Ambergris and Other Valuable Ejaculate

Taking a break from the mind-bending derangement of storywriting, I have been, as all great lovers of fiction and maritime subjects must, reading the tome that so many consider to be the very line in the sand separating those who enjoy reading and those who believe their spirit to be made from the same mana as the books occupying the shelves of the metaphysical library. (Editor's note: The whereabouts of the Metaphysical Library are currently unknown, though experts believe it to be somewhere near the entrance to Narnia. The Metaphysical Library has the greatest selection of books on earth, though late fees are unprecedentedly steep.)

To complete the novel of which I speak demands only three things: a pathological determination to turn pages; the wide-eyed nights of the insomniac; and the delirious pursuance of existential latencies in poetic manifestations of phrase. It is the retelling of old myths, and the revelation of new ones. And, it is, uncontestedly, one of the greatest American novels of all time.*

What book, you might ask? Why Moby Dick! of course. I'll bet you thought I was talking about Where the Wild Things Are didn't you? Dirty philistines, pull your head out of the honey jar. (Editor's note: There's nothing wrong with having your head in the honey jar unless you're Winnie the Pooh, and then Mr. Rabbit will have your sugary ass in a sling.)

Moby Dick is by no means the leviathan of boredom so many believe it to be. True, it weighs in at over 600 pages, but so does the wrap sheet of Robert Downey Jr. and the transparent propaganda of one Ayn Rand. It's riveting, funny, touching, and absurd. I mean, the savage Queequeg eats his breakfast with a harpoon! What does he drink his rum with? A blubber bailer!? (Editor's note: Queequeg was unavailable for comment, though his publicist insists Queequeg drinks his rum from a glass just like everybody else, though the glass he uses is fashioned from a human skull.)

Melville's tale It is not light reading by any means, however, it is twice as compelling as anything written by the man to whom it is dedicated. (Editor's note: Nathaniel Hawthorne was a sissy boy who liked his lollies and wore bows in his hair.) Believe me, Moby Dick is a much preferred alternative to the following disappointments that have, regrettably, forced themselves into my visual field lately:

1. Oliver Stone's Alexander. I don't like Colin Farrell as a unshaven, whore-frequenting, heterosexual Irishman. I don't like him as an unshaven, murderous homosexual Greek either. There are more accents in this movie than there are euthanasia candidates on the Jerry Springer show, and not a one of them sounds Greek. Angelina Jolie is so one dimensional in everything she does it amazes me that she pulled off not one but twain movies about 2-D video-game-female-Indiana-Jones Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

2. The aftereffects of Hurricane Kartrina.

3. The end of season performance of the Minnesota Twins.

4. A naked man selling doughnuts on the freeway entry ramp. (Editor's note: The author has, under threat of perjuring himself, willfully admitted that he never saw a naked man selling doughnuts anywhere near the freeway. The man of which the author spoke was, in fact, selling Nashville Star Maps and scantily clad in a dust mask around the waist.)


*(Editor's note: Rounding out the definitive list of the Ten Greatest American novels of All Time are, in no particular order:

1. "When I Was a Kid This Was a Free Country," the autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy.

2. "The Book of Mormon."

3. "The Dukes of Hazzard Coloring Book," [author is currently in a witness protection agency to protect his identity due to the controversial nature of this banned book].

4. "A Complete Idiots Guide to Papercuts," by Solomon Crimsteb, martyr for snail mail, bled to death while licking envelopes.

5. "The Collected Sonnets of Jeff Foxworthy," by Jeff Foxworthy and Microsoft Word Spell Check.

6. "Bootylicious...and Other 4 Syllable Words I Made Up to Describe My Tooshylumpums," by Beyonce Knowles.

7. "Seuss is Satan: Green Eggs and Ham and the Devil Too,' by Jerry Falwell.

8. "Saddam Hussein's Guide to Bar Mitzvahs and Mustard Gas," by Saddam Hussein.

9. "The Guinness Book of World Records 1957"

This list was definitively cross-referenced with the Lord God himself.)

A Beast of Modernity

Photo Caption:I hate this guy, and now I'm him.


I feel inclined to talk about my upcoming grad school applications, although I'm sure that's not really of interest to anybody. So I won't.

Instead, I'll talk about how I am currently in a state of cognitive dissonance with myself. No, I did not commit a hit and run or steal a little old lady's purse (although I might be headed in that direction), I bought a cell phone. I feel dirty.

There was a time when I went an entire year without a phone of any kind. When I was living in Spain, and even after I came back, I didn't see the need for one. I thought, and still think, cell phones a curse that's finally catching up to us. I've been told Nostradamus predicted them at some point and I think he's referring to cell phones when he talks about a "demonic presence that screams in the middle of 'My Best Friend's Wedding' and distracts us from crucial plot developments of the eleventh hour of our finality." He was either speaking of cell phones or infants, experts are still investigating.

So, alas, I am now nearly caught up with the rest of the technological world. Computers I was happy to use, microwaves, radios, DVD players-all great. But cell phones, I don't know, they seem like mechanical leeches.

The Amish sent me a letter the other day expressing their strong disapproval. I tried to call them to apologize, but all I got was a busy signal.

They Say One Out of Every 10 People is a Descendant of Genghis Khan

It is surprising to me that for the majority of human life as we know it, it was much rarer to find a man who had never taken another's life than it was to find a man who had.

Perhaps we are only alive now because we are the progeny of the most successful murderers of all time. In that case, are we pacifists not the outsiders, and those imprisoned for violent crime the norm?

The Theatre

So, I'm housesitting for my parents for ten days and fortunately they have Netflix (that's not a plug unless Netflix would like to send me a check!) Here are my impressions of what I've seen so far...(Editor's note: Only Apocalypse Now and Caddyshack have ever received the maximum stellar rating of five stars.)

1. A Love Song for Bobby Long- starting John Travolta and the gorgeous Scarlet Johansen. Let me just put it this way: you'll be more entertained waiting for the action scene in Girl with a Pearl Earring while occasionally glancing at your Saturday Night Fever poster. (Editor's note: For those of you who haven't seen it, there is no action scene in GWAPE.)

Rating: 0.0 stars

2. David Cross: Let America Laugh - David Cross is one of those people who I laugh at because he reminds me of someone I hate but feel guilty about hating them, and I feel if I laugh I'm somehow no longer going to hell because I can take pleasure in the success of somebody I hate. Does that make any sense? Well, let's just say that the double CD "Shut the F**k Up, You Baby" is much better than the DVD created from the same tour.

Rating: 1 1/3 star if you want to laugh, 3 stars if you wanted to go to a local stand-up gig but your buddy had to work a double so he couldn't give you a ride and you got high instead.

3. Sin City: Cartoony, hot chicks, comic-like, hot chicks, yellow blood, hot chicks, black and white noir mystery, hot chicks, guys in their fifties kicking the shit out of guys in their twenties (i.e. Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke [who I think kicks more ass in this movie than he did when he tried to be a legit boxer]) and once in a while a hot chick. Think Dick Tracy meets Faces of Death with a side of Orson Welles.

Rating: 4 stars

4. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: If you like Wilco, rent it. If you don't I hope you're enjoying the new Backstreet Boys album. P.S. Rob Thomas called, he said he thinks he's cooler than you. (Editor's note: That's low.)

Rating: 3 1/2 stars.

5. Entourage: The Series: I only have one thing to say about this HBO show: I never would have rented it had I known Mark Wahlberg was an executive producer. Did you ever see The Big Hit? Well, it's like that, minus the guns, minus the violence, and then add a bunch of New Jersey guidos transplanted to LA. Then try to make yourself care about them. Can't do it? Even after you've taken the time to remember their names? Neither could I.

Rating: Dirk Diggler was 13 inches. This show is 13 hydrogen atoms. (Editor's note: A star has at least 1 quadrillion billion billion hydrogen atoms. Margin of error: two billion atoms.)

6. The Manchurian Candidate: This remake stars Denzel Washington (playing a very good borderline schizophrenic), Liev Shreiber (playing a very good George Herbert Bush, uh...I mean, political puppet), and Meryl Streep (playing a very good sexual pervert senator who wants to jump her son's bones so badly she's willing to put the whole world at risk.) Freud meets democracy meets Illuminatis. Enjoyable.

Rating: 3 1/2 stars.

7. Collateral: Michael Mann knows how to create suspense, but will he ever do something as great as Heat? Probably not, so I'll settle for Collateral even if it is predictable and far fetched and cliched. (Oh, no...the cell phone battery dies out just as Jamie Fox is about to tell Jada Pinket Smith how to not get murdered! Such is life, right? [Editor's note: If I had a dime for every time somebody died because I didn't charge my cell phone battery the night before Donald Trump would be shining my shoes.]) I didn't really want to see this movie because of Tom Cruise's dye-job, but in the end it bothered me less than Mark Ruffalo hair, this great actor looked like he was an otter victimized by the Exxon oil spill. [Editor's note: Mark, would you like an extra quart of pomade before we shoot the next scene?]

Rating: 3 stars.

Next on the list:

1. God is Great, and I'm not...it's either a movie starring Audrey Tatou of Amelie or the one thing that's never crossed Karl Rove's thoughts.

2. Cremaster III: Neither Cremaster I nor Cremaster II have been released on DVD so I'll have to pick up this saga-esque visual journey of Masonic imagery with no dialogue in the middle. I think I'd be lost either way.

3. Oz, Season 1: Jail. I'm anticipating a male on male rape scene. Bring the kids. [Editor's note: Don't bring the kids.]

4. Da Ali G Show: If you don't love him, you don't understand what the world "culture" means and you surely don't unerstand what the words "feigned ignorance" means. And that goes for everybody, even Jacques Chirac. [Editor's note: Sorry, Jacques, I don't know what he's talking about.]

Don't forget the popcorn.

Murderous Whores Wear White Dresses and Live in White Houses

The Minotaur's vassal
- a small, yolked calf -
opalesces and Oval-ates
while rickety old Daedalus puzzles him
with demagoguery
from the other side of the labyrinth wall.

Herds of Roving swine
follow blindly
the filthiest Boar of all.

The cattle's horns,
the tawny barbs of piggish maw
are nothing if not
the spearheads
the New Virginians
skewer the bodies of the
Water American
and the man he helped
draft a nation
with sobriety.

(Orion is Scorpio forgiving
the wincing stab delivered,
the two stalemates gaze at Gaza as home and edict
of eviction)

Ailing Daedalus, the Boar,
and the Minotaur's aide
threaten to make glass
out of sand if others
continue to make glass
out of sand.



Once again, this piece in response to Laboratorium.

The Gift of Power

I find I cannot remember why
Perseus wanted to slay
Medusa.

"Hubris,"
you say.
"Was he want of reason?"

I laugh nervously
with my bitter Americano
absent of sugar.
Steaming.

The treachery of bastions
is their will to say,
"There's a gorgon!"
when it's a ruddy faced child
with wispy locks

that smiles
and smiles
so widely
as the sun behind waves
and fans her fair hair
into glowing, virulent snakes.



This poem in response/in conjunction to Laboratorium posting"Here We Go Again," blogged on Monday, August 15, 2005.

The Lonesome

There is something startling about being alone. Once you've grown accustomed to the habits, however unlike your own, of another person, spending time away from them reawakens a longing for companionship. A nascent want to be unified. A desire for the secure feeling of community. A deeper appreciation of being understood and wanted.

Solitude sheds light on one's anonymity. I was listening to the news the other day and the question was posed: "Do we have the right to be anonymous?" Of course we do, but to exercise this right is like exercising the right to be obese or exercising the right to not bathe. It is a very strange epiphany to realize that you've not spoken to another person in two days, or that no one has seen your face for a week, or should you fall down and break your back it would be days before anyone would miss you.

Unless you've grown up a hermit or have a schizoid personality and don't enjoy the company of others, being alone enforces the innate social drive we had even before we were even human. Look at primate species, most of them fall into one of two groups: those with a constant mate and those with a colony. Even outcast male gorillas form coup de jungla groups that aid each other in the forceful overthrow of a silverback so that one of them may appropriate the fallen silverback's harem. Even outcasts and pariahs rarely choose to exist on their own.

Solitude is a form of death, a type of death that does not involve grief, wakes, or burials. It is a living death. It is death in that we are allowed to peer into that vacancy we cannot escape. As they say, the only certainty in life is death. One enters this life anonymously, even unknown to oneself, however, no one should leave life anonymously. To do so would to be overlooked by fate, to have left a mark on nothing, not even the things you thought you touched.



Perhaps the solitary elderly tire of living not because the world has lost its novelty, but because the fear of being alone, of being removed from the social human chain, is a crippling fear. Oftentimes, these people long to die and go to heaven, or maybe even hell, because there will be others. Nobody ever thinks of heaven as a place where you can finally be alone.

Nietzsche said that people fear solitude because it forces them to cogitate on themselves, and they rarely like what they find. What do they find? That they are a shell without others? That everything they base their beliefs on is contingent upon beliefs suggested by others? (Don't believe me? Can ideas like racism, democracy, and justice exist in a society of one?)That there is no such thing as individuality because it takes a comparison to others for difference to be recognized? That even the most countercultural movement is focused not on isolating itself from society but on drawing society's attention inward to people who feel they've been overlooked?

Even the most degenerate sociopaths cannot escape the uneasiness of being alone. Criminals are put in solitary confinement as punishment, not because this is the only place where they can't harm others, but because this is a simulacrum for being forgotten. It is the fear of being forgotten-the fear that a day goes by when somebody doesn't think of you, the fear that we are not loved unless we're in the presence of the lover, the fear that you cease to exist as soon as everyone you know forgets your name and face-that frightens us the most.

P: Vol. 3. Final Condemnation

or
Political Buffoonery

The sky during the day was most often green with streaks of orange. Water fountains bubbled a sanguinary red whey - a tactic the Department of Catastrophic Prevention and Provocation believed would satisfy the bloodlust inspired by the oppressive Futurcon Amendments - resulting in many stained silk shirts. Policemen wore penguin suits and hurled eggs at innocent bystanders, then fined them for “sedentary sedition.” Extinguishing blazes was halted by the fire chief until the incendiary brilliance had ceased to impress the gathered spectators. Street performers - the bowling pin jugglers, the paintedpanickycy mimes, the mustachioed organ grinders - were indistinguishable from the members of the Upper Court, and the Lower Court Members wore the zebra-striped canvas jumpers of those they sent to the labor camps for the crime of being adilettantete or exhibiting uninspired comport."



Borders had been crossed. Arbitrarily. As arbitrarily as the establishment of inalienable rights. As arbitrarily as a raging mother spanks an ordinary child. Arbitrariness defined most of the customs of...

Pulchritude. The name as dichotomous as the town, the town as misleading as the word. The inner ear grasps onto the phonemes and theiarrangementnt and gags the brain, all four lobes seize with epileptic repugnance at the very sound of it. Pulchritude. How this word came to signify stunning vestige baffled even the profoundest of philosophers (who were allowed to wear only wool, even on sweltering days, as it had been decided that intelligence should secrete from the body and emit an odor recognizable from a distance).



The word and its meaning, thsignifierer and signified, the sound and the idea so vastly differed that the very word seemed to not be in earnest. Confabulating in its own ironic phonetic. Turning in on its nature as a word. Living a life of smoke and mirrors.



Pulchritude. Every time it was uttered the speaker became a pathologicamiscommunicatoror, a violator of words, a straddler of truth and lying in the extramoral sense. Pulchritude. The syllables of skulls and bones, meant only for the odiferous scraps of offal organs and humus, for rotting meat on carrion bones. For sewage pumping out of a gaping, regurgitating orifice of riveted steel. For the earthy, mushroompungencece of second-story hotel sheets in dissolute rooms, well above the grime of the streets but still below them.



Pulchritude. The word meant beauty, the town meant Hell.

P: Vol. 2. Engineering Feats of the Future

or
Further Obscuring the Line Between Florid and Fauna

What kind of place was this? What legion of emboldened lunatics had designed a city so fast in its stead and dedication to the absurd and surreal that mimicry had become its anthem? That the town itself had become not a desirable place of residence, not a locus of repute or a center of commerce, but an overpopulated and crime-riddled shamlet? A place of living nightmares and monstruous eyesores? A horrifying merger of abstraction and architecture?



Helicopters flew upside down. Food glowed in the dark so that when one opened one's mouth after a meal a train and its cyclopic headlamp appeared to be emerging from a mountain tunnel of tarmac and teeth.



Apartment buildings plummeted with antigravity aplomb, reaching toward the sky with sinuous, self-congratulatory appendages, their towers frolicking around one another like an embroiled mass of nucleic acid chains and Christmas tinsel. Like DNA skipping double dutch with dandelions. Phallic towers of stocks and bonds leaned incongruously at sixty-five degree angles, their domed tiers and severe needle-like antennas aimed as missiles toward the 10 o'clock sun.



Enormous doughnuts made of red brick and scrap metal housed shopping malls and colleges and processing plants. Subways were built with the unnecessary corkscrewing of rickety wooden roller coasters. Bus stop benches were fashioned to resemble spawning salmon.



And the opulent houses miles above the sun drenched hills - suspended like horse thieves to the impassable cliffs with Herculean steel threads - were built in the shape of tomatoes and pumpkins and peppers.



The poor lived in Petri dishes and clear glass boxes for all to see. On display at the theater of Pulchritude were the fruits of advantage or, showing at the nickelodeons, the foibles of misery.

P: Vol. 1. Cities of the Future

or
Baltimore, Eastern Ave. 1:00 A.M. Saturday Morning

Steam rose out from under the manhole covers in dry spindles and curved daintily around imaginary axes, the molecules careening off each other freely before dispersing into the air where they disappeared against the backdrop of the crimson night sky. The sky, like the manhole, and the steam for that matter, was illusory; a piecemeal blotch of pointillist burgundy cherries and imploded candy apples, an orchestrated tapestry conducted by tricky-dick lasers, distant particle spinners, and a series of reflective glass orbitals filled with reactive gelatin. The manholes were nothing more than a brand pressed into the asphalt by industrial stamping machines, like the demarcation of cattle with a cast-iron prod. Frozen nitrogen pellets dropped into vats of mineral water created the wafts of “steam” that wavered tentatively against the impressionist blur of the cosmos, like asphyxiating cigar smoke being blown in front of a macabre murder scene.



A car barreled through the whisps of steam, spreading open the gauzy curtains with the rip and roar of a twelve cylinder rhinoceros on wheels. In fact, to the hoards of tourists that sojourned to the foreign city every year, to the untrained eye with virginal vision, a motorcar cruising the streets at night looked more like a purple rhinoceros stampeding through the moist funk of an enshrouding jungle than an automotive achievement.



By official ordinance, all automobiles produced after the inauguration of the Futurcon Amendments were required to be built in the likeness of rhinoceroses (sedans), elephants (four wheel drive), or hippopotamuses (wagons). Occasionally, with government approval, state-commissioned engineers were allowed to design, for their express purpose as status symbols and bribes to foreign dignitaries, ostentatious two-seater convertibles inspired by the stout-snout tapirs of South America. Of course, production of such sportive beasts was limited and their acquisition coveted. The pachydermal carriages brayed sighs of congestion and excreted exhaustive clouds of carbon monoxide. The inhabitants of this zone of terror, whether they be butchers,



barristers,



belittling buckwheats,



bank robbers,



bobble bangers,



bourbon bottlers,



barnacle bumpers,



or bee bouncers,



all lived in the purgatorial vividness of their dreams. They all lived in Pulchritude.

Job Hunting on the Steppes of Mongolia

Job hunting - a truly dreaded activity - makes me think of the Herman Melville short story Bartleby. In Melville's short, he explores the dynamic of the work environment itself, how office politics are simply devious power struggles and how work itself is nothing more than a demoralizing routine of servitude, as Marx pointed out in his own writings.

Bartleby himself is a very interesting character. He has been hired to fill the roll of a filling clerk and his primary duty is, obviously, to file papers. After a certain point, however, Bartleby shirks his duties. When his supervisor asks him to perform routine tasks, Bartleby simply replies, "I would prefer not to."

I would prefer not to have to search for a job unrelated to my field. I would prefer to receive money to write, to read, to critique, to edit, to create stories. To think. I would prefer not to think I wasted four and a half years of my life and thousands of dollars gaining inapplicable knowledge. There has to be a job for me out there somewhere. Maybe I should start writing saucy romance novels. I'd rather do that than resort to telemarketing.

A degree in Humanities, knowledge of literature, having read the canon, being able to write and think analytically is like giving a caveman a sac of pebbles and telling him to bring home some mammoth steaks. In our day and age, if you want a spear an atlatl, you have to study either business, medicine, or law.

Children Should Be Scene Not Herd

Is it strange that whenever I'm driving alone I stop and wonder, "If I suddenly began choking, at this very moment, would I be able to pull over to a gas station quickly enough and get something to drink or convince someone to use the Heimlich maneuver on me before I passed out?" You would think this paranoia would make me uncomfortable driving in the country. It doesn't.

Is the world asking too much that we accept the danger of having drivers-in-training operating vehicles on the same streets as the rest of us? Shouldn't they have a training course of their own somewhere? Some facility? I don't trust people with their licenses, why should I be expected to drive amongst people without them?

And, gosh darn it, I never agreed to become an adult. Show me where I'm legally bound! Because I don't ever remember signing up to become an adult and it's an injustice that I should be expected to act like one!

Somewhere along the line I must have turned myself into an anagram.