We were discussing the mystery of why I don’t update this website sometimes for long periods of time.  Yeah, my neighborhood liquor store owner reads the site.  Sometimes I hammer away at the site, hell fire burning in my veins, but other times the place is a ghost town for months on end.  In my absence people wonder.  People make assumptions.  People judge.

“He doesn’t want to see anymore.”

“He doesn’t want to write anymore.”

“He doesn’t want to try anymore.”

It’s not enough for something to either happen or not happen.  People want to flash lights on it, give it a voice, give it a reason.  Strange and invisible arrangements are made.  My legacy is auctioned off a piece at a time.

“People,” Ray said.  “They can’t understand the silence.  If he is dead, they want to know it.  If he is insane, they want to know it.  If he has a reason for silence, they want to know it.”

Me, “Right on man.”

I’ve been getting a lot of hate mail lately, and to be fair I am a real sonofabitch.  The shit comes is waves, usually in the hotter months.  Some certain group of assbags finds something I have to say here offensive to their world view and feel the need to strike against it.  A hundred hateful questions that they don’t really want answers to.  Well, fuck it.  The rhythm of the rails is an enticing song to those who long to be far away.  If life does suck, then it can suck my dick.  My shit is profane, nihilistic, sexual, racist, crass, horrifying, glorified, and comedic.  I will not justify myself.  If you don’t like it, just click away, don’t read it, and fuck you.

Ray asked about my shoulder.  I had worn a sling for 6 excruciating weeks after the surgery, but now the only evidence is a long jagged scar that itches uncontrollably at inopportune times.  He asked me about the girl I brought into the place a few weeks ago.  She had honey blonde hair, amazing deep dark eyes, but even though I hung her on my arm proudly for the beauty she was, she and I both knew deep down that she wanted nothing to do with me because she couldn’t have a future with an un-saved guy.  Motherfucker.

I suppose I was never innocent.  I popped my cherry in the backseat of a stolen car with a cheerleader and looked back with no regrets.  You can’t ascribe my fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances.  You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.  Mass market nostalgia gets you all hopped up for the good old days, a glorious past that never existed.  My continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight.  Only a reckless girl’s similitude can set that line straight.  The real holy trinity is look good, kick ass, and get laid.  After a couple weeks of late nights and Kafkaesque office politics I was hungry and tired in ways that reduced my ‘give a shit’ level almost to zero.

I pull into my condo complex.  The place hides in the hinterland of several overlapping districts.  It’s located near bars, basically guaranteed to produce class struggle on every night of the week.  I crack open a beer and walk down the street to pick up a few groceries (read: booze and cigars) for the weekend.  Work’s been demanding, I haven’t had time to do laundry, clean my apartment, or buy food.

My cell phone was buzzing as I sat down at the bar.  I gave up on groceries to explore bewilderment at the local watering hole.  I check out the avalanche of texts and sigh with annoyance.

Scumbag bartender, “What’s up?”

Me, “Oh, it’s just some dizzy dame who hates me for using the internet.”

I don’t remember the dude’s goddamn name, and I don’t even pretend to know it.  I think we’ve had a few heart to heart’s, wasted of course, right in this same dirty spot.

Scumbag, “How can any woman love you, you have such things in your head.”

Me, “What!? What the fuck are you talking about!?  Whaddya think’s going on in their heads?”

Scumbag, “You must have a miserable life, you are such a tormented soul.”

Me, thinking I must have fucked this guy’s sister or something, “What!? No boss, I’m having a blast!  I’ve got this big fucking throbbing hard-on for life, for history, and for women as redemption.  Just don’t use the word ‘normal’ around me, bub!”

Scumbag, “You want another one?”

Me, “Yeah bro, fill ‘er up again.”

So is this fucker right?  Am I just another alienated misanthrope basking in the aura of my own perceived ‘rightness’?  What is the fucking truth? It’s hard to recognize the truth when you are bombarded by lies all the time, every minute of the day. You have to go to sleep, but even in sleep you dream of the presence you have during the day.  You are bombarded by commercials and completely senseless information every single day.  If you turn on the TV you are bombarded.  If you turn your head in any direction, you see some sign, some commercial, every magazine, newspaper.. Senseless information.  The news is itself the products being sold.  Everything is meaningless.  Sure the truth is out there, likethe fucking  x-files.  The truth is there to be found, but in a sea of lies it’s just about impossible to find it.  Unless you know how to look, where to look, and when to look.  Of course it’s not possible to just wake up in the morning and say ‘yeah man, I’m gonna find the truth’ and then go find it.  You have to try and fail, and eventually you will weed out all the lies and you will end up with something that is at least similar to the truth.

The truth is hidden, under grass, under some rocks, on a hidden trail, a forgotten trail, in the forest.  And when you are trying to find these trails you will stumble, you will have branches scratch your face, and you will make mistakes before you finally find it.  And so then you think you’ve found it, so what do you do with it?  What do you do at all?  I can’t just live out the rest of your life like a jellyfish, spineless, soulless, leaving no fossil record, invisible to history.  Living at the bottom of the ocean in a cold world without day or night, perpetually in darkness.  No seasons, no weather, only the poison breath of the earth on which to live.

The agony of living verses the inevitability of death.  I think back to my old crimes, my childhood explorations, my youthful fantasies.  Breaking into mansions, sneaking around while the people were out to dinner at a restaurant, away on vacation, or in their summer house somewhere far off.  Take a few hits of booze, raid the medicine cabinet.  All the rich houses are filled with prescription drugs.   Pop a couple pills, not too many because you don’t want to get noticed so you can come back again.  Make yourself a sandwich.  Try on a fancy sportcoat.  Sniff some panties.  Take a shit like a king, wearing fancy robe and slippers, while reading travel magazines.   And then disappear like a ghost.  I existed in this way, like Gatsby, a voyeur to the human community.  At the heart of, yet completely alien to it.

I think about the knowledge of my own death.  I suppose it was only a matter of time after Angie killed herself that this would happen.  I remember the dead bodies I’ve seen, turning to leather in the sun.  Eaten by stray dogs.  The face goes black, starts to rot.  The skin tightens, pulls back, away from the teeth.  White teeth.  The corpse is smiling… at you… because it knows that you will be dead one day yourself.

To have emerged from nothing.  To have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this – yet to die.  Every day we involve ourselves in a multitude of activities to distance ourselves from harm and death.  Click a seatbelt, lock a door, look both ways before crossing the street, but we are aware that beneath the surface all these strategies are doomed to fail.  We will die eventually, and all of this will come to an end.

Human beings find themselves in quite the predicament.  We have the mental capacity to ponder the infinite, seemingly capable of anything, yet trapped in a heart pounding, breath gasping, decaying body.

We are godly yet creaturely.  Death is the end of the self.  It is the ultimate mystery.  Death is to be avoided.  What do we do with it and why do we fear it?  Fear of death is ubiquitous, it is hard-wired into us.  For me, on the most fundamental level, death is unacceptable.  I did not sign that contract.  I refuse to pay up.  I object.

We have the capacity to think symbolically, to make one thing stand for another.  This of course is the basis for language.  We have the capacity to project ourselves through time and imagine things that have not yet happen.  We have the capacity to think of things in terms of cause and effect.  We have the capacity to reflect back on ourselves and look back from a standpoint outside of ourselves.  All of these capacities play a central role in the system through which humans regulate their behavior.

On the one hand we have these minds that are capable of just really embracing the universe on all fronts, you know – we can think of the old days, we can think what it will be like 500 years from now, we can think of what it would be like to fistfight Nazi’s on the surface of mars while we sit here drinking beers in San Diego.  So we can ponder our present circumstances in light of future possibilities and modify our behavior accordingly.  All of that is tremendous, and all of that is highly problematic because it renders us as human beings uniquely aware of the inevitability of our demise.

We then recognize that death then happens to us.  I have to live with the knowledge that ‘I am going to die’.  All organisms have a life instinct, an instinct to live.  Our species has as much of that as any other species, but we also have the intelligence to know that we’re doomed.  This creates a cognitive problem for us.  It creates a potentially enormous amount of anxiety that we have to do something with.

The explicit awareness that you are a breathing piece of defecating meat, destined to die and ultimately no more significant than the worms that will eventually eat you.  This is not especially uplifting.

Fear is a response to danger.  Animals experience fear, but animals live in the present moment.  When animals experience fear it is due to a present danger be it a fire, or a predator, or some threat to their life.  Their response to that is the fight/flight reaction.  They will either fight or flee from the predator.

We too experience fear when we are presented with a present danger.  But we can also anticipate future dangers, and we can imagine future dangers, but the physiology is the same fight/flight reaction because the body can’t tell the difference between the past and the future.  Anxiety is the anticipation or imagination of a future danger.  So were all anxious about the future because we all know we’re going to die, we just don’t know when.  We carry a burden of anxiety that no other species carries.

Since the beginning of recorded history, and times immemorial, the existence of our mortality has haunted us.  We have gone to great lengths to forget, deny, and overcome death.  From the ancient myth of Osiris, to the myth of Jesus Christ, history is filled with tales of the afterlife.  Of people rising from their graves, returning from the dead.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, I quote it on this site endlessly, is a quest for immortality.

Death anxiety pervades every aspect of our existence.  Death awareness is a broad topic and requires broad scope investigation.  The bringing together of all the knowledge from the different social sciences and even in the humanities as well.  This leads into an exploration of the writings of the ages.  Ernest Becker in his famous work ‘The Denial of Death’ states that if “I want to understand very broad questions about what it is that underlies human behavior.”  If you undertake that quest seriously then you can’t confine your inquiry to any particular discipline.  Big questions require wide ranging scrutiny and no discipline should be disqualified from the act of consideration.  What Becker insists is that the human species solved the existential problem of death by utilizing the same intellectual skills that created the problem in the first place which is our vast intelligence and the ability to think in abstract and symbolic ways in the service of constructing and maintaining what he calls ‘culture’.

For Becker, culture is a collective fabrication.  A shared set of beliefs about the nature of reality in order to help us deal with our death anxiety.  Culture provides meaning and helps us to maintain a sense of security in an unsure world.  When we look at history that as long as can be recorded, across cultures and across vast amounts of time and space that death denial seems to be rather central to all human constructions.

We cannot be human without living in culture.  We are meaning hungry creatures as human beings.  We require meaning, and whether we talk about it or not, we are always living within meaning whether it has to do with some kind of family or work or activity or goal.  It may be, and usually is, unspoken.

Culture provides meaning by giving us a sense of where we’ve come from.   Some of these creation stories are oppressive and mundane, while others are fantastic and quite beautiful.  While creation stories give members of a culture a sense of meaning, it is roles within those cultures that give individuals a specific and individual sense of importance.

Culture helps us out by essentially giving each of the roadmap to find the prescriptions of acceptable action.  All cultures have social roles with associated standards of valued conduct.  The satisfaction of which allows you to proceed yourself as a significant individual, but it’s only through this culturally constructed sense of reality that we know what it means to be a valuable or an important figure.

In American culture you can stuff a rubber ball through a metal hoop, but in other cultures that would be pretty much worthless, some cultures value the ability to throw a stick through a fish’s head.

There is also a connection to the eternal through religion.  Throughout the ages people have debated the existence of the ‘eternal soul’.  Belonging to a religion is a sort of collective immortality, a symbolic immortality.

Symbols concrete our most cherished beliefs and values.  They are tangible representations of abstract ideas and meanings.  Without symbols it would be impossible to sustain our faith in ideas.   When the literal world fails us we turn to the symbolic.  In the case of death, if the battle can’t be won in the physical world then perhaps we can gain a sense of victory in the symbolic.

Darwin comes along, and periods of history like the enlightenment, and people start to think that this is all there is.  Were just this, physical materials, that will decay and die and that’s it.  What happens then when you don’t have that literal immortality thing, then how do you cope?  Instead of trying to live on in the physical world we take that whole dilemma and we move it to the symbolic level.  We invest ourselves in symbols that we get from our culture and from religion that come to represent us.  We identify with them.  We see ourselves in them.  And instead of trying to live on literally, physically, we try instead to make sure that our symbols of immortality, our culture, our religion are seen as powerful and durable.  Through their endurance we feel that some aspect of ourselves lives on with them.

One aspect of it is a collective sense of immortality.  If you can get a sense of being a part of something bigger than yourself that is immortal, that can transcend your individual death, then that is a kind of symbolic immortality.  But also there are individual way, we all know this, American’s certainly know this.  We’re going to write the great book, create the great work of art, have that amazing blog website (!?).

We try to figure out in what ways our culture defines the good life and we try to excel at it.  I distinguish myself and I stand out as special and when I do that I have a comparative gap between myself and other people and when I do that I find I kind of see those other people as merely mortal and I see myself as transcending the limit of mere mortality.  I look around me and everybody represents the ways that human beings naturally are, but I become supernatural.  Heroism as a means to transcend the limits of mortality.

The urge for immortality expresses itself as the urge for creativity.  The urge to build, the urge to make a mark in the world, even if just to carve our name in a tree or spray paint it on an abandoned building as a way of telling the world that we’ve been here and that we matter.

Our immortality then is contingent on our culture being stable and lasting forever.  Monuments, architecture, religious buildings, even the law – being constructed out of what historically have been the most enduring materials known to human beings.

American utopianism at the moment is consumer utopia.  It is associated with money and the ability to command the wills of other people by paying them something, which is in effect magnifying your own self.  It’s magnifying your own strength.  Effectually if you can make anyone in the world do your bidding with your check book then you have everyone in the world under your power.  Wealth is a symbolic barrier against death.  The tragic flip side is that if you do not have money, you do not have the ability to control other people.  You are radically vulnerable.  You are a slave.

If our immortality depends on the durability and persistence of our symbols and our symbolic systems, what happens when those symbols fall or fail us.  Again our symbols and our efforts to become something more that we are, are shown to be just as fleeting as life itself.  We experience a sort of symbolic death.  On a social scale, the loss of jobs, relationships, and our sense of self-worth in our day to day lives are experienced as a sort of social death – an overwhelming sense that we have not achieved the standards set by our culture.  To be totally vulnerable to the wills of the people around you.  In many ways, social death is analogous to and just as disturbing as real death.

This is why it’s not surprising that when you look around the world again and again you see people threatened by social death responding with the kinds of vehement emotional reactions that you would associate with a more explicit threat to life and limb.  Which is to say deep depression or volatile aggression of a kind of berserk violence.

Death imagery tends to haunt us and we constantly try to transcend it with experiences of life or affirmations of life imagery.  It can include the producing and raising and nurturing of children which are both a source of love and affection but are also a symbol of the human future and the prospect of a larger human connectedness.  That’s why after large-scale destruction many people seek to marry and have children because they wanted to reassert life, feelings of life, images of life.

One of the easiest ways to make yourself feel more than mortal is to stand as the conqueror of someone else.  Anyone who’s won a fistfight knows this feeling.  There is this tendency to lift yourself up by elbowing other people down.  That can be done in socially acceptable ways, sporting teams or getting the promotion at work over your colleague, but it also can manifest itself in violence.  If culture helps us deny or stave off death then the existence of other cultures or differing others within our own culture can pose a threat to our emotional and psychological stability.

If ultimately there can be only one ‘true’ then the other supposed ‘true’ must be wrong.  The existence of other perceptions of reality causes us to question our own belief system and therefore our claims to immortality.

If I believe that god created the earth in 6 days and then took a day to chill out and then I run into somebody like the Norse people who believe that the earth was made from the various parts of a frost giant, well if he’s right then I’ve got a big problem.  What we generally do when this happens is engage in a host of unsavory behaviors that serve a defensive compensatory function that allows us to restore our own psychological equanimity by bolstering our faith in our particular perspective.  So what we generally do when we encounter somebody different is to just dismiss them as an inferior form of life.  Sure the African dude believes that the earth was created by god out of a giant drop of milk, but these are ignorant savages worshipping piles of sticks and mud and they don’t have email and iPhones and cable television.  By derogating we kind of defuse the threat.

The thing is that these stick and mud pile worshipping savages are doing ok.  They are no less happy than we are, how can that be?  So derogation is not enough, and we try to assimilate others into our worldview.  If we can sell them our world view and they buy it that’s a very strong validation that we are right.  The most obvious example of this sort of behavior is missionary activity.

The cold war, a battle between two death denying ideologies – capitalism and communism, who attempted to extend their sphere of influence through as much of the world as possible. This is another example of this activity.

Sometimes what you can do is, if the alternative world view that is implicitly stating that yours is not the best or that yours may not be true, you can incorporate certain aspects of that alternative world view into your own and thereby defuse the threat.

Hippie subculture in the mid 60’s for example.  Mainstream America incorporated certain appealing aspects of the hippie subculture into the mainstream culture and cut off the really threatening aspects.  Hippies started wearing blue jeans.  Blue jeans, before the hippies came along, were something that was worn by a certain population of workers in America. After James Dean popularized them in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, wearing jeans by teenagers and youth and/or young adults became a symbol of youth rebellion during the 1950s. Because of this, they were sometimes banned in theaters, restaurants and schools.  The hippies said, ‘appearance is bullshit, we’re going to wear blue jeans.’  That had some appeal, so what mainstream America said is ‘if these things are going to get popular, fine, but now were going to have designer blue jeans and they’re going to become a status symbol.’  Today jeans can even be seen as formal attire.  This use of blue jeans is actually contrary to the original message of why hippies started wearing blue jeans.

These are all methods of coping that originate in our subconscious.  They linger under the surface of our actions.  However, what happens when these methods fail and the threat to one’s immortality is not sufficiently diminished?  For one’s culture to continue serving its death denying function the threat must be dealt with at any cost.  It’s a fight or flight reaction.  The derogation, the assimilation, and the accommodation of others are occasionally intense, direct, and brutal – but are no match for the final means of dealing with differing others.  Annihilation.

Related posts:

1. Home Sweet Home..?
2. Ignus Fatuus
3. Angie

“Information wants to be free.” – Stewart Brand

I knew I shouldn’t have, but I did.  I took the red pill.  I sat there and watched the cars on the freeway, they barely moved.  In that moment a decision was made.  I was going into the Deep Webs.  Who the fuck was I anyway?  Once a young nonconformist who had no choice but to go his own way, to succeed on his own terms.  Now just a tired protagonist holding up the constitution like a shabby homeless doomsday prophet on a dusty downtown street screaming into deaf ears.  It was an old trick, writing about life like you’ve got an angle on it.  I do it myself.  I even admire my own piss while I’m pissing.  Piss and writing are closest to our own.  I was curious, hungry for a new frontier.  Could this be the pirate enclave I was longing for (The Self-Licking Ice-Cream Cone)?  I was bored, I didn’t even need the sales pitch, all I had to hear was ‘Deep Webs’ and I was in.

‘What the fuck are the Deep Webs anyway? ‘, you ask yourself.  Ask the dust on the road. Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins.  Ask the revolutionaries and prophets.  Ask the hackers and terrorists.  Ask them about the Deep Webs, and they will whisper its name.

Simply put, the Deep Webs are all content on the internet that is not part of the ‘surface web’, which is indexed by standard search engines (google, etc…).  The Deep Web is also called ‘Deepnet’, the ‘invisible Web’, ‘DarkNet’, ‘Undernet’, or the ‘hidden Web’.  According to Wikipedia, in 2000, it was estimated that the Deep Web contained approximately 7,500 terabytes of data and 550 billion individual documents.  Estimates based on extrapolations from a study done at University of California, Berkeley in the year 2000, speculate that the Deep Web consists of about 91,000 terabytes.  By contrast, the surface Web (which is easily reached by search engines) is about 167 terabytes; Just to put things in perspective, the Library of Congress, in 1997, was estimated to have 3,000 terabytes.

So it is an extremely vast and mysterious place.

• Public information on the deep Web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web.

• More than 200,000 deep Web sites presently exist.

• Sixty of the largest deep-Web sites collectively contain about 750 terabytes of information — sufficient by themselves to exceed the size of the entire surface Web forty times.

• The Deep Web is the largest growing category of new information on the Internet.

• Deep Web sites tend to be narrower, with deeper content, than conventional surface sites.

• Total quality content of the deep Web is 1,000 to 2,000 times greater than that of the surface Web.

• Deep Web content is highly relevant to every information need, market, and domain.

• More than half of the deep Web content resides in topic-specific databases.

• A full ninety-five percent of the Deep Web is publicly accessible information — not subject to fees or subscriptions.

• The Deep Web is completely anonymous.

What crawls beneath the surface is a who’s who of hackers, scientists, drug dealers, astronomers, assassins, physicists, revolutionaries, government officials, police, feds, terrorists, perverts, data miners, kidnappers, sociologists, cultists, etc…

I was immediately reminded of the books of William Gibson.  Cyberpunk.  Cybernetics and punk, high tech and low life.  A world navigated by marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society.  The Deep Webs, a seedy and unregulated underworld where the console cowboys, like film noir detectives, interface with criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits.  The surface web appears, by contrast, a placid, sterile, flavorless, almost Orwellian dystopia run by mega-corporations and intrusive government agencies.  The Deep Webs even has its own currency, totally anonymous, with its own exchange rate, which exists exclusively in that virtual space for completely anonymous transactions.

I believe in evil.  Evil can do something exceptional.  Now, accepted beauty only goes on stroking accepted beauty.  “And here I am, I’m accepted beauty, I died on the cross two thousand years ago.”  Accepted beauty is for the weak and cowardly, too timid to admit even to themselves what they really want lest they be ashamed for lack of possessing it.  But evil, he can say, “Hey motherfucker, 8 ball in the side pocket.”  And he’ll do it.  I believe in what’s happening now.  I studied history in college, but I detest history.  I detest lies told as if they were truth.  I believe in the wet-backs selling oranges at freeway off-ramps.  I believe in the bums hustling pocket change at busy intersections.  I believe in fists smashing faces, and boots kicking teeth.  I believe in machine guns singing to the drum beat of mortar rounds crashing down in every direction.  I don’t worship evil, at times I am even sickened by evil, but I believe in it.

That being said, bashful lovely boy that I am, I was drawn like a moth to the flame of the Deep Webs.

‘How do you get in?  How do you access the Deep Webs?’ You question fearfully.  It should be noted that it is impossible to be completely safe here. There are hackers, viruses, trojans, and every flavor of unsavory person.  There are certain precautions that you better follow before you start exploring.

1. Find an old laptop, format it down to nothing, then install a fresh copy of your favorite operating system on there and nothing else.  I use an old Panasonic Toughbook with Windows XP (Service Pack 2) – it seemed a fitting choice.
2. Download the Tor browsing software.  Tor is a system intended to enable online anonymity. Tor client software routes Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers in order to conceal a user’s location or usage from someone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

3. https://www.torproject.org/

4. Go to an anonymous internet location (Starbucks, Public Library, neighbor’s WiFi) and start up the Tor browser.
5. You’re in.

‘Ok, well great, now what!?’  Don’t be an idiot.  The screen is not going to show you flying through stars like hyperspace in Star Wars, cause Kelly LeBrock to walk out of your closet, or start World War 3.  In fact the actual Deep Web is somewhat underwhelming.  I harken back to my old junior-high dial-up BBS days of 2400 baud modems, reading the Anarchist’s Cookbook, and tapping phone lines with my trusty lineman’s handset.   First of all the websites in the Deep Web are not very visual.  They are more text driven than anything else.  The information is not organized into nice, neat, categories – it’s hidden, and it’s hidden for a reason.  The vast majority of information in the Deep Web is large, unindexed databases.  The reason the Deep Web is like this is because only about 10 percent of what’s on the internet is generally/commercially interesting.  Sure you could dig deep into the annals of the information superhighway but most if it is raw information.  It’s not packaged and easily digestible like stumbleupon or tumblr.  The Deep Websites purposely don’t get pinged by search engines so they are harder to find.  The URL’s and addresses to these websites are completely random as well so there is absolutely no indexing tool that can be used to find any specific type of information.

In summary, most of the information in the Deep Web is immensely boring.  It’s a private section of server space to share data off the record.  At the same time it is dark and free.  All that wiki leaks stuff that came out a few months ago? That’s been on Deep Web for years.  Ever seen a movie and see the bad guy log into some weird looking private server?  That’s all real.  Generally, terrorist networks, spy agencies, drug dealers, assassins-for-hire, and those looking for child porn lurk around those parts.  There’s a Hidden Wiki.  Yep, even the Deep Webs has a Wiki.  On it are categories of links.  There are things like blogs, forums (from normal to revolutionary to blatantly illegal), Tor-enabled instant messaging and chat, anonymous file hosting, anonymous financing, anonymous tipping and information exchanges, information on computer security/anonymity, info on warez/cracks/hacking, links to underground fighting tournaments where combatants fight to the death, all the books, music, movies you can possibly imagine, even links to sports betting and trade information, international drug markets, prostitution rings, assassin markets, black market products, child pornography, some of society’s most deviant people use this network.  There’s a dark eBay called ‘Silk Road’ where you can bid/buy on every drug under the sun – a black market drug trade for console cowboys.  The place is habituated not just by those who browse the sites, but also by those who create and manage them… and it’s almost impossible to find any of the offenders.

In closing, I will say good luck, have fun, be safe, and don’t do anything illegal!

Hidden Wiki:

web.kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion

Related posts:

1. Quantum Gallery
2. Guitar Tab Universe
3. The Valley of the Shadow of Death (All Hail Moloch!)

Angie was a handful, to say the least.  She was poisonous, insightful, scathing, and caring almost simultaneously.  She would break up with a boyfriend by telling him that she cheated and got pregnant with her ex.  She would get rid of her car by driving it off a cliff, into a tree, or just telling the cops that some Mexican stole it.  She came to realize that people have always based their attitudes towards her based on feelings of superiority.  Angie the fuck-up.  Angie the liar.  Angie the whore.  For the most part, other people have treated her not only as an inferior but also as less of a human being than they are.  Cruelty disguised as kindness.  Condescension concealed as charity.  She was strong and vulnerable in equal amounts.  She was constantly fighting a battle between intellect and emotion.  She was a fighter.

A cheap Saturday night took her down.  She was hooked on pills, hooked on booze, the ticking of the clock drove her insane.  She died stupidly, alone, without the means to hold her own life dear.  Her stint of sobriety a few weeks ago was a brief reprieve.  She loved gravel, would play with it, crunch it in her toes or in her fingers – therapy.

She was a beautiful person, her two children’s eyes flashed with her life spark.  She was in pain, physically, existentially.  She pulled away from the world.  She brought me into hiding as her good luck charm and I failed her as a talisman.  So I stand now as her witness.  Her death, in some way, defines my life.  I want to find the love we never had and explicate it in her name.  I want to take her secrets public.  I want to burn down the distance between us.  I want to give her breath.

We talked many times about suicide.  She wanted to steal power from the gods, for once in her life be the master of fate.   She was misanthropic, disillusioned, alienated.  The world was a trip to an asylum, other people were the inmates, so she medicated herself against the world.  We argued in circles about it, usually by the end of the night she would capitulate, and agree to live just a little bit longer.  I told her not to be so fucking selfish, that her kids needed her, that life is insane but it’s the only one you get.  My arguments were hollow.

I cared about her very much, but not romantically.  We never complicated ourselves even for an instant.  She was in the fight, one of the few, holding a torch against the darkness.  The world seems emptier without her, lonelier.  What is needed now is a comedian, ancient style.  A jester with jokes of absurd pain.  Pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more.  I run my fingers through my beard, a man who was once young and said to have potential, but that’s the tragedy of the dead leaves, the dead flowers, the dead plants.  My wit will soon be dimmer than last Fall’s sunlight.  I drove to the dark beach, where we once stood, execrating and final.  Sending me to hell.  Waving her pale freckled arms and screaming for revenge because the world had failed us both.  She must have had an awareness, precognition, some kind of strange telepathy, that our dirty time was just about served and done.

Her family went rummaging through her belongings, found a box with my name on it.  It was filled with dildos.  You sneaky bitch.  I guess the joke was on me.

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The only solitude is

Sleep or death

We were not clever enough

Kind to others and cruel to self

When self asked for mercy

and was denied

The holiest privacy remains

waiting on us

and all that was

misunderstood or abandoned

will come together

let my failure be your fortune

this that was broken

and careless

error

let it be known

that to know your own death

is to die twice

once really

and then hardly at all

let it be known

that there is nothing as ugly

in all it’s tangents

as the human beast

a trick set against the blood of your soul

let it be known

that solitude is the only

mercy

and the only

lover

let it be known

that a man need not be Christ

to be crucified

let it be known

that a man can be

crucified

each day

each moment

each breath

to sleep and awake

and (then) to be tormented again

let it be known

that a man can die

and die

and die

and die

and still feel the pain

and know he is dead

and still feel the pain

and know there is nothing he can do

and still feel

the pain

let it be known

let it be known

that the temples are nothing

and the bells are nothing

and fame is nothing

and victory is nothing

and sex is nothing

and that solitude brings madness

and the crowd brings madness

and drinks and eats the body

like a tiger

that there is no voice to speak with

no ear to hear

let it be known

there will be other men such as I

lifted for the lions mouth

burned down by false loves

tricked by kindness

missiled by intellect

dizzied by posy

sacrificed for profit

used as cheap labor

and these will be the kindest of happenings

compared to what will enter the eye

and ear

and the brain

and seep to the innards to begin their

death work

I pity all such brothers of mine

Who will follow me in the centuries

Unable to love because there is nothing to love

Unable to kill because there is nothing alive

Forever hanging and

bleeding and dizzied

By the beast

Human

The walls

The gardens

The sun

The flowers

The kisses

The flags

The seas

The animals

The food

The liquors

The paintings

The symphonies

All uselessness

Let it be known

That most men

Love when they can see

And they see each other

And they love this

Because they see very little

Let it be known

That I am bitter

and damned

and tired

and useless

let it be known

when the final hope goes

there remains but a staring at the dance

and a watching the feeble intercourse

of the idiots

with very little note taking

let it be known

that I am dead

but there is no anger

let it be known

that most men are dead

many years before burial

let it be known

that many men die in childhood

that many men are born dead

although their parts move

and they make sound

and grow

and advance

into adult behavior

and do things of

civilization

Let it be known

that these men never existed

and that their funerals

were extreme farce

and also the dead tears

for the already dead

let it be known

that the worms themselves

were nearer to truth

in that they did

not

cry

let it be known

that birth is not holy

that death is not holy

that life is not holy

let it be known

that I have bled without crowns

that I will bleed in a moment

that I will bleed forever

red

red

red

and the hawks will dance

within my bones

and rejoice

let it be known

that I do not die for man’s sins

but that I die for what man is

and for what I almost was

they- too little of anything

in myself lifted enough

to see the horror

to sicken

and go mad

and wilt

do not take as personal

what I say as life

altogether

or man

altogether

unless

on another plane

you consider yourself

a defender of life and man

which is only another natural weakness of the species

like a rat guarding it’s nest

and for which

I cannot hold you totally to blame

The only solitude is death

but not this death

not this death

not

this

death

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1. Holy Land

The desert is one of the last free zones.  Rattlesnakes and scorpions.  A pirate utopia open for ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism, and scathing self evaluation.  Peter Wilson revered these pirate enclaves; they typified proto-anarchist societies operating beyond laws and governments and, in their stead, embraced unrestricted freedom.  From the 16th to the 18th century pirates ravaged European shipping operations and enslaved many thousands of captives.  However, thousands of Europeans also converted to Islam, forming the “Renegados” and joining the pirate holy war.  Wilson writes that these men and women were not only apostates and traitors, as they were considered in their homelands, but their voluntary betrayal of Christendom can also be thought of as praxis of social resistance.

These were secret islands; William Gibson evolved them into virtual safe havens in the net – the seedy dive bars in the matrix.  For me, here and now, drinking fermented cactus juice by a campfire, playing revolution songs on my guitar, cursing the stars – this was my pirate island, and it was just what I needed.

I had been living too long unquestioningly.  Life was moving too quickly, events slipping into the past unscathed; I couldn’t let that persist, needed to rage.  My life was becoming commoditized.   Work and bills and groceries and gas stations.  Commoditized society is a detriment to human creativity.   My life was being smothered by simply living.  Modern society modifies human behavior so that people will seek to consume goods and services as much as possible.  This modification in turn means that everyone who makes goods or provides services will be able to stay employed.  Thus, the society’s economy will remain stable.  I had been plodding along, blinders on; I put them on, needed to push through difficult times.  This was the consequence, I had been a philosophical coward and now I was suffering the coward’s curse – regret.

The world has become reliant upon commoditization, but such reliance also blunts any attempt at original thought.  Consumption becomes so important to the society that all of a person’s energy and reason is put into activities of work and play that consume goods; these actions in turn keep the economy running.  This is, of course, important for maintaining the structured and controlled environment of modern society, but it also produces human beings who simply do what they have been taught and have no reason to think on their own.

I am starting to see that we largely define freedom through the structures that prevent freedom.  I feel that these constraints most acutely are expressed in the ideas of pleasure, comfort, and leisure.  People would insist that freedom in expressed by having the ability to have as much fun as possible, an adulteration on the principle of ‘pursuit of happiness’.  This also may be an offshoot of the convenience centric lifestyle of the progeny of baby boomers, or a vestige of old social arguments from the cold war.  The thing is that this kind of freedom puts people into a hypnotic state in which they no longer feel as though they should ask questions or defy the structures of society.  Morality of individuals like this becomes fundamentally corrupt.  This kind of freedom is no freedom at all.

My ideal of freedom is the freedom to be an individual apart from the rest of society.  I strive to be free in my own way.  Certain structures in our own modern society work in the same way that addictive drugs do. The use of advertising specifically for the way that it hypnotizes people into wanting and buying the same products can be seen as an extension of this principal. Such things keep people within predefined structures, and it quashes free thought, which ultimately restricts freedom.

Human impulses play a complicated role in modern society.  We seek pleasure and retract from pain.  Human impulses can both stabilize and destabilize society.  Society demands at times opposite and even contradictory practices in regards to impulses like sexuality and promiscuity, perhaps the epitome of pleasure.  Celebrated and encouraged is the idea for all humans to sleep with as many other people as often as they can, yet revered and respected are institutions such as monogamy and marriage.   Such institutions work to control these impulses, while glamour and publicity make celebrity of the unrestricted impulse.  With the increasing complexity of human sexuality and promiscuity traditional institutions are becoming entropic, and may ultimately unravel.  The immediate reaction is so the better, the less restriction the more freedom.  In essence, the freedom of these impulses actually undermines humanity’s creativity.  Complete freedom to have unrestricted pleasure has made each person like an infant, incapable of adult thought and creativity.

Society itself is evolving, and modern society is seemingly moving towards utilitarianism; a society that aims to produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.  Within the paradigm of these ideas, this particular good is ‘happiness’, and government, industry, and all other social apparatuses exist in order to maximize the happiness of all members of society.  I personally rebel against the notion of utilitarian happiness.  Humanity must also know how to be unhappy in order to create and appreciate beauty.  Because people refuse to experience unhappiness they are excommunicated from wonder and the appreciation of beauty.  When faced with devastation people only see a horribly frightening scene that they want to avoid, blind to the magnificence of a vast and destructive universe.

There are some things that get better with use, but for the most part things degrade.  The things that last are precious, have emotional value, and have an emotional relationship that is more valuable over time.  It is an object that wears in instead of wearing out.  My guitar; it has a wooden core with black paint on the outside.  It gets dinged or dropped, and a bit of paint flakes off and you see some of the wood showing through.  It gets scratched from use, my fingers wear dull spots into the neck, and there are even places where sweat and blood has dried into the cracks.  Somehow you feel better because of this.  The object becomes more real; the more worn it becomes the more life it embodies.

We have been programmed not to live.  The world is all around us, invisible.  Like a wireless network, you need only the right device to interact with it.  You pick it up, a clunky piece of plastic and metal.  You use it.  Within a few moments you are forgetting about its physical design, realizing that everything that you’re really interested in was happening in your relationship between yourself and what was happening behind the screen.  You are sucked into the machine.  You are now having a completely cerebral, intimate, interaction between yourself and the device-world.

Think of all the interactions we have with programming every day.  ATM, cell phone, computer, iPod, car, GPS, wrist watch, stationary bike, camera, X-box, television.  The number and extensiveness of these interactions is increasing.  How does this affect the thinking process, the expectations for relationships, human communication?  We are being increasingly programmed.

We are constantly fidgeting.  The pure and singular actions of earlier ages have been buried under a brimming landfill of fumbling.  The edges of our modern world inexorably cause the fingers to want to touch it, feel the texture, play with it in their hands.  The kind of actions you are unconscious of until someone points out that you are doing it, but you can’t help it.  You don’t think about the pen when you write with it, you’re thinking about the writing.  In fact, the less you are conscious of it the better it is, the more naturally it can be held.  This is a hidden world, made only of actions that human beings make subconsciously, without thought.  How many things take place in this unconscious netherworld, in the gap of the zeno paradox?  This is how subtle the control is, this is the depth of nuance in the programming.

We have this unquestioning belief in progress and technology yet this too is rationed.  At a carefully controlled timetable technology is allowed to plod forward.  Too much progress could create the potential to destabilize society.  To maximize profit means making light bulbs to burn out and engines to die within a calculable lifetime.  There are no quantum leaps forward, merely a thousand minuscule steps each with its own price tag.  In this way science itself is being restrained, bridled by a system that demands perseverance over progress.

The tequila is burning deep in my bloodstream now.  I can’t see the lights of the highway over the far ridge, but I know it’s alive with cars.  I pull a book of poetry out of my sleeping bag and curl up.  Society and its workings have become a consensual hallucination, a drug, a delusion.  I do not wish to be a part of this malevolent dream.  The fire starts to die down, I’m too drunk and tired now to get more wood out of my truck.  The dying light flickers across the sage brush in every direction, throwing shadows that form a hundred black daggers aimed at the center where I lie.  The daggers slowly close in on me.  I fall asleep, alone in the desert, as the coyotes howl.

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3. Writhing In My Insect Fear

I had been sitting there thinking about some subtle cues that I had picked up on recently.  A friend at work told me I was riding high before a great fall.

“Whaddya mean by that?”

“Well, you go out boozing all the time.  You’re always dating a bunch of different women.  You’re charging hard, man.”

“Elaborate.”

“Well, I’m happy in my married life.  I don’t want to go out, I want to do my married life things.  You’re single and you want to do you’re single life things, and you’re doing it.”

After an initial effort many of my friends become lost after they got married.  Sucked into the vortex of what they call ‘married life’.  They stop going out, stop doing things altogether.  I have no idea what they must do all goddamn day, sitting at home, staring at each other.  I’ve had girlfriends that were like this.  The lovely Christy.  She was so sweet and beautiful.  She could have walked straight out of the pages of a Victoria Secret magazine.  She would come over, plop down on the couch, and stare at me.

“Hey, what do you want to do today?” I would ask.

“I’m doing it.” Her innocent green eyes would tell me with a vapid smile.

Her only ambition was to be with me.  Sit there on the couch, staring at each other, being together.  It wasn’t for me, I had to cut the strings, it was driving me insane.  My married buddies always crowd in with eyes glowing like a child’s on Christmas morning when I roll into work on Monday.  They have been doing ‘family things’ all weekend while I was out hunting.  They were sitting on couches or remodeling bathrooms while I was out savaging the earth.  Society itself has a vested interest in having men get married, they are less threatening to the social order.  These men are emasculated.  Sterile.  Emotionless.  They are the dead.  It could be argued that by having children and a family that they are  prospering  while I am actually the one cut out of posterity, but there is nothing dynamic in their lives.  There can be no threat of defeat in their lives, so there becomes no potential for victory.

I’ve had a number of dates, serious dates, with dinner and drinks and conversation and bullshit.  All the trappings of human pair bonding.  Clean clothes and brushed teeth and deodorant.

There was the vegan I took to a steakhouse.  She only told me after we arrived at the restaurant that she was vegan.  I ordered a giant steak, she the shitake mushroom burger.  We were at one of those places where you grill your own food.  There we stood, huddled around a roaring flame, me grilling my massive steak – she grilling a giant fucking mushroom.  She got drunk off two martinis; I think that was the only thing saving her from vomiting as she watched me destroy a pound and a half of raw meat.  Her contorted facial expressions as she watched me eat are clear in my mind even to this day.

There was the obsessive compulsive girl that freaked out that there might be gum under the bar, moving her hands in strange ritualistic ways as we talked.  Wondering endlessly whether she had left her flat iron on at home and if it would burn the house down.  I, eventually frustrated with her insanity, swiped my hand under the bar.  “Nope, no gum.”  I then wiped my hand off on her shoulder.  She cringed, then sat frozen – disgusted beyond the capacity to act.  She eventually had to leave, she was worried about her dogs.  She had four daschunds.

There was the twelve stepper I met out for a drink one Thursday night.  She preached on and on and on about ‘the program’ and how great it was.  The more she talked, the more I drank.  She had been sober for four years now, quitting the stuff when she was only 24.  I asked her why she did it, was there some event or great tragedy that drove her from booze? ; Hoping that there was just one sign of life within her.  She said that she had simply been drinking too much and she needed to quit.  I finished my drink and left.  She was lifeless.

I’ll tell you this because I know it, every man or woman has buried within themselves a dark side, a savage side.  When a man is taken out of society and left to create his own norms, he rediscovers those instincts, which have lain dormant since the beginning of existence.  Survival of the fittest, physically and intellectually, is the foundation of these instincts.  I remember being back in West Virginia for training some years ago.  We were using an abandoned mental institution for close quarters combat training.  The town itself had only one main intersection.  The mentality, the disposition of people there, coal miners.  You don’t work that job without knowing that you’re going to die.  There’s a desperation to it, a sense of abandon.  You see your friend killed, buried under a pile of shale, then go back to work the next day, that’s just the job.  You start to develop this careless sense of your own mortality.  People who have been working in some of the most dangerous occupations there are, it creates a sense of fatalism and a lack of fear of death.  That type of thinking was pervasive there, and it’s all about hopelessness.  You don’t see a lot of optimism about the future.  These were common people, but that sounds pretentious and condescending.  They were the salt of the earth.  They were fearless.  They drank fearlessly and lived fearlessly.  They fought the world and they fought each other.  They chopped away at life like their shovels and pick axes chopped away at the unforgiving earth.  A place where they all knew they would end up.

I have had these experiences as well.  There are monsters in this world, and since monsters cannot be allowed to roam the civilized world, someone must be sent to destroy them.  I have been sent into the wilderness to slay monsters.  To find the monster, you must take the same path as the monster.  This path is a journey into one’s own mind, soul, and true self.  While on this path you will never see evil so clear and defined as in your own reflection.  In taking this path, you run the risk of becoming the very thing you are trying to destroy.  When fighting monsters you should be careful not to become one, and when looking into a void you must be aware that the void also looks into you.

In returning from the wilds you must face the duality of your new existence.  You are in the world yet forever separated from it.  You are full of emotion and simultaneously emotionless.  You ask yourself, “am I the only one who is alive or am I the only one who is dead?”  Your soul seeks to embrace nihilism, a philosophy of nothingness where there is no ultimate meaning to anything.  Modern society is becoming nihilistic. You are profoundly alone.  Your parents don’t understand you, are absent, except for insisting that you progress along a conventional path.  You look around you and find nobody to trust with your feelings; most people everywhere are not genuine.   You start to view humanity with intense disappointment, even cynicism.  How is it that the older people get, the farther from authenticity they get?  Meanwhile, the gradual deterioration of the body disgusts you.  There is no allure in growing older.

Authority does not seem related to wisdom, either.   People tell you to find direction and thus stability, but you view such advice as both suspicious and naïve; playing such a game is inauthentic.  Going your own way autonomously, as a law unto yourself, does not work out so well either most of the time, so it is unclear where you might find legitimate authority.  Religion is pure garbage.  Individual achievement is being replaced by misplaced notions of virtue in society and in the state.   Humanity has become ruled by ‘the mob’.

Whenever you feel the urge to meet someone, to call up a girl, to have a social experience, you end up sabotaging it.  You might want to sleep with a prostitute, to party with strippers, to feel human comfort, but this will not do.  You might want to interact with friends at a bar, but you end up saying something hurtful or raw so that they abandon you.  Pushing them away provides a deeper and deeper loneliness, but at these moments of choice you are willing to endure it rather than eventually face the ultimate, devastating loneliness of your nihilistic heart or compromise yourself and become non genuine.

The greatest tragedy, aside from your loneliness, is in the relationship between the pain of actual experience and feeling your own feelings.  They both posses an equally destructive numbness that comes with shutting down your emotions in order to overcome suffering.   After being faced with death, parts of you essentially shut down, forcing you to lose attachments to other people. You repeatedly tell yourself how important it is not to get attached to anyone, you have an independent streak now, and they will let you down anyway.  Then, every once in a while you meet someone pure and true, reminding you that you still hold the capacity to love, but when you look at her, you feel smothered by the same tortured feelings of realization that we are all doomed.

This is truly an existential crisis. Everyone around you, everyone you see or interact with, is completely full of shit.  They have not stared into the abyss, their existence is trite and meaningless and ultimately superficial.  It is this superficiality that drives you insane.  The fact that no one is acknowledging how trivial and fleeting life is, compared with the grand things we tell one another about reality—how difficult it is to truly love and share oneself with people knowing that all will eventually die—causes you to burn with frustration, contempt, and even rage.  Knowing that on some level one of the most profound truths of mortal life: the superficial matters little because it will not last, yet it is made to seem so much more important.  Meanwhile, all around you, you must watch superficial people win honors through their artifice.  You yourself are even castigated for your honesty and hard work, while the mindless superficial sheep are raised high.  You grow to hate society for embracing so superficial a perspective.

In the end, all you truly want is some authentic living, to hold on to someone true who knows nothing of or is enraged against the world’s superficiality and therefore is not tainted by it.  You remember all the greatest moments of your life, standing alone on the icy mountaintop, and you seek to experience this again.  You push living to the extreme, like the coal miners, erasing the lines between what should be done and what can be done.  This has been a solitary journey and none of the superficial or sterilized people have or will ever understand it.  Your only hope is that at journey’s end you have satisfaction in your own choices and actions.

So I slowly sip my whiskey and water.  I’m alone in the bar now except for the bartender.  I listen to the cars speed by outside, the news reports bleating from the old tv set hanging in the corner.  The wind is blowing hard now hinting at dark and turbulent seas.  I have to go back to work tomorrow, back to the starving eyes of my coworkers.  I had authentic experiences this weekend.  I lived raw and true and proudly wear the scars to prove it.  So here I sit, waiting, with my whiskey and my doomed wondering, like a Neanderthal putting flowers on a grave.  Genetic testing shows that there was zero breeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal man.  They were a completely separate race of creatures living on this planet, yet they had souls.  I finish my drink, consider walking home, through this soulless city.  I pause momentarily, close my eyes, hold my breath, and swallow hard against the truth – I’m still waiting to meet someone who will come and help me shake the pillars of heaven.  I exhale and walk home.

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The urge to piss hits me like a punch in the gut.  I stumble out of bed, half-naked.. damn, and walk to the bathroom.  Johnny’s jacket and boots are on the floor, his wallet, keys, and phone are sitting on the counter but he is nowhere to be found.  In the futon where he passed out lays a blonde girl with huge fake tits wearing only a g-string.  I remember Serina calling one of her stripper friends to come over last night but I have never seen this girl before in my life.  She smells like Jagermeister and cigarettes.  Where the fuck is Johnny!?  No time to solve this now, my bladder is about to erupt.  With the first drop of urine into the bowl I exhale in rapturous triumph as I imagine somewhere, far off, a glorious symphony of angels celebrates my pissing.  I sluggishly crawl back into bed, want to sleep, need to sleep.  My head feels like it’s filled with a swarm of angry bees.  Serina’s little dog Pirate wakes up and starts licking the bottom of my left foot.  I am the damned.  I pass out.

When I awake again things are starting to come to life.  Serina and the blonde are playing with Pirate in the kitchen, neither dressed.  I walk out into the room;

Me, “Where’s Johnny?”

Blonde, “There was nobody here when I got here last night and you two had already sleeping.”

Serina, “When did you get here?”

Blonde, “I dunno… I was really drunk.  Did we mess around, my kitty itches?”

Serina, “I don’t think so, did we?” She looks at me quizzically.

Me, “Look man, I don’t fucking know a goddamn fucking thing and right now I don’t fucking care.  I just wanna find Johnny and go home.”

Serina, “Awww baby, let me take care of you.”

She lays me down on the bed and starts to caress my face.  The blonde comes in and plops down on the bed, she is stroking Serina’s hair.  I try to sit up but they push me down and tell me to just relax.  They are both massaging me now.  Holy shit.  I contemplate attempting the oft fantasized feat that is two girls at the same time.  Both are naked, both are willing, but alas my pitiful aching brain is too feeble and hungover to muster the effort to transform fantasy into reality.  I settle for drinking warm tap water while they make out on top of me.  My only reprieve, a short lived moment of glory when I tell Serina to “Give me both barrels, baby!”  just before I motorboat her bountiful rack.  Sometimes even despair can be fun.  I think I must still be drunk.  Despite the knowledge that on my death bed I’ll probably regret not powering through, they both start to feel their mortality the way I was already feeling mine and we all settle on a nap together.

After a 45 minute refresher I awake troubled.  I am fairly concerned about Johnny.  I’ve never known him to wander off like this before and I am praying to the god of hangovers that he is not in the clink.  He has no money, no phone, no boots, no keys, no nothing.  I need to collect his shit and escape, but I am a fucking wreck.  It’s all I can do to suggest breakfast and limp towards the door.

My stomache hurts deep.  A stab of pain, I buckle, bend over, and puke into the grass out front of her apartment.  My puke is mostly water mixed with a little blood.  The blood, idealized in the sticky heat, sits glistening on the grass below my face.  My tear-filled eyes stare at it woefully.

Serina, “Baby, you ok?”

Me, “I’m broken.  I need a fucking drink.”

Serina, “Yeah me too.  I know just the place.”

This is why I love strippers, they are pure rock n roll.  The neighbor’s dog trots over and happily begins lapping up my bloody puke.  Life sure is fucking gnarly.  Just for the record I don’t think the blood is actually from me boozing, and no you fuck-tards it’s not just denial talking.  I’ve been taking this bodybuilder speed for the last couple weeks to kick my workouts to the next level.  You know, that cherry flavored napalm they pack with heaps of caffeine, creatine, and a medley of other exotic chemicals to assist in your “thermogenic vasodilation” and other such nonsense.  I am usually dry-heaving through the last 45 minutes of my workout.   I started off taking just one scoop, but these days I tweak out on three.  It’s mutating my genes and killing my stomach, but I’m having some of the best workouts of my life.  Good stuff.

Breakfast stared back at me with bloodshot eyes.  Roast beef hash and eggs.  I was hoping the horseradish sauce and salsa would pull me back down to earth, no dice.   I swigged a cold beer, it felt so rejuvenating on my aching stomach that I had another.  Throughout breakfast I calculated my escape from this situation.  I mean, I had completely extricated myself from this girl and now I was having breakfast with her after a drunken night of god knows what.  My cell phone was now dead, its lifeless face mocking me, frozen into a perpetual snarl.  I decide that the best course of action is to just ride it out.  I’m not being shot at.  I’m not in Iraq or Afghanistan.  I’m not bruised, bloodied, or beat up.  I’m not in jail.  I’m having breakfast with a besotted bump-and-grinder, things could be a hell of a lot worse.  I sit there watching her eat.  She has such a sweet and pleasant way about her.  It’s hard to deny that she is attractive, aside from the obvious fact that she dances naked for money.  Historically, the formula of attraction was not very difficult for me.  The women that usually accompany me only really needed two qualities; they must be strikingly beautiful and shockingly crazy.  Finding both qualities in the same woman is never a very hard thing to do.  Serina was reading Vonnegut when we first met.  She moved on to Nietzsche without any knowledge of my love for his work, or for reading.   This had an obvious draw for me.  Well that and her rocking body.  But before she even had a chance, the scars on my heart started to itch, warning me to never let her inside.  And so she was locked out.  Her sad beautiful eyes never had a chance.  I tried to warn her one night while wasted; “I’m a sinking ship, swim away from me sea-horse.”  This only had the opposite effect.  An idea finally sprouted in my brain: Hang out with her today, deal with the consequences tomorrow.  So it goes.

We pulled into my neighborhood.  I had only invited her over twice before, counting the time I passed out drunk when she was coming over and she sat forlorn in her car all night.  Somehow she knew the way by heart.  I invite her in, I put on a record and started to relax on the couch.  My condo had been the starting point of the night and in returning home I was greeted by two dozen empty beer bottles and an assortment of booze-sticky cups, music was still playing.  I had left every light on and the back window open.  By now fruit flies were cultivating the third generation of families in this newly discovered utopia of my wrecked home.  I am too tired to even think about cleaning up.  Serina is on her absolute best behavior, no hint of the psycho stalker that caused me to run for the hills two months ago.  I think she knows that at the slightest hint of crazy I’ll pull the plug on her for another couple months, possibly forever.  I’ve never believed in god, I don’t believe in Prozac anymore.  Apparently Johnny called her the night before because we needed a ride home from the Hustler Club.  I don’t even remember going or being there.  Despite the evidence presented by the entire content of this episode I actually despise strip clubs.  I wonder if I’m just lying to myself, but now is not the time to confront lingering lassitudes.

The night started out so innocently.  Johnny and I were going to see a Johnny Cash cover band at the Casbah.  We decided to pre-party at my place.  Then Jake dropped by with a couple more buddies.  Before anyone knew it we were swept up in the whirlwind that ended up ripping homes off foundations and threw me carelessly into the embosoming embrace of a lovestruck stripper.  Fuck, JOHNNY!?  I still had no word from him.  I needed to mobilize.  Serina acted understanding when I cut away to check Johnny’s house for signs of life.

I pulled into his driveway with his truck, affectionately named the ‘Apocalypse 6000’.  It was still parked at my place from the night before – yet more cause for concern.  I bang on his door, Draco starts barking, and then Johnny emerges.  Thank fucking shit!  Johnny told me he walked outside to take a piss in the bushes and got lost.  Unable to find his way back to the house in his drunken state he ended up wandering the streets of the city until hailing a cab.  He had no money, no phone, and no shoes.  He tricked the cab driver into driving to a house a block away from his actual home, and when the guy stopped the car Johnny niggered the cabbie and ran away.  He twisted his ankle running through backyards with only his socks, but he made it home safe and sound, and I was glad to see him.   We drank beers and recounted the highlights of an amazing night as the sun set.  Eventually he gave me a ride home and the weekend was over.

There is a part of my brain that is telling me to tread carefully, that the water is rising, but living raw and feral is my only escape from the tyranny of this world sometimes.  There are no frontiers any more.  There are no more wilds.  The bill of rights is just toilet paper.  I got a ticket for talking on my cell phone while driving last week.   I know strangers on X-box better than my own neighbors.  Statistics show that 98% of people eventually die.  Maybe, like Kurtz, I have created a wilderness in my own heart.  Right now, as I crack a beer and finish up this article, I don’t really fucking care.

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I’ve been in a weird state lately.  My birthday this year triggered something, it was the rifle shot that started an avalanche.  My living room has become a bridge that spans a chasm between two worlds.  I’ve been wrestling ideas – tiring work.  My conclusions have all been as drab as an armful of dead leaves.  My fingernails soiled from digging for answers in the damp autumn earth.  I sit here buried alive with absurdity trying to think myself out of the coffin, unable to argue against the cosmic purposelessness of life itself.  At times my life seems guided by unseen forces that wield my fate with a presence more felt than seen.  I am moving into increasingly incomprehensible directions.  The great frigid weight of a hunger that spans decades is rising up in me again.  I want blood, I want freedom.  Each night crashes over me like a black plutonian wave, I am blinded, being led to certain destruction.  A rage that speaks to me in a cacophony of voices stolen from the dead, summons my own dark gods.  I walk through the bars and alleyways, every man a brother, all of us unified only in the sudden inexplicable sense of our own doom.  I watch the pint glasses being washed, dried, and then put back into service behind the bar – an inescapable cycle of decay.

San Diego itself seems a necropolis today, a city of the dead.  I laugh as I watch one pull a Styrofoam cup out of a public trash can then drink from it.  Another slowly staggers across the street with the aid of a walker.  A fat one looks about to explode, bulging with a slimy gaseous putrescence.  We all love to laugh about it, the insidious tedium, the pointless desperation in a place more virtual than real.  Joking about the drama in a vast virtual hallucination patrolled by the darkest secrets of our wandering lives.  The truth is that the sole industry of this place is carnage, scarred and mangled corpses its only product.  The horror of another day smothered out by alcohol and politics and sex and tv.  The ceaseless night buzzing over head like a surgeons lamp as I lay anesthetized on the table.  I feel like I’ve been trying to claw my way out of this dirty bathroom stall all this time and finally realizing that the only escape is down the toilet.  Maybe the computer’s subtle control exerted over me by stopping at every red light eventually drove me insane so that the only path seemed to be just to fucking floor it and hope for the best.

I talked with some friends about this recently and many of them are feeling the same thing.  Get out.  Get out now.  We are all feeling trapped, they in their world, me in mine.  I am a bird of prey locked in a golden cage.  I return to my apartment, kick off my shoes.  A days worth of change thrown into the tall jar next to my front door.  Yesterday, today, tomorrow.  Every day, for a lifetime.  This is the modern price of a human life, a handful of pocket change.  This is what the bums want, your soul.  Speaking of bums, I ran into one of my neighbors in the local bar last night.  He said that he watches and remembers everything that happens in the complex.  He’s the “oldest”, been there the longest, and he doesn’t forget anything.  He reminds me of the times the cops have come and kicked in my front door for one reason or another.  He refreshes my memory on every girlfriend I’ve ever had, somehow making me miss them.  He talks about the crazy people that live in the building; he says that I am the most secretive.  I am the most secluded, the most antisocial.  He says there’s rumors that I travel overseas for the government, that I’m a Navy SEAL, that I’m a killer.  He says that despite all this that I’m an amazing listener.  He actually thinks I give a shit. Wrong.  In fact, while he is talking, I’m thinking; ‘How can I give less of shit?’  That’s why I look interested.  I finally tell him that he’s fucking crazy and to stay the fuck away from me.  Drunken troubles with the law are only a fraction of my alienation from society.  I am paranoid, a conspiracy theorist, even at times to my own detriment.  This is a nightmare world that I cannot wake up from.   But I am a soldier, and it’s a soldier’s job to survive.  I will survive.

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