it's that time again

September 11^th, 2010 – 2:06 p.m.

Herein lies the paradox: I’ve been incredibly inspired as of late and I haven’t written in my designated cache of blog entries for four days. It’s because I’ve been too busy enjoying the tempestuous throes of existence. My eyes are starting to feel… open. I don’t want to say that this evolving personal perspective/subjectivity/a posteriori whatever corresponds with absolute “truth” – that is just trite and vague and abstract (three things that I HATE being, especially in writing). This would only be true in the Greek sense of truth – aletheia – the unconcealment of beings (in the face of their Being).

I’m enjoying being an expatriate today. Since I find disharmony exceedingly harmonious, and I crave the taste of unconventionality, I got Liz to start reading Welcome to the Desert of the Real today. It’s about how September 11^th was essentially the snuff-film equivalent of a string of pornographic Hollywood spectacles. Guess what day it is? Yeah. I’m that person. I’m not necessarily unpatriotic; however, being cynical and nihilistic and pretending like I belong to the Frankfurt school is far too much fun. I’m not even a Marxist really, I just like reading developed ideas – especially ones that succeed in pissing people off.

Meanwhile, back at  the farm….

So, our creature comforts have been entirely disrupted by many creatures. I made a joke that they get bigger every night – like they’re openers leading up to the headliner – and it’s entirely true. This worries me greatly. Liz and I take turns killing them in different and creative ways. They are each christened with a holy name and baptized by immersion (well, if we drown them) before we hand them a one-way ticket to the endless void of bug mortality.  Here are some of the ones I can remember.

Victim number one: Job, the giant flying cockroach. 5 inches by 5 inches. Bottle-green and loud as hell. Jessica imposed death by mallet. Said victim lived, even after my torture, for approximately 9 hours (hence the name Job – he never lost faith despite his adversity. Ha.) There he was, twitching and flailing. Fluttering his bedraggled wings. I heard a audibly macabre death rattle; however, I’m quite sure it was my swollen ego projecting human characteristics onto this pathetic insect.

Victim number two: Jose the scorpion. Approximately 12 inches in length. Stinger measured 4-6 inches (and that’s flaccid!) Wingspan (or clawspan, rather) was approximately five inches. Liz hacked this one to death with a hoe. Those hoes, they be brutal. Its posthumous spasms were quite unnerving.  Additionally, it attempted to crawl away even after it was severed in half. Liz and I should move to Vegas and become magicians. Yeah, so, about the cat killing these godless creatures? Vida just licked it and played with it like it was a ball of string. Worst scorpion slaying cat ever.

Victim number three: Slurpy, the giant pit viper. Approximately 5 feet in length. Killer fangs. Black with yellow and red triangles on his belly. Carlos had the pleasure of slicing this one into three pieces with a machete. See photo: Although the entirety of the body is hanging and connected, the three pieces are barely held together by tiny bits of snakey sinew. Snake guts look a lot like bloody-veiny-rotting-sausage.

Victim number four: Medusa, the black-widow-esque spider that was way too big to be a black widow. This lass was one of our smaller victories. Her body was about the size of a quarter, and with her legs extended she could have rivaled the circumference of a john f. kennedy 50 cent piece. She had a massive red diamond shape on her underbelly. This reina de la noche was hanging above liz’s bed. I captured her in a Tupperware and she is currently in the freezer, perfectly preserved. After I spent a moment admiring her shiny black torso, I decided she’d make an awesome broach.

Victim number five: Gimpy. This furry brown spider, legs included, was the size of a nerf ball. He had hundreds of eyes and gigantic pincer-like teeth. Even after Liz sliced off two of his legs, he kept protesting and scrambling around. Who knew – that bastard had six more! Eventually we trapped him under a Tupperware and he is currently starving to death on our front porch next to a few other prisoners of war.

Victim number six: Kirby, the baby scorpion. This little fella was about the size of a quarter. I found him on one of my sandals right as I slipped it on my foot. It was pleasant, really. I froze him. I’m going to catch the next baby we see and make Liz a pair of kickass earrings.

September 12, 2010 – no concept of time

51% battery left. Low on energy. Who knows how many days. I feel like weeks wouldn’t be enough time to describe the decades of which the last few hours were comprised.

It started this morning on our way to the river. We chewed our gum. We bought our one-way tickets to enlightenment. I was scared, I knew there was no going back. I started getting butterflies on the way to the river. I could feel my heartbeat steadily increase as my legs moved faster.

The sunlight was sweltering. The cool breath of the morning on my skin had been a tease. It sizzled as I could feel freshness of the air cooling my sweat. But this was all before the sun hung high in the sky. I was sitting in the cool stream, feeling the rocks and earth and mud all around me. Everything was sublime and intricate and inexplicable. As I picked up the stones, one by one, I projected my fears or dislikes or bad memories onto them before I tossed them back into the current. It was liberating.

I found a flat stone the size of my palm. It looked just like a tablet. I found another pen-shaped sharp rock. I began to recreate every masterpiece of western art on it from memory while I was sitting in the river. After I’d finish, I’d submerge the stone for a few seconds until it was wiped clean. A few of my favorite renditions were the Mona Lisa, Starry Night, and a Warhol-esque campbell’s soup can. It was funny to see them carved in stone. But I guess that’s all we are as humans – scrambling to scratch our legacy somewhere before we’re all turned to dust. Whether it is immortalized on cave walls or the walls of a museum is completely arbitrary.

The symphonious dichotomy of the sweltering heat baking my skin and the frigid water cooling me from the waist down was – if pleasure can be – excruciating. The hanging vines around me weaved tapestries of a million lifetimes I’d live – if I so chose.

Elizabeth looked like a bronze statue glistening in the sun. Her skin had been kissed by hundreds of tiny water droplets. They shimmered and winked flirtatiously in the sun. I am reminded of Fitzgerald’s Cut Glass Bowl – or A Diamond as Big as the Ritz. Here, even the miniscule light fractures were blinding. But these glimmers were far from sinister. It was ironic that the closest I had ever come to this sort of sublimity was a critique of western opulence – written in the roaring twenties – a decade of extravagance.

Sitting in that river, we were entirely without luxury. Yet, I had never seen a sight more opulent nor a beauty more regal. We were skin and bones and blood. We were cloaked in mantles of earth and sunlight. We reigned over our kingdom harmoniously – staying still and revering the ethereal heartbeat of nature while doing nothing to domesticate it.

Today has felt like at least 15 lifetimes.

In another life we were putting our clothes back on, drying off, preparing for the hike back up. For some reason, despite my sweat and labored breathing, this time was far easier than all the rest. I felt powerful as my legs burned and the sweat collected on my brow, on my chest, in between my shoulder blades. It got steeper and I climbed harder. The roots reached out from under the hundreds of trees lining our dirt path. They were intricate and interwoven. It was obvious here that all human construction consisted merely of poor imitations – we would never be able to harness the entropy that catalyzed the inexplicable.

Then, another life had started, concurrently with all the rest. We looked out over the valley – we were gods on Olympus. I clung to the barbed wire and everything became metaphorical. Those hills – vast, unceasing, and sublime, represented the unknown. It was that transcendental and harmonious realm of human emotion and experience in the face of universe. These sharp, biting fences – they were language. It didn’t matter how much I pulled – I pushed – I pried. It wouldn’t bend. It wouldn’t break. I could inch a little closer to the sublime, but there’s no way I’d ever reach it. Looking at it now – how vast it was – how small I was – the thought is laughable.

Then, we were back at the house. I don’t know how it happened. Led Zeppelin was playing and I was doing dishes and birds were singing outside and somehow I was in awe. With those bluesy wails I was transported to another time. The heat and my imagination swirled around me and I was wearing sequins – dancing – singing – and then I opened my eyes. Back into the present.

Showering was a few lifetimes in itself. Again – an attempt to describe the profound sensation of the cool water in immaculate contrast with the hot air seems laughable.

Having freshly washed hair after five normal days (and the hundreds of lifetimes of today) was the most impeccably clean I’ve ever felt.

Liz and I played for hours. I pretended to be a beauty queen and made a crown out of tubing and carted  dead flowers around the house as I cast a macabre wave to an invisible audience of thousands. We sang and danced and laughed at the cold buggy faces of the predators we’ve been freezing to death. We were human – all too human.

Then I read philosophy and watched the visualizer and listened to eric clapton and at some point the world spun harder and I danced and my hair was down and at no point did liz and I deem it important to wear pants.

We needed bananas. I grabbed a machete and we ran out in the middle of the orchard – still in our underwear. It was raining harder now. I hacked down an entire banana tree just because I could. I picked up the large bushel as if it was weightless and we trudged back up to the house. I laughed to myself. It was ironic and slightly dangerous that I had access to numerous sharp knives at this juncture.

Then – another reincarnation – we were outside in our underwear and rubber boots with flowers in our hair. It was raining heavily. We danced and sang and played. Nothing mattered. I was six again, feeling beautiful and alive and in awe of the whole world I had ahead of me. I had my innocence.

Then, we lit candles and made fresh pasta and garlic bread from scratch. The process of making it was just as delicious as the meal. Chopping the onions was so cathartic.

We watched Bangkok Dangerous with Nicholas Cage. God, I have never laughed so hard in my life. I have a feeling this wasn’t meant to be a comedy.

Now we’re sitting here, writing, listening to music, and I’m reminiscing about the present while I’m still in the present. It is arguable that I’m “wasting” the feelings of the moment – but there is something innately gratifying about describing all of it. This way, I can relive it over and over again. Highs come and go – but perspective, that is something which never leaves you.

Now entering Enlightenment – Population: 2. The best things about enlightenment: you can’t get noise complaints and everything is clothing optional (nudity preferred).  

On that note – I’m going to go live for awhile.