The Radio and The Internet

In many of the obscure gnostic cultures  where death seems to be cautiously revered  there are sordid accounts -- daringly  naive and provocatively convincing --  of beings that edit and influence  our memories in service of  dreaming of the future.  Mischievous faeries, if that suits you,  featherweight, indestructible drones  no larger than a quantum  that dive into the ear down  the red-neon-negra canal  or permeate like licegerms  through hair follicles,  swim and fly  through the matrix of bone  into the cellular fabric of your brain.  You briefly turn from your temporal lobes  to the world they left beginning to sink in its nova.  Launched here unembellished by forecast  and now something akin to immortal, laughing  in its crazy chance in the stubborn  entropic maze of its echo.  **** 

I.  Vonnegut in Upstate New York, twilight hours, the  telephone sometimes ringing, sometimes dialed.  The wife he eventually divorced and the son  who went to Vietnam. The whole chronology                                      punctuated  with mental-illness, personalized methods of suicide;  narrated through the kind eyes of a war veteran  who'd quit a corporate job to write stories  about science-fiction and daily life  (in one of those distant eras before Social Media)  and he made it to his 80s with his life  in his hands  (and everywhere else)  without ever getting possessed by alcohol or psychedelics or              narcotics: Rarely  does such abstinence produce such originality.  (God bless, sir.)  II.  I think NPR described Thompson once as a kind of  angry Hold...

If our bodies are meant to unravel  and deflate the corruption of suffering,  if they are meant to be sacred vessels  of the Dharma,  then, perhaps, the Self is an engine  rather than a hindrance or a curse.  Lord Buddha told us the length of the Path  is indefinite. He did not say it was meant  to be exclusively unbearable.  I make no dispute that humans are fated to perish.  As suddenly as we're born, as suddenly as we live,  so will determine through stochasticity  and surprise  the moment of our unappealable demise.  Monks die, too.  Sit calmly in your bhavana, monk.  In your brow are the robes  of a wise  ancestor.  **** 

Trying to coerce some poems  from the sleepy depths of me,  the shimmering chirps of insects,  tree life, sifting with the lingering  amyloid.  No breathtaking surprises,  no rellevatory turns of perception  here, friend.  Just the sound of a man  counting filters in the  ashtray, then standing  to pour  a second cup of coffee.  **** 

A few months after my restorative departure, I'm  remembering the babysteps, the minor discontinuities  of the building where my room was and the harmless  alterations that welcomed harmless alterations  that made Jack & Raoul unbearable to live around.  Our landlord got around to fixing the broken socket  in the lights above the bathroom sink. He also made it  so the faucet didn't drip, even a little. And so, too, the  circuits were repaired that the light housed with the venti- lator-fan now ignited when the corresponding switch  was moved.  I was feeling altruistic.  I hadn't worked steadily in several months.  Nor had I continued attending the obligatory therapy & counseling  I was required to in order to receive government funds  for my rent. (The maternal benefactor assured there was a  pillow beneath my face and a roof over my head that wasn't hers.)  I'd taken a mostly uninterrupted retreat f...

Perhaps in disintegrated Gospels, texts lost  beneath the historical morass,  Iscariot counts the money on a blanket sewn from camel hair,  nervous sweat thickening his eyebrows and beard, the popular  and unpopular animosity of his time. Legs folded in  the style of a hindu, heart crossed with the certainty of death:  the young man thought of being a fugitive among fugitives  and tried bartering with the fates for a better hand.  The glimmering tokens that secured his cooperation--  Who paid them out, out of who's funds? No one that greedy  can bear sincere competition. For a guy without a dad and  horribly disorganized handlers, Jesus sure had a way of dictating  how kind, brave men should become fathers....  So, remember the nameless country where all fathers eventually take residence,  remember the stories they did, and didn't, tell. Those roads are paid for  with money, too. And no one kept their promises to...

Modesty becomes unreliable.  So, don't let egotistical narcissists  living in castles with neutered horizons  con and bully you into shyness.   Relieve them of their therapeutic razors  and ply new tools of creative destruction.  Revolt against homogeny and conformity  with Camus in your ear and the  table of element's at arm's reach.  Fashion new methods and lamps  from the follies of lackluster hubris.  Stop making excuses from your unfulfilled aspiration.  Stop pretending you don't hear lies.  (Abandon the coordinated navel-gazing of social media  wheresoever it overcrowds your attention with echo  after echo after echo of flat responses to  empty questions.)  Anger is useful until it paralyzes.  Anger without restraint has an equally short span of consequence.  Anger borne from noble origins  lasts longer than mountains.  Be a nomadic student enduring out of backpacks and su...

I have an amateur familiarity with physics in the last seven years  or so.  I like thinking how space should unfold itself  to gestate and disseminate  the contents of stars. I'm of the simple, perhaps amateur, opinion  that every virus, every egg, every  nail and tooth and claw and neurotransmitter  began in their supposedly  incalculable glow.  Plus, of course, the wisely impersonal drift of planets.  Our own being the first (and so far the last) to call the name of Shiva.  (Don't let deranged optimists persuade you: their educations have  made them fearful and desperate.) Planets named for  gods of war and loving harmony, without footprints,  seemingly without thoughts of any kind.  (And further are colossal assemblies of ancient water molecules neglected by the previous ring of gravity.)  (And further are colossal assemblies  of ancient debris that hardly sticks  to anything.)  I have an a...