Hot Chocolate, Fresh Salted Butter

He passes beneath the tracks in the piss dank tunnel everyday on his way to school. He is only 8, alert, sharp, but still - 8. Perhaps, it could be argued, he has no business walking anywhere alone. His mother always warned him about never talking to strangers, and yet when he was riding his bike one day, through the Paris suburb of St. Cloud, he stopped at a traffic light, long enough for a man to pull up in his little orange car. The man rolled his window down and signaled the boy over. This boy, he is very independent. He has a very strong sense of himself for someone so young. He knows that despite his mother's warnings, something in him tells him this man is safe. The man leans his shoulder out the window and actually says, "Hey, you want a piece of candy?"

I take it.

I live to tell about it. 

Was he a pedophile? Was he a step away from robbing my mother of her entire world? He may well have been. It seems likely that he was. Perhaps someone appeared within view, got a good look at the guy. Perhaps it wasn't worth the risk at that moment. Perhaps the overly confident and seriously naive boy was handed a commuted sentence. 

This same boy - that is to say - I, sometime later, am walking to school. I pass beneath the tracks and now I actually sense danger. I am beginning to become afraid. I slow as I pass to the back end of the tunnel. There is an embankment on either side of the tunnel, and they are covered in a deep green vine all the way up to the top. I stop at the hill, look to my right and there I see it. There is a man lying in the vines on his side. He is shabbily dressed, could possibly be one of the gypsies that lives in the hobbled-together shacks that line the Seine, the great river which lies about a half mile away. He might be one of the people who live in the streets, even in our quiet suburb, utterly mad and giving off an intense and burning odor that I remember distinctly to this day. He is about halfway up the hill, almost covered in vine. For a moment I am paralyzed in terror. I wonder if he will get up, I am practically waiting for him to stir, no matter how much this would frighten me, just so that I could be certain that this man was not dead. There are small scraps of paper scattered around him, and there is a very dark stain just where his chest comes away from the ground. It could have been blood. 

I resume my walk to school. 

I never tell anyone. Until today. 

There is an island of stone upon which a fortress is built, a fortress that is peaked with a monastery. The entire island sits in a tidal pool, and when the tide is low there are numerous areas of deadly quicksand waiting for anyone foolish enough to ignore the warning signs by straying off the paved path. you can buy inflatable rabbits and toy guns on your winding hike around and up the island. The entire place smells of brine and feels ancient.

On our way back from this place I watch as a man loses himself in stupidity. It is beyond me. It is defining. And sometimes, if you run fast enough, you can squeeze under the gate before the dogs get you.

Just That and Nothing More

In my trolling across the psychological minefield that is the internet, I spend a fair amount of time observing the people I know, sort of know, hardly know and don't really know at all through the windows of the Facebook madhouse. In short time I have managed to run across a good selection of friends - some of my actual, no bullshit, would trust with my life friends. I am talking about people I hadn't spoken with or heard from in years. It's a mindfuck to see them all grown up and making it happen. I am pretty damn grateful for that element of the FB universe. And then I have also managed to at least find a small measure of amusement from reacquainting myself with people I have known for many years but who have somehow devolved into full-blown versions of their more annoying selves. We all know the guy that drove us mad up to the point at which we decided it was over and walked away, never looking back. These are people I don't really need in my life. I still care for them, wish them well, but ultimately would be happiest knowing they just pissed right off and went away, back to their reactionary Christian nightmare stories replete with sanctimonious badgering. These are the people who get back in touch with you only to point their fingers in judgment because you don't "know god," or, look down at you (even though you didn't ask) because you don't think abortion in any form is murder, and so on ...

To be perfectly frank - fuck those people. I don't need this noise clouding up the already filthy windshield I peer through on my drive through this baffling rollercoaster of a life.

So, lately I have been thinking about mortality in a specific way. I say it is specific because saying that I think about mortality in general is like saying I eat food. I'm an eater, It's pretty prevalent. What has been on my mind lately is the mortality of the people I have grown up with, the people in my generation, I guess, for lack of a better term. I know the time anyone has is limited, so it doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that it won't be long before some of us start running out of time. Yes, I already know people who met untimely ends, but I'm just saying, we're getting fatter, grayer, uglier and sicker, and it all catches up to us in time. I know guys who are way beyond morbidly obese, these are the ticking time-bombs. These are the guys you see in a picture and think, "Wow, this guy has one foot in the grave." But then again, he might outlive me. I might keel over from an asymptomatic heart condition, so it's a spin of the roulette wheel when you get right down to it.

I think it's funny how you see yourself a certain way as a teenager, and in my case try really hard to envision what sort of a man I will make when I grow up. Well, young me, I am here to tell you the news is good and it is not so good. For all the time I spent worrying about losing my ideals, fantasizing about being a 40 year old with snap, still retaining my bite, I now know I had nothing to fear. I am as obnoxious and suspicious and uncompromising with my inner life as I was then, if not more. What I hadn't accounted for, however, was the fact that life sort of creeps up on you, and that for me anyway, I am still no closer to knowing what I want to be than I was then. And that is a problem because I am something, and that something is what I am in the stead of being something focused and targeted, goal-oriented and all that sexy stuff. What I am is not sexy. But perhaps defining what I have become is better put by telling you what I am not.

Thanks to Facebook again I have stumbled across a cross-segment of my youth that is comprised of the yearbook idols. These were the guys who played football, dated all the prettyish cheerleader types, made great grades despite having almost no comprehension of what it was they were acing, went to the best schools because it was expected of their world, and spent an inordinate amount of high school time trying to pick fights with guys like me whenever I was alone and they were at least two guys deep. You know them, they are the fratboy, jock contingent. Mooks. Date rapists. And unless you yourself were one of them, there's a fair chance you hated most of them as much as I did. And so there they were, splayed all over Facebook, plump in that well-fed sort of American way. They clearly survived the economic downturn quite handily. Their wives and girlfriends all look exactly like the girls they dated back then.

I would love to tell you that I don't hold a grudge against any of them, and that it was simply a part of the adolescent experience. I would like to tell you that everyone had a role to play in high school, and that had I wanted into that life I could had reached out and Carpe Diem-ed that motherfucker, but I know better. Things don't work like that. Truth is, I sincerely hope that they are as miserable as they made the rest of us. I hope that they are, at the end of the day, as empty inside as they have always presented themselves to be. I would like to hope that their skewing of the teenaged pendulum has always been a reflection of their hollowness.

Thing is, all of that is wrong.

They're just people. Plain and simple. And they have lives and problems and maybe even a worry or two that isn't a reflection of their need for a new haircut, or a curious nagging that they should have used a rubber in the car after the club last night. What they are doing is living the life that was laid down before them by the world, by our preconceptions, and by a world of tradition and history, all tailor-made to breed people like them to run this town, and to make sure that people like me, people who are self-aware, semi-intelligent, and just cynical enough to keep both eyes open, will always remain on the outside, will always remain utterly uncomfortable in a role that finds me leading the way when all I see is a world of people who need to learn to lead themselves, without outside direction, and eventually show us all what it is that really makes us worth something.

I come off as hopelessly negative, trust me, I get that a lot; but it's a mistake. Or maybe it's just subterfuge perpetrated at the hands of a man who always distrusts a smile until he fully realizes the motivation behind it. I don't fuel the tank with doubt, I fuel the fucking tank with art and passion. That is first and that is for all time. What keeps my head from misting the walls is the awareness of beauty, the aching and crippling beauty. It's still there. Beyond my growing waist, it's still there, beyond my dimming spark, my Sisyphian battle against fear, it is there - I can still see it. So yeah, I am angry to think that the children of privilege who seemed to be handed a world that was crafted to keep them in charge and the rest of us on the march are shitting on their progeny and pushing it all forward, but what else should I expect? I don't look to the government for direction, don't look to the ornate diversion of god - the ultimate joke, don't look towards huge numbers of pliant, fear-stricken followers in order to find meaning in life. I look to artists, authors, philosophers, scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, and musicians. And at the end of the day I look at my children and I am filled with fear for what I have given for them to inherit, fear for the future of this very sick world, guilt that I have ripped their family apart much in the way that my father did before me, guilt that I am so very poorly equipped to handle all the little things that go into insuring that they will be strong, that they will say "Fuck you!" to those guys who feel so entitled to tell us that we build this world for them to enjoy, so that they can play and breed and work and fuck and smile and cry and live and thrive and one day die ... all at our expense.

Sometimes I just wonder, I just wonder is all.

I'll Take Hell for the Company

There was no fanfare, no gnashing of teeth, no self-flagellating agonies to throw at the feet of the divine. There was none of that. There was only silence; and in the world outside of poetry and artifice, ultimate silence was utterly devastating. And let’s be honest here - devastation was the terrain upon which he felt most familiar. He was able to find his footing among the cragged and gnarled landscape. He was a navigator through a world with no map, a world that contained mortal threat around every corner, on every precipice and at the bottom of every contaminated stream. And there was more - every living thing was only half a living thing, such was the extent to which the dark had swept in, seductively, and placed its hold on all in its path. All manner of plant and animal conspired and plotted the darkest revenge. He trod among their anthracite shells, their clicking mandibles, their empty, reflective eyes, and he knew their rage, shook beneath the weight of their panicked desire to swarm him and devour him until there was nothing of him left for which to consider a man. He plied his arrogant trade across the mosses and ivies, bursting with acrid oils and lined with piercing barbs aching to penetrate his flesh, inject their venoms beneath the surface and wait for him to cease, to become the sacrament of the most unholy order. 

But he was not afraid. He knew the alternative, and the alternative was oblivion. The alternative was to plunge head first into the maw, to finally succumb to the wet, crisp air that is constantly drawn into the insatiable, hideous void. A void - an absence, a lack of what, of something ... no, of anything. This was the sort of thought that bled through his consciousness were he weak enough to follow the scent as it filigreed around his mind, wisps and tendrils, and took the place of all else. No, this would not do, this was the way of men who stood in the way of trains and believed that will alone would be their salvation.

He knew better. 

So what had brought him to this place, to this fate? Was it inevitable? Or, was there a fork at some specific point along the way through which he might have had the chance to stop and make a decision, choose one of two paths, maybe one of a number of paths? 

For those who are not initiated, this is not an important question. In the end it doesn’t matter to sit and waste your time pondering the significance of this or that choice. The reason it doesn’t matter is because, again, in the end, the path that is taken bears little resemblance to the paths taken previously. Which is to say, the past, while resembling the future, is merely a palimpsest. The future unravels before us, oblivious to any and all, and the past now sits in the gallery and takes its place among the entombed, the withered and the decaying. 

And so this is a story about decay. We are the purveyors of decay, here in the blood-soaked shop of the Butcher. The years of honing our knives, wearing down our blocks, eviscerating the carcasses, snapping bones, stripping flesh, cutting sinew, wrapping it all, gift-like, in brown paper, has made of us the bloody seers of this life, and it is our message that all is not well. 

History has lied to us all, made the devil out of a liar, and built for us a god from the sewer. And dutifully we have heeded the call, blindly, naked, shivering, drooling, dumb with rage, simultaneously empty and filled with longing, and, at the end of the day - entirely alone. And it is in this deception that we have thrown ourselves as loyal subjects, as mercenaries for an insidious cause, only to have nothing to show for it save our self-righteous indignation and hollow threats.

And all throughout this landslide of nonsense mankind has made the cardinal mistake of listening to the wrong prophets when it was time for wisdom. 

HE has wormed through the underbelly of madness to bring you the truth.

HE has sickened to inhale the dank and musty breath of the most wicked.

HE has swallowed the half promises and late-night confessions, and he has survived the inevitable, the predictable and the outright translucent pleas to the other, the next and the better. 

HE is the Butcher, and despite his being utterly and completely blind - HE sees all. 

People always remember that Oppenheimer imagined the verse from the Bhagavad Gita when the Trinity test lit up the American desert and hurtled us exponentially closer to our doom - Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.  It’s good stuff, but it’s what Kenneth Bainbridge told him directly after the explosion that gives a much more accurate fit to what it is we have laid before us, cold and on display like a naked corpse - Now we are all sons of bitches.

And that’s what your steadfast Butcher told you. 

Now who’s next in line?

There Are Places

I am not well put-together. I look a mess. I don't play the right games. It's what it is. But I know something.

I work in a bookstore. It's cool enough - not a huge point of pride, perhaps - but a job with benefits, reliable, and usually stable enough to keep me from totally losing my mind. Totally losing my mind, it might be said, is something for which I am an adept. Yearly I compete at the Panicked Assholes convention in Park City, Utah, and like clockwork I take home the grand prize. That, on the other hand, is a great point of pride.

At my work, which consists of my working in a giant cave of a room with one other guy, I take a small number of trips outside every day in order to take out the trash and recycling, shoo bums, pick up crack pipes, shovel human feces from around the dumpster, call the cops and have loiterers arrested, and, once in a blue moon, help the homicide detectives at HPD solve a missing persons case and then nervously talk about it to reporters from Inside Edition.

I stay busy.

But here is the story. The building I work in is laid out in an enormous rectangle, easily the size of a football field. The sales floor is 40,000 square feet. The place is gigantic. It sits sideways, its right flank butted up against Westheimer, which is also known as Houston's all-purpose Vegas Strip, street of Dreams, Road to Nowhere, and Hades River all rolled into one. If you are facing my building, the area to your immediate right is where the magic happens. This is the spot where we get deliveries, dump trash, etc ... It  might help to know that the parking lot in our shopping center is gargantuan, so big in fact that it makes our store look downright quaint (something it most assuredly is not). And again, facing the building and looking right you will see the row of businesses that comprise the bulk of the center. The first spot to your left was taken up by a high-end home decor outlet, but that place folded years ago, and since, the building has remained empty, another victim of the failing economy.

Lining the back fence leading from the back of our store to the abandoned spot is a long grassy strip of land. This is the place where the neighbors from the heavily Muslim apartments behind the back strip bring their dogs to take their large, untended shits. It's also the spot where homeless people frolic at night, leaving empty boxes and debris on the ground for someone else to deal with. Often, I will see people parked in this area, making out, fighting, sleeping, or working on their cars. There are always shopping carts sadly sitting about, unused, pathetically taking up a fraction of the vast cement expanse.

The genius that designed our building for some reason thought it would be a good idea to put an alley behind our building that literally leads right off the sidewalk on Westheimer (and a fucking Metro bus stop), and down the entire length of our building. As I mentioned above, this area is grassed, but this area is also cemented over along the width of our store. Then there is a fence that lines the back and separates out little corner of humanity from the neighborhood directly behind us. You know, what a fucking dream it must be to have your backyard literally butt up against an alley behind a giant retail building. An alley, no less, that is constantly populated by crack-smoking, porn-addicted bums who love to throw their beer bottles, empty deviled chicken tins, and horrendous body waste about as if they own the place. That must work wonders for property values. Imagine what it must be like to have your kids out in the yard for a pool party, when you notice that the slats in the fence at the back of your yard have been removed, which means bums have probably been bathing, and pissing in your pool. Choice.

But, here's the rub. There are places. There are places in the urban landscape that defy description. I would venture to guess that every village, every town, every city has these places. These are the places where the air blows the other direction, where it's always a couple degrees hotter in the summer, a few percentage points more humid, slightly uncomfortable, out of balance, indescribably - off. These are the places that make you feel uneasy, that exist out of time. Every city has them, thousands of them perhaps. This particular spot, like all the rest, is a mere stone's throw from the constant, everyday flow of normal life. Despite its being intentionally created, literally planned by a real person in a real office, this little spot is wrong on so many levels. And yet the effect is so subtle it's like you imagined the whole thing. I'm telling you because I know. There will be death here, if there hasn't already. There is a bridge here between what we know and what knows us.

To literally walk just around the corner from this spot of mine, to enter the main parking area in front of my store, the spell would be broken, all would return to normal. The beggars would appear to be human again, the birds somehow less robotic. The weirdness more the manageable sort that one might grow in their garden. All would be back in its place, and you would move on.

Truth be told, I love to stand out there at the end of my shift, when nobody is left in my cave. I love to just stand out there and soak in the other-ness of the place. It's filthy. It's unsettling. It's a magnet for something bad. It robs you of your self-congratulatory smugness, and for some reason that's what makes me happy in this predictably fucked-up wasteland of a life - the unpredictable madness of these ambiguous, autonomous psychic zones, stamped over the veneer of normal urban life.

Some of us know better. You should know that I am one of them.