all French here, it makes not making “English Conversation” very convenient; brief, awkward and annoying! Just what I had in mind, short and sweet, a ‘ca va and au revoir’ does the job. I am exhausted bartering these tired empty niceties and run around trying to avoid these delicacies without any success. Life’s a real drag on days like these and the one person that I would love to have most murdered is the one nut head I just cannot crack and avoid. Me! And to think I even tried that unsuccessfully!
The mirror’s the worst of it all. Who invented this crap? There’s a person staring back at me every time I catch my reflection and it’s a complete fucking stranger. It gets worse, the reflection has this know-it-all attitude that taunts and teases my very existence and I cannot take it anymore. I am losing the battle for my own survival against my own reflection! On a pane of shattered glass, a window on a passing car, a mirror in a shop, a stagnant pool on a road, its everywhere, even in the shadows that’s become more and more distinct and prominent. I am living in a body I can no longer recognize; in a house I do not own, in a land I do not belong, in a language I cannot speak and in an existence I cannot comprehend.
Am I on the wrong planet? Or does every cuckoo feel this way? Remembering Jack flying over the cuckoo’s nest and having a blast at it is quite a comforter!
I feel this way some days and today’s been one of those days. They come and they go, but they always manage to leave me baffled, gasping, empty, hollow, shallow, narrow and bereft of any meaning or purpose.
Then my mind goes back in time when I swallowed a whole pharmacy. There I go digressing again, well, don’t blame me! Just be patient and read what the fingers have to punch. To recall, well, metaphorically speaking, when for nearly a dozen years I lived life with huge fetishes and bonhomie appetites for anything the pharmaceutical industry could manufacture. I’m now beginning to believe the old adage about ‘you are what you eat’. It frightens the shit out of me to think I might have become the very diseases and sicknesses all those myriad drugs were meant to heal and cure. Irony has a humor and it’s usually a nasty laugh! The joke’s on me and this body now has a life of its own. I do not get along even moderately with the external limbs and other forms of visible extensions of the human physical contours such as the eyes, ears, nose, fingers, hands, legs, et al. Of particular concern has been the hair, I have always had long hair, or rather worn it that way in some psychological need to cover as much of myself as possible, in this regard the facial factor. In the beginning it developed in a way to emulate a highly realized Buddhist spiritual master whose long hair washing afternoon I was privy to as a little kid. In my teens it was that pop band ‘Wham’. In college it was the glamorized revisited and recommercialised era of the drug induced sixties, mainly ‘The Doors’ music and movie. Then it was the tough guy ‘Rambo’ parts, and now its just ‘problem hair’, plain and simple.
My hair falls like autumn leaves and every time I run my fingers through it’s like raking the leaves off a lawn. They just come off! This is frightening the hell out of me! I am bound home for New Year’s and I don’t wanna face my family or friends with a receding hairline and a frustrating lifeline.
‘Hair today, gone tomorrow’, was something I said quite often. My head up till now’s been eerily similar.
‘Do you lose a sense of yourself every time you lose a strand of hair? I don’t know and I have thought about the possibilities. ‘Does one hold onto a balding process that is as natural as anything can be or fight against every strand of falling hair, and have it the way you been accustomed to, a head full of bushy hair?’
To wit, ‘to hair or not to hair, there’s the question’, and where’s the answer I wonder….”
What was all that about? Forgive me! When you get a solar or a lunar eclipse this is bound to happen. I still can’t help thinking my perpetually ‘cracking fingers, ugly knuckles’ were doing a better job of thumping the right letters on the keyboard than I been doing with my brains, if I have that many. Think I should stick with the finger version of the sonnies and the loonies. That’s a good story of opposites and contradictions, of yin and the yang, male-female, right-left, up-down, hairy-bald, broke-loaded et al. I think you get the idea. But where’s the junction man? Where do these opposites meet? When the male organ’s in the female’s? When dusk and dawn collide? When two hands make a folding lotus flower? When two roads meet at an intersection? When the burger’s washed down with a coke? When one hits the jackpot? You get the idea. Where’s the point of confluence, and of dissolution? Where, where, where? Now lemme make some assumptions for the sake of making this look like a long and well thought out essay about some meaningful lengthy solution to some vague idea about distinctions and contradictions, drugs and identity crises.
I assume the point of dissolution sexually is in the orgasm, you can’t go on inter-coursing indefinitely, and the act has to conclude/end. Is it then when it’s done and finished? What if the female wants more and the male’s, well, wasted? What if the merging of dusk and dawn is more like a disoriented time of light and darkness leaving some like the sonnies to wake up and the loonies to go hit the sacks? What if the junction of roads collides at a point of many intersections with no further directions? Which way is the right way? What if the lotus flower becomes a combined fist of fury pounding the Bruce Lee out of some poor unfortunate soul?
What, what, what? Of course, now here comes the Whyfors, the Whens and the Howsos. They sound more like alternative rock bands!
Fucking great! Misery Loves Company, just as meaningless chatter begets more of the same, sounds like the 2004 American election. More of the same, that’s what I am doing here and I wont allow myself to be humiliated or John Kerried anymore. No flipflops, and I wanna be as Bushy as possible, stay the course and not waver! Could Kerry be a loony? Bush sure does sound like a pucca sonny! That hasn’t got me convinced either, you gotta be flexible, and if it entails being a flipflopper, what’s the problem? All survival depends upon adaptability, a good option, and staying the course unwaveringly might just get one in a stuck and stagnant stubborn situation someday with no options. So I’ll do a bit of both. Guess that qualifies me as the ‘undecided voter’! The guys who swung Ohio and gave us four more years of www.dubya.com, a great site to lighten up, smirk, sneer and laugh at the president, like he does at himself occasionally and at others mostly. Discover idiotic comradeship and find more relaxation than in a Thai massage parlor! I’m really serious here, check it out when the going’s tough, I’m happy Bush won if for the continuation of that website alone; I know it’s a narrow view, a selfish one but hey, I’m a loony trying to become a sonny remember! Anyhow the site’s been a source of great comfort and laughter, without demeaning or excusing the terrible repercussions Bushisms brought upon the rest of the world.
In unapologetic conclusion, here’s the obituary; Fuck all this shit about being a writer, what’s that anyway, a writer? Anybody with a pen or a pencil can do that stuff. Listen to all those rappers; they recite lines long enough to fill a thousand bibles in one album! Their gestures alone could finish off all those insurgents in Fallujah! That’s a bit over the top but you get the rap, know what I’m saying? Look round you, artistic expression of symbolic graffiti writings on the walls, warm poetry conjuring deep images of want and loss on commercial billboards, sixty second TV ads able to marshmallow a tough fellow. What you saw in those ‘Analyze This and That’ movies where DeNiro goes a crying on those TV spots are quite closer home than you’d like to believe, or you do but hold the fort and laugh at the scenarios. I cannot think of any more examples but you get the picture, right? Everyone writes!
No wonder writing ever fed anybody! No wonder all writers live and die paupers with a lifetime of confusion and confinements trying to make the guy across believe that your profession is that of a writer! There’re just too many writers!
Look at it, the writings always been on the wall, it’s just the writers bitter irony he never sees it, if he does, he ignores the shit. When filing for my passport, I’m smug and happy now I decided to tell the official just the right word then when he enquired about my profession.
‘Business’ I replied. That sounds serious enough to ruffle the stiffest of feathers and has a ringing intent about it, a kind of timeless vogue and definite purpose. On the other hand you go, ‘I’m a writer’ and they wonder where? So there!
Just what kind of ‘business’ is now the writing on my wall? Getting older, it’s important I now get not just the meaning of the writing on the wall but the writer imprisoned behind those bricks as well. Being a lunatic’s made me appreciate solar power better, and having lived a lunar life for so long has made me realize there’s nothing really fearful in the sunny day lights, long as you will let your fears come forth and present themselves. The moon’s a silver representation of what’s secret, wise and justly hidden, just as the sun’s a golden symbol of transforming that secretive wisdom into visible bold action. Thus the twain worlds of the sonnies and the loonies do meet and match, collide and merge. Mostly embodied and symbolized by the heavenly bodies themselves in acts of celestial unions during periods of solar and lunar eclipses, for us to hold and behold, when the sonny feels the loony in him and vice versa. And what a sight that is! The middle path thus beckons…
Till the next eclipse,
Amen! West Africa 2004
