Heed the Muse

This weather is inspirational on a spiritual level. I want to start a fire, read poetry, have sex, cook a meal, talk to interesting people, build something out of wood, and listen to good music. In no particular order. Honestly, it might also be nice to get into a fist fight with a total stranger in a parking lot. I’m open to everything.

Chickens Always Come Home To Roost

The Highest Point In Culture

Still me. All the time. Ben Affleck may think he got into acting for more grandiose reasons than to be the guy in this meme, but the guy in this meme is the realest and most resonant character in all of art.

God Is Trash

If God made me
And all things return
To whence they came
I am God

If God made me
And I am trash
Then God is trash

Your Own Space

"I am alone. There is no God where I am." - Aleister Crowley

This quote popped out at me the other day, and it's stuck around. I know I have family and friends who I love and who love me back, but I don't think that's the aloneness Crowley is talking about. To realize that I am alone on a spiritual level...to realize that I am free to create myself day after day is liberating. There's nothing to fear about being alone. You really can't know yourself in a crowd. There is richness in the cosmic silence and absence of God(s). At my best moments, I like to listen to the silence. It's peaceful. It lets me know where I'm at.

Drinking the Mortal Brew: You’ve Got To Tolerate all Those People That You Hate

"We honor our characters as if they were distinctive to ourselves, whether we have worthy characters snd are admired by men or not. Therefore, We must esteem the characters of our neighbors, if they are friendly to us."-Epicurus, 7th Vatican Saying.

I love Epicurus's qualifiers: "If they are friendly to us".

Loving your enemies can be tiresome. You don't have to hate them, mind you (that can be even more exhausting), but loving them requires a huge investment that doesn't promise any returns; and besides, how many of us who attempt to 'love' our enemies really act as if we love them? How often is the love we feel for those who hate us really either just a self-aggrandizing veneer, or a sharp tool we use to beat ourselves down with when we realize that we are incapable of wishing well those who wish us ill? Why not just be honest about it?

Instead of choosing one or the other emotional extreme, Epicurus advocated that we tolerate the personality traits of those we encounter that do us no real harm, and as pertains to the other poles, I guess it's carte blanche. Destroy your enemies and love your friends to your heart's content. I endorse this position.

It may sound cold to advocate the destruction of your enemies, but sometimes it is necessary. And consider this: one of the best and most effective way of destroying your enemies is to turn them into friends. Discovering a mutual self-interest with an enemy can take you far away from a situation that would undoubtedly lead to much pain and suffering for both parties if it were allowed to escalate.

The genius and realism of Epicurus is notable in this Vatican saying: rather than calling us to strive for some kind of unrealistic ethereal ideal, he suggests that we understand our more carnal aspects. The poet Robert Bly has a lot to say about the way in which we unrealistically deal with our carnal aspects in his wonderful essay 'The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us':

"Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: “Good children don’t get angry over such little things.”  So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota we were known as “the nice Bly boys.” Our bags were already a mile long.

Then we do a lot of bag-stuffing in high school. This time it’s no longer the evil grownups that pressure us, but people our own age."

he then adds what the consequences of all of this stuffing-into-the-bag is:

"We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed. Suppose the bag remains sealed-what happens then? A great nineteenth-century story has an idea about that. One night Robert Louis Stevenson woke up and told his wife a bit of a dream he’d just had. She urged him to write it down; he did, and it became “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The nice side of the personality becomes, in our idealistic culture, nicer and nicer. The Western man may be a liberal doctor, for example, always thinking about the good of others. Morally and ethically he is wonderful. But the substance in the bag takes on a personality of its own; it can’t be ignored. The story says that the substance locked in the bag appears one day somewhere else in the city. The substance in the bag feels angry, and when you see it it is shaped like an ape, and moves like an ape.

The story says then that when we put a part of ourselves in the bag it regresses. It de-evolves toward barbarism. Suppose a young man seals a bag at twenty and then waits fifteen or twenty years before he opens it again. What will he find? Sadly, the sexuality, the wildness, the impulsiveness, the anger, the freedom he put in have all regressed; they are not only primitive in mood, they are hostile to the person who opens the bag. The man who opens his bag at forty-five or the woman who opens her bag rightly feels fear. She glances up and sees the shadow of an ape passing along the alley wall; anyone seeing that would be frightened."

that essay can be found in a book by Bly called 'A Little Book on the Human Shadow', and I recommend it.

The message of Epicurus and Robert Bly is pretty clear here: Be honest about your shit, and deal with it honestly.

It's much less scary that way, and the results you get will be infinitely better.

H.P. Lovecraft on Why You Shouldn’t Kill Yourself

It may seem strange to most people that one would need a reason not to commit suicide, but there are those of us out there who need one. To some, knowing that the self checkout lane is open is actually a consolation. Hunter S. Thompson said "If I didn't know I could commit suicide at any moment, life would be unbearable". Of course, there are many reasons not to kill yourself. ' This Too Shall Pass' is the protective motto of those traversing the Territory of the blackest mind. The transitory nature of everything is reason enough to see if you can ride it out when it comes to depressed states, mixed states, and plain old bad luck.

Far be it from me to suggest such a thing is easy. As a person who has traversed this black landscape, I understand how the poisoned mind can laugh at our stoic bearings. Far be it from me also to suggest that there is anything inherently evil, selfish, or wrong about suicide. Sometimes, suicide is in fact a reasonable choice. Some choose to end their lives rather than experience prolonged pain and suffering connected to a chronic illness. I understand this choice, and would probably choose it for myself if it ever seemed necessary. Also, suicide is often committed by people with mental health issues. They do this while in the grips of a disease, and faulting a person who kills themselves in such a state is akin to faulting a person with a heart disorder for dying of a heart attack.

One of the ways we manage to survive is to remind ourselves of the transitory nature of our suffering. Another is to participate in therapy or counseling. Another is to take medication that is appropriate to our illness, exercise, eat healthy, and get good rest. Another way is to seek out folks who share our experience and struggle, and to empathize with them and learn from their hard won wisdom (all wisdom is hard won, isn't it?).

That brings me to the excerpt I wanted to share with you. I am a huge H.P. Lovecraft fan. I love his stories, but what I am coming to love even more than his stories are his letters. He was a great letter writer, and in the below excerpt he talks about a time he seriously considered suicide, and how he navigated his way back out of it:

"How easy it would be to wade out among the rushes and lie face down in the warm water till oblivion came. There would be a certain gurgling or choking unpleasantness at first--but it would soon be over. Then the long, peaceful night of non-existence..."

But something held him up:

"And yet certain elements--notably scientific curiosity and a sense of world drama--held me back. Much in the universe baffled me, yet I knew I could pry the answer out of books if I lived and studied longer. Geology, for example. Just how did these ancient sediments and stratifications get crystallized and upheaved into granite peaks? Geography--just what would Scott and Shackleton and Borchgrevink find in the great white Antarctic or their next expeditions...which I could--if I wished--live to see described?"

Lovecraft goes through questions about history, Africa, Mathematics, and other intellectual curiosities that he would miss out on if he snuffed himself out, ultimately concluding,

"So in the end I decided to postpone my exit till the following summer. I would do a little curiosity-satisfying at first; filling certain gaps of scientific and historical knowledge, and attaining a greater sense of completeness before merging with the infinite blackness."

after finding himself engaged in life to a much greater degree on this path of postponement--starting up an old newsletter, finding more questions at the ends of questions answered--he decided to grant himself another extension:

"Possibly I would wait til '06 before making my exit...one could drown in '06 just as well as in '05 or '04!'

Questions of life and death and meaning popped up over and over again in Lovecraft's life--he kept a cyanide pill on his person at all times just in case 'it ever got too much'--but he found his way through that particular darkness with the aid of curiosity.

Curiosity is a fine reason to go on living. I had just discovered Billy Collins a little bit before the suicide of a dear friend several years back, and was very excited to share it with him the next time he was in town. Before I had a chance to do that, he had jumped off an overpass in Tennessee. Not far after all of the other assorted kinds of thoughts a person has after receiving such news, it occurred to me that my friend would never get to experience Billy Collins. My friend--a highly intelligent, clever, soulful person--had missed out on something I was pretty sure he would have liked.

There are always new things to discover. Life is about change and possibility, and who knows what is waiting for us in the future? It's a compelling reason to stick around.

That Thing You Do

There are so many issues a person could have an opinion about. What issues do you often talk about in social media or in your personal life? Do you know why these are the primary issues that concern you? Do you know why these—among all possible issues—are the ones that concern you the most? Self-Awareness is so important, and so essential to understanding why the things that move us move us the way they do. Are you in touch with that part of yourself?

The BDSM Party

The sub/dom relationship between the Democratic Party and it’s voters is fascinating. I just passed a car with an ‘Any Functioning Adult 2020’ bumper sticker, and thought about how that was a cute liberal joke right after Trump got elected. They’re like, ‘Just give me someone! Anyone!’. Fast forward past all the voter disenfranchisement and shenanigans the party orchestrated to this moment, where Joe Biden is the candidate the party is offering, and the ‘functioning adult’ requirement of that bumper sticker is questionably met at best. And still they will expect party members to vote for their candidate, and party members probably will, because that is the cathartic nature of the degradation that occurs in sub/dom relationships. I’m just waiting for the whips and zipper masks and ball-gags to come into play. That’s when it will all be complete.

Here I Go

Call the doctor

I’m coming down

With a fever

Call a priest

I’m too scared to die

An unbeliever

Tell the truth:

Will I even

Notice?

Does it hurt?

And where does the darkness

Take us?

Here I go

Leaving my body behind

Just like my wallet, full of cash

For some lucky stranger to find

Do what you want

With the pictures, business cards

And the condom

I’m not coming back

And where I’m going 

I don’t need them

Here I go

Call out the punchline

Before the comedian

Finishes the joke

Swallow the bread

And gesture wildly

When you choke

There’s really no lesson

Nothing to learn

That’s worth keeping

It’s all transition

And that is why I’m leaving

Here I go

Leaving it all behind

God eats the fruit

And disposes of the rind

Take off your skin

After taking off your clothes

We’re getting out of here

To where?

No one knows

Here I go.


* These lyrics took a markedly gloomy and existential turn from where they began. I was talking to a friend on the phone about our various aches and pains, and was joking about I totally live up to the stereotype about how men turn into total babies when they’re sick. Then we got off the phone, and I thought about the narrator from ‘Notes From the Underground’ when he was talking about how gratifying it can be to complain about a toothache. That’s where the first lines came from. Then suddenly I heard Nick Cave’s voice singing the lines, and it ended up where it ended up.