Good God girl, I should have known all this shit was comin’ due to the damn dreams.
There was a dream I nocturnally waded into like a stream in late October in which I was dangling off the hairlip precipice of a craggy cliff in the cemetery where the ashes of my father lay planted in a mantle of earth, grasping with all the temerity my soul could muster, wailing for help, watching as my boss (as well as a bevy of rich yuppies in fulsome sports cars) whizzed past and observed my supplication but refused to offer any assistance before I lost my grip and helplessly spiraled into a fumbling gothic meadow below.
There was a dream harvested in the autumnal magic of Mid-November where I found myself in a bleak college town living with a glitter of college students (sorority sirens and excessive make-up mermaids) in a dilapidated apartment complex, offering to buy them beer because they are not yet of age. The bacchanalian collegiate Girls Gone Wyld wet-t-shirt fete is in full swing when I leave and when I return with the alcohol the house is completely sad and empty and desolate. I then waltz over to a white marble sarcophagus-shaped box which I internally psychoanalyze as being the container where all my literary offerings and manuscripts are stowed and, upon creaking open the hinges sadly discern that the box is vacant and that I had yet to write a single page, that I had forgotten to fuel the linguistic armor of a lone word with the poetic petrol of my heart, that I had failed, after all this time dwelling in a collegiate setting, to scribe out the amorous scent and sound of a single worthy syllable.
Exactly one week prior to the emotional 9-11 detonating the interior architecture of my chest into a nest of ashes and hurt I started having dreams of lovers from the past two years. Rice-sized Esmeralda, Ash, Tricia and Tara— plus (!!!!) a beautiful serene dream of union and joy where the two of us dipped and waded together in a very somewhat familiar parkbenchesque setting (ahhhhhhhhh). In each of these nocturnal vignettes my feminine cohort (including you) were pointing like an airline stewardess to something inscrutable and cubist drifting in the tang-hued horizon above like a banner.
Finally the night before I was canned, I harbored a dream where I was hanging out with dear ol’ David Hale (ie, Big Dave, whose spirit you’ve met) and I was explicating to him that if I didn’t get out of the library now, I would be lethargically lodged in there for another thirty years.
I know, damn david and his damn dreams.
***
APRES MOI, LE DELUGE
This is how it all went down :
The night before Uncle Mike insisted on buying me about fifty dollars worth of groceries. I declined. I tried telling him that for the first time in my euphemistically christened so-called adult life I was finally able to make ends meet. Finally able to pay rent and bills and still have 100 bucks left in the bank between paychecks. Finally able to make fiduciary split-ends meet without having to prostitute myself at the shylock spiritually-grubbing palms of the “money lending stores.”
I was finally developing into the man I felt destined to become.
I had broken up with my beautiful socially vivacious and spiritually sensual rock star girlfriend simply because we were both partying too hard and drinking our health comatose in calculated bacchanalian 30 hour binge-club sessions every weekend. I was falling in love with cooking (developing an almost obscene obsession with Rachel Ray youtube videos—Diggory note to Polly: you tell anyone you die…)—cooking vegetables and rice three times a week, brandishing the spatula like an alchemist and a wand as I delved into an olfactory ocean of spices and scents. I was watching my caffeine intake. My alcohol consumption was cut like a maladroit high school athlete trying out for the Varsity squad. I was working out. Color was inching its way back to my physique. My visage no longer looked like something stale and aspirin-like you’d find leftover and expired in the back of your grandmothers’ bathroom cabinet. I was spending more time with my own novels. I started bloggin’ again (mostly on the recital blog). I could not for the life of me stop reading (the greatest perk of my former place of employment was being completely draped in vertical sea of book spines…) I was reading books on art again. Books on theosophy and quantum universal interconnectedness. Books on different religious movements. Books on chakras and alternative health. Books on history and science. I was watching every documentary ever shot by Ken Burns (his Lewis and Clarke’s Corps of Discovery still coerces the ducts of my eyelids into teary applause). I was revisiting the gentle parkbench purity of Children’s literature (my goal of reading every Newberry award winner was sadly truncated at three). I was falling in love with the fashion in which language backstroked across the openness of a page.
Finally the pulsating independent image of the independent man I had yearned to become—the image I had carried around in my chest like a fetus for all these years was coming to fruition. Like “Aslan’s mane” trusses of my hair were finally dripping down into the topography of my shoulders again, granting me the semblance of the vagabond hippie who once, in another woods-between-the-worlds-lifetime so it seems, somehow stumbled into a certain lecture at a Baha’i retreat in Wisconsin and felt the metaphysical anthem of a sunrise applaud the interior-lining of his chest as I fell into a pond of words exuding from the horizon of your lips as everything inside my flesh some how opened like lotus opens when kissed by a slither of the most pure light.
I was myself again. I was growing and giving and giving and growing and then, somehow, all shit broke loose and I found myself out of work during the Christmas season within the geometrical confines of a staggering economy that was all too reminiscent of a late-stage HIV infection—moribund and bleak and spiraling out of control with a feeble chance of ever returning to sustainable viability whatsoever.
***
Perhaps the only word that aptly fits the pending description of this fiasco is a word you’ve always used which I’ve honestly hated. If, in another plural universe, in another prismatic reflection of time space, where we’ve been married for ten years and are financially struggling and are in bed together (I have short hair cause I know that’s how you like it) and you are clipping your toenails and I am trying to get some sleep cause I just clocked off from my shit job and we keep addressing each other as “honey” so often that our last name could pass for smuckers and we are having the inevitable verbal altercation all couples-in-it-for-the-long-cross-country-on-camel-back-you-haul have which is “I-love-you –so-much-but-I- can’t-stand- it-when- you-say-or-do-this-in- public, honey.” I would confess that I, in all candor, I can’t stand it every time you use the word “Heebie-jeebies.”
Honey.
Heebie-jeebies.
Something about the phonetic assonance of the word has never registered well with my nervous system. It sounds like the medicinal diagnosis of a frat boy who decided to dry hump a beehive as part of an obscure drinking game ritual. Or the sounds echoed from ones lips as they try to swallow a dusty 7-up bottle laced with sand paper only to have it crunch into rough triangular shards of glass halfway downs ones esophagus. Heebie-jeebies. Or the high-pitched shrill an uppity- high class British lady would make while playing bridge at a country club, who while halfway sipping her tea, lets out a shriek as she realizes that she just sat her plump British arse on an ear of petrified corn—the kind reserved for hog feed.
Heebie-jeebies
Worst off about that word, just seeing the bumper-car jellybean syllables of the word in print makes me shudder.
Every time the word appear chat framed in the museum opus of our infinite IM conversations my body would flinch and titter in an almost epileptic echo. The veins skirting from my shoulders to the tips of my fingers would twitch, my shoulders would harden and wretch in pinched momentary electrocuted uncomfort, that akin to sticking a copper penny into a European outlet.
Heebie-jeebies.
A word I despise, but no other word can do justice to everything that follows:
(NOTE: If I were David foster Wallace here is where I would insert a footnote detailing to you the emotional torment of writing and reenacting this stuff. But in the immortal words of the seedy 2oth century French philosopher Maurice Blanchot (or was it Bataille???) “He who knows not how to hide, knows not how to love.” So like neighboring Wilson from Home Improvement, allow me to detail the following shit cloaked behind the security fence of language and sound.)
Heebie-jeebies.
Was walking into the library that night and seeing that the fucking swischer sweet craggily countenance of the Dean of the department is seated next to the bitchy Human Resource tramp as I entered the library for my shift and the fuck-face dean sternly says, “David, will you come with me please.” (a scene I keep on mentally revisiting and am trying to shake)….
Heebie-jeebies.
Was (as I found out later that night) the policeman sent to the library to escort me off the premises---after being handed a slip paper informing me that “serious allegation of sexual harassment were made” against me. I never saw the campus police (who are my friends) that night. After being mandated to turn in my keys and my ID, I asked that I take the back door of the building out (didn’t want my student workers to see their boss like this).
Heebie-jeebies.
Was hearing about a campus wide e-mail sent the following day to everyone in my department informing them that I was not to be allowed on campus and that if I was spotted anywhere near the vicinity of the university authorities were to be contacted immediately (hard because my apartment is right on campus).
Heebie-jeebies.
Was spending the first few days throwing up everything inside my anatomy. I couldn’t keep water down. Heebie-jeebies was the sweats and dry shakes. The hives. The inability to eat or to digest food. The shock. The feeling of betrayal.
Heebie-jeebies.
Was the absolutely “disgusting” allegations that were made against me (I later found out at my resignation meeting with HR). Allegations of having sex with high school girls in the library basement. Allegations of having sex on my desk with student workers. Allegations of leaving work on my break and getting high with fellow students. Allegations that I was bi-sexual and hurtled myself at every beautiful person that walked inside the building. There was even an allegation that the dual conniving “bitches” took from one of my novels—a scene I was working on one night on my own computer and a scene where I they claimed I “forced” people to read. A scene that had nothing to do with sex at all ( the girlfriends dad is at a Barbecue and is wearing an apron that says, THE BEEF IS IN MY PANTS BABY—nothing like manipulating words for your own means)
Heebie-jeebies.
Was hearing that they fired five of the student workers (all male) I hired over petty-self-indulged reasons, firing them simply because I wrote them recommendations. Because I was close to them. Because I was there boss and encouraged them. Because (as I later heard) they had the balls to stand up for me.
Heebie-fucking-jeebies
Is every time you turn on the television all you hear about is the damn economy and how you had modicum financial security one second and absolutely nothing the next.
Heebie-jeebies.
Was the feeling of complete hollowness and complete loneliness— being broke, the complete confusion of not knowing where to go next or having no clue how to get there— the feeling that you are 31 years old and everything you have ever touched in this lifetime has disintegrated in a hasty overturned ashtray of failure.
Heebie-fucking jeebies-fucking jeebies-fucking-jeebies-fucking-jeebies.
***
All this crazy shit and I somehow lost the copper baby, the oxidized element of earth that has been loyally lodged in my pocket since you presented it to me at the art Institute on that immaculate azure blue eye shadow September afternoon four and a half years ago. The orbed asteroid of unalloyed spiritual love that has seldom abandoned the aching configuration of my grasp and that I can honestly say is the most valuable thing I have ever owned. Sometime, in late October, it completely disappeared. 
Uncle Mike has resplendent mystical offerings about Baha’i’s loosing valuable/sentimental talismans of the heart and finding them in the most mystically astounding fashion. There is a story about Pearle (uncle mike’s Baha’i psychic mentor, whose grave I whisked you past in our woods-between-worlds-eternal-afternoon of joy) who lost an earring that was the last gift her father had given her mother before he died. Pearle always had faith the concourse would give it to her again. Ten years evaporated in a snap and then, one day, inexplicably, when she was walking with a fellow Baha’i outside her house, the earring fell seemingly straight down from the sky, like a golden tear of ecstasy shed from the eyelid of a nearby overhead cherub visible only to those who squint with the lens of the heart. Pearle smiled and turned to her cohort and, offering a smile, inquired if she had witnessed the event.
“Yes,” The friend replied, “But I still don’t believe it.”
The story I love most is about Tudorpole, The British intellectual army general who was a friend of Abbdul-baha and even provided him sanctuary in a time of need. Abdul-baha had given Tudorpole a ring and one day, when Tudorpole was bathing in a nearby river, he lost it. Abdul-baha assured him not to frown, stating that he would find the ring again someday.
There was later an assassination attempt on Tuderpole’s life that occurred across the street from his office. As the bullet hit the side window Tudorpole ducked. He looked up and granite was falling from the top of the ceiling where the bullet hit. IN addition to the crumbs of ceiling the ring, Abdul baha said he would have again someday, also fell down from the heavens as if the wayward bullet had hit it. Simply unreal.
It is arduous and lonely storming through the worse emotional tempest I have perhaps ever endured padding the flanks of my pocketed jeans in search for alchemized remnant of your smile, the spiritual nugget of metaphysical companionship, a clod of soil stripped from the cobbled avenues of the next world Concourse that I have squeezed the fuck out of the last four (hmmmmmmm) years. Even after rampaging my apartment in late November, overturning the desk drawers, scattering dossiers and heaps of manuscripts in a fashion reminiscent of tornadic winds kissing a Kinkos—even after the night in January when I snuck back in to the library to get my possessions, pillaging drawer after drawer, bending down and looking under my desk, going into the staff bathroom in hopes that if might have fallen behind a shelf, looking everywhere for the copper,
Somehow I feel just like Pearle and Tudderpole that the copper will again find itself into the grasp of my fingers in perhaps the most beautiful concourse applauding fashion.
*** *** *** *** **** ***** ***** *****
After working for Barnes and Nobles for four years in the late nineties I started working at the library in February 2000 (got the call that I was hired after a traipse up to good-ol-woods between the worlds Mattheison state park that same afternoon) and then left late that summer to travel and live the life of a nicotine-addled peripatetic poetic bohemian bum for a few years. Ironically I resumed my duties back at the library full time late August 2002, the day after I returned back from our initial sunrise-on-the- shoreline-inside-the-chest encounter at Greenlake. I vividly remember walking to work in the pre-autumnal shingles of stippled tangerine light that late August afternoon, saying a few Baha’i prayers, bathing in the terse memory of the fresh spring of our encounter.
I won’t go into much of the actual termination of my employment—my exile from the building in whose basement burrowed within in a secluded carrel while, thanks the probably unhealthy literary influence of Kerouac and Wallace, I made the transition from poetry to prose and wrote my first short story in 1997 (entitled, “The Drowning”—blawh!!!) the building where I’ve pissed out thousands upon thousands of pages of fiction, watching with giddy school boy adulation as the tips of my fingers stroked the keyboard like a frenzied classical pianist, living for the moment where time becomes frozen and distilled as the heart begins to leak out the blood-letting yearn of passion, the Midwest January country road dusty lavender sunset that is the creative impetus of our collective craft.
The building where my freshman year in high school I was working on a research paper and a beautiful side-pony-tailed college girl grasped my wrist and wished me best of luck and then I overheard her tell her friend how fucked up on Tequila she was going to get over the weekend and I thought, “yes, that’s what college kids do. Drink.”
The building where, later in high school (before the pervasiveness of the net) I would walk to on Sunday afternoon after church and comb through the art and book sections of the NY and London Times, the brick of hope lodged in my chest of a world fraught with aesthetic potential that for some fucking reason escapes us as we breech the altitude of middle aged sunlight, Pandora trying to snip at the fairy of hope and lock it back in the unbridled security of the boxed potential of youth.
The building which housed the decimal addresses of my best friends. The building where I was to spend hours after hours browsing through the labyrinthine shelves of beautiful books in the basement. The second floor which housed a commodious periodical section and where we had every issue of the New Yorker, bound and on the shelf, dating back to the 1920’s—oh the liquer adds!!! Seriously, I could show you the issue where Sylvia Plath debuted her first poem or where an excerpt of Catcher and the Rye, first appeared (written in the THIRD PERSON) a decade before the novel was published.
Incidentally when I was canned I had 98 books checked out (the limit was 100), while my immediate boss and fellow gossipy supervisors (the most gossipy, fat asexual human beings you can ever imagine meeting, like fatuous hens who can only give birth to empty eggs, cohorts in my career they took pleasure in crumbling with their words) monopolized all their time playing video games on line, the ample-torso’d director of the library living vicariously through a slim-cyber variation of herself on second life.
If I was guilty of sexually harassing anything in the library is that I couldn’t keep my fingers off of books. I could not help but undress the cover of every book I found in my possession. Could not help but unhook the alphabetic bra-strap of every sentence I visually fucked. Could not hide the enthusiasm I felt being ensconced around pagoda stacks of books on a daily basis. Or how it felt walking home from work at three in the morning, a heap of books cradled in my hand like a new born, going home, cracking open a few beers, and slipping into the inky trenches of a delicious narrative.
It was the building where, inexplicably, your old-old dragon-embroidered bosomed profile page used to spontaneously pop up every time I went to google on the old access services computer (‘member that), weird, I know, even after I cleared the history on the computer. The building where (shit) every blurred blog entry, from that eternal summer of five years ago as to day, was conceived, birthed, and housed.
The building where I fell in love with and began to live for the sweet (esculent) syllabic stanza of arya is typing.
The building where at one time, we somehow held each other close and danced into the eyelids of eternity, together, as reading the pulse of the angel and discerning it sounds like the tympanic tide of our collective heartbeat….
***
The week leading up to my dénouement I was psychologically tortured. I had this weird belief that I was going to be arrested (????) and began to metaphysically quaver every time a cop car sidled past me on the side of the road. I had a hard time keeping food down. I tried not to think at all about my financial situation or how I was going to get money to pay rent or that I just spent 600 bucks on Christmas presents the weekend before I was canned. I divided my time that week at Uncle Mike’s and my mom, mostly sleeping, trying not to think about the bleakness of my future. I battled interior demons and dragons whose scales insinuated that everything I had every done in my life was equitable to failure. The prayer of Ahmad became my best friend (good ol’ Nightingale on the branch of eternity) and I found myself supplicating on the caps of my knees like a plastic holiday flavored nativity shepherd, asking God simply for peace and for closure regarding the sick situation I found myself in.
But it was Uncle Mike who gave me the best advice. “When you find yourself in the room, just imagine Abdul-baha sitting in the same room with you, smiling.”
And that’s what I did. Smiled the whole damn meeting while facing the trigger-happy disparaging nozzle of the firing squad. It’s hard for me to talk about what happen inside that meeting with HR. since the allegations (rumors) make me uncomfortable to dwell on still to this day. I made jokes, “I guess when God closes a door, He opens a guillotine.” I denied all the allegations. Rather than dragging it out, or getting the law involved for a wrongful termination lawsuit (something my sister thinks I should have done) I resigned. It was emotional and boss, who admittedly has a hard time communicating with people began to cry. Still I held my chin up at the latitude of a halo, seeing the Masters’ smile across the room without squinting and yet, somehow, at the end of our meeting everyone in the room was shaking my hand like I just got offered the job promotion.
*
But still I was broke and shit, had nothing ‘cept the lint off my dreams to live on.
*
And here’s the moment where I tell you that I fucking lost it baby. In the slurred delusional haze of splintered abandonment and hurt that all human beings (particularly those who fucking feel and fucking give and fucking sacrifice and fucking love) from time to time are ineluctably chosen by the gentle wings of the concourse to endure— the maelstrom meltdown from the lips of sanity, the capitulation of your own creativity and joy yielding into the shaded psychological chasms of unrelenting darkness and loss.
The moment where I confess to you that I felt I had emotionally miscarried my one chance at becoming a viable, functioning human being. The moment in mid-December where I found myself in my apartment, naked, my long hair bleeding down into the blades of my shoulders like something feral that has just hatched from the shell of the earth.
The moment where I tell you that I just couldn’t take it anymore. The feeling of hardcore failure mingled with margarita salt of cheek-bone tears as I found myself frisking the tips of my fingers through my kitchen cabinets, fishing out the longest, thickest knife I could find (the type reserved for chopping thick aortic clumps of garlic) duck-taping that knife to the side of the fridge like a silver beak or a horizontal stalactite, a spike to the most selfish, solipsistic act a loss vagabond soul could ever indeed contemplate.
(oh love, forgive me)
The moment where I confess to you that I sat for three hours in a yogi-esque posture, the arrow tip of the knife pointed in my direction like the needle to some compass indicative of perennial defeat, the mathematical emblem for “lesser than” sign piercingly drooping down into the ashen desert of my chest as I contemplated sloughing the corporeal attire of health I mistook for a fleshy turtleneck harboring hurt and pain.
Heebie-jeebies indeed.
***
Why didn’t I end it that fearful night in my apartment? Three reasons. Number one (undoubtedly) your prayers. I know beyond all measure of human cognition that on that unthinkable night at that tittering moment of corporeal uncertainty you were praying for me in Hafai at the Shrine of the Bab. I could feel it. The angelic thread of metaphysical communion that has always been the rudiments of our union, the eternal gentle sacredness of our laughter and joy seemed to lead me in the pastures of assurance that you were somehow oh-so near…
(………………………………..)
Thank you.
Second was my alcohol intake. The more I drank the less suicidal I became, so of course, I continued to drink. And drink. And drink. Drinking my way into a medicated pasture of emotional hollowness bruised inside my chest. As I look back with hackneyed “hindsight-is always-20/20” proverbial nostalgia over the last three years, the one thing I wish I could have controlled more is my alcoholic intake. I always looked at myself as being a jovial lush, getting shit faced, twirling around my apartment listening to music, quoting Rumi and Whitman, being witty, smiling as my thoughts breezed into debauched avenues and hedonistic highways of creative thought. The wrenching truth is that I can count on the number of fingers on one hand the number of days over the past three years when I didn’t wake up and have a few beers before getting into routine. I’ve always been a big partier (at least since the 99 after break up with Vanessa, my longest relationship of 13 months, discovering a bunch of fellow creative bohemian booze guzzlers, going out and partying all night)—And I would get bombed at least three or four times a month for the next couple of years. I didn’t start drinking (addiction) every day until May 2005. Since then I couldn’t imagine watching a movie without having a beer, doing housework without harboring a beer in tandem like scepter, writing sentences without passing out at my desktop after only a page ten hours later, taking a shower (love cracking open the icy cylinders of a beer while baptizing my limbs in a hot shower) watching sports, reading a book (even going as far as correlating certain chapters of Johnny Tremain to certain Sam Adams patriotic selections….or correlating certain high-alcoholic and uber-hoppy IP Ales to chapters in the Narnia chronicles, thinking that this is what Mr. Tumnus imbibed by a hearth in ye olde Caspian pub…pathetic….)
I realized I was addicted to alcohol—really addicted, when I realized that I couldn’t keep beer or hard liquor in the house without drinking it. Having an unopened bottle of beer or an uncorked bottle of wine was like having a book on your shelf unread (ahem—dance to the music of time). I could not have a bottle of Jack Daniels or a 24 case of Guinness in my fridge for over a day without pounding it, usually first thing after rolling out of bed with an acclimated hangover. Over the past three years every weekend has been a bacchanalian blur, brachiating from barstool to barstool, drink to drink. I began to avg at least 5-10 beers a day. On the weekends it wasn’t uncommon for me to drink 30 beers over the discourse of a day and night, waking up, cracking one open before swan-diving into the spontaneity and bliss that alcohol avails. My girlfriend last summer, Tara, is a huge partier and barfly butterfly. Weekends were reserved with the two of us going on a 30 hour drinking binge, being crazy social whores, going to seedy bars where you can still smoke in, passing out comatose somewhere and then taking a day to recover. What Tara couldn’t understand was how I kept on drinking so much during the week. I then began to understand that I couldn’t comprehend why I continued drinking so much during the week—nor could I stop or control it.
It’s been nearly six months since I got canned and my alcohol predilection has yet to wane. I’ve been smuggling beers into the basement of Uncle Mike’s abode and when I took the trash out last week felt almost embarrassed by the rapidity at which I have been imbibing as of late. I don’t think the Concourse is planning an intervention any time soon. More of what I hear the concourse telling me is something like this: If you continue on drinking “You will try a lot of cool beers and have many more moments of laughter and joy. You’ll feel the transience love which alcohol floods into your veins. You’ll have sex with many more beautiful out of this world females that will end in crazy drama.”
But a sobering truth ( lid off of casket sobering) is that labeled onto each beer I for some reason feel compelled to chug on a daily basis, the feathers on the wings of my ambitions get anchored a little more from the reality of my life as an independent author ever happening. I’m a good writer when I’m drunk, but the very painful truth is that, when I’m sober, some days I’m untouchable. And that, as far as the last four years is concerned, if I would have put a fraction of the energy and devotion into my writing (which is already frissoned with devotion and jolt) as I have with my drinking you’d be able to google my last name right now and read my Pulitzer prize acceptance speech. It’s not easy baby (that’s part of the fun with it). Writers often have a long incubation period before they hatch and it hurts more than I can fill into the measuring cup of the alphabet when I hear of contemporaries such as asshole Eggers or (royal fuckwad) Foer who hail from extremely disgustingly-privileged Northshore backgrounds who have been wiping their asses with two dollar bills their entire life and get published in their mid-twenties. Kills me. Boys who had the luxury of not working shitty jobs and monopolize six months on their family’s yacht where the entire focus was writing something that entitles them to a life of even more privilege.
The third reason why I refrained from supplicating the emotional cogs of the factory of the flesh into the arrow head of the knife was a quote that kept propping into my head over and over again at that moment like a Kindergarten round. Last October I blogged an-infamous dvb “loooooooooong” letteresque blog epitaph for my late mentor David Foster Wallace and for one of the first times in my life I received flattering fan mail afterwards. One e-mail was from Justin, a buddy of mine of Iranian origins (former student worker at the ‘brary) and a modern fiction junky. In the DFW essay I quoted a brilliant long essay that former poet laureate Doanld Hall had written 30 years earlier about his experiences partying with the late Dylan Thomas (who was drinking something like 50 beers a day the last eight years of his life---and essay again I found when I was browsing through shit at the brary…sniff) in the essay Mr. Hall laments that “The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate. The human who confronts darkness and defeats it is the most admirable human.” When I read Justin’s e-mail it said:“Seriously, good writing man, and it made me feel like you are our second coming as I read it. I particularly hope you are the one who confronts his darkness’s and becomes the admirable human.”
And that’s the mantra I juggled somewhere in the rafters of my psyche oscillating like a carousel that night. That the writer who somehow survives is the writer to celebrate somehow. And that’s what I did. Tried hard as fuck to survive.
In your classy international cultural patois:
“Il n'est pas différent de tuer un dragon, non?”
****
Here are some of the mystical experiences I have had in the past six months:
I had a dream where I was, in the biblical tradition, “wrestling” with an angel. In the old testament Jacob went out into the wilderness and wrestled with an angel and would not let the winged divinity go until the cherub blessed him. The angel blesses him and renames him “Israel—"one that struggled with the divine angel.” In this vision, the angel was a female and I had her pinned down on all fours plus wings and I was going to rape her so that she would bless me. As I began disrobe her she began to shed beautiful prismatic tears pebbled with drops of gold. She kindly requested that I not rape her. I responded, “Fine. I’ll hold you all night. But I need you to bless me. I’m sick of all this fucking shit all the time.”
I held on to the angel (snuggled, not nearly as perfect as the geometry of our limbs that parkbench afternoon, but still…) as I held her feathers (note) began to molt and scatter like leaves on cement in mid-October. Three feathers whisked past me and then transitioned slowly into three novels, presumably one day perhaps my own.
Last August my girlfriend Tara pulled up to my apartment to pick me up for a three day wilderness canoe sojourn. I was waiting for her with my shirt off at the window of my second floor unit, sipping a cup of coffee, admiring the angle of morning light as it reverberates against the church across the street. Tara parked the car, looked at me and then ran up the steps into my apartment and began visually assaying the entire apartment, ran into the bathroom, ran out into the balcony. When I asked her what was up Tara replied with the phrase, “Where is she?” I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about. Tara then began to swear that, as she parked her ex-mother-in-laws SUV outside the cement cusp of my apartment she saw a beautiful woman with long hair, her arms embracing my waist as I looked out my window and smiled and waved. Tara swears to it. The hair was long and she thought it could have been my sister Jenn at first. We discussed the matter (Was it an angel she saw???) and came to the conclusion that it might have been the spirit of an older deceased woman whose husband, an old farmer married fifty years we met in a bar a week earlier (he was in his 80’s drinking and smoking like pipes at a nuclear facility in an effort to assuage his grief). But part of me likes to think that the apparition Tara perceived that beautiful morning has something to do with the trumpeting glory that is your soul (the copper was in my jeans at that moment) and that you may have left part of the residue of your spirit inside my apartment that timeless autumnal afternoon almost three years ago.
As I’ve told you before I have experiences were these weird muppet-shaped half-deformed fucked up but beautiful souls visit me at night and I (for lack of a better phrase) “release them” by saying the greatest holy name. This happens quite a bit. I even had an experience where Jim Morrison of the Doors appeared in my bedroom and sat down on my bed and when I said the Greatest Holy name it sacred the fuck out of him and he dissipated.
There was a native American spirit that also appeared in my bedroom quite a bit and stood like he was outside a tobacco store in the 1880’s (bad analogy but true). He was old and seldom would eke out a smile. I thought he was hopi for the longest time but lately I’m almost convinced that he’s from the north and had something to do with the voice that lead you to the copper.
The meditations. Sometimes when I meditate I go to this place where there are Houses of Worship everywhere only they are huge. Think of seeing a sportdome shaped like a house of worship then double it to the size of continent. Huge. Goes on forever in a serene ambient overturned umbrella of bliss and I can’t help but leak out a smile and think of you because I know this is what the inside of your heart yearns to, as Whitman says, “swim in like a sea.”
I’ve also spiritually invested a lot of time on chakras, auras, and the kundalini. I’m not into yoga (too many well-read vegetarian ex-girlfriends who were into Yoga hardcore and scowled when I gorged on white castle in front of them), but lately I’ve been drawn to certain spiritual disciplines as a chore to curb my chronic alcoholism. I had an experience just last week where I was acutely meditating on the Kundalini (kunda, comes from the Sanskrit, coiled snake, waiting to sprout up the life centers and awake our creative potential) and I left my body (literally, flung out holding onto my shoulders like a curb or a jet streamer). Had one experience where I was a very old man crying. Another experiences where, deep in a kundalini induced meditative state, I saw a dervish spinning around next to this nerdy looking kid who looked like he was having the time of his life dancing at an outdoor music festival. I read once where in Sufism, sometimes the soul leaves the body while in a dance-like trance and continues to gyrate like a planet for eternity. Perhaps this is what I witnessed, somehow.
(also, there’s an experience where you were with me in a time of hurt that is to unbelievable to write here you’ll just have to wait for me to tell you in person or on the phone someday—remind me, “fortune cookie arya.”)
Perhaps the biggest mystical miracle has been Uncle Mike. I was telling Hale that perhaps even the reason I was “released” from Bradley in the first place was to foster my relationship with Uncle Mike. In January (hell even Valentines day) if you would have asked me about Uncle Mike I would have told you that he probably had only six weeks to live. He was yelling uncontrollably in the middle of the night. His ankles had swelled up so that they looked like a ham roll. He was falling asleep when he was driving. Since about the first week of march—ironically when I started crashing there more and more, things have improved EXPONENTIALLY. 
I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s lost 50 pounds. He’s as ornery (god love ‘em) as ever. He won’t slow down and just keeps on going and has regained a vigor towards life that is empowering to witness. I don’t know if it happened to do with my presence or with his change in meds (probably a conglomeration of both) but its good to see transformation on any level. I’ve seen him talk about the Bahai faith and he starts glowing and he looks 20 years younger and there’s this, for lack of a better word, vibes the slant of light that is eternity. Sometimes when he’s talking about the Bahai faith the vibes are so potent that it almost induces me to sleep, knocks me out so to say. Mike has a wonderful story about being in Hafai with Rúhíyyih Khanum outside the shrine when she was very old. He was with several pilgrims at the time. Mike said that one second she was Rúhíyyih Khanum and the next second she physically changed. Her whole body glowed, she was at least 8 feet tall, there was a lingering aura of heavenly joy saddled around her entire frame that proclaimed that she was the Guardian’s companion given the metaphysical assignment of purveying the sacred cosmic rudiments of this divine faith in its germinal incubational stages (Mike also has a story where he was hanging out with her one afternoon and she looked at him very seriously and said, “You know, I’m lonely.”)
***
I don’t understand how all this shit works. Even when they found me in the cemetery passed out a few weeks back (more from exhaustion instead of drinking) I realized only yesterday that, shit, I wrote a scene three years earlier where they find the protagonist passed out in the same cemetery where they found me. Same with living on the cusp of the nuclear woods now (which I wrote about seven years earlier) or how in the fuck that when I wrote the first draft of boot straps, it came to me (exactly) in the same spot where our lips first embraced—I wrote that poem for you but it was about six months before blogger and I had no clue you would ever bless me with the best afternoon of my life by spontaneously floating into that damn starbuckss like an angel heralding news to some virgin birth somewhere. Sometimes I think the veils of time are just a fucking illusion and our optical experience of the planet are (as JC says) “Time-space lenses” which separate us from the field of eternity. I like to think that if that corporeal veil shrouding eternity is ever lifted and the abundance of all time space prevails in an infinite sheet of metaphysical glory, there’s only one place I want me lips to be.
***
In a recent New Yorker article, I read that when they found DFW’s body there was a half-finished manuscript entitled “The Pale King” bound next to him. Part of the novel which (sonuvabitch) is set in Peoria of all places. Being the poetic pauper of this town for over half my life (or at least the alcoholic avatar), I felt honored indeed and felt that perhaps, as he had an influence on my life, I might have inadvertently returned the favor.
*
My job, it seems guided by the palms of providence is located two blocks down from Uncle Mike’s on the wooded stump of good ol’ Heading Avenue, the same house where I first moved into the beautiful summer were we bathed in the abundance of each others spirit via blogger (damn those were good times!!!), the house with the four acres of land in back (the stars I used to look up after our sunset chat sessions, search for Sirius and then, smile) the house with the cool portico that is perfect for outdoor writing, the two barn like sheds (one of which I still, admittedly, go into when it is raining outside and cuddle up under a blanket and pretend I am Chris McCandless of Into the wild renown) the abandoned swimming pool flanked in a thick oak banister where, just last week, after mowing the lawn, I saw where, perhaps years ago, carved your name ARYA just like that, into the skeleton of the wood.
The backyard that is perfect for drinking beer on a crisp autumnal night, the froth of the earth, the sight of a family of deer silently grazing nearby.
That house that is on the sylvan lips of what years early I fictionalized as the Nuclear Woods—the woods I cut through every day, often in route to get a six pack, a beautiful abandoned off kiltered green park bench located in the center, I place for high school kid to smoke weed, bums to crash, but I use it as a gazebo for thought.. The house that, inside are book shelves upon bookshelves teeming with beautiful Baha’i books, literally thousands of gentle spiritual spines proclaiming the most beautiful name I have ever heard. How I love reading the thickly trussed collated periodical tomes of BAHA’I WORLD NEWS. I especially love reading MEMORIALS OF THE FAITHFUL, feeling a golden thread of communion with the legions of faithful, especially on elady, Melba C. Call King, the first Eskimo bahai who was blind and seved th faith with the vision of angels landscaping the topography of the world to come. Beautiful.
My job at Freedom St. Group Home is as a residential counselor for about 18 boys who are wards of the state. All come from truncated-sad home lives. Most have been sexually abused. For the most part I work thirds so the residents are asleep and I have two hours of paper work and cleaning which leaves six solid hours in which I can makeout with mircrosoft word. The job has been a blessing in a time of economic peril. Looking back I was only unemployed for six weeks (had my first interview for the job the day Obama was sworn in). I’ve been working around the clock, several day shifts as well, which can be taxing at times. I’ve been having three months of training in addition to working my shifts so for a couple times a week, after working thirds, I come back at 9am for a couple of hours. There was one week about two months ago where I did not think I was going to make it. I was trying to learn the Therapeutic crisis karate-like restraint techniques and, being enervated from working nights, I just couldn’t keep my balance during the class and actually had to repeat the class (aced the written part though). Below are a few checks are certain lecture by a certain someone influenced me to scribe (since, still no copper), and thankfully I got through it.
The building where I work at is old and gothic-looking on the outside the staff is mostly hip African American so we look like something out of Sister Act 2. There is a kid who is a rapper and a boy who does stand up comedy. I made a bound fast with a cool Mexican kid named Brandun who wheel-chair bound but who has one of the most positive attitudes of anyone I have ever met. A beautiful girl who used to model named Brooke whose eyes so green they look like they could serve as the emblematic flag for Ralph Nadars political party. My fellow co-worker, Lanelle, who used to waitress at the coffee house where I wrote poems after poems at in high school. Miss Lanelle who was 8 months pregnant with a beluga-belly when I first started working. One day, one seven year old fire-hydrant sized resident who has a slight lisp and looks just like Webster (tv show, not dictionary guru) from the 8o’s was out of control and had to be restrained only I couldn’t restrain yet because I wasn’t certified and pregnant and huge Miss Lanelle manacled by both of his wrists and every time the resident said, in his snug little inflection that is vulgar and somehow cute, “Fuck you, You son of a bitch!” Miss Lanelle would reply by saying “I love you.” I stood by helpless and witnessed this transaction, each bartering innocuous fuckyou greeted with a sincere, “I love you.” I had to excuse myself and go to the bathroom and simply cry, feeling that I witnessed the modern day representation of the Pieta.
***
So here we are finding ourselves again sliding down the circular cusp of another four year cycle (cycles within cycles within cycles within cycles within cycles), the dizzing free fall downward greased slip into the oblivious you-shaped south pole tub followed by the sloped gradual upward ache, past the tropic of cancer of our respective creativity, past the equilibrium equator of complacency into heavenly hemispheres, the parabolic paradise of yearning and joy for a sliced oceanic breeze-nipping-on-the-back-of-you neck dollop of eternity that seems like it is cached somewhere in the moment, in the chapter of eternity only to slide on the steeple of the domed precipice at the pinnacle of the cycle like a circus bear trying to keeps its clawed bavarian balance before toppling down and repeating the cycle over and over again, cycles within cycles within cycles world without end.
One thing that has almost completely dissipated is the burden (boulder-shoulders Atlas arching up the oval dish of the planet) ache of fiduciary stress. As bitter as I still am from time to time about what transpired at Bradley six months ago, I’m making more money now on a weekly basis and there where times at Bradley even as recently as last October when, after closing the building I would ransack through garbage cans on the second floor hoping to find a crust of left over pizza or a half-eaten bag of chips. All the continuing stampeding locomotive stress of living paycheck-to-paycheck-to-paycheck-to-paycheck is slowly starting to wane. What I’m beginning to realize is that I can spend the next four years drinking or I can hammer my heart out into the aching anvil of the page. I know I have the opportunity in this cycle to live a unique life and to really grow and to create. The goal right now is, very simply, to be able to make an income off my writing by the time I’m in my mid-thirties (what an honor!!!)…that I will somehow be given the opportunity to really serve humanity and lost souls by giving them companionship. A literary elixir for their loneliness, a friend when no one else in the world gives a fuck about them, and maybe, somehow, hope, all through the sound the cloak of sentences sometimes avail to a wayfarer in need.
..And how so it seems that every time you spread open the wings of your lips and sing about the Bahai faith, the mystery and ecstasy that serve as the golden next world pillar of our unyielding love is somehow consummated all the more…
***
This is how I found the copper again baby:
The literary relics inside the apartment that has served as my hedonistic den of artistic debauchery over the last three years found themselves transitioned into a calculated array of cardboard boxes, ready for my move back into the bucolic rivedendell of Uncle Mike’s hamlet. Heaps of manuscripts stuffed in a haphazard yawn erupting out of packages fraught with callow poems (found a file of about 40 poems from two years ago entitled “new arya poems”—one even about how I wanted to take you up to Mayo clinic and operate on the soul of your tummy using the lips of my heart as a panacea), I spent an hour taking down my “wonkavator” ( 100’s of different beer bottle caps I plastered inside the interior of my kitchen cupboard)…I found myself looking at the salacious slop-fest manuscript that is “Book of Muses” the narratoir (half memoir/half narrative) which ends 12 hours before I first met you that gentle August afternoon at Greenlake. I saw the box which contains 100’s of pages of my British novel “PINTA PARADE” (still hate you for going to TATE t’day—honestly, what was the concourse thinking when they assigned us our respective life roles????)…I then looked at the HUGE Infinite Jest-inspired manuscript from the past ten years, thousand and thousand upon thousands pages, which around 950 are currently in use, looked at it like it was a drowned four year old in a casket at an Irish wake, wondering what will perhaps ever become of it now……
And since I struggle with alcohol my apartment is strewn with vacant beer miniature silo-shaped cans and vacuous 40’s and cigar butts and cigar wrappers (cheap grape 89 cent swischers are the best) splotched everywhere like leaves in cement after an autumnal tempest.
I looked at the big steel filing cabinet where I kept every poem I so-ever cheaply chiseled out from high school (thousands and thousands of bad sallow-flavored cheap coffee poems, but damn, I wore my heart on my poetic sleeve back then). And, of course, everywhere in my apartment, boxes overflowing with books, layers and layers of cardboard squares filled with beautiful books, some of my best friends.
And in the back of the closet inside of which I had just stripped a montage of all the friends I love most in the world, I found the copper, way in the back, like a fossilized angelic teardrop winking at me. It had been six perilous months and a lifetime of change since last the beloved vestige of joy you once gave to me in a blue bag had been lodged in my pocket, the copper I’ve squeezed the fuck out of the last four years (remember leaving chi-town that day and falling asleep in the back of the bus with your copper tightly clutched in my palms).
Although I had spent hours searching for it over the past six months, I never doubted for a second that I would somehow find it again.
The moment I picked it up two unbelievable things happened:
First, right as I picked it up, Tom Petty’s Learning to Fly (a song about wings and feathers) fluttered on to the radio, it is a song about spreading your wings and launching your dreams—and fucking up along the way but still arching your wings and dreaming— and of course, with the prodigal copper now planted deep in the palms you always found unreadable, I started dancing.
What happened next was simply unreal.
With the song still on I started taking apart my writers desk (I tossed the desk, was going to use it as firewood, then decided to keep it, whole nother story there)…In the back, behind one of the drawers, wedged between where the drawer ends and the interior architectural stump of my dreams begins, I found this picture of you. In all romantic candor I can look at you forever, worlds throughout worlds, can look at the horizon of you forehead, get lost in the sunrise of your cheekbones and lips and lets not even talk about which metaphysical strings that smile of yours yanks at inside the rafters of my heart. I have never seen a picture of you that hasn’t completely emptied my breath away (often in bouquets of invisible-pocketed fireworks)…still this picture out ranks them all.
It has always been my favorite picture of you (even beats out the one you made me delete of you clad in the sexy two-piece down in Mexico, ha-ha-ha) This picture was snapped in our hookah lounge three years ago. I’ll refrain from poetically evincing what happens in certain zip codes of my chest when I look at this picture of you, but for now, just know …. ….
(…………………………………………………………………………..)
With the picture of my muse in one hand and the copper clutched in the other, manuscripts scattered around me, Tom Petty on the radio I felt like the wealthiest man alive.
***
Later in the day I stumbled upon the blade that was once duck taped to the side of my fridge like a silver beak and smiled as I placed it in an empty sack and dumped it out in the trash. Later that week, the last night of my apartment, my Uncle came over to help me move boxes. As I was moving the second to last trip the student worker who was directly involved with circulating the rumors that constituted my firing walked by talking into her cell phone. I simply looked at her and smiled.
Nothin’ like a park bench, eh there celine and jesse….
