The way light is cast upon a world you don't want to be a part of has always been a kind of supreme fascination to me. I'm reminded of those last school days, fagged and wounded, how the incandescent light fixtures were filtered into such horrid hues by the prejudice of my own experience. Christ, I've been in jails and nuthouses with cheerier an atmosphere! It's a wonder what something of a chemical buffer between you and all that which lay before you has upon the spirit. It's also a wonder how little time spent in the world without can seemingly damage one of a certain strain so thoroughly. It's rare to find a man who can walk through the world without so much as a two-bit shield to protect himself and walk away unmolested.
My father was almost such a man. Before he died, he had suffered through so much that it had driven him half-way to madness; the other half, it would seem, was simply impervious to any attempt at maiming. But even half-madness is a grave wound. It had destroyed his quality of life, and rendered him the loneliest man I ever hoped to meet. He perished at the hands of a weak heart. He died with his head up. He died in a kingly fashion. He died, or so it appeared to me, without any pain to speak of. He died, without permanent address, having roughed the last year of his life in a Lincoln towncar, many payments remaining, now returned to the dealership. He died on a May evening just before midnight, in my bed. I miss him so terribly ever since.
The room was exceptionally well lit, but it was perhaps the darkest place I had ever viewed. I don't mean dark in the metaphorical sense of things, but I suggest that the events of that evening had a drastic effect on my conscious perception of light and colour. The light then was sickening. The dark then, was sickening too. What the hell could be done? I had been sober for about a year at that point, but a sobriety without enthuse, a true white-knuckling in the most classical sense. I sat in that same room, bathing myself alternatingly in the grotesque cut of light and the black bile of night. At seven A.M. sharp, the bonds enforced by the state government concerning the sale of alcohol were lifted, and the flow of liquor to the town commenced once again. I was there of course. I was there ten minutes before, as I often was. I bought four bottles of a cheap pinot, which I would drink myself silly with (which is the way I like to drink myself, incidentally) the same day. Later that night, the national guard inside myself vanquished from the wine, I would trade my wine-bottles for gin-bottles, and there was no getting off the carousel yet or soon!
I wrote of this in another stint I spent in a drug and alcohol rehab, the lake-diving and the bug-watching. I wrote then that were was no real difference between the moment in time I watched a caterpillar ascend a blade of grass and the moment my father died, that they were two moments of that strange mother called time, that they were just as preposterous at the other..
I still very much believe this to be true, but understand that my intentions are more of the classical pessimism than any kind of chickenshit modern stoicism that Chekhov so valiantly fought and embarrassed; That is to say, I don't say this for any attempt at it as a method of comforting abstraction, their common trick, the convincing that one thing is in fact the other, but rather, that it seems to lie closer to some kind of two-bit truth we idiots are capable of divining, and to die close at the hands of a vicious truth rather than artifically extending my lifespan by means of a comfortable cowarding away, I have come to believe, is the only thing resembling a graceful aquiescence to life's wantonly bizarre beauty and wickedness that I have yet been able to uncover. It seems a crummy truth. It seems better to get the idea of the crumminess of things as they are. I have not, at any rate, ascertained any other way possible for me. Sometimes all I can do is wrap my arms around my legs and sit and think about death for real for a change. All else is a fog of dreams, so far from life to me than where things ought to be.
Life was always easier in the dream-blur of constant and bewildering drunkenness. I'm reminded of the famous scene in Ham On Rye, when Chinaski remarks upon his first experience drinking from a friend's wine cellar as a kid, that he had found something that was going to help him for a long time to come. I remember reading that and audibly cursing for how true this had been for me, too. Naturally, the alcohol and the literature went hand in hand. A perfect waltz, mutually indispensible... It similarly makes much sense that a man's preference in literature tends toward the decadent and vulgar (and frankly honest!) as the habit of bottled courage becomes a physiological necessity. There's something in alcohol that brings us to the darkest corners of human experience, and what wisdom there is to spare in those very corners! What humour, and what great hope abounds in the pages of Fante or Céline or Houllebecq or Turgenev! To know that it's not all, as I've put it, "excruciations and the always interminably dull!" There's something great to be said of those long dead men and their words still remnant on moth-eaten pages. Decades and centuries since they last drew breath on this earth, they still breath life anew to the drunks, the gangsters, and the poets, to our ragged band of terrestrial trash struggling for anything at-all in the lightless, doorless corridors we're forced into like some kind of mad and non-euclidean oubliette. Akutagawa famous wrote shortly before his death that life wasn't worth a single line of Baudelaire. It is absurd and fascinating and lovely all at once, that despite all of man's cumulative human crumminess, and all the proof in the world that man might be the least deserving of it than any chickenshit organism, we still find ourselves receiving the gift of these curious, often insane, men and women, and their strange echoes through time called words. Akutagawa was not a religious man. In a confidential letter to a friend he wrote that he had read Mainländer and couldn't get his notions of reality out of his head. He died, from a purposeful overdose of Veronal, a now-extinct type of sedative-hypnotic drug common in suicides in Japan during the Taishō period. He allegedly passed from this world while reading the Bible, until he reached a perfectly dreamless sleep, forever. I miss this man deeply, too.
Dazai, incidentally, was a great fan of Akutagawa's. His debaucheries and alcoholism coincided with his death, and proceeded to get worse, until he too, would take his life, some twenty years later. There is a famous photo of him standing before the channel he would drown himself in, just months prior.
Before all that, he wrote in his seminal work, No Longer Human, of having been confined to a sanatorium for his addiction to morphine. He had not been insane a day in his life, he said, but the ones that came to this place were lunatics, and all others normal. That was just how it worked. It's mostly the same now, if you can believe that. What people fail to realize is that institutions house both the right and the wrong people: a place of ultimate convenience for people that no longer wish to deal with other, inconvenient, people in their life. A great boon for the transactional types of this epoch; and a living hell for all those on the wrong end.
I frequented mental hospitals and crisis wards all throughout my teenage years into adulthood. These were something of the places that would end up having the most dramatic impact on the course of my life. A revolving door for the lowest reaches of society, many of whom simply weren't insane but strung out, and caught in the violent torrent of getting high on the street and cooling down in an institution. An entire caste of people spanning multiple generations, with no help promised and no help ever coming their way. Sure, there were geniuses in there, and the outright craziest shits you've ever seen, too, but the msost troubling thing of all, the thing that still keeps me up at night, is how many otherwise ordinary people inhabit them. I've often thought that there are free menwho walk amongst us that are much more deserving of a spot in one of those holes, and angels inside who will never get out, that I cannot imagine anybody treating so barbarously.
So it has been for a long time, one comes to understand. It is why I have such an outstanding revulsion to the petty stoicisms the comfortable doctors of the wards so often spout, lofty nonsense only capable of being uttered by those with an entirely theoretical acquaintance with the world, with reality. How little one must truly think to work in that field and not understand how easily they themselves could be sitting where I am! Or, rather than thinking little, it is a matter of a false demarcation, a kind of 'insulation,' a haughty sense that one is invulernerable to the sufferings of "these" people, the medical doctor versus the mentally ill. A matter of pedigree, or distinction, or some equally and totally revolting notion. The worst part of it all, however, isn't the inside but the outside upon return from numerous trips to the madhouse. You begin to see things in the context of habitual confinement. Even walking down the street, or out of town to the next one over, things seem more and more like a series of walls and locks, or like some kind of pen, no matter where one goes, it is hard to shake the awful sense that there is no concrete difference between the outside and the inside, besides an elaborate Vaudeville charade of smoke and mirrors to give the impression that the former is not truly the latter, that the quality of prison-likeness isn't inherently inescapable, in life and work, that one is not by the very definition of their existence condemned to action or inaction without the good sense or simple kindness to include an option for non-participation. A final, maddening cornering.
As with all such solipsisms, the brief respite of a moment's clarity is shattered by the following throes of suffocation. We are brought ever the closer to no-where in particular, and, when the "revelation," if it can even be called such, has run its course, you still sit alone in a room somewhere, ceiling-gazing, always ceiling-gazing, wondering where the hell it all went wrong at ten bucks an hour, wondering if you can stand another day at the grindstone or if it really is high time to throw up hands and declare finally "Fuck the job!"
There is only so much teolerance for purposeless toil within us all, that the idea of a wilder conception of life as we know it becomes preferable. But for the common man, the means of accessing such an escape is simply not plausibly attainable. Let me be clear about this: very few if any of us are ever going to strike it decent enough, in work and life, to own land and be self-sustainable and all that other horseshit, if we never had it in the first place. America is full of these wonderful ideas and so very many of these same ideas are so full of shit that it is no wonder that this country is by-and-large a shithouse! What's left is the street...But even living on the street is simply the same society in another element, and it becomes readily apparent that your previous captors have simply taken on an altered form. You have to feed yourself, still, and clothe yourself too. You have to seek shelter if the cops have ousted you from where you've been quasi-legally inhabiting. Most of us out there had nothing really better to do than get loaded on cheap high-gravity beers or rotgut spirits or fentanyl analogues. It's hard to live a virtued existence when everybody looks at you like something the cat drug in despite all your politeness. Happiness revolved around the schedule of the liquorstores or our dealers who peddled us their poisons without so much a fucking scintilla of regret as to what it might actually do to us. This was simply show-business.
Most of my friends from those days are dead now, naturally. It comes with the territory. My ex-girlfriend, who was one of the sweetest people I ever hope to meet, lost in her battle with addiction almost two and a half years ago now, after the passing of her older brother and her step-father in a very short period. Her family, like mine, was a family of addicts. It makes a kind of cruel sense that the trajectories of our lives turned out in such a way. I miss her dearly, too.
I am gripped by a strange sense of ruefulness on these late nights where I reminisce on the things of old. After all this time, what remains isn't the soaring highs and the crushing lows of my time with these people so dear to me: what remains are the silly little happinesses that I never could have realized in the moment how so very much they meant. I remember sharing cup noodles with my ex, exchanging little quips. I remember my father singing a tune from his childhood. I am crushed by the memory of happinesses that cannot be any longer, and the prejudice of experience precludes the calloused from happinesses all the newer. Youth's privilege of unfettered emotion has, at length, melted with the snow. How unfathomable it is that even those supposed awful times at the present hour seem so preferable to the reality of this life, of this non-life, of this reluctant stoicism toward life, so far from resembling anything close to life! I miss the gift of kindness from another when a single word or a gaze was enough to turn a knife in the stomach and blow me to fucking smithereens! Where does it all go? Why are we bereft of all but perfunctory and idiot waitings for the good corner of a memory, for the witty death-rattles on lost pages, and for mostly nothing at-alls?
* * *
For the longest time, perceiving something of a perpetual homelessness in my own body and spirit that had swollen to physical and digital homelessness at times, I have felt that the only true non-madness at my disposal was poetry. I have written poetry now for most of my life. It is actually a strange thing to write prose as this, something between treatise and confession, although it is not entirely dissimilar. Both serve similar endsl for me, it has been something of a method of communion, being the only way I could speak (with, of course, no response) with those that could no longer physically have an audience, because they were dead, mostly, and also something of a means of atonement. I wrote somewhere once that I felt duty-bound to turn the loose strands of thought in the gears of my cognition into something pretty and honest as I thought things ought-to-be.
It has been something of an inseparable ally, a sidekicker, that has carried me through to the present where no-one else existed any longer to do so: through the nocturnal ward screamings, through the delirium tremens and the dope withdrawals, through the deaths of all those so dear to my heart. It has delivered me, without fail ,to the appointed place and the appointed time where I rest, barrenly contemplating, and put words to a page once more.
There had never been a chance for me to be anything other than here at the present. Maybe that goes for us all. The men who had against all odds found their way into my life through the libraries and the thrift bookstores had given me something I could never hope to repay in a thousand lifespans. Their laughter and their cries became an inextricable aspect of my own conscious experience, and I follow these footsteps with the solace that, if say, a hundred or two-hundred years from this very moment in time, I could ever mean a quarter or perhaps even a tenth as much, as any single one of those men has come to mean to me, to someone I can and will never know, but who will know me better than I could ever know myself, just maybe, the crude flailings in the dark I have come to call this life may have been worth it yet.
* * *
It was the same old tune, really, the insane ripping of hangover-exacerbated tinnitus and somewhere in the distance the voices of children, or maybe dogs like the echoes of future ghosts. Jesus Christ, you've really done it now old-timer . . . What an awful and colourless world it is, these mornings afraid to check the clock . . . four-fifteen, I am late . . . But the clock is an hour off from neglect and ten or so minutes off from my own drunken stupidity, so that makes it three . . . three twenty five . . . I've had closer shaves . . . Ten minutes, reasonably, for the shower-shave-shit and then getting in the car and driving twenty minutes there and praying to everything and anything and Nothing that you don't hit any traffic while traveling down that vein, as it were, that you can get the hairline and come out on the otherside clean . . . What a crummy way to live, what a crummy way to die . . . Kowtowing my rotten guts out just for almost-enough to get by uncomfortably . . . Slowling losing the war on my own deficit of sleep, crazy, insane, the bizarre and troubling despairs of mounting insanity . . . It gets so that a man is so tired the food won't go down anymore . . . That's what they say, when your appetite goes, death is soon to follow . . . You're cooked . . . What you really need to be wary of is when your tiredness starts to make sense . . . That this is man's natural state, and all that hullabaloo . . . The senseless exhaustions that adorn our existences like ugly polka-dots on a green plane. . . When it's seeped into you . . . Into your skin . . . Into your bones . . . Then you've really had it, oh yes sir! . . . You lose your common sense . . . Your dreams are all work dreams . . . It ought to be a crime to do that to a man, make him work doubles in his sleep between shifts . . . That'd be enough for seven of the nine layers of hell alone . . . Perpetual toil . . . Hope a soiled handkerchief . . . What are you doing? . . . Get back to work! . . .
How dreary it all is . . . No wonder a man can't eat . . . He's not eating to his health . . . He's eating to prolong his death . . . That's what really gives me the chills . . . Chills me to the bone . . .
* * *
"I've worked here for nine years," the lady training me tells me.
"Jesus," I say, "How can you stand it?"
She gives me this oblong face of utter confusion and terror that I've said such a thing. I've never seen anything quite like it.
"This is a fine company!" she yells, company smile, company tone.
I didn't know just what the hell to say to that so I didn't say anything. I just stood there for a while. She showed me to the pies. You never saw so many damn pies in your life. She looked like she had one-too-many in her time. She told me you had to tell the pies apart just from the holes on top and the distinct shade of the crust, and count them, and recount them... Nine years of counting pies... Maybe it's better than nine years at a boiler room, or a meat-packing plant, but not by much, not for these wages... No wonder so many of us go so screwy. When my shift was through I got the hell out of there: that was enough for me for today. I bought a fifth on the way home. I had no hot water or any of that jazz so I just sat under the cold water taking belts of the warm booze while they played Grieg on the internet radio. Jesus Christ... how many years until they have me doing the whole fucking corporate shuffle, the works? A shiver ran through my spine and through into my blistered toes and not, mind you, from the cold water.
* * *
Soon the bastards will cure sleep and it will be truly and finally over for us. It'll keep the costs down and the productivity up and up! To hell with the consequences, they will say, this is a revolution that will change the face of corporate America forever, of every American household, no longer is half of our life ruled by that demon sleep, or some other stilted jive they are so very good at fashioning out of thin air for circumstances as these...
* * *
If there is anything in the future it will not be for me, surely; Maybe it is what I get for being born in the last century, to see everything turned lousy and screwed up just before it's normal. I am too much like my father, in that respect. At least my father understood why working as a minimum-wage stooge, as it were, was enough to make me want to put a gun in my mouth. No hope, no future; no cold air, no breeze; no touch, no sound: What idiot blarney we've been had with!
* * *
I've found an ally in this writing business but Christ knows I've earnestly thought a few times about putting the motherfucker on the shelf forever and seeing if it'd lobotomize me enough so that I wasn't so distraught and "feeling" all the time!
* * *
And, at the end of it all, the words come less. They always do, somehow, someway. Maybe there will be heroes of us after all and Céline will be taught in schools yet...! But, don't hold your breath. For now it's the same old, same old, and we all get old and the trees now, are older too and the rain now is older too. Old rain on old leaves on old motherfucking ears... "the same chickenshit sadness of living it out," Jesus Christ Bukowski you were right, all right... The thunder is upon the face of the night and it is brilliant and terrifying and like men huddled around the fire ten-thousand years ago we turn in, inward, on ourselves and wait for the morning... waiting for something new, at last...explaining to the insurance lady that it's simply cheaper for you to just fucking die, at this point, and ain't it true, so stop trying to sell me on what I can't afford... the clogged sinks of a whole stinking country isn't enough to slow the whole business down, not for a second, so you can catch your breath... not for anything... Oh well, what the hell... Blow, wad, flush... When it comes down to it life is simply not good for some people the way it is and it is both painful to see it and painful to live it. We are the idiot and abandoned children of a godforsaken century, the century of speed, the century of great changes, but so much of it as far back as a man can read doesn't seem so very changed at all.. What a farce... What hokum... and all the dumb thrashings of a million sad nights go on, and the ink that spells your name on a clock-in printout fades just a little.