by Tomorrow's Man
The Eleven Day Tale: Day 3
The Third Epiphany: Endless Depth
"Perception takes the right kind of eyes." Perception also takes the right width, and depth of mind. What is going on in front of you, the motion, is nothing more than a dance of placeholders -- we are bookmarks blurring between countless pages.
My face is my cover. My body is my binding (there is a good reason a book's spine is called a spine). However, it is my pages that I am now able to read -- pages so thick with script that they careen heavily through my bloodstream, my neural passages, and in the dreamspace between my thoughts.
Since the exposition and then deconstruction of myself last week, I've come to realize that the me -- the Book of Me -- has been written, perpetually, alongside the building of my mansion; but I am not only a daily account of my life, I am also a diary; a dictionary; a bible. I contain stories, lessons, logic and philosophy. I am a university.
When I open my eyes now -- when I look around the commuters on the train, or peek out at the couples on the beach at midnight, or sit and talk with a single friend at sundown -- I can now see the rippling of your pages. Part of self-reconstruction is the replacement of much of my head's old furniture; including my dusty, worn-out senses. We learn how to sense quite early on in life, eh; in utero. But as we're raised, we are quickly taught what the strict boundaries of sense should be, for sanity's sake, for society's sake, and -- unfortunately -- for the sake of laziness. Generations of humans are being taught less and less about our extensive sensual abilities with each passing day. Homogeny. Television. Fashion. Popular Music. Fast Food. Homogeny. Most people do not realize that they are capable of sensing, of feeling ten times more than they ever try.
Thus, this, my third epiphany: We Are Always Witnessing Something. The moment you open your eyes in the morning, you begin to see. But, after opened, open them wider. See more. Hear a sound. Put salt in your mouth. Feel a breeze. Smell that breeze. You are writing your own pages. You embellish them as you try. And you are being written into the pages of a grand volume, an epic of which you can choose to read every word.
Never think you have seen it all. You have not. The moment you turn your senses from a scene -- turn back. Take it in again. See something else; it is there. Hear that? It was there before. Can you smell the musk? That, too, had already been present. Everything, every mundane encounter, event, or passing moment resonates; and everything footnotes one of your own pages.
The complexity and greatness of the tiniest events can change your life, given enough energy and thought to explore them. Look again. And then...look again.
There is always something more happening. There is always a revelation waiting.
You have the senses. You have the mind.
Open your depth.
The Eleven Day Tale: Day 2
The Second Epiphany: Self-Deconstruction
I have been torn down. This was a painful week of tears and longing, loneliness and despair sharing the crowded space in my tender head with love, enlightenment, and this smooth beach made ready to be corrugated by the tides. This then was my impetus to take an ax to my mental apartment.
Hot sun where roof had been. Here I stand, wet and panting. My hands, normally so smooth, are blistered and bleeding. They will heal. Around me is a plain of dusty rubble. Broken boards that smell like my old toybox. Stones slicked with the ph of tears, tears shed with every one of the 1,261,440,017 beats of my heart (and counting). Twisted metal, a reminder of the only bike I ever owned. Shreds of paper that held poems, stories, phone numbers, secrets. Photographs stutter by on bent corners. Shattered CDs glint and glare. I tore it all down, from the roof to the carpet.
I did not need this tiny place where I have resided for so long. I had outgrown the musty claustrophobia of this dim box years ago. And in the meantime, I have been busy. I have been building. I have a mansion, with many rooms. I have been constructing it for over thirty years. This mansion has been uninhabited and waiting for life -- my life. However, I have stayed here in this place, my mental apartment, convinced I was satisfied, serene, and could desire no more – always knowing this to be untrue. I deceived myself. [This shall be the fourth epiphany: the perception of self-deception.]
My mental apartment could not contain what I am, where I am going, where I need to live, what I need to do, to accomplish. My revelations have weakened the cheap wood of its walls. They tore fist-sized holes in my roof. These revelations, they handed me an ax, a heavy, Thor-sized beauty of an ax that I could somehow swing easily – perhaps because I have always wanted to, or I have always known that, inevitably, I would begin to swing away.
I have spent ten days taking that ax to my mental apartment. I have razed it to the ground. Today, I stand exposed. My skin is new, like a young serpent’s. I am fragile, brittle, moist and wide open. I am exposed, my wings wet, my legs weak. Soon, I will fly, I will walk.
The second epiphany: Everything I need I already posess. I've got the mind, I've got the mettle. I've got my spine self-aligned.
My foundation is strong, and ready to support my mansion. I need to do some cleaning, some dusting, sure. I need to clear the rubble; then I can enter my one true home. I will walk through the door; then I will fly to the rafters and begin to sing, reconstructed.
Hey. Take a look at the new me.
Today Begins the Eleven-Day Tale
Day 1
I may have fallen asleep. Or I may have died, for just a little while. I was in the arms of angels at certain points; and I was also ignited by light in flame. I had one hundred dreams. I may have been drugged; or I may have died, for just a little while.
Upon waking last Monday morning, I was to begin a mandatory education. I am to learn eleven things, epiphanies, that will illustrate the man who I thought I was.
I am currently no-man. I am not he who flew to the midwest 10 days ago. I am not he who awoke this morning. However, soon, I will be him, I will know him, this new man, this new me that I have become.
I am not the same man today as when last you met me; and I will never be him again. It is the eleven epiphanies -- and their steady revelation -- that are teaching me this.
This, then, is the first epiphany.
To quote a song, ‘everything is in its right place.’ As with planets aligning to birth new solar systems, this life around me reached its crecendo, the end of preparation. The time to do arrived. All of the people I know, my family and my friends, my enemies and lovers and strangers I pass on the street, all of the humans were moved into position last weekend. All of the cities became ready while I slept – Boston and Madison, but also somewhere on the West coast, and somewhere south. These are instrumental places, though I do not know them yet. I will know.
Last Monday morning, I awoke to sunlight. Someone in my skin awoke to sunlight, and smiled with the gift of the first epiphany.
This is the first epiphany: I was aligned; the stage was made ready. Upon my waking into the sunlight last Monday morning a story began to unfold, a story that may end soon, or never; but it will end when I end. Perhaps this is my final act; perhaps this is, finally, my first.
Either way -- it (revelation; education) has begun.
I am not Brad Pitt, or Michael Jackson, or Winston Churchill.
I am not Cat Stevens, or Frederico Fellini, or even Geoge W. Bush.
I am not Nancy Kerrigan. I am not even Tonya Harding. I'm not even Jeff Gilloly.
I am not Martha Stewart, or even Stuart Little. I am not Tim Burton, Rosa Parks, or Susan B. Anthony. I am not even Anthony Perkins.
I am not Tiger Woods. I am not Bill Gates. I am not Brendan Frasier.
I am not even Pauly Shore.
I am not John Gotti, and I am not Johnny Dangerously. I am not the Pope.
I am not Charles Bukowski. I am not Prince. And I am not Johnny Depp.
I am a guy, a white guy, an American guy, in debt, ignorant, in limbo atop the bell curve. I am a guy with two new lumpy, crooked, purple toes, and I am a guy with a pudgy stomach and a bit of a pocked, forlorn face. I am a guy whose every dream has become such a nightmare that his body refuses to sleep.
I am the same awake as I am asleep. But, asleep, I do not have to know it.
11:34 P.M.
I have been torn down. I am now considering reconstruction. Blueprints are on the way.
Bye bye, Mr. American Pie.
Stay tuned.
4:30 A.M.
Insomnia again. Nothig here but me in my shirt of burns, that smell of carbon and my dead sweat, this screen, and a few souls dancing before the grave.
There are drums in the distance at 4:30 A.M. No flights, no roads, no water parts with passage. The world is with End, despite this electricity.
The sun usually rises by now, this time of year. But I think a watched sun never rises. That should keep the ocean from boiling.
I will keep the ocean from boiling. And perhaps later, earlier, as the day sits in dark and approches noon, as the tension of holding the sun at bay burns the acid in my stomach up and through my eyes, I will walk out to the shore, in my shirt of dead wood and dead sweat, and find out what life is like on the bottom, where everything must be very, very heavy.
4:42 A.M. I still hold the sunrise at bay.
I just realized -- yes, while sitting here naked and sweating after a grueling sandy-beach workout -- that I have been memorizing all of the prime numbers as my life has gone on. I can now bang them out, without hesitation, up to 57.
Why am I doing this? No, not what am I doing with my sweating NakedSelf, I mean, why am I unconsciously, indefatigably memorizing the prime numbers?
This is no way to be thinking on a Friday.
That is my voice you hear, shouting from the sky in the exhaust of every jet, every crying hawk, every cicada drone. That is me, up there, always on the way somewhere, trying to find home, trying to land and refuel, rest my wings, or simply become a small, rich spot in the soil.
It is a picture of me, naked, blurred against a deep-blue background. I am standing, arms raised, perhaps bound, at the wrists. I lean to the left on the same death-angle as Jesus. I have been wrapped as if with barbed wire; but the strands pinching into my skin are simple multi-color strands of Christmas lights.
In this picture of me, blurred colors against my flesh pinned to a blue haze, I wonder, do they burn? Or am I just awake, naked and bound, and dreaming?
The demon leaps as she calls out his name. He lands squarely before her, and she turns. They lay atop the leaves, he behind, her wondering why he is so still.
He stirs. She shakes. is ulgy palm finds the swell of her belly. She shivers. He shakes. Like this, they become drinks, mixtures of fluid and sweet and hot and tart and they mix, drinks made for each other, from each other, the beauty, the demon.
He cries. She has a smile ready for each and every one of his tears, and she dries him with that mouth, those muscles arced like a full-moon rise. She blesses the demon. With her kisses, she blesses his ugly palms and full, beating heart.
Madison Notes
2:12 A.M.
I look up slowly. Around me, scattered and colorful and dancing in the heat haze are the puzzle pieces, all in their right places. They smile and speak, they tell jokes and stories, they share and sometimes shed their albatrosses, and then they whisper and then they shout that they have forever known how this all works: these people, these pieces of my life, they know and they teach me and keep me sane and tethered, they keep me in cleansing tears, they touch me in my sore places and bring me joy and remind me in hugs and hands drying my cheeks that my ability to love is an endless capacity.
I look up slowly. He smiles, she cartwheels, and over there, perfectly placed, they complete my sanity. I'm reminded of my heart. As she laughs, whispers, and kisses my ear, I cry again, through all this joy.
I look up slowly, and above me the night lightning scrawl across the sky these important names, the people, these puzzle pieces, illuminating me.
Madison Notes
7:25 A.M.
I hear the mothers of dust; they sigh at 28, 000 feet and perhaps what I hear is a groan, the mothers groan, while here on the ground. The secrets they reveal of the rhythms Earth sky, the vibrations heart soil, the steady ultradean respiration that tells us babies that all is well. I'm still a baby.
A baby. Aloft, and alive. I am new in skin while flying, unfeathered, unfettered, tongue-tied no longer in the speech of a simple sigh. But.
But.
And,
the mothers of dust, they rock me. They roll me (and you yes and you) around in their palms, eliciting giggles that fall as treacly crystals into the fog below.
Crystals
Crystals
as the last leaves my lips I freeze my smile and take that sliver of that slice of that moment of that second of that minute fo that day of that week of that month of that year of this life and offer it back to the mothers of dust, who promise, someday, to take it, my moment, and create for me an eternity.
9:34 A.M. - Somewhere Over New York State
What...what can this mean...this can't...
the man sitting next to me, folding and refolding his flimsy square of napkin at 30,000 feet, mumbling, "...the living...the living...now outnumber the dead...so many bodies, so few lives -- ! The ground becoming layers of human ash, but six billion of us and five billion of them...nature's levels have been canted...the balance is upset, homeostasis has tested positive and terminal in the biopsy...the tables are terminal...the tables have been turned...something has turned...."
Instead of turning up the music in my headphones I turn it down, take the plastic cups from my sweating ears, and learn through his sobs how the world is to end.
10:01 A.M. Somewhere over New York State. I have ordered a very, very strong drink.
I'm leaving home, I'm coming home.
I'm up a tree, I'm a foot deep in the cold wash of the sea, I'm sniffing in southwestern desert sand, I'm scratching the itch in the middle of your back, I'm catching the bee at the lamplight and freeing it into the sky, the sky, I'm a cloud in the sky, a jet, a dove, a human in the sky, I'm a whispered secret on a Chicago-bound Greyhound, I'm three toes of a humming vagabond, I'm the wink of scotch bonnet passing Bourbon Street, I'm just now holding my breath in Panama's lochs, I'm the hum upon the Mississippi, I'm the broken elastic in a red G-string on USAir flight 5251, here I come, here I come, fingers salty, here I come,
I'm leaving home, and I'm coming home.
I stil see them, those jagged, toothy mouths that used to open in my mind every time I'd close my eyes. I used to think those mouths, those gapes that grew, screamed, and died at the ends of their thick red and grey-fleshed stems, I used to think they were just the phantasmagoric, imagined result of a long weekend of frustrated drinking and nihilistic drug abuse. Now, I am not so sure. I've healed since then. But, the mouths, they're still screaming.
Something inside me is still screaming.
Beerspit night. Wandered home crushed. Not by the commute this time, through Boston's sweating and humid teeming tunnels.
Just answered the phone, already fragile, and it was a hang-up call. Not any ol' hang-up call. It was a girl, a young girl, I could tell by her tone, crying, hysterical, into the receiver. I don't know her, she does not know me past being a wrong number, but now, as she redials correctly, I sit here devastated. She's babbling through her snot at the person she meant to contact; I sit alone, completely alone in this digital cold, and all I can hear is the ricochet of her sob, her half-single, half-second sob, playing bumper pool with the rubber emotions flexing too far in my head.
I'm an old rubber band right now. Stretched too far. If you look, you can see the cracks in me, about to burst, about to snap and end this tension. But, but, I will not go with a sting at her and her sobbing voice nor anyone anything else; I will simply go with a wry flick as I lob slowly through the air, land on the unclean carpet, and get tossed into the recycle bin, where I will be understandably ignored.
"Okay, here's what you're going to do. You're not even going to think about it. Pretend it's a myth, pretend every scenario, experience, and fact you've ever associated with the act is nothing but stroke-caused fantasy, a dying epiphany of an imagined heaven that your brain threw together with chemicals and suffocating flesh in the last nanosecond of your life.
"Now, I want you to think of bunnies, bunnies alone on the tundra, but not white bunnies like you see on the Discovery Channel that always seem to somehow outrun the polar bear or the lynx unless it's sweeps week, no, I want you to imagine a big bunny that's a peachish, salmonish color, not pink exactly but a bit more, hm, creamy, a three-foot at the shoulder peach-salmon-colored bunny sitting there on the permafrost freezing its twitching little whiskers off, and I want you to just begin to feel bad for this pfirsich-lachse uber-Häschen, even though you can see blood on its teeth, the yellowed, corrugated incisors that you've just noticed jutting from top jaw to well below its bottom lip, and I want you to just get that first swollen tear in your left eye, saltily globbed and ready to fall and freeze to the ice where bunny-bunny is about to die, when the big pink rabbit belches and explodes into twenty-seven white-hot diamonds that fly up into the endless daytime, arc, ignite the green in the Northern Lights, return to earth, then melt through the snow so deeply that no one will find them for thousands of years.
"One of those diamonds, one of those diamonds is the desire you are feeling right now, the desire that burns right on through to the capillaries in your eyes. Hot hot hot; freeze it. Hothothot -- freeze it. Freeze it.
"Freeze it."
Live with me in steam. This can be our bath. Breathe me in, use my chemicals, exhale, make me tingle. We don't need breezes. Don't need storms. We just need heat and steam to breathe. Humidity.
Monday 15 July, 2002 Addendum
8:03 P.M.
Just in from dancing on the beach in the rain. The storms have arrived again, beautiful summer storms. Now, from my window, I watch Shiva oil paint: The sky to my left is peach; the ocean to my left is lava; the sky to my right is indigo; the ocean to my right viridian. I am watching snapshot spiderwebs of lethal light flash through, in, around the huge arc of a rainbow. Before it all, standing pristine in the surf, a crane so white it glows in this scene watches the horizon, nodding its head in approval.
!
Love, Love, gotten my lessons these weeks, how to wear my love like an albatross, how to carry it barefoot like too-hot coffee, how to inhale it like bus exhaust, how to entice it into my chest with a writhing hooked worm, how to catch it with dry fly paper, how to beg it from the poor of body and hope and
borrowing it from my other pants' pocket, I learn how
to steal it
from those around me handing it over.
As I slide through life I have gotten used to feeling like the slippery serpent in the baptismal pool. The crecendo or crash of any smile I have depends on the moment I slither around your legs, and how happy or vile you feel.
I always confuse Mormons and marmosets. It seems the marmosets are more upset when they find out.
I am a sexy boy. Look at my pucker. Touch it, touch it right in the middle, where I can make an O. I can make more letters, too, if you want, with my sexy pucker. I can make an L! And I can also make a V. And I have even practiced enough with my beautiful pucker so that I can make an E. I use my tongue to help to make the E.
Don't you know what I can spell?? Yes, I can spell VOLE. Do you like small furry creatures? I do, I do very much like them.
I like making small furry creatures with my mouth.
Would you like to touch it?
I am a simple, honest, innocent bystander, smiling into glory, always in love. This is what I am.
7:56 PM
Dancing! Dancing, I was dancing, on the beach in the lightning -- the wind freezing from heaven, then hot from the sun. The drops thin and whispering, then heavy, drowning pelts shouting moisture at the sand, the craters, tiny craters, exploded around my feet. I am so strong, to resist the power, to remain unopened by the rain.
I feel hail, panic quickly, before it fades with another hellish hot belch from the sky. The heated breath gives way to another light drizzle. I sense a rainbow, then clouds, angry and bruised, collapse again. Thunder...then the lightning! Soaked to my skin, shivering through bouts of sweat, I watch lethal ribbons scrawl across the sky, telling me bold alien language secrets. If only I could decipher!! If only I could understand!!
I run into the sea. So cold! The wind was cold, the sea is bitter, endless, the sea could suspend the smile of God. It does not look like the sea -- crests and waves are gone as the rain stipples the surface to that of ululant green toast...I pucker at the crannies, the sky opens again, I pucker at the sky, blow a wet kiss to the lightning as it crashes so close that the soft hair on my body rises out straight. I wonder what will happen if the ocean gets hit. I will die.
I run. I run for the shore, laughing, I run for home, laughing, I run for home, believing in everything.
Tomorrow, I realized that my joy is that I believe in everything. Faithful, in every thought and action. I own joy. If all is true...then there are no lies.
I learned this tomorrow, and it opened me widely.
Inside my bedroom, the blinds thrown wide, I can smell Quebec burning. Acreage the size of states is becoming molten, turning to carbon, immolating, so much Canadian land that even this far away, hundreds of miles, the sunset glows through a thick umber pall that smells of alarm, and makes me look around my room to locate my precious things and my nearest exits.
I have Quebecois friends there, and Quebecois friends here, and though I know they are likely all quite safe, my heart jags for a beat when I hear the man say, "Quebec is burning."
Though I've seen my friends recently enough to still smell them in my clothes, I miss them, and wish them in my arms, safe from the flames, and squinting with me into the hanging red haze.
Open eyes on a bird of prey. Awake or dreaming or each breath the same. King or prisoner or naked the same. Eyes open, on a bird of prey, feathers of sharp light, beak open, the call, the shrill, the end. Bird screams. You scream. I scream, prisoner and king, consumed all the same.
A calamity as it crosses the street, climbs the stair. A calamity through the door, bursts into tears, screams out in ecstasy.
Dreams leak from four sides, babies turn, vibrators buzz, something begins shaking just next door, something is awaking.
Lonliness that borders on dread. Waking up alone to this hole, feeling the suck of it drain my heart of blood. Careen down the highways, miles upon miles, but never closer to her, so far away.
Out there, rockets emit red glares. Barbecues roast herds and flocks in homage to the heat. Bloodstreams thin from alcohol, and history's chapbook gains another tumultuous page.
Out there, it is Independance Day. But in here, where the lonliness borders on dread, I have had to face my interdependance, finally. I cry with the freedom to need her so badly.
9:08 P.M.
After watching the temp finally dip down from 105 back through the 90s, and come to rest now at 86, I can breathe again, slightly. Outside my window, scores of people are flocking to the beach -- Winthrop is having a bonfire tonight.
They had begun building it when I left for work this morning, but I had no idea then what it was. It looked like they turned a house inside out and dumped it in a vaguely dog-doo-doo shaped pile on the beach. When I got home, the pile was still there, only 20 feet high.
They've just lit it. I can feel the heat coming off of it. Incredible, flames shooting star-high into the night. What must the pilots of the planes coming in to land over our heads be thinking?
Actually, what the hell are these hundreds of people thinking. They just spent three days in 100-degree heat, tonight is the first slight break in the humidity we've had in a week, and hundreds of people thought to themselves, "I know...I'll go stand next to a fire hot enough to melt glass."
We're a curious bunch, we coastliners.
Okay. Gotta go look at the fire.
Heat Index: 103 degrees. The melt is on.
Outside, metal is melting. Tires have exploded on parked cars. Lightning is randomly leaping from gashes in the hazy, demented sky. On the train today two men brushed by each other then began pounding their sweating fists into each other's faces. One was suited, one in shorts and a tee-shirt. I stood three feet away, gasping for air. The doors opened and I left that tiny bit of heat madness behind and wandered into the claws of another steaming, brutal day.