thursday com(mute)

As I get older I’ve been finding myself increasingly ambivalent about thorough ass-wipings. 

It’s like listen, everyone has an asshole and most people shit out of them, so why do the two (assholes and shit) have to always be mutually exclusive?

I’m walking slower than usual to the train, burdened by the weight of cleanliness and visualizing tightly wound tubes of toothpaste being wound tighter against the knowledge that it’s impossible to squeeze everything out and anticipating someone wrapping his/her arm around my shoulder and whispering something like “hey sphincter-face, why so glum?” thereby allowing me to strangle him/her with my iPod earbud cord in an attempt to force out the remnants of what used to be colloquially known as a soul and rub them in his/her dying face like someone berating their French bulldog for rug-pissing while muttering "look at what you did, look at what you did..."

As usual, no one makes eye contact except for children. I want to wink and smile/grimace at them, but not in a way that suggests imminent molestation. More like, ah, wistful acceptance. Like, "No worries little man, Time will rape all of us soon enough."

are you down with the zest?

Living the LUNA Life at The Mugwump Corporation

The Natural Order

Walking home from the annual get-blitzed-and-forget-my-breath mixer at the Victims of Female Waterboarding lodge, my father and I heard some dirt talking to a tree. 

It said, “I can discharge you from this cortex, or collect your organs like raindrops with colors to spare.”

I thought that sounded beautiful. 

“That sounded beautiful,” I said, tugging on my father’s Cuckold Klein unlimited edition denim jacket. 

He gave me this look: Your teeth and eyes and maladjusted thyroid are from the left-handed side of the family, meaning, Liquid should be illegal, she slid too fast, or simply, These summers are moot.

So this is what my father did: he went back to Walmart for the fifth time that week, bought a power saw (Only $149.99 – Don’t miss a single Rollback or special offer!), cut the tree down and pissed on the stump.

Then he made me do it.

“That sounded beautiful,” my father whispered while lighting my jacket on fire.

We Always Managed to Have the Same Teachers

Carl didn’t see the piñata-bashing club as I cracked him with it on the back of his dome piece, knocking him out for a solid two minutes. And I didn’t see the two massive parental hands that grabbed me from behind and spanked my learing, chubby rump until I apologized to Carl, our non-offensively biracial god and the president. “Crappy birthday to you” is an understatement. Honey-bearded Jesus and George Bush 41 just kept staring at me from behind their picture frames on the plastic, Pine-Sol-colored mantel, and I wouldn’t be getting my new Super Nintendo until the following year, when the only thing anyone really wanted to play with were Stretch Saddam dolls and Branch Davidian Big Wheels. But I would be seeing a lot more of Carl. Until the next time he touched me where it smelled funny.

PTSD Is So 2005

Oprah agreed on a fair way to decide initiation, which involves two closed fists and pretending your grandmother’s in the room. The compromise proved to be a big ratings boost in most major markets (except, of course, in Kandahar) and was rated as favorable by almost every viable demographic besides panty-sniffing Japanese stock brokers vacationing in Haiti and bomb-sniffing dogs out on recon.

Honestly, I think it made most people feel a little better about the future: vapid suit-herders could still meditate under clouds of dharma-jizz in obese central-air pumping boxes, highways would still shimmer in the hot afternoons and block complete glimpses of fields, bizarre tension vibes and unprovoked assaults would still be the two most sought-after traits of every washed-up child actor.

My brother came home in August with half a femur and a pull-one-over-on-you Midwestern drawl he got from watching too many John Hughes movies in the hospital. Maybe that’s why nobody argued when he stopped taking his Ambiens and started stashing them away for what we assumed would be one heck of an Alive Day party the following year.

“The least coolest person on TV is more interesting than anyone I know,” he told me while I sponged him down for the last time, his Budweisers raised above the tub like night goggles.

I LOVE TODDLERS & TIARAS

Interracial porn leads to god, leads to art, leads to [*]

I watch a trashy blonde woman in her early twenties kneeling next to a beige fake-leather couch -- bleached hair, oily pores, dribbling eye-liner, small breasts, protruding nipples, apple-shaped thighs, thin growing spirals of cellulite spreading from under her fleshy ass. Her face is getting fucked by a massive black cock, a penis more suitable for certain breeds of domestic cattle. Pumping her mouth with the sheer racial force of 300 years of caged aggression. Flinging gobs of frothy saliva onto her artificially tanned neck, her hair, and the couch.

It’s near the end of a long scene. One that involved a good amount of oral (on both actors), some missionary, doggy, reverse cow-girl, ass-to-mouth, and a conspicuous little toy called the Road Warrior that looks like an mp3 player with furry insect legs. As I sit here, hunched over my laptop in the near-dark of my parents’ guest bedroom, watching the African fire hose finally drench his visibly shaken partner in a milky rain of self-loathing, I realize that the streaming images and near-muted sound in front of me represent the closest I’ve come in a long time to having a genuine religious experience.

Religious Experience (Encyclopedia Britannica definition): A moment of wonder at the infinity of the cosmos, the sense of awe and mystery in the presence of the holy, feelings of dependence on a divine power or an unseen order, the sense of guilt and anxiety accompanying belief in a divine judgment, and the feeling of peace that follows faith in divine forgiveness.

OK, maybe what I’m feeling isn’t really a religious experience. And anyway, the Western concept of RELIGION has been a difficult one for me since early adolescence. I can specifically trace my feelings of doubt regarding Judeo-Christian tradition to a snowy, chemically ambiguous night in March 2001, a few weeks after receiving the sacrament of Confirmation and a few days after a brief, awkward, bumbling, yet ultimately gratifying physical episode with a younger female classmate. Over the years – for many reasons – the doubts multiplied, became shards of glass, bullets, wrecking balls, and finally the pound of TNT that vaporized any remnants of my grandparents’ Eurocentric faith somewhere toward the end of my last semester at college. Jesus was a cool guy, don’t get me wrong. I love most of thy neighbors, even the crackheads that sit in my hallway and spark their white flashes and demons. Basically what it came down to was that there was no way I could justify sitting for an hour every week listening to an old man who probably beats off to the Toys R Us catalog tell me that it’s a sin for me to fixate on how the right breast of the girl in the pew in front of me resembles a pomegranate, or that the five dollars my father throws in the collection basket every week is going to go to starving Hispanic children in the North End of Hartford and not toward gas money for the priest’s Lexus that’s parked behind the rectory. Then there’s that whole Inquisition thing…

In the aftermath of my dogmatic holocaust (May – June 2007), I still had this urgent need to feel something, anything, amidst an absence of meaning in the synthetic, desensitized realm of post-modern pseudo-existence. So I focused my spiritual curiosity Eastward – to the beautiful precepts of Lao Tzi, to the awakened nirvana of the Buddha, and to the sacred cookbook of Baba Ram Dass. At first, this triad of philosophies – Taoism, Buddhism, and Americanized Hinduism – seemed to offer so much comfort and sensible insight. Each renounces the worship of an arbitrary, white-bearded, human-shaped ‘god’ and instead implores each of its followers to look within himself. I can do this by myself? My own brain is the church? Far out, brahh. Woo! But after further reading, and after many failed attempts at finding my own enlightentment, I formed this general definition of Eastern philosophy:

Look! A nontheistic spirit is already inherent in each of us, an untapped resource for personal enlightenment. All we have to do meditate, meditate, MEDITATE, go vegan, stop drinking, meditate, focus on the present, be compassionate but forget EMOTIONS!!!, forget anger, forget joy, forget MONEY, forget the past, forget the girl who sleeps at your apartment but won’t tell you she’s been fucking one of your friends for the past week, forget fucking, forget the future, meditate, fast, deny good, deny evil, deny, deny, DENY your reality, meditate and then you will find enlightenment in NOTHINGNESS, in the absence of your life…

Granted, that may be a little extreme. There are a lot of great things about these philosophies that are worth looking into. But the ultimate problem with Eastern philosophy – like Christianity – is that the goal of the believer is not to embrace his humanity completely, but to deny certain integral parts of it, to find the ultimate experience elsewhere, and not in the physical realm of the world around us. Yes, we are taught that happiness is found in the present, but it is a present I’d rather spend eating a Hardee’s Monster Thickburger with four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame-seed bun than sitting in the lotus position for ten hours contemplating how wet the rain is. Also, being a true Taoist or Buddhist would be impractical and impossible in our America-Fuck-Yeah! culture. I need money to buy food and beer. I need a job to get that money. I need to exploit natural resources in order to survive in the good old USA. I also highly enjoy television, central air-conditioning, and my new pair of baby-blue and cream-colored custom Nikes. I continue eating cheap, processed ham, regardless of how many infant pig testicles were ripped off for me to enjoy its sliced deliciousness. Call me coldhearted, but I think I’m a pretty average Westerner in most respects.

So now that I’ve basically thrown out the teachings of every major formal religious school of the last 10,000 years, what else is there? What do I believe in? Is it possible that I believe in – GASP – nothing???? BUT, watching the interracial porn, I know I feel something. Something that cannot be explained in strict scientific terms; an innate connection established through purely spiritual channels, one that goes beyond the images. But wait:

Religious Experience (Wikipedia definition): In a religious experience, or sacred experience, an individual comes in contact with transcendental reality.

Transcendental reality!!! Now that makes sense. The feeling I get from watching the porn is something that transcends the digitized pixels of the screen, the circuitry of my laptop, and the process of light filtering through my eyes to put that picture in my brain. Sort of the way recorded music transcends the physical aspects of its nature (i.e. CDs, amplifiers, soundwaves). The porn and music both stimulate my body and my mind at the same time in two completely different ways. This definition of religious experience looks suspiciously similar to another Wikipedia definition:

Art: is a product of human activity, made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind; by transmitting emotions and/or ideas… "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science".

So there it is. Faith in the human mind, faith in its ability to create, in its ability to transcend our own reality, to inform us of our own reality, to embrace with sweaty palms every aspect of this reality, to fuck this reality into submission! I believe in this art, and not just in the definitive mediums – music, literature, sculpture, film, painting, and printmaking. Everyone loves a good book and a pretty picture. I’m talking about real art, human art. I believe in the Guatemalan crackhead who sits outside my building, and who I sometimes give old newspapers that he uses to insulate his garbage-bag parka. I believe in the black girls from Brooklyn going to school, carrying nine books. I believe in the character of my handshake. I believe the sticky sex angels of a Thursday drunk. I believe in my friends' success. I believe that the self-disgust and self-inflicted purgatory of this past semester served an ultimately beautiful purpose. I believe in the terrifying authority of my imagined rages and ecstasies. I believe in memories of crumpled yellow promises. I believe in my own future and the passion I have for my work. I believe in Manhattan. I believe in flights to Europe – to anywhere – and in the thoughtfulness of Iberia Airlines employees. I believe in the ancient burnt stench of camels and Moroccan taxi drivers. I believe in screaming, vomiting, dicks, and pussies. I believe that love is slippery. I believe in words that sound like scarecrows. I believe in road trips to Vermont and other Northern New England locales. I believe in chemicals. I believe in the angry Harlem PCP-fiends, howling up the stairs in my hallway for another golden fix. I believe that I may never completely come to grips with my four years of college. I believe in the sexual streetlights of 47th and Lexington. I believe in the curve of a girl’s naked lower back as she bends over to pick up her thong in the misty darkness of a gray morning-after. I believe in Santa. I believe in the elements of my life that are beautiful and sinister, creative and destructive, and I am in love with all of them. I believe that the setting sun is just an illusion caused by the world spinning around its axis. And I believe in YOU.

Happy holidays!