to be deleted.

Perhaps the nicest thing about Las Vegas these days is that anyone can Win. And anyone can go to the hospital.... Junkies, thieves, bankers, stocktraders: They arrive at the city limits, its visage a sexy alien to make you come harder than you ever have before.  And you bring your suitcases loaded with books and booze; maybe a decent camcorder for sight-seeing, and your envious friends who couldn't make it. You come to Las Vegas -- ignoring the beggar in the filthy three-piece suit by the turnpike exit -- and drive straight into the heart of Dreamland, like a cash-money wooden stake into the vampire-center of your poor, middleclass heart....   And when your checking/savings account and both of your arms are broke, you watch the other Players working through cataract lenses and high blood pressure, taking another spin on the wheel of subjectivity, while you all pay homage to the same electric god.  ****

To be returned to the living-world a second time, to have somehow outlasted mortality & death while virtually countless others remained bound by the doctrine of Hades and meta-consequential punishment... Sisyphus had to wonder why he was so fortunate. He had to examine his bones and his thoughts and the trajectory he'd carried all along....  Of course, much had changed while he was pushing the boulder: Women's bodies and the rights guarding the condition of those bodies had fallen in & out favor in a dizzying atmosphere -- a world of problems and conditions far more than even Persephone could account for. And workers of farms, factories and everywhere between and after had boulders of their own to push, relationships of their own to navigate and mend and grow. Sisyphus found himself permanently engaged, yet was speechless to offer any proposals.  He -- dressed in jogging shorts, fresh sneakers and a t-shirt that read Kill The Mountain -- stopped outside an extraordinar...

 When my mother speaks on matters of God, faith, spirituality, her answers are as clean and straight as Bingo balls. She is not persuaded the Earth was made in 7 days, nor that women should be forbidden abortions. She says that she wouldn't have one herself (the same answer now at 68-years-old as it was when I was a teenager) and that she doesn't agree with everything the church tells her. She doesn't hold opinions about Jesus, the Resurrection, or the nature of divine miracles. But when I talk to her about Afterlife in Heaven, it becomes clear her position is unmovable. She wants to see her parents again. She says that they have visited her in her dreams. And I try to bring her to this world, I talk about philosophy, Buddhism, Absurdism, death. Again, her position is unmovable. She agrees with some of the things I say, but it comes across more as skillful patronization than conversation with her son. It feels like I'm just one of those Bingo balls, or a family member s...

He was born in '43 and sailed to America with his mother and then-fetus of a brother at a very young age. So he must've started being socially-aware in the 50s -- when it's relatively common knowledge the country was enduring an abject phase of conformity: and young people had to endure a great many arbitrary rules such as letting a woman walk on their stomachs if you were a man. In fact, it's also said that the counter-culture of the 1960s was a direct response, direct protest to these bizarre sorts of demands. (Plus Vietnam. Plus the widespread communities of racists and purposefully brutal police.) And I never knew any of his friends if he had any. But he liked Steppenwolf and the Godfather and Seinfeld and Rush Limbaugh, at one point, too, and he had a son who's forgiven him all of his trespasses.  **** 

 I've always had a keen sense  of detachment. Even through  suicidal grief, abject frustration  and poverty, I have a talent to separate  the moment from the continuum.  So perhaps it's little note or surprise that this techno-stalking  of a man I once considered  a close friend  hasn't corrupted me into  petty soullessness or persuaded me to  identify with his lame egoic navel-scratching.  This one's for you, Jeff.  May Mrs. Green take eternal rest  in proper order  and your next suicide  enjoy lasting success. 

It's the nature of history to  accumulate insight. It has often been  painful, unfailingly moves at its leisure,  and often the value is outright rejected.  Nonetheless, the light of human thought  emerges through ephemeral conditions.  I wish we didn't have to re-learn  obvious lessons  every decade, century, millennia, though.  No army and no messiah and no contract  prevented the American Stock Market Crash,  and I fail to see improvement of this method  in either the Financial Bailout or the Stimulus  when people asphyxiate on disease  or adolescents murder children and strangers.  I fail to understand the habitual ingratitude  of life. I fail to understand the clinging to bullshit.  Maybe I've just been reborn too many times?  Born to stubbornness and unshakeable laughter.  **** 

 In the novel, at some point after  Lewellyn takes off with the money,  there's this exchange between the  deputy and sheriff, the deputy not  a whit less naïve than he is in the  film, commenting on how awful it is  that heroin is sold to children, met by  the subdued emotion of the sheriff.  The sheriff notes how awful it is  the kids are buying heroin at all.  I was thinking about that and  the tidal wave of mass-shootings  in the first week  of this month.  How it's a joint effort of  the despicable and the manipulated.  It's unwise to sleep outside in a lightning storm.  Why do we keep inventing lightning then?  **** 

I've been writing poems every day  for a solid week now. The words are  savagely defending themselves against  the tyranny of listlessness and the awful  social weirdness of undignified silence  and the pheromonal harassment of shitheads.  Amanda's got her family here oscillating  between self-conscious frustration, brief laughter,  and the ten-year-old squeaky joy of a woman  at least 30 years old.  But even that hasn't derailed  the terminal syllables from stampeding  into  the heavenly vein of light....  Just think of it: a month ago I woke up  dizzy every morning, drunk, stoned on the porch  near every afternoon, with insomnia and angst  sure to follow every night.  And now my pen daces like a psychotic ballerina  tearing up the dirt and ruin and apathy  and confusion doesn't stand a chance.  **** 

History demonstrates wisdom by default.  Humans, praying to Goldilocks and Robin Hood,  try to calculate the odds.  We are fish seeking a habitat, bears  wanting for hibernation. The smallest  children of nomadic neanderthals, like  a russian-doll unbound by ultimate logic.  History demonstrates wisdom by default.  The earth absorbs our sins, like a limbic system  well-acquainted with grief.  ****  

Social interaction has always been  plagued with adversity.  We are routinely discouraged  from expressing spontaneous insight.  Instead our education, personal and otherwise,  is set in the impersonal hands  of anti-artistic laborers and  excessively groomed politicians.  We suffer this one at a time, regardless  or because of shared company.  We listen, receive, consider,  respond as politely or as quickly  as we can.  The incensed respond through aggravation.  The calm navigate, manipulate, or quietly massage  the ill feelings in our guts, hearts, minds.  And the ugliest behave as there  weren't any disagreement in the least.  Corporations and governments and cults  collect more into their attendance,  while the introspective, solitary and righteous  sleep in handsewn blankets in countries  of dirt & chance.  We are caretakers and victims, all of us,  influenced...

Doing the daily beer and grocery shopping,  something in the Dollar Store  hijacks my inner calm.  The weirdness invades my  nostrils-lungs-heart.  And often as manageable  I try to suppress discomfort.  Others see a man a little too neat  for the occasion, covering his  nose and mouth, eyes frozen,  memorized words  ticking in the brain.  On other occasions, like this one,  I've got this daring sense of mischief  and self-confidence...  I noticed the woman behind the register,  this overweight gal who's reliably obnoxious  and phony, and like some deleted scene  from Mulholland Dr. she amplifies the weirdness.  I walk around, collecting my things, then  pause in the aisle that lines up with the  register, about a hundred feet away, and  I put down my basket and stand there.  Hand over nose and mouth, I draw a deep breath  from somewhere inside, randomly decide a mantr...

If a day passed without some fashion of scumbag  either shopping or working at the Tractor Supply,  it's been lost beneath some inactive cerebral tissue  with my second grade math...  This one time a customer, a woman in  her late-40s, asked for help when  I happened to be near the service desk.  She was picking up an order.   I got her name, clicked a few things  on the computer, and quicker than  a farting contest  the items were secured  and we headed for her truck.  She'd been mildly flirty,  in that way that's not seeking a  direct response. Just a quick jolt  for her parts, an object of meditation  for something later.  And in truth health  hadn't fled  her face, breasts, buttocks,  and she moved with  a limber step.  It was as I loaded the package  onto her truck, the sun shining down  on the brown skin of my face, hands, forearms,  that this stra...

Nelson was this guy I knew  when I was homeless.  He'd been homeless, too,  and, even though empathy  wasn't a word  he'd regularly use,  he had empathy  for my situation.  (That, plus, I think he liked  being friendly with someone  intellectual.)  Nelson had the monkey when  he was younger, you know, heroin,  and I suspect he took a taste  every now & then in his older years,  when I got to know him.  Not that he and I ever shared any:  heroin makes the shortlist  of drugs I haven't  tried  or done habitually. We'd  just smoke a joint or two  (or three or four when our budgets allowed)  and smoke cigarettes, drinking  drinking beer in his livingroom.   It was a respectable place  except Nelson was a slob,  and I can hardly remember  a single damn time  there weren't stacks of old Playboys  on either side of his couch  and a ...

 The car is a  percussion instrument,  with pedals and  surfaces capable  of resonance  eager to be  refined, abused,  controlled.  The engine is the chorus  and the chassis receives  its energy.  The chassis is the promise  and the engine is  its god.  The car is a tool, a metaphor,  with gauges and gears  to measure the performer's skill.  The wheels determine the audience,  the needles navigate  ecstasy.  The car is a percussion  instrument, and its  music is natural  as an earthquake.  The wheel,  the windshield,  the dashboard  await every playful hand.  The car is a percussion instrument  made of fire, gushing around  an eternal bend, bursting  to a listening tomorrow  and the driver climbs the highway  to a paradise as red as blood.  ****  

Never thought pronouns were so slippery.  That words like man, woman, or  even transgender would require  a village to define.  But 2022 -- and really a few years  before this -- call for some reappraisal.  That genitals are no longer  the determining features they once were.  There's a compulsory sense of wordplay,  neither inspiring nor entertaining in the least.  The sort of micromanaging of language  once reserved to the middle-aged and bitter  has been appropriated by a generation  of entitled suckers.  They don't write poems. They don't play songs.  They seem to draw embarrassment or confusion  to every conversation they enter, and are unlikely  to endure like the painter or the pioneer.  **** 

Once upon a time in America,  when George Bush II was president,  I was little more than half  the age I am now,  and sharpening the blade of my expression.  Science was a point of interest, especially  neurology, the switches and compositions  that detail intention, skill, fear.  I was owned by admiration for men  like Hunter S. Thompson. Men who  wasted no effort  in making their disgust something palpable.  The internet taught me about the amygdala.  An animal almost independent in the mind.  Like a dangerous sea monster that determines  its enemies -- one random episode  at a time.  And I learned how it can be provoked,  how subjectively it can be wired for detonation.  I learned the term 'psychological totalitarianism'.  Being a graduate of political punk, fed  a steady diet of self-research and  the news, this was a very easy lesson  to learn.  I never forgot tha...

The school shootings and massive assaults  exceed practical numbers and understanding.  Bodies hit the floor and plant sadness in the earth and the NRA and cowards with jelly pricks  uphold the values espoused by now-  ancient slave owners. Mothers weep  in print, on television, filling mile after mile  of streets that run from Now until  the apocalypse. While pretense debates  authenticity. While success is defined  in auditoriums  yet so rarely seen in person.  Charles Manson would charge with envy.  Ramirez would inhale with focus.  The killer is everywhere like insects,  defended by technicalities, armed by  avoidance, and utterly fueled  by an inability to love.  **** 

Buddhists maintain our actions are of  lasting consequence, that our righteous and evil  deeds  determine the reach  of life thereafter.  With this notion set firmly in mind,  let's consider the ad-bot, the bogus  social media account.  They're easy to notice with a functioning brain,  even in the absence of a skilled tutor.  Note the abundance of "friends," the commonness  of interests, the photo warped with age  in spite of modern technology.  Laugh, when the spirit emerges, at  the troubled language expressed  in confident honesty. These  are the hallmarks of the  privileged damned.  One can safely imagine the authors  of these profiles, lonely and incensed  like murderous turtles. Working  expensive keyboards, producing  stiff illumination.  Perhaps their efforts are  penance of undignified karma,  a playful humiliation  sentenced by the gods.  Who k...

In your day-to-day affairs  such as work, school, domestic life,  be selective in your arguments  and conservative in speech:  this will provide you a minor yet  largely inexhaustible degree  of comfort and respect. Remember that your peers are  just as young as you and  barring sudden death or  equally spontaneous disfigurement  or enlightenment,  they will always be as young as you.  Beware of all cults, movements, and trends  although it's unwise to dismiss them  out of hand. Remember the Civil Rights Movement  and protest of the Vietnam War  prevented neither  the Invasion of Iraq nor the  curious election of Donald Trump.  And that sexual identity -- even among  us straights -- has never carried a banner, that  love's strength rests more in biology  than agreement.  Form and improvise an education for yourself.  Consider men like Tim O'Brien and  Cormac McCar...

 Lack of creativity will kill you.  Even just weed, cigarettes and alcohol  eventually repurpose your body  into a lazy prison of aimlessness.  The obnoxious, invasive voices  of dildos on the street  will chip away at your love & self-respect.  You need the creativity. You need something more  than oxygen and blood. Even lust and  curiosity can't replace. You need the shapely world  of growing chance, the hidden dimension  between the fragility of this world  and the concrete-mixture that slides  towards  dream.  You need it. Let no one tell you different.  Including yourself. Don't let the timid &  the living dead fool you. Unsubscribe  from the ranks  of the everlasting apathetic.  **** 

 They move with a patience that has no hunger at all.  Blue marbles for eyes. Green marbles for  eyes. Black marbles for eyes. Camouflaged in  designer normalcy, they never stutter a word.  Approximately half have children.  (Approximately half never will.)  Life for them moves in obligation to  assembly, a plastic puzzle of  lifeless pieces. Gestures and formalities.  A ritual to disguise  the transformation of  prejudice and indifference  into the poisonous red meat of self-anger.  While soulful outlaws and nostalgic introverts  learn the texture of walls and skies,  they re-imagine small aspects of the weather.  They never search or stutter a word.  **** 

 Four years in, I felt I'd exhausted my chances  in New York. Person after person, city after  city, year after year, the indifference and  timidity of America chewed up some part  of my psyche and replaced it with a cautious disgust.  Hence: California. I thought a citizen or  celebrity out there would help me secure  the secret fortune, grab this sorry bullshit  by the throat and cut its throat.  Well, two weeks in -- a length of time  pitifully shorter than I'd like to admit --  my resolve withered to nothing.  I went to the ocean for eternal rest.  The somber night contrasted only  by the outline of the country.  Had nothing to my credit save  two weeks of bodyrot and  maybe a cigarette.  I found a payphone and called an ambulance.  They kept me overnight. (Refused me a shower.)  I couldn't stay at the hospital because  I didn't have state insurance or  wasn't keen on m...