Click each for the full (front and back) “postcard” version.

Last year’s

Hope your loved ones and arch enemies will enjoy these.

With that I return. Not with a trumpet and throaty throng but quietly, as though by moonlight, avoiding the squeaky step.

“Is that you? (groggily) What time is it?”

“Go back to sleep honey.”

I’ve sprung the trap and survived, and escaped, and so here I am. Home again. The trap is obvious, and in plain sight, but I am forgetful. Each time I look at it I see the glint on the teeth but not the teeth themselves. The glint is bright and shiny and I am a dim, dumb animal.  Probability, or Nature, or Destiny, or whatever you’ve labeled the comically inadequate mason jar in which you hold this concept- things take their course.

What can I say?

You turn your head sometimes, as if hearing a coo or whisper, and looking toward the window, expecting to see some winged thing perched on your windowsill, you see instead your own reflection. You see your life and it startles you more than any winged thing would. It is not what you expected to see, but worse it’s not even what you’d expect a life to look like. Its proportions are all wrong, its color off, its shape odd; In truth it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It looks foreign, and in as much, frightening. But it is your life still, and it’s as if in this unexpected moment you were glimpsing it for the first time.

Of course this is all Balderdash, or Poppycock, or Bullshit, or whatever you’ve labeled your most treasured mason jar- you’ve seen this ugly thing before.

I’m forgetful, as I’ve already mentioned. When I momentarily see past the well-tooled facade, past the fortification of amusements and distractions, over and beyond the ramparts of routine, I get spooked.

More often than not I react to this reoccurring revelation in a predictable way. I cycle through my mason jars, popping their lids in quick succession- Confusion, Annoyance, Anger, Regret, Longing, Sadness. Their smells waft through my rooms, swirling, blending into complex and potent combinations. What began as merely disturbing, through my panic, becomes overwhelming. Like the dim, dumb animal I am I seek a dark place, hidden from predatory eyes, where I can gather myself and think.

Q: “Ever wondered what turns straight-forward drama into melodrama?”

A: “It’s the attempt at spreading a small portion of honest pain over every banal nook and cranny of the proceedings, creating a thin smear, rather than letting it lay, as a thick dollop, just where it naturally landed. That and the bad metaphors of course!”

So where was I?

Oh yes, In my forgetfulness I’d sprung the trap.

There is an incorrect assumption I repeatedly make, which is that through sheer force of will, given enough time and space, I can understand, dismantle, and rebuild existence into something which more resembles the existence of my imagination. Because of this I abandon things in an attempt to carve out that space and create that time. I stop, turn off, take a step back, begin analyzing and over-analyzing. Like a cat with a ball of yarn I smack at my existence with my thumb-less paws and claws and unravel it, only to find finally that my ball is gone, I’m tangled in the yarn, and there is nothing at the center. This is folly but it’s not the trap I speak of, not really.

At the center of life is a terror, a mystery, a question, a void. It is huge, and it has a gravitational pull of sorts, and were you to face it and stare into it every day you would not be able to function. We build a barricade against it with whatever materials we can scrounge because were we faced with it continuously we would not be able to attain even the most paltry scrap of contentment. That’s what Happiness, or Peace, or whatever you label your half-full mason jar really is- moments of distraction strung successfully together. If you can string those moments together for an entire lifetime you are a genius, a giant, a lucky son of a bitch.

So the trap is simply this: forgetting the void. When you do that you are apt to start misinterpreting your own defenses against it as something holding you in rather than something keeping it out. Happiness is being successfully distracted from the void, by projects, jobs, entertainments, passions, dreams… the trap is forgetting the void exists.

I’ve spent many an hour in my life scrutinizing my defenses, becoming dissatisfied with their materials, and tearing them down, only to see the void rather than greener grass, and be reminded why I’d built them in the first place. I’ve spent many an hour rebuilding my defenses from the wreckage of older ones. A real time waster let me tell you.

So the lesson, which my forgetfulness forces me to re-learn continually, is this: defenses need only be judged by a single criteria- their effectiveness. No matter what they look like, no matter from what materials they are cobbled, no matter whether they are the shape and proportions you imagined them to be when you were a mere emotional zygote, they need only work. If they do, leave them alone and keep on keepin’ on.

With that I return. As a cobbler returns to his shop on a grey monday morning.

(The bell on the door jingles. In you step.)

“Hi there. What can I do for you?”

-

Related: Dissatisfaction, Dexterity Puzzle of the Mind.

Again, If you’d like any more information please feel free to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) me. Note that the image I used to begin the post is no longer available.

You are descended from mortal men whose mortality can be glimpsed beneath all the fresh coats of enamel and giant pixelated printouts which seek to guide your purchases and reassure your mind. You are mortal as well. You know this. Walking the grid you can feel time as if it were a physical force, a gusting wind or a punishing wave. You look at the strange messages left by your ancestors, the ads, the architecture, the signs, the photos, the tints, the scrawl, the sum-partial of their choices, and you realize that though they are familiar they are at the same time foreign, and you, the modern mover-and-shaker, can never really understand their meaning.

The beauty of the eroding, the fading, the disappearing is that of reinvigoration. As counterintuitive as it sounds, things which are half-lost, torn from their original contexts are in a certain way given new life. Stripped as they are of their intended meaning and divorced from their real purpose they are open to interpretation. In reclaiming obscurity they reclaim mystery, and hence, beauty for those with eyes to see it.

In New York when something dies the corpse is often left out to rot, slowly and fragrantly, in the public eye and nostril. The American ideal of progress overrunning all sentiment. No time for mourning or last rights! A penny kept from an eyelid is a penny saved! Left out and ignored long enough these things become strangely vital again, moving in their death-throes, with none of the living remembering quite how they came to be, or why. 

If only my own remains could be left out on the street, to first bleach in the heat-wave sun, and then blacken in the taxi-exhaust. To be kicked into some corner and piled willy-nilly for passersby to wonder at; a hundred years from now becoming fodder for the imagination of observant romantics with an abundance of internal chop and too little weight to their anchors. I would smile at them and wink from a forgotten hollow, a ghost sign of bone, signifying nothing.

(The image for this post was adapted from the beautiful ghost signs flikr group.)

Mutation

And rather than being a whiny little douchebag about it I will do my best to continue posting as always. I only mention it so that if I go a few days here and there without updating you will know why without my having to post some longwinded self-involved explanation. Alright? Business as usual commencing now.

Text Reads:

I bought this at Chelsea Fleamarkets for twenty-five cents. I can’t help but wonder that if maybe Karen had scanned it into her computer and applied a decent black border around, perhaps I would suddenly consider it art. Images like these are ubiquitous in Art; we all like to think that we are somehow profound because we appreciate images such as this one. We look at this photograph and we think, “That’s someone’s great grandmother” and we yearn for the identities of these people. And we yearn for our own identities as well, because we have no sense of family in the way that our grandparents do. And so we yell everyone that it has aesthetic value because we don’t even know who we are, and then we blame them for not understanding our Art. We subject the entire world to our idiosyncratic insecurities and then we think we are somehow deeper when they don’t get it.

“The sweetness of sorrow and love. To be smiled at by her in the car. That was the most beautiful thing of all. Always the longing to die & yet keeping oneself alive; this alone is love.” -Kafka.

Admission:
In April I bought 8 colored pencils and 5 different pads. They were beautiful things. The possibilities inherent in their eventual interaction were exciting. I imagined them as they’d look here on this screen. I imagined the birth of pixels rather than their simple relocation. I imagined the characters of A Voyage to Arcturis with their many eyes and foreign limbs rendered and neatly titled. I imagined my hand moving in sweeping arcs and careful angles. I imagined a flow which I’d call freedom. The pencils and pads are beautiful things still, dusty things in the museum of my desk.

What if I wrote? Wrote like a machine without a grammar-module or spell-check? Wrote like the eyes of a man lost in a jungle? What if I wrote hard and wild and whistled into the necks of empty bottles in the nighttime? Would you be gratified? What if I cast it all aside and hunted the head of my potential’s long shadow? Isn’t that what you do already? Can anything slow the relentless narrowing down of possibility into reality? No.

Admission:
I’ve forgotten how to write. What you see before you is what you see everywhere-compromise. It’s the road paved with good intention. It’s an anagen hair hiding its precious root-tip. It’s about as funny and beloved as a woman’s laugh lines. It’s all excuses. It’s the personal failure which passes for public accomplishment. You think I kid but I do not. No creator ever hungered to be a curator instead.

People enjoy it. So what? I brush up against thousands of people every day on the subway, in the elevator, on the sidewalk, in the hallways, at the bank and the deli; They file past my desk and window in an endless shambling stream. Their children shit themselves and scream and want; their dogs walk on the left and they walk on the right, taught leashes strung between like tripwires. “People enjoy it?” Yes. What the fuck do I care what they enjoy? Is it my job to tickle their asses with a delightful little feather? I don’t like them much, not sure I ever have. “Hope you enjoy.” How many times have you written that? Weak moments, punch-lines, every one.

Admission:
All is not what it seems. It’s less than it seems, and perhaps even less than that.

What if I called a spade a spade? Do you destroy a delusion by naming it as such? What if I called it what it was, self-absorption, and rather than prostrating myself and pretending at remorse I embraced it as my birthright in our culture? What if I wrapped myself in my own weaknesses? What if I split apart all syntax, ignored all context, and defied all expectation? What if I broke the contract and burst the bounds and spit in the eye of every passerby? That wouldn’t be like you. Exactly! And if “it” is me then to change it… But why would you want to change it?

Admission:
Because eventually the repetitive act of rooting out links and following them to their connected pretty pictures makes you want to do nothing so much as vomit.

What if I wrote a self-indulgent, rambling prose-poem, and posted it accompanied by meaningless scribbles? Would the result still be The Nonist? I don’t know. And does it matter?

For my safety, landlubber that I am, the captain brought me down into the hold of the ship amid a payload of instruments and devices, the purposes of which I dared not ponder. He sat me down saying, “just relax, lay back, you shouldn’t feel a thing. It will all be over before you know it.” His first mate placed a cup of water at my side and the they went about their duties, not paying me any heed.

What followed was… well unpleasant. I closed my eyes, feeling nothing so much as numb. I opened my mouth as if to yawn but no sound issued. Outside thunder did what it does best and rumbled ominously. Other noises sounded above me and my closed eyes which were less familiar and is as much perhaps even more ominous.

I heard machinery revving and spinning and a wet spluttering as though the boats motor were meeting resistance and throwing water against rocks. I heard the scraping and clinking of unknown devices being put to use, and the voices of the crew, calling out in the lingo of their kind, the meanings impenetrable to such as I. I’d swear I could feel the heat of these unknown machines on me as though they were a millimeter from my face. I found it hard to swallow. The burning smell of motors and hot friction was inescapable. I promised myself I’d take whatever precautions needed to avoid trips like this in the future.

Suddenly everything seemed to stop. No more sounds; no more fury. I opened my eyes. As if on cue the captain reappeared, saying, “Pick up that cup of water and use it son! Then get up out of that chair and come with me. It’s all over.” And indeed it was.

As it turns out while I was down in the hold the storm had blown over. I walked out onto the upper decks to find bright clear skies. We’d docked and my leg of this blasted trip was at an end. The captain handed me my writs of passage, informed me the price of the voyage had been taken care of (miracle of miracles!), and simply bid me farewell, as though it were just another day at the office for him, which I guess it was. I disembarked from the ship and headed out into a gloriously warm and sunny day, my trial at sea over.

All of which is to simply to say:

It was pouring this afternoon here in New York, and I had the misfortune of being obliged to head down to my local dentist, in the pissing rain, to have two, counte em’, two root canals. Not a fun scenario. But as it turns out when it was all over and I left the office the rain had stopped, giving way to a gorgeous sunny day. I had a scrip for some heavy pain-killers in hand and a stroll through a glistening Central Park in front of me. So it ain’t all bad!

Oh wait, I spoke too soon. It’s pouring again, worse than before. And the Novocain is wearing off… I think I’m about to have a flashback…

yeesh. For more on the trials and tribulations of dentistry see this previous post pulling teeth.