Obviously I am not a Christian, but Jesus is my companion. More than that, even. We were bound together in darkness, in a moment we both chose without resistance. The ropes encircling us are sacred. We are each other’s atrium and ventricle. We live in the same house. We love the same woman. We lay together on a raft sometimes, continuing our passage across the sea to visit the birth of life. At night, when I’m […]
I used to think the very act of coming out to this frontier town, to this slat-walled refuge set down in the wild light and crooning darkness, would be sufficient. A proof of concept. Like I could purchase everlasting freedom with an act of unexpected boldness. Without thinking it per se, I believed that after packing just my necessaries and lashing them down, selling the house and the grandfather clock, then riding west across creaking leagues […]
However it happened—none can really say. I only know that I was standing in a pasture filled with mirrored boxes, like disco saunas, and that people were lined up in front of them in silent repose. We were like a host of jet-lagged arrivals waiting to get our passports stamped—or our eyes examined, or our opinion surveyed, or our future turned upside down and shaken out, its contents inspected for contraband bits of the past. […]
The limited predictive intelligence of nuance can sometimes permit the obfuscation of the glaringly obvious. Said another way: forecasts predicated on the data typically accrued during the life span of a single human being are known to be astoundingly flawed. This may explain why Hafiz and Rumi stare at me like a pair of dispassionate fieldstones on the verge of sprouting horns when I wax extemporaneously about the day’s events— as if my mouth is moving, […]
I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but, man when your heart becomes a field of grinning beings pulling rubies out of a passed hat and, there that goddamned magnificent moon is staring you down with a pregnant candor that makes rocks moan in their sockets and try to sneak you answers to the question of your existence, and all this with the whole domed sky watching, I do grant you there’s a certain bald logic to keeping on […]
A film lies over the world, a distortive coating– a difficulty that has been sprinkled throughout the realm. Somehow we let the powder escape from the bag: the dust that causes permanence to fracture and dissemble into half-lives, the dust that causes recognition to thicken and cloud into obscurity. The wind blew it in all directions. Now everything is a strange, skewed cinema of what it once was. Now fading has become natural, and youth […]
Until you’ve given yourself to it entirely– until you’ve stepped forward in the silence of your own heart, drenched in commitment, and called your life’s bluff, or taken a sabbatical from what makes sense and spent a few of those precious vacation days sleeping in back of a rusted car that is flying awkwardly in gutted stasis on a litter of cinder blocks strewn along the ground like the crumbs of a passing barrage of scrapped cities, […]
At one level, the human body is an Enigma– a code machine. All day long they run: informing, creating, conducting. There’s the genetic code, sure. Then there’s the histone code, the sugar code, the signal transduction code, the ubiquitin code, the adhesive code, the splicing code, the tubulin code, the metabolic code, and so on and so forth. Kids, too– they know this game. We’ve all dabbled. We sprinted across the yard, dove into leaf piles, barked […]
All our assumptions were wrong. The strangest part is realizing we always knew this, even in the hour of our deepest pain. We’re like a secret of the universe that wandered through the trees to a scenic overlook and stood slack-jawed peering into a crevasse full of stars and comets choreographing the meaning of existence, then got whacked in the back of the head with a frying pan and splattered into a corpus callosum of inter-combinant […]
There are so many amazing things a person could choose to learn about in this world, enough to fill whole lifetimes– like the way photons make decisions when faced with the conundrum of a diffraction grating, or the way high-speed traders manipulate the flow of money on time scales that make the pace of human thought seem like canyon-making, or how the fashion industry unraveled the mystery of the neons. There was a time when […]
Embracing Forever 