There is an idea I once had about a tree. It wasn’t very good. There’s no point trying to recreate it for someone else.

The thoughts worth having are already written down. If you’ve ever picked up a trail that had gone cold. If there’s even one time that was better than this one.

Don’t let it wander off. Throw it in jail. Take it to the bank.

Preview. Publish. Edit.

They are only aware of this in the hypnopomic moments on their way towards the grave.

There’s a phrase that people tend to repeat to themselves that has something to do with minds and their terrifying wastefulness, or the terror of wasting them.

I’ve spent my whole life forgetting this phrase.

If I were ever to remember it entirely everything else would probably shatter.

Luckily, I begin each day by forgetting it, so as to preserve these minds.

All the minds.

Not just mine.

If you’ve ever wanted to lose something permanently, all you really need to do is try to remember where you put it.

That way it’ll occupy your mind so much that you won’t stand the slightest chance of finding it.

Once you’ve done your worst to strangle every last breath out of your memory muscles it’ll merely evaporate, or even “melt into air,” quicker than you can say “neurasthenia.”

This is the way out of the spotlight…

Back into the “private sphere.”

Don’t forget to check with the ushers next time.

In case you miss your aisle and walk onto the stage.

~Wallace Stevens

In order to press back against reality what is first needed is a pause.  An absence of motion, and therefore an interruption in the natural flow or ongoing stumbling of attention over the objects placed in its path.  This could also be described as a rupture achievable only by a more radical form of absence.  In this sense, what is required is the imagination’s ability to destroy time, since motion can never be stopped by simply standing still.  To stop time is to puncture the curtain of reality, but also to dissolve the space in which that curtain was thought to exist.  That’s the problem.  That’s the joke: there is no spoon.

How can we proceed within the territory of the imagination, if the entrance to that territory is the rupture in all concepts of process, stability, presence and absence?  Is this a state of free play?  The remainders of discourse may not be anything more than a hollow gesture towards themselves… or their negation.

First, before beginning–i.e. before anything is necessary–the openness cannot be grasped for or attempted, but rather inhabited and laughed at.  What’s needed for imagination is possibility, but the possibility of this necessity cannot be treated idly in an offhand manner of cathartic removal, or absentminded wandering.  Is there a way for the weak to escape from these blind meanderings and breakthrough into unknown territory… to stop asking questions and groping for something they haven’t the slightest idea of… to fix their own spelling and grammar without writing anything down?

In the waiting room of the outpatient center, Keith’s grandfather received greetings from half a dozen or so nurses and orderlies that recognized him, while Keith signed documents and filled out various forms.  He was still scrambling to sign and date an armful of papers when the nurse called him in with his grandfather in tow.  Keith was led to a bed that the nurse gestured to silently.  Not knowing whether to sit or lie down, Keith attempted to do both by awkwardly adjusting his position on the bed to a nearly forty-five degree angle.  Suspended uncomfortably in this state of limbo, he decided to sit up, and proceeded to lie down just as Dr. Magden walked in.  Keith sat up as his grandfather shook Dr. Magden’s hand, and introduced Keith to his “good friend” Dr. Magden.  As he finished scribbling on the forms he was given in the waiting room–plus a few more that the doctor’s assistant added to the pile–his grandfather discussed tennis with Dr. Magden.  Keith finally signed the last one, and the nurse prepped his left cheek for the surgery and told him to lie down.   Dr. Magden mumbled something to the nurse about a skinhook, and they got started on what he was told was a “short and simple procedure.”

As the knife separated Keith’s left cheek into two distinct sections he found his muscles tensing without his immediate approval.  As Dr. Magden started to pull these two sections of Keith’s face apart, Keith realized that he had no idea where these tensed muscles were, or when they had become inducted into the community of various organs that comprised Keith’s body.  Upon reflection it occurred to him that, perhaps, they were not a part of that community at all, but merely passing through.  They seemed to be stopping in to greet distant relatives who hadn’t been enthusiastic about receiving these new guests.  During this reunion, Keith’s attention veered sharply from the increasingly distressing interactions between the unfamiliar sensations of his facial tissue and Dr. Magden’s skinhook to the nearly inaudible “easy listening” station coming from a radio somewhere in the general vicinity.  It occurred to him that, as horribly uninteresting as he knew the notes were, his inability to identify them made it nearly impossible to remove them from his brain cells.  This double penetration of skinhook and the ever so aptly titled “hook” of the distant chorus gave Keith a feeling of helplessness like never before.  The dual inability to exercise his will over either his mental or physical condition made him slightly more “in touch” with those numerous accounts of out-of-body-experiences that he had heard often depicted on the operating table.

Once they were back at the house, Keith’s grandmother was asleep in same chair that she had been in when they left that morning.  The same chair, in fact, that she had spent most of the days sleeping in since returning from the hospital herself two weeks ago.  Keith decided that instead of quietly puttering about while trying to avoid hushed conversations with his grandfather, he would walk down to the nearby beach where he spent most of his childhood summers with his mother and older sister.  The wooden fence along the path to the beach was rotting and in pieces.  The steps were overgrown and decrepit.  The beach was exactly as he remembered it.  When he turned right to walk along the beach, the wind brushed along his anesthetized cheek with just the right amount of absence to allow Keith to go along on a trajectory of his own just like he had while “under the knife.”  As Keith reached a promontory and hid his body from the wind behind a large rock he either stopped to think, or thought to stop.  Whatever resulted in the intermittent time that passed in that spot, Keith neither knew nor cared to know and even started to wonder whether there was something there that he could know; almost as though looking upon his body as no different then the rock it was placed next to.  He decided to turn around to head back to the house and continued walking in the direction he had came.  It wasn’t as though some disembodied ego went on in the direction of Keith, while watching Keith’s body do whatever it happened to do.  Instead, the meanderings of his body and thoughts were together in more than a parallelism, but less than a unity.  Their distinct substances were fused into something else entirely.  Something more than human.

Upon his return to the house, which reeked of the inevitable continuation of both the most cosmic and minute rotations, he felt the need to vomit.  Whether this was caused by the wearing off of the anesthesia, the collision of his soul with an impasse of metaphysical rivers too deep to cross, or the realization that his grandmother had not been alive since before he had headed off to the hospital, Keith did not know.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the big shithole in the sky, and hoping to maybe speed my return there by a marginal amount at least. Still don’t really like any of the practical solutions to the problem of getting there, but I figure that the somewhat more enjoyable ways of getting there that ppl try like smoking, drinking, fucking and that sort of thing might suit my fancy. Speaking of that, fuck this I’m gettin a cancer stick right now… seeya.

Facts gathered, statistics analyzed, percentages measured.

Only a drunk motherfucker has any real thoughts.

No, this is the identity of a failure.

What makes something more worthwhile?

Well, I suppose mediocrity is an accomplishment.

No wait… fresh, new, real.  Yes?  No.

This is the best you can do.  What?

Words. Perhaps… a sickening pace.  Does anyone read stream of conscious… that was cool once upon a time.

But cliches have gotten old, young, new, mediocre.  This is not getting any closer.

Greatness is backwards.

Malcolm fucking Gladwell!?

No

The internet is not a form of life.

But mechanical creatures roaming the beach are more interesting than this bullshit… but this bullshit is more interesting than Hollywood… but Hollywood is nothing better than a pile of dead animals.

What kind of animals?

The kind that are nothing but mistakes… mistakes and shit.

Who cares?

No one really.

But this is just data, and you haven’t really made anything worthwhile.

Yes.

Ok then.

Done.

Reading: War and Peace

Listening: Boards of Canada

Drinking: Whiskey and Lemonade

As in, “lives are full of meaning.”

That is a normative statement.

Normative means it is how things should be,

i.e. lives should be “full of meaning.”

This does not mean that “meaning” means, or is, or should be anything.

Instead, “meaning” is just similar to things like shit, or piss, or love, or gummy bears, or dead animals, or other things that people are often full of.

But then somebody wrote the sentence that is the title of this “poem.”

I didn’t write that sentence.

Someone who I enjoyed believing wrote that sentence.

So I believed it.

That is, “The world does not speak, only we do.”

I believed that.

I still believe that.

I plan on believing that for a long time, or maybe for a while at least.

I like believing that, because I think it means that only words have meanings.

I didn’t like feeling like I should be full of something that could really be anything.

Now I don’t feel that way.

That makes being alive much easier, because otherwise “meaning” starts to mean too many things at once, which makes it weigh a lot.

Just like trying to hold too many things at once weighs a lot,

Which sucks,

Because that makes you really tired after a while.