when i close my eyes the lights of the world go out

When I close my eyes the lights of the world go out.

My most unrelenting fear is of drowning. Tonight I read about an airplane disaster. A plane crashed into the ocean. Later they found a few bodies. Many they never found. How many of those people had a fear of flying but never thought about drowning? Reading it, I found myself hoping that they were killed in the crash itself, that death was quick and painless.

To die slowly in the ocean, utterly alone, would be the worst of deaths. There was a movie made a few years back called Open Water that dealt with this. Supposedly based on a true story (really, the connections were tenuous...yes I researched it; I am obsessive in my own way) the story concerned a couple who went out with a scuba diving group. The group was not well run, the crew failed to take an accurate head count, and as a result the boat later left without the couple, no one aware they were ever there in the first place. The film follows the couple as they come to grips with what has happened and their inevitable demise. It is a minimalist film, as befits such a terrifying idea. There is almost no soundtrack, just the sound of water, of the vast ocean.

How cold they must have been. How very, very cold.

My reaction to this movie was visceral. I still find it hard to write about. I don't know how to swim. I'm uneasy around the water. And yet I love the ocean...love it and fear it. I am utterly in awe of its power. The ocean doesn't care about you. The ocean can make you disappear without even trying. Your life does not scale to the ocean. The ocean is always at the end of the world.

I can feel my bones humming. Rolling waves of my blood. Warmth. I am not cold, I am not chilled, I can walk and the solid earth is beneath my feet.

In the dark early morning hours I roll over and drape a hand across my wife. Her body is warm. My body is warm. Together we make warmth, the blankets covering us. I say a prayer into her skin. We are alive and together. We will not escape death. But for this moment, we are alive together, she asleep and I awake. These moments are known only to us. This is our secret history, the history of lovers. This is the other side of the unknowable Cosmos.

The cold ocean waits out there. The end of the world waits out there. Let it wait, wait, wait.

lava lamps and st. anger

Maybe your altar needs a lava lamp. Maybe you never thought of it as an altar, only as your own space, and you resent any encroachment into that space. You hate lava lamps, after all. They represent the hipster condescending attitude towards prior generations, the too-cute "weren't they just so groovy, man," the revisionist tendency to take any cultural shift and package it up as just more disposable crap to sell (see also: the entirety of the 1980s.)

But it's more: lava lamps in their original context were annoying, something for stoned heads to stare at and go "Ooooohhh!" Presumably while listening to Pink Floyd. The idea that drug taking could be a legitimate spiritual inquiry is lost in the molten wax. Thinking about life from a different angle simply becomes another novelty. "Dude, pass me the Cheetos. Netflix is streaming Up in Smoke."

So you don't need a lava lamp in your life, nor do you need it on your altar that is not an altar. Except maybe you do. Is this meta enough yet? Meta--the Internet Age version of too clever by half. What you say when you think you are above your audience. Everyone nod seriously. Mmm-hmm. And let's not forget irony! It's good for your blood. It also makes it easy to prevent any meaningful exchange from taking place. Those are messy.

You are grumpy tonight, sir. I think you do need a lava lamp on your altar. It fits because it doesn't fit. You are listening to St. Anger right now, perhaps the most reviled album of the last fifteen years before people stopped caring about music altogether unless new U2 albums were appearing unwanted on their phones. (You really like that U2 album, too.) St. Anger is part of your altar, sure, just like everything Metallica has ever done is part of why you are alive. In your very DNA. But if someone were to build a Metallica altar, it would almost certainly stop after the first four albums, maybe the first five. It sure as hell wouldn't have St. Anger on it. But you like St. Anger for the same reason everyone else hates it: it's raw, honest, self-indulgent, and a complete and utter mess. It has the worst drum sound ever recorded. The lyrics are often cringe-worthy from a band that once wrote beautifully structured epics intelligently exploring a variety of topics. To go from that to rehab speak! But you dig it anyway. Maybe it doesn't hold a candle to the other records. It still, at certain times, speaks loudly to you. Loudly with a ping (god that fucking non-existent snare sound!)

A flawed altar needs a lava lamp like a tourniquet needs a chainsaw. Or a wisdom tooth needs a jackhammer. If you were more clever...oh hell, if you were more clever you wouldn't write unfocused ramblings about lava lamps and St. Anger. The altar that is not an altar needs a lava lamp that is most certainly a lava lamp. 

a saturday afternoon ramble about the beats

Recently I finished reading the comprehensive William Burroughs biography by Barry Miles, simply entitled "Burroughs: A Life." And what a life it was. The book is a worthy companion to the earlier biography of Burroughs by Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw, written in the early 90s when Burroughs was still alive. I would recommend both to anyone interested in this most American of writers (even though he wrote most of his material abroad, his voice to me has always been uniquely American, no matter how outlandish the literary technique he is using on any given work.)

I know the story of Burroughs and the Beats well; the Beats were very influential on me in my youth. But I rarely read them these days, and, after glancing back through some formerly influential works while reading the Burroughs bio, I find that of the big three (Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg) only Burroughs' work still resonates on any level. The rest feels locked into the era and the myth of that era. The best of Burrough's work, though, has never lost its power. In any case, it's a Saturday afternoon and I feel like rambling. So here we go. (Note: this has not been edited for length or clarity and is a first draft. Very Beat of me!)