Who wants to be right?
all the way through?
never a doubt
your life like a perfect photograph
sorted out with precision
each thing in it’s place
Who wants to be right?
knowing what’s what
setting everyone straight?
It’s a lonely profession
being great
having endless conversations
with yourself
who wants to be heavy?
when you can be light.
who wants to be right?
So so sad
this summer morning
all that I would
seems faded
history closes in
why can’t I get it up again?
and challenge the world
to be more?
Instead I pretend
and write poems to the wind
so so sad it is
when I have lost that spark
no interest, no heart
a shell of a man
what remains are only parts
held together by a fierce will
and a determined heart
so sad though
that this has come to be
once I sang brightly
my destiny urged me forward
and whispered in my ear every day
today I feel lonely
so sad so so so sad today
my path seems cloudy, windy, and grey
such is my state
as my body slowly reaches it’s fate
leaving my soul in sadness
so so sad
I should be happy. I have a good job. It’s true I cracked under stress and blew up at my boss, but that got cleaned up, and now I am an even better employee than before. But I worry. Boy! do I ever! I worry about keeping this job and I worry about my health. I worry about how much more time I have left on this dismal Earth. But in spite of all that, happiness often breaks out within my body and my soul and I am happy. For absolutely no reason whatsoever. That is a blessing. But most of the time I fret. I feel tired and there is never enough time. Everything seems fragile, temporary, and quite uncertain. Most of the time I am in that place where uncertainty reigns.
I can’t seem to relax and just let things be. I have to know what lies ahead and be comforted that it will be alright. My anxiety poisons my experience, and I am often not fully present. I dwell in my fevered imagination, where the silence is filled with an indefinite fear. Sometimes I feel pissed off and I am not clear why. It seriously gets in my way at times, and then I get angry because I am angry, and then I feel sad. I feel empty, misunderstood, and unappreciated. This is how it feels in an uncertain world. This is how it feels when you have an apartment but you no longer have a home. I seek a reassurance that cannot be obtained. Of course Jesus loves me, but this fails to comfort me. I feel abandoned by time. I have gone past my date and grown curdled and sour. I need more time, or even better, I need to stop time altogether and give myself an opportunity to catch up with myself. I am too damn old. What happened? Where was I all this time? Daydreaming about my future while failing to notice when that future arrived? Sounds about right.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my life. I am not always filled with anxiety. Sometimes I am comfortable with uncertainty, or even enjoy it. The risk is intoxicating. When everything is going really well I seem to always find a way to fuck it up. I’m sure this sounds quite familiar to many of my readers. But, still…..Those two words are the words that define where uncertainty reigns. Everything is good, I’m happy, but, still…….
I hate how this uncertainty prevents my truly enjoying the time I have left on this exasperating but fascinating planet. I realize some people turn to alcohol or drugs to silence that constant drumbeat of uncertainty. I try to use sex for that purpose but it only emphasizes the emptiness, and how terribly temporary it all is. All is fleeting, and it is up to us to catch a bit of meaning along the way if we can. Some find solace in religion, politics, or a stamp collection, but I can never commit myself fully, because uncertainty reigns in my soul. Nothing is ever enough, nothing feels truly complete. There is the feeling that something is missing, and I will die before I find it. There is that nagging doubt which always insists that whatever the truth is, this ain’t it. A mistake was made, and I am dealing with the consequences. All of us are. We make the best of it. Sometimes I am depressed over all of this, and other times I am filled with joy in spite of all of my attempts to sabotage my magnificence.
I know that I am bigger than all of this. This malignant tumor of a philosophy whose odor taints my perfect knowledge is like a hobby of mine. I use it to hedge my bets, for I am always suspecting that I may be full of shit. Bliss and Bullshit come full circle and become one. It doesn’t really matter in the end. It is what it is, and becomes a perfect whole. In the end I will be struck dumb by delight and disappear into the night.
Uncertainty reigns and that’s alright. The end will arrive before I have even begun. I won’t be prepared, but then, have I ever been prepared? Life seized me and threw into this mess to make of it what I will. Whatever lies ahead I accept. I know absolutely nothing, I am as fresh as the first atom peeking out from nothingness.
What if they held an election and nobody voted?
And nobody went to work?
What if the gangs stopped killing each other?
What if everyone lost their smirk?
What if Jesus returned and nobody cared?
What if everything were shared?
What if Madonna stopped touring
and meth were a thing of the past?
What then? I ask
Would the birds stop their singing?
Would the phones stop ringing?
Would people stop lying?
Would babies stop their crying?
Would I finally give up my act?
If the server went down
You couldn’t get to town
Blank screens throughout the internet
Emptiness filling the streets
What then? I ask
Would we be afraid?
Would we have a parade?
Would it piss us off?
Or would we just take off our clothes
and relax?
Never know what you might find
Poking around
Might be pretty, could be gross
It might bite, or stick in your throat
Poking around I discovered things
That you might not believe
Tiny little levers that move the universe
Poking around I improvised
Making tools out of tickets
Treasures out of wickets
Poking around I blew my mind
And had to replace the sockets
Poking around is always fun
filling my pockets with gum and soot
Poking around
I just might find the truth
I like fog. I like the way it makes me feel. I love San Francisco, and the city is given a sense of mystery when enshrouded in fog. When I arrived for work this morning the Golden Gate Bridge was completely covered in fog. The fog moved across the ground like an ephemeral animal seeking it’s prey. You can smell the fog and it has a unique flavor. A foggy day enhances my senses and makes me feel more alive. I don’t mind it at all. By contrast, although I love sunny warm days because it means beautiful women tend to wear less clothes, I don’t like the way it saps all of my energy causing me to just lie around and sweat. I am certain I would like Scotland and other foggy climates. Many of my ancestors were Scots, and I can easily imagine these hardy souls freezing their asses off just for the thrill of it, standing above some fog filled crevice.
We live in such a beautiful world and don’t stop to appreciate it often enough. Ever since my eyes have been restored (actually better than just restored, my eyesight with my new glasses is 20/20 and close to that without glasses) I can see things that touch my soul in little ways. I can’t necessarily explain it, but it bares close resemblance to wasabi. I think that is the right word. This is a taoist concept of when something is perfect just as it is, in perfect balance and harmony. At times I can see wasabi in all kinds of unexpected places. But the tao puts on an especially lovely and intriguing coat on a foggy day.
There is a freshness in the air on a foggy day, and even though it isn’t comfortable I rejoice in my uncomfortableness. I am alive. I play a part in this beautiful play of existence. It seems that everyone and everything has it’s part. I still can see the squalor and sad urban decay both animate and inanimate, but I view it from a different perspective. I marveled at the sight of the little black birds picking their way through the tasty goodies hidden in the grass at Fort Mason while humans frolicked nearby. Each species absorbed in it’s own agenda, and beautiful in it’s own way.
This is why people sometimes seem unaccountably cheerful on foggy days. Even though it is chilly, the world has taken on an eerie, inexplicable quality which excites their imaginations. Or, at least, that is what it does to me. I am reminded of the tourist I saw. He was laughing and taking a picture of where the Golden Gate Bridge would have been if it were not for the fog. He was delighted with this trick played by nature, and decided to get even by snapping his photo anyway. I am often struck by the hardiness of tourists who come out to see the Golden Gate Bridge and are wearing shorts and no jacket expecting warm weather. They are tough, they enjoy themselves anyway. This says something about the human spirit, it’s tenacity in the face of adversity.
I feel like I am in the middle of a really good novel when I walk about on a foggy day. This is the cinematic backdrop to this drama called my life. I have always absorbed the texture and the mood of any place I have lived and San Francisco offers a rich antique, and yet very up to the minute contemporary texture and mood which is enhanced on a foggy day.
I am in a strange place tonight. It is getting late and that is when my thoughts are often not my own. Whose then? A self I have often disowned, been uncomfortable with and lies tucked away with my old photographs, journals, and acid flashbacks. Something is amiss, or perhaps, I was amiss before and now I am on the correct course. It feels as though I am on a double track, my actual life and imaginary lives overlap in a precarious manner. I need an outlet desperately, any outlet will do. There is another world which embraces this one, it comforts us as we stand in the fierce wind waiting for the bus. It carries me away to beautiful lands and to dark twisted sweat filled nightmares each night. Another life, another self. Here I am young, here I am female, or not even human. Here I am very very old, living alone in the midst of a vast desert of my own making. Here I am a celebrity, with many many people vying for my attention. I have many heavy responsibilities, and I can’t even remember my own name. SUch as it Is, I am CraCKing Up. It isn’t as much fun as I expected. All the usual habits fall away in the face of the abyss. Each day is a NEW DAY. When you are crazy, it is all new to you.
Now don’t get worried, I am not truly crazy, I am just feeling a bit dislocated. Like I said, I live many lives at the same time, and occasionally my focus wavers, and it is hard to sort things out. When the contents of your imagination outweigh all else it is time to stop and take an inventory. Do I have all my marbles? I do. I am exaggerating to make a point. We are all crazy to a degree. We are multitasking many many lives at once. We have a rich untapped tapestry which continues to surprise us, and provide us with source material.
But wait.
But wait.
This was not meant to reassure.
The world has become unhinged. Just read the news.
We are all cracking up by degrees. Sometimes I feel I have too much inside. I cannot contain it in a story.
It bleeds into my body, and possesses my mind with a noisy cacophony of meaningfulness, an urgent meaningfulness to which I must attend.
Cracking up.
Living a life for which I am no longer responsible, has it’s appeal.
Cracking up
Being taken care of for the rest of life, has it’s appeal.
But the nut house has it’s terrors.
And I have lived with my strange musings,
and will foolishly continue my flirtation with insanity
For that is the nature of the game
So much is going on, and I can only write about a small piece of it.
Still writing, though
In that, I find comfort.
This photo was taken from this blog http://www.muttmansion.com/ds/archives/2004_08.html
All your life you had dreamed of this day.
With all the bright colors, the smiles and parade.
You would cross that bridge today!
The pictures you would take.
The stories you could tell.
Obscured by fog.
Oh well.
Is this a time to throw up your hands?
Stamp your feet and yell?
Lest your mood make grey your day.
Find another way.
Laugh and dance in the cold damp air
And snap a picture of a bridge that isn’t there.
But of course you know
This is only fog
This too will pass in time
And the bridge in all it’s promise
Will reappear.
This poem was inspired by what I saw as I left work today. A tourist was laughing and happily snapping a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was completely obscured by fog. You couldn’t see the bridge at all. But, undaunted, he decided to take a picture anyway. Something about that encapsulated the human spirit. and made me smile.
So what was on the cosmic radio this afternoon? As I walked to and from Safeway I was bombarded by an ongoing philosophical discourse inside my head. This first post concerns the most esoteric part of this broadcast. Another post on russellpop.wordpress.com will take up the cultural and misleadingly superficial aspects of that broadcast. I get so bored with my own soap opera at times that I have to disconnect from my fragile ego and listen in on something far more interesting and engaging than my own tedious neuroses. Today was such a time. I posed the question to myself, ‘what is actually going on?’ as opposed to what I think is going on. Our perception of reality is determined by our internal dialogue. But we miss out on a lot, some of which is trivial and some of which could change our lives. It is up to us which channels we attend to. There is the practical channel which prevents our running into lampposts and reminds us of why we are out here on the sidewalk walking. We do in fact have a destination, and unlike the gentleman to my left who is talking out loud, I actually know where I am going and why. But this utilitarian shopping channel doesn’t take up much space in my hard drive and I am free to tune into more interesting material without fear I will have an accident of some kind. So once again, ‘what, in fact is going on?’ I reiterate. Well, if we look to science, to the most precise measures of actual nuts and bolts physical stuff, we get an interesting conclusion. Nothing actually exists, and conversely nothing can be said to not exist either. Both are wrong. Our tools are insufficient to describe what is actually going on. Our language necessitates a subject and object, a duality which does not actually exist but works wonderfully as a descriptive device enabling us to investigate in our limited fashion this something/nothing within which we lead our daily lives. But whatever we manage to come up with, that ain’t it. Scientists aren’t bothered by this. They are routinely satisfied with approximations of reality. It is the best we can do given our limitations.
But for us regular folks it is frustrating, aggravating, take your pick. The truth will set you free but at first it will piss you off. Truth? Reality? What’s the difference? Is there a difference? My older brother has been hammering away at this philosophical conundrum for some time now. I agree with his conclusions as I understand them, knowing that whatever I write about it, it isn’t precisely what he is saying. I’ll do my best to do justice to his masterwork. Reality is what we perceive, which is colored by what we feel, think, what we have learned, been told, and whether we are coming down with a cold, in short, reality is our shared experience. The more something is shared the more real it becomes. Reality appears obvious to us, it differs from belief in that reality is what we know to be true. When someone says ‘Duh!’ in regard to something we have said, they are referring to reality. It is what everybody knows, and therefore, for most of us it is indistinguishable from the truth. But is it? What we know to be true is subject to a high level of distortion. It is conditioned by our own perception, our life experience, and the propaganda barrage we are subjected to daily. So what is true? Good question. The truth lies beyond our ability to communicate at this time in our evolution. All we can really do is say, ‘nope. that ain’t it. that isn’t it either. Close, but no cigar.’ The truth is elusive. So close, yet so far from paradise. We can approach it, but even to say that is misleading because how can you know that you are approaching the truth when you don’t know the truth? Duh! The answer I like, is that we are the truth. There are only two accurate statements, ‘all of it is true’ and ‘none of it is true’. Back to the existence/nonexistence conundrum. It is in the nature of language that nothing makes sense taken out of context. So we cannot talk intelligently about a context which contains all other contexts. It becomes unintelligible. You have to define what you are talking about, or in other words, put it in context, before it can make sense. But this necessarily distorts the information, causing it to become false. All reality is contextual, and therefore false to a degree. This is the principle behind the concept of maya. Maya is the phenomenal universe, or reality. (although even the nonphenomenal or noumenal universe is also reality, albeit much more subtle). If you can talk about it, strictly speaking, it isn’t it. You are inevitably off the mark, if only by a tiny tiny bit. Scientists are comfortable with this, and although they wouldn’t like to call it this, they take it on faith basically. Faith is what you have when you can’t verify your data, but nevertheless are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that what you suspect is true, is in fact true. Once again I am attracted to the notion that the truth is where all of this is headed and it is where all of this came from. This idea of time, of something happening in a linear fashion is nothing more than a philosophical and also a scientific convenience. It is so hard to talk about any of this without that convenience. Time is a measurement of change in the data. That’s all. It doesn’t exist, in the same way that numbers don’t actually exist but are philosophical tools to enable us to communicate about something we don’t fully understand. Allow me to indulge in a brief analogy to help unclog all this stuff I just wrote. A bit of philosophical Drano if you will. Languages of all sorts, mathematical and linguistic serve as the software, a translation of the machine code which God only knows who can read that stuff (literally!!). You could say that the machine code is like the quantum foam at the very heart of physicality. Binary. On/Off Exist/Not Exist This duality allows a pattern to emerge, and this pattern is reality, if you will (or even if you won’t, the foam doesn’t ask for our opinion, or then again, does it?) Who are we? Who am I? Do I reside within the quantum foam, or am I somewhere else? I think most would agree that our bodies are definitely a product, ultimately, of this quantum funkiness, but are we something other than our bodies? Sorry, no dependable data on this question. I prefer to think that we are intangible. We lie outside the either/or universe of quantum indeterminism. We both exist and do not exist, or neither, or I don’t know, feets don’t fail me now! We are not the data, we are collecting the data. We lie outside the experiment. Or do we?
So, clearly this radio could continue it’s program for as long as I, or you, or anyone would care to tune in. But you can see that the lines of communication are corroded. I was getting a bad translation. There was a lot of static on the line. It can’t be helped. Inevitably, as I grappled with this philosophical problem of what is actually going on, it become more and more unintelligible. I found myself seeking refuge in analogies and elegant solutions which may or may not have anything to do with the price of eggs in China. What is actually going on? Nothing. A program is running, and so something appears to be happening. At various moments, the device breaks down, or the program attempts to execute a bad block of code, and we discover that what we thought was happening was just an enticing puppet show of sorts, and we glimpse something else. Something that isn’t properly anything at all, just this indefinable suchness which can only be pointed at, but not intelligently discussed. Perhaps we can approach such things with poetry. Perhaps we know, but cannot tell, struck mute by our linguistic and mathematical limitations. That is how it feels to me, at any rate. So, there it is, the rough approximation of this afternoon’s broadcast of the cosmic radio. As always it leaves me unsatisfied. What was that all about? Nothing. and yet and yet, I can’t help feeling that I am on the verge of a great discovery, which would change everything forever, and for the better.
Can’t you see?
It isn’t like that at all!
It is so much better!
If only I had the words to tell you,
you would be so happy.
But I don’t.
It is just a cosmic radio,
for whatever it is worth.
I CANNOT RECALL WHERE I BEGAN
MEMORIES BECOME DREAM BECOME SAND
A PUBIC PORTAL POPPED OPEN
TO THE EAGER PENIS’ DELIGHT
AND THE MAGIC BEGAN IN THE NIGHT
PAIN AND PLEASURE
WITH A SUDDEN FLASH OF LIGHT
I AM RUSSELL FREE TO BE
IN A MOMENT OF ETERNITY
NO MORE
I IMMERSE MYSELF BY CHOICE
WITH BOTH FEAR AND REMORSE
INTO THIS FUNKY MESS
THIS THRILL OF SEX
WITH APPROACHING DEATH
I FIND IT MORE WORTHWHILE
RUSSELL WAS AND IS AND SOON
WILL BE NO MORE IN TIME
I STAND OUTSIDE
NO TIME NO CHRONICLE
NO RUSSELL
JUST AS IS AS IT WAS IN ETERNITY
AND A NEW IDENTITY
russell5087 