In Diegesis

Today I DJ’d on KCUK radio (broadcast radius of thirty miles). After I faded out ALL THINGS CONSIDERED on NPR and pressed in the sideways triangle for the microphone I said, “Hello Chevak and other of the Tundra’s wondrous lovers, this is DJ Linguini. Up next is ‘Together We Are Beautiful’ by Fern Kinney.” (The kids at school all call me Linguini due to my resemblance to the young cook in Pixar’s ‘Ratatouille’ who channels the genius of a rat in the kitchen of his father’s restaurant).
I played some nineties hits. David Bowie, Echo & the Bunnymen from earlier decades. Deerhunter, Best Coast from the now. I ended the hour with the last nine minutes of Abbey Road by The Beatles.
As I sat there alone, listening to the end of one of the first albums I ever fell in love with, I quietly considered the poetry of the human heart.
I thought about girls who don’t like the Beatles but do like boys who like the Beatles. How hopeless that relationship is.
I thought about Bradley Boyscout, who just this morning came into the classroom looking as depressed and hopeless as I’m sure I ever looked. Who asked me the question when Mary T left the room and I was trying to make them write a comparison between their summers and the summers of an illegal, 14-year-old migrant farm worker, “Why do people care about other people?”
To which I replied, “Well people have all sorts of various specific reasons for caring about other people, like so and so is so and so’s mother or brother, and – ”
“What about someone you never even met?” he interrupted.
“Uhh…Someone you haven’t met… Bradley you could be a philosopher – that’s probably just about one of the deepest questions out there. I don’t think there is a simple, logical answer why people choose to love strangers and humanity. It’s a way of life, or… a mode of thought. It’s something you choose.”
Though I have less than a year of experience aiding reading teachers in Philadelphia and bush Alaska, remarkably, Bradley is one of two middle schoolers who have expressed to me their suicidal sentiments.
The first, Nate, from Philly, told me that he’d kill himself if his mother ever died. His tone carried a matter-of-fact logicality. “I mean, if your mother died, why would you want to go on living?” He asked me in between my explanation of vocabulary definitions. “That’s your mom, y’know. Your everything.” I didn’t know what to say or do, but I couldn’t just sit there and pretend to continue on with the inanity of teaching literacy to a human being who could care less about it. I asked my supervisor if he and I could go for a walk, and she nodded, so we walked upstairs and looked outside at some tall trees. He pointed to the tips of the trees and said he’d like to sit on top of one of those trees with his mom. “That would be Heaven. Just swaying on the tips of trees with my mom. That’s my dream. That’s Heaven.”
There are no trees on the tundra, but I have never been in a place more Heavenly. Bradley says it’s boring. He wants to move twenty miles north to Scammon Bay so that he can live with his cousins and leave his mom and dad and older brother. “My cousins care about me,” he told me the other day as we both stood staring out the window at the blue expanse of northern infinity.
“No one cares about you like your parents care about you,” I said.
“That’s not true,” he said.
“I mean, though your parents may not love you the way you’d like them to, no one does care about you like your parents do. For or better or worse…”
“My mom drinks. She won’t stop when I ask her to. My brother’s not nice to me.”
I remember that age all too well, when your ideals of love are so pure that it’s almost as though you’re destined to be heartbroken. But my heart has already been broken. In some ways I think maybe I spent the last few years making sure of that. And though maybe I understand adolescent love better than many other people, there is nonetheless a gap in the soul – in everyone’s soul, dare I project – that simply cannot be bridged. A purity that cannot be shared, that is destined to change.
Like how my taste went from “All You Need Is Love” at age six to “Sound of Silver” at age seventeen, in which a baritone James Murphy bellows, “Makes you want to feel like a teenager / until you remember the feelings of / a real live emotional teenager…”
When Bradley told me about his suicidal feelings a week or so before our conversation by the window he prefaced it by saying, “If you were feeling like you wanted to die, would you talk to someone about it?” I was sitting on Mary T’s cushioned chair behind her desk. He stood in front of the desk, standing uncertainly.
“Well I may not be the best person to ask, because when I was your age I just watched movies by myself and didn’t share any feelings with anybody.”
“I don’t really think like that,” he said, paying no mind to my response, but rather following the pathway of his inner thoughts. “That’s not me.” Then he walked away.
“Bradley,” I said. He stopped, his back still facing me. “Come here, there’s something I want to tell you.”
He turned around slowly and returned to where he had been standing. His head was bowed, because when you have these conversations you’re never really sure if you’re sharing your reality. Or if you even want to. This I know from experience.
“I’ve spent a lot of time questioning a lot of things,” I began. “I questioned religion and philosophy and… a lot of other things. I’ve come up with only one conclusion and only recently has it truly begun to sink into me as an unshakeable truth. I really believe this. That there is only One Mind. All minds are a part of one bigger mind. And the lines between minds are very blurry, blurrier than we typically think. Energy transfers between people. And there is an energy here now, on the tundra, a dark energy. It wasn’t always here, I’m not sure how much you know about the history of the area, but the whites came, and cultures clashed, and alcohol and marijuana… Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that sometimes we have thoughts that aren’t really ours. I don’t know about your family or the energy that is around you in particular, but it seems as though this energy has found you. And it found me too a while ago. And whenever I’ve had those thoughts, I’ve thought, “Why would I want to die?” Y’know… Why should I deserve that, or… want that for myself? It’s a challenge, a test that other people failed and have deflected to us to face. And that’s sad, but… It’s not just you. I mean, you’re not alone.”
He nodded and walked away.
I thought of my dad. When Karen kicked us out of the house, the summer between high school and college, when he told me he was suicidal. I told him I didn’t want to hear that; he told me too bad, it’s true. I said, “Well you can’t do that, so it doesn’t matter.” Sitting there, watching Bradley lie down on the floor in boredom, I thought about the kids who don’t understand how their parents could not be sustainably happy simply because of the kids’ existence. I thought – how could my dad not be happy just to know I have lived because of him? And beautifully.
But of course happiness and sadness, depression and joy, are not really things that are inherited. They’re parts of existence that we have to own up to ourselves, individually. And that’s the hardest part. A few days ago Bradley called me a faggot for taking his iPod away. And my dad’s still occasionally suicidal (he’s soon getting married to the woman who kicked us out). That’s fine; its their lives, their experience of the world.
But I will never stop loving. That is my choice, “to carry that weight / for a long time,” as Abbey Road goes. It’s my destiny. I made sure of that when I was six and falling in love with the Beatles.
Bradley’s response to the assignment today was very literate, better than all of his peers. He said that in his summers he goes to Hooper Bay, gets “the heck out of Chevak”, that he has much more freedom than the migrant worker his age and that he gets to do what he wants.
When I came home from DJing I cleaned the house and jammed to Pet Sounds. Then I put on Discovery by Daft Punk and started writing this at the kitchen table. Now I’m onto The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips. The window blinds are wide open; the sunset is glowing effervescently, illuminating those particles in the air that are always there, that I once marveled at as a child in my bedroom.

Here’s what I want:
To convince a girl that I am incapable of doubt.
And to likewise believe in the solidarity of her resolve.
This could only be possible by concerning myself entirely with beauty.
No more facts or opinions, no more subjective philosophy.
Cripes, no more words!
From now on every time I go to the bathroom it’ll be ten minutes before I really freaking NEED to go. (My bowels will obey my breath without hesitation).
I want to hang with Confident Dean and meet a girl at Penn’s Landing.
It’ll only take a few minutes of silently looking at a big, lit-up bridge for me to really get to know her.
The Delaware River will shimmer George Washington conviction.
Our kiss will FINALLY balance out the violence of the American Revolution.
All the Native Americans, from the Iroquois of New York to the Yupik of Alaska, will suddenly know exactly what to do with their festering feelings. Their hearts will open their eyes; they will throw away any booze lying about, kiss their wives, don their grandfathers’ coats and step boldly into the light.
Bored men and women of civilization will surprise themselves, remembering something they had forgotten while toiling on the first farms thousands of years ago – namely, that the future should be embraced lovingly, moment to moment, not fearfully, season to season.
And She and I will never see each other again.
Because Confident Ian doesn’t get bored.
Because Confident Ian is one with the sovereign will of humanity.
Confident Ian is Good.
Confident Ian has “Revolution’s a Lie” stuck in his head all day every day.
A Krautrock life. A rolling, rhythmic conviction.
People who meet Confident Ian wonder silently to themselves for days afterwards:
What does it even feel like to relax?
Indeed, this question haunts my every movement.

There is one stance democrats and republicans could agree on to conform, I believe, that is, electoral reform.
We must do something about these panzies’ egos and itchy fingers and green libidos.
Here is what I propose, a semantic slight of hand.
Let us change the word “President” to “Pharaoh”;
“Congressman” to “disciple” or “priest” or “shaman”.
And let them never be re-elected, but rather die in their position with no outlet for escape in retirement.
Let them truly prove their worth! And let us truly saturate our mistaken judgements!
I’m tired of ‘so and so promised this but then changed, like, he’s so different now!’
wah wah.
put your conviction where your scripture is, and let’s call Obama our Pharaoh-God.
Can you picture it?
Stimulate the economy, turn Oklahoma into a statue.
Use the homeless if you have to.
I want to see Obama with a sword in his hand.
I want to see Henry Paulson’s head on the Washington Monument.
Joe Biden with a crazy eye, bulging temples, wondering where the Hell Mitt Romney went.
I’m so sick of my fellow One Mind constituents not admitting the obvious.
The television is our church.
Let’s bow down collectively to C-Span.
Shag carpets, old potato chip crumbs, Dad’s cigarette smoke.
“The Pharaoh is willing His Nasa legion to send men and women to the Andromeda Galaxy…”
Here, here!
Amen.
The rich need more money! The poor need more money! The system needs to work!
This way! That way!
By God if we’re going to be hypnotized let’s do it right!
Let us gaze into the emerald scepter of our Pharaoh, let us chant His praises. Let us channel all the Gods of the Human Spirit through him.
Praise Allah! Praise Jehovah! Praise Christ! Praise God and Abraham! Muhammed! Praise be the Pharaoh who carries the sovereign will of the One Mind!
I simply can’t believe people can believe so wholeheartedly in the difference between them.
Honestly, we are all God. This is simple ass shit.
The world needs to run. Humans need to turn. This different countries with borders and diametrically opposed political parties stuff is not working. The human spirit is in fucking danger.
Oh Lord just give me a pharaoh.
And I swear I’ll never doubt myself again.

I’ve got it all backwards.
Absolution is not my solution, it’s my means to saying, “What’s up?”
“Nothin.”
Nods.
“You?”
Shrugs. ”Oh, y’know, I’m just busy suppressing the God inside me.”
“Uh huh.”
All this talk, I can’t even believe it.
Department stores are more than real.
They’re cosmic, they’re divine. This is stunning to me, that the sacred can’t be obliterated.
That after all these millennia of wars we haven’t managed to …
Absolve.
Or, shit! At least dissolve.
All this resolve, I mean, what’s it for?
Who’s it for?
Kick-snare. Walking through that door.
All the sex I’ve had, all the dick cumming, whoring boredom to death, cheek sweating, Tower of Babel loudspeakers shooting orgasmic moans across the oceanic bedsheets, Poseidon spitting, ass pounding, bubbly breast escapist memories.
They’re just memories. (Where’s someone else’s worshipping of my pleasure when I want it, huh? LOL)
And the elementary school bullying, the hating my father, the cutting off from my mother, the umbilical cord of my soul floating off in the nothingness of space, all the senseless Rachel Maddow purposeful evenings, all the conscientious shameful feelings cutting me off from the One Mind.
It’s all in the past now. Yogic squat, back-bends, Kundalini and the chakras.
“Yeah I saw them. They were pretty good.”
“That’s cool.”

“Check it out, it’s your child, it’s your gypsy, it’s Heaven, it’s Heavenly!”
Where?
She just jumped off the Comcast building.
Soaring. Kurosawa couldn’t capture it on film, so he made “Seven Samurai”.
She’s going to hit the ground soon, and amazingly,
life will go on.
I mean your life.
Personally I can not wait to be done with this will to absolution.
So annoying, always challenging everything I do, always weighing my worth against the worth of my baby’s cheeks.
Get it?
I never REALLY wanted to die! I was just considering my worth is all.
For a decade now I’ve just been considering my worth, since the first Lord of the Rings movie came out.
A Beautiful Mind won best picture.
“Picture,” LOL.
Considering, considering. My Suicide.
For your consideration, esteemed Academy voters. You should like it, it’s a Holocaust story.
It’s the end of the world, the essence of life-affirmation, like Steven Spielberg swimming in his pool with his kids and regretting the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
He was so young then, and starry-eyed.

“Mommy, mommy, you really should meet my Dad!”
I said that. I was nearly two and a half years old. They were recently divorced.
This is my poetic statement,
Martin Heidegger, you goddamn nazi.
Revision, overhaul, novel, movie, album, pending.

Thinking alone without a clear purpose is weird to think about.
On the one hand it’s just brain exercise, the exhaust of an active mental energy with no definite outlet.
On the other hand it often makes me depressed.
Or nostalgic.
Fine line there.
Depression’s even weirder to think about,
because really those feelings are just trying to pull me back to the center.
The Source.
Love.
But in this weak body, in this troubled moment of time, I often confuse the Source for something physical.
It follows then that when my thoughts are idling negative exhaust fumes and I don’t know what to do, I masturbate.
Or eat.
Two nights ago while lying under four blankets I imagined the All-Beauty.
It stretched out above my head like a never-ending thought bubble.
Filled with the dark colors under my lids but with no discernible outline.
To illustrate abstractly:
The other day string theorists found a way to explain the lack of the the nine dimensions that the theory apparently presupposes.
It seems the other six are trapped in infinitesimal particles somewhere.
They got bullied and crowded out by dots, lines, and bodies in the free-for-all maelstrom that followed the big bang, or big membrane bounce, or big black hole ejaculation – the supernatural, Higgs particle disturbance.
Or whatever.
This endless beautiful thought bubble of mine was kind of like one of those other dimensions.
After I reeled in my night-time sense of it all I thought of you.
I imagined your face.
I had no idea what it looked like where you were of course.
I assumed you were sleeping. Bed, blankets, pillows, a ceiling, darkness.
Your face.
Then I took that blackish-purplish infinity and pushed it out in a spiritual wormhole.
To the cloud maidens and wind phantoms it must have looked like a roller-coaster of a solar coronal loop.
I rode that wormhole with not an ounce of my body.
Soon enough I whooshed into a giant loop-de-loop.
I thought I might not reach you, that my mind would just do a loop-de and come right back home.
But I rode it out like a weathered surfer and before I knew it you were awash with my spirit.
I was right. You were sleeping.
During those brief moments your face shimmered in the darkness like moonlight.
All that infinite beauty seeped under your eyelids.
Your eyelashes gently combed its subtle entrance.
I felt so strange being there, hovering amorphously around your cheeks.
Beyond innocent or impure.
It was a matter of beauty, of spiritual capability. Curiously following the mystical pathways I come across.
How I wondered what you were dreaming!
But in an instant I was pulled back into the wormhole.
In the middle of the loop-de-loop I tried to return, curling back and forth like a DJ’s fingers scratch a record,
but I second-guessed myself.
Maybe this kind of power shouldn’t be abused.
Like the strange, dark gateways people open in their souls with pornography or one-sided fantasies.
Maybe I should leave other souls be – find another way to soothe my restless curiosity.
So I returned back to my bed and sighed.
Alone, again.
Then, determined not to feel at all depressed, I ducked my head under the covers and quickly scratched the afghan my mom’s mom made for my mom.
Blue-white sparks popped and cracked so close about me, like lovers’ pre-dreaming whispers.
This is one of the many lovely perks of spending a winter on the tundra, where the cold air is dry enough to split the skin on your heels and knuckles. Fortuitously I had forgotten to use a drier sheet on all of my linens, so now I get to carve light shows out of the darkness under my blankets with my fingertips. And when my breath has moisturized the air and the blanket is out of static electricity, I pull my head out and return to my circuitous and fruitless thoughts. Ten minutes later the tundra will have refreshed all the magic.
I repeat this process until I fall asleep.

Isn’t it weird when you actually meet someone who seems to know what love is?
The depth of her feeling of purpose and life-appreciation can astound you.
As though you had not just forgotten some memories and ambitions, but rather, you lost them completely.
Which you did do by the way but that’s OK – don’t think about that.
Just when you thought you were growing up, becoming more real, pushing forward,
there’s this crazy fucker with Andromeda eyes, and suddenly you’re like,
shit shit shit! I’m not nearly Perseus!
I only just started getting into yoga and running on the treadmill.
The Kraken or some more modern monster – like virulent self-pity and doubt – is going to
tear this lover to shreds.
Fuck.
But then you think, well, I guess somebody else must be Perseus.
After all, aren’t depths of hearts supposed to match up between star-crossed iPod listeners?
Like, such great heights – a mountain and the moon – or
two deep cavernous souls – one that leads to a warm, crystalline reservoir and another that leads to the sewers of Hong Kong -
how are we ever going to understand each other?
And then, if you’re like me, you just go, oh well…
But not completely. No, no,
imaginative curiosity remains…

Look…

Moon.

I know Earth is probably your dad, and you’re probably my mom.
And everything else is me and God.
But I want to walk on you. I just want to hop and play all over you.
I know you’re probably mostly dead, all craterous and enslaved to gravity.
Still I want to hover so and descend in a dusted cavity.
Froomph.

Listen, Moon,
This cannot happen too soon.
At high noon I’m dreaming of you.
I’m not in love – I’m just American.
The human mind is troubled, which of course you didn’t know, but it is.
It’s all spread thin like the universe, atrophying.
Laughing, laughing, laughter means raftered ceilings.
My mind is troubled too of course but I’m not yet past your healing,
Om shanti disaster dealings, alone wanting after stealing stone, daunting masters reeling thrones haunting His last home feeling.

Moon…
Moon don’t speak!
Don’t you say a word.

What does freedom look like? How do I simulate it with words? Is it the will to Heaven manifested in every moment? Isn’t that what catharsis presupposes anyway – a strange adjustment from what’s inside to reality? And on that note, does freedom have to be an emotional sensation?

Jeez questions questions! Boxes within thoughts within boxes made of dots. Solar eclipses are better for my spine than trips to the chiropractor. On the tundra I can see Jupiter – the brightest looking star by far. Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Ares, Andromeda, Cassiopeia – ancient stories swirling around the King of Gods. It’s just another night with a cigarette and an iPad – feelings fluctuating between alive and sad.

That’s me, mostly cosmic.

My cells have will power; they’re pushing a part, all reaching for the sun, or maybe just another vessel to leap onto; maybe that’s why I’m driven towards sex. My cells are like galaxies, my mind is like a black hole.

My heart’s just like, wtf man?

What ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Oh shut up you know I love you – spinning words just means I’m passing the time – ah, look, a rhyme! Writing is like exploring the dense forest in home’s backyard. You don’t really know where you’re going, and you’re pretty sure you’ll find your way home. And why do we do it?

Why are you reading the next word – word after absurd gurgling burst of murderous word?

Curiosity.

This is what purpose feels like. I’m trapped in the current of humanity’s suicidal sentiments, asking Poseidon to help me temper it. It’s dark and cold, and the pressure’s like – well I can’t really hear anything, because I think my ears exploded a long time ago (probably at a music festival), so you see – every thought’s a digestive success, every word leads to the next best alternative to real rest. Every poem is a prayer transmitting my deepest-most care not to the reader, no, not just to you.

But to everything.

[I wrote this in early August of last year just for fun. I don't consider myself a very powerful philosopher but the act of writing philosophy does occasionally have a cathartic effect for me. It feels as though I'm validating something deep within me. I remember when I finished writing this I walked out of the Drexel library, listening to "Age of Consent" by New Order. I felt like my eyes were open for the first time; the sunlight glistened beautifully on all the cars and people and concrete and asphalt. It was a very empowering and beautiful sensation. I recommend to any reluctant philosophers to smash the wave of your intellect against the hard cold stone of reality. The worst that can happen would be to discover discrepancies between your understanding and reality, and how bad is that?! At least then you are more aware of both your mind and reality!]

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This is a life force

A ripe course for a tight horse.

This ain’t a fuckin’ syllogism,

You’re sucking vanilla jism

I’m on about what I can’t be wrong about.

Fuck realism, idealism, material imperialism.

This is a life force prism. Like daoism.

The tao isn’t proud business, it’s a loud sickness,

now finished within us like the British quit us, (resentful!)

it takes a war to begin us together as winners. (so eventful!)

Remember Joan Rivers, dismembered lone sinners, surrendered dinners

administered for weathered killers?

Do you want to kill somebody?

I just want to spill some loving.

That is, until I want to kill somebody

or at least thrill somebody.

Fill somebody with some loving

fuzzy fun, getting scuzzy, son,

’til it feels like we won.

Highs get low, the moon gets sun, the son gets some.

It all comes undone.

Then my life force has begun.

my dick feels

forgiveness coming on;

if you feel ashamed

you should come into this song.

magic steals

what’s in your soul that’s wrong;

if you feel ashamed

just come into this song.

When the future’s just an idea

and you’ve got bad luck

and the past is all around you,

then you know you’re fucked.

I bet black holes suck

into God’s stomach.

Welcome, welcome, masturbation nations, to my imagination, another validation station from a humble mother’s creation. Don’t be hateful, let’s be playful, standing at the gates of friendship dancing in and out, never knowing when to begin or end this stance that’s full of doubt. Landing that hate-to-pretend shit, chancing sinful clouds grounded to clever whatevers ever flowing bends that tend to rescind or send missed answers all about never lending tender ends to pouty cowards who clout your proud powers for hours just to give you mine, me yours, and them ours. Don’t break up, kiss and make up this fantasy of love. Can’t you see above managing a bluff? Your panacea’s not enough to stand in the sea of tough love. Tough luck, mister trillion bucks, a fistful of Sicilian wives cuckolded your lives ‘n’ tucked ‘em into the blacks of God’s dilated eyes beholding lies insisting you exist. Didn’t we miss this shit when it twisted priests’ listless lips into our sleepless trysts? I think therefore I’m pissed. Can you join me in anointing noisy annoying toys with a spermy ointment, call it a Wormy Appointment, same as fucking, but I coined it. In the connection of loins I detect some enjoyment, pity the celibate brothers in deployment, wait, no I don’t. It’s all just a way to pass the time, my wit’s fall must today amass massive rhyming enzymes that chime with lemons and limes like slimy red war crimes. Denim dimes fill your failed heart with a whale tart and you’re still thinking how do I start? Jesus. Rene Descartes pleases a play-day twat; who threw the first stone? You do the worst stoned impression of mirth’s lone concession to the church’s tones meshing with worthless phone messages. Please hang up and buy forgotten friends. I mean try your call again when dying malls blend into the crying stalled ends of adolescent men suspended in breezy upended dreams, depending on teams to please sexy teases, ten years away from paying skeezy fees to ladies named Theresa. Mona Lisa moaning beneath a phony creeper playing follow the leader. Didn’t see me featured; I’m busy standing at the gates of friendship dancing in and out, never knowing when to pretend this stance is full of doubt. How about now? How about how, mister horny well endowed, dick like a trout? You can fuck a wide open cow mouth. I’m out.

I was nineteen years old when I wrote a short story called “Vainglory”.

At that time in my life I felt so tenderly individual that I didn’t think anyone could understand me. I talked to my closest friends about the need for a spiritual revolution in humanity’s consciousness. I used to say things like, “There is a connotative energy in every single thing, and so few connect to it. Most people just see the function of things, the denotation. There needs to be a revolution of the soul, something like in 2001: a Space Odyssey. We’ll become one with it and feel it.” My friends humored me, patronized me, changed the subject, joked around.

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In a Good Mood

What I see what I hear

individuates me my dear

reminds me of that healthy fear

makes me pull my power so, so near.

In a Bad Mood

What I see what I hear

means nothing

taunts my purposelessness

fuck rhyming.

In Wisdom

(knows better than to desire

transcends success and failure good and evil

doesn’t need to create or destroy

i don’t want to be wise

not really…)