An Early Encounter with Seldon Kingswit

Some of the elders tell us that this is a different earth now, that there were no survivors after all, and this is all there is to the great beyond. They say the survivors walked through a curtain of some kind and everything smells and feels differently now. The earth has grown larger, too vast for a journey of several lifetimes. And the survivors gave up on technology. And now a weary, wary and quiet anarchy reigns.

Now and then you pass an outpost where they still use a diesel truck to drag tree trunks; but most of them have become rusty bones hidden in the brush. 

The elders say that technology holds the embers of the previous world.

They say the earth used to be crowded with people. Now there are only a handful of people for every 3 days journey. People are shy, maybe it’s an inherited shame. Maybe in other places the power vacuum has been filled by warlords. But here nobody wants that kind of power. It’s an ember of that lost world.

Kingswit

I’d prefer not to think about these things, but it tugs on my nerves, and then I find myself two or three days down the road and I can’t remember seeing anything but the mud in the ruts. So then I have to talk, even if I’m only talking to hallucinations. 

Seldon Kingswit was a con artist, even though he wanted nothing substantial. While you might be an hallucination, you’re an honest lie. And he was a flesh and blood fake, a liar who never swindled anyone of anything material. It was the immaterial swindle that got under your skin. We didn’t like him because we couldn’t figure out what he was stealing. No, he never swindled anyone, no one ever said he did, and we take note of such things because that’s what sets us apart from the wandering tribes and the old-timers, the ones who still cling to the illusion that the previous world was a golden age.

Strictly truthful though he was, you could never speak to Kingswit without feeling poisoned. He wanted your admiration and he’d do something to earn it too, anything, anything, Christ, somersaults, or singing, for God’s sake. He made you feel sorry for him, that’s how he conned you. He made you participate in swindling him of his own honor and dignity.

He was a lying sack of shit, that’s another way to put it, even though he never told a lie. Make of it what you will. A truth-teller who was dishonest as hell, because a lie is something you do now and then and it’s over. But dishonesty is a gas that lingers, like body odor. Every truthful thing he ever did always gave off a poisonous stink, you could hardly thank him for his many generosities, it would make you sick after a while, or you’d say it quick and look away fast, because he wanted something more rare than food or shelter, he wanted you to believe in the man he tried to be, so it was easier to say nothing to him, never applaud his ridiculous antics, and truth be told they were remarkable antics, he worked hard to impress you. And you couldn’t even tell him that what he was doing was worse than suicide, he wouldn’t see it. Even though he had to know what he was doing because he was the one doing it, he was the one holding out his throat and handing us the knife.

The Oven Mitt: A Comedy About Psychopathy, Guilt, Fascism and Death

I feel sorry for the left oven mitt because we don’t really need it. Sometimes I wear it when it’s not necessary, just to give it a boost.

This sounds like I’m trying to be cute, but it’s a raw confession. This is no joke: I recently bought a bottle of beet juice because I felt sorry for the bottle. It felt like walking past a homeless person. And I even spoke comforting words to the bottle as it languished in my refrigerator for weeks, before I finally had to throw it out, because it tasted like shit.

It makes me sick to hear how amused I sound by my own antics. But it’s the act of confession that provides some needed respite, and respite always produces a certain giddiness. That’s why priests always thought I was making stuff up in the Confession booth. As a result, I don’t think they gave me sufficient penance. But it’s confusing the way they made us worship a statue, and then believe that a tasteless wafer was the body of Jesus. They encouraged us to blur the line between animate and inanimate just as we were learning in school that nothing is real unless it can be measured, and everything is basically an automaton, including our own biological drives and patterns of thinking.
It was confusing, so I rebelled by regressing and staying regressed. It’s no wonder I constantly talk to anything extractable from the unrelenting whole, myself, my fingers, individually, or as a group, the chairs, car antennae (up there like R2D2 in all kinds of weather).

The Title Goes Here (a satirical philosophical essay/story/nonsense)

Part 1: Rounds, Corkscrews and Drunks; or Fatheads, Screwups and Imbeciles

It was difficult to imagine a place more desolate than the peneplain. But Zeke Sage spent his afternoon suffering, as his physicians described it, from “Bacchanalias dipsomania”, which left his body wracked with indecision in the easy chair, from which visions arose that went one step further than the peneplain in their absence of qualities of any type. For at least the peneplain had a line distinguishing earth from sky; whereas Zeke’s mind – referred to by researchers as the “pene-pate” – merely had what was known in medical circles as the flat line.

However, knowledge of lines by circles is baseless. Lines and circles may intersect; they may run more or less parallel for a while; they may even screw one another over, but circularity cannot know singularity and vice versa.

“And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life and never understand”

There’s a new post on Negative Geography.

Writing to Live, Not Living to Write

I can always go into a room and be alone — free from the web of mutual expectations that is the “me” and the “you.”

This is rare. Usually I go into a room, and I’m merely “by myself” – still spinning in the wake of the previous room’s social vortexes. But now and then a door opens leading to an empty space, one with no self-conscious observer interpreting the situation.

Writing as a Ceremony

Writing as a “Ceremony”

This project is the product of extremely introverted perspectives. However, the intention is to plunge my head even further up my own ass than usual, thereby provoking a kind of poor man’s second sight, staring out and in at the same time (not to be confused with “seeing double” in part I). I’m hoping to see my own idiocies as they unfold. I think an immediate recognition of one’s own idiocy is possible, and “promising” in some way that will take a long while to make clear.

A Few Examples of Cartoon Stories

I wrote thousands of these cartoons, all of which were written back and forth to Walter Cybulski, who is perhaps the funniest writer I’ve ever read. These are a few examples of cartoons I wrote back to him.

More Profiles of Thumb-Wrestling Legends: Nate and Edwina Nabob

Nate Nabob was a milkshake flavor idea consultant for one of Eddy Industries’ floundering fish fry houses. Nabob worked the night-shift, doodling recipes with one hand while the other pursued a career on the thumb-wrestling circuit.

That’s how he met Edwina. She was hitchhiking from DePuke to attend her final semester at Saint Johosavat’s School of Leaping to Conclusions. The moment he saw her thumb he knew she was a natural and could probably win the paperweight crown.

He picked her up and said, “say, that’s some sucking thumb you got there”, but she misheard him and pulled his tongue out a ways, hollering, “what’s that about my tongue, cash-register face?”

Light Verse for Times of Terror

When comedy and tragedy combined
And Sirens of apocalypse did sing
I looked for laughs by contemplating ‘Mind’
I noticed thought (I mean I heard the wings
Of bats who from my belfry flutter blind)
I do believe I got a little ding
When ducking past the superego’s glare
I fell into a vat of old despair.

But nothing keeps me down for long, I roll,
Or rid myself of worries with a shake
(And yet this optimism takes a toll).
I claim, “I am but what I am” (a flake) —
God said that too, and Popeye, on the dole,
While he was waiting for a boat to take
Him out to sea where he was free to think.
For me, my boat’s a rhyme, my sea’s a drink.

Constraint, it seems, is good to some extent.
Look, Popeye found his freedom on a poop;
And through a burning bush that soon was spent
God found a way to give Ole Mose’ a scoop.
And by this rhyme, now, all my thoughts are bent.
But be you too constrained (as with a loop
Around the neck like suet hung for birds)
And you can end up rather lost for words.

Why waste my effort trying to improve
The traffic of this idiotic brain?
I see the thing is stuck within its groove
And even when I hit it with a cane
The senseless thing remains – I’d like to move
But parting from the head can be a pain.
Besides, it’s clear the speaker is the spoke
That let’s the vicious circle run for broke.

 

 

Beam Me Up, Scotty: The Autobiography of a Space Cadet

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

It’s been said we start as gleams in our mothers’ eyes. More likely it’s glint off the infamous beam. What else but a blind spot explains a woman’s compulsion to go through the tortures of childbearing knowing she’ll be thanked with a bawling mass of needy flesh clinging to her body by its gums?