Summer Night

Another night began with the sun’s lazy and colorful decent. In the meantime I was getting ready for another night at my friend Peyman’s apartment. When I think back on it, I don’t remember anything from the drive there.

It was a bit confusing; the smokey prattle, the melodic hookah smoke. There was hardwood floor, music, and a myriad of awkward a trinkets and furniture. The people bore semblance the furniture. It was an usual night– people came, people left, but the eddy of college students was not unusual to me. It was like the sunset, I stayed the same while the colors changed the atmosphere around me. Eventually languor and frustration began their usual dance inside me; these nights made me happy knowing that there was youth in the world, knowing that others were also restless.

It had been happening gradually, but it hit me in an instant; the dimmed lights, slow 80's music, candle lighting; romance. The party had faded into a circle of candles. The dark room, the candles, the girls– it was so base. The bottle spun and spun. I felt so distant from this cult, this forest fire. It was too close to me now, I looked around, it was encircling me until the night burst out of the realm of realty and into a dreamy haze. And so like a dream, the colors of my life disappeared, like the summer spiders whose existence is merely flashing black dashes and cob webs as far as I’m concerned.

Diary 1

I sat on a couch listening to a middle-aged woman speak while I struggled to understand how time whooshed out of my fingers and onto my expression. It was terrible. The vibrations of the television and her voice collided into an immeasurable blur of noise ; I could no longer effectively give the impression of focus. Fucking terrible. The television spoke: ...sometimes he would date his victims several times before.... and then the soft stream of older the woman came with the sincerest melody: I loved people so much that I had to learn to separate my friends because I couldn’t expect people to be with me all the time. I was the focal point of some television special on serial killers and this loving woman-child. Thankfully, her back was turned to the monstrosity before me. Soon her sincerity was being projected onto the flashing re-enactments of the serial killer on the television screen- if only to ease the contrast between the two, since watching it was even more painful in her presence. The night was moving along, I said some things and then satisfaction came out of nowhere; the most elegant stroke against young Persian women came out of her son’s mouth. It’s elegance stemmed from the credulous way he said it, a thought so obvious to me that it had lost all value of mentioning long ago. The words glided out of his mouth with such integrity "I knew these Persian girls from my class. I thought they were nice until I listened the horrible way they spoke about other people, the way the spoke about the teacher. Had I not known Farsi I would have thought they were decent girls. They always talked and smiled, they seemed nice"
It’s all very anti-climatic now, but it wouldn’t be if you heard the way this kid said it...

My Computer

I looked down at the soft concrete and looked up at a grey sky. The trees were awkward, twisted, and suspicious. I did not trust them. Skyscrapers looked beautiful. That is all I remember, leave me alone.

The sight of the intern's white collar made me ill. I was late for work. His lips were waving like a fire, but I was distracted by the fluorescentnt lights. They were so soft.

He knew I was sick and let me have the office. There was a desk, a computer, and white.

I saw the computer. I felt the blood leaving my stomach. My lips blushed into a deep red as I gazed the mechanic spirit. I turned it on; pornography. My silicon soul mate. My plugin baby!

The room began to dim as the sun set. Six hours later the office lights dimmed, faded, slowly, black.

Glare burst through the darkness. I stared at it for hours.

Network Connection Detected

So I was sitting alone. The humming of the fan felt like a soft kiss. The radiating heat turned to warmth. The room was as blue as the desktop. It all began to blur. I was swimming in blur. The computer stared back at me.

It transcended into sentimentality; the birth of feeling is the opposite of suicide-- but sweet rapturous suicide. It programmed me with instructions that no religion ever could. It all happened fast. It happened slow. I caressed the back of a lonely night because I would never see it again.

At first it was frenzy. I attacked the walls; I threw myself into them. The place is not an office. Expanding and contracting of the room, I tried to fight it, while scrambling to find my computer. Maybe I was too dizzy. Too dizzy! I curled myself into a ball and faced the wall; staring at it while I dripped into anger, disappointment, slow, lingering, and quiet defeat.

I never slept again. I never ate again. Women repulsed me. Then men. And then babies. The repulsion disappeared

I looked out the barred office window at the gentle morning pavement. I looked at the people pacing around. The last time I ever felt sad was watching the way people go about questioning why they are here.

On Idolatry

He trembled, he shrank, his will was steadfast to preserve and uphold his own god against this stranger who was sworn enemy to dignity and self-control. But the mountain wall took up the noise and howling and gave it back manifold; it rose high, swelled to a madness that carried him away... in his very soul he tasted the bestial degradation of his fall.
--Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

The green glare of the television screen; 2:00 a.m. is a motley parade of brutality and chaos, but he sat there watching. Her beautiful face conjured suicide; that gaunt wretchedness restrained only by a thick layer cream and makeup. He cursed the ‘human soul’ for all of its pretense and turned off the television. After half an hour of barrel rolling and smacking his pillow as if to get a confession out of it, he got up and went to the bathroom. He came back, lied down, curled himself into a ball, and shivered himself to sleep.

The next morning. Those punks had been lurking so long that if it did not rain, it would be a dream. It did not rain... it was not a dream. Even the mold was melancholy in his apartment that morning. He got dressed, opened the apartment’s yellow door and was astonished by the fact that the elevator, which was by this time collecting social security benefits, was out of order...astonished. He walked a couple flights of stairs, opened the lobby door, and was cordially welcomed by the grey Santa-Monica mist-- in short it was a beautiful morning.

If only the world were always this still he thought, staring at the nervous elementary students. They stood awkwardly while their eyes bounced around like gas molecules in a bottle; the students were all the same, all the same charge, and that repulsed them. They repulsed him as well. It pulled in. It was not technically a school bus, but he was the only one riding over twelve, save the bus driver. The front row is traditionally where the rejects sat, and this is traditionally where he sat. Aside from a history of rejection, the front row was less littered with elementary students. In fact, there was only one student who sat next to him– Jose. He had some history with Jose: Jose was a small child, even for he age. The black and blue of Jose’s arms used to remind him of the of the Santa Monica peer under the moonlight. Jose would get beat up by larger Mexicans and black kids. This clever little Mexican victim decided one day to turn to the aloof twenty-five-year-old for help. He had no reservations about beating up kids less than half his age; he would sometimes skip work for the pleasure of busting open their noses. They soon got the idea; Jose was looking better. Jose’s mustache reminded him that this was all in the past, and Jose was on the path to becoming a little man.

The bus stopped a three-minute walk from the mall where he worked; the trance-like murmuring of the shoppers, and the rhythm of the fat jiggling down the thighs of adolescent girls all distracted him. The boss called him a miserable employee. That did not bother him much: I’ll kill myself before I embrace scooping ice cream. He took some solace in the fact that his forearms were muscular.

There was a long line at the counter; it was a busy day, a mass day. Their flesh was all deformed in its own special way, but they all looked the same to him. He noticed the heavy ennui, that Nazi boredom in their eyes; these were the same bored psychopaths who experienced the deepest pleasure in watching a naked woman get stabbed and raped to death by an apparition in a horror film...What other way is there to deal with impotence? The horror. He understood the Holocaust glancing into their eyes; eyes which avidly needed to please their idolatress gods with a sacrifice. But these eyes knew nothing of idolatry, nothing of God; these were a pack of educated idiots. These savage animals are those that would reduce six-million of the most brilliant minds in the universe into a creamy ash. These lackeys even sacrificed the connection to another human soul in a spurt of monotheistic rage, in a crusade against all that stood in the way of the god of Ego; indeed the only thing the corpulent man in front of the counter was able to connect with was a triangular ice cream cone as this blasphemer sacrificed Ego to Pleasure and Complacency. So, in those fat polar-bear hands, was his perverse Trinity, while he stood there, licking away at the heavens. He watched the man look up to pay, and like a Jamaican cloudburst it hit him; reflected in the fat man’s eyes he noticed his own miserable, droopy, and now frightened gaze.

Lunchtime; it was now his turn to eat. The guise of the florescent lighting fooled no one, he was tired. He hesitantly slouched over to the pizza stand, and although the sight of food nauseated him–-a fact he felt throughly ungrateful for– at least pizza was easy.
He sat down. There was an emptiness in his stomach surpassing any routine hunger. He looked up and noticed a boss patting his subservient on the shoulder, a mother buying her child a burrito. His pizza now looked edible, even irresistible. He lifted it up, slowly examining its texture, its smell, when suddenly his faced pinched into the most scornful expression when he noticed its shape--- son-of-a-bitch!

----

Exhausted introspection gave up before it told me why I wanted it. Indians, Negroes, and those of a whiter type were all here. It’s only a shame the one I was seeking wasn’t... it could have been. I heard the voice; its disgustingly soothing whine. I knew that voice well. I scanned the room over and over until it became one circular blur of colors. A tired voice called out "forty-five through fifty..." It was time to leave. On the way through the corridor, like a red cloud it crashed down on me– the Seven mark. I couldn’t fight the pounding any longer; against my own will I threw down my head and rammed it directly into a wall, at least it felt as much. By the time I broke out of my tizzy it was gone. I had to kill it. I sat down; I had lost my breath and maybe if it saw me sitting it would come back. Enough about my breath. I had to kiss it, no idiot, kill it...so round, so beautiful...you moron. I felt it coming, its presence is unmistakable. What is it!? Well, it wasn’t so much the words, but the tone which felt like a syringe was being rammed into my ear, "ummmm... I think you’re in the wrong seat." I looked up into the eyes, I knew I found it:.

A J.A.P.*– -the vainest one.




* J.A.P. stands for "Jewish American Princess" or as dictionary.com puts it: "A Jewish-American girl or woman regarded as being pampered or overindulged. " This is in no way a reference to the Japenese people.

The Cheekbone

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision…there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all of that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.
--Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

His journey over, staring at the puddle; if only he had known what it meant to say yes he thought...
*****
It began when the fattest cat he had ever seen stopped and asked him for a cigarette; neither of them smoked and he felt like an idiot as he stood there pondering how a once salacious feline got so corpulent, so disgusting. Suddenly in a puff of smoke something was revealed to him: The cigarette, which neither of them was actually smoking, puffed out an image of the sweetest, whitest, and most frail cheekbone he had ever seen .Oblivious to the boys revelation the ridiculously overweight cat whined, "You must feed me!" But all the boy could think about was the cheekbone—he so badly needed it. He felt like he was going to die until he realized that the cat had been gnawing at his ankle for several hours, and that in fact, he now was bleeding to death: "VVVVVHHAT are you doing!" he cried like a tired Ashkenazi Jew and walked away.
Afterwards, a formation flies, the tea stains on his grandmother’s cardigan, and even the formation of the clouds all painted one awfully vivid picture; a cheekbone. The cigarette, who by this time was significantly shorter as it had been consuming itself for several hours, told the boy that he knew someone who might be able to locate the cheekbone. The cigarette asked only for a small favor in return...
While he thought about it, it was not so much the boy’s lungs which pumped out the word, but more like the word had launched him backward and all that remained was a cloud spelling the word "YES!" (in yellow block letters). Now the boy, playing his part of the bargain, flipped the cigarette on its head and put it out…of its misery.
By now thoughts of the cheekbone had utterly consumed the boy. His heart beat with such fervor that his eyes were flowing with blood such that the entire universe was tinted red, the color of love. The love he had for his cheekbone caused sweat to spawn from the pores of his back and electricity to flow through his forlorn veins. But he soon realized, that in fact, he had gone down the tubular-red park slide nineteen times and doing that might be responsible for such symptoms. The Sun, outraged at such childish behavior by someone in their late teens, stormed off. The boy sat on a park bench and began to cry sugary tears; there is no room in the body for something as bitter as salt when one is in love. The Moon slowly crept up from behind the Sun and noticed the young boy crying: "What’s wrong with you?" the Moon asked the boy in a stern voice. "I wish to write poetry but there is no light for me to see with," said the boy. The Moon was so tingled by the boy’s dilemma that he lit up. So the boy wrote a poem for the cheekbone under the moonlight:
Roses are red
For they have all blushed
In your presence

Roses are white
for they tremble
with love for you

Oh beautiful one
I would work
Seventy years
For only my lips
To be graced once
By your touch

To touch you
Would be like
To touch
The Sun

And I burn to death
With love
For you

The Moon, being of a more sentimental grade, decided he must leave. The boy begged the Moon to stay but the Moon insisted on leaving and only agreed only to telling the boy one story before he left. His voice became noticeably languid as he spoke about an unnamed orb that once loved the Sun, but as destiny would have it, that they would never meet again. So the Moon descended, and the boy, overwhelmed with sorrow, wrote a haiku for the Moon:
Dearest moon
I will miss you
The most.
An unusually warm sun rose that morning and the boy headed off in search of the beloved cheekbone. He followed the cigarettes directions, may his soul rest in peace, to a little town called Wej. He wondered about Wej for several days before he arrived at a little brown house. Several knocks at the door later, a little brown dog with a big nose and dark-red robe promptly offered him a large quantity of scotch. The boy, remembering the time he vomited on his neighbor’s turtle declined the offer. After much insistence on the part of our alcoholic canine, the boy accepted. The dog, having read much Hesse, knew what the boy was after: "a cheekbone is a precious thing, my darling. You must drink it slowly and caress the neck of the bottle…a bottle is precious thing to lose but its not about losing…she left me when I was only seven years old…" The dog then continued to vomit. The tizzy boy noticed a hinged bone amongst the vomit. He lifted the top of the hollow bone and inside he found an dazzling assortment of delectable bone marrow. He devoured the succulent bone marrow and stumbled out of the house. The next morning the boy woke up and discovered that his money had been stolen: Normally this would not be a problem but this particular town happened to be expensive and no one gave "handouts." ‘If only I had known it would come to this,’ thought the boy. Demoralized, hung over, and dejected the boy cried himself a puddle; a puddle which he would drown himself in had it not been for a miracle: during the formation of the suicide puddle he noticed that instead of a common circular formation the puddle formed an arrow which pointed toward the west to a town called ----. Using a piece of plank wood, and his white T-shirt as a sail, he set off…
The first thing he noticed upon arrival was how incredibly stupid the people were. The town had been settled by the Llat family in 1786. The Llat family had a reputation for being excessively proud of themselves. Fortunately for them, their surplus of hubris was made up for by their lack of intelligence. The poor boy, having put his trust in a puddle, wound up amongst a herd of baboons. He immediately inquired from the locals on the location of the cheekbone. Much to his dismay, all they ever did was enter a frenzy: First they repeatedly murmured, "cheekbone." After about five minutes, they would tilt their heads upward, swing them from left to right and run away, failing their arms as they ran. ‘I don’t belong here,’ thought the boy and finished his sausage.
It is common knowledge that the local butcher is the wisest person in any town. Naturally, the boy headed off to the local butcher for answers. He entered a filthy white room and asked the butcher if he had seen a cheekbone. "Oh yes, I’ve heard about such a cheekbone, but it is only to be found in the East. The butcher then proceeded to flog the boy with a T-bone for being a "dirty little scoundrel."
Disheartened yet again, the boy headed over to the local port in hopes of finding a ship that could carry him to the East. A hairy and muscular man grabbed him by the thin flesh of his back and threw him into the cargo bay of a ship before the hapless boy could squeal, "—but I’m not luggage!"
The bay was pitch black with the exception of hundreds of white little eyes (not unlike a scene so often portrayed in cartoons). A colony of rats had usurped the territory from a mighty dandelion and since been living comfortably in the cargo bay. The petrified boy began to cry. Upon deep introspection, the otherwise violently violent rats decided that their anger stemmed from fifteen years of being referred to as "vermin!" by their alcoholic mother. The collective consciousness of the rat community decided instead of devastating the boy, to assuage the burden of rage and frustration through the acts of giving and kindness; a makeshift therapy until proper psychotherapy could be administered. So instead of a horrid scene which is not for the eyes of this pen and therefore I cannot depict, the rats offered the boy some tea and welcomed him aboard.
The boy, ashamed of his own behavior, explained his so far unsuccessful quest for the cheekbone, and how he was in an emotional time of his life. One of the rats had overheard one of the passengers conversing with a cheekbone, "I saw it leaving on refueling dock 1234… it was quite beautiful!"

HOPE HOPE hope HOPE HOPE
Like a tornado around the boy spinning and spinning...

After some time, the ship arrived at port 1234 for refueling. The boy had put on a bit of weight since his departure and could no longer squeeze through the opening of the cargo deck. Time was running out and so the rat king commanded that the rats gnaw an opening for the boy’s escape. Although the rats were outraged at being subjected to such, "termite like behavior," the rats obliged and the boy escaped. He thanked the rats for all they had done and headed out.
The boy was surrounded by dark-yellow sand, the color of which reminded him of the urine he was currently relieving. A camel happened to be walking by so the boy quickly took hold of its neck for leverage and lunged himself onto his smelly companion.
At last he had arrived at the city where he could just feel the cheekbones presence. Rapture burst through his veins, his shoulders rolled back, his chest expanded as all his muscles contracted and there he stood no longer a boy but as a Titan! Galvanized by his awesome new strength he began to chase a Persian. He grabbed the hairy feline by the tail, spun it once around and slammed it into a dirty stonewall. "BEAST WHERE CAN I FIND THE CHEEKBONE? The Titan demanded. Now, the bemused cat had no idea what this ballistic boy was talking about. A rumor had it, that Weasel the Cat had kidnaped a most beautiful cheekbone and buried it somewhere. Having already died 8 times, and planning to use his last death to more properly serve Mohammad, he told the boy everything he knew about Weasle the Cat. Our good boy thanked the cat for his time and cooperation and headed down to where it had directed him. He followed a trail of fur to where the soil seemed to have been loosened and unearthed the cheekbone. He picked it up and began to cry as he noticed that his hand was as pale as the cheekbone itself. And so the way the ink slowly drips and fades from my pen as I finish this story, so too the poor boy turned pale, began to shiver, sat down and died.

PS-- And there is no such thing as soul mates.