There are glizzies somewhere, but not here
Says an incense wisp of thought as it escapes my brain into the lunch rush kwik trip

I walked a bit of the earth
In a colder-than-should-be spring
Watching birds chase each other in mating dance exuberance
winter is not done with our part of the world
it breathes from the soil and catches breezes and chills a man
licking and wandering

Still, my head was high and my eyes were sharp
I’ll have a glizzy soon
i thought

My shitkicker shoes, blown out at the sides, tread flapping and ducklike over the cheapest asphault available. The sun was an angry white bead, glaring at her subjects. I was strangely uncomfortable. This is familiar territory, thought I. This is where I live. But something was off. Something was unknown.

I walked into kwik trip with something like an inhale. Here is where i visit every day. Here is where there are glizzies. Youth is pressing outward, for novelty and risk. Maturity wants things familiar, wants constancy. Here i breathe in the familiar. The steady routine.

I approached, with admittedly naive optimism, the glizzy station. As I rounded the corner, my eyes lowered to the sterling rollers where glizzies should be, and there was nothing.

The absence had presence. I stopped like a cough in physical discomfort to witness the empty glizzy station. Finely machined, stainless steel rollers, heating elements, a front-facing facefront that shows the most beautiful glizzy you’ve ever seen. Inactive. Dead. Nothing.There are glizzies somewhere, but not here

And of course my thoughts unspool into ragged tendrils. How can you think about anything when everything is bumping up against something else? There are no glizzies. What does it mean? What is in a glizzy? Who made this glizzy cooker-display-machine? Who drove the truck to get the product here before? Why did his great-grandmother commit suicide? How many glizzies can i fit in a fannypack?

Everything is touching everything else.

Still haven’t tracked down a glizzy. They’re common, robust, and you can buy a whole pack of them for next to nothing. Eat a glizzy today, so you can remember it tomorrow.

Highlow

There exists within me an ideation of the best version of me. And it would mean I’m like a 6’5 buff guy with white-guy dreadlocks who also has a jetpack and can sing in perfect pitch. This has also been my New Year’s Resolution for about seven years, secretly. (It’s not panning out)

So as a consolation, I’ve been thinking about what is the best version of me given the present circumstances.

The present version of me is near middle-aged, renting a dumpy apartment, no kids except for my Yoncho and Tibby, earning decent enough money at a job with no grand prospects, driving a car from George W. Bush’s first term and now the brakes are fucking up on me.

I imagine a lot of people will read the preceding paragraph as Grim, but I’ve never been much for keeping pace with my peers or fitting in with the group. In fact, I’ll have you know, I have a kind of disdain for people who bow to societal pressure. There are millions of people my age who put on Macy’s sweaters and pose with their kids in front of their fireplaces to send out christmas cards (also they owe multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars on said houses) in order to emulate some kind of Way You’re Supposed to Do It.

There’s a prescribed, easy on-board ramp into what society and capitalism wants from you. You do what your mommy and daddy did. Wouldn’t you know it? It involves spending more and more money, trying to keep up with or outdo everyone else. In the most boring, saccharine, performative thing you’ve been taught your whole life.

It’s much better to plant yourself at the base of that tree and start cutting. Offer your mind things that terrify you. Cut away at the wick of the tree. Take way too many drugs! Get drunk and wake up the next day, and not remember how you got that scrape on your knee or that scar on your chest! Drag your steel over that vein, and be thankful. I fucked up, I don’t remember why! Nobody’s mad at me!

I think the best version of me is the one where I keep it all in mind. Each person is equal. Each person comes here in the same way. This is not dumb metaphysical bullshit. Each person enters the world small and afraid and knowing nothing. Each person dies. The interim is immensely defined by time and space and the color and shape of the things they have no control over.

My religion is that. Of mutual respect for those of us tempest-tossed in this place. Of knowing that all that is happening comes from the same place and all goes to the same place. To assume primacy over another is to sin, and to perform kindness is what brings you closer to Heaven. Heaven is dying without fear.

Heaven is dying without fear.

And if you know any jetpack and/or white dreadlock guys, please let me know.

Updown

Look down.

You see your feet, and your carpet, and also the carpet on the floor. This is where your vision ends. This is the navigable space in our everyday lives. The physical, ownable and monetizable space wherein the day to day happens. Each moment, your eyes stop at the floor, the wall, the doorway. This makes sense. This is the framework wherein experience happens for us. The consequences usually come from within a few dozen feet.

An animal like us, with sharp eyes and a big brain, and not much else, can garner so much from a cursory glance or a peek over the shoulder. This works, more or less.

But now, I want you to look down. And really look down. And try to see not with those two eyes you normally use, but use that third one. Use that one that’s buried under your mortgage and your alarm clock and your envy. Pop open that peeper and let’s explore.

And you peer down through the floor, and below your apartment is another apartment. An older woman lives down there. She doesn’t have a car. She stands outside and smokes cigarettes sometimes. She has a lifetime of friends and lovers and disappointment. If you talked to her from dawn to dusk you would continually be learning new things. Her inner world, her mind, is rich and elaborate. Her life has immeasurably impacted hundreds of others. You will never speak with her. Her stories trail away as we look deeper down.

You are now in the dirt. The topsoil. This is a universe unto itself. Worms, ants, plant roots, fungii, moles. A cold and dark ecosystem where nothing has eyes. We’ve got whole religious systems dedicated to the sun, and these guys don’t give a fuck. Nutrients filter down and get reprocessed and keep the daywalkers fat and happy. The damp and tunnelling crew keeps living here.

We’re deeper now, boring into the earth with our truesight. The geography has become sandstone and fossils. Imitations of living things become sluice casts. We can guess at these bodyforms, watch the continents drift. A fossil of a fern from back then looks just the same as a living fern today. This fractal spiral beauty recedes from view as we move farther down.

Now we’re getting into the gigantic slabs of iron, nickel, gold. The primal bones of our world roil here. Continents of minerals swirl deep within the earth. The capitalists would rape these if it were practical to do so to boost the next fiscal quarter’s profits. They have no means of extracting them yet.

Deeper still, mother earth’s heart is a burning solid ball of an iron-nickel alloy, so I’d wager it tastes and smells like pennies. A ten thousand degree sphere, still cooking from the creation of the universe. Old Faithful squirts because of this internal battery. The core of our planet is still mystery, because how could you possibly get there? Unless you were looking down like we are. Plunging through the heartmind of our mother. We continue through the aftermath of the birth of the universe. No big deal.

And as above, so below, sure. The other side of the world has everything I just talked about in reverse order. Dinosaurs, worms, apartments. Sure.

And if you stare down long enough, you’re looking up. Be careful with your reverence for the stars and the moon. There are constellations on the other side of the earth. Creation watches you back. Its enormity and cruelty watches you. Look up and be humbled by the night. Be proud of your son. Dinosaurs, worms, apartments. Sure.

Be humbled by the stark black gaze of your cat. Watch everything move without you. Be thankful. I love the winedark sea of the night. The stars shimmer. If this isn’t nice, what is?

“Hey, I’ve got some tomatoes that are really good, you wanna try one?”

Through clenched teeth, using almost all mental energy to supress the gag reflex, “Sure”

“Here, have a slice”

a bone white, pock-marked lattice wheel of fibrous arms houses an inflamed-red watery and tumorous pulp, interspersed with mite-like seeds

I’m pale and clammy but I say “Yum”

“Do you want some salt?”

“Sure,” I answer.

I pour salt onto this lump of indecent mush that somehow makes me think of something born premature and also long-dead. I gather strength and courtesy as the quivering ooze nears my mouth. As I bite into the stiff globule, its awful skin begins to unspool, a thin thread of bitter paper to herald the disgusting crush of garbage-smell and acridity into my face.

Chewing only finds new ways to suffer. A blandish muck, with notes of mildew and insects. Mouth is sogging through a texture similar to soaked toilet paper. A few beads of salt touch the roof of my mouth.

I don’t swallow so much as gulp. The trial has ended.

“Pretty good right?”

“Uh, yeah. I just don’t like tomatoes that much.”

Impossible to know what time it is.

I’m one of the old people. There used to be a bright day and a dark night. Each morning, the sun would warm the horizon into a purple and orange butter when it rose, and it would glare into swords of radiance as it sunk into the west, streaming red and yellow fingers into the twilight. At night, a hypnotic indigo rested over us. Seemingly pinpricked by diamonds of pure white, so clarion and pristine as to inspire religions and draw our minds into it. A ribbon of beauty was the spine of the night. Flowing over the vastness, a milky-honey, a band of majesty to stir owls and to wonder us.

There was once a difference between the night and the day.

My eyes open to introduce me to another episode of the new real. I have slept but I have not rested. The ash has found the pockets of my nose and my lips. I spit and wipe my face. Everything I see is grey.

I never speak. Why would I?

The wind stinks like burning rubber and I’m exhausted. I stand, take two steps, and kneel down. I put my forehead into my fist and it feels cold. I close my eyes and I’m too dehydrated to cry. I listen to my ragged breath as microplastic particulate batters my skin. Memories flog my mind. Happy memories batter my sentience like a lash. My son learns to ride a bike, and I remember the explosion in Reno. My wife cooks my favorite meal, and she is carried off by bandits. My weakness, my impotence in the face of a cruel imitation of what my life once was. Impossible to know what time it is. I heave to breathe, my skeletal ribcage working to draw in this plastic/air mixture.

I crawl, as best I can, to a pile of refuse. It is a mixture of dirt, human bones, and unsold Oculus Rifts. I imagine this will be my pieta, cradled in the filth of the world that knew time. I snuggle up, nudging my head against the skulls of other old people. I try to think of last words, but they are all references. I can’t come up with any of my own.

And then I hear a sound

Something I’d lost long ago comes roaring back into me, it’s endorphins or love or humanity. I don’t know, much less care, what this could be. The sound is a song. It’s enveloping me. It’s ringing my veins and pulling me out of my death-stupor. It rears back and displays like a cobra and looks me in the eyes and commands that I have strength. The song locks into my soul and animates my fragile dust-skin body. I will walk. I will.

I will without time, without anyone to watch. And as almost all humans have walked, without time watching them, without a faint whisper to honor their names, without a gossamer of love to remember them by, I walk.

[If you want this to be a serious post, stop reading. if you want this to be funny, this is the song:]

The idea of objective truth is contained entirely within the subjective minds of human beings. The scientific method posits that whatever is observable and repeatable under the same circumstances must be Truth. It has no means of validating an event that occurs once.

This is useful. The human mind rewards itself with dopamine hits for recognizing patterns. Medicine and technology work because we fuck around and find patterns. However, practicality and application are not Truth. No matter how much they seem like they must be. Science is a tool. It is an application of a way of thinking. It is not self-evident Truth. For hundreds of years, priest-philosophers were the closest things to scientists. Their base assumption was that the Christian God was real, and all their thinking was framed by this basic truth. And these were not dumb people. The smartest people alive had this rubric framing their thoughts.There were many brilliant people who thought that sometimes your blood just went bad, and you had to bleed all that bad blood out. But you actually had typhoid or something.

The modes of assuming reality change. They evolve. They apply themselves to the zeitgeist. This is working for now, so it must be golden.

Anyway, enough about that fucking shit, I want to talk about Mothman.

West Virginia. Blue ridge mountains. Shenandoah River.

On November 15, 1966,in the cultural backwater of West Virginia, a young couple was driving around by an old World War II munitions plant, and they found themselves pursued by a giant monster. A creature, humanoid in shape, with great grey wings of shadow, eyes glowing red. A terrifying, otherworldly creature. Chasing them. Maybe an overly elaborate cover story for a guy who didn’t get his girlfriend back home before curfew, you think.

However, other people kept seeing this shit. A pair of firemen saw a creature in a field whose eyes glowed bright red when they put a light on him.

The Mothman supposedly landed on the Silver Bridge, which connected West Virginia to Ohio. Eyewitnesses said he landed on a high point on the bridge, and then, in real life, it collapsed. 46 people died, plunging from their cars into the shrapnel and cold December river water. Now, there is a statue of Mothman in that town. I imagine getting stuck in traffic on a bridge, looking up to the steel lattice supporting me, and a grey humanoid with glowing red eyes watching me, deep dark doom filling my stomach, and the bottom of everything falling out from under me. Steel and rebar and concrete batter me as I sink into ice water, and primal panic forces me to suck death into my lungs.

Science says Mothman is not provable, probably. Probable. The people dying bloody in a river saw him. A grotesque mounting the instrument of mass death. The impossible happens. It happens all the time.

Home Sweet Home

i heard a woodpecker across the street.
he was doing the same thing every woodpecker i have ever seen has been doing: pecking wood.
apt naming.
the early afternoon sun was prickling bright, the sky was blown out and it shined over the snow all over the ground and rooftops.
i didn’t see this woodpecker but i heard him and i knew right where he was.
that tree across the street.
i’ve watched him a few times over there.

i don’t know why religion is so hard for so many people. you are in, and of, and creating reality. this is what is. you are here in it. all empire and all ash is your heritage. when someone else dreams of you, that is part of it. the future is predicated on you sipping your morning coffee and putting on a hoodie. This is all interconnected. It was how it was so that it is now and so shall it be. Y’get me?

I nodded appreciation to my woodpecker pal, keep on doing God’s work dude, I’m too cold. I went inside and sat at my computer chair. A fat calico kitty jumped into my lap and began purring. Just as the prophecy said.

There are tiny bees deep in the earth right now, buried under dirt and frost, and in the spring they will come out and make honey.

“Be” Means “Grow”, and “Rail” means “Rail”

I found out an interesting thing. Etymology. The origins of the English word “be” starts with the Sanskrit word for “grow”. The English words “is” and “are” have roots in “breathe”.

Interesting, to a dork like me. “Be” is a constant, not really a decision, sort of a background assumption meaning that you will “grow”. “Is” and “Are” are more immediate, an action that you do, even though it is just about equally automatic as just “being”.

To be is to grow seems natural to me. Whatever is in nature grows or dies. I know more today than I did yesterday. That’s inarguable. Unless I spent yesterday pounding down White Claws and twerking on the corner for more White Claws. But I didn’t do that. Nobody has any proof, anyway.

Being is a long-arc. We grow throughout our lives. All your life, you’re growing up. Is and are are temporary states, things you are experiencing right now, which may or may not be part of the being. Hell, last night my cat climbed on my back and started kneading on me at like 4 in the morning and I was like “dude, please stop.” That’s an is/are. Not a part of my being, but a part of my experience. That is drawing breath. That is not reflective of my continuum or my time on earth.

Modern American Chirstianity is Satanic. It is all about prosperity gospel and preaching that “god helps those who help themselves” and it is very interested in Earthly Rewards for people who succeed in this system. There is no basis for this. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” says Jesus. Y’know, the Main Guy.

And rich Republican shit-heads have made up this whole myth about how “Actually, the ‘eye of the needle’ was a very wide gate in Jerusalem, so I can fuck over all of my employees and feel no guilt and duh duhh duhh”

Christianity is ancillary to capitalism for these diseased-minded freaks. “I’m doing so well, God must love me!” Even though actual Jesus told people to basically be a pauper and beg for provisions and even if you don’t get them, well just die probably.

You’re going to die. That black balloon bouncing against your forehead is death. It’s coming. Why, oh why, would you fall so in love with this place and it’s temporary pleasures? God tells you to disconnect. There’s much more available, outside of material gains and social stature. Why won’t you come back to that simple love? Breathing, and growing. That’s what we’re here for.

I can’t tell you for sure, but I think the loop closes, and I understand it all. Reality dips in to kiss my mind once more, and it’s unfathomably beautiful. I am.

Create Destroy

Magic is real.

Not like shooting fireballs or anything. That’s not going to happen. But magic is real. If you can create an outcome that is opposite to what is probable, that be magic. If you can get a person to act some way against their own interest, might that be the dark art, Magicka?

This method of communication is some dark arcane art. I’m hammering out these little symbols and you’re looking at them and gathering meaning. That’s not natural at all. That’s some witchy shit. A dog dragging it’s ass across the carpet. You just envisioned it. I invasively put that thing into your mind now. I am practicing magic.

Written language is magic. I read stuff from dead people all the time. I have the thoughts of dead people inside of my head. We take it for granted because we grow up in such a world, but holy fucking shit, what an amazing and insane technology. The written word is the dead speaking.

Also I am dead. I mean, not right now. But at some point I will be. And this might survive. You might be reading this after I’m dead. How would I know? I’d be dead.

There is a magic to the act of creating something in someone else’s mind. Animals? I don’t think they have this. They have a primacy, a here and now and reaction. Tibby, featured in the upper right, looks out the window and sees a squirrel. He’s right there in it. Does he imagine? Certainly he cannot practice magic. He can’t put something into my mind. If he does, it’s by biting my beard and being annoying, which is decidedly in the phsyical realm and not in this space where I would measure Magic.

Fucker sticks his wet nose on my face at like 4 in the morning sometimes. He’s a good boy though.

ABRACADABRA means “I will create as I speak” And I will.

A leaf falling from a tree in a misty forest. An old Mexican woman, leaning against you on an flight because she’s nervous. Your bathtub filling up with water. Just banged out three of ’em. This thing has power.

This is what advertising is, this is what politics in general is. This is some out-of-body experience for all of humanity. Magic is that thing that imagination sits in. Periphery to physical reality, but dictating what the course of action is.

This is the great creator/destroyer

And it destroys

“well Mark,” you might be saying, to the long-dead me, “This sounds p cool. Got a lot of features that I like and stuff,” but let me tell you it’s not all good. This level of abstraction is causing fatalistic, suicidal behavior. There are even sad clowns now. Can you imagine such a thing?

Because such a removed from basic reality world view creates some schism in the psyche. In the affluent, Western cultures we need not want. We are mostly okay, have enough food and shelter from the wind that we don’t care about creature comforts. We have stressors that involve things like friends and our opinions. We’re not chewing on cactuses for moisture.

This thing is destroying our sentience. It is making us part of the culture and killing our animal self. God help us.

This awareness creates knowledge, and the prominent knowledge is that of death. And we kiss it lightly on the lips, nervous prom dates, and hope that somehow it won’t happen. I bet if I was born 25,000 years ago I’d know Lady Death a litle better, and I’d grab her titties and just fly into the nothing.

But instead we have this awareness, acute and paralyzing, of the finality of this life. I’m a Gnostic. Gnotty by nature. This whole thing is One thing. But damn, I’d like to never die. I am dead. You are dead.

Happy Halloween!

The ocean has receded
Low tide means clams and creatures of the deep
left sucking air on wet sand
We gather these living things
We leave footprints
The ocean and the sky are the same
blue grey mist
Salt and fog intermingling
Gulls sail the air
Envious in our wake
Landing where we have already passed because they are afraid

I take a clam into my hands and
With my thumbs I pull it in half
but part of its shell is broken
and it cuts my hand
I pull the meat out of the rock creature
and beads of red drip from my hands
into this tan sand slurry below
and I am so hungry I just pinch
the meat out of the shell and drop
it into my teeth and chew
no cooking

Blood drips in a steady meted pace
Leaving little blackish spots
to mark where i have been
while I keep gathering

I come upon a creature I have never seen before
Body slick and strange
Seems to be rising, heaving here on the land
Red like my blood
And I see it’s eye
and i see it and it sees me

It is long, many legs
strange
Looks weak here
And I watch it
It is thinking
I can see in its eyes it is thinking while it is watching me

I kneel down to it, it moves like nothing else
and I touch it
Fear for a moment
A seagull calls in its sharp repetition
A bead of blood drips from me onto the creature

I gather it into my hands, slippery and slimy
It is not resisting
It is light
I walk to the water
I wade to my waist
Its strange eye is watching me the whole time
Many legs articulating and grasping
Touching my arms
I give it back to the water
And it lingers for a moment
seeming to find its strength
and our eyes meet again and then it is gone in a swift movement

I wade back to the beach to find more clams
with a deep cut in my hand
every drop measures time