The Certainty of Crayola Crayons

I woke up with one shoe, and blue paint all over my hands—don’t ask me what happened. All I can say is, at least it wasn’t blood."
I joked with her about narrow escapes from saucers, and who knows what color vital fluids are in other regions of time and space.
"Don’t say that," she said. "You’re giving me the creeps. I had no recollection whatsoever of what went down, or with whom.

Blue paint ... I considered that. I love either explanation, diving from a gangplank amidst ball lightning as the Aurora Pulsejets are scrambled, or being locked in the trunk of a fetish artist, blasted on mickies, pain pills, wine and cocaine. While speaking to her, the radio spat interviews with sports fans, the latter five were couch surfers, one of which raced Indy cars with his father, and uttered this epithet: "I love the competitiveness of it... being able to crush your friends." And I drew my breath in. Just when the world seems as mad as it can be, you get an eleven year old perspective on things. And theater never seemed so shallow; one has to wonder vouchsafe about ancient Scottish Rite followers, fornicating to loud chants, coveting the orgasm state to fleece the mind of thought, to discover things.




It was a pretentious time of my life, where I touted adages, lies in the likes of: No matter how little there is in the fridge, a gourmet meal lies waiting there, as surely as Michelangelo’s David lay dormant in its original slab of marble. The trick exists in its parsimonious alchemical rendering, which dilettantes are blind to. Most chefs, and I use that term most loosely, are habituated to fresh ingredients, not macaroni and cheese in a box, where the latter’s a powder in orange. No amount of Zen will return two week old wine from ruin, unless you’re not long for this world, having mastered its finest lessons twice.




Associating pleasures with narcotics posed difficulties in quitting one, for its compliment seems intimately attached to it, suggesting both must be sacrificed . Because the feeling you receive from the pleasure is shaped by the intoxicant, the attachment to it is profound, as it threatens the sanctitude, or defining aspect, of the pleasure itself. If you’ve been using the drug recreationally for years, it has invaded your cause and effect to the point, it is part of a larger weave. Stopping it affects everything you most attach to. What we turn to is the noble glory a war veteran suffers when they recall momentous times, which stripped them of fundamental safeties and pleasures. They have been brought down to their naked souls, where survival instincts short-circuit. Here, you can release anything; the atomic bonds behind higher ideas collapse; all things are fleeting; moments become hours. I remember with surprise, learning the Latin of Passion is suffering—and there you have it. Misery is a product of the ground we rise from.


White pow(d)ers elicit black depressions. What did you expect, eternal enlightenment? You’re borrowing from something, to fuel another ... it’s a debt with interest, so choose your expenditures wisely. In its court, the bankruptcy clause is nullified. What you own and believe (same thing) is ground into raw material, and melted down into base ingots, for resale. You must begin again from zero. Being impatient people, this is impractical. Usually, as a stopgap, people turn to god, and grab the life ring of preordained dogma, the whole defends with its lives. I’m just warning you ... the I told you so won’t reach your brain stem, once the pat answers take hold.



a supremely overweight professorial type is alternating between The Epic of Unitarianism, and the Atlantic Monthly article on the US Armed Forces game plan to militarily subdue China, in the coming cold war, madly highlighting each in three neon colors accented by roller ball, clipped to his contractor-grade nylon web suspenders. Good god, the thinking usually goes ... has it come to this? I get the eery certainty, I’m living some Riemann1 hypothesis that’s slowly driving all the sane people mad, and frighteningly, vice-versa. Who on earth would covet the idea of a cold war with China? Are we so stupid, we’d elect another maniac as president? They bottle feed us the idea, before it’s reality, to make sure our subconscious is pacified with its repetition, that ill-lit foundation of sycophancy forges belief.